by Alice Sebold
“She’s intense, Ray,” Ruth said, putting down the bag. “No wonder you’re so freak-a-delic.”
“What’s in the bag?”
“Candles,” said Ruth. “I got them at the grocery store. It’s December sixth.”
“I know.”
“I thought we might go to the cornfield and light them. Say goodbye.”
“How many times can you say it?”
“It was an idea,” Ruth said. “I’ll go alone.”
“No,” Ray said. “I’ll go.”
Ruth sat down in her jacket and overalls and waited for him to change his shirt. She watched him with his back toward her, how thin he was but also how the muscles seemed to pop on his arms the way they were supposed to and the color of his skin, like his mother’s, so much more inviting than her own.
“We can kiss for a while if you want.”
And he turned, grinning. He had begun to like the experiments. He was not thinking of me anymore—though he couldn’t tell that to Ruth.
He liked the way she cursed and hated school. He liked how smart she was and how she tried to pretend that it didn’t matter to her that his father was a doctor (even though not a real doctor, as she pointed out) and her father scavenged old houses, or that the Singhs had rows and rows of books in their house while she was starved for them.
He sat down next to her on the bed.
“Do you want to take your parka off?”
She did.
And so on the anniversary of my death, Ray mashed himself against Ruth and the two of them kissed and at some point she looked him in the face. “Shit!” she said. “I think I feel something.”
When Ray and Ruth arrived at the cornfield, they were silent and he was holding her hand. She didn’t know whether he was holding it because they were observing my death together or because he liked her. Her brain was a storm, her usual insight gone.
Then she saw she had not been the only one to think of me. Hal and Samuel Heckler were standing in the cornfield with their hands jammed in their pockets and their backs turned toward her. Ruth saw yellow daffodils on the ground.
“Did you bring those?” Ruth asked Samuel.
“No,” Hal said, answering for his brother. “They were already here when we got here.”
Mrs. Stead watched from her son’s upstairs bedroom. She decided to throw on her coat and walk out to the field. It was not something she even tried to judge, whether or not she belonged there.
Grace Tarking was walking around the block when she saw Mrs. Stead leaving her house with a poinsettia. They talked briefly in the street. Grace said that she was going to stop at home but she would come and join them.
Grace made two phone calls, one to her boyfriend, who lived a short distance away in a slightly richer area, and one to the Gilberts. They had not yet recovered from their strange role in the discovery of my death—their faithful lab having found the first evidence. Grace offered to escort them, since they were older and cutting across neighbors’ lawns and over the bumpy earth of the cornfield would be a challenge to them, but yes, Mr. Gilbert had said, he wanted to come. They needed this, he told Grace Tarking, his wife particularly—though I could see how crushed he was. He always covered his pain by being attentive to his wife. Though they had thought briefly of giving their dog away, he was too much comfort to both of them.
Mr. Gilbert wondered if Ray, who ran errands for them and was a sweet boy who had been badly judged, knew, and so he called the Singh household. Ruana said she suspected her son must already be there but that she would be along herself.
Lindsey was looking out the window when she saw Grace Tarking with her arm in Mrs. Gilbert’s and Grace’s boyfriend steadying Mr. Gilbert as the four of them cut across the O’Dwyers’ lawn.
“Something’s going on in the cornfield, Mom,” she said.
My mother was reading Molière, whom she had studied so intensely in college but hadn’t looked at since. Beside her were the books that had marked her as an avant-garde undergraduate: Sartre, Colette, Proust, Flaubert. She had pulled them off the shelves in her bedroom and promised herself she would reread them that year.
“I’m not interested,” she said to Lindsey, “but I’m sure your father will be when he gets home. Why don’t you go up and play with your brother?”
My sister had dutifully hovered for weeks now, paying court to our mother regardless of the signals she gave. There was something on the other side of the icy surface. Lindsey was sure of it. She stayed by my mother, sitting by her chair and watching our neighbors outside the window.
* * *
By the time darkness fell, the candles the latecomers had had the foresight to bring lit the cornfield. It seemed like everyone I’d ever known or sat next to in a classroom from kindergarten to eighth grade was there. Mr. Botte saw that something was happening when he’d come out of the school after preparing his classroom for the next day’s annual animal digestion experiment. He’d strolled over, and, when he realized what it was, he let himself back into the school and made some calls. There had been a secretary who had been overcome by my death. She came with her son. There had been some teachers who hadn’t come to the official school memorial.
The rumors of Mr. Harvey’s suspected guilt had begun to make their way from neighbor to neighbor on Thanksgiving night. By the next afternoon it was the only thing the neighbors could talk about—was it possible? Could that strange man who had lived so quietly among them have killed Susie Salmon? But no one had dared approach my family to find out the details. Cousins of friends or fathers of the boys who cut their lawn were asked if they knew anything. Anyone who might know what the police were doing had been buddied up to in the past week, and so my memorial was both a way to mark my memory and a way for the neighbors to seek comfort from one another. A murderer had lived among them, passed them on the street, bought Girl Scout cookies from their daughters and magazine subscriptions from their sons.
