The Lovely Bones (7 page)

On the way back to the wagon Mr. Harvey put his hands in his pockets. There was my silver charm bracelet. He couldn’t remember
taking it off my wrist. Had no memory of thrusting it into the pocket of his clean pants. He fingered it, the fleshy pad of
his index finger finding the smooth gold metal of the Pennsylvania keystone, the back of the ballet slipper, the tiny hole of
the minuscule thimble, and the spokes of the bicycle with wheels that worked. Down Route 202, he pulled over on the shoulder,
ate a liverwurst sandwich he’d prepared earlier that day, then drove to an industrial park they were building south of Downingtown.
No one was on the construction lot. In those days there was no security in the suburbs. He parked his car near a Port-o-John.
His excuse was prepared in the unlikely event that he needed one.

It was this part of the aftermath that I thought of when I thought of Mr. Harvey—how he wandered the muddy excavations and
got lost among the dormant bulldozers, their monstrous bulk frightening in the dark. The sky of the earth was dark blue on
the night following my death, and out in this open area Mr. Harvey could see for miles. I chose to stand with him, to see
those miles ahead as he saw them. I wanted to go where he would go. The snow had stopped. There was wind. He walked into what
his builder’s instincts told him would soon be a false pond, and he stood there and fingered the charms one last time. He liked
the Pennsylvania keystone, which my father had had engraved with my initials—my favorite was the tiny bike—and he pulled it
off and placed it in his pocket. He threw the bracelet, with its remaining charms, into the soon-to-be man-made lake.

Two days before Christmas, I watched Mr. Harvey read a book on the Dogon and Bambara of Mali. I saw the bright spark of an
idea when he was reading of the cloth and ropes they used to build shelters. He decided he wanted to build again, to experiment
as he had with the hole, and he settled on a ceremonial tent like the ones described in his reading. He would gather the simple
materials and raise it in a few hours in his backyard.

After smashing all the ships in bottles, my father found him there.

It was cold out, but Mr. Harvey wore only a thin cotton shirt. He had turned thirty-six that year and was experimenting with
hard contacts. They made his eyes perpetually bloodshot, and many people, my father among them, believed he had taken to drink.

“What’s this?” my father asked.

Despite the Salmon men’s heart disease, my father was hardy. He was a bigger man than Mr. Harvey, so when he walked around
the front of the green shingled house and into the backyard, where he saw Harvey erecting things that looked like goalposts,
he seemed bluff and able. He was buzzing from having seen me in the shattered glass. I watched him cut through the lawn, ambling
as school kids did on their way toward the high school. He stopped just short of brushing Mr. Harvey’s elderberry hedge with
his palm.

“What’s this?” he asked again.

Mr. Harvey stopped long enough to look at him and then turned back to his work.

“A mat tent.”

“What’s that?”

“Mr. Salmon,” he said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Drawing himself up, my father gave back what the ritual demanded.

“Thank you.” It was like a rock perched in his throat.

There was a moment of quiet, and then Mr. Harvey, sensing my father had no intention of leaving, asked him if he wanted to
help.

So it was that, from heaven, I watched my father build a tent with the man who’d killed me.

My father did not learn much. He learned how to lash arch pieces onto pronged posts and to weave more slender rods through
these pieces to form semiarches in the other direction. He learned to gather the ends of these rods and lash them to the crossbars.
He learned he was doing this because Mr. Harvey had been reading about the Imezzureg tribe and had wanted to replicate their
tents. He stood, confirmed in the neighborhood opinion that the man was odd. So far, that was all.

But when the basic structure was done—a one-hour job—Mr. Harvey went toward the house without giving a reason. My father assumed
it was breaktime. That Mr. Harvey had gone in to get coffee or brew a pot of tea.

He was wrong. Mr. Harvey went into the house and up the stairs to check on the carving knife that he had put in his bedroom.
It was still in the nightstand, on top of which he kept his sketch pad where, often, in the middle of the night, he drew the
designs in his dreams. He looked inside a crumpled paper grocery sack. My blood on the blade had turned black. Remembering
it, remembering his act in the hole, made him remember what he had read about a particular tribe in southern Ayr. How, when
a tent was made for a newly married couple, the women of the tribe made the sheet that would cover it as beautiful as they
could.

