by Alice Sebold
“Is that a dog?”
“Yes, that’s a Scottie.”
“Mine!”
“Okay,” my father said. He was patient. He had found a way to explain it. He held his son in his lap, and as he spoke, he felt Buckley’s small body on his knee—the very human, very warm, very alive weight of it. It comforted him. “The Scottie will be your piece from now on. Which piece is Susie’s again?”
“The shoe,” Buckley said.
“Right, and I’m the car, your sister’s the iron, and your mother is the cannon.”
My brother concentrated very hard.
“Now let’s put all the pieces on the board, okay? You go ahead and do it for me.”
Buckley grabbed a fist of pieces and then another, until all the pieces lay between the Chance and Community Chest cards.
“Let’s say the other pieces are our friends.”
“Like Nate?”
“Right, we’ll make your friend Nate the hat. And the board is the world. Now if I were to tell you that when I rolled the dice, one of the pieces would be taken away, what would that mean?”
“They can’t play anymore?”
“Right.”
“Why?” Buckley asked.
He looked up at my father; my father flinched.
“Why?” my brother asked again.
My father did not want to say “because life is unfair” or “because that’s how it is.” He wanted something neat, something that could explain death to a four-year-old. He placed his hand on the small of Buckley’s back.
“Susie is dead,” he said now, unable to make it fit in the rules of any game. “Do you know what that means?”
Buckley reached over with his hand and covered the shoe. He looked up to see if his answer was right.
My father nodded. “You won’t see Susie anymore, honey. None of us will.” My father cried. Buckley looked up into the eyes of our father and did not fully understand.
Buckley kept the shoe on his dresser, until one day it wasn’t there anymore and no amount of looking for it could turn it up.
In the kitchen my mother finished her eggnog and excused herself. She went into the dining room and counted silverware, methodically laying out the three kinds of forks, the knives, and the spoons, making them “climb the stairs” as she’d been taught when she worked in Wanamaker’s bridal shop before I was born. She wanted a cigarette and for her children who were living to disappear for a little while.
“Are you going to open your gift?” Samuel Heckler asked my sister.
They stood at the counter, leaning against the dishwasher and the drawers that held napkins and towels. In the room to their right sat my father and brother; on the other side of the kitchen, my mother was thinking Wedgwood Florentine, Cobalt Blue; Royal Worcester, Mountbatten; Lenox, Eternal.
Lindsey smiled and pulled at the white ribbon on top of the box.
“My mom did the ribbon for me,” Samuel Heckler said.
She tore the blue paper away from the black velvet box. Carefully she held it in her palm once the paper was off. In heaven I was excited. When Lindsey and I played Barbies, Barbie and Ken got married at sixteen. To us there was only one true love in everyone’s life; we had no concept of compromise, or retrys.
“Open it,” Samuel Heckler said.
“I’m scared.”
“Don’t be.”
He put his hand on her forearm and—Wow!—what I felt when he did that. Lindsey had a cute boy in the kitchen, vampire or no! This was news, this was a bulletin—I was suddenly privy to everything. She never would have told me any of this stuff.
What the box held was typical or disappointing or miraculous depending on the eye. It was typical because he was a thirteen-year-old boy, or it was disappointing because it was not a wedding ring, or it was miraculous. He’d given her a half a heart. It was gold and from inside his Hukapoo shirt, he pulled out the other side. It hung around his neck on a rawhide cord.
Lindsey’s face flushed; mine flushed up in heaven.
I forgot my father in the family room and my mother counting silver. I saw Lindsey move toward Samuel Heckler. She kissed him; it was glorious. I was almost alive again.
SIX
Two weeks before my death, I left the house later than usual, and by the time I reached the school, the blacktop circle where the school buses usually hovered was empty.
A hall monitor from the discipline office would write down your name if you tried to get in the front doors after the first bell rang, and I didn’t want to be paged during class to come and sit on the hard bench outside Mr. Peterford’s room, where, it was widely known, he would bend you over and paddle your behind with a board. He’d asked the shop teacher to drill holes into it for less wind resistance on the downstroke and more pain when it landed against your jeans.
I had never been late enough or done anything bad enough to meet the board, but in my mind as in every other kid’s I could visualize it so well my butt would sting. Clarissa had told me that the baby stoners, as they were called in junior high, used the back door to the stage, which was always left open by Cleo, the janitor, who had dropped out of high school as a full-blown stoner.
So that day I crept into the backstage area, watching my step, careful not to trip over the various cords and wires. I paused near some scaffolding and put down my book bag to brush my hair. I’d taken to leaving the house in the jingle-bell cap and then switching, as soon as I gained cover behind the O’Dwyers’ house, to an old black watch cap of my father’s. All this left my hair full of static electricity, and my first stop was usually the girls’ room, where I would brush it flat.
“You are beautiful, Susie Salmon.”
I heard the voice but could not place it immediately. I looked around me.
“Here,” the voice said.
I looked up and saw the head and torso of Ray Singh leaning out over the top of the scaffold above me.
“Hello,” he said.