In my heaven I buzzed with heat and energy as more and more people reached the cornfield and lit their candles and began to hum a low, dirgelike song for which Mr. O’Dwyer called back to the distant memory of his Dublin grandfather. My neighbors were awkward at first, but the secretary from the school clung to Mr. O’Dwyer as his voice gave forth, and she added her less melodious one. Ruana Singh stood stiffly in an outer circle away from her son. Dr. Singh had called as she was leaving to say he would be sleeping overnight in his office. But other fathers, coming home from their offices, parked their cars in their driveways only to get out and follow their neighbors. How could they both work to support their families and watch their children to make sure they were safe? As a group they would learn it was impossible, no matter how many rules they laid down. What had happened to me could happen to anyone.
No one had called my house. My family was left undisturbed. The impenetrable barrier that surrounded the shingles, the chimney, the woodpile, the driveway, the fence, was like a layer of clear ice that coated the trees when it rained and then froze. Our house looked the same as every other one on the block, but it was not the same. Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.
When the sky had turned a dappled rose, Lindsey realized what was happening. My mother never lifted her eyes from her book.
“They’re having a ceremony for Susie,” Lindsey said. “Listen.” She cracked the window open. In rushed the cold December air and the distant sound of singing.
My mother used all her energy. “We’ve had the memorial,” she said. “That’s done for me.”
“What’s done?”
My mother’s elbows were on the armrests of the yellow winged-back chair. She leaned slightly forward and her face moved into shadow, making it harder for Lindsey to see the expression on her face. “I don’t believe she’s waiting for us out there. I don’t think lighting candles and doing all that stuff is honoring her memory. There are other ways to honor it.”
“Like what?” Lindsey said. She sat c
ross-legged on the rug in front of my mother, who sat in her chair with her finger marking her place in Molière.
“I want to be more than a mother.”
Lindsey thought she could understand this. She wanted to be more than a girl.
My mother put the Molière book on top of the coffee table and scooted forward on the chair until she lowered herself down onto the rug. I was struck by this. My mother did not sit on the floor, she sat at the bill-paying desk or in the wing chairs or sometimes on the end of the couch with Holiday curled up beside her.
She took my sister’s hand in hers.
“Are you going to leave us?” Lindsey asked.
My mother wobbled. How could she say what she already knew? Instead, she told a lie. “I promise I won’t leave you.”
What she wanted most was to be that free girl again, stacking china at Wanamaker’s, hiding from her manager the Wedgwood cup with the handle she broke, dreaming of living in Paris like de Beauvoir and Sartre, and going home that day laughing to herself about the nerdy Jack Salmon, who was pretty cute even if he hated smoke. The cafés in Paris were full of cigarettes, she’d told him, and he’d seemed impressed. At the end of that summer when she invited him in and they had, both for the first time, made love, she’d smoked a cigarette, and for the joke he said he’d have one too. When she handed him the damaged blue china to use as an ashtray, she used all her favorite words to embellish the story of breaking and then hiding, inside her coat, the now homely Wedgwood cup.
“Come here, baby,” my mother said, and Lindsey did. She leaned her back into my mother’s chest, and my mother rocked her awkwardly on the rug. “You are doing so well, Lindsey; you are keeping your father alive.” And they heard his car pull into the drive.
Lindsey let herself be held while my mother thought of Ruana Singh out behind her house, smoking. The sweet scent of Dunhills had drifted out onto the road and taken my mother far away. Her last boyfriend before my father had loved Gauloises. He had been a pretentious little thing, she thought, but he had also been oh-so-serious in a way that let her be oh-so-serious as well.
“Do you see the candles, Mom?” Lindsey asked, as she stared out the window.
“Go get your father,” my mother said.
My sister met my father in the mud room, hanging up his keys and coat. Yes, they would go, he said. Of course they would go.
“Daddy!” My brother called from the second floor, where my sister and father went to meet him.
“Your call,” my father said as Buckley bodychecked him.
“I’m tired of protecting him,” Lindsey said. “It doesn’t feel real not to include him. Susie’s gone. He knows that.”
My brother stared up at her.
“There is a party for Susie,” Lindsey said. “And me and Daddy are taking you.”
“Is Mommy sick?” Buckley asked.
Lindsey didn’t want to lie to him, but she also felt it was an accurate description of what she knew.
“Yes.”
Lindsey agreed to meet our father downstairs while she brought Buckley into his room to change his clothes.
“I see her, you know,” Buckley said, and Lindsey looked at him.
“She comes and talks to me, and spends time with me when you’re at soccer.”
Lindsey didn’t know what to say, but she reached out and grabbed him and squeezed him to her, the way he often squeezed Holiday.
“You are so special,” she said to my brother. “I’ll always be here, no matter what.”
My father made his slow way down the stairs, his left hand tightening on the wooden banister, until he reached the flagstone landing.
His approach was loud. My mother took her Molière book and crept into the dining room, where he wouldn’t see her. She read her book, standing in the corner of the dining room and hiding from her family. She waited for the front door to open and close.
