Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones

In the afternoon light my father looked smaller somehow, thinner, but his eyes looked grateful in a way they had not in years.

My mother, for her part, was thinking moment by moment that she might be able to survive being home again.

All four of them got out at once. Buckley came forward from the rear passenger seat to assist my father perhaps more than he needed assistance, perhaps protecting him from my mother. Lindsey looked over the hood of the car at our brother – her habitual check-in mode still operating. She felt responsible, just as my brother did, just as my father did. And then she turned back and saw my mother looking at her, her face lit by the yellowy light of the daffodils.

“What?”

“You are the spitting image of your father’s mother,” my mother said.

“Help me with the bags,” my sister said.

They walked to the trunk together as Buckley led my father up the front path.

Lindsey stared into the dark space of the trunk. She wanted to know only one thing.

“Are you going to hurt him again?”

“I’m going to do everything I can not to,” my mother said, “but no promises this time.” She waited until Lindsey glanced up and looked at her, her eyes a challenge now as much as the eyes of a child who had grown up fast, run fast since the day the police had said too much blood in the earth, your daughter/sister/child is dead.

“I know what you did.”

“I stand warned.”

My sister hefted the bag.

They heard shouting. Buckley ran out onto the front porch. “Lindsey!” he said, forgetting his serious self, his heavy body buoyant. “Come see what Hal got me!”

He banged. And he banged and he banged and he banged. And Hal was the only one still smiling after five minutes of it. Everyone else had glimpsed the future and it was loud.

“I think now would be a good time to introduce him to the brush,” Grandma Lynn said. Hal obliged.

My mother had handed the daffodils to Grandma Lynn and gone upstairs almost immediately, using the bathroom as an excuse. Everyone knew where she was going: my old room.

She stood at the edge of it, alone, as if she were standing at the edge of the Pacific. It was still lavender. The furniture, save for a reclining chair of my grandmother’s, was unchanged.

“I love you, Susie,” she said.

I had heard these words so many times from my father that it shocked me now; I had been waiting, unknowingly, to hear it from my mother. She had needed the time to know that this love would not destroy her, and I had, I now knew, given her that time, could give it, for it was what I had in great supply.

She noticed a photograph on my old dresser, which Grandma Lynn had put in a gold frame. It was the very first photograph I’d ever taken of her – my secret portrait of Abigail before her family woke and she put on her lipstick. Susie Salmon, wildlife photographer, had captured a woman staring out across her misty suburban lawn.

She used the bathroom, running the tap noisily and disturbing the towels. She knew immediately that her mother had bought these towels – cream, a ridiculous color for towels – and monogrammed – also ridiculous, my mother thought. But then, just as quickly, she laughed at herself. She was beginning to wonder how useful her scorched-earth policy had been to her all these years. Her mother was loving if she was drunk, solid if she was vain. When was it all right to let go not only of the dead but of the living – to learn to accept?

I was not in the bathroom, in the tub, or in the spigot; I did not hold court in the mirror above her head or stand in miniature at the tip of every bristle on Lindsey’s or Buckley’s toothbrush. In some way I could not account for – had they reached a state of bliss? were my parents back together forever? had Buckley begun to tell someone his troubles? would my father’s heart truly heal? – I was done yearning for them, needing them to yearn for me. Though I still would. Though they still would. Always.

Downstairs Hal was holding Buckley’s wrist as it held the brush stick. “Just pass it over the snare lightly.” And Buckley did and looked up at Lindsey sitting across from him on the couch.

“Pretty cool, Buck,” my sister said.

“Like a rattlesnake.”

Hal liked that. “Exactly,” he said, visions of his ultimate jazz combo dancing in his head.

My mother arrived back downstairs. When she entered the room she saw my father first. Silently she tried to let him know she was okay, that she was still breathing the air in, coping with the altitude.

“Okay, everyone!” my grandmother shouted from the kitchen, “Samuel has an announcement to make, so sit down!”

Everyone laughed and before they realigned into their more closed selves – this being together so hard for them even if it was what they all had wanted – Samuel came into the room along with Grandma Lynn. She held a tray of champagne flutes ready to be filled. He glanced at Lindsey briefly.

“Lynn is going to assist me by pouring,” he said.

“Something she’s quite good at,” my mother said.

“Abigail?” Grandma Lynn said.

“Yes?”

“It’s nice to see you too.”

“Go ahead, Samuel,” my father said.

“I wanted to say that I’m happy to be here with you all.”

But Hal knew his brother. “You’re not done, wordsmith. Buck, give him some brush.” This time Hal let Buckley do it without assistance, and my brother backed Samuel up.

“I wanted to say that I’m glad that Mrs. Salmon is home, and that Mr. Salmon is home too, and that I’m honored to be marrying their beautiful daughter.”

“Hear! Hear!” my father said.

My mother stood to hold the tray for Grandma Lynn, and together they distributed the glasses across the room.

As I watched my family sip champagne, I thought about how their lives trailed backward and forward from my death and then, I saw, as Samuel took the daring step of kissing Lindsey in a room full of family, became borne aloft away from it.

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections – sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent – that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.

My father looked at the daughter who was standing there in front of him. The shadow daughter was gone.

With the promise that Hal would teach him to do drum rolls after dinner, Buckley put up his brush and drumsticks, and the seven of them began to trail through the kitchen into the dining room, where Samuel and Grandma Lynn had used the good plates to serve her trademark Stouffer’s frozen ziti and Sara Lee frozen cheesecake.

“Someone’s outside,” Hal said, spotting a man through the window. “It’s Ray Singh!”

“Let him in,” my mother said.

“He’s leaving.”

All of them save my father and grandmother, who stayed together in the dining room, began to go after him.

“Hey, Ray!” Hal said, opening the door and nearly stepping directly in the pie. “Wait up!”

Ray turned. His mother was in the car with the engine running.

“We didn’t mean to interrupt,” Ray said now to Hal. Lindsey and Samuel and Buckley and a woman he recognized as Mrs. Salmon were all crowded together on the porch.

“Is that Ruana?” my mother called. “Please ask her in.”

“Really, that’s fine,” Ray said and made no move to come closer. He wondered, Is Susie watching this ?

Lindsey and Samuel broke away from the group and came toward him.