The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

“The cops are punting,” Lindsey said, taking Buckley gently by the shoulders and holding him against her.

  “Punting?” Buckley asked. He always rolled a sound around in his mouth like a sourball until he had its taste and feel.

  “What?”

  “Detective Fenerman is here to tell Dad to stop bugging them.”

  “Lindsey,” Len said, “I wouldn’t put it like that.”

  “Whatever,” she said. My sister wanted out, now, into a place where gifted camp continued, where Samuel and she, or even Artie, who at the last minute had won the Perfect Murder competition by entering the icicle-as-murder-weapon idea, ruled her world.

  “Come on, Dad,” she said. My father was slowly fitting something together. It had nothing to do with George Harvey, nothing to do with me. It was in my mother’s eyes.

  That night, as he had more and more often, my father stayed up by himself in his study. He could not believe the world falling down around him—how unexpected it all was after the initial blast of my death. “I feel like I’m standing in the wake of a volcano eruption,” he wrote in his notebook. “Abigail thinks Len Fenerman is right about Harvey.”

  As he wrote, the candle in the window kept flickering, and despite his desk lamp the flickering distracted him. He sat back in the old wooden school chair he’d had since college and heard the reassuring squeak of the wood under him. At the firm he was failing to even register what was needed of him. Daily now he faced column after column of meaningless numbers he was supposed to make square with company claims. He was making mistakes with a frequency that was frightening, and he feared, more than he had in the first days following my disappearance, that he would not be able to support his two remaining children.

  He stood up and stretched his arms overhead, trying to concentrate on the few exercises that our family doctor had suggested. I watched his body bend in uneasy and surprising ways I had never seen before. He could have been a dancer rather than a businessman. He could have danced on Broadway with Ruana Singh.

  He snapped off the desk light, leaving only the candle.

  In his low green easy chair he now felt the most comfortable. It was where I often saw him sleep. The room like a vault, the chair like a womb, and me standing guard over him. He stared at the candle in the window and thought about what to do; how he had tried to touch my mother and she had pulled away over to the edge of the bed. But how in the presence of the police she seemed to bloom.

  He had grown used to the ghostly light behind the candle’s flame, that quivering reflection in the window. He stared at the two of them—real flame and ghost—and began to work toward a doze, dozing in thought and strain and the events of the day.

  As he was about to let go for the night, we both saw the same thing: another light. Outside.

  It looked like a penlight from that distance. One white beam slowly moving out across the lawns and toward the junior high. My father watched it. It was after midnight now, and the moon was not full enough, as it often was, to see the outlines of the trees and houses. Mr. Stead, who rode his bike late at night with a flashing light on the front powered by his pedals, would never degrade the lawns of his neighbors that way. It was too late for Mr. Stead anyway.

  My father leaned forward in the green chair in his study and watched the flashlight move in the direction of the fallow cornfield.

  “Bastard,” he whispered. “You murderous bastard.”

  He dressed quickly from the storage closet in his study, putting on a hunting jacket that he hadn’t had on since an ill-fated hunting trip ten years earlier. Downstairs he went into the front hall closet and found the baseball bat he’d bought for Lindsey before she favored soccer.

  First he shut off the porch light they kept on all night for me and that, even though it had been eight months since the police said I would not be found alive, they could not bring themselves to stop leaving on. With his hand on the doorknob, he took a deep breath.

  He turned the knob and found himself out on the dark front porch. Closed the door and found himself standing in his front yard with a baseball bat and these words: find a quiet way.

  He walked through his front yard and across the street and then into the O’Dwyers’ yard, where he had first seen the light. He passed their darkened swimming pool and the rusted-out swing set. His heart was pumping, but he could not feel anything but the knowledge in his brain. George Harvey had killed his last little girl.

  He reached the soccer field. To his right, far into the cornfield but not in the vicinity he knew by heart—the area that had been roped off and cleared and combed and bulldozed—he saw the small light. He clenched his fingers tighter around the bat by his side. For just a second he could not believe what he was about to do, but then, with everything in him, he knew.