I knew Ray Singh had a crush on me. He had moved from England the year before but Clarissa said he was born in India. That someone could have the face of one country and the voice of another and then move to a third was too incredible for me to fathom. It made him immediately cool. Plus, he seemed eight hundred times smarter than the rest of us, and he had a crush on me. What I finally realized were affectations—the smoking jacket that he sometimes wore to school and his foreign cigarettes, which were actually his mother’s—I thought were evidence of his higher breeding. He knew and saw things that the rest of us didn’t see. That morning when he spoke to me from above, my heart plunged to the floor.
“Hasn’t the first bell rung?” I asked.
“I have Mr. Morton for homeroom,” he said. This explained everything. Mr. Morton had a perpetual hangover, which was at its peak during homeroom. He never called roll.
“What are you doing up there?”
“Climb up and see,” he said, removing his head and shoulders from my view.
I hesitated.
“Come on, Susie.”
It was my one day in life of being a bad kid—of at least feigning the moves. I placed my foot on the bottom rung of the scaffold and reached my arms up to the first crossbar.
“Bring your stuff,” Ray advised.
I went back for my book bag and then climbed unsteadily up.
“Let me help you,” he said and put his hands under my armpits, which, even though covered by my winter parka, I was self-conscious about. I sat for a moment with my feet dangling over the side.
“Tuck them in,” he said. “That way no one will see us.”
I did what he told me, and then I stared at him for a moment. I felt suddenly stupid—unsure of why I was there.
“Will you stay up here all day?” I asked.
“Just until English class is over.”
“You’re cutting English!” It was as if he said he’d robbed a bank.
“I’ve seen every Shakespeare play put on by the Royal Shakespeare Compa
ny,” Ray said. “That bitch has nothing to teach me.”
I felt sorry for Mrs. Dewitt then. If part of being bad was calling Mrs. Dewitt a bitch, I wasn’t into it.
“I like Othello,” I ventured.
“It’s condescending twaddle the way she teaches it. A sort of Black Like Me version of the Moor.”
Ray was smart. This combined with being an Indian from England had made him a Martian in Norristown.
“That guy in the movie looked pretty stupid with black makeup on,” I said.
“You mean Sir Laurence Olivier.”
Ray and I were quiet. Quiet enough to hear the bell for the end of homeroom ring and then, five minutes later, the bell that meant we should be on the first floor in Mrs. Dewitt’s class. As each second passed after that bell, I could feel my skin heat up and Ray’s look lengthen out over my body, taking in my royal blue parka and my kelly green miniskirt with my matching Danskin tights. My real shoes sat beside me inside my bag. On my feet I had a pair of fake sheepskin boots with dirty synthetic shearing spilling out like animal innards around the tops and seams. If I had known this was to be the sex scene of my life, I might have prepared a bit, reapplied my Strawberry-Banana Kissing Potion as I came in the door.
I could feel Ray’s body leaning toward me, the scaffolding underneath us squeaking from his movement. He is from England, I was thinking. His lips moved closer, the scaffold listed. I was dizzy—about to go under the wave of my first kiss, when we both heard something. We froze.
Ray and I lay down side by side and stared at the lights and wires overhead. A moment later, the stage door opened and in walked Mr. Peterford and the art teacher, Miss Ryan, who we recognized by their voices. There was a third person with them.
“We are not taking disciplinary action at this time, but we will if you persist,” Mr. Peterford was saying. “Miss Ryan, did you bring the materials?”
“Yes.” Miss Ryan had come to Kennet from a Catholic school and taken over the art department from two ex-hippies who had been fired when the kiln exploded. Our art classes had gone from wild experiments with molten metals and throwing clay to day after day of drawing profiles of wooden figures she placed in stiff positions at the beginning of each class.
“I’m only doing the assignments.” It was Ruth Connors. I recognized the voice and so did Ray. We all had Mrs. Dewitt’s English class first period.
“This,” Mr. Peterford said, “was not the assignment.”
Ray reached for my hand and squeezed. We knew what they were talking about. A xeroxed copy of one of Ruth’s drawings had been passed around in the library until it had reached a boy at the card catalog who was overtaken by the librarian.
“If I’m not mistaken,” said Miss Ryan, “there are no breasts on our anatomy model.”
The drawing had been of a woman reclining with her legs crossed. And it was no wooden figure with eyehooks connecting the limbs. It was a real woman, and the charcoal smudges of her eyes—whether by accident or intent—had given her a leering look that made every kid who saw it either highly uncomfortable or quite happy, thank you.
“There isn’t a nose or mouth on that wooden model either,” Ruth said, “but you encouraged us to draw in faces.”
Again Ray squeezed my hand.
“That’s enough, young lady,” Mr. Peterford said. “It is the attitude of repose in this particular drawing that clearly made it something the Nelson boy would xerox.”
“Is that my fault?”
“Without the drawing there would be no problem.”
“So it’s my fault?”
“I invite you to realize the position this puts the school in and to assist us by drawing what Miss Ryan instructs the class to draw without making unnecessary additions.”
“Leonardo da Vinci drew cadavers,” Ruth said softly.
“Understood?”
“Yes,” said Ruth.
