The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

  In the moments when Buckley sought her out, she often made a barter of it. She would focus on him for a few minutes, and then she would allow herself to drift away from her house and home and think of Len.

  By November, my father had mastered what he called an “adroit hobble,” and when Buckley egged him on he would do a contorted skip that, as long as it made his son laugh, didn’t make him think of how odd and desperate he might look to an outsider or to my mother. Everyone save Buckley knew what was coming: the first anniversary.

  Buckley and my father spent the crisp fall afternoons out in the fenced-in yard with Holiday. My father would sit in the old iron lawn chair with his leg stretched out in front of him and propped up slightly on an ostentatious boot scraper that Grandma Lynn had found in a curio shop in Maryland.

  Buckley threw the squeaky cow toy while Holiday ran to get it. My father took pleasure in the agile body of his five-year-old son and Buckley’s peals of delight when Holiday knocked him over and nudged him with his nose or licked his face with his long pink tongue. But he couldn’t rid himself of one thought: this too—this perfect boy—could be taken from him.

  It had been a combination of things, his injury not the least among them, that had made him stay inside the house on an extended sick leave from his firm. His boss acted differently around him now, and so did his coworkers. They trod gently outside his office and would stop a few feet from his desk as if, should they be too relaxed in his presence, what had happened to him would happen to them—as if having a dead child were contagious. No one knew how he continued to do what he did, while simultaneously they wanted him to shut all signs of his grief away, place it in a file somewhere and tuck it in a drawer that no one would be asked to open again. He called in regularly, and his boss just as easily agreed that he could take another week, another month if he had to, and he counted this as a blessing of always having been on time or willing to work late. But he stayed away from Mr. Harvey and tried to curb even the thought of him. He would not use his name except in his notebook, which he kept hidden in his study, where it was surprisingly easily agreed with my mother that she would no longer clean. He had apologized to me in his notebook. “I need to rest, honey. I need to understand how to go after this man. I hope you’ll understand.”

  But he had set his return to work for December 2, right after Thanksgiving. He wanted to be back in the office by the anniversary of my disappearance. Functioning and catching up on work—in as public and distracting a place as he could think of. And away from my mother, if he was honest with himself.

  How to swim back to her, how to reach her again. She was pulling and pulling away—all her energy was against the house, and all his energy was inside it. He settled on building back his strength and finding a strategy to pursue Mr. Harvey. Placing blame was easier than adding up the mounting figures of what he’d lost.

  Grandma Lynn was due for Thanksgiving, and Lindsey had kept to a beautifying regime Grandma had set up for her through letters. She’d felt silly when she first put cucumbers on her eyes (to diminish puffiness), or oatmeal on her face (to cleanse the pores and absorb excess oils), or eggs yolks in her hair (to make it shine). Her use of groceries had even made my mother laugh, then wonder if she too should start to beautify. But that was only for a second, because she was thinking of Len, not because she was in love with him but because being with him was the fastest way she knew to forget.

  Two weeks before Grandma Lynn’s arrival, Buckley and my father were out in the yard with Holiday. Buckley and Holiday were romping from one large pile of burnished oak leaves to another in an increasingly hyper game of tag. “Watch out, Buck,” my father said. “You’ll make Holiday nip.” And sure enough.

  My father said he wanted to try something out.

  “We have to see if your old dad can carry you piggyback style again. Soon you’ll be too big.”

  So, awkwardly, in the beautiful isolation of the yard, where if my father fell only a boy and a dog who loved him would see, the two of them worked together to make what they both wanted—this return to father/son normalcy—happen. When Buckley stood on the iron chair—“Now scoot up my back,” my father said, stooping forward, “and grab on to my shoulders,” not knowing if he’d have the strength to lift him up from there—I crossed my fingers hard in heaven and held my breath. In the cornfield, yes, but, in this moment, repairing the most basic fabric of their previous day-to-day lives, challenging his injury to take a moment like this back, my father became my hero.

  “Duck, now duck again,” he said as they galumphed through the downstairs doorways and up the stairs, each step a balance my father negotiated, a wincing pain. And with Holiday rushing past them on the stairs, and Buckley joyous on his mount, he knew that in this challenge to his strength he had done the right thing.

  When the two of them—with dog—discovered Lindsey in the upstairs bathroom, she whined a loud complaint.

  “Daaaaddd!”

  My father stood up straight. Buckley reached up and touched the light fixture with his hand.

  “What are you doing?” my father said.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  She sat on the toilet lid wrapped in a large white towel (the towels my mother bleached, the towels my mother hung on the line to dry, the towels she folded, and placed in a basket and brought up to the linen closet…). Her left leg was propped up on the edge of the tub, covered with shaving cream. In her hand she held my father’s razor.

  “Don’t be petulant,” my father said.

  “I’m sorry,” my sister said, looking down. “I just want a little privacy is all.”

