The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

  “My poor, poor sweetie,” my grandmother said. “Give me your hand.”

  They were awkward. My mother could count on her fingers how many times her tall father had leaned down and kissed her as a child. The scratchy beard that smelled of a cologne that, after years of searching, she could never identify. My grandmother took her hand and held on as they walked the other way.

  They walked into an area of the neighborhood where newer families seemed to be moving in more and more. The anchor houses, I remembered my mother calling them, because they lined the street that led into the whole development—anchored the neighborhood to an original road built before the township was a township. The road that led to Valley Forge, to George Washington and the Revolution.

  “Susie’s death brought your father’s back to me,” my grandmother said. “I never let myself mourn him properly.”

  “I know,” my mother said.

  “Do you resent me for it?”

  My mother paused. “Yes.”

  My grandmother patted the back of my mother’s hand with her free one. “Good, see, that’s a nugget.”

  “A nugget?”

  “Something that’s coming out of all this. You and me. A nugget of truth between us.”

  They passed the one-acre lots on which trees had been growing for twenty years. If not exactly towering, they were still twice as tall as the fathers who had first held them and stomped the dirt around them with their weekend work shoes.

  “Do you know how alone I’ve always felt?” my mother asked her mother.

  “That’s why we’re walking, Abigail,” Grandma Lynn said.

  My mother focused her eyes in front of her but stayed connected to her mother with her hand. She thought of the solitary nature of her childhood. How, when she had watched her two daughters tie string between paper cups and go to separate rooms to whisper secrets to each other, she could not really say she knew how that felt. There had been no one else in the house with her but her mother and father, and then her father had gone.

  She stared at the tops of the trees, which, miles from our development, were the tallest things around. They stood on a high hill that had never been cleared for houses and on which a few old farmers still dwelled.

  “I can’t describe what I’m feeling,” she said. “To anyone.”

  They reached the end of the development just as the sun was going down over the hill in front of them. A moment passed without either of them turning around. My mother watched the last light flicker in a drain-off puddle at the end of the road.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “It’s all over now.”

  My grandmother was not sure what she meant by “it,” but she did not press harder.

  “Shall we head back?” my grandmother offered.

  “How?” my mother said.

  “To the house, Abigail. Head back to the house.”

  They turned and began walking again. The houses one after another, identical in structure. Only what my grandmother thought of as their accessories marked them as different. She had never understood places like this—places where her own child had chosen to live.

  “When we get to the turn to the circle,” my mother said, “I want to walk past it.”

  “His house?”

  “Yes.”

  I watched Grandma Lynn turn when my mother turned.

  “Would you promise me not to see the man anymore?” my grandmother asked.

  “Who?”

  “The man you’re involved with. That’s what I’ve been talking about.”

  “I’m not involved with anyone,” my mother said. Her mind flew like a bird from one rooftop to the next. “Mother?” she said, and turned.

  “Abigail?”

  “If I needed to get away for a while, could I use Daddy’s cabin?”

  “Have you been listening to me?”

  They could smell something in the air, and again my mother’s anxious, agile mind slipped away. “Someone is smoking,” she said.

  Grandma Lynn was staring at her child. The pragmatic, prim mistress that my mother had always been was gone. She was flighty and distracted. My grandmother had nothing left to say to her.

  “They’re foreign cigarettes,” my mother said. “Let’s go find them!”

  And in the fading light my grandmother stared, flabbergasted, as my mother began to follow the scent to its source.

  “I’m heading back,” my grandmother said.

  But my mother kept walking.

  She found the source of the smoke soon enough. It was Ruana Singh, standing behind a tall fir tree in her backyard.

  “Hello,” my mother said.

  Ruana did not start as I thought she would. Her calmness had become something practiced. She could make a breath last through the most startling event, whether it was her son being accused of murder by the police or her husband running their dinner party as if it were an academic committee meeting. She had told Ray he could go upstairs, and then she had disappeared out the back door and not been missed.

  “Mrs. Salmon,” Ruana said, exhaling the heady smell of her cigarettes. In a rush of smoke and warmth my mother met Ruana’s extended hand. “I’m so glad to see you.”

  “Are you having a party?” my mother asked.

  “My husband is having a party. I am the hostess.”

  My mother smiled.

  “This is a weird place we both live,” Ruana said.

  Their eyes met. My mother nodded her head. Back on the road somewhere was her own mother, but for right now she, like Ruana, was on a quiet island off the mainland.

  “Do you have another cigarette?”

  “Absolutely, Mrs. Salmon, yes.” Ruana fished into the pocket of her long black cardigan and held out the pack and her lighter. “Dunhills,” she said. “I hope that’s all right.”

  My mother lit her cigarette and handed the blue package with its golden foil back to Ruana. “Abigail,” she said as she exhaled. “Please call me Abigail.”

