The Lovely Bones (32 page)

He turned his head toward her like a racheted gun. “Buck,” he said.

“Buck,” she repeated softly and looked down at her hands.

Lindsey wanted to ask,
Where are your rings?

“Shall we go?” Samuel asked.

The four of them entered the long carpeted tunnel that would bring them from her gate into the main terminal. They were headed
toward the cavernous baggage claim when my mother said, “I didn’t bring any bags.”

They stood in an awkward cluster, Samuel looking for the right signs to redirect them back to the parking garage.

“Mom,” my sister tried again.

“I lied to you,” my mother said before Lindsey could say anything further. Their eyes met, and in that hot wire that went
from one to the other I swore I saw it, like a rat bulging, undigested, inside a snake: the secret of Len.

“We go back up the escalator,” Samuel said, “and then we can take the overhead walkway into the parking lot.”

Samuel called for Buckley, who had drifted off in the direction of a cadre of airport security officers. Uniforms had never
lost the draw they held for him.

They were on the highway when Lindsey spoke next. “They won’t let Buckley in to see Dad because of his age.”

My mother turned around in her seat. “I’ll try and do something about that,” she said, looking at Buckley and attempting her
first smile.

“Fuck you,” my brother whispered without looking up.

My mother froze. The car opened up. Full of hate and tension—a riptide of blood to swim through.

“Buck,” she said, remembering the shortened name just in time, “will you look at me?”

He glared over the front seat, boring his fury into her.

Eventually my mother turned back around and Samuel, Lindsey, and my brother could hear the sounds from the passenger seat
that she was trying hard not to make. Little peeps and a choked sob. But no amount of tears would sway Buckley. He had been
keeping, daily, weekly, yearly, an underground storage room of hate. Deep inside this, the four-year-old sat, his heart flashing.
Heart to stone, heart to stone.

“We’ll all feel better after seeing Mr. Salmon,” Samuel said, and then, because even he could not bear it, he leaned forward
toward the dash and turned on the radio.

It was the same hospital that she had come to eight years ago in the middle of the night. A different floor painted a different
color, but she could feel it encasing her as she walked down the hall—what she’d done there. The push of Len’s body, her back
pressed into the sharp stucco wall. Everything in her wanted to run—fly back to California, back to her quiet existence working
among strangers. Hiding out in the folds of tree trunks and tropical petals, tucked away safely among so many foreign plants
and people.

Her mother’s ankles and oxford pumps, which she saw from the hallway, brought her back. One of the many simple things she’d
lost by moving so far away, just the commonplace of her mother’s feet—their solidity and humor—seventy-year-old feet in ridiculously
uncomfortable shoes.

But as she walked forward into the room, everyone else—her son, her daughter, her mother—fell away.

My father’s eyes were weak but fluttered open when he heard her enter. He had tubes and wires coming out of his wrist and shoulder.
His head seemed so fragile on the small square pillow.

She held his hand and cried silently, letting the tears come freely.

“Hello, Ocean Eyes,” he said.

She nodded her head. This broken, beaten man—her husband.

“My girl,” he breathed out heavily.

“Jack.”

“Look what it took to get you home.”

“Was it worth it?” she said, smiling bleakly.

“We’ll have to see,” he said.

To see them together was like a tenuous belief made real.

My father could see glimmers, like the colored flecks inside my mother’s eyes—things to hold on to. These he counted among
the broken planks and boards of a long-ago ship that had struck something greater than itself and sunk. There were only remnants
and artifacts left to him now. He tried to reach up and touch her cheek, but his arm felt too weak. She moved closer and laid
her cheek in his palm.

My grandmother knew how to move silently in heels. She tiptoed out of the room. As she resumed her normal stride and approached
the waiting area, she intercepted a nurse with a message for Jack Salmon in Room 582. She had never met the man but knew his
name. “Len Fenerman, will visit soon. Wishes you well.” She folded the note neatly. Just before she came upon Lindsey and
Buckley, who had gone to join Samuel in the waiting room, she popped open the metal lip of her purse and placed it between
her powder and comb.

