by Alice Sebold
What it was like:
Every day he got up. Before sleep wore off, he was who he used to be. Then, as his consciousness woke, it was as if poison seeped in. At first he couldn’t even get up. He lay there under a heavy weight. But then only movement could save him, and he moved and he moved and he moved, no movement being enough to make up for it. The guilt on him, the hand of God pressing down on him, saying, You were not there when your daughter needed you.
Before my father left for Mr. Harvey’s, my mother had been sitting in the front hall next to the statue they’d bought of St. Francis. She was gone when he came back. He’d called for her, said her name three times, said it like a wish that she would not appear, and then he ascended the steps to his den to jot things down in a small spiral notebook: “A drinker? Get him drunk. Maybe he’s a talker.” He wrote this next: “I think Susie watches me.” I was ecstatic in heaven. I hugged Holly, I hugged Franny. My father knew, I thought.
Then Lindsey slammed the front door more loudly than usual, and my father was glad for the noise. He was afraid of going further in his notes, of writing the words down. The slamming door echoed down the strange afternoon he’d spent and brought him into the present, into activity, where he needed to be so he would not drown. I understood this—I’m not saying I didn’t resent it, that it didn’t remind me of sitting at the dinner table and having to listen to Lindsey tell my parents about the test she’d done so well on, or about how the history teacher was going to recommend her for the district honors council, but Lindsey was living, and the living deserved attention too.
She stomped up the stairs. Her clogs slammed against the pine boards of the staircase and shook the house.
I may have begrudged her my father’s attention, but I respected her way of handling things. Of everyone in the family, it was Lindsey who had to deal with what Holly called the Walking Dead Syndrome—when other people see the dead person and don’t see you.
When people looked at Lindsey, even my father and mother, they saw me. Even Lindsey was not immune. She avoided mirrors. She now took her showers in the dark.
She would leave the dark shower and feel her way over to the towel rack. She would be safe in the dark—the moist steam from the shower still rising off the tiles encased her. If the house was quiet or if she heard murmurs below her, she knew she would be undisturbed. This was when she could think of me and she did so in two ways: she either thought Susie, just that one word, and cried there, letting her tears roll down her already damp cheeks, knowing no one would see her, no one would quantify this dangerous substance as grief, or she would imagine me running, imagine me getting away, imagine herself being taken instead, fighting until she was free. She fought back the constant question, Where is Susie now?
My father listened to Lindsey in her room. Bang, the door was slammed shut. Thump, her books were thrown down. Squeak, she fell onto her bed. Her clogs, boom, boom, were kicked off onto the floor. A few minutes later he stood outside her door.
“Lindsey,” he said upon knocking.
There was no answer.
“Lindsey, can I come in?”
“Go away,” came her resolute answer.
“Come on now, honey,” he pleaded.
“Go away!”
“Lindsey,” my father said, sucking in his breath, “why can’t you let me in?” He placed his forehead gently against the bedroom door. The wood felt cool and, for a second, he forgot the pounding of his temples, the suspicion he now held that kept repeating itself. Harvey, Harvey, Harvey.
In sock feet, Lindsey came silently to the door. She unlocked it as my father drew back and prepared a face that he hoped said “Don’t run.”
“What?” she said. Her face was rigid, an affront. “What is it?”
“I want to know how you are,” he said. He thought of the curtain falling between him and Mr. Harvey, how a certain capture, a lovely blame, was lost to him. He had his family walking through the streets, going to school, passing, on their way, Mr. Harvey’s green-shingled house. To get the blood back in his heart he needed his child.
“I want to be alone,” Lindsey said. “Isn’t that obvious?”
“I’m here if you need me,” he said.
“Look, Dad,” my sister said, making her one concession for him, “I’m handling this alone.”
What could he do with that? He could have broken the code and said, “I’m not, I can’t, don’t make me,” but he stood there for a second and then retreated. “I understand,” he said first, although he didn’t.