  Up in his room with his lights off, Ray could smell his mother’s cigarettes, which she never accused him of pilfering, just as he never let on that he knew she had them. He heard voices downstairs—the loud sounds of his father and his colleagues speaking six different languages and laughing delightedly over the oh-so-American holiday to come. He did not know that my mother was out on the lawn with his mother or that I was watching him sit in his window and smell their sweet tobacco. Soon he would turn away from the window and switch on the small light by his bed to read. Mrs. McBride had told them to find a sonnet they’d like to write a paper on, but as he read the lines of those available to him in his Norton Anthology he kept drifting back to the moment he wished he could take back and do over again. If he had just kissed me on the scaffold, maybe everything would have turned out differently.

  Grandma Lynn kept on the course she had set with my mother, and, eventually, there it was—the house they tried to forget while living two houses down. Jack was right, my grandmother thought. She could even feel it in the dark. The place radiated something malevolent. She shivered and began to hear the crickets and see the fireflies gathering in a swarm above his front flower beds. She thought suddenly that she would do nothing but sympathize with her daughter. Her child was living inside the middle of a ground zero to which no affair on her own husband’s part could offer her insight. She would tell my mother in the morning that the keys to the cabin would always be there for her if she needed them.

  That night my mother had what she considered a wonderful dream. She dreamed of the country of India, where she had never been. There were orange traffic cones and beautiful lapis lazuli insects with mandibles of gold. A young girl was being led through the streets. She was taken to a pyre where she was wound in a sheet and placed up on a platform built from sticks. The bright fire that consumed her brought my mother into that deep, light, dreamlike bliss. The girl was being burned alive, but, first, there had been her body, clean and whole.

  FOURTEEN
>
  For a week Lindsey cased my killer’s house. She was doing exactly what he did to everyone else.

  She had agreed to train with the boys’ soccer team all year in preparation for the challenge Mr. Dewitt and Samuel encouraged her to take on: qualifying to play in the all-male high school soccer league. And Samuel, to show his support, trained alongside her with no hope of qualifying for anything, he said, other than “fastest guy in shorts.”

  He could run, even if kicking and fielding and noticing a ball anywhere within his vicinity were all beyond him. And so, while they did laps around the neighborhood, each time Lindsey shot a look toward Mr. Harvey’s house, Samuel was out in front, setting the pace for her—unaware of anything else.

  Inside the green house, Mr. Harvey was looking out. He saw her watching and he began to itch. It had been almost a year now, but the Salmons remained bent on crowding him.

  It had happened before in other towns and states. The family of a girl suspected him but no one else did. He had perfected his patter to the police, a certain obsequious innocence peppered with wonder about their procedures or useless ideas that he presented as if they might help. Bringing up the Ellis boy with Fenerman had been a good stroke, and the lie that he was a widower always helped. He fashioned a wife out of whichever victim he’d recently been taking pleasure in in his memory, and to flesh her out there was always his mother.

  He left the house every day for an hour or two in the afternoon. He would pick up any supplies he needed and then drive out to Valley Forge Park and walk the paved roads and the unpaved trails and find himself suddenly surrounded by school tours at George Washington’s log cabin or the Washington Memorial Chapel. This would buoy him up—these moments when the children were eager to see history, as if they might actually find a long silver hair from Washington’s wig caught on the rough end of a log post.

  Occasionally one of the tour guides or teachers would notice him standing there, unfamiliar even if amiable, and he would be met with a questioning stare. He had a thousand lines to give them: “I used to bring my children here.” “This is where I met my wife.” He knew to ground whatever he said in connection to some imagined family, and then the women would smile at him. Once an attractive, heavy woman tried to engage him in conversation while the park guide told the children about the winter of 1776 and the Battle of the Clouds.

  He had used the story of widowhood and talked about a woman named Sophie Cichetti, making her his now-deceased wife and true love. It had been like luscious food to this woman, and, as he listened to her tell him about her cats and her brother, who had three children, whom she loved, he pictured her sitting on the chair in his basement, dead.

  After that, when he met a teacher’s questioning glare he would shyly back off and go somewhere else inside the park. He watched mothers with their children still in strollers walk briskly along the exposed paths. He saw teenagers who were cutting school necking in the uncut fields or along the interior trails. And at the highest point of the park was a small wood beside which he sometimes parked. He would sit in his Wagoneer and watch lonely men pull up beside him and get out of their cars. Men in suits on their lunch hour or men in flannel and jeans would walk quickly into that wood. Sometimes they would cast a look back in his direction—an inquiry. If they were close enough, these men could see, through his windshield, what his victims saw—his wild and bottomless lust.

  On November 26, 1974, Lindsey saw Mr. Harvey leaving the green house, and she began to hang back from the pack of running boys. Later she could claim she had gotten her period and all of them would hush up, even be satisfied that this was proof that Mr. Dewitt’s unpopular plan—a girl at regionals!—would never work out.

  I watched my sister and marveled. She was becoming everything all at once. A woman. A spy. A jock. The Ostracized: One Man Alone.

  She walked, clutching her side in a false cramp, and waved the boys on when they turned to notice her. She kept walking with her hand on her waist until they turned the corner at the far end of the block. At the edge of Mr. Harvey’s property was a row of tall, thick pines that had been left untrimmed for years. She sat down by one of them, still feigning exhaustion in case any neighbor was looking out, and then, when she felt the moment was right, she curled up in a ball and rolled in between two pines. She waited. The boys had one more lap. She watched them pass her and followed them with her eyes as they cut up through the vacant lot and back to the high school. She was alone. She calculated she had forty-five minutes before our father would begin to wonder when she’d be home. The agreement had been that if she trained with the boys’ soccer team, Samuel would escort her home and have her back by five o’clock.