B
y the time Mr. Harvey reached the tin-roofed shack in Connecticut that night, it promised rain. He had killed a young waitress
inside the shack several years before and then bought some new slacks with the tips he’d found in the front pocket of her
apron. By now the rot would have been eclipsed, and it was true, as he approached the area, that no rank smell greeted him.
But the shack was open and inside he could see the earth had been dug up. He breathed in and approached the shack warily.

He fell asleep beside her empty grave.

At some point, to counter the list of the dead, I had begun keeping my own list of the living. It was something I noticed
Len Fenerman did too. When he was off duty he would note the young girls and elderly women and every other female in the rainbow
in between and count them among the things that sustained him. That young girl in the mall whose pale legs had grown too long
for her now-too-young dress and who had an aching vulnerability that went straight to both Len’s and my own heart. Elderly
women, wobbling with walkers, who insisted on dyeing their hair unnatural versions of the colors they had in youth. Middle-aged
single mothers racing around in grocery stores while their children pulled bags of candy off the shelves. When I saw them,
I took count. Living, breathing women. Sometimes I saw the wounded—those who had been beaten by husbands or raped by strangers,
children raped by their fathers—and I would wish to intervene somehow.

Len saw these wounded women all the time. They were regulars at the station, but even when he went somewhere outside his jurisdiction
he could sense them when they came near. The wife in the bait-’n’-tackle shop had no bruises on her face but cowered like
a dog and spoke in apologetic whispers. The girl he saw walk the road each time he went upstate to visit his sisters. As the
years passed she’d grown leaner, the fat from her cheeks had drained, and sorrow had loaded her eyes in a way that made them
hang heavy and hopeless inside her mallowed skin. When she was not there it worried him. When she was there it both depressed
and revived him.

He had not had much to write in my file for a long time, but a few items had joined the log of old evidence in the last few
months: the name of another potential victim, Sophie Cichetti, the name of her son, and an alias of George Harvey’s. There
was also what he held in his hands: my Pennsylvania keystone charm. He moved it around inside the evidence bag, using his
fingers, and found, again, my initials. The charm had been checked for any clues it could provide, and, besides its presence
at the scene of another girl’s murder, it had come up clean under the microscope.

He had wanted to give the charm back to my father from the first moment he was able to confirm it was mine. Doing so was breaking
the rules, but he had never had a body for them, just a sodden schoolbook and the pages from my biology book mixed in with
a boy’s love note. A Coke bottle. My jingle-bell hat. These he had cataloged and kept. But the charm was different, and he
meant to give it back.

A nurse he’d dated in the years after my mother left had called him when she noticed the name Jack Salmon on a list of patients
admitted. Len had determined that he would visit my father in the hospital and bring my charm along with him. In Len’s mind
he saw the charm as a talisman that might speed my father’s recovery.

I couldn’t help but think, as I watched him, of the barrels of toxic fluids that had accrued behind Hal’s bike shop where the
scrub lining the railroad tracks had offered local companies enough cover to dump a stray container or two. Everything had
been sealed up, but things were beginning to leak out. I had come to both pity and respect Len in the years since my mother
left. He followed the physical to try to understand things that were impossible to comprehend. In that, I could see, he was
like me.

Outside the hospital, a young girl was selling small bouquets of daffodils, their green stems tied with lavender ribbons.
I watched as my mother bought out the girl’s whole stock.

Nurse Eliot, who remembered my mother from eight years ago, volunteered to help her when she saw her coming down the hall,
her arms full of flowers. She rounded up extra water pitchers from a supply closet and together she and my mother filled them
with water and placed the flowers around my father’s room while he slept. Nurse Eliot thought that if loss could be used as
a measure of beauty in a woman, my mother had grown even more beautiful.

