The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

“Do you have cigarettes?”

  “You know I do,” Len said, smiling guiltily. He had to seek out her eyes. They weren’t focusing on him. They seemed to be preoccupied, and he wished he could reach up and grab them and train them on the here and now. On him.

  “Let’s find an exit, then.”

  They found a door to a small concrete balcony near my father’s room. It was a service balcony for a heating unit, so even though it was cramped and slightly chilly, the noise and the hot exhaust of the humming hydrant beside them shut them into a capsule that felt far away. They smoked cigarettes and looked at each other as if they had suddenly and without preparation moved on to a new page, where the pressing business had already been highlighted for prompt attention.

  “How did your wife die?” my mother asked.

  “Suicide.”

  Her hair was covering most of her face, and watching her I was reminded of Clarissa at her most self-conscious. The way she behaved around boys when we went to the mall. She would giggle too much and flash her eyes over at them to see where they were looking. But I was also struck by my mother’s red mouth with the cigarette going up and away from it and smoke trailing out. I had seen this mother only once before—in the photograph. This mother had never had us.

  “Why did she kill herself?”

  “That’s the question that preoccupies me most when I’m not preoccupied by things like your daughter’s murder.”

  A strange smile came across my mother’s face.

  “Say that again,” she said.

  “What?” Len looked at her smile, wanted to reach out and trace the corners of it with his fingertips.

  “My daughter’s murder,” my mother said.

  “Abigail, are you okay?”

  “No one says it. No one in the neighborhood talks about it. People call it the ‘horrible tragedy’ or some variation on that. I just want it to be spoken out loud by somebody. To have it said aloud. I’m ready—I wasn’t ready before.”

  My mother dropped her cigarette onto the concrete and let it burn. She took Len’s face in her hands.

  “Say it,” she said.

  “Your daughter’s murder.”

  “Thank you.”

  And I watched that flat red mouth move across an invisible line that separated her from the rest of the world. She pulled Len in to her and slowly kissed him on the mouth. He seemed to hesitate at first. His body tensed, telling him NO, but that NO became vague and cloudy, became air sucked into the intake fan of the humming hydrant beside them. She reached up and unbuttoned her raincoat. He placed his hand against the thin gauzy material of her summer gown.

  My mother was, in her need, irresistible. As a child I had seen her effect on men. When we were in grocery stores, stockers volunteered to find the items on her list and would help us out to the car. Like Ruana Singh, she was known as one of the pretty mothers in the neighborhood; no man who met her could help but smile. When she asked a question, their beating hearts gave in.

  But still, it had only ever been my father who stretched her laughter out into the rooms of the house and made it okay, somehow, for her to let go.

  By tacking on extra hours here and there and skipping lunches, my father had managed to come home early from work every Thursday when we were little. But whereas the weekends were family time, they called that day “Mommy and Daddy time.” Lindsey and I thought of it as good-girl time. It meant no peeps out of us as we stayed quiet on the other side of the house, while we used my father’s then sparsely filled den as our playroom.

  My mother would start preparing us around two.

  “Bath time,” she sang, as if she were saying we could go out to play. And in the beginning that was how it felt. All three of us would rush up to our rooms and put on bathrobes. We would meet in the hallway—three girls—and my mother would take us by the hands and lead us into our pink bathroom.

  Back then she talked to us about mythology, which she had studied in school. She liked to tell us stories about Persephone and Zeus. She bought us illustrated books on the Norse gods, which gave us nightmares. She had gotten her master’s in English—having fought tooth and nail with Grandma Lynn to go so far in school—and still held on to vague ideas of teaching when the two of us were old enough to be left on our own.

  Those bath times blur together, as do all the gods and goddesses, but what I remember most is watching things hit my mother while I looked at her, how the life she had wanted and the loss of it reached her in waves. As her firstborn, I thought it was me who took away all those dreams of what she had wanted to be.

