The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

  It was near four when I saw my father’s eyes open and saw him feel the warmth of my mother’s breath on his cheek even before he knew she was asleep. We wished together that he could hold her, but he was too weak. There was another way and he took it. He would tell her the things he had felt after my death—the things that came into his mind so frequently but that no one knew but me.

  But he did not want to wake her. The hospital was silent except for the sound of rain. Rain was following him, he felt, darkness and damp—he thought of Lindsey and Samuel at the doorway, soaked and smiling, having run all that way to relieve him. He often found himself repeatedly commanding himself back to center. Lindsey. Lindsey. Lindsey. Buckley. Buckley. Buckley.

  The way the rain looked outside the windows, lit up in circular patches by the lights in the hospital parking lot, reminded him of the movies he had gone to see as a boy—Hollywood rain. He closed his eyes with the breath of my mother reassuringly exhaling against his cheek and listened to it, the slight patter on the slim metal window sills, and then he heard the sound of birds—small birds chirping, but he could not see them. And the idea of this, that there might be a nest right outside his window where baby birds had woken in the rain and found their mother gone, made him want to rescue them. He felt my mother’s limp fingers, which had loosened their hold on his hand in sleep. She was here, and this time, despite all, he was going to let her be who she was.

  It was then that I slipped inside the room with my mother and father. I was present somehow, as a person, in a way I had never been. I had always hovered but had never stood beside them.

  I made myself small in the darkness, unable to know if I could be seen. I had left him for hours every day for eight and a half years as I had left my mother or Ruth and Ray, my brother and sister, and certainly Mr. Harvey, but he, I now saw, had never left me. His devotion to me had made me know again and again that I had been beloved. In the warm light of my father’s love I had remained Susie Salmon—a girl with my whole life in front of me.

  “I thought if I was very quiet I would hear you,” he whispered. “If I was still enough you might come back.”

  “Jack?” my mother said, waking. “I must have fallen asleep.”

  “It’s wonderful to have you back,” he said.

  And my mother looked at him. Everything stripped away. “How do you do it?” she asked.

  “There’s no choice, Abbie,” he said. “What else can I do?”

  “Go away, start over again,” she said.

  “Did it work?”

  They were silent. I reached out my hand and faded away.

  “Why don’t you come lie down up here?” my father said. “We have a little time before the enforcers come on duty and kick you out.”

  She didn’t move.

  “They’ve been nice to me,” she said. “Nurse Eliot helped me put all the flowers in water while you slept.”

  He looked around him and made out their shapes. “Daffodils,” he said.

  “It’s Susie’s flower.”

  My father smiled beautifully. “See,” he said, “that’s how. You live in the face of it, by giving her a flower.”

  “That’s so sad,” my mother said.

  “Yes,” he said, “it is.”

  My mother had to balance somewhat precariously on one hip near the edge of his hospital bed, but they managed. They managed to stretch out together beside each other so they could stare into each other’s eyes.

  “How was it seeing Buckley and Lindsey?”

  “Incredibly hard,” she said.

  They were silent for a moment and he squeezed her hand.

  “You look so different,” he said.

  “You mean older.”

  I watched him reach up and take a strand of my mother’s hair and loop it around her ear. “I fell in love with you again while you were away,” he said.

  I realized how much I wished I could be where my mother was. His love for my mother wasn’t about looking back and loving something that would never change. It was about loving my mother for everything—for her brokenness and her fleeing, for her being there right then in that moment before the sun rose and the hospital staff came in. It was about touching that hair with the side of his fingertip, and knowing yet plumbing fearlessly the depths of her ocean eyes.

  My mother could not bring herself to say “I love you.”

  “Will you stay?” he asked.

  “For a while.”

  This was something.

  “Good,” he said. “So what did you say when people asked you about family in California?”

  “Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.”

  “Did you mention a husband?” he asked.

  And she looked at him. “No.”

  “Man,” he said.

  “I didn’t come back to pretend, Jack,” she said.

  “Why did you come back?”

  “My mother called me. She said it was a heart attack and I thought about your father.”

  “Because I might die?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were sleeping,” he said. “You didn’t see her.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone came in the room and then left. I think it was Susie.”

  “Jack?” my mother asked, but her alarm was only at half-mast.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t see her.”

  She let go.

  “I see her everywhere,” she said, breathing out her relief. “Even in California she was everywhere. Boarding buses or on the streets outside schools when I drove by. I’d see her hair but it didn’t match the face or I’d see her body or the way she moved. I’d see older sisters and their little brothers, or two girls that looked like sisters and I imagined what Lindsey wouldn’t have in her life—the whole relationship gone for her and for Buckley, and then that would just hit me, because I had left too. It would just spin onto you and even to my mother.”

  “She’s been great,” he said, “a rock. A spongelike rock, but a rock.”

  “So I gather.”

  “So if I tell you that Susie was in the room ten minutes ago, what would you say?”

  “I’d say you were insane and you were probably right.”

