The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

  “Mom,” she said.

  My mother looked at my sister and flashed forward thirty-eight years from the lonely girl she’d been at Camp Winnekukka.

  “Lindsey,” my mother said.

  Lindsey stared at her. Buckley was standing now, but he looked first down at his shoes and then over his shoulder, out past the window to where the planes were parked, disgorging their passengers into accordioned tubes.

  “How is your father?” my mother asked.

  My sister had spoken the word Mom and then frozen. It tasted soapy and foreign in her mouth.

  “He’s not in the greatest shape, I’m afraid,” Samuel said. It was the longest sentence anyone had said, and my mother found herself disproportionately grateful for it.

  “Buckley?” my mother said, preparing no face for him. Being who she was—whoever that was.

  He turned his head toward her like a racheted gun. “Buck,” he said.

  “Buck,” she repeated softly and looked down at her hands.

  Lindsey wanted to ask, Where are your rings?

  “Shall we go?” Samuel asked.

  The four of them entered the long carpeted tunnel that would bring them from her gate into the main terminal. They were headed toward the cavernous baggage claim when my mother said, “I didn’t bring any bags.”

  They stood in an awkward cluster, Samuel looking for the right signs to redirect them back to the parking garage.

  “Mom,” my sister tried again.

  “I lied to you,” my mother said before Lindsey could say anything further. Their eyes met, and in that hot wire that went from one to the other I swore I saw it, like a rat bulging, undigested, inside a snake: the secret of Len.

  “We go back up the escalator,” Samuel said, “and then we can take the overhead walkway into the parking lot.”

  Samuel called for Buckley, who had drifted off in the direction of a cadre of airport security officers. Uniforms had never lost the draw they held for him.

  They were on the highway when Lindsey spoke next. “They won’t let Buckley in to see Dad because of his age.”

  My mother turned around in her seat. “I’ll try and do something about that,” she said, looking at Buckley and attempting her first smile.

  “Fuck you,” my brother whispered without looking up.

  My mother froze. The car opened up. Full of hate and tension—a riptide of blood to swim through.

  “Buck,” she said, remembering the shortened name just in time, “will you look at me?”

  He glared over the front seat, boring his fury into her.

  Eventually my mother turned back around and Samuel, Lindsey, and my brother could hear the sounds from the passenger seat that she was trying hard not to make. Little peeps and a choked sob. But no amount of tears would sway Buckley. He had been keeping, daily, weekly, yearly, an underground storage room of hate. Deep inside this, the four-year-old sat, his heart flashing. Heart to stone, heart to stone.

  “We’ll all feel better after seeing Mr. Salmon,” Samuel said, and then, because even he could not bear it, he leaned forward toward the dash and turned on the radio.

  It was the same hospital that she had come to eight years ago in the middle of the night. A different floor painted a different color, but she could feel it encasing her as she walked down the hall—what she’d done there. The push of Len’s body, her back pressed into the sharp stucco wall. Everything in her wanted to run—fly back to California, back to her quiet existence working among strangers. Hiding out in the folds of tree trunks and tropical petals, tucked away safely among so many foreign plants and people.

  Her mother’s ankles and oxford pumps, which she saw from the hallway, brought her back. One of the many simple things she’d lost by moving so far away, just the commonplace of her mother’s feet—their solidity and humor—seventy-year-old feet in ridiculously uncomfortable shoes.

  But as she walked forward into the room, everyone else—her son, her daughter, her mother—fell away.

  My father’s eyes were weak but fluttered open when he heard her enter. He had tubes and wires coming out of his wrist and shoulder. His head seemed so fragile on the small square pillow.

  She held his hand and cried silently, letting the tears come freely.

  “Hello, Ocean Eyes,” he said.

  She nodded her head. This broken, beaten man—her husband.

  “My girl,” he breathed out heavily.

  “Jack.”

  “Look what it took to get you home.”

  “Was it worth it?” she said, smiling bleakly.

  “We’ll have to see,” he said.

  To see them together was like a tenuous belief made real.

  My father could see glimmers, like the colored flecks inside my mother’s eyes—things to hold on to. These he counted among the broken planks and boards of a long-ago ship that had struck something greater than itself and sunk. There were only remnants and artifacts left to him now. He tried to reach up and touch her cheek, but his arm felt too weak. She moved closer and laid her cheek in his palm.

  My grandmother knew how to move silently in heels. She tiptoed out of the room. As she resumed her normal stride and approached the waiting area, she intercepted a nurse with a message for Jack Salmon in Room 582. She had never met the man but knew his name. “Len Fenerman, will visit soon. Wishes you well.” She folded the note neatly. Just before she came upon Lindsey and Buckley, who had gone to join Samuel in the waiting room, she popped open the metal lip of her purse and placed it between her powder and comb.

  TWENTY

  By the time Mr. Harvey reached the tin-roofed shack in Connecticut that night, it promised rain. He had killed a young waitress inside the shack several years before and then bought some new slacks with the tips he’d found in the front pocket of her apron. By now the rot would have been eclipsed, and it was true, as he approached the area, that no rank smell greeted him. But the shack was open and inside he could see the earth had been dug up. He breathed in and approached the shack warily.

