by Alice Sebold
Then she saw it. My back darting into the next room. Our dining room, the room that held his finished dollhouses. I was a child running just ahead of her.
She hurried after me.
She chased me through the downstairs rooms and though she was training hard for soccer, when she returned to the front hall she was unable to catch her breath. She grew dizzy.
I thought of what my mother had always said about a boy at our bus stop who was twice as old as us but still in the second grade. “He doesn’t know his own strength, so you need to be careful around him.” He liked to give bear hugs to anyone who was nice to him, and you could see this dopey love drop into his features and ignite his desire to touch. Before he was removed from regular school and sent somewhere else no one talked about, he had picked up a little girl named Daphne and squeezed her so hard that she fell into the road when he let go. I was pushing so hard on the Inbetween to get to Lindsey that I suddenly felt I might hurt her when I meant to help.
My sister sat down on the wide steps at the bottom of the front hall and closed her eyes, focused on regaining her breath, on why she was in Mr. Harvey’s house in the first place. She felt encased in something heavy, a fly trapped in a spider’s funnel web, the thick silk binding up around her. She knew that our father had walked into the cornfield possessed by something that was creeping into her now. She had wanted to bring back clues he could use as rungs to climb back to her on, to anchor him with facts, to ballast his sentences to Len. Instead she saw herself falling after him into a bottomless pit.
She had twenty minutes.
Inside that house my sister was the only living being, but she was not alone, and I was not her only company. The architecture of my murderer’s life, the bodies of the girls he’d left behind, began to reveal itself to me now that my sister was in that house. I stood in heaven. I called their names:
Jackie Meyer. Delaware, 1967. Thirteen.
A chair knocked over, its underside facing the room. Lying curled toward it, she wore a striped T-shirt and nothing else. Near her head, a small pool of blood.
Flora Hernandez. Delaware, 1963. Eight.
He’d only wanted to touch her, but she screamed. A small girl for her age. Her left sock and shoe were found later. The body, unrecovered. The bones lay in the earthen basement of an old apartment house.
Leah Fox. Delaware, 1969. Twelve.
On a slipcovered couch under a highway on-ramp, he killed her, very quietly. He fell asleep on top of her, lulled by the sound of cars rushing above them. Not until ten hours later, when a vagrant knocked on the small shack Mr. Harvey had built out of discarded doors—did he begin to pack himself and Leah Fox’s body up.
Sophie Cichetti, Pennsylvania, 1960. Forty-nine.
A landlady, she had divided her upstairs apartment into two by erecting a Sheetrock wall. He liked the half-circle window this created, and the rent was cheap. But she talked too much about her son and insisted on reading him poems from a book of sonnets. He made love to her on her side of the divided room, smashed her skull in when she started to talk, and brought her body to the bank of a creek nearby.
Leidia Johnson. 1960. Six.
Buck’s County, Pennsylvania. He dug an arched cave inside a hill near the quarry and waited. She was the youngest one.
Wendy Richter. Connecticut, 1971. Thirteen.
She was waiting for her father outside a bar. He raped her in the bushes and then strangled her. That time, as he grew conscious, coming up out of the stupor that often clung on, he heard noises. He turned the dead girl’s face toward his, and as the voices grew closer he bit down on her ear. “Sorry, man,” he heard two drunk men say as they walked into the nearby bushes to take a leak.
I saw now that town of floating graves, cold and whipped by winds, where the victims of murder went in the minds of the living. I could see his other victims as they occupied his house—those trace memories left behind before they fled this earth—but I let them go that day and went to my sister.
Lindsey stood up the moment I focused back on her. Together the two of us walked the stairs. She felt like the zombies in the movies Samuel and Hal loved. One foot in front of the other and staring blankly straight ahead. She reached what was my parents’ bedroom in our house and found nothing. She circled the hallway upstairs. Nothing. Then she went into what had been my bedroom in our house, and she found my killer’s.
It was the least barren room in the house, and she did her best not to displace anything. To move her hand in between the sweaters stacked on the shelf, prepared to find anything in their warm insides—a knife, a gun, a Bic pen chewed on by Holiday. Nothing. But then, as she heard something but could not identify what it was, she turned toward the bed and saw the bedside table and, lying in the circle of light from a reading lamp left on, his sketchbook. She walked toward it and heard another sound, again, not putting the sounds together. Car pulling up. Car braking with a squeak. Car door slamming shut.
She turned the pages of the sketchbook and looked at the inky drawings of crossbeams and braces or turrets and buttresses, and she saw the measurements and notes, none of which meant any-thing to her. Then, as she flipped a final page, she thought she heard footsteps outside and very close.
As Mr. Harvey turned the key in the lock of his front door, she saw the light pencil sketch on the page in front of her. It was a small drawing of stalks above a sunken hole, a detail off to the side of a shelf and how a chimney could draw out smoke from a fire, and the thing that sunk into her: in a spidery hand he had written “Stolfuz cornfield.” If it were not for the articles in the paper after the discovery of my elbow, she would not have known that the cornfield was owned by a man named Stolfuz. Now she saw what I wanted her to know. I had died inside that hole; I had screamed and fought and lost.