  My father lifted Buckley up and over his head. “The counter, the counter, son,” he said, and Buckley thrilled at the illegal halfway point of the bathroom counter and how his muddy feet soiled the tile.

  “Now hop down.” And he did. Holiday tackled him.

  “You’re too young to shave your legs, sweetie,” my father said.

  “Grandma Lynn started shaving at eleven.”

  “Buckley, will you go in your room and take the dog? I’ll be in in a while.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  Buckley was still a little boy who my father could, with patience and a bit of maneuvering, get up on his shoulders so they could be a typical father and son. But he now saw in Lindsey what brought a double pain. I was a little girl in the tub, a toddler being held up to the sink, a girl who had forever stopped just short of sitting as my sister did now.

  When Buckley was gone, he turned his attention to my sister. He would care for his two daughters by caring for one: “Are you being careful?” he asked.

  “I just started,” Lindsey said. “I’d like to be alone, Dad.”

  “Is that the same blade that was on it when you got it from my shaving kit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, my beard stubble dulls the blade. I’ll go get you a fresh one.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” my sister said, and again she was his sweet, piggyback-riding Lindsey.

  He left the room and went down the hallway to the other side of the house and the master bathroom that he and my mother still shared, though they no longer slept in the same room together. As he reached up into the cabinet for the package of fresh razors, he felt a tear in his chest. He ignored it and focused on the task. There was only a flicker of a thought then: Abigail should be doing this.

  He brought the razor blades back, showed Lindsey how to change them, and gave her a few pointers on how best to shave. “Watch out for the ankle and the knee,” he said. “Your mother always called those the danger spots.”

  “You can stay if you want,” she said, ready now to let him in.

  “But I might be a bloody mess.” She wanted to hit herself. “Sorry, Dad,” she said. “Here, I’ll move—you sit.”

  She got up and went to sit on the edge of the tub. She ran the tap, and my father lowered himself onto the toilet lid.

  “It’s okay, honey,” he said
. “We haven’t talked about your sister in a while.”

  “Who needs to?” my sister said. “She’s everywhere.”

  “Your brother seems to be all right.”

  “He’s glued to you.”

  “Yes,” he said, and he realized he liked it, this father-courting his son was doing.

  “Ouch,” Lindsey said, a fine trickle of blood beginning to spread into the white foam of the shaving cream. “This is a total hassle.”

  “Press down on the nick with your thumb. It stops the bleeding. You could do just to the top of your knee,” he offered. “That’s what your mother does unless we’re going to the beach.”

  Lindsey paused. “You guys never go to the beach.”

  “We used to.”

  My father had met my mother when they were both working at Wanamaker’s during the summer break from college. He had just made a nasty comment about how the employee’s lounge reeked of cigarettes when she smiled and brought out her then-habitual pack of Pall Malls. “Touché,” he said, and he stayed beside her despite the reeking stink of her cigarettes enveloping him from head to toe.

  “I’ve been trying to decide who I look like,” Lindsey said, “Grandma Lynn or Mom.”

  “I’ve always thought both you and your sister looked like my mother,” he said.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you still convinced that Mr. Harvey had something to do with it?”

  It was like a stick finally sparking against another stick—the friction took.

  “There is no doubt in my mind, honey. None.”

  “Then why doesn’t Len arrest him?”

  She drew the razor sloppily up and finished her first leg. She hesitated there, waiting.

  “I wish it was easy to explain,” he said, the words coiling out of him. He had never talked at length about his suspicion to anyone. “When I met him that day, in his backyard, and we built that tent—the one he claimed he built for his wife, whose name I thought was Sophie and Len took down as Leah—there was something about his movements that made me sure.”

  “Everyone thinks he’s kind of weird.”

  “True, I understand that,” he said. “But then everyone hasn’t had much to do with him either. They don’t know whether his weirdness is benign or not.”

  “Benign?”

  “Harmless.”

  “Holiday doesn’t like him,” Lindsey offered.

  “Exactly. I’ve never seen that dog bark so hard. The fur on his back stood straight up that morning.”

  “But the cops think you’re nuts.”

  “ ‘No evidence’ is all they can say. Without evidence and without—excuse me, honey—a body, they have nothing to move on and no basis for an arrest.”

  “What would be a basis?”

  “I guess something to link him to Susie. If someone had seen him in the cornfield or even lurking around the school. Something like that.”

  “Or if he had something of hers?” Both my father and Lindsey were heatedly talking, her second leg lathered but left unshaved, because what radiated as the two sticks of their interest sparked flame was that I was in that house somewhere. My body—in the basement, first floor, second floor, attic. To keep from acknowledging that horrible—but oh, if it were true, so blatant so perfect so conclusive as evidence—thought, they remembered what I wore that day, remembered what I carried, the Frito Bandito eraser I prized, the David Cassidy button I’d pinned inside my bag, the David Bowie one I had pinned on the outside. They named all the clutter and accessories that surrounded what would be the best, most hideous evidence anyone could find—my corpse cut up, my blank and rotting eyes.

