The Lovely Bones (8 page)

“I’ll check it out,” Len Fenerman said, because he had to. That was the role he played in the dance. But what my father had
given him offered him little or nothing to work with. “Don’t talk to anyone and don’t approach him again,” Len warned.

When my father hung up the phone he felt strangely empty. Drained, he opened the door to his den and closed it quietly behind
him. In the hallway, for the second time, he called my mother’s name: “Abigail.”

She was in the downstairs bathroom, sneaking bites from the macaroons my father’s firm always sent us for Christmas. She ate
them greedily; they were like suns bursting open in her mouth. The summer she was pregnant with me, she wore one gingham maternity
dress over and over, refusing to spend money on another, and ate all she wanted, rubbing her belly and saying, “Thank you,
baby,” as she dribbled chocolate on her breasts.

There was a knock down low on the door.

“Momma?” She stuffed the macaroons back in the medicine cabinet, swallowing what was already in her mouth.

“Momma?” Buckley repeated. His voice was sleepy.

“Mommmmm-maaa!”

She despised the word.

When my mother opened the door, my little brother held on to her knees. Buckley pressed his face into the flesh above them.

Hearing movement, my father went to meet my mother in the kitchen. Together they took solace in attending to Buckley.

“Where’s Susie?” Buckley asked as my father spread Fluffernutter on wheat bread. He made three. One for himself, one for my
mother, and one for his four-year-old son.

“Did you put away your game?” my father asked Buckley, wondering why he persisted in avoiding the topic with the one person
who approached it head-on.

“What’s wrong with Mommy?” Buckley asked. Together they watched my mother, who was staring into the dry basin of the sink.

“How would you like to go to the zoo this week?” my father asked. He hated himself for it. Hated the bribe and the tease—the
deceit. But how could he tell his son that, somewhere, his big sister might lie in pieces?

But Buckley heard the word
zoo
and all that it meant—which to him was largely
Monkeys!
—and he began on the rippling path to forgetting for one more day. The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He
knew I was away, but when people left they always came back.

When Len Fenerman had gone door to door in the neighborhood he had found nothing remarkable at George Harvey’s. Mr. Harvey
was a single man who, it was said, had meant to move in with his wife. She had died sometime before this. He built dollhouses
for specialty stores and kept to himself. That was all anyone knew. Though friendships had not exactly blossomed around him,
the sympathy of the neighborhood had always been with him. Each split-level contained a narrative. To Len Fenerman especially,
George Harvey’s seemed a compelling one.

No, Harvey said, he didn’t know the Salmons well. Had seen the children. Everyone knew who had children and who didn’t, he
noted, his head hanging down and to the left a bit. “You can see the toys in the yard. The houses are always more lively,”
he noted, his voice halting.

“I understand you had a conversation with Mr. Salmon recently,” Len said on his second trip to the dark green house.

“Yes, is there something wrong?” Mr. Harvey asked. He squinted at Len but then had to pause. “Let me get my glasses,” he said.
“I was doing some close work on a Second Empire.”

“Second Empire?” Len asked.

“Now that my Christmas orders are done, I can experiment,” Mr. Harvey said. Len followed him into the back, where a dining
table was pushed against a wall. Dozens of small lengths of what looked like miniature wainscoting were lined up on top of
it.

A little strange,
Fenerman thought,
but it doesn’t make the man a murderer.

Mr. Harvey got his glasses and immediately opened up. “Yes, Mr. Salmon was on one of his walks and he helped me build the
bridal tent.”

“The bridal tent?”

“Each year it’s something I do for Leah,” he said. “My wife. I’m a widower.”

Len felt he was intruding on this man’s private rituals. “So I understand,” he said.

“I feel terrible about what happened to that girl,” Mr. Harvey said. “I tried to express that to Mr. Salmon. But I know from
experience that nothing makes sense at a time like this.”

“So you erect this tent every year?” Len Fenerman asked. This was something he could get confirmation on from neighbors.

“In the past, I’ve done it inside, but I tried to do it outside this year. We were married in the winter. Until the snow picked
up, I thought it would work.”

“Where inside?”

“The basement. I can show you if you want. I have all of Leah’s things down there still.”

But Len did not go further.

