Free Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng Page B

crevices of her mind. The air-conditioning shuts off, silence ballooning to fill the room, then the whole department. The weight of everything he’s read settles on him, crushing him to his chair. It is too heavy. He cannot even lift his head.
    “Professor Lee?”
    It’s Louisa, at the door, still wearing the black dress she’d worn at the funeral that morning.
    “Oh,” she says. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t think you’d come in after—” She stops.
    “It’s okay.” His voice crackles at the edges, like old leather.
    Louisa slips into the room, leaving the door ajar. “Are you all right?” She takes in his red-rimmed eyes, the slouch of his shoulders, the manila envelope in his lap. Then she comes to stand beside him and gently takes the papers from his hands. “You shouldn’t be here,” she says, setting them on his desk.
    James shakes his head. With one hand he holds out the report.
    Louisa looks down at the sheaf of papers and hesitates.
    Read, James says—or tries to say. No sound emerges, but to him it seems Louisa hears anyway. She nods, leans against the edge of the desk, and bends her head over the pages. Her face doesn’t change as she reads, but she grows stiller and stiller, until, at the end of the report, she rises and takes James’s hand.
    “You shouldn’t be here,” Louisa says again. It’s not a question. With her other hand, she touches the small of his back, and he can feel her warmth through his shirt. Then she says, “Why don’t you come to my apartment. I’ll cook you some lunch.” And he nods.
    Her apartment is a third-floor walk-up, only six blocks from campus. Outside apartment 3A Louisa hesitates, just for a moment. Then she unlocks the door and lets them in and leads him straight to the bedroom.
    Everything about her is different: the flex of her limbs, the texture of her skin. Even her taste is different, slightly tangy, like citrus, as he touches his tongue to hers. When she kneels over him to undo the buttons of his shirt, her hair curtains her face. James closes his eyes then, lets out a long, shuddering sigh. Afterward he falls asleep with Louisa still atop him. Since Lydia was found —the only word he can bear to use for it—the little sleep he’s had has been restless. In his dreams, no one but him remembers what has happened to Lydia; he alone is acutely aware, and over and over he must persuade Marilyn, Nath, complete strangers that his daughter is dead. I saw her body. One of her blue eyes was gone. Now, still slicked to Louisa with sweat, he sleeps soundly for the first time in days, a dreamless sleep: his mind, for the moment, gone blissfully blank.
    At home, in their bedroom, Marilyn too wills her mind to go blank, but nothing happens. For hours, trying to sleep, she has been counting the flowers on her pillowcase: not the big red poppies that sprawl across the cotton, but the blue forget-me-nots of the background pattern, the chorus dancers behind the divas. She keeps losing track, moving from eighty-nine back down to eighty, crossing a fold in the fabric and forgetting which are accounted for, which have yet to be numbered. By the time she reaches two hundred, she knows that sleep is impossible. She can’t keep her eyes closed; even blinking makes her jittery. Whenever she tries to lie still, her mind whirrs to life like an overwound toy. Upstairs, there is no sound from Hannah; downstairs, no sign of Nath. At last, just as James sinks into sleep across town, she rises and goes where her thoughts have been all this time: Lydia’s room.
    It still smells like Lydia. Not just the powdery flowers of her perfume, or the clean scent of shampoo on her pillowcase, or the trace of cigarette smoke— Karen smokes, Lydia had explained when Marilyn sniffed suspiciously one day. It gets all on my clothes and books and everything. No, when Marilyn breathes in deep, she can smell Lydia herself under all those surface layers, the sour-sweet smell of her skin. She could