I wanted to lift him up, like statues I’d seen in art history books. A woman lifting up a man. The rescue in reverse. Daughter to father saying, “It’s okay. You’re okay. Now I won’t let anything hurt.”
Instead, I watched him as he went to place a call to Len Fenerman.
The police in those first weeks were almost reverent. Missing dead girls were not a common occurrence in the suburbs. But with no leads coming in on where my body was or who had killed me, the police were getting nervous. There was a window of time during which physical evidence was usually found; that window grew smaller every day.
“I don’t want to sound irrational, Detective Fenerman,” my father said.
“Len, please.” Tucked in the corner of his desk blotter was the school picture Len Fenerman had taken from my mother. He had known, before anyone said the words, that I was already dead.
“I’m certain there’s a man in the neighborhood who knows something,” my father said. He was staring out the window of his upstairs den, toward the cornfield. The man who owned it had told the press he was going to let it sit fallow for now.
“Who is it, and what led you to believe this?” Len Fenerman asked. He chose a stubby, chewed pencil from the front metal lip of his desk drawer.
My father told him about the tent, about how Mr. Harvey had told him to go home, about saying my name, about how weird the neighborhood thought Mr. Harvey was with no regular job and no kids.
“I’ll check it out,” Len Fenerman said, because he had to. That was the role he played in the dance. But what my father had given him offered him little or nothing to work with. “Don’t talk to anyone and don’t approach him again,” Len warned.
When my father hung up the phone he felt strangely empty. Drained, he opened the door to his den and closed it quietly behind him. In the hallway, for the second time, he called my mother’s name: “Abigail.”
She was in the downstairs bathroom, sneaking bites from the macaroons my father’s firm always sent us for Christmas. She ate them greedily; they were like suns bursting open in her mouth. The summer she was pregnant with me, she wore one gingham maternity dress over and over, refusing to spend money on another, and ate all she wanted, rubbing her belly and saying, “Thank you, baby,” as she dribbled chocolate on her breasts.
There was a knock down low on the door.
“Momma?” She stuffed the macaroons back in the medicine cabinet, swallowing what was already in her mouth.
“Momma?” Buckley repeated. His voice was sleepy.
“Mommmmm-maaa!”
She despised the word.
When my mother opened the door, my little brother held on to her knees. Buckley pressed his face into the flesh above them.
Hearing movement, my father went to meet my mother in the kitchen. Together they took solace in attending to Buckley.
“Where’s Susie?” Buckley asked as my father spread Fluffernutter on wheat bread. He made three. One for himself, one for my mother, and one for his four-year-old son.
“Did you put away your game?” my father asked Buckley, wondering why he persisted in avoiding the topic with the one person who approached it head-on.
“What’s wrong with Mommy?” Buckley asked. Together they watched my mother, who was staring into the dry basin of the sink.
“How would you like to go to the zoo this week?” my father asked. He hated himself for it. Hated the bribe and the tease—the deceit. But how could he
tell his son that, somewhere, his big sister might lie in pieces?
But Buckley heard the word zoo and all that it meant—which to him was largely Monkeys!—and he began on the rippling path to forgetting for one more day. The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He knew I was away, but when people left they always came back.
When Len Fenerman had gone door to door in the neighborhood he had found nothing remarkable at George Harvey’s. Mr. Harvey was a single man who, it was said, had meant to move in with his wife. She had died sometime before this. He built dollhouses for specialty stores and kept to himself. That was all anyone knew. Though friendships had not exactly blossomed around him, the sympathy of the neighborhood had always been with him. Each split-level contained a narrative. To Len Fenerman especially, George Harvey’s seemed a compelling one.
No, Harvey said, he didn’t know the Salmons well. Had seen the children. Everyone knew who had children and who didn’t, he noted, his head hanging down and to the left a bit. “You can see the toys in the yard. The houses are always more lively,” he noted, his voice halting.
