The Lovely Bones

Twenty-One

After I left my parents in the hospital, I went to watch Ray Singh. We had been fourteen together, he and I. Now I saw his head on his pillow, dark hair on yellow sheets, dark skin on yellow sheets. I had always been in love with him. I counted the lashes of each closed eye. He had been my almost, my might-have-been, and I did not want to leave him any more than I did my family.

On the listing scaffold behind the stage, with Ruth below us, Ray Singh had gotten close enough to me so that his breath was near mine. I could smell the mixture of cloves and cinnamon that I imagined he topped his cereal with each morning, and a dark smell too, the human smell of the body coming at me where deep inside there were organs suspended by a chemistry separate from mine.

From the time I knew it would happen until the time it did, I had made sure not to be alone with Ray Singh inside or outside school. I was afraid of what I wanted most – his kiss. That it would not be good enough to match the stories everyone told or those I read in Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue. I feared that I would not be good enough – that my first kiss would equal rejection, not love. Still, I collected kiss stories.

“Your first kiss is destiny knocking,” Grandma Lynn said over the phone one day. I was holding the phone while my father went to get my mother. I heard him in the kitchen say “three sheets to the wind.”

“If I had it to do over again I would have worn something stupendous – like Fire and Ice, but Revlon didn’t make that lipstick back then. I would have left my mark on the man.”

“Mother?” my mother said into the bedroom extension.

“We’re talking kiss business, Abigail.”

“How much have you had?”

“See, Susie,” Grandma Lynn said, “if you kiss like a lemon, you make lemonade.”

“What was it like?”

“Ah, the kiss question,” my mother said. “I’ll leave you to it.” I had been making my father and her tell it over and over again to hear their different takes. What I came away with was an image of my parents behind a cloud of cigarette smoke – the lips only vaguely touching inside the cloud.

A moment later Grandma Lynn whispered, “Susie, are you still there?”

“Yes, Grandma.”

She was quiet for a while longer. “I was your age, and my first kiss came from a grown man. A father of a friend.”

“Grandma!” I said, honestly shocked.

“You’re not going to tell on me, are you?”

“No.”

“It was wonderful,” Grandma Lynn said. “He knew how to kiss. The boys who kissed me I couldn’t even tolerate. I’d put my hand flat against their chests and push them away. Mr. McGahern knew how to use his lips.”

“So what happened?”

“Bliss,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t right, but it was wonderful – at least for me. I never asked him how he felt about it, but then I never saw him alone after that.”

“But did you want to do it again?”

“Yes, I was always searching for that first kiss.”

“How about Grandaddy?”

“Not much of a kisser,” she said. I could hear the clink of ice cubes on the other end of the phone. “I’ve never forgotten Mr. McGahern, even though it was just for a moment. Is there a boy who wants to kiss you?”

Neither of my parents had asked me this. I now know that they knew this already, could tell, smiled at each other when they compared notes.

I swallowed hard on my end. “Yes.”

“What’s his name?”

“Ray Singh.”

“Do you like him?”

“Yes.”

“Then what’s the holdup?”

“I’m afraid I won’t be good at it.”

“Susie?”

“Yes?”

“Just have fun, kid.”

But when I stood by my locker that afternoon and I heard Ray’s voice say my name – this time behind me and not above me – it felt like anything but fun. It didn’t feel not fun either. The easy states of black and white that I had known before did not apply. I felt, if I were to say any word, churned. Not as a verb but as an adjective. Happy + Frightened = Churned.

“Ray,” I said, but before the name had left my mouth, he leaned into me and caught my open mouth in his. It was so unexpected, even though I had waited weeks for it, that I wanted more. I wanted so badly to kiss Ray Singh again.

The following morning Mr. Connors cut out an article from the paper and saved it for Ruth. It was a detailed drawing of the Flanagan sinkhole and how it was going to be filled in. While Ruth dressed, he penned a note to her. “This is a crock of shit,” it said. “Someday some poor sap’s car is going to fall into it all over again.”

“Dad says this is the death knell for him,” Ruth said to Ray, waving the clipping at him as she got into Ray’s ice blue Chevy at the end of her driveway. “Our place is going to be swallowed up in subdivision land. Get this. In this article they have four blocks like the cubes you draw in beginning art class, and it’s supposed to show how they’re going to patch the sinkhole up.”

“Nice to see you too, Ruth,” Ray said, reversing out of the driveway while making eyes at Ruth’s unbuckled seat belt.

“Sorry,” Ruth said. “Hello.”

“What does the article say?” Ray asked.

“Nice day today, beautiful weather.”

“Okay, okay. Tell me about the article.”

Every time he saw Ruth after a few months had passed, he was reminded of her impatience and her curiosity – two traits that had both made and kept them friends.

“The first three are the same drawing only with different arrows pointing to different places and saying ‘topsoil,’ ‘cracked limestone,’ and ‘dissolving rock.’ The last one has a big headline that says, ‘Patching it’ and underneath it says, ‘Concrete fills the throat and grout fills the cracks.’”

“Throat?” Ray said.

“I know,” said Ruth. “Then there’s this other arrow on the other side as if this was such a huge project that they had to pause a second so readers could understand the concept, and this one says, ‘Then the hole is filled with dirt.’”

Ray started laughing.

“Like a medical procedure,” Ruth said. “Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet.”

“I think holes in the earth draw on some pretty primal fears.”

“I’ll say,” Ruth said. “They have throats, for God’s sake! Hey, let’s check this out.”

A mile or so down the road there were signs of new construction. Ray took a left and drove into the circles of freshly paved roads where the trees had been cleared and small red and yellow flags waved at intervals from the tops of waist-high wire markers.

