The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

  More and more of these undeveloped patches were disappearing, but they, more than anything, had marked my childhood. We lived in one of the first developments to be built on the converted farmland in the area—a development that became the model and inspiration for what now seemed a limitless number—but my imagination had always rested on the stretch of road that had not been filled in with the bright colors of shingles and drainpipes, paved driveways and super-size mailboxes. So too had Samuel’s.

  “Wow!” Lindsey said. “How old do you think this is?”

  Lindsey’s voice echoed off the walls as if they stood alone in a church.

  “Let’s explore,” said Samuel.

  The boarded-up windows on the first floor made it hard to see anything, but with the help of Samuel’s safety light they could pick out both a fireplace and the chair rail along the walls.

  “Look at the floor,” Samuel said. He knelt down, taking her with him. “Do you see the tongue and groove work? These people had more money than their neighbors.”

  Lindsey smiled. Just as Hal cared only for the inner workings of motorcycles, Samuel had become obsessed with carpentry.

  He ran his fingers over the floor and had Lindsey do it too. “This is a gorgeous old wreck,” he said.

  “Victorian?” Lindsey asked, making her best guess.

  “It blows my mind to say this,” Samuel said, “but I think it’s gothic revival. I noticed cross-bracing on the gable trim, so that means it was after 1860.”

  “Look,” said Lindsey.

  In the center of the floor someone had once, long ago, set a fire.

  “And that is a tragedy,” Samuel said.

  “Why didn’t they use the fireplace? There’s one in every room.”

  But Samuel was busy looking up through the hole the fire had burned into the ceiling, trying to make out the patterns of the woodwork along the window frames.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” he said.

  “I feel like I’m in a cave,” said Lindsey as they climbed the stairs. “It’s so quiet in here you can barely hear the rain.”

  Samuel bounced the soft side of his fist off the plaster as he went. “You could wall someone into this place.”

  And suddenly it was one of those awkward moments that they had learned to let pass and I lived to anticipate. It begged a central question. Where was I? Would I be mentioned? Brought up and discussed? Usually now the answer was a disappointing no. It was no longer a Susie-fest on Earth.

  But something about the house and the night—markers like graduations and birthdays always meant that I was more alive, higher up in the register of thoughts—made Lindsey dwell on me more in that moment than she normally might. Still, she didn’t mention it. She remembered the heady feeling she had had in Mr. Harvey’s house and that she had often felt since—that I was with her somehow, in her thoughts and limbs—moving with her like a twin.

  At the top of the stairs they found the entrance to the room they had stared up at.

  “I want this house,” Samuel said.

  “What?”

  “This house needs me, I can feel it.”

  “Maybe you should wait until the sun comes out to decide,” she said.

  “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.

  “Samuel Heckler,” my sister said, “fixer of broken things.”

  “One to talk,” he said.

  They stood for a moment in silence and smelled the damp air coming through the chimney and flooding the room. Even with the sound of rain, Lindsey still felt hidden away, tucked safely in an outside corner of the world with the one person she loved more than anyone else.

  She took his hand, and I traveled with them up to the doorway of a small room at the very front. It jutted out over what would be the entrance hall of the floor below and was octagonal in shape.

  “Oriels,” Samuel said. “The windows”—he turned to Lindsey—“when they’re built out like that, like a tiny room, that’s called an oriel.”

  “Do they turn you on?” Lindsey asked, smiling.

  I left them in the rain and darkness. I wondered if Lindsey noticed that when she and Samuel began to unzip their leathers the lightning stopped and the rumble in the throat of God—that scary thunder—ceased.

  In his den, my father reached out to hold the snow globe in his hand. The cold glass against his fingers comforted him, and he shook it to watch the penguin disappear and then slowly be uncovered by the gently falling snow.

  Hal had made it back from the graduation ceremonies on his motorcycle but instead of calming my father—providing some assurance that if one motorcycle could maneuver the storm and deliver its rider safe to his door, another one could too—it seemed to stack the probabilities in the reverse in his mind.

  He had taken what could be called a painful delight in Lindsey’s graduation ceremony. Buckley had sat beside him, dutifully prompting him when to smile and react. He often knew when, but his synapses were never as quick now as normal people’s—or at least that was how he explained it to himself. It was like reaction time in the insurance claims he reviewed. There was an average number of seconds for most people between when they saw something coming—another car, a rock rolling down an embankment—and when they reacted. My father’s response times were slower than most, as if he moved in a world where a crushing inevitability had robbed him of any hope of accurate perception.

  Buckley tapped on the half-open door of my father’s den.

  “Come in,” he said.

  “They’ll be okay, Dad.” At twelve, my brother had become serious and considerate. Even if he didn’t pay for the food or cook the meals, he managed the house.

  “You looked good in your suit, son,” my father said.

  “Thanks.” This mattered to my brother. He had wanted to make my father proud and had taken time with his appearance, even asking Grandma Lynn that morning to help trim the bangs that fell in his eyes. My brother was in the most awkward stage of adolescence—not boy, not man. Most days he hid his body in big T-shirts and sloppy jeans, but he had liked wearing the suit that day. “Hal and Grandma are waiting for us downstairs,” he said.