  The wind helped him. It swept along the soccer field alongside the cornfield and whipped his trousers around the front of his legs; it pushed him forward despite himself. Everything fell away. Once he was among the rows of corn, his focus solely on the light, the wind disguised his presence. The sound of his feet crushing the stalks was swept up in the whistle and bustle of the wind against the broken plants.

  Things that made no sense flooded his head—the hard rubber sound of children’s roller skates on pavement, the smell of his father’s pipe tobacco, Abigail’s smile when he met her, like light piercing his confused heart—and then the flashlight shut off and everything went equal and dark.

  He took a few more steps, then stopped.

  “I know you’re here,” he said.

  I flooded the cornfield, I flashed fires through it to light it up, I sent storms of hail and flowers, but none of it worked to warn him. I was relegated to heaven: I watched.

  “I’m here for it,” my father said, his voice trembling. That heart bursting in and out, blood gorging the rivers of his chest and then cinching up. Breath and fire and lungs seizing, releasing, adrenaline saving what was left. My mother’s smile in his mind gone, mine taking its place.

  “Nobody’s awake,” my father said. “I’m here to finish it.”

  He heard whimpering. I wanted to cast down a spotlight like they did in the school auditorium, awkwardly, the light not always hitting the right place on the stage. There she would be, crouching and whimpering and now, despite her blue eye shadow and Western-style boots from Bakers’, wetting her pants. A child.

  She didn’t recognize my father’s voice infused with hate. “Brian?” Clarissa’s quavering voice came out. “Brian?” It was hope like a shield.

  My father’s hand loosened on the bat, letting it fall.

  “Hello? Who’s there?”

  With wind in his ears, Brian Nelson, the beanstalk scarecrow, parked his older brother’s Spyder Corvette in the school lot. Late, always late, sleeping in class and at the dinner table but never when a boy had a Playboy or a cute girl walked by, never on a night when he had a girl waiting for him out in the cornfield. Still, he took his time. The wind, glorious blanket and cover for what he had planned, whipped past his ears.

  Brian moved toward the cornfield with his giant torch light from his mother’s under-the-sink disaster kit. Finally he heard what he would later say were Clarissa’s cries for help.

  My father’s heart was like a stone there, heavy, carried inside his chest as he ran and fumbled toward the sound of the girl’s whimpering. His mother was knitting him mittens, Susie was asking for gloves, so cold in the cornfield in winter. Clarissa! Susie’s silly friend. Makeup, prissy jam sandwiches, and her tropical tan skin.

  He ran blind into her and knocked her down in the darkness. Her screaming filled his ear and poured into the empty spaces, ricocheting inside of him. “Susie!” he screamed back.

  Brian ran when he heard my name—full-speed-ahead awake. His light hopped over the cornfield, and, for one bright second, there was Mr. Harvey. No one but me saw him. Brian’s light hit his back as he crawled into the high stalks and listened, again, for the sound of whimpering.

 
And then the light hit target and Brian dragged my father up and off Clarissa to hit him. Hit him on the head and back and face with the survival-kit flashlight. My father shouted and yelped and moaned.

  And then Brian saw the bat.

  I pushed and pushed against the unyielding borders of my heaven. I wanted to reach out and lift my father up, away, to me.

  Clarissa ran and Brian swung. My father’s eyes caught Brian’s but he could barely breathe.

  “You fucker!” Brian was black and white with blame.

  I heard mumblings in the dirt. I heard my name. I thought I could taste the blood on my father’s face, reach out to draw my fingers across his cut lips, lie down with him in my grave.

  But I had to turn my back in heaven. I could do nothing—trapped in my perfect world. The blood I tasted was bitter. Acid. I wanted my father’s vigil, his tight love for me. But also I wanted him to go away and leave me be. I was granted one weak grace. Back in the room where the green chair was still warm from his body, I blew that lonely, flickering candle out.

