by Alice Sebold
When he saw her walking on the other side of the chain-link fence that separated the school from the soccer field and inside which was the most revered of the sports fields—the football one—he rubbed his hands together and prepared what he wanted to say. His bravery this time came not from having kissed me—a goal he’d set himself a full year before its completion—but from being, at fourteen, intensely lonely.
I watched Ruth approach the soccer field, thinking she was alone. In an old home her father had gone to scavenge, he had found her a treat to go along with her new hobby—an anthology of poems. She held them close.
She saw Ray stand up when she was still some distance away.
“Hello, Ruth Connors!” he called and waved his arms.
Ruth looked over, and his name came into her head: Ray Singh. But she didn’t know much more than that. She had heard the rumors about the police being over at his house, but she believed what her father had said—“No kid did that”—and so she walked over to him.
“I prepared tea and have it in my thermos here,” Ray said. I blushed for him up in heaven. He was smart when it came to Othello, but now he was acting like a geek.
“No thank you,” Ruth said. She stood near him but with a definite few feet more than usual still in between. Her fingernails were pressed into the worn cover of the poetry anthology.
“I was there that day, when you and Susie talked backstage,” Ray said. He held the thermos out to her. She made no move closer and didn’t respond.
“Susie Salmon,” he clarified.
“I know who you mean,” she said.
“Are you going to the memorial service?”
“I didn’t know there was one,” she said.
“I don’t think I’m going.”
I was staring hard at his lips. They were redder than usual from the cold. Ruth took a step forward.
“Do you want some lip balm?” Ruth asked.
Ray lifted his wool gloves up to his lips, where they snagged briefly on the chapped surface that I had kissed. Ruth dug her hands in the peacoat pocket and pulled out her Chap Stick. “Here,” she said, “I have tons of them. You can keep it.”
“That’s so nice,” he said. “Will you at least sit with me until the buses come?”
They sat together on the shot-putters’ cement platform. Again I was seeing something I never would have seen: the two of them together. It made Ray more attractive to me than he had ever been. His eyes were the darkest gray. When I watched him from heaven I did not hesitate to fall inside of them.
It became a ritual for the two of them. On the days that his father taught, Ruth brought him a little bourbon in her father’s flask; otherwise they had sweet tea. They were cold as hell, but that didn’t seem to matter to them.
They talked about what it was like to be a foreigner in Norristown. They read poems aloud from Ruth’s anthology. They talked about how to become what they wanted to be. A doctor for Ray. A painter/poet for Ruth. They made a secret club of the other oddballs they could point out in our class. There were the obvious ones like Mike Bayles, who had taken so much acid no one understood how he was still in school, or Jeremiah, who was from Louisiana and so just as much a foreigner as Ray. Then there were the quiet ones. Artie, who talked excitedly to anyone about the effects of formaldehyde. Harry Orland, who was so painfully shy he wore his gym shorts over his jeans. And Vicki Kurtz, who everyone thought was okay after the death of her mother, but whom Ruth had seen sleeping in a bed of pine needles behind the junior high’s regulating plant. And, sometimes, they would talk about me.
“It’s so strange,” Ruth said. “I mean, it’s like we were in the same class since kindergarten but that day backstage in the auditorium was the first time we ever looked at each other.”
“She was great,” Ray said. He thought of our lips brushing past one another as we stood alone in a column of lockers. How I had smiled with my eyes closed and then almost run away. “Do you think they’ll find him?”
“I guess so. You know, we’re only like one hundred yards away from where it happened.”
“I know,” he said.
They both sat on the thin metal rim of the shot-putters’ brace, holding tea in their gloved hands. The cornfield had become a place no one went. When a ball strayed from the soccer field, a boy took a dare to go in and get it. That morning the sun was slicing right through the dead stalks as it rose, but there was no heat from it.
“I found these here,” she said, indicating the leather gloves.
“Do you ever think about her?” he asked.
They were quiet again.
“All the time,” Ruth said. A chill ran down my spine. “Sometimes I think she’s lucky, you know. I hate this place.”
“Me too,” Ray said. “But I’ve lived other places. This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one.”
“You’re not implying…”
“She’s in heaven, if you believe in that stuff.”
“You don’t?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“I do,” Ruth said. “I don’t mean la-la angel-wing crap, but I do think there’s a heaven.”
“Is she happy?”
“It is heaven, right?”
“But what does that mean?”
The tea was stone-cold and the first bell had already rung. Ruth smiled into her cup. “Well, as my dad would say, it means she’s out of this shithole.”
When my father knocked on the door of Ray Singh’s house, he was struck dumb by Ray’s mother, Ruana. It was not that she was immediately welcoming, and she was far from sunny, but something about her dark hair, and her gray eyes, and even the strange way she seemed to step back from the door once she opened it, all of these things overwhelmed him.
He had heard the offhand comments the police made about her. To their mind she was cold and snobbish, condescending, odd. And so that was what he imagined he would find.
