The Lovely Bones (6 page)

The first time I broke through, it was an accident. It was December 23, 1973.

Buckley was sleeping. My mother had taken Lindsey to the dentist. That week they had agreed that each day, as a family, they
would spend time trying to move forward. My father had assigned himself the task of cleaning the upstairs guest room, which
long ago had become his den.

His own father had taught him how to build ships in bottles. They were something my mother, sister, and brother couldn’t care
less about. It was something I adored. The den was full of them.

All day at work he counted numbers—due diligence for a Chadds Ford insurance firm—and at night he built the ships or read Civil
War books to unwind. He would call me in whenever he was ready to raise the sail. By then the ship would have been glued fast
to the bottom of the bottle. I would come in and my father would ask me to shut the door. Often, it seemed, the dinner bell
rang immediately, as if my mother had a sixth sense for things that didn’t include her. But when this sense failed her, my
job was to hold the bottle for him.

“Stay steady,” he’d say. “You’re my first mate.”

Gently he would draw the one string that still reached out of the bottle’s neck, and, voilà, the sails all rose, from simple
mast to clipper ship. We had our boat. I couldn’t clap because I held the bottle, but I always wanted to. My father worked
quickly then, burning the end of the string off inside the bottle with a coat hanger he’d heated over a candle. If he did
it improperly, the ship would be ruined, or, worse still, the tiny paper sails would catch on fire and suddenly, in a giant
whoosh, I would be holding a bottle of flames in my hands.

Eventually my father built a balsa wood stand to replace me. Lindsey and Buckley didn’t share my fascination. After trying
to create enough enthusiasm for all three of them, he gave up and retreated to his den. One ship in a bottle was equal to
any other as far as the rest of my family was concerned.

But as he cleaned that day he talked to me.

“Susie, my baby, my little sailor girl,” he said, “you always liked these smaller ones.”

I watched him as he lined up the ships in bottles on his desk, bringing them over from the shelves where they usually sat.
He used an old shirt of my mother’s that had been ripped into rags and began dusting the shelves. Under his desk there were
empty bottles—rows and rows of them we had collected for our future shipbuilding. In the closet were more ships—the ships
he had built with his own father, ships he had built alone, and then those we had made together. Some were perfect, but their
sails browned; some had sagged or toppled over after years. Then there was the one that had burst into flames in the week before
my death.

He smashed that one first.

My heart seized up. He turned and saw all the others, all the years they marked and the hands that had held them. His dead
father’s, his dead child’s. I watched him as he smashed the rest. He christened the walls and wooden chair with the news of
my death, and afterward he stood in the guest room/den surrounded by green glass. The bottles, all of them, lay broken on
the floor, the sails and boat bodies strewn among them. He stood in the wreckage. It was then that, without knowing how, I
revealed myself. In every piece of glass, in every shard and sliver, I cast my face. My father glanced down and around him,
his eyes roving across the room. Wild. It was just for a second, and then I was gone. He was quiet for a moment, and then
he laughed—a howl coming up from the bottom of his stomach. He laughed so loud and deep, I shook with it in my heaven.

He left the room and went down the two doors to my bedroom. The hallway was tiny, my door like all the others, hollow enough
to easily punch a fist through. He was about to smash the mirror over my dresser, rip the wallpaper down with his nails, but
instead he fell against my bed, sobbing, and balled the lavender sheets up in his hands.

“Daddy?” Buckley said. My brother held the doorknob with his hand.

My father turned but was unable to stop his tears. He slid to the floor with the sheets still in his fists, and then he opened
up his arms. He had to ask my brother twice, which he had never had to do before, but Buckley came to him.

My father wrapped my brother inside the sheets that smelled of me. He remembered the day I’d begged him to paint and paper
my room purple. Remembered moving in the old
National Geographics
to the bottom shelves of my bookcases. (I had wanted to steep myself in wildlife photography.) Remembered when there was
just one child in the house for the briefest of time until Lindsey arrived.

“You are so special to me, little man,” my father said, clinging to him.