The stage doors opened and shut, and a moment later Ray and I could hear Ruth Connors crying. Ray mouthed the word go, and I moved to the end of the scaffold, dangling my foot over the side to find a hold.
That week Ray would kiss me by my locker. It didn’t happen up on the scaffold when he’d wanted it to. Our only kiss was like an accident—a beautiful gasoline rainbow.
I climbed down off the scaffold with my back to her. She didn’t move or hide, just looked at me when I turned around. She was sitting on a wooden crate near the back of the stage. A pair of old curtains hung to her left. She watched me walk toward her but didn’t wipe her eyes.
“Susie Salmon,” she said, just to confirm it. The possibility of my cutting first period and hiding backstage in the auditorium was, until that day, as remote as the smartest girl in our class being bawled out by the discipline officer.
I stood in front of her, hat in hand.
“That’s a stupid hat,” she said.
I lifted the jingle-bell cap and looked at it. “I know. My mom made it.”
“So you heard?”
“Can I see?”
Ruth unfolded the much-handled xerox and I stared.
Using a blue ballpoint pen, Brian Nelson had made an obscene hole where her legs were crossed. I recoiled and she watched me. I could see something flicker in her eyes, a private wondering, and then she leaned over and brought out a black leather sketchbook from her knapsack.
Inside, it was beautiful. Drawings of women mostly, but of animals and men too. I’d never seen anything like it before. Each page was covered in her drawings. I realized how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers. She was the quietest kind of rebel. Helpless, really.
“You’re really good, Ruth,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said, and I kept looking through the pages of her book and drinking it in. I was both frightened and excited by what existed underneath the black line of the navel in those drawings—what my mother called the “baby-making machinery.”
I told Lindsey I’d never have one, and when I was ten I’d spent the better part of six months telling any adult who would listen that I intended on getting my tubes tied. I didn’t know what this meant, exactly, but I knew it was drastic, required surgery, and it made my father laugh out loud.
Ruth went from weird to special for me then. The drawings were so good that in that moment I forgot the rules of school, all the bells and whistles, which as kids we were supposed to respond to.
After the cornfield was roped off, searched, then abandoned, Ruth went walking there. She would wrap a large wool shawl of her grandmother’s around her under the ratty old peacoat of her father’s. Soon she noted that teachers in subjects besides gym didn’t report her if she cut. They were happy not to have her there: her intelligence made her a problem. It demanded attention and rushed their lesson plans forward.
And she began to take rides from her father in the mornings to avoid the bus. He left very early and brought his red metal, sloped-top lunchbox, which he had allowed her to pretend was a barn for her Barbies when she was little, and in which he now tucked bourbon. Before he let her out in the empty parking lot, he would stop his truck but keep the heater running.
“Going to be okay today?” he always asked.
Ruth nodded.
“One for the road?”
And without nodding this time she handed him the lunchbox. He opened it, unscrewed the bourbon, took a deep swallow, and then passed it to her. She threw her head back dramatically and either placed her tongue against the glass so very little would make it to her mouth, or took a small, wincing gulp if he was watching her.
She slid out of the high cab. It was cold, bitterly cold, before the sun rose. Then she remembered a fact from one of our classes: people moving are warmer than people at rest. So she began to walk directly to the cornfield, keeping a good pace. She talked to herself, and sometimes she thought about me. Often she would rest a moment against the chain-link fence that separated th
e soccer field from the track, while she watched the world come alive around her.
So we met each morning in those first few months. The sun would come up over the cornfield and Holiday, let loose by my father, would come to chase rabbits in and out of the tall dry stalks of dead corn. The rabbits loved the trimmed lawns of the athletic fields, and as Ruth approached she’d see their dark forms line up along the white chalk of the farthest boundaries like some sort of tiny sports team. She liked the idea of this and I did too. She believed stuffed animals moved at night when humans went to sleep. She still thought in her father’s lunchbox there might be minute cows and sheep that found time to graze on the bourbon and baloney.
When Lindsey left the gloves from Christmas for me, in between the farthest boundary of the soccer field and the cornfield, I looked down one morning to see the rabbits investigate: sniff at the corners of the gloves lined with their own kin. Then I saw Ruth pick them up before Holiday grabbed them. She turned the bottom of one glove so the fur faced out and held it up to her cheek. She looked up to the sky and said, “Thank you.” I liked to think she was talking to me.
I grew to love Ruth on those mornings, feeling that in some way we could never explain on our opposite sides of the Inbetween, we were born to keep each other company. Odd girls who had found each other in the strangest way—in the shiver she had felt when I passed.
Ray was a walker, like me, living at the far end of our development, which surrounded the school. He had seen Ruth Connors walking alone out on the soccer fields. Since Christmas he had come and gone to school as quickly as he could, never lingering. He wanted my killer to be caught almost as much as my parents did. Until he was, Ray could not wipe the traces of suspicion off himself, despite his alibi.
He chose a morning when his father was not going to work at the university and filled his father’s thermos with his mother’s sweet tea. He left early to wait for Ruth and made a little camp of the cement shot-put circle, sitting on the metal curve against which the shot-putters braced their feet.