“Come in and sit,” she’d said to him when he pronounced his name. Her eyes, on the word Salmon, had gone from closed to open doorways—dark rooms where he wanted to travel firsthand.
He almost lost his balance as she led him into the small cramped front room of their house. There were books on the floor with their spines facing up. They came out three rows deep from the wall. She was wearing a yellow sari and what looked like gold lamé capri pants underneath. Her feet were bare. She padded across the wall-to-wall and stopped at the couch. “Something to drink?” she asked, and he nodded his head.
“Hot or cold?”
“Hot.”
As she turned the corner into a room he couldn’t see, he sat down on the brown plaid couch. The windows across from him under which the books were lined were draped with long muslin curtains, which the harsh daylight outside had to fight to filter through. He felt suddenly very warm, almost close to forgetting why that morning he had double-checked the Singhs’ address.
A little while later, as my father was thinking of how tired he was and how he had promised my mother to pick up some long-held dry cleaning, Mrs. Singh returned with tea on a tray and put it down on the carpet in front of him.
“We don’t have much furniture, I’m afraid. Dr. Singh is still looking for tenure.”
She went into an adjoining room and brought back a purple floor pillow for herself, which she placed on the floor to face him.
“Dr. Singh is a professor?” my father asked, though he knew this already, knew more than he was comfortable with about this beautiful woman and her sparsely furnished home.
“Yes,” she said, and poured the tea. It was quiet. She held out a cup to him, and as he took it she said, “Ray was with him the day your daughter was killed.”
He wanted to fall over into her.
“That must be why you’ve come,” she continued.
“Yes,” he said, “I want to talk to him.”
“He’s at school right now,” she said. “You know that.” Her legs in the gold pants were tucked to her side. The
nails on her toes were long and unpolished, their surface gnarled from years of dancing.
“I wanted to come by and assure you I mean him no harm,” my father said. I watched him. I had never seen him like this before. The words fell out of him like burdens he was delivering, backlogged verbs and nouns, but he was watching her feet curl against the dun-colored rug and the way the small pool of numbed light from the curtains touched her right cheek.
“He did nothing wrong and loved your little girl. A schoolboy crush, but still.”
Schoolboy crushes happened all the time to Ray’s mother. The teenager who delivered the paper would pause on his bike, hoping that she would be near the door when she heard the thump of the Philadelphia Inquirer hit the porch. That she would come out and, if she did, that she would wave. She didn’t even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house—it was the eyes, her dancer’s carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.
When the police had come they had stumbled into the dark front hall in search of a killer, but before Ray even reached the top of the stairs, Ruana had so confused them that they were agreeing to tea and sitting on silk pillows. They had expected her to fall into the grooves of the patter they relied on with all attractive women, but she only grew more erect in posture as they tried harder and harder to ingratiate themselves, and she stood upright by the windows while they questioned her son.
“I’m glad Susie had a nice boy like her,” my father said. “I’ll thank your son for that.”
She smiled, not showing teeth.
“He wrote her a love note,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I wish I had known enough to do the same,” he said. “Tell her I loved her on that last day.”
“Yes.”
“But your son did.”
“Yes.”
They stared at each other for a moment.
“You must have driven the policemen nuts,” he said and smiled more to himself than to her.
“They came to accuse Ray,” she said. “I wasn’t concerned with how they felt about me.”
“I imagine it’s been hard for him,” my father said.
“No, I won’t allow that,” she said sternly and placed her cup back on the tray. “You cannot have sympathy for Ray or for us.”
My father tried to stutter out a protest.
She placed her hand in the air. “You have lost a daughter and come here for some purpose. I will allow you that and that only, but trying to understand our lives, no.”
“I didn’t mean to offend,” he said. “I only…”
Again, the hand up.
“Ray will be home in twenty minutes. I will talk to him first and prepare him, then you may talk to my son about your daughter.”
“What did I say?”
“I like that we don’t have much furniture. It allows me to think that someday we might pack up and leave.”
“I hope you’ll stay,” my father said. He said it because he had been trained to be polite from an early age, a training he passed on to me, but he also said it because part of him wanted more of her, this cold woman who was not exactly cold, this rock who was not stone.
“With all gentleness,” she said, “you don’t even know me. We’ll wait together for Ray.”
My father had left our house in the midst of a fight between Lindsey and my mother. My mother was trying to get Lindsey to go with her to the Y to swim. Without thinking, Lindsey had blared, “I’d rather die!” at the top of her lungs. My father watched as my mother froze, then burst, fleeing to their bedroom to wail behind the door. He quietly tucked his notebook in his jacket pocket, took the car keys off the hook by the back door, and snuck out.
In those first two months my mother and father moved in opposite directions from each other. One stayed in, the other went out. My father fell asleep in his den in the green chair, and when he woke he crept carefully into the bedroom and slid into bed. If my mother had most of the sheets he would lie without them, his body curled up tight, ready to spring at a moment’s notice, ready for anything.
“I know who killed her,” he heard himself say to Ruana Singh.