Buckley drew back and stared at my father’s creased face, the fine bright spots of tears at the corners of his eyes. He nodded
seriously and kissed my father’s cheek. Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child
took with an adult.

My father draped the sheets around Buckley’s shoulders and remembered how I would fall out of the tall four-poster bed and
onto the rug, never waking up. Sitting in his study in his green chair and reading a book, he would be startled by the sound
of my body landing. He would get up and walk the short distance to my bedroom. He liked to watch me sleeping soundly, unchecked
by nightmare or even hardwood floor. He swore in those moments that his children would be kings or rulers or artists or doctors
or wildlife photographers. Anything they dreamed they could be.

A few months before I died, he had found me like this, but tucked inside my sheets with me was Buckley, in his pajamas, with
his bear, curled up against my back, sucking sleepily on his thumb. My father had felt in that moment the first flicker of the
strange sad mortality of being a father. His life had given birth to three children, so the number calmed him. No matter what
happened to Abigail or to him, the three would have one another. In that way the line he had begun seemed immortal to him,
like a strong steel filament threading into the future, continuing past him no matter where he might fall off. Even in deep
snowy old age.

He would find his Susie now inside his young son. Give that love to the living. He told himself this—spoke it aloud inside
his brain—but my presence was like a tug on him, it dragged him back back back. He stared at the small boy he held in his
arms.
“Who are you?”
he found himself asking.
“Where did you come from?”

I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was that the line
between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.

I
n the hours after I was murdered, as my mother made phone calls and my father began going door to door in the neighborhood
looking for me, Mr. Harvey had collapsed the hole in the cornfield and carried away a sack filled with my body parts. He passed
within two houses of where my father stood talking to Mr. and Mrs. Tarking. He kept to the property line in between two rows
of warring hedge—the O’Dwyers’ boxwood and the Steads’ goldenrod. His body brushed past the sturdy green leaves, leaving traces
of me behind him, smells the Gilberts’ dog would pick up and follow to find my elbow, smells the sleet and rain of the next
three days would wash away before police dogs could even be thought of. He carried me back to his house, where, while he went
inside to wash up, I waited for him.

After the house changed hands, the new owners tsk-tsked at the dark spot on the floor of their garage. As she brought prospective
buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag Mr. Harvey carried and spilling
onto the concrete. The beginning of my secret signals to the world.

It would be some time before I realized what you’ve undoubtedly already assumed, that I wasn’t the first girl he’d killed.
He knew to remove my body from the field. He knew to watch the weather and to kill during an arc of light-to-heavy precipitation
because that would rob the police of evidence. But he was not as fastidious as the police liked to think. He forgot my elbow,
he used a cloth sack for a bloody body, and if someone, anyone, had been watching, maybe they would have thought it strange
to see their neighbor walk a property line that was a tight fit, even for children who liked to pretend the warring hedges
were a hideout.

As he scoured his body in the hot water of his suburban bathroom—one with the identical layout to the one Lindsey, Buckley,
and I shared—his movements were slow, not anxious. He felt a calm flood him. He kept the lights out in the bathroom and felt
the warm water wash me away and he felt thoughts of me then. My muffled scream in his ear. My delicious death moan. The glorious
white flesh that had never seen the sun, like an infant’s, and then split, so perfectly, with the blade of his knife. He shivered
under the heat, a prickling pleasure creating goose bumps up and down his arms and legs. He had put me in the waxy cloth sack
and thrown in the shaving cream and razor from the mud ledge, his book of sonnets, and finally the bloody knife. They were
tumbled together with my knees, fingers, and toes, but he made a note to extract them before my blood grew too sticky later
that night. The sonnets and the knife, at least, he saved.

At Evensong, there were all sorts of dogs. And some of them, the ones I liked best, would lift their heads when they smelled
an interesting scent in the air. If it was vivid enough, if they couldn’t identify it immediately, or if, as the case may
be, they knew exactly what it was—their brains going, “Um steak tartare”—they’d track it until they came to the object itself.
In the face of the real article, the true story, they decided then what to do. That’s how they operated. They didn’t shut
down their desire to know just because the smell was bad or the object was dangerous. They hunted. So did I.

