Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones

He had heard the offhand comments the police made about her. To their mind she was cold and snobbish, condescending, odd. And so that was what he imagined he would find.

“Come in and sit,” she’d said to him when he pronounced his name. Her eyes, on the word Salmon , had gone from closed to open doorways – dark rooms where he wanted to travel firsthand.

He almost lost his balance as she led him into the small cramped front room of their house. There were books on the floor with their spines facing up. They came out three rows deep from the wall. She was wearing a yellow sari and what looked like gold lamé capri pants underneath. Her feet were bare. She padded across the wall-to-wall and stopped at the couch. “Something to drink?” she asked, and he nodded his head.

“Hot or cold?”

“Hot.”

As she turned the corner into a room he couldn’t see, he sat down on the brown plaid couch. The windows across from him under which the books were lined were draped with long muslin curtains, which the harsh daylight outside had to fight to filter through. He felt suddenly very warm, almost close to forgetting why that morning he had double-checked the Singhs’ address.

A little while later, as my father was thinking of how tired he was and how he had promised my mother to pick up some long-held dry cleaning, Mrs. Singh returned with tea on a tray and put it down on the carpet in front of him.

“We don’t have much furniture, I’m afraid. Dr. Singh is still looking for tenure.”

She went into an adjoining room and brought back a purple floor pillow for herself, which she placed on the floor to face him.

“Dr. Singh is a professor?” my father asked, though he knew this already, knew more than he was comfortable with about this beautiful woman and her sparsely furnished home.

“Yes,” she said, and poured the tea. It was quiet. She held out a cup to him, and as he took it she said, “Ray was with him the day your daughter was killed.”

He wanted to fall over into her.

“That must be why you’ve come,” she continued.

“Yes,” he said, “I want to talk to him.”

“He’s at school right now,” she said. “You know that.” Her legs in the gold pants were tucked to her side. The nails on her toes were long and unpolished, their surface gnarled from years of dancing.

“I wanted to come by and assure you I mean him no harm,” my father said. I watched him. I had never seen him like this before. The words fell out of him like burdens he was delivering, backlogged verbs and nouns, but he was watching her feet curl against the dun-colored rug and the way the small pool of numbed light from the curtains touched her right cheek.

“He did nothing wrong and loved your little girl. A schoolboy crush, but still.”

Schoolboy crushes happened all the time to Ray’s mother. The teenager who delivered the paper would pause on his bike, hoping that she would be near the door when she heard the thump of the Philadelphia Inquirer hit the porch. That she would come out and, if she did, that she would wave. She didn’t even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house – it was the eyes, her dancer’s carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.

When the police had come they had stumbled into the dark front hall in search of a killer, but before Ray even reached the top of the stairs, Ruana had so confused them that they were agreeing to tea and sitting on silk pillows. They had expected her to fall into the grooves of the patter they relied on with all attractive women, but she only grew more erect in posture as they tried harder and harder to ingratiate themselves, and she stood upright by the windows while they questioned her son.

“I’m glad Susie had a nice boy like her,” my father said. “I’ll thank your son for that.”

She smiled, not showing teeth.

“He wrote her a love note,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I wish I had known enough to do the same,” he said. “Tell her I loved her on that last day.”

“Yes.”

“But your son did.”

“Yes.”

They stared at each other for a moment.

“You must have driven the policemen nuts,” he said and smiled more to himself than to her.

“They came to accuse Ray,” she said. “I wasn’t concerned with how they felt about me.”

“I imagine it’s been hard for him,” my father said.

“No, I won’t allow that,” she said sternly and placed her cup back on the tray. “You cannot have sympathy for Ray or for us.”

My father tried to stutter out a protest.

She placed her hand in the air. “You have lost a daughter and come here for some purpose. I will allow you that and that only, but trying to understand our lives, no.”

“I didn’t mean to offend,” he said. “I only…”

Again, the hand up.

“Ray will be home in twenty minutes. I will talk to him first and prepare him, then you may talk to my son about your daughter.”

“What did I say?”

“I like that we don’t have much furniture. It allows me to think that someday we might pack up and leave.”

“I hope you’ll stay,” my father said. He said it because he had been trained to be polite from an early age, a training he passed on to me, but he also said it because part of him wanted more of her, this cold woman who was not exactly cold, this rock who was not stone.

“With all gentleness,” she said, “you don’t even know me. We’ll wait together for Ray.”

My father had left our house in the midst of a fight between Lindsey and my mother. My mother was trying to get Lindsey to go with her to the Y to swim. Without thinking, Lindsey had blared, “I’d rather die!” at the top of her lungs. My father watched as my mother froze, then burst, fleeing to their bedroom to wail behind the door. He quietly tucked his notebook in his jacket pocket, took the car keys off the hook by the back door, and snuck out.

In those first two months my mother and father moved in opposite directions from each other. One stayed in, the other went out. My father fell asleep in his den in the green chair, and when he woke he crept carefully into the bedroom and slid into bed. If my mother had most of the sheets he would lie without them, his body curled up tight, ready to spring at a moment’s notice, ready for anything.

“I know who killed her,” he heard himself say to Ruana Singh.

“Have you told the police?”

“Yes.”

“What do they say?”

“They say that for now there is nothing but my suspicion to link him to the crime.”

“A father’s suspicion…” she began.

“Is as powerful as a mother’s intuition.”

This time there were teeth in her smile.

“He lives in the neighborhood.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m investigating all leads,” my father said, knowing how it sounded as he said it.

“And my son…”

“Is a lead.”

“Perhaps the other man frightens you too much.”

“But I have to do something,” he protested.

“Here we are again, Mr. Salmon,” she said. “You misinterpret me. I am not saying you are doing the wrong thing by coming here. It is the right thing in its way. You want to find something soft, something warm in all this. Your searching led you here. That’s a good thing. I am only concerned that it be good, too, for my son.”

“I mean no harm.”

“What is the man’s name?”

“George Harvey.” It was the first time he’d said it aloud to anyone but Len Fenerman.

She paused and stood. Turning her back to him, she walked over to first one window and then the other and drew the curtains back. It was the after-school light that she loved. She watched for Ray as he walked up the road.