  My mother would lift Lindsey out of the tub first, dry her, and listen to her chatter about ducks and cuts. Then she would get me out of the tub and though I tried to be quiet the warm water made my sister and me drunk, and we talked to my mother about everything that mattered to us. Boys that teased us or how another family down the block had a puppy and why couldn’t we have one too. She would listen seriously as if she were mentally noting the points of our agenda on a steno pad to which she would later refer.

  “Well, first things first,” she summed up. “Which means a nice nap for the two of you!”

  She and I would tuck Lindsey in together. I stood by the bed as she kissed my sister on her forehead and brushed back her hair from her face. I think competition started there for me. Who got the better kiss, the longer time after the bath with Mom.

  Luckily, I always won this. When I look back now I see that my mother had become—and very quickly after they moved into that house—lonely. Because I was the oldest, I became her closest friend.

  I was too little to know what she was really saying to me, but I loved to be hushed to sleep by the soft lullaby of her words. One of the blessings of my heaven is that I can go back to these moments, live them again, and be with my mother in a way I never could have been. I reach my hand across the Inbetween and take the hand of that young lonely mother in mine.

  What she said to a four-year-old about Helen of Troy: “A feisty woman who screwed things up.” About Margaret Sanger: “She was judged by her looks, Susie. Because she looked like a mouse, no one expected her to last.” Gloria Steinem: “I feel horrible, but I wish she’d trim those nails.” Our neighbors: “An idiot in tight pants; oppressed by that prig of a husband; typically provincial and judgmental of everyone.”

  “Do you know who Persephone is?” she asked me absently one Thursday. But I didn’t answer. By then I’d learned to hush when she brought me into my room. My sister’s and my time was in the bathroom as we were being toweled off. Lindsey and I could talk about anything then. In my bedroom it was Mommy’s time.

  She took the towel and draped it over the spindle knob of my four-poster bed. “Imagine our neighbor Mrs. Tarking as Persephone,” she said. She opened the drawer of the dresser and handed me my underpants. She always doled out my clothes piecemeal, not wanting to pressure me. She understood my needs early. If I was aware I would have to tie laces I would not have been able to put my feet into socks.

  “She’s wearing a long white robe, like a sheet draped over her shoulders, but made out of some nice shiny or light fabric, like silk. And she has sandals made of gold and she’s surrounded by torches which are light made out of flames…”

  She went to the drawer to get my undershirt and absentmindedly put it over my head instead of leaving it to me. Once my mother was launched I could take advantage of it—be the baby again. I never protested and claimed to be grown up or a big girl. Those afternoons were about listening to my mysterious mother.

  She pulled back the tough-cord Sears bedspread, and I scooted over to the far side along the wall. She always checked her watch then and afterward she would say, “Just for a little while,” and slide off her shoes and slip in between the sheets with me.

  For both of us it was about getting lost. She got lost in her story. I got lost in her talk.

  She would tell me about Persephone’s mother, Demeter, or Cupid and Psyche, and I would listen to her
until I fell asleep. Sometimes my parents’ laughter in the room beside me or the sounds of their late-afternoon lovemaking would wake me up. I would lie there in half-sleep, listening. I liked to pretend that I was in the warm hold of a ship from one of the stories my father read to us, and that all of us were on the ocean and the waves were rolling gently up against the sides of the ship. The laughter, the small sounds of muffled moaning, would usher me back under into sleep.

  But then my mother’s escape, her half-measure return to the outside world, had been smashed when I was ten and Lindsey nine. She’d missed her period and had taken the fateful car trip to the doctor. Underneath her smile and exclamations to my sister and me were fissures that led somewhere deep inside her. But because I didn’t want to, because I was a child, I chose not to follow them. I grabbed the smile like a prize and entered the land of wonder of whether I would be the sister to a little boy or to a little girl.