  TWELVE

  I stood in the room beside him and watched him sleep. During the night the story had come unwound and spun down so that the police understood: Mr. Salmon was crazy with grief and had gone out to the cornfield seeking revenge. It fit what they knew of him, his persistent phone calls, his obsession with the neighbor, and Detective Fenerman having visited that same day to tell my parents that for all intents and purposes my murder investigation had entered a sort of hiatus. No clues were left to pursue. No body had been found.

  The surgeon had to operate on his knee to replace the cap with a purselike suture that partially disabled the joint. As I watched the operation I thought of how much like sewing it seemed, and I hoped that my father was in more capable hands than if he had been brought to me. In home ec my hands had been clumsy. Zipper foot or baster, I got them all confused.

  But the surgeon had been patient. A nurse had filled him in on the story as he washed and scrubbed his hands. He remembered reading about what had happened to me in the papers. He was my father’s age and had children of his own. He shivered as he stretched his gloves out over his hands. How alike he and this man were. How very different.

  In the dark hospital room, a fluorescent bar light buzzed just behind my father’s bed. As dawn approached it was the only light in the room until my sister walked in.

  My mother and sister and brother woke to the sounds of the police sirens and came down into the dark kitchen from their bedrooms.

  “Go wake your father,” my mother said to Lindsey. “I can’t believe he slept through this.”

  And so my sister had gone up. Everyone now knew where to look for him: in only six months, the green chair had become his true bed.

  “Dad’s not here!” my sister yelled as soon as she realized. “Dad’s gone. Mom! Mom! Dad’s gone!” For a rare moment Lindsey was a frightened child.

  “Damn!” my mother said.

  “Mommy?” Buckley said.

  Lindsey rushed into the kitchen. My mother faced the stove. Her back was a riddled mass of nerves as she went about making tea.

  “Mom?” Lindsey asked. “We have to do something.”

  “Don’t you see…?” my mother said, stopping for a moment with a box of Earl Grey suspended in the air.

  “What?”

  She put the tea down, switched on the burner, and turned around. She saw something herself then: Buckley had gone to cling to my sister as he anxiously sucked his thumb.

  “He’s gone off after that man and gotten himself in trouble.”

  “We should go out, Mom,” Lindsey said. “We should go help him.”

  “No.”

  “Mom, we have to help Daddy.”

  “Buckley, stop milking your thumb!”

  My brother burst into hot panicked tears, and my sister reached her arms down to pull him in tighter. She looked at our mother.

  “I’m going out to find him,” Lindsey said.

  “You are doing no such thing,” my mother said. “He’ll come home in good time. We’re staying out of this.”

  “Mom,” Lindsey said, “what if he’s hurt?”

  Buckley stopped crying long enough to look back and forth from my sister to my mother. He knew what hurt meant and who was missing from the house.

  My mother gave Lindsey a meaningful look. “We are not discussing this further. You can go up to your room and wait or wait with me. Your choice.”

  Lindsey was dumbfounded. She stared at our mother and knew what she wanted most: to flee, to run out into the cornfield where my father was, where I was, where she felt suddenly that the heart of her family had moved. But Buckley stood warm against her.

  “Buckley,” she said, “let’s go back upstairs. You can sleep in my bed.”

  He was beginning to understand: you were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.

  When the call came from the police, my mother went immediately to the front closet. “He’s been hit with our own baseball bat!” she said, grabbing her coat and keys and lipstick. My sister felt more alone than she had ever been but also more responsible. Buckley couldn’t be left by himself, and Lindsey wasn’t even able to drive. Besides, it made the clearest sense in the world. Didn’t the wife belong most at the husband’s side?

