Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones

“Can you throw me a towel?” Ray yelled after shutting off the water. When I did not answer he pulled back the curtain. I heard him get out of the tub and come to the doorway. He saw Ruth and ran toward her. He touched her shoulder and, sleepily, she roused. They looked at each other. She did not have to say anything. He knew that I was gone.

I remembered once, with my parents and Lindsey and Buckley, riding backward on a train into a dark tunnel. That was how it felt to leave Earth the second time. The destination somehow inevitable, the sights seen in passing so many times. But this time I was accompanied, not ripped away, and I knew we were taking a long trip to a place very far away.

Leaving Earth again was easier than coming back had been. I got to see two old friends silently holding each other in the back of Hal’s bike shop, neither of them ready to say aloud what had happened to them. Ruth was both more tired and more happy than she had ever been. For Ray, what he had been through and the possibilities this opened up for him were just starting to sink in.

The next morning the smell of his mother’s baking had sneaked up the stairs and into Ray’s room where he and Ruth lay together. Overnight, their world had changed. It was that simple.

After leaving Hal’s bike shop, being careful to cover any trace that they had ever been there, Ray and Ruth drove in silence back to Ray’s house. Later that night, when Ruana found the two of them curled up together asleep and fully clothed, she was glad that Ray had at least this one weird friend.

Around three A.M., Ray had stirred. He sat up and looked at Ruth, at her long gangly limbs, at the beautiful body to which he had made love, and felt a sudden warmth infuse him. He reached out to touch her, and just then a bit of moonlight fell across the floor from the window where I had watched him sit and study for so many years. He followed it. There on the floor was Ruth’s bag.

Careful not to wake her, he slid off the bed and walked over to it. Inside was her journal. He lifted it out and began to read:

“At the tips of feathers there is air and at their base: blood. I hold up bones; I wish like broken glass they could court light… still I try to place these pieces back together, to set them firm, to make murdered girls live again.”

He skipped ahead:

“Penn Station, bathroom stall, struggle which led to the sink. Older woman.

“Domestic. Ave. C. Husband and wife.

“Roof on Mott Street, a teenage girl, gunshot.

“Time? Little girl in C.P. strays toward bushes. White lace collar, fancy.”

He grew incredibly cold in the room but kept reading, looking up only when he heard Ruth stir.

“I have so much to tell you,” she said.

Nurse Eliot helped my father lower himself into the wheelchair while my mother and sister fussed about the room, collecting the daffodils to take home.

“Nurse Eliot,” he said, “I’ll remember your kindness but I hope it will be a long time before I see you again.”

“I hope so too,” she said. She looked at my family gathered in the room, standing awkwardly about. “Buckley, your mother’s and sister’s hands are full. It’s up to you.”

“Steer her easy, Buck,” my father said.

I watched the four of them begin to trail down the hall to the elevator, Buckley and my father first while Lindsey and my mother followed behind, their arms full of dripping daffodils.

In the elevator going down, Lindsey stared into the throats of the bright yellow flowers. She remembered that Samuel and Hal had found yellow daffodils lying in the cornfield on the afternoon of the first memorial. They had never known who placed them there. My sister looked at the flowers and then my mother. She could feel my brother’s body touching hers, and our father, sitting in the shiny hospital chair, looking tired but happy to be going home. When they reached the lobby and the doors opened I knew they were meant to be there, the four of them together, alone.

While Ruana’s hands grew wet and swollen paring apple after apple, she began to say the word in her mind, the one she had avoided for years: divorce . It had been something about the crumpled, clinging postures of her son and Ruth that finally freed her. She could not remember the last time she had gone to bed at the same time as her husband. He walked in the room like a ghost and like a ghost slipped in between the sheets, barely creasing them. He was not unkind in the ways that the television and newspapers were full of. His cruelty was in his absence. Even when he came and sat at her dinner table and ate her food, he was not there.

She heard the sound of water running in the bathroom above her and waited what she thought was a considerate interval before calling up to them. My mother had called that morning to thank her for having talked to her when she called from California, and Ruana had decided to drop off a pie.

After handing a mug of coffee each to Ruth and Ray, Ruana announced that it was already late and she wanted Ray to accompany her to the Salmons’, where she intended to run quietly to the door and place a pie on their doorstep.

“Whoa, pony,” Ruth managed.

Ruana stared at her.

“Sorry, Mom,” Ray said. “We had a pretty intense day yesterday.” But he wondered, might his mother ever believe him?

Ruana turned toward the counter and brought one of two pies she had baked to the table, where the scent of it rose in a steamy mist from the holes cut into the crust. “Breakfast?” she said.

“You’re a goddess!” said Ruth.

Ruana smiled.

“Eat your fill and then get dressed and both of you can come with me.”

Ruth looked at Ray while she said, “Actually, I have somewhere to go, but I’ll drop by later.”

Hal brought the drum set over for my brother. Hal and my grandmother had agreed. Though it was still weeks before Buckley turned thirteen, he needed them. Samuel had let Lindsey and Buckley meet my parents at the hospital without him. It would be a double homecoming for them. My mother had stayed with my father for forty-eight hours straight, during which the world had changed for them and for others and would, I saw now, change again and again and again. There was no way to stop it.

“I know we shouldn’t start too early,” Grandma Lynn said, “but what’s your poison, boys?”

“I thought we were set up for champagne,” Samuel said.

“We are later,” she said. “I’m offering an aperitif.”

“I think I’m passing,” Samuel said. “I’ll have something when Lindsey does.”

“Hal?”

“I’m teaching Buck the drums.”

Grandma Lynn held her tongue about the questionable sobriety of known jazz greats. “Well, how about three scintillating tumblers of water?”

My grandmother stepped back into the kitchen to get their drinks. I had come to love her more after death than I ever had on Earth. I wish I could say that in that moment in the kitchen she decided to quit drinking, but I now saw that drinking was part of what made her who she was. If the worst of what she left on Earth was a legacy of inebriated support, it was a good legacy in my book.

She brought the ice over to the sink from the freezer and splurged on cubes. Seven in each tall glass. She ran the tap to make the water as cold as it would come. Her Abigail was coming home again. Her strange Abigail, whom she loved.

But when she looked up and through the window, she swore she saw a young girl wearing the clothes of her youth sitting outside Buckley’s garden-shed fort and staring back at her. The next moment the girl was gone. She shook it off. The day was busy. She would not tell anyone.

When my father’s car pulled into the drive, I was beginning to wonder if this had been what I’d been waiting for, for my family to come home, not to me anymore but to one another with me gone.