  If I had paid attention, I would have noticed signs. Now I see the shifting, how the stack of books on my parents’ bedside table changed from catalogs for local colleges, encyclopedias of mythology, novels by James, Eliot, and Dickens, to the works of Dr. Spock. Then came gardening books and cookbooks until for her birthday two months before I died, I thought the perfect gift was Better Homes and Gardens Guide to Entertaining. When she realized she was pregnant the third time, she sealed the more mysterious mother off. Bottled up for years behind that wall, that needy part of her had grown, not shrunk, and in Len, the greed to get out, to smash, destroy, rescind, overtook her. Her body led, and in its wake would be the pieces left to her.

  It was not easy for me to witness, but I did.

  Their first embrace was hurried, fumbled, passionate.

  “Abigail,” Len said, his two hands now on either side of her waist underneath the coat, the gauzy gown barely a veil between them. “Think of what you’re doing.”

  “I’m tired of thinking,” she said. Her hair was floating above her head because of the fan beside them—in an aureole. Len blinked as he looked at her. Marvelous, dangerous, wild.

  “Your husband,” he said.

  “Kiss me,” she said. “Please.”

  I was watching a beg for leniency on my mother’s part. My mother was moving physically through time to flee from me. I could not hold her back.

  Len kissed her forehead hard and closed his eyes. She took his hand and placed it on her breast. She whispered in his ear. I knew what was happening. Her rage, her loss, her despair. The whole life lost tumbling out in an arc on that roof, clogging up her being. She needed Len to drive the dead daughter out.

  He pushed her back into the stucco surface of the wall as they kissed, and my mother held on to him as if on the other side of his kiss there could be a new life.

  * * *

  On my way home from the junior high, I would sometimes stop at the edge of our property and watch my mother ride the ride-on mower, looping in and out among the pine trees, and I could remember then how she used to whistle in the mornings as she made her tea and how my father, rushing home on Thursdays, would bring her marigolds and her face would light up yellowy in delight. They had been deeply, separately, wholly in love—apart from her children my mother could reclaim this love, but with them she began to drift. It was my father who grew toward us as the years went by; it was my mother who grew away.

  Beside his hospital bed, Lindsey had fallen asleep while holding our father’s hand. My mother, still mussed, passed by Hal Heckler in the visitors’ area, and a moment later so did Len. Hal didn’t need more than this. He grabbed his helmet and went off down the hall.

  After a brief visit to the ladies’ room, my mother was heading in the direction of my father’s room when Hal stopped her.

  “Your daughter’s in there,” Hal called out. She turned.

  “Hal Heckler,” he said, “Samuel’s brother. I was at the memorial service.”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you.”

  “Not your job,” he said.

  There was an awkward pause.

  “So, Lindsey called me and I brought her here an hour ago.”

  “Oh.”

  “Buckley’s with a neighbor,” he said.

  “Oh.” She was staring at him. In her eyes she was climbing back to the surface. She used his face to climb back to.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m a little upset—that’s understandable, right?”

  “Perfectly,” he said, speaking slowly. “I just wanted to let you know that your daughter is in there with your husband. I’ll be in the visitors’ area if you need me.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She watched him turn away and paused for a moment to listen to the worn heels of his motorcycle boots reverberate down the linoleum hall.

  She caught herself then, shook herself back to where she was, never guessing for a second that that had been Hal’s purpose in greeting her.

  Inside the room it was dark now, the fluorescent light behind my father flickering so slightly it lit only the most obvious masses in the room. My sister was in a chair pulled up alongside the bed, her head resting on the side of it with her hand extended out to touch my father. My father, deep under, was lying on his back. My mother could not know that I was there with them, that here were the four of us so changed now from the days when she tucked Lindsey and me into bed and went to make love to her husband, our father. Now she saw the pieces. She saw that my sister and father, together, had become a piece. She was glad of it.

  I had played a hide-and-seek game of love with my mother as I grew up, courting her attention and approval in a way that I had never had to with my father.

  I didn’t have to play hide-and-seek anymore. As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of the things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.