“I understand you had a conversation with Mr. Salmon recently,” Len said on his second trip to the dark green house.
“Yes, is there something wrong?” Mr. Harvey asked. He squinted at Len but then had to pause. “Let me get my glasses,” he said. “I was doing some close work on a Second Empire.”
“Second Empire?” Len asked.
“Now that my Christmas orders are done, I can experiment,” Mr. Harvey said. Len followed him into the back, where a dining table was pushed against a wall. Dozens of small lengths of what looked like miniature wainscoting were lined up on top of it.
A little strange, Fenerman thought, but it doesn’t make the man a murderer.
Mr. Harvey got his glasses and immediately opened up. “Yes, Mr. Salmon was on one of his walks and he helped me build the bridal tent.”
“The bridal tent?”
“Each year it’s something I do for Leah,” he said. “My wife. I’m a widower.”
Len felt he was intruding on this man’s private rituals. “So I understand,” he said.
“I feel terrible about what happened to that girl,” Mr. Harvey said. “I tried to express that to Mr. Salmon. But I know from experience that nothing makes sense at a time like this.”
“So you erect this tent every year?” Len Fenerman asked. This was something he could get confirmation on from neighbors.
“In the past, I’ve done it inside, but I tried to do it outside this year. We were married in the winter. Until the snow picked up, I thought it would work.”
“Where inside?”
“The basement. I can show you if you want. I have all of Leah’s things down there still.”
But Len did not go further.
“I’ve intruded enough,” he said. “I just wanted to sweep the neighborhood a second time.”
“How’s your investigation coming?” Mr. Harvey asked. “Are you finding anything?”
Len never liked questions like this, though he supposed they were the right of the people whose lives he was invading.
“Sometimes I think clues find their way in good time,” he said. “If they want to be found, that is.” It was cryptic, sort of a Confucius-says answer, but it worked on almost every civilian.
“Have you talked to the Ellis boy?” Mr. Harvey asked.
“We talked to the family.”
“He’s hurt some animals in the neighborhood, I hear.”
“He sounds like a bad kid, I grant you,” said Len, “but he was working in the mall at the time.”
“Witnesses?”
“Yes.”
“That’s my only idea,” Mr. Harvey said. “I wish I could do more.”
Len felt him to be sincere.
“He’s certainly a bit tweaked at an angle,” Len said when he called my father, “but I have nothing on him.”
“What did he say about the tent?”
“That he built it for Leah, his wife.”
“I remember Mrs. Stead told Abigail his wife’s name was Sophie,” my father said.
Len checked his notes. “No, Leah. I wrote it down.”
My father doubted himself. Where had he gotten the name Sophie? He was sure he had heard it too, but that was years ago, at a block party, where the names of children and wives flew about like confetti between the stories people told to be neighborly and the introductions to infants and strangers too vague to remember the following day.
He did remember that Mr. Harvey had not come to the block party. He had never come to any of them. This went to his strangeness by the standards of many in the neighborhood but not by my father’s own standards. He had never felt completely comfortable at these forced efforts of conviviality himself.
My father wrote “Leah?” in his book. Then he wrote, “Sophie?” Though unaware of it, he had begun a list of the dead.
On Christmas Day, my family would have been more comfortable in heaven. Christmas was largely ignored in my heaven. Some people dressed all in white and pretended they were snowflakes, but other than that, nothing.
That Christmas, Samuel Heckler came to our house on an unexpected visit. He was not dressed like a snowflake. He wore his older brother’s leather jacket and a pair of ill-fitting army fatigues.
My brother was in the front room with his toys. My mother blessed the fact that she had gone early to buy his gifts. Lindsey got gloves and cherry-flavored lip gloss. My father got five white handkerchiefs that she’d ordered months ago in the mail. Save Buckley, no one wanted anything anyway. In the days before Christmas the lights on the tree were not plugged in. Only the candle that my father kept in the window of his den burned. He lit it after dark, but my mother, sister, and brother had stopped leaving the house after four o’clock. Only I saw it.