  My father reached up and traced the line of my mother’s nose and brought his finger over her two lips. As he did, the lips parted ever so slightly.

  “You have to lean down,” he said, “I’m still a sick man.”

  And I watched as my parents kissed. They kept their eyes open as they did, and my mother was the one to cry first, the tears dropping down onto my father’s cheeks until he wept too.

  TWENTY-ONE

  After I left my parents in the hospital, I went to watch Ray Singh. We had been fourteen together, he and I. Now I saw his head on his pillow, dark hair on yellow sheets, dark skin on yellow sheets. I had always been in love with him. I counted the lashes of each closed eye. He had been my almost, my might-have-been, and I did not want to leave him any more than I did my family.

  On the listing scaffold behind the stage, with Ruth below us, Ray Singh had gotten close enough to me so that his breath was near mine. I could smell the mixture of cloves and cinnamon that I imagined he topped his cereal with each morning, and a dark smell too, the human smell of the body coming at me where deep inside there were organs suspended by a chemistry separate from mine.

  From the time I knew it would happen until the time it did, I had made sure not to be alone with Ray Singh inside or outside school. I was afraid of what I wanted most—his kiss. That it would not be good enough to match the stories everyone told or those I read in Seventeenand Glamourand Vogue.I feared that I would not be good enough—that my first kiss would equal rejection, not love. Still, I collected kiss stories.

  “Your first kiss is destiny knocking,” Grandma Lynn said over the phone one day. I was holding the phone while my father went to get my mother. I heard him in the kitchen say “th
ree sheets to the wind.”

  “If I had it to do over again I would have worn something stupendous—like Fire and Ice, but Revlon didn’t make that lipstick back then. I would have left my mark on the man.”

  “Mother?” my mother said into the bedroom extension.

  “We’re talking kiss business, Abigail.”

  “How much have you had?”

  “See, Susie,” Grandma Lynn said, “if you kiss like a lemon, you make lemonade.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Ah, the kiss question,” my mother said. “I’ll leave you to it.” I had been making my father and her tell it over and over again to hear their different takes. What I came away with was an image of my parents behind a cloud of cigarette smoke—the lips only vaguely touching inside the cloud.

  A moment later Grandma Lynn whispered, “Susie, are you still there?”

  “Yes, Grandma.”

  She was quiet for a while longer. “I was your age, and my first kiss came from a grown man. A father of a friend.”

  “Grandma!” I said, honestly shocked.

  “You’re not going to tell on me, are you?”

  “No.”

  “It was wonderful,” Grandma Lynn said. “He knew how to kiss. The boys who kissed me I couldn’t even tolerate. I’d put my hand flat against their chests and push them away. Mr. McGahern knew how to use his lips.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Bliss,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t right, but it was wonderful—at least for me. I never asked him how he felt about it, but then I never saw him alone after that.”

  “But did you want to do it again?”

  “Yes, I was always searching for that first kiss.”

  “How about Grandaddy?”

  “Not much of a kisser,” she said. I could hear the clink of ice cubes on the other end of the phone. “I’ve never forgotten Mr. McGahern, even though it was just for a moment. Is there a boy who wants to kiss you?”

  Neither of my parents had asked me this. I now know that they knew this already, could tell, smiled at each other when they compared notes.

  I swallowed hard on my end. “Yes.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Ray Singh.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what’s the holdup?”

  “I’m afraid I won’t be good at it.”

  “Susie?”

  “Yes?”

  “Just have fun, kid.”

  But when I stood by my locker that afternoon and I heard Ray’s voice say my name—this time behind me and not above me—it felt like anything but fun. It didn’t feel not fun either. The easy states of black and white that I had known before did not apply. I felt, if I were to say any word, churned. Not as a verb but as an adjective. Happy + Frightened = Churned.

  “Ray,” I said, but before the name had left my mouth, he leaned into me and caught my open mouth in his. It was so unexpected, even though I had waited weeks for it, that I wanted more. I wanted so badly to kiss Ray Singh again.

  The following morning Mr. Connors cut out an article from the paper and saved it for Ruth. It was a detailed drawing of the Flanagan sinkhole and how it was going to be filled in. While Ruth dressed, he penned a note to her. “This is a crock of shit,” it said. “Someday some poor sap’s car is going to fall into it all over again.”

  “Dad says this is the death knell for him,” Ruth said to Ray, waving the clipping at him as she got into Ray’s ice blue Chevy at the end of her driveway. “Our place is going to be swallowed up in subdivision land. Get this. In this article they have four blocks like the cubes you draw in beginning art class, and it’s supposed to show how they’re going to patch the sinkhole up.”

  “Nice to see you too, Ruth,” Ray said, reversing out of the driveway while making eyes at Ruth’s unbuckled seat belt.

  “Sorry,” Ruth said. “Hello.”

  “What does the article say?” Ray asked.

  “Nice day today, beautiful weather.”

  “Okay, okay. Tell me about the article.”

  Every time he saw Ruth after a few months had passed, he was reminded of her impatience and her curiosity—two traits that had both made and kept them friends.