Lindsey, Samuel, and Grandma Lynn had taken Buckley home earlier in the evening. My mother was not ready to see the house
yet. She focused solely on my father. Everything else would have to wait, from the house and its silent reproach to her son
and daughter. She needed something to eat and time to think. Instead of going to the hospital cafeteria, where the bright
lights made her think only of all the futile efforts that hospitals contained to keep people awake for more bad news—the weak
coffee, the hard chairs, the elevators that stopped on every floor—she left the building and walked down the sloped sidewalk
leading away from the entrance.

It was dark out now, and the parking lot where she had once driven in the middle of the night in her nightgown was spotted
with only a few cars. She hugged the cardigan her mother had left behind tightly to her.

She crossed the parking lot, looking into the dark cars for signs of who the people inside the hospital were. There were cassette
tapes spread out on the passenger seat of one car, the bulky shape of a baby’s carseat in another. It became a game to her
then, seeing what she could in each car. A way not to feel so alone and alien, as if she were a child playing a spy game in
the house of her parents’ friends. Agent Abigail to Mission Control. I see a fuzzy dog toy, I see a soccer ball, I see a woman!
There she was, a stranger sitting in the driver’s side behind the wheel. The woman did not see my mother looking at her, and
as soon as she saw her face my mother turned her attention away, focusing on the bright lights of the old diner she had as
her goal. She did not have to look back to know what the woman was doing. She was girding herself up to go inside. She knew
the face. It was the face of someone who wanted more than anything to be anywhere but where she was.

She stood on the landscaped strip between the hospital and the emergency room entrance and wished for a cigarette. She had
not questioned anything that morning. Jack had had a heart attack; she would go home. But now here, she didn’t know what she
was supposed to do anymore. How long would she have to wait, what would have to happen, before she could leave again? Behind
her in the parking lot, she heard the sound of a car door opening and closing—the woman going in.

The diner was a blur to her. She sat in a booth alone and ordered the kind of food—chicken-fried steak—that didn’t seem to
exist in California.

She was thinking about this when a man directly across from her gave her the eye. She registered every detail of his appearance.
It was automatic and something she didn’t do out west. While living in Pennsylvania after my murder, when she saw a strange
man whom she didn’t trust, she did an immediate breakdown in her mind. It was quicker—honoring the pragmatics of fear—than
pretending she shouldn’t think this way. Her dinner arrived, the chicken-fried steak and tea, and she focused on her food,
on the gritty breading around the rubbery meat, on the metallic taste of old tea. She did not think she could handle being
home more than a few days. Everywhere she looked she saw me, and at the booth across from her she saw the man who could have
murdered me.

She finished the food, paid for it, and walked out of the diner without raising her eyes above waist level. A bell mounted
on the door jingled above her, and she started, her heart jumping up in her chest.

She made it back across the highway in one piece, but she was breathing shallowly as she passed back across the parking lot.
The car of the apprehensive visitor was still there.

In the main lobby, where people rarely sat, she decided to sit down and wait for her breathing to come back again.

She would spend a few hours with him and when he woke, she would say goodbye. As soon as her decision was made, a welcome
coolness flew through her. The sudden relief of responsibility. Her ticket to a far-away land.

It was late now, after ten, and she took an empty elevator to the fifth floor, where the hall lights had been dimmed. She passed
the nurses’ station, behind which two nurses were quietly gossiping. She could hear the lilt and glee of nuanced rumors being
exchanged between them, the sound of easy intimacy in the air. Then, just as one nurse was unable to suppress a high-pitched
laugh, my mother opened my father’s door and let it swing shut again.

Alone.

It was as if there was a vacuum hush when the door closed. I felt I did not belong, that I should go too. But I was glued.

Seeing him sleeping in the dark, with only the low-wattage fluorescent light on at the back of the bed, she remembered standing
in this same hospital and taking steps to sever herself from him.

As I saw her take my father’s hand, I thought of my sister and me sitting underneath the grave rubbing in the upstairs hallway.
I was the dead knight gone to heaven with my faithful dog and she was the live wire of a wife. “How can I be expected to be
trapped for the rest of my life by a man frozen in time?” Lindsey’s favorite line.