Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones

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 silk-screened 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 harder, 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.

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.