“I’ve intruded enough,” he said. “I just wanted to sweep the neighborhood a second time.”

“How’s your investigation coming?” Mr. Harvey asked. “Are you finding anything?”

Len never liked questions like this, though he supposed they were the right of the people whose lives he was invading.

“Sometimes I think clues find their way in good time,” he said. “If they want to be found, that is.” It was cryptic, sort of
a Confucius-says answer, but it worked on almost every civilian.

“Have you talked to the Ellis boy?” Mr. Harvey asked.

“We talked to the family.”

“He’s hurt some animals in the neighborhood, I hear.”

“He sounds like a bad kid, I grant you,” said Len, “but he was working in the mall at the time.”

“Witnesses?”

“Yes.”

“That’s my only idea,” Mr. Harvey said. “I wish I could do more.”

Len felt him to be sincere.

“He’s certainly a bit tweaked at an angle,” Len said when he called my father, “but I have nothing on him.”

“What did he say about the tent?”

“That he built it for Leah, his wife.”

“I remember Mrs. Stead told Abigail his wife’s name was Sophie,” my father said.

Len checked his notes. “No, Leah. I wrote it down.”

My father doubted himself. Where had he gotten the name Sophie? He was sure he had heard it too, but that was years ago, at
a block party, where the names of children and wives flew about like confetti between the stories people told to be neighborly
and the introductions to infants and strangers too vague to remember the following day.

He did remember that Mr. Harvey had not come to the block party. He had never come to any of them. This went to his strangeness
by the standards of many in the neighborhood but not by my father’s own standards. He had never felt completely comfortable
at these forced efforts of conviviality himself.

My father wrote “Leah?” in his book. Then he wrote, “Sophie?” Though unaware of it, he had begun a list of the dead.

On Christmas Day, my family would have been more comfortable in heaven. Christmas was largely ignored in my heaven. Some people
dressed all in white and pretended they were snowflakes, but other than that, nothing.

That Christmas, Samuel Heckler came to our house on an unexpected visit. He was not dressed like a snowflake. He wore his older
brother’s leather jacket and a pair of ill-fitting army fatigues.

My brother was in the front room with his toys. My mother blessed the fact that she had gone early to buy his gifts. Lindsey
got gloves and cherry-flavored lip gloss. My father got five white handkerchiefs that she’d ordered months ago in the mail.
Save Buckley, no one wanted anything anyway. In the days before Christmas the lights on the tree were not plugged in. Only
the candle that my father kept in the window of his den burned. He lit it after dark, but my mother, sister, and brother had
stopped leaving the house after four o’clock. Only I saw it.

“There’s a man outside!” my brother shouted. He’d been playing Skyscraper and it had yet to collapse. “He’s got a suitcase.”

My mother left her eggnog in the kitchen and came to the front of the house. Lindsey was suffering the mandatory presence
in the family room that all holidays required. She and my father played Monopoly, ignoring the more brutal squares for each
other’s sake. There was no Luxury Tax, and a bad Chance wasn’t recognized.

In the front hall my mother pressed her hands down along her skirt. She placed Buckley in front of her and put her arms on
his shoulders.

“Wait for the man to knock,” she said.

“Maybe it’s Reverend Strick,” my father said to Lindsey, collecting his fifteen dollars for winning second prize in a beauty
contest.

“For Susie’s sake, I hope not,” Lindsey ventured.

My father held on to it, on to my sister saying my name. She rolled doubles and moved to Marvin Gardens.

“That’s twenty-four dollars,” my father said, “but I’ll take ten.”

“Lindsey,” my mother called. “It’s a visitor for you.”

My father watched my sister get up and leave the room. We both did. I sat with my father then. I was the ghost on the board.
He stared at the old shoe lying on its side in the box. If only I could have lifted it up, made it hop from Boardwalk to Baltic,
where I always claimed the better people lived. “That’s because you’re a purple freak,” Lindsey would say. My father would
say, “I’m proud I didn’t raise a snob.”

“Railroads, Susie,” he said. “You always liked owning those railroads.”

To accentuate his widow’s peak and tame his cowlick, Samuel Heckler insisted on combing his hair straight back. This made
him look, at thirteen and dressed in black leather, like an adolescent vampire.