It had begun to snow outside. It was the first snow since my death, and this was not lost on my father.

“I can hear you, honey,” he said to me, even though I wasn’t talking. “What is it?”

I focused very hard on the dead geranium in his line of vision. I thought if I could make it bloom he would have his answer.
In my heaven it bloomed. In my heaven geranium petals swirled in eddies up to my waist. On Earth nothing happened.

But through the snow I noticed this: my father was looking toward the green house in a new way. He had begun to wonder.

Inside, Mr. Harvey had donned a heavy flannel shirt, but what my father noticed first was what he carried in his arms: a stack
of white cotton sheets.

“What are those for?” my father asked. Suddenly he could not stop seeing my face.

“Tarps,” said Mr. Harvey. When he handed a stack to my father, the back of his hand touched my father’s fingers. It was like
an electric shock.

“You know something,” my father said.

He met my father’s eyes, held them, but did not speak.

They worked together, the snow falling, almost wafting, down. And as my father moved, his adrenaline raced. He checked what
he knew. Had anyone asked this man where he was the day I disappeared? Had anyone seen this man in the cornfield? He knew his
neighbors had been questioned. Methodically, the police had gone from door to door.

My father and Mr. Harvey spread the sheets over the domed arch, anchoring them along the square formed by the crossbars that
linked the forked posts. Then they hung the remaining sheets straight down from these crossbars so that the bottoms of the
sheets brushed the ground.

By the time they had finished, the snow sat gingerly on the covered arches. It filled in the hollows of my father’s shirt and
lay in a line across the top of his belt. I ached. I realized I would never rush out into the snow with Holiday again, would
never push Lindsey on a sled, would never teach, against my better judgment, my little brother how to compact snow by shaping
it against the base of his palm. I stood alone in a sea of bright petals. On Earth the snowflakes fell soft and blameless,
a curtain descending.

Standing inside the tent, Mr. Harvey thought of how the virgin bride would be brought to a member of the Imezzureg on a camel.
When my father made a move toward him, Mr. Harvey put his palm up.

“That’s enough now,” he said. “Why don’t you go on home?”

The time had come for my father to think of something to say. But all he could think of was this: “Susie,” he whispered, the
second syllable whipped like a snake.

“We’ve just built a tent,” Mr. Harvey said. “The neighbors saw us. We’re friends now.”

“You know something,” my father said.

“Go home. I can’t help you.”

Mr. Harvey did not smile or step forward. He retreated into the bridal tent and let the final monogrammed white cotton sheet
fall down.

P
art of me wished swift vengeance, wanted my father to turn into the man he could never have been—a man violent in rage. That’s
what you see in movies, that’s what happens in the books people read. An everyman takes a gun or a knife and stalks the murderer
of his family; he does a Bronson on them and everyone cheers.

What it
was
like:

Every day he got up. Before sleep wore off, he was who he used to be. Then, as his consciousness woke, it was as if poison
seeped in. At first he couldn’t even get up. He lay there under a heavy weight. But then only movement could save him, and
he moved and he moved and he moved, no movement being enough to make up for it. The guilt on him, the hand of God pressing
down on him, saying,
You were not there when your daughter needed you.

Before my father left for Mr. Harvey’s, my mother had been sitting in the front hall next to the statue they’d bought of St.
Francis. She was gone when he came back. He’d called for her, said her name three times, said it like a wish that she would
not appear, and then he ascended the steps to his den to jot things down in a small spiral notebook: “A drinker? Get him drunk.
Maybe he’s a talker.” He wrote this next: “I think Susie watches me.” I was ecstatic in heaven. I hugged Holly, I hugged Franny.
My father knew, I thought.