  “The first three are the same drawing only with different arrows pointing to different places and saying ‘topsoil,’ ‘cracked limestone,’ and ‘dissolving rock.’ The last one has a big headline that says, ‘Patching it’ and underneath it says, ‘Concrete fills the throat and grout fills the cracks.’ ”

  “Throat?” Ray said.

  “I know,” said Ruth. “Then there’s this other arrow on the other side as if this was such a huge project that they had to pause a second so readers could understand the concept, and this one says, ‘Then the hole is filled with dirt.’ ”

  Ray started laughing.

  “Like a medical procedure,” Ruth said. “Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet.”

  “I think holes in the earth draw on some pretty primal fears.”

  “I’ll say,” Ruth said. “They have throats, for God’s sake! Hey, let’s check this out.”

  A mile or so down the road there were signs of new construction. Ray took a left and drove into the circles of freshly paved roads where the trees had been cleared and small red and yellow flags waved at intervals from the tops of waist-high wire markers.

  Just as they had lulled themselves into thinking that they were alone, exploring the roads laid out for a territory as yet uninhabited, they saw Joe Ellis walking up ahead.

  Ruth didn’t wave and neither did Ray, nor did Joe make a move to acknowledge them.

  “My mom says he still lives at home and can’t get a job.”

  “What does he do all day?” Ray asked.

  “Look creepy, I guess.”

  “He never got over it,” Ray said, and Ruth stared out into the rows and rows of vacant lots until Ray connected with the main road again and they crossed back over the railroad tracks moving toward Route 30, which would take them in the direction of the sinkhole.

  Ruth floated her arm out the window to feel the moist air of the morning after rain. Although Ray had been accused of being involved in my disappearance, he had understood why, knew that the police were doing their job. But Joe Ellis had never recovered from being accused of killing the cats and dogs Mr. Harvey had killed. He wandered around, keeping a good distance from his neighbors and wanting so much to take solace in the love of cats and dogs. For me the saddest thing was that these animals smelled the brokenness in him—the human defect—and kept away.

  Down Route 30 near Eels Rod Pike, at a spot that Ray and Ruth were about to pass, I saw Len coming out of an apartment over Joe’s barbershop. He carried a lightly stuffed student knapsack out to his car. The knapsack had been the gift of the young woman who owned the apartment. She had asked him out for coffee one day after they met down at the station as part of a criminology course at West Chester College. Inside the knapsack he had a combination of things—some of which he would show my father and some that no child’s parent needed to see. The latter included the photos of the graves of the recovered bodies—both elbows there in each case.

  When he had called the hospital, the nurse had told him Mr. Salmon was with his wife and family. Now his guilt thickened as he pulled his car into the hospital parking lot and sat for a moment with the hot sun coming through the windshield, baking in the heat.

  I could see Len working on how to state what he had to say. He could work with only one assumption in his head—after almost seven years of ever more dwindling contact since late 1975, what my parents would hope for most was a body or the news that Mr. Harvey had been found. What he had to give them was a charm.

  He grabbed his knapsack and locked up the car, passing by the girl outside with her replenished buckets of daffodils. He knew the number of my father’s room, so he did not bother announcing himself to the fifth-floor nurses’ station but
merely tapped lightly on my father’s open door before walking in.

  My mother was standing with her back toward him. When she turned, I could see the force of her presence hit him. She was holding my father’s hand. I suddenly felt terribly lonely.

  My mother wobbled a bit when she met Len’s eyes, and then she led with what came easiest.

  “Is it everwonderful to see you?” she tried to joke.

  “Len,” my father managed. “Abbie, will you tilt me up?”

  “How are you feeling, Mr. Salmon?” Len asked as my mother pressed the up arrow button on the bed.

  “Jack, please,” my father insisted.

  “Before you get your hopes up,” Len said, “we haven’t caught him.”

  My father visibly deflated.

  My mother readjusted the foam pillows behind my father’s back and neck. “Then why are you here?” she asked.

  “We found an item of Susie’s,” Len said.

  He had used almost the same sentence when he’d come to the house with the jingle-bell hat. It was a distant echo in her head.

  The night before, as first my mother watched my father sleeping and then my father woke to see her head beside his on his pillow, they had both been staving off the memory of that first night of snow and hail and rain and how they had clung to each other, neither of them voicing aloud their greatest hope. Last night it had been my father who’d finally said it: “She’s never coming home.” A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it.

  “It’s a charm off her bracelet,” Len said. “A Pennsylvania keystone with her initials on it.”

  “I bought that for her,” my father said. “At Thirtieth Street Station when I went into the city one day. They had a booth, and a man wearing safety glasses etched in initials for free. I brought Lindsey one too. Remember, Abigail?”

  “I remember,” my mother said.

  “We found it near a grave in Connecticut.”

  My parents were suddenly still for a moment—like animals trapped in ice—their eyes frozen open and beseeching whoever walked above them to release them now, please.