  But when my sister was able to get Nate’s mother on the line—after all, the commotion in the cornfield had awakened the whole neighborhood—she knew what she would do. She called Samuel next. Within an hour, Nate’s mother arrived to take Buckley, and Hal Heckler pulled up to our house on his motorcycle. It should have been exciting—clutching on to Samuel’s gorgeous older brother, riding on a motorcycle for the first time—but all she could think of was our father.

  My mother was not in his hospital room when Lindsey entered; it was just my father and me. She came up and stood on the other side of his bed and started to cry quietly.

  “Daddy?” she said. “Are you okay, Daddy?”

  The door opened a crack. It was Hal Heckler, a tall handsome slash of a man.

  “Lindsey,” he said, “I’ll wait for you out in the visitors’ area in case you need a ride home.”

  He saw her tears when she turned around. “Thanks, Hal. If you see my mother…”

  “I’ll tell her you’re in here.”

  Lindsey took my father’s hand and watched his face for movement. My sister was growing up before my eyes. I listened as she whispered the words he had sung to the two of us before Buckley was born:

  Stones and bones;

  snow and frost;

  seeds and beans and polliwogs.

  Paths and twigs, assorted kisses,

  We all know who Daddy misses!

  His two little frogs of girls, that’s who.

  They know where they are, do you, do you?

  I wish a smile had come curling up onto my father’s face, but he was deep under, swimming against drug and nightmare and waking dream. For a time leaden weights had been tied by anesthesia to the four corners of his consciousness. Like a firm waxen cover it had locked him away tight into the hard-blessed hours where there was no dead daughter and no gone knee, and where there was also no sweet daughter whispering rhymes.

  “When the dead are done with the living,” Franny said to me, “the living can go on to other things.”

  “What about the dead?” I asked. “Where do we go?”

  She wouldn’t answer me.

  Len Fenerman had rushed to the hospital as soon as they put the call through. Abigail Salmon, the dispatcher said, requesting him.

  My father was in surgery, and my mother was pacing back and forth near the nurses’ station. She had driven to the hospital in her raincoat with only her thin summer nightgown beneath it. She had her beating-around-the-yard ballet flats on her feet. She hadn’t bothered to pull her hair back, and there hadn’t been any hair elastics in her pockets or purse. In the dark foggy parking lot of the hospital she had stopped to check he
r face and applied her stock red lipstick with a practiced hand.

  When she saw Len approaching from the end of the long white corridor, she relaxed.

  “Abigail,” he said when he grew closer.

  “Oh, Len,” she said. Her face puzzled up on what she could say next. His name had been the sigh she needed. Everything that came next was not words.

  The nurses at their station turned their heads away as Len and my mother touched hands. They extended this privacy veil habitually, as a matter of course, but even so they could see this man meant something to this woman.

  “Let’s talk in the visitors’ area,” Len said and led my mother down the corridor.

  As they walked she told him my father was in surgery. He filled her in on what had happened in the cornfield.

  “Apparently he said he thought the girl was George Harvey.”

  “He thought Clarissa was George Harvey?” My mother stopped, incredulous, just outside the visitors’ area.

  “It was dark out, Abigail. I think he only saw the girl’s flashlight. My visit today couldn’t have helped much. He’s convinced that Harvey is involved.”

  “Is Clarissa all right?”

  “She was treated for scratches and released. She was hysterical. Crying and screaming. It was a horrible coincidence, her being Susie’s friend.”

  Hal was slumped down in a darkened corner of the visitors’ area with his feet propped up on the helmet he’d brought for Lindsey. When he heard the voices approaching he stirred.

  It was my mother and a cop. He slumped back down and let his shoulder-length hair obscure his face. He was pretty sure my mother wouldn’t remember him.

  But she recognized the jacket as Samuel’s and for a moment thought, Samuel’s here, but then thought, His brother.

  “Let’s sit,” Len said, indicating the connected modular chairs on the far side of the room.

  “I’d rather keep walking,” my mother said. “The doctor said it will be an hour at least before they have anything to tell us.”

  “Where to?”