Mr. Harvey took the waxy orange sack of my remains to a sinkhole eight miles from our neighborhood, an area that until recently
had been desolate save for the railroad tracks and a nearby motorcycle repair shop. In his car he played a radio station that
looped Christmas carols during the month of December. He whistled inside his huge station wagon and congratulated himself,
felt full-up. Apple pie, cheeseburger, ice cream, coffee. Full. Better and better he was getting now, never using an old pattern
that would bore him but making each kill a surprise to himself, a gift to himself.

The air inside the station wagon was cold and fragile. I could see the moist air when he exhaled, and this made me want to
palpate my own stony lungs.

He drove the reed-thin road that cut between two new industrial lots. The wagon fishtailed coming up out of a particularly
deep pothole, and the safe that held the sack that held my body smashed against the inside hub of the wagon’s back wheel,
cracking the plastic. “Damn,” Mr. Harvey said. But he picked up his whistling again without pause.

I had a memory of going down this road with my father at the wheel and Buckley sitting nestled against me—one seat belt serving
the two of us—in an illegal joyride away from the house.

My father had asked if any of us kids wanted to watch a refrigerator disappear.

“The earth will swallow it!” he said. He put on his hat and the dark cordovan gloves I coveted. I knew gloves meant you were
an adult and mittens meant you weren’t. (For Christmas 1973, my mother had bought me a pair of gloves. Lindsey ended up with
them, but she knew they were mine. She left them at the edge of the cornfield one day on her way home from school. She was
always doing that—bringing me things.)

“The earth has a mouth?” Buckley asked.

“A big round mouth but with no lips,” my father said.

“Jack,” my mother said, laughing, “stop it. Do you know I caught him outside growling at the snapdragons?”

“I’ll go,” I said. My father had told me that there was an abandoned underground mine and it had collapsed to create a sinkhole.
I didn’t care; I liked to see the earth swallow something as much as the next kid.

So when I watched Mr. Harvey take me out to the sinkhole, I couldn’t help but think how smart he was. How he put the bag in
a metal safe, placing me in the middle of all that weight.

It was late when he got there, and he left the safe in his Wagoneer while he approached the house of the Flanagans, who lived
on the property where the sinkhole was. The Flanagans made their living by charging people to dump their appliances.

Mr. Harvey knocked on the door of the small white house and a woman came to answer it. The scent of rosemary and lamb filled
my heaven and hit Mr. Harvey’s nose as it trailed out from the back of the house. He could see a man in the kitchen.

“Good evening, sir,” Mrs. Flanagan said. “Got an item?”

“Back of my wagon,” Mr. Harvey said. He was ready with a twenty-dollar bill.

“What you got in there, a dead body?” she joked.

It was the last thing on her mind. She lived in a warm if small house. She had a husband who was always home to fix things
and to be sweet on her because he never had to work, and she had a son who was still young enough to think his mother was
the only thing in the world.

Mr. Harvey smiled, and, as I watched his smile break across his face, I would not look away.

“Old safe of my father’s, finally got it out here,” he said. “Been meaning to do it for years. No one remembers the combination.”

“Anything in it?” she asked.

“Stale air.”

“Back her up then. You need any help?”

“That would be lovely,” he said.

The Flanagans never suspected for a moment that the girl they read about in the papers over the next few years—
MISSING, FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED; ELBOW FOUND BY NEIGHBORING DOG; GIRL, 14, BELIEVED KILLED IN STOLFUZ CORNFIELD; WARNINGS TO
OTHER YOUNG WOMEN; TOWNSHIP TO REZONE ADJOINING LOTS TO HIGH SCHOOL; LINDSEY SALMON, SISTER OF DEAD GIRL, GIVES VALEDICTORIAN
SPEECH
—could have been in the gray metal safe that a lonely man brought over one night and paid them twenty dollars to sink.