  “I’ll be down in a minute.”

  Buckley closed the door all the way this time, letting the latch snap into place.

  That fall my father had developed the last roll of film that I’d kept in my closet in my “rolls to hold back” box, and now, as he often did when he begged just a minute before dinner or saw something on TV or read an article in the paper that made his heart ache, he drew back his desk drawer and gingerly lifted the photos in his hand.

  He had lectured me repeatedly that what I called my “artistic shots” were foolhardy, but the best portrait he ever had was one I took of him at an angle so his face filled the three-by-three square when you held it so it was a diamond.

  I must have been listening to his hints on camera angles and composition when I took the pictures he held now. He had had no idea what order the rolls were in or what they were of when he had them developed. There were an inordinate number of photos of Holiday, and many a shot of my feet or the grass. Gray balls of blurs in the air which were birds, and a grainy attempt at a sunset over the pussy-willow tree. But at some point I had decided to take portraits of my mother. When he’d picked the roll up at the photo lab my father sat in the car staring at photos of a woman he felt he barely knew anymore.

  Since then he had taken these photos out too many times to count, but each time he looked into the face of this woman he had felt something growing inside him. It took him a long time to realize what it was. Only recently had his wounded synapses allowed him to name it. He had been falling in love all over again.

  He didn’t understand how two people who were married, who saw each other every day, could forget what each other looked like, but if he had had to name what had happened—this was it. And the last two photos in the roll provided the key. He had come home from work—I remember trying to keep my mother�
�s attention as Holiday barked when he heard the car pull into the garage.

  “He’ll come out,” I said. “Stay still.” And she did. Part of what I loved about photography was the power it gave me over the people on the other side of the camera, even my own parents.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw my father walk through the side door into the yard. He carried his slim briefcase, which, years before, Lindsey and I had heatedly investigated only to find very little of interest to us. As he set it down I snapped the last solitary photo of my mother. Already her eyes had begun to seem distracted and anxious, diving under and up into a mask somehow. In the next photo, the mask was almost, but not quite, in place and the final photo, where my father was leaning slightly down to give her a kiss on the cheek—there it was.

  “Did I do that to you?” he asked her image as he stared at the pictures of my mother, lined up in a row. “How did that happen?”

  “The lightning stopped,” my sister said. The moisture of the rain on her skin had been replaced by sweat.

  “I love you,” Samuel said.

  “I know.”

  “No, I mean I love you, and I want to marry you, and I want to live in this house!”

  “What?”

  “That hideous, hideous college shit is over!” Samuel screamed. The small room absorbed his voice, barely bouncing back an echo from its thick walls.

  “Not for me, it isn’t,” my sister said.

  Samuel got up off the floor, where he had been lying beside my sister, and came to his knees in front of her. “Marry me.”

  “Samuel?”

  “I’m tired of doing all the right things. Marry me and I’ll make this house gorgeous.”

  “Who will support us?”

  “We will,” he said, “somehow.”

  She sat up and then joined him kneeling. They were both half-dressed and growing colder as their heat began to dissipate.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “I think I can,” my sister said. “I mean, yes!”

  Some clichés I understood only when they came into my heaven full speed. I had never seen a chicken with its head cut off. It had never meant much to me except something else that had been treated much the same as me. But that moment I ran around my heaven like… a chicken with its head cut off! I was so happy I screamed over and over and over again. My sister! My Samuel! My dream!

  She was crying, and he held her in his arms, rocking her against him.

  “Are you happy, sweetheart?” he asked.

  She nodded against his bare chest. “Yes,” she said, then froze. “My dad.” She raised her head and looked at Samuel. “I know he’s worried.”

  “Yes,” he said, trying to switch gears with her.

  “How many miles is it to the house from here?”

  “Ten maybe,” Samuel said. “Maybe eight.”

  “We could do that,” she said.

  “You’re nuts.”

  “We have sneakers in the other pannard.”

  They could not run in leather, so they wore their underwear and T-shirts, as close to streakers as anyone in my family would ever be. Samuel, as he had for years, set a pace just ahead of my sister to keep her going. There were hardly any cars on the road, but when one passed by a wall of water would come up from the puddles near the side of the road and make the two of them gasp to get air back in their lungs. Both of them had run in rain before but never rain this heavy. They made a game of who could gain the most shelter as they ran the miles, waltzing in and out to gain cover under any overhanging trees, even as the dirt and grime of the road covered their legs. But by mile three they were silent, pushing their feet forward in a natural rhythm they had both known for years, focusing on the sound of their own breath and the sound of their wet shoes hitting the pavement.

  At some point as she splashed through a large puddle, no longer trying to avoid them, she thought of the local pool of which we had been members until my death brought the comfortably public existence of my family to a close. It had been somewhere along this road, but she did not lift her head to find the familiar chain-link fence. Instead, she had a memory. She and I were under water in our bathing suits with their small ruffled skirts. Both of our eyes were open under water, a new skill—newer for her—and we were looking at each other, our separate bodies suspended under water. Hair floating, small skirts floating, our cheeks bulging with captured air. Then, together, we would grab on to each other and shoot up out of the water, breaking the surface. We sucked air into our lungs—ears popping—and laughed together.

