Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones

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 rescued 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.”