“Have you told the police?”
“Yes.”
“What do they say?”
“They say that for now there is nothing but my suspicion to link him to the crime.”
“A father’s suspicion…” she began.
“Is as powerful as a mother’s intuition.”
This time there were teeth in her smile.
“He lives in the neighborhood.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m investigating all leads,” my father said, knowing how it sounded as he said it.
“And my son…”
“Is a lead.”
“Perhaps the other man frightens you too much.”
“But I have to do something,” he protested.
“Here we are again, Mr. Salmon,” she said. “You misinterpret me. I am not saying you are doing the wrong thing by coming here. It is the right thing in its way. You want to find something soft, something warm in all this. Your searching led you here. That’s a good thing. I am only concerned that it be good, too, for my son.”
“I mean no harm.”
“What is the man’s name?”
“George Harvey.” It was the first time he’d said it aloud to anyone but Len Fenerman.
She paused and stood. Turning her back to him, she walked over to first one window and then the other and drew the curtains back. It was the after-school light that she loved. She watched for Ray as he walked up the road.
“Ray will come now. I will go to meet him. If you’ll excuse me I need to put on my coat and boots.” She paused. “Mr. Salmon,” she said, “I would do exactly what you are doing: I would talk to everyone I needed to, I would not tell too many people his name. When I was sure,” she said, “I would find a quiet way, and I would kill him.”
He could hear her in the hallway, the metal clank of hangers as she got her coat. A few minutes later the door was opened and closed. A cold breeze came in from the outside and then out on the road he could see a mother greet her son. Neither of them smiled. Their heads bent low. Their mouths moved. Ray took in the fact that my father was waiting for him inside his home.
At first my mother and I thought it was just the obvious that marked Len Fenerman as different from the rest of the force. He was smaller than the hulking uniforms who frequently accompanied him. Then there were the less obvious traits too—the way he often seemed to be thinking to himself, how he wasn’t much for joking or trying to be anything but serious when he talked about me and the circumstances of the case. But, talking with my mother, Len Fenerman had shown himself for what he was: an optimist. He believed my killer would be caught.
“Maybe not today or tomorrow,” he said to my mother, “but someday he’ll do something uncontrollable. They are too uncontrolled in their habits not to.”
My mother was left to entertain Len Fenerman until my father arrived home from the Singhs’. On the table in the family room Buckley’s crayons were scattered across the butcher paper my mother had laid down. Buckley and Nate had drawn until their heads began to nod like heavy flowers, and my mother had plucked them up in her arms, first one and then the other, and brought them over to the couch. They slept there end to end with their feet almost touching in the center.
Len Fenerman knew enough to talk in hushed whispers, but he wasn’t, my mother noted, a worshiper of children. He watched her carry the two boys but did not stand to help or comment on them the way the other policemen always did, defining her by her children, both living and dead.
“Jack wants to talk to you,” my mother said. “But I’m sure you’re too busy to wait.”
“Not too busy.”
I saw a black strand of her hair fall from where she had tucked it behind her ear. It softened her face. I saw Len see it too.
“He went over to that poor Ray Sin
gh’s house,” she said and tucked the fallen hair back in its proper place.
“I’m sorry we had to question him,” Len said.
“Yes,” she said. “No young boy is capable of…” She couldn’t say it, and he didn’t make her.
“His alibi was airtight.”
My mother took up a crayon from the butcher paper.
Len Fenerman watched my mother draw stick figures and stick dogs. Buckley and Nate made quiet sounds of sleep on the couch. My brother curled up into a fetal position and a moment later placed his thumb in his mouth to suck. It was a habit my mother had told us all we must help him break. Now she envied such easy peace.
“You remind me of my wife,” Len said after a long silence, during which my mother had drawn an orange poodle and what looked like a blue horse undergoing electroshock treatment.
“She can’t draw either?”
“She wasn’t much of a talker when there was nothing to say.”
A few more minutes passed. A yellow ball of sun. A brown house with flowers outside the door—pink, blue, purple.
“You used the past tense.”
They both heard the garage door. “She died soon after we were married,” he said.
“Daddy!” Buckley yelled, and leapt up, forgetting Nate and everyone else.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Len.
“I am too,” he said, “about Susie. Really.”
In the back hall my father greeted Buckley and Nate with high cheers and calls for “Oxygen!” as he always did when we besieged him after a long day. Even if it felt false, elevating his mood for my brother was often the favorite part of his day.
My mother stared at Len Fenerman while my father walked toward the family room from the back. Rush to the sink, I felt like saying to her, stare down the hole and look into the earth. I’m down there waiting; I’m up here watching.
Len Fenerman had been the one that first asked my mother for my school picture when the police thought I might be found alive. In his wallet, my photo sat in a stack. Among these dead children and strangers was a picture of his wife. If a case had been solved he had written the date of its resolution on the back of the photo. If the case was still open—in his mind if not in the official files of the police—it was blank. There was nothing on the back of mine. There was nothing on his wife’s.