She ripped out the page. Mr. Harvey was in the kitchen making something to eat—the liverwurst he favored, a bowl of sweet green grapes. He heard a board creak. He stiffened. He heard another and his back rose and blossomed with sudden understanding.
The grapes dropped on the floor to be crushed by his left foot, while my sister in the room above sprang to the aluminum blinds and unlocked the stubborn window. Mr. Harvey mounted the stairs two at a time, and my sister smashed out the screen, scrambling onto the porch roof and rolling down it as he gained the upstairs hall and came barreling toward her. The gutter broke when her body tipped past it. As he reached his bedroom, she fell into the bushes and brambles and muck.
But she was not hurt. Gloriously not hurt. Gloriously young. She stood up as he reached the window to climb out. But he stopped. He saw her running toward the elderberry. The silkscreened number on her back screamed out at him. 5! 5! 5!
Lindsey Salmon in her soccer shirt.
Samuel was sitting with my parents and Grandma Lynn when Lindsey reached the house.
“Oh my God,” my mother said, the first to see her through the small square windows that lined either side of our front door.
And by the time my mother opened it Samuel had rushed to fill the space, and she walked, without looking at my mother or even my father hobbling forward, right into Samuel’s arms.
“My God, my God, my God,” my mother said as she took in the dirt and the cuts.
My grandmother came to stand beside her.
Samuel put his hand on my sister’s head and smoothed her hair back.
“Where have you been?”
But Lindsey turned to our father, lessened so now—smaller, weaker, than this child who raged. How alive she was consumed me whole that day.
“Daddy?”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“I did it. I broke into his house.” She was shaking slightly and trying not to cry.
My mother balked: “You what?”
But my sister didn’t look at her, not once.
“I brought you this. I think it might be important.”
She had kept the drawing in her hand, crumpled tightly into a ball. It had made her landing h
arder, but she had come away anyway.
A phrase my father had read that day appeared in his mind now. He spoke it aloud as he looked into Lindsey’s eyes.
“There is no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.”
Lindsey handed him the drawing.
“I’m going to pick up Buckley,” my mother said.
“Don’t you even want to look at this, Mom?”
“I don’t know what to say. Your grandmother is here. I have shopping to do, a bird to cook. No one seems to realize that we have a family. We have a family, a family and a son, and I’m going.”
Grandma Lynn walked my mother to the back door but did not try to stop her.
My mother gone, my sister reached her hand out to Samuel. My father saw what Lindsey did in Mr. Harvey’s spidery hand: the possible blueprint of my grave. He looked up.
“Do you believe me now?” he asked Lindsey.
“Yes, Daddy.”
My father—so grateful—had a call to make.
“Dad,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I think he saw me.”
I could never have imagined a blessing greater to me than the physical safety of my sister that day. As I walked back from the gazebo I shivered with the fear that had held me, the possibility of her loss on Earth not just to my father, my mother, Buckley, and Samuel, but, selfishly, the loss of her on Earth to me.
Franny walked toward me from the cafeteria. I barely raised my head.
“Susie,” she said. “I have something to tell you.”
She drew me under one of the old-fashioned lampposts and then out of the light. She handed me a piece of paper folded into four.
“When you feel stronger, look at it and go there.”
Two days later, Franny’s map led me to a field that I had always walked by but which, though beautiful, I’d left unexplored. The drawing had a dotted line to indicate a path. Searching nervously, I looked for an indentation in the rows and rows of wheat. Just ahead I saw it, and as I began to walk between the rows the paper dissolved in my hand.
I could see an old and beautiful olive tree just up ahead.
The sun was high, and in front of the olive tree was a clearing. I waited only a moment until I saw the wheat on the other side begin to pulse with the arrival of someone who did not crest the stalks.
She was small for her age, as she had been on Earth, and she wore a calico dress that was frayed at the hem and the cuffs.
She paused and we stared at each other.
“I come here almost every day,” she said. “I like to listen to the sounds.”
All around us, I realized, the wheat was rustling as it moved against itself in the wind.
“Do you know Franny?” I asked.
The little girl nodded solemnly.
“She gave me a map to this place.”
“Then you must be ready,” she said, but she was in her heaven too, and that called for twirling and making her skirt fly out in a circle. I sat on the ground under the tree and watched her.
When she was done she came toward me and breathlessly sat herself down. “I was Flora Hernandez,” she said. “What was your name?”
I told her, and then I began to cry with comfort, to know another girl he had killed.
“The others will be here soon,” she said.
And as Flora twirled, other girls and women came through the field in all directions. Our heartache poured into one another like water from cup to cup. Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
FIFTEEN
At first no one stopped them, and it was something his mother enjoyed so much, the trill of her laughter when they ducked around the corner from whatever store and she uncovered and presented the pilfered item to him, that George Harvey joined in her laughter and, spying an opportunity, would hug her while she was occupied with her newest prize.