Then Lindsey slammed the front door more loudly than usual, and my father was glad for the noise. He was afraid of going further
in his notes, of writing the words down. The slamming door echoed down the strange afternoon he’d spent and brought him into
the present, into activity, where he needed to be so he would not drown. I understood this—I’m not saying I didn’t resent
it, that it didn’t remind me of sitting at the dinner table and having to listen to Lindsey tell my parents about the test
she’d done so well on, or about how the history teacher was going to recommend her for the district honors council, but Lindsey
was living, and the living deserved attention too.

She stomped up the stairs. Her clogs slammed against the pine boards of the staircase and shook the house.

I may have begrudged her my father’s attention, but I respected her way of handling things. Of everyone in the family, it
was Lindsey who had to deal with what Holly called the Walking Dead Syndrome—when other people see the dead person and don’t
see you.

When people looked at Lindsey, even my father and mother, they saw me. Even Lindsey was not immune. She avoided mirrors. She
now took her showers in the dark.

She would leave the dark shower and feel her way over to the towel rack. She would be safe in the dark—the moist steam from
the shower still rising off the tiles encased her. If the house was quiet or if she heard murmurs below her, she knew she
would be undisturbed. This was when she could think of me and she did so in two ways: she either thought
Susie,
just that one word, and cried there, letting her tears roll down her already damp cheeks, knowing no one would see her, no
one would quantify this dangerous substance as grief, or she would imagine me running, imagine me getting away, imagine herself
being taken instead, fighting until she was free. She fought back the constant question,
Where is Susie now?

My father listened to Lindsey in her room. Bang, the door was slammed shut. Thump, her books were thrown down. Squeak, she
fell onto her bed. Her clogs, boom, boom, were kicked off onto the floor. A few minutes later he stood outside her door.

“Lindsey,” he said upon knocking.

There was no answer.

“Lindsey, can I come in?”

“Go away,” came her resolute answer.

“Come on now, honey,” he pleaded.

“Go away!”

“Lindsey,” my father said, sucking in his breath, “why can’t you let me in?” He placed his forehead gently against the bedroom
door. The wood felt cool and, for a second, he forgot the pounding of his temples, the suspicion he now held that kept repeating
itself.
Harvey, Harvey, Harvey.

In sock feet, Lindsey came silently to the door. She unlocked it as my father drew back and prepared a face that he hoped
said “Don’t run.”

“What?” she said. Her face was rigid, an affront. “What is it?”

“I want to know how you are,” he said. He thought of the curtain falling between him and Mr. Harvey, how a certain capture,
a lovely blame, was lost to him. He had his family walking through the streets, going to school, passing, on their way, Mr.
Harvey’s green-shingled house. To get the blood back in his heart he needed his child.

“I want to be alone,” Lindsey said. “Isn’t that obvious?”

“I’m here if you need me,” he said.

“Look, Dad,” my sister said, making her one concession for him, “I’m handling this alone.”

What could he do with that? He could have broken the code and said, “I’m not, I can’t, don’t make me,” but he stood there
for a second and then retreated. “I understand,” he said first, although he didn’t.

I wanted to lift him up, like statues I’d seen in art history books. A woman lifting up a man. The rescue in reverse. Daughter
to father saying, “It’s okay. You’re okay. Now I won’t let anything hurt.”

Instead, I watched him as he went to place a call to Len Fenerman.

The police in those first weeks were almost reverent. Missing dead girls were not a common occurrence in the suburbs. But with
no leads coming in on where my body was or who had killed me, the police were getting nervous. There was a window of time
during which physical evidence was usually found; that window grew smaller every day.

“I don’t want to sound irrational, Detective Fenerman,” my father said.

“Len, please.” Tucked in the corner of his desk blotter was the school picture Len Fenerman had taken from my mother. He had
known, before anyone said the words, that I was already dead.

“I’m certain there’s a man in the neighborhood who knows something,” my father said. He was staring out the window of his
upstairs den, toward the cornfield. The man who owned it had told the press he was going to let it sit fallow for now.

“Who is it, and what led you to believe this?” Len Fenerman asked. He chose a stubby, chewed pencil from the front metal lip
of his desk drawer.

My father told him about the tent, about how Mr. Harvey had told him to go home, about saying my name, about how weird the
neighborhood thought Mr. Harvey was with no regular job and no kids.