“There’s a man outside!” my brother shouted. He’d been playing Skyscraper and it had yet to collapse. “He’s got a suitcase.”
My mother left her eggnog in the kitchen and came to the front of the house. Lindsey was suffering the mandatory presence in the family room that all holidays required. She and my father played Monopoly, ignoring the more brutal squares for each other’s sake. There was no Luxury Tax, and a bad Chance wasn’t recognized.
In the front hall my mother pressed her hands down along her skirt. She placed Buckley in front of her and put her arms on his shoulders.
“Wait for the man to knock,” she said.
“Maybe it’s Reverend Strick,” my father said to Lindsey, collecting his fifteen dollars for winning second prize in a beauty contest.
“For Susie’s sake, I hope not,” Lindsey ventured.
My father held on to it, on to my sister saying my name. She rolled doubles and moved to Marvin Gardens.
“That’s twenty-four dollars,” my father said, “but I’ll take ten.”
“Lindsey,” my mother called. “It’s a visitor for you.”
My father watched my sister get up and leave the room. We both did. I sat with my father then. I was the ghost on the board. He stared at the old shoe lying on its side in the box. If only I could have lifted it up, made it hop from Boardwalk to Baltic, where I always claimed the better people lived. “That’s because you’re a purple freak,” Lindsey would say. My father would say, “I’m proud I didn’t raise a snob.”
“Railroads, Susie,” he said. “You always liked owning those railroads.”
To accentuate his widow’s peak and tame his cowlick, Samuel Heckler insisted on combing his hair straight back. This made him look, at thirteen and dressed in black leather, like an adolescent vampire.
“Merry Christmas, Lindsey,” he said to my sister, and held out a small box wrapped in blue paper.
I could see it happen: Lindsey’s body began to knot. She was working hard keeping everyone out, everyone, but she found Samuel Heckler cute. Her heart, like an ingredient in a recipe, was reduced, and regardless of my death she was thirteen, he was cute, a
nd he had visited her on Christmas Day.
“I heard you made gifted,” he said to her, because no one was talking. “Me too.”
My mother remembered then, and she switched on her autopilot hostess. “Would you like to come sit?” she managed. “I have some eggnog in the kitchen.”
“That would be wonderful,” Samuel Heckler said and, to Lindsey’s amazement and mine, offered my sister his arm.
“What’s that?” asked Buckley, trailing behind and pointing to what he thought was a suitcase.
“An alto,” Samuel Heckler said.
“What?” asked Buckley.
Lindsey spoke then. “Samuel plays the alto saxophone.”
“Barely,” Samuel said.
My brother did not ask what a saxophone was. He knew what Lindsey was being. She was being what I called snooty-wooty, as in “Buckley, don’t worry, Lindsey’s being snooty-wooty.” Usually I’d tickle him as I said the word, sometimes burrowing into his stomach with my head, butting him and saying “snooty-wooty” over and over until his trills of laughter flowed down over me.
Buckley followed the three of them into the kitchen and asked, as he had at least once a day, “Where’s Susie?”
They were silent. Samuel looked at Lindsey.
“Buckley,” my father called from the adjoining room, “come play Monopoly with me.”
My brother had never been invited to play Monopoly. Everyone said he was too young, but this was the magic of Christmas. He rushed into the family room, and my father picked him up and sat him on his lap.
“See this shoe?” my father said.
Buckley nodded his head.
“I want you to listen to everything I say about it, okay?”
“Susie?” my brother asked, somehow connecting the two.
“Yes, I’m going to tell you where Susie is.”
I began to cry up in heaven. What else was there for me to do?
“This shoe was the piece Susie played Monopoly with,” he said. “I play with the car or sometimes the wheelbarrow. Lindsey plays with the iron, and when your mother plays, she likes the cannon.”