“Merry Christmas, Lindsey,” he said to my sister, and held out a small box wrapped in blue paper.

I could see it happen: Lindsey’s body began to knot. She was working hard keeping everyone out, everyone, but she found Samuel
Heckler cute. Her heart, like an ingredient in a recipe, was reduced, and regardless of my death she was thirteen, he was
cute, and he had visited her on Christmas Day.

“I heard you made gifted,” he said to her, because no one was talking. “Me too.”

My mother remembered then, and she switched on her autopilot hostess. “Would you like to come sit?” she managed. “I have some
eggnog in the kitchen.”

“That would be wonderful,” Samuel Heckler said and, to Lindsey’s amazement and mine, offered my sister his arm.

“What’s that?” asked Buckley, trailing behind and pointing to what he thought was a suitcase.

“An alto,” Samuel Heckler said.

“What?” asked Buckley.

Lindsey spoke then. “Samuel plays the alto saxophone.”

“Barely,” Samuel said.

My brother did not ask what a saxophone was. He knew what Lindsey was being. She was being what I called snooty-wooty, as
in “Buckley, don’t worry, Lindsey’s being snooty-wooty.” Usually I’d tickle him as I said the word, sometimes burrowing into
his stomach with my head, butting him and saying “snooty-wooty” over and over until his trills of laughter flowed down over
me.

Buckley followed the three of them into the kitchen and asked, as he had at least once a day, “Where’s Susie?”

They were silent. Samuel looked at Lindsey.

“Buckley,” my father called from the adjoining room, “come play Monopoly with me.”

My brother had never been invited to play Monopoly. Everyone said he was too young, but this was the magic of Christmas. He
rushed into the family room, and my father picked him up and sat him on his lap.

“See this shoe?” my father said.

Buckley nodded his head.

“I want you to listen to everything I say about it, okay?”

“Susie?” my brother asked, somehow connecting the two.

“Yes, I’m going to tell you where Susie is.”

I began to cry up in heaven. What else was there for me to do?

“This shoe was the piece Susie played Monopoly with,” he said. “I play with the car or sometimes the wheelbarrow. Lindsey
plays with the iron, and when your mother plays, she likes the cannon.”

“Is that a dog?”

“Yes, that’s a Scottie.”

“Mine!”

“Okay,” my father said. He was patient. He had found a way to explain it. He held his son in his lap, and as he spoke, he
felt Buckley’s small body on his knee—the very human, very warm, very alive weight of it. It comforted him. “The Scottie will
be your piece from now on. Which piece is Susie’s again?”

“The shoe,” Buckley said.

“Right, and I’m the car, your sister’s the iron, and your mother is the cannon.”

My brother concentrated very hard.

“Now let’s put all the pieces on the board, okay? You go ahead and do it for me.”

Buckley grabbed a fist of pieces and then another, until all the pieces lay between the Chance and Community Chest cards.

“Let’s say the other pieces are our friends.”

“Like Nate?”

“Right, we’ll make your friend Nate the hat. And the board is the world. Now if I were to tell you that when I rolled the
dice, one of the pieces would be taken away, what would that mean?”

“They can’t play anymore?”

“Right.”

“Why?” Buckley asked.

He looked up at my father; my father flinched.

“Why?” my brother asked again.

My father did not want to say “because life is unfair” or “because that’s how it is.” He wanted something neat, something
that could explain death to a four-year-old. He placed his hand on the small of Buckley’s back.

“Susie is dead,” he said now, unable to make it fit in the rules of any game. “Do you know what that means?”

Buckley reached over with his hand and covered the shoe. He looked up to see if his answer was right.

My father nodded. “You won’t see Susie anymore, honey. None of us will.” My father cried. Buckley looked up into the eyes
of our father and did not fully understand.

Buckley kept the shoe on his dresser, until one day it wasn’t there anymore and no amount of looking for it could turn it
up.

In the kitchen my mother finished her eggnog and excused herself. She went into the dining room and counted silverware, methodically
laying out the three kinds of forks, the knives, and the spoons, making them “climb the stairs” as she’d been taught when
she worked in Wanamaker’s bridal shop before I was born. She wanted a cigarette and for her children who were living to disappear
for a little while.