Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones

She stretched until she was quite warm and she’d forgotten herself, and the home she stood in fell away from her. Her age. Her son. But still, creeping in on her was the figure of her husband. She had a premonition. She did not believe it was a woman, or even a student who worshiped him, that made him late more and more often. She knew what it was because it was something she too had had and had severed herself from after having been injured long ago. It was ambition.

She heard sounds now. Holiday barking two streets over and the Gilberts’ dog answering him and Ray moving around upstairs. Blessedly, in another moment, Jethro Tull erupted again, shutting out all else.

Except for the occasional cigarette, which she smoked as secretly as she could so as not to give Ray license, she had kept herself in good health. Many of the women in the neighborhood commented on how well she kept herself and some had asked her if she would mind showing them how, though she had always taken these entreaties merely as their way of making conversation with their lone foreign-born neighbor. But as she sat in Sukhasana and her breath slowed to a deep rhythm, she could not fully release and let go. The niggling idea of what she would do as Ray grew older and her husband worked increasingly long hours crept up the inside of her foot and along her calf to the back of her knee and began to climb into her lap.

The doorbell rang.

Ruana was happy for the escape, and though she was someone to whom order was also a sort of meditation, she hopped up, wrapped a shawl that was hanging on the back of a chair around her waist, and, with Ray’s music barreling down the stairs, walked to the door. She thought only for a moment that it might be a neighbor. A complaining neighbor – the music – and she, dressed in a red leotard and shawl.

Ruth stood on the stoop, holding a grocery sack.

“Hello,” Ruana said. “May I help you?”

“I’m here to see Ray.”

“Come in.”

All of this had to be half-shouted over the noise coming from upstairs. Ruth stepped into the front hall.

“Go on up,” Ruana shouted, pointing to the stairs.

I watched Ruana take in Ruth’s baggy overalls, her turdeneck, her parka. I could start with her , Ruana thought to herself.

Ruth had been standing in the grocery store with her mother when she saw the candles among the paper plates and plastic forks and spoons. At school that day she had been acutely aware of what day it was and even though what she had done so far – lain in bed reading The Bell Jar , helped her mother clean out what her father insisted on calling his toolshed and what she thought of as the poetry shed, and tagged along to the grocery store – hadn’t consisted of anything that might mark the anniversary of my death, she had been determined to do something.

When she saw the candles she knew immediately that she would find her way over to Ray’s house and ask him to come with her. Because of their meetings at the shot-put circle, the kids at school had made them a couple despite all evidence to the contrary. Ruth could draw as many female nudes as she might wish and fashion scarves on her head and write papers on Janis Joplin and loudly protest the oppression of shaving her legs and armpits. In the eyes of her classmates at Fairfax, she remained a weird girl who had been found K-I-S-S-I-N-G a weird boy.

What no one understood – and they could not begin to tell anyone – was that it had been an experiment between them. Ray had kissed only me, and Ruth had never kissed anyone, so, united, they had agreed to kiss each other and see.

“I don’t feel anything,” Ruth had said afterward, as they lay in the maple leaves under a tree behind the teachers’ parking lot.

“I don’t either,” Ray admitted.

“Did you feel something when you kissed Susie?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“That I wanted more. That night I dreamed of kissing her again and wondered if she was thinking the same thing.”

“And sex?”

“I hadn’t really gotten that far yet,” Ray said. “Now I kiss you and it’s not the same.”

“We could keep trying,” Ruth said. “I’m game if you don’t tell anyone.”

“I thought you liked girls,” Ray said.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Ruth said. “You can pretend I’m Susie and I will too.”

“You are so entirely screwed up,” Ray said, smiling.

“Are you saying you don’t want to?” Ruth teased.

“Show me your drawings again.”

“I may be screwed up,” Ruth said, dragging out her sketchbook from her book bag – it was now full of nudes she’d copied out of Playboy , scaling various parts up or down and adding hair and wrinkles where they had been airbrushed out – “but at least I’m not a perv for charcoal.”

Ray was dancing around his bedroom when Ruth walked in. He wore his glasses, which at school he tried to do without because they were thick and his father had only sprung for the least expensive, hard-to-break frames. He had on a pair of jeans that were baggy and stained and a T-shirt that Ruth imagined, and I knew, had been slept in.

He stopped dancing as soon as he saw her standing at the doorway holding the grocery bag. His hands went up immediately and collected his glasses, and then, not knowing what to do with them, he waved them at her and said, “Hello.”

“Can you turn it down?” Ruth screamed.

“Sure!”

When the noise ceased her ears rang for a second, and in that second she saw something flicker across Ray’s eyes.

He now stood on the other side of the room, and in between them was his bed, where sheets were rumpled and balled and over which hung a drawing Ruth had done of me from memory.

“You hung it up,” Ruth said.

“I think it’s really good.”

“You and me and nobody else.”

“My mom thinks it’s good.”

“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.