  My eyes: the makeup Grandma Lynn had given her helped but did not solve the problem of how much everyone could see my eyes in Lindsey’s. When they presented themselves—a compact flashing past her when in use by a girl at a neighboring desk, or an unexpected reflection in the window of a store—she looked away. It was particularly painful with my father. What she realized as they talked was that as long as they were on this subject—Mr. Harvey, my clothes, my book bag, my body, me—the vigilance to my memory made my father see her as Lindsey and not as a tragic combination of his two daughters.

  “So you would want to be able to get in his house?” she said.

  They stared at each other, a flicker of recognition of a dangerous idea. In his hesitation, before he finally said that that would be illegal, and no, he hadn’t thought of that, she knew he was lying. She also knew he needed someone to do it for him.

  “You should finish shaving, honey,” he said.

  She agreed with him and turned away, knowing what she’d been told.

  Grandma Lynn arrived on the Monday before Thanksgiving. With the same laser-beam eyes that immediately sought out any unsightly blemish on my sister, she now saw something beneath the surface of her daughter’s smile, in her placated, tranquilized movements and in how her body responded whenever Detective Fenerman or the police work came up.

  When my mother refused my father’s help in cleaning up after dinner that night, the laser eyes were certain. Adamantly, and to the shock of everyone at the table and the relief of my sister—Grandma Lynn made an announcement.

  “Abigail, I am going to help you clean up. It will be a mother/daughter thing.”

  “What?”

  My mother had calculated that she could let Lindsey off easily and early and then she would spend the rest of the night over the sink, washing slowly and staring out the window until the darkness brought her own reflection back to her. The sounds of the TV would fade away and she would be alone again.

  “I just did my nails yesterday,” Grandma Lynn said after tying on an apron over her camel-colored A-line dress, “so I’ll dry.”

  “Mother, really. This isn’t necessary.”

  “It is necessary, believe me, sweetie,” my grandmother said. There was something sober and curt in that sweetie.

  Buckley led my father by the hand into the adjoining room where the TV sat. They took up their stations and Lindsey, having been given a reprieve, went upstairs to call Samuel.

  It was such a strange thing to see. So out of the ordinary. My grandmother in an apron, holding a dish towel up like a matador’s red flag in anticipation of the first dish coming her way.

  They were quiet as they worked, and the silence—the only sounds being the splash of my mother’s hands plunging into the scalding water, the squeak of plates, and the clank of the silver—made a tension fill the room which grew unbearable. The noises of the game from the nearby room were just as odd to me. My father had never watched football; basketball his only sport. Grandma Lynn had never done dishes; frozen meals and takeout menus were her weapons of choice.

  “Oh Christ,” she finally said. “Take this.” She handed the just-washed dish back to my mother. “I want to have a real conversation but I’m afraid I’m going to drop these things. Let’s take a walk.”

  “Mother, I need to…”

  “You need to take a walk.”

  “After the dishes.”

  “Listen,” my grandmother said, “I know I’m whatever I am and you’re whatever you are, which isn’t me, which makes you happy, but I know some things when I see them and I know something is going on that isn’t kosher. Capisce?”

  My mother’s face was wavering, soft and malleable—almost as soft and malleable as the image of her that floated on the sullied water in the sink.

  “What?”

  “I have suspicions and I don’t want to talk about them here.”

  Ten-four, Grandma Lynn, I thought. I’d never seen her nervous before.

  It would be easy for the two of them to leave the house alone. My father, with his knee, would never think to join them, and, these days, where my father went or did not go, my brother, Buckley, followed.

  My mother was silent. She saw no other option. As an afterthought they removed their aprons in the garage and piled them on the roof of the Mustang. My m
other bent down and lifted the garage door.

  It was still early enough so the light would hold for the beginning of their walk. “We could take Holiday,” my mother tried.

  “Just you and your mother,” my grandmother said. “The most frightening pairing imaginable.”

  They had never been close. They both knew it, but it wasn’t something they acknowledged very much. They joked around it like two children who didn’t particularly like each other but were the only children in a large, barren neighborhood. Now, never having tried to before, having always let her daughter run as fast as she could in whatever direction she wished, my grandmother found that she was suddenly catching up.

  They had passed by the O’Dwyers’ and were near the Tarkings’ before my grandmother said what she had to say.

  “My humor buried my acceptance,” my grandmother said. “Your father had a long-term affair in New Hampshire. Her first initial was F and I never knew what it stood for. I found a thousand options for it over the years.”

  “Mother?”

  My grandmother kept walking, didn’t turn. She found that the crisp fall air helped, filling her lungs until they felt cleaner than they had just minutes before.

  “Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “I guess I never told you,” she said. “I didn’t think you needed to know. Now you do, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not sure why you’re telling me this.”

  They had come to the bend in the road that would lead them back around the circle. If they went that way and did not stop, eventually they would find themselves in front of Mr. Harvey’s house. My mother froze.