  Late at night the air above hospitals and senior citizen homes was often thick and fast with souls. Holly and I watched sometimes on the nights when sleep was lost to us. We came to realize how these deaths seemed choreographed from somewhere far away. Not our heaven. And so we began to suspect that there was a place more all-encompassing than where we were.

  Franny came to watch with us in the beginning.

  “It’s one of my secret pleasures,” she admitted. “After all these years I still love to watch the souls that float and spin in masses, all of them clamoring at once inside the air.”

  “I don’t see anything,” I said that first time.

  “Watch closely,” she said, “and hush.”

  But I felt them before I saw them, small warm sparks along my arms. Then there they were, fireflies lighting up and expanding in howls and swirls as they abandoned human flesh.

  “Like snowflakes,” Franny said, “none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before.”

  THIRTEEN

  When she returned to junior high in the fall of 1974, Lindsey was not only the sister of the murdered girl but the child of a “crackpot,” “nutcase,” “looney-tunes,” and the latter hurt her more because it wasn’t true.

  The rumors Lindsey and Samuel heard in the first weeks of the school year wove in and out of the rows of student lockers like the most persistent of snakes. Now the swirl had grown to include Brian Nelson and Clarissa who, thankfully, had both entered the high school that year. At Fairfax Brian and Clarissa clung to each other, exploiting what had happened to them, using my fa-ther’s debasement as a varnish of cool they could coat themselves with by retelling throughout the school what had happened that night in the cornfield.

  Ray and Ruth walked by on the inside of the glass wall that looked out on the outdoor lounge. On the false boulders where the supposed bad kids sat, they would see Brian holding court. His walk that year went from anxious scarecrow to masculine strut. Clarissa, giggly with both fear and lust, had unlocked her privates and slept with Brian. However haphazardly, everyone I’d known was gro
wing up.

  Buckley entered kindergarten that year and immediately arrived home with a crush on his teacher, Miss Koekle. She held his hand so gently whenever she had to lead him to the bathroom or help explain an assignment that her force was irresistible. In one way he profited—she would often sneak him an extra cookie or a softer sit-upon—but in another he was held aloft and apart from his fellow kindergartners. By my death he was made different among the one group—children—in which he might have been anonymous.

  Samuel would walk Lindsey home and then go down the main road and thumb his way to Hal’s bike shop. He counted on buddies of his brother’s to recognize him, and he reached his destination in various pasted-together bikes and trucks that Hal would fine-tune for the driver when they pulled up.

  He did not go inside our house for a while. No one but family did. By October my father was just beginning to get up and around. His doctors had told him that his right leg would always be stiff, but if he stretched and stayed limber it wouldn’t present too much of an obstacle. “No running bases, but everything else,” the surgeon said the morning after his surgery, when my father woke to find Lindsey beside him and my mother standing by the window staring out at the parking lot.

  Buckley went right from basking in the shine of Miss Koekle home to burrow in the empty cave of my father’s heart. He asked ceaseless questions about the “fake knee,” and my father warmed to him.

  “The knee came from outer space,” my father would say. “They brought pieces of the moon back and carved them up and now they use them for things like this.”

  “Wow,” Buckley would say, grinning. “When can Nate see?”

  “Soon, Buck, soon,” my father said. But his smile grew weak.

  When Buckley took these conversations and brought them to our mother—“Daddy’s knee is made out of moonbone,” he would tell her, or “Miss Koekle said my colors were really good”—she would nod her head. She had become aware of what she did. She cut carrots and celery into edible lengths. She washed out thermoses and lunchboxes, and when Lindsey decided she was too old for a lunchbox, my mother caught herself actually happy when she found wax-lined bags that would keep her daughter’s lunch from seeping through and staining her clothes. Which she washed. Which she folded. Which she ironed when necessary and which she straightened on hangers. Which she picked up from the floor or retrieved from the car or untangled from the wet towel left on the bed that she made every morning, tucking the corners in, and fluffing the pillows, and propping up stuffed animals, and opening the blinds to let the light in.