The Lovely Bones (4 page)

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.

The school district made everyone take tests and then decided who was gifted and who was not. I liked to suggest to Lindsey
that I was much more pissed off by her hair than by my dumbo status. We had both been born with masses of blond hair, but
mine quickly fell out and was replaced with a grudging growth of mousy brown. Lindsey’s stayed and acquired a sort of mythical
place. She was the only true blonde in our family.

But once called gifted, it had spurred her on to live up to the name. She locked herself in her bedroom and read big books.
When I read
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,
she read Camus’s
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death.
She might not have gotten most of it, but she carried it around, and that made people—including teachers—begin to leave her
alone.

“What I’m saying, Lindsey, is that we all miss Susie,” Mr. Caden said.

She did not respond.

“She was very bright,” he tried.

She stared blankly back at him.

“It’s on your shoulders now.” He had no idea what he was saying, but he thought the silence might mean he was getting somewhere.
“You’re the only Salmon girl now.”

Nothing.

“You know who came in to see me this morning?” Mr. Caden had held back his big finish, the one he was sure would work. “Mr.
Dewitt. He’s considering coaching a girls’ team,” Mr. Caden said. “The idea is all centered around you. He’s watched how good
you are, as competitive as his boys, and he thinks other girls would come out if you led the charge. What do you say?”

Inside, my sister’s heart closed like a fist. “I’d say it would be pretty hard to play soccer on the soccer field when it’s
approximately twenty feet from where my sister was supposedly murdered.”

Score!

Mr. Caden’s mouth opened and he stared at her.

“Anything else?” Lindsey asked.

“No, I…” Mr. Caden reached out his hand again. There was a thread still—a desire to understand. “I want you to know how sorry
we are,” he said.

“I’m late for first period,” she said.

In that moment she reminded me of a character in the Westerns my father loved, the ones we watched together on late-night
TV. There was always a man who, after he shot his gun, raised the pistol to his lips and blew air across the opening.

Lindsey got up and took the walk out of Principal Caden’s office slow. The walks away were her only rest time. Secretaries
were on the other side of the door, teachers were at the front of the class, students in every desk, our parents at home,
police coming by. She would not break. I watched her, felt the lines she repeated over and over again in her head.
Fine. All of it is fine.
I was dead, but that was something that happened all the time—people died. As she left the outer office that day, she appeared
to be looking into the eyes of the secretaries, but she was focusing on their misapplied lipstick or two-piece paisley crepe
de chine instead.

At home that night she lay on the floor of her room and braced her feet under her bureau. She did ten sets of sit-ups. Then
she got into push-up position. Not the girl’s kind. Mr. Dewitt had told her about the kind he had done in the Marines, head-up,
or one-handed, clapping between. After she did ten push-ups, she went to her shelf and chose the two heaviest books—her dictionary
and a world almanac. She did bicep curls until her arms ached. She focused only on her breathing. The in. The out.

I sat in the gazebo in the main square of my heaven (our neighbors, the O’Dwyers, had had a gazebo; I had grown up jealous
for one), and watched my sister rage.

Hours before I died, my mother hung on the refrigerator a picture that Buckley had drawn. In the drawing a thick blue line
separated the air and ground. In the days that followed I watched my family walk back and forth past that drawing and I became
convinced that that thick blue line was a real place—an Inbetween, where heaven’s horizon met Earth’s. I wanted to go there
into the cornflower blue of Crayola, the royal, the turquoise, the sky.

Often I found myself desiring simple things and I would get them. Riches in furry packages. Dogs.

Every day in my heaven tiny dogs and big dogs, dogs of every kind, ran through the park outside my room. When I opened the
door I saw them fat and happy, skinny and hairy, lean and hairless even. Pitbulls rolled on their backs, the nipples of the
females distended and dark, begging for their pups to come and suckle them, happy in the sun. Bassets tripped over their ears,
ambling forward, nudging the rumps of dachshunds, the ankles of greyhounds, and the heads of the Pekingese. And when Holly
took her tenor sax, set herself up outside the door that looked onto the park, and played the blues, the hounds all ran to
form her chorus. On their haunches they sat wailing. Other doors opened then, and women stepped out from where they lived
alone or with roommates. I would step outside, Holly would go into an endless encore, the sun going down, and we would dance
with the dogs—all of us together. We chased them, they chased us. We circled tail to tail. We wore spotted gowns, flowered
gowns, striped gowns, plain. When the moon was high the music would stop. The dancing stopped. We froze.

Mrs. Bethel Utemeyer, the oldest resident of my heaven, would bring out her violin. Holly tread lightly on her horn. They
would do a duet. One woman old and silent, one woman not past girl yet. Back and forth, a crazy schizoid solace they’d create.

All the dancers would slowly go inside. The song reverberated until Holly, for a final time, passed the tune over, and Mrs.
Utemeyer, quiet, upright, historical, finished with a jig.

The house asleep by then; this was my Evensong.

T
he odd thing about Earth was what we saw when we looked down. Besides the initial view that you might suspect, the old ants-from-the-skyscraper
phenomenon, there were souls leaving bodies all over the world.

Holly and I could be scanning Earth, alighting on one scene or another for a second or two, looking for the unexpected in
the most mundane moment. And a soul would run by a living being, touch them softly on the shoulder or cheek, and continue
on its way to heaven. The dead are never exactly seen by the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed
around them. They speak of a chill in the air. The mates of the deceased wake from dreams and see a figure standing at the
end of their bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus.

On my way out of Earth, I touched a girl named Ruth. She went to my school but we’d never been close. She was standing in
my path that night when my soul shrieked out of Earth. I could not help but graze her. Once released from life, having lost
it in such violence, I couldn’t calculate my steps. I didn’t have time for contemplation. In violence, it is the getting away
that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from shore,
you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from
where you are.

Like a phone call from the jail cell, I brushed by Ruth Connors—wrong number, accidental call. I saw her standing there near
Mr. Botte’s red and rusted Fiat. When I streaked by her, my hand leapt out to touch her, touch the last face, feel the last
connection to Earth in this not-so-standard-issue teenage girl.

On the morning of December seventh, Ruth complained to her mother about having had a dream that seemed too real to be a dream.
When her mother asked her what she meant, Ruth said, “I was crossing through the faculty parking lot, and suddenly, down out
of the soccer field, I saw a pale running ghost coming toward me.”

Mrs. Connors stirred the hardening oatmeal in its pot. She watched her daughter gesticulating with the long thin fingers of
her hands—hands she had inherited from her father.