  He fell asleep beside her empty grave.

  At some point, to counter the list of the dead, I had begun keeping my own list of the living. It was something I noticed Len Fenerman did too. When he was off duty he would note the young girls and elderly women and every other female in the rainbow in between and count them among the things that sustained him. That young girl in the mall whose pale legs had grown too long for her now-too-young dress and who had an aching vulnerability that went straight to both Len’s and my own heart. Elderly women, wobbling with walkers, who insisted on dyeing their hair unnatural versions of the colors they had in youth. Middle-aged single mothers racing around in grocery stores while their children pulled bags of candy off the shelves. When I saw them, I took count. Living, breathing women. Sometimes I saw the wounded—those who had been beaten by husbands or raped by strangers, children raped by their fathers—and I would wish to intervene somehow.

  Len saw these wounded women all the time. They were regulars at the station, but even when he went somewhere outside his jurisdiction he could sense them when they came near. The wife in the bait-’n’-tackle shop had no bruises on her face but cowered like a dog and spoke in apologetic whispers. The girl he saw walk the road each time he went upstate to visit his sisters. As the years passed she’d grown leaner, the fat from her cheeks had drained, and sorrow had loaded her eyes in a way that made them hang heavy and hopeless inside her mallowed skin. When she was not there it worried him. When she was there it both depressed and revived him.

  He had not had much to write in my file for a long time, but a few items had joined the log of old evidence in the last few months: the name of another potential victim, Sophie Cichetti, the name of her son, and an alias of George Harvey’s. There was also what he held in his hands: my Pennsylvania keystone charm. He moved it around inside the evidence bag, using his fingers, and found, again, my initials. The charm had been checked for any clues it could provide, and, besides
its presence at the scene of another girl’s murder, it had come up clean under the microscope.

  He had wanted to give the charm back to my father from the first moment he was able to confirm it was mine. Doing so was breaking the rules, but he had never had a body for them, just a sodden schoolbook and the pages from my biology book mixed in with a boy’s love note. A Coke bottle. My jingle-bell hat. These he had cataloged and kept. But the charm was different, and he meant to give it back.

  A nurse he’d dated in the years after my mother left had called him when she noticed the name Jack Salmon on a list of patients admitted. Len had determined that he would visit my father in the hospital and bring my charm along with him. In Len’s mind he saw the charm as a talisman that might speed my father’s recovery.

  I couldn’t help but think, as I watched him, of the barrels of toxic fluids that had accrued behind Hal’s bike shop where the scrub lining the railroad tracks had offered local companies enough cover to dump a stray container or two. Everything had been sealed up, but things were beginning to leak out. I had come to both pity and respect Len in the years since my mother left. He followed the physical to try to understand things that were impossible to comprehend. In that, I could see, he was like me.

  Outside the hospital, a young girl was selling small bouquets of daffodils, their green stems tied with lavender ribbons. I watched as my mother bought out the girl’s whole stock.

  Nurse Eliot, who remembered my mother from eight years ago, volunteered to help her when she saw her coming down the hall, her arms full of flowers. She rounded up extra water pitchers from a supply closet and together she and my mother filled them with water and placed the flowers around my father’s room while he slept. Nurse Eliot thought that if loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman, my mother had grown even more beautiful.

  Lindsey, Samuel, and Grandma Lynn had taken Buckley home earlier in the evening. My mother was not ready to see the house yet. She focused solely on my father. Everything else would have to wait, from the house and its silent reproach to her son and daughter. She needed something to eat and time to think. Instead of going to the hospital cafeteria, where the bright lights made her think only of all the futile efforts that hospitals contained to keep people awake for more bad news—the weak coffee, the hard chairs, the elevators that stopped on every floor—she left the building and walked down the sloped sidewalk leading away from the entrance.

  It was dark out now, and the parking lot where she had once driven in the middle of the night in her nightgown was spotted with only a few cars. She hugged the cardigan her mother had left behind tightly to her.

  She crossed the parking lot, looking into the dark cars for signs of who the people inside the hospital were. There were cassette tapes spread out on the passenger seat of one car, the bulky shape of a baby’s carseat in another. It became a game to her then, seeing what she could in each car. A way not to feel so alone and alien, as if she were a child playing a spy game in the house of her parents’ friends. Agent Abigail to Mission Control. I see a fuzzy dog toy, I see a soccer ball, I see a woman! There she was, a stranger sitting in the driver’s side behind the wheel. The woman did not see my mother looking at her, and as soon as she saw her face my mother turned her attention away, focusing on the bright lights of the old diner she had as her goal. She did not have to look back to know what the woman was doing. She was girding herself up to go inside. She knew the face. It was the face of someone who wanted more than anything to be anywhere but where she was.

  She stood on the landscaped strip between the hospital and the emergency room entrance and wished for a cigarette. She had not questioned anything that morning. Jack had had a heart attack; she would go home. But now here, she didn’t know what she was supposed to do anymore. How long would she have to wait, what would have to happen, before she could leave again? Behind her in the parking lot, she heard the sound of a car door opening and closing—the woman going in.