  I watched my beautiful sister running, her lungs and legs pumping, and the skill from the pool still there—fighting to see through the rain, fighting to keep her legs lifting at the pace set by Samuel, and I knew she was not running away from me or toward me. Like someone who has survived a gut-shot, the wound had been closing, closing—braiding into a scar for eight long years.

  By the time the two of them were within a mile of my house, the rain had lightened and people were beginning to look out their windows toward the street.

  Samuel slowed his pace and she joined him. Their T-shirts were locked onto their bodies like paste.

  Lindsey had fought off a cramp in her side, but as the cramp lifted she ran with Samuel full-out. Suddenly she was covered in goose bumps and smiling ear to ear.

  “We’re getting married!” she said, and he stopped short, grabbed her up in his arms, and they were still kissing when a car passed them on the road, the driver honking his horn.

  When the doorbell rang at our house it was four o’clock and Hal was in the kitchen wearing one of my mother’s old white chef’s aprons and cutting brownies for Grandma Lynn. He liked being put to work, feeling useful, and my grandmother liked to use him. They were a simpatico team. While Buckley, the boy-guard, loved to eat.

  “I’ll get it,” my father said. He had been propping himself up during the rain with highballs, mixed, not measured, by Grandma Lynn.

  He was spry now with a thin sort of grace, like a retired ballet dancer who favored one leg over the other after long years of one-footed leaps.

  “I was so worried,” he said when he opened the door.

  Lindsey was holding her arms over her chest, and even my father had to laugh while he looked away and hurriedly got the extra blankets kept in the front closet. Samuel draped one around Lindsey first, as my father covered Samuel’s shoulders as best he could and puddles collected on the flagstone floor. Just as Lindsey had covered herself up, Buckley and Hal and Grandma Lynn came forward into the hallway.

  “Buckley,” Grandma Lynn said, “go get some towels.”

  “Did you manage the bike in this?” Hal asked, incredulous.

  “No, we ran,” Samuel said.

  “You what?”

  “Get into the family room,” my father said. “We’ll set a fire going.”

  * * *

  While the two of them sat with their backs to the fire, shivering at first and drinking the brandy shots Grandma Lynn had Buckley serve them on a silver tray, everyone heard the story of the bike and the house and the octagonal room with windows that had made Samuel euphoric.

  “And the bike’s okay?” Hal asked.

  “We did the best we could,” Samuel said, “but we’ll need a tow.”

  “I’m just happy that the two of you are safe,” my father said.

  “We ran home for you, Mr. Salmon.”

  My grandmother and brother had taken seats at the far end of the room, away from the fire.

  “We didn’t want anyone to worry,” Lindsey said.

  “Lindsey didn’t want you to worry, specifically.”

  The room was silent for a moment. What Samuel had said was true, of course, but it also pointed too clearly to a certain fact—that Lindsey and Buckley had come to live their lives in direct proportion to what effect it would have on a fragile father.

  Grandma Lynn caught my sister’s eye and winked. “Hal and Buckley and I made brown
ies,” she said. “And I have some frozen lasagna I can break out if you’d like.” She stood and so did my brother—ready to help.

  “I’d love some brownies, Lynn,” Samuel said.

  “Lynn? I like that,” she said. “Are you going to start calling Jack ‘Jack’?”

  “Maybe.”

  Once Buckley and Grandma Lynn had left the room, Hal felt a new nervousness in the air. “I think I’ll pitch in,” he said.

  Lindsey, Samuel, and my father listened to the busy noises of the kitchen. They could all hear the clock ticking in the corner, the one my mother had called our “rustic colonial clock.”

  “I know I worry too much,” my father said.

  “That’s not what Samuel meant,” Lindsey said.

  Samuel was quiet and I was watching him.

  “Mr. Salmon,” he finally said—he was not quite ready to try “Jack.” “I’ve asked Lindsey to marry me.”

  Lindsey’s heart was in her throat, but she wasn’t looking at Samuel. She was looking at my father.

  Buckley came in with a plate of brownies, and Hal followed him with champagne glasses hanging from his fingers and a bottle of 1978 Dom Perignon. “From your grandmother, on your graduation day,” Hal said.

  Grandma Lynn came through next, empty-handed except for her highball. It caught the light and glittered like a jar of icy diamonds.

  For Lindsey, it was as if no one but herself and my father were there. “What do you say, Dad?” she asked.

  “I’d say,” he managed, standing up to shake Samuel’s hand, “that I couldn’t wish for a better son-in-law.”

  Grandma Lynn exploded on the final word. “My God, oh, honey! Congratulations!”

  Even Buckley let loose, slipping out of the knot that usually held him and into a rare joy. But I saw the fine, wavering line that still tied my sister to my father. The invisible cord that can kill.

  The champagne cork popped.

  “Like a master!” my grandmother said to Hal, who was pouring.