It was a relief for both of them, getting away from his father for the afternoon and driving into the nearby town to get food or other supplies. They were scavengers at best and made their money by collecting scrap metal and old bottles and hauling them into town on the back of the elder Harvey’s ancient flatbed truck.
When his mother and he were caught for the first time, the two of them were treated graciously by the woman at the cash register. “If you can pay for it, do. If you can’t, leave it on the counter as good as new,” she said brightly and winked at the eight-year-old George Harvey. His mother took the small glass bottle of aspirin out of her pocket and placed it sheepishly on the counter. Her face sank. “No better than the child,” his father often reprimanded her.
Getting caught became another moment in his life that brought fear—that sick feeling curling into his stomach like eggs being folded into a bowl—and he could tell by the closed faces and hard eyes when the person walking down the aisle toward them was a store employee who had seen a woman stealing.
And she began handing him the stolen items to hide on his body, and he did it because she wanted him to. If they got outside and away in the truck, she would smile and bang the steering wheel with the flat of her hand and call him her little accomplice. The cab would fill with her wild, unpredictable love, and for a little while—until it wore off and they spied something glinting on the side of the road that they would have to investigate for what his mother called its “possibilities”—he did feel free. Free and warm.
He remembered the advice she gave him the first time they drove a stretch of road in Texas and saw a white wooden cross along the road. Around the base of it were clusters of fresh and dead flowers. His scavenger’s eye had been drawn immediately by the colors.
“You have to be able to look past the dead,” his mother said. “Sometimes there are good trinkets to take away from them.”
Even then, he could sense they were doing something wrong. The two of them got out of the truck and went up to the cross, and his mother’s eyes changed into the two black points that he was used to seeing when they were searching. She found a charm in the shape of an eye and one in the shape of a heart and held them out for George Harvey to see.
“Don’t know what your father would make of them, but we can keep them, just you and me.”
She had a secret stash of things that she never showed his father.
“Do you want the eye or the heart?”
“The eye,” he said.
“I think these roses are fresh enough to save, nice for the truck.”
That night they slept in the truck, unable to make the drive back to where his father was working a temporary job splitting and riving boards by hand.
The two of them slept curled into each other as they did with some frequency, making the inside of the cab an awkward nest. His mother, like a dog worrying a blanket, moved around in her seat and fidgeted. George Harvey had realized after earlier struggles that it was best to go limp and let her move him as she wished. Until his mother was comfortable, no one slept.
In the middle of the night, as he was dreaming about the soft insides of the palaces in picture books he’d seen in public libraries, someone banged on the roof, and George Harvey and his mother sat bolt upright. It was three men, looking through the windows in a way George Harvey recognized. It was the way his own father looked when he was drunk sometimes. It had a double effect: the whole gaze was leveled at his mother and simultaneously absented his son.
He knew not to cry out.
“Stay quiet. They aren’t here for you,” she whispered to him. He began to shiver underneath the old army blankets that covered them.
One of the three men was standing in front of the truck. The other two were banging on either side of the truck’s roof, laughing and lolling their tongues.
His mother shook her head vehemently, but this only enraged them. The man blocking the truc
k started rocking his hips back and forth against the front end, which caused the other two men to laugh harder.
“I’m going to move slow,” his mother whispered, “and pretend I’m getting out of the truck. I want you to reach forward and turn the keys in the ignition when I say so.”
He knew he was being told something very important. That she needed him. Despite her practiced calm, he could hear the metal in her voice, the iron breaking up through fear now.
She smiled at the men, and as they sent up whoops and their bodies relaxed, she used her elbow to knock the gear shift into place. “Now,” she said in a flat monotone, and George Harvey reached forward and turned the keys. The truck came to life with its rumbling old engine.
The faces of the men changed, fading from an acquisitive joy and then, as she reversed back to a good degree and they stared after her, uncertainty. She switched into drive and screamed, “On the floor!” to her son. He could feel the bump of the man’s body hitting the truck only a few feet from where he lay curled up inside. Then the body was pitched up onto the roof. It lay there for a second until his mother reversed again. He had had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.
His heart had beat wildly as he watched Lindsey make for the elderberry hedge, but then immediately he had calmed. It was a skill his mother, not his father, had taught him—to take action only after calculating the worst possible outcome of each choice available. He saw the notebook disturbed and the missing page in his sketchbook. He checked the bag with the knife. He took the knife with him to the basement and dropped it down the square hole that was drilled through the foundation. From the metal shelving, he retrieved the group of charms that he kept from the women. He took the Pennsylvania keystone charm from my bracelet and held it in his hand. Good luck. The others he spread out on his white handkerchief, and then he brought the four ends together to form a small hobo sack. He put his hand inside the hole under the foundation and got down on the floor on his stomach to push his arm in all the way to the shoulder. He groped, feeling with the free fingers of his hand as the other held the hobo sack, until he found a rusty jut of a metal support over which the workmen had poured the cement. He hung his trophy bag there and then withdrew his arm and stood. The book of sonnets he had buried earlier that summer in the woods of Valley Forge Park, shedding evidence slowly as he always did; now, he had to hope, not too slowly.
