Alice Sebold: The Lovely Bones

But when they held up the evidence bag with my hat inside, something broke in her. The fine wall of leaden crystal that had protected her heart – somehow numbed her into disbelief – shattered.

“The pompom,” Lindsey said. She had crept into the living room from the kitchen. No one had seen her come in but me.

My mother made a sound and reached out her hand. The sound was a metallic squeak, a human-as-machine breaking down, uttering last sounds before the whole engine locks.

“We’ve tested the fibers,” Len said. “It appears whoever accosted Susie used this during the crime.”

“What?” my father asked. He was powerless. He was being told something he could not comprehend.

“As a way to keep her quiet.”

“What?”

“It is covered with her saliva,” the uniformed officer, who had been silent until now, volunteered. “He gagged her with it.”

My mother grabbed it out of Len Fenerman’s hands, and the bells she had sewn into the pompom sounded as she landed on her knees. She bent over the hat she had made me.

I saw Lindsey stiffen at the door. Our parents were unrecognizable to her; everything was unrecognizable.

My father led the well-meaning Len Fenerman and the uniformed officer to the front door.

“Mr. Salmon,” Len Fenerman said, “with the amount of blood we’ve found, and the violence I’m afraid it implies, as well as other material evidence we’ve discussed, we must work with the assumption that your daughter has been killed.”

Lindsey overheard what she already knew, had known since five days before, when my father told her about my elbow. My mother began to wail.

“We’ll be working with this as a murder investigation from this point out,” Fenerman said.

“But there is no body,” my father tried.

“All evidence points to your daughter’s death. I’m very sorry.”

The uniformed officer had been staring to the right of my father’s pleading eyes. I wondered if that was something they’d taught him in school. But Len Fenerman met my father’s gaze. “I’ll call to check in on you later today,” he said.

By the time my father turned back to the living room, he was too devastated to reach out to my mother sitting on the carpet or my sister’s hardened form nearby. He could not let them see him. He mounted the stairs, thinking of Holiday on the rug in the study. He had last seen him there. Into the deep ruff of fur surrounding the dog’s neck, my father would let himself cry.

That afternoon the three of them crept forward in silence, as if the sound of footsteps might confirm the news. Nate’s mother knocked on the door to return Buckley. No one answered. She stepped away, knowing something had changed inside the house, which looked exactly like the ones on either side of it. She made herself my brother’s co-conspirator, telling him they would go out for ice cream and ruin his appetite.

At four, my mother and father ended up standing in the same room downstairs. They had come in from opposite doorways.

My mother looked at my father: “Mother,” she said, and he nodded his head. He made the phone call to my only living grandparent, my mother’s mother, Grandma Lynn.

I worried that my sister, left alone, would do something rash. She sat in her room on the old couch my parents had given up on and worked on hardening herself. Take deep breaths and hold them. Try to stay still for longer and longer periods of time. Make yourself small and like a stone. Curl the edges of yourself up and fold them under where no one can see .

My mother told her it was her choice whether she wanted to return to school before Christmas – there was only one week left – but Lindsey chose to go.

On Monday, in homeroom, everyone stared at her as she approached the front of the classroom.

“The principal would like to see you, dear,” Mrs. Dewitt confided in a hush.

My sister did not look at Mrs. Dewitt when she was speaking. She was perfecting the art of talking to someone while looking through them. That was my first clue that something would have to give. Mrs. Dewitt was also the English teacher, but more importantly she was married to Mr. Dewitt, who coached boys’ soccer and had encouraged Lindsey to try out for his team. My sister liked the Dewitts, but that morning she began looking into the eyes of only those people she could fight against.

As she gathered her things, she heard whispers everywhere. She was certain that right before she left the room Danny Clarke had whispered something to Sylvia Henley. Someone had dropped something near the back of the classroom. They did this, she believed, so that on their way to pick it up and back again, they could say a word or two to their neighbor about the dead girl’s sister.

Lindsey walked through the hallways and in and out of the rows of lockers – dodging anyone who might be near. I wished I could walk with her, mimic the principal and the way he always started out a meeting in the auditorium: “Your principal is your pal with principles!” I would whine in her ear, cracking her up.

But while she was blessed with empty halls, when she reached the main office she was cursed with the drippy looks of consoling secretaries. No matter. She had prepared herself at home in her bedroom. She was armed to the teeth for any onslaught of sympathy.

“Lindsey,” Principal Caden said, “I received a call from the police this morning. I’m sorry to hear of your loss.”

She looked right at him. It was not so much a look as a laser. “What exactly is my loss?”

Mr. Caden felt he needed to address issues of children’s crises directly. He walked out from behind his desk and ushered Lindsey onto what was commonly referred to by the students as The Sofa. Eventually he would replace The Sofa with two chairs, when politics swept through the school district and told him, “It is not good to have a sofa here – chairs are better. Sofas send the wrong message.”

Mr. Caden sat on The Sofa and so did my sister. I like to think she was a little thrilled, in that moment, no matter how upset, to be on The Sofa itself. I like to think I hadn’t robbed her of everything.

“We’re here to help in any way we can,” Mr. Caden said. He was doing his best.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Would you like to talk about it?”

“What?” Lindsey asked. She was being what my father called “petulant,” as in, “Susie, don’t speak to me in that petulant tone.”

“Your loss,” he said. He reached out to touch my sister’s knee. His hand was like a brand burning into her.

“I wasn’t aware I had lost anything,” she said, and in a Herculean effort she made the motions of patting her shirt and checking her pockets.

Mr. Caden didn’t know what to say. He had had Vicki Kurtz fall apart in his arms the year before. It had been difficult, yes, but now, in hindsight, Vicki Kurtz and her dead mother seemed an artfully handled crisis. He had led Vicki Kurtz to the couch – no, no, Vicki had just gone right over and sat down on it – he had said, “I’m sorry for your loss,” and Vicki Kurtz had burst like an overinflated balloon. He held her in his arms as she sobbed, and sobbed, and that night he brought his suit to the dry cleaner’s.

But Lindsey Salmon was another thing altogether. She was gifted, one of the twenty students from his school who had been selected for the statewide Gifted Symposium. The only trouble in her file was a slight altercation early in the year when a teacher reprimanded her for bringing obscene literature – Fear of Flying – into the classroom.

“Make her laugh,” I wanted to say to him. “Bring her to a Marx Brothers movie, sit on a fart cushion, show her the boxers you have on with the little devils eating hot dogs on them!” All I could do was talk, but no one on Earth could hear me.