  The clouds had hung heavy in the sky all day, and the late-fall cold raised goose bumps along her legs and arms. The team runs always warmed her, but when she reached the locker room where she shared the showers with the field hockey team, she would begin to shiver until the hot water hit her body. But on the lawn of the green house, her goose bumps were also from fear.

  When the boys cut up the path, she scrambled over to the basement window at the side of Mr. Harvey’s house. She had already thought of a story if she was caught. She was chasing a kitten that she’d seen dart in between the pine trees. She would say it was gray, that it was fast, that it had run toward Mr. Harvey’s house and she’d followed it without thinking.

  She could see inside to the basement, where it was dark. She tried the window, but the latch lock was pushed in. She would have to break the glass. Her mind racing, she worried about the noise, but she was too far along to stop now. She thought of my father at home, ever mindful of the clock near his chair, and took her sweatshirt off and balled it around her feet. Sitting down, she braced her body with her arms and then kicked once, twice, three times with both feet until the window smashed—a muffled cracking.

  Carefully, she lowered herself down, searching the wall for a foothold but having to jump the final few feet onto the broken glass and concrete.

  The room appeared tidy and swept, different from our own basement, where heaps of holiday-marked boxes—EASTER EGGS AND GREEN GRASS, CHRISTMAS STAR/ORNAMENTS—never made it back on the shelves my father had built.

  The cold air from outside came in, and she felt the draft along her neck pushing her out of the shimmering semicircle of shattered glass and into the rest of the room. She saw the easy chair and a little table beside it. She saw the large alarm clock with luminous numbers sitting on the metal shelving. I wanted to guide her eyes to the crawlspace, where she would find the bones of the animals, but I knew, too, that regardless of drawing a fly’s eyes on graph paper and excelling that fall in Mr. Botte’s biology class, she would imagine the bones were mine. For this, I was glad she went nowhere near them.

  Despite my inability to appear or whisper, push or usher, Lindsey, all alone, felt something. Something charged the air in the cold, dank basement and made her cringe. She stood only a few feet from the open window, knowing that she would, no matter what, be walking farther in and that she had to, no matter what, calm and focus herself to look for clues; but right then, for one moment, she thought of Samuel running ahead, having thought he would find her on his last lap, then running back toward the school, thinking he would find her outside, and then assuming, but with the first trace of a doubt, that she was showering, and so he too would be showering now, and then waiting for her before he did anything else. How long would he wait? As her eyes mounted the stairs to the first floor before her feet followed, she wished that Samuel were there to climb down after her and trace her movements, erasing her solitude as he went, fitting into her limbs. But she had not told him on purpose—had told no one. What she was doing was beyond the pale—criminal—and she knew it.

  If she thought about it later, she would say that she had needed air and so that was what had gotten her up the stairs. Small flecks of white dust collected at the tips of her shoes as she mounted the stairs, but she didn’t notice them.

&nb
sp; She twisted the knob of the basement door and reached the first floor. Only five minutes had passed. She had forty left, or so she thought. There was still a bit of light seeping in through the closed blinds. As she stood, again, hesitating, in this house identical to our own, she heard the thwack of the Evening Bulletin hit the stoop and the delivery boy ring the bell on his bike as he passed.

  My sister told herself that she was inside a series of rooms and spaces that, gone through methodically, might yield what she needed, provide her the trophy she could take home to our father, earning her freedom from me that way. Competition always, even between the living and the dead. She saw the flagstones in the hall—the same dark green and gray as ours—and imagined crawling after me when she was a baby and I was just learning to walk. Then she saw my toddler body running delightedly away from her and into the next room, and she remembered her own sense of reaching out, of taking her first steps as I teased her from the living room.

  But Mr. Harvey’s house was much emptier than ours, and there were no rugs to lend warmth to the decor. Lindsey stepped from the flagstones onto the polished pine floors of what in our house was the living room. She made echoes up the open front hall, the sound of every movement reaching back for her.

  She couldn’t stop the memories slamming into her. Every one had a brutal report. Buckley riding piggyback on my shoulders down the stairs. Our mother steadying me as Lindsey looked on, jealous that I could reach, with the silver star in my hands, the top of the Christmas tree. Me sliding down the banister and asking her to join. Both of us begging the comics off our father after dinner. All of us running after Holiday as he barked and barked. And the countless exhausted smiles awkwardly dressing our faces for photos at birthdays, and holidays, and after school. Two sisters dressed identically in velvet or plaid or Easter yellows. We held baskets of bunnies and eggs we had sunk in dye. Patent leather shoes with straps and hard buckles. Smiling hard as our mother tried to focus her camera. The photos always fuzzy, our eyes bright red spots. None of them, these artifacts left to my sister, would hold for posterity the moments before and the moments after, when we two girls played in the house or fought over toys. When we were sisters.