Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones

“Ray will come now. I will go to meet him. If you’ll excuse me I need to put on my coat and boots.” She paused. “Mr. Salmon,” she said, “I would do exactly what you are doing: I would talk to everyone I needed to, I would not tell too many people his name. When I was sure,” she said, “I would find a quiet way, and I would kill him.”

He could hear her in the hallway, the metal clank of hangers as she got her coat. A few minutes later the door was opened and closed. A cold breeze came in from the outside and then out on the road he could see a mother greet her son. Neither of them smiled. Their heads bent low. Their mouths moved. Ray took in the fact that my father was waiting for him inside his home.

At first my mother and I thought it was just the obvious that marked Len Fenerman as different from the rest of the force. He was smaller than the hulking uniforms who frequently accompanied him. Then there were the less obvious traits too – the way he often seemed to be thinking to himself, how he wasn’t much for joking or trying to be anything but serious when he talked about me and the circumstances of the case. But, talking with my mother, Len Fenerman had shown himself for what he was: an optimist. He believed my killer would be caught.

“Maybe not today or tomorrow,” he said to my mother, “but someday he’ll do something uncontrollable. They are too uncontrolled in their habits not to.”

My mother was left to entertain Len Fenerman until my father arrived home from the Singhs’. On the table in the family room Buckley’s crayons were scattered across the butcher paper my mother had laid down. Buckley and Nate had drawn until their heads began to nod like heavy flowers, and my mother had plucked them up in her arms, first one and then the other, and brought them over to the couch. They slept there end to end with their feet almost touching in the center.

Len Fenerman knew enough to talk in hushed whispers, but he wasn’t, my mother noted, a worshiper of children. He watched her carry the two boys but did not stand to help or comment on them the way the other policemen always did, defining her by her children, both living and dead.

“Jack wants to talk to you,” my mother said. “But I’m sure you’re too busy to wait.”

“Not too busy.”

I saw a black strand of her hair fall from where she had tucked it behind her ear. It softened her face. I saw Len see it too.

“He went over to that poor Ray Singh’s house,” she said and tucked the fallen hair back in its proper place.

“I’m sorry we had to question him,” Len said.

“Yes,” she said. “No young boy is capable of…” She couldn’t say it, and he didn’t make her.

“His alibi was airtight.”

My mother took up a crayon from the butcher paper.

Len Fenerman watched my mother draw stick figures and stick dogs. Buckley and Nate made quiet sounds of sleep on the couch. My brother curled up into a fetal position and a moment later placed his thumb in his mouth to suck. It was a habit my mother had told us all we must help him break. Now she envied such easy peace.

“You remind me of my wife,” Len said after a long silence, during which my mother had drawn an orange poodle and what looked like a blue horse undergoing electroshock treatment.

“She can’t draw either?”

“She wasn’t much of a talker when there was nothing to say.”

A few more minutes passed. A yellow ball of sun. A brown house with flowers outside the door – pink, blue, purple.

“You used the past tense.”

They both heard the garage door. “She died soon after we were married,” he said.

“Daddy!” Buckley yelled, and leapt up, forgetting Nate and everyone else.

“I’m sorry,” she said to Len.

“I am too,” he said, “about Susie. Really.”

In the back hall my father greeted Buckley and Nate with high cheers and calls for “Oxygen!” as he always did when we besieged him after a long day. Even if it felt false, elevating his mood for my brother was often the favorite part of his day.

My mother stared at Len Fenerman while my father walked toward the family room from the back. Rush to the sink , I felt like saying to her, stare down the hole and look into the earth. I’m down there waiting; I’m up here watching.

Len Fenerman had been the one that first asked my mother for my school picture when the police thought I might be found alive. In his wallet, my photo sat in a stack. Among these dead children and strangers was a picture of his wife. If a case had been solved he had written the date of its resolution on the back of the photo. If the case was still open – in his mind if not in the official files of the police – it was blank. There was nothing on the back of mine. There was nothing on his wife’s.

“Len, how are you?” my father asked. Holiday up and wiggling back and forth for my father to pet him.

“I hear you went to see Ray Singh,” Len said.

“Boys, why don’t you go play up in Buckley’s room?” my mother suggested. “Detective Fenerman and Daddy need to talk.”

“Do you see her?” Buckley asked Nate as they climbed the stairs, Holiday in tow. “That’s my sister.”

“No,” Nate said.

“She was gone for a while, but now she’s back. Race!”

And the three of them – two boys and a dog – raced the rest of the way up the long curve of the staircase.

I had never even let myself yearn for Buckley, afraid he might see my image in a mirror or a bottle cap. Like everyone else I was trying to protect him. “Too young,” I said to Franny. “Where do you think imaginary friends come from?” she said.

For a few minutes the two boys sat under the framed grave rubbing outside my parents’ room. It was from a tomb in a London graveyard. My mother had told Lindsey and me the story of how my father and she had wanted things to hang on their walls and an old woman they met on their honeymoon had taught them how to do grave rubbings. By the time I was in double digits most of the grave rubbings had been put down in the basement for storage, the spots on our suburban walls replaced with bright graphic prints meant to stimulate children. But Lindsey and I loved the grave rubbings, particularly the one under which Nate and Buckley sat that afternoon.

Lindsey and I would lie down on the floor underneath it. I would pretend to be the knight that was pictured, and Holiday was the faithful dog curled up at his feet. Lindsey would be the wife he’d left behind. It always dissolved into giggles no matter how solemn the start. Lindsey would tell the dead knight that a wife had to move on, that she couldn’t be trapped for the rest of her life by a man who was frozen in time. I would act stormy and mad, but it never lasted. Eventually she would describe her new lover: the fat butcher who gave her prime cuts of meat, the agile blacksmith who made her hooks. “You are dead, knight,” she would say. “Time to move on.”

“Last night she came in and kissed me on the cheek,” Buckley said.

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you told your mom?”

“It’s a secret,” Buckley said. “Susie told me she isn’t ready to talk to them yet. Do you want to see something else?”

“Sure,” said Nate.

The two of them stood up to go to the children’s side of the house, leaving Holiday asleep under the grave rubbing.

“Come look,” Buckley said.

They were in my room. The picture of my mother had been taken by Lindsey. After reconsideration, she had come back for the “Hippy-Dippy Says Love” button too.

“Susie’s room,” Nate said.

Buckley put his fingers to his lips. He’d seen my mother do this when she wanted us to be quiet, and now he wanted that from Nate. He got down on his belly and gestured for Nate to follow, and they wriggled like Holiday as they made their way beneath the dust ruffle of my bed into my secret storage space.