  The diner was a blur to her. She sat in a booth alone and ordered the kind of food—chicken-fried steak—that didn’t seem to exist in California.

  She was thinking about this when a man directly across from her gave her the eye. She registered every detail of his appearance. It was automatic and something she didn’t do out west. While living in Pennsylvania after my murder, when she saw a strange man whom she didn’t trust, she did an immediate breakdown in her mind. It was quicker—honoring the pragmatics of fear—than pretending she shouldn’t think this way. Her dinner arrived, the chicken-fried steak and tea, and she focused on her food, on the gritty breading around the rubbery meat, on the metallic taste of old tea. She did not think she could handle being home more than a few days. Everywhere she looked she saw me, and at the booth across from her she saw the man who could have murdered me.

  She finished the food, paid for it, and walked out of the diner without raising her eyes above waist level. A bell mounted on the door jingled above her, and she started, her heart jumping up in her chest.

  She made it back across the highway in one piece, but she was breathing shallowly as she passed back across the parking lot. The car of the apprehensive visitor was still there.

  In the main lobby, where people rarely sat, she decided to sit down and wait for her breathing to come back again.

  She would spend a few hours with him and when he woke, she would say goodbye. As soon as her decision was made, a welcome coolness flew through her. The sudden relief of responsibility. Her ticket to a far-away land.

  It was late now, after ten, and she took an empty elevator to the fifth floor, where the hall lights had been dimmed. She passed the nurses’ station, behind which two nurses were quietly gossiping. She could hear the lilt and glee of nuanced rumors being exchanged between them, the sound of easy intimacy in the air. Then, just as one nurse was unable to suppress a high-pitched laugh, my mother opened my father’s door and let it swing shut again.

  Alone.

  It was as if there was a vacuum hush when the door closed. I felt I did not belong, that I should go too. But I was glued.

  Seeing him sleeping in the dark, with only the low-wattage fluorescent light on at the back of the bed, she remembered standing in this same hospital and taking steps to sever herself from him.

  As I saw her take my father’s hand, I thought of my sister and me sitting underneath the grave rubbing in the upstairs hallway. I was the dead knight gone to heaven with my faithful dog and she was the live wire of a wife. “How can I be expected to be trapped for the rest of my life by a man frozen in time?” Lindsey’s favorite line.

  My mother sat with my father’s hand in hers for a long while. She thought how wonderful it would be to climb up on the fresh hospital sheets and lie beside him. And how impossible.

  She leaned close. Even under the smells of antiseptics and alcohol, she could smell the grassy smell of his skin. When she’d left, she had packed her favorite shirt of my father’s and would sometimes wrap it around her just to have something of his on. She never wore it outside, so it kept his scent longer than it might have. She remembered one night, when she missed him most, buttoning it over a pillow and hugging it to her as if she were still a high school girl.

  In the distance beyond the closed window she could hear the hum of far-off traffic on the highway, but the hospital was shutting down for the night. Only the rubber soles of the night nurses’ shoes made sounds as they passed in the hallway.

  Just that winter she had found herself saying to a young woman who worked with her at the tasting bar on Saturdays that between a man and a woman there was always one person who was stronger than the other one. “That doesn’t mean the weaker one doesn’t love the stronger,” she’d pleaded. The girl looked at her blankly. But for my mother what mattered was that as she spoke, she had suddenly identified herself as the weaker one. This revelation sent her reeling. What had she thought all those years but the opposite?

  She pulled her chair as close to his head as s
he could and laid her face on the edge of his pillow to watch him breathing, to see the flutter of his eye beneath his eyelid when he dreamed. How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home? She had put billboards and roads in between them, throwing roadblocks behind her and ripping off the rearview mirror, and thought that that would make him disappear? erase their life and children?

  It was so simple, as she watched him, as his regular breathing calmed her, that she did not even see it happening at first. She began to think of the rooms in our house and the hours that she had worked so hard to forget spent inside of them. Like fruit put up in jars and forgotten about, the sweetness seemed even more distilled as she returned. There on that shelf were all the dates and silliness of their early love, the braid that began to form of their dreams, the solid root of a burgeoning family. The first solid evidence of it all. Me.

  She traced a new line on my father’s face. She liked the silvering of his temples.

  Shortly after midnight, she fell asleep after trying as hard as she could to keep her eyes open. To hold on to everything all at once while she looked at that face, so that when he woke she could say goodbye.

  When her eyes were closed and they both slept silently together, I whispered to them:

  Stones and bones;

  snow and frost;

  seeds and beans and polliwogs.

  Paths and twigs, assorted kisses,

  We all know who Susie misses…

  Around two A.M. it began to rain, and it rained down on the hospital and on my old home and in my heaven. On the tin-roofed shack where Mr. Harvey slept, it was raining too. As the rain beat its tiny hammers above his head, he dreamed. He did not dream of the girl whose remains had been removed and were now being analyzed but of Lindsey Salmon, of the 5! 5! 5! hitting the border of elderberry. He had this dream whenever he felt threatened. It had been in the flash of her soccer shirt that his life had begun to spin out of control.