My neighbors and teachers, friends and family, circled an arbitrary spot not far from where I’d been killed. My father, sister, and brother heard the singing again once they were outside. Everything in my father leaned and pitched toward the warmth and light. He wanted so badly to have me remembered in the minds and hearts of everyone. I knew something as I watched: almost everyone was saying goodbye to me. I was becoming one of many little-girl-losts. They would go back to their homes and put me to rest, a letter from the past never reopened or reread. And I could say goodbye to them, wish them well, bless them somehow for their good thoughts. A handshake in the street, a dropped item picked up and retrieved and handed back, or a friendly wave from a distant window, a nod, a smile, a moment when the eyes lock over the antics of a child.
Ruth saw my three family members first, and she tugged on Ray’s sleeve. “Go help him,” she whispered. And Ray, who had met my father on his first day of what would prove a long journey to try to find my killer, moved forward. Samuel came away too. Like youthful pastors, they brought my father and sister and brother into the group, which made a wide berth for them and grew silent.
My father had not been outside the house except to drive back and forth to work or sit out in the backyard, for months, nor had he seen his neighbors. Now he looked at them, from face to face, until he realized I had been loved by people he didn’t even recognize. His heart filled up, warm again as it had not been in what seemed so long to him—save small forgotten moments with Buckley, the accidents of love that happened with his son.
He looked at Mr. O’Dwyer. “Stan,” he said, “Susie used to stand at the front window during the summer and listen to you singing in your yard. She loved it. Will you sing for us?”
And in the kind of grace that is granted, but rarely, and not when you wish it most—to save a loved one from dying—Mr. O’Dwyer wobbled only a moment on his first note, then sang loud and clear and fine.
Everyone joined in.
I remembered those summer nights my father spoke of. How the darkness would take forever to come and with it I always hoped for it to cool down. Sometimes, standing at the open window in the front hall, I would feel a breeze, and on that breeze was the music coming from the O’Dwyers’ house. As I listened to Mr. O’Dwyer run through all the Irish ballads he had ever learned, the breeze would begin to smell of earth and air and a mossy scent that meant only one thing: a thunderstorm.
There was a wonderful temporary hush then, as Lindsey sat in her room on the old couch studying, my father sat in his den reading his books, my mother downstairs doing needlepoint or washing up.
I liked to change into a long cotton nightgown and go out onto the back porch, where, as the rain began falling in heavy drops against the roof, breezes came in the screens from all sides and swept my gown against me. It was warm and wonderful and the lightning would come and, a few moments later, the thunder.
My mother would stand at the open porch door, and, after she said her standard warning, “You’re going to catch your death of cold,” she grew quiet. We both listened together to the rain pour down and the thunder clap and smelled the earth rising to greet us.
“You look invincible,” my mother said one night.
I loved these times, when we seemed to feel the same thing. I turned to her, wrapped in my thin gown, and said:
“I am.”
SNAPSHOTS
With the camera my parents gave me, I took dozens of candids of my family. So many that my father forced me to choose which rolls I thought should be developed. As the cost of my obsession mounted, I began keeping two boxes in my closet. “Rolls to be sent out” and “Rolls to hold back.” It was, my mother said, the only hint of any organizational skills I possessed.
I loved the way the burned-out flashcubes of the Kodak Instamatic marked a moment that had passed, one that would now be gone forever except for a picture. When they were spent, I took the cubed four-corner flashbulbs and passed them from hand to hand until they cooled. The broken filaments of the flash would turn a molten marble blue or sometimes smoke the thin glass black. I had re
scued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found a way to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it.
* * *
On a summer evening in 1975, my mother turned to my father and said:
“Have you ever made love in the ocean?”
And he said, “No.”
“Neither have I,” my mother said. “Let’s pretend it is the ocean and that I am going away and we might never see each other again.”
The next day she left for her father’s cabin in New Hampshire.
That same summer, Lindsey or Buckley or my father would open the front door and find a casserole or a bundt cake on the front stoop. Sometimes an apple pie—my father’s favorite. The food was unpredictable. The casseroles Mrs. Stead made were horrible. The bundt cakes Mrs. Gilbert made were overly moist but bearable. The apple pies from Ruana: heaven on Earth.
In his study during the long nights after my mother left, my father would try to lose himself by rereading passages from the Civil War letters of Mary Chestnut to her husband. He tried to let go of any blame, of any hope, but it was impossible. He did manage a small smile once.
“Ruana Singh bakes a mean apple pie,” he wrote in his notebook.
In the fall he picked up the phone one afternoon to hear Grandma Lynn.
“Jack,” my grandmother announced, “I am thinking of coming to stay.”
My father was silent, but the line was riddled with his hesitation.
“I would like to make myself available to you and the children. I’ve been knocking around in this mausoleum long enough.”
“Lynn, we’re just beginning to start over again,” he stammered. Still, he couldn’t depend on Nate’s mother to watch Buckley forever. Four months after my mother left, her temporary absence was beginning to take on the feel of permanence.
My grandmother insisted. I watched her resist the remaining slug of vodka in her glass. “I will contain my drinking until”—she thought hard here—“after five o’clock, and,” she said, “what the hell, I’ll stop altogether if you should find it necessary.”