Just as they had lulled themselves into thinking that they were alone, exploring the roads laid out for a territory as yet uninhabited, they saw Joe Ellis walking up ahead.

Ruth didn’t wave and neither did Ray, nor did Joe make a move to acknowledge them.

“My mom says he still lives at home and can’t get a job.”

“What does he do all day?” Ray asked.

“Look creepy, I guess.”

“He never got over it,” Ray said, and Ruth stared out into the rows and rows of vacant lots until Ray connected with the main road again and they crossed back over the railroad tracks moving toward Route 30, which would take them in the direction of the sinkhole.

Ruth floated her arm out the window to feel the moist air of the morning after rain. Although Ray had been accused of being involved in my disappearance, he had understood why, knew that the police were doing their job. But Joe Ellis had never recovered from being accused of killing the cats and dogs Mr. Harvey had killed. He wandered around, keeping a good distance from his neighbors and wanting so much to take solace in the love of cats and dogs. For me the saddest thing was that these animals smelled the brokenness in him – the human defect – and kept away.

Down Route 30 near Eels Rod Pike, at a spot that Ray and Ruth were about to pass, I saw Len coming out of an apartment over Joe’s barbershop. He carried a lightly stuffed student knapsack out to his car. The knapsack had been the gift of the young woman who owned the apartment. She had asked him out for coffee one day after they met down at the station as part of a criminology course at West Chester College. Inside the knapsack he had a combination of things – some of which he would show my father and some that no child’s parent needed to see. The latter included the photos of the graves of the recovered bodies – both elbows there in each case.

When he had called the hospital, the nurse had told him Mr. Salmon was with his wife and family. Now his guilt thickened as he pulled his car into the hospital parking lot and sat for a moment with the hot sun coming through the windshield, baking in the heat.

I could see Len working on how to state what he had to say. He could work with only one assumption in his head – after almost seven years of ever more dwindling contact since late 1975, what my parents would hope for most was a body or the news that Mr. Harvey had been found. What he had to give them was a charm.

He grabbed his knapsack and locked up the car, passing by the girl outside with her replenished buckets of daffodils. He knew the number of my father’s room, so he did not bother announcing himself to the fifth-floor nurses’ station but merely tapped lightly on my father’s open door before walking in.

My mother was standing with her back toward him. When she turned, I could see the force of her presence hit him. She was holding my father’s hand. I suddenly felt terribly lonely.

My mother wobbled a bit when she met Len’s eyes, and then she led with what came easiest.

“Is it ever wonderful to see you?” she tried to joke.

“Len,” my father managed. “Abbie, will you tilt me up?”

“How are you feeling, Mr. Salmon?” Len asked as my mother pressed the up arrow button on the bed.

“Jack, please,” my father insisted.

“Before you get your hopes up,” Len said, “we haven’t caught him.”

My father visibly deflated.

My mother readjusted the foam pillows behind my father’s back and neck. “Then why are you here?” she asked.

“We found an item of Susie’s,” Len said.

He had used almost the same sentence when he’d come to the house with the jingle-bell hat. It was a distant echo in her head.

The night before, as first my mother watched my father sleeping and then my father woke to see her head beside his on his pillow, they had both been staving off the memory of that first night of snow and hail and rain and how they had clung to each other, neither of them voicing aloud their greatest hope. Last night it had been my father who’d finally said it: “She’s never coming home.” A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it.

“It’s a charm off her bracelet,” Len said. “A Pennsylvania keystone with her initials on it.”

“I bought that for her,” my father said. “At Thirtieth Street Station when I went into the city one day. They had a booth, and a man wearing safety glasses etched in initials for free. I brought Lindsey one too. Remember, Abigail?”

“I remember,” my mother said.

“We found it near a grave in Connecticut.”

My parents were suddenly still for a moment – like animals trapped in ice – their eyes frozen open and beseeching whoever walked above them to release them now, please.

“It wasn’t Susie,” Len said, rushing to fill the space. “What it means is that Harvey has been linked to other murders in Delaware and Connecticut. It was at the grave site outside Hartford where we found Susie’s charm.”

My father and mother watched as Len fumbled to open the slightly jammed zipper of his knapsack. My mother smoothed my father’s hair back and tried to catch his eye. But my father was focused on the prospect Len presented – my murder case reopening. And my mother, just when she was beginning to feel on more solid ground, had to hide the fact that she’d never wanted it to begin again. The name George Harvey silenced her. She had never known what to say about him. For my mother, connecting her life to his capture and punishment spoke more about choosing to live with the enemy than about having to learn to live in the world without me.

Len pulled out a large Ziploc bag. At the bottom corner of the bag my parents could see the glint of gold. Len handed it to my mother, and she held it in front of her, slightly away from her body.

“Don’t you need this, Len?” my father asked.

“We did all the tests on it,” he said. “We’ve documented where it was found and taken the required photographs. The time may come when I would have to ask for it back, but until then, it’s yours to keep.”

“Open it, Abbie,” my father said.

I watched my mother hold open the bag and lean over the bed. “It’s for you, Jack,” she said. “It was a gift from you.”

As my father reached in, his hand shook, and it took him a second to feel the small, sharp edges of the keystone against the flesh of his fingers. The way he drew it out of the bag reminded me of playing the game Operation with Lindsey when we were little. If he touched the sides of the Ziploc bag an alarm would go off and he would have to forfeit.

“How can you be sure he killed these other girls?” my mother asked. She stared at the tiny ember of gold in my father’s palm.

“Nothing is ever certain,” Len said.

And the echo rang in her ears again. Len had a fixed set of phrases. It was this same phrase that my father had borrowed to soothe his family. It was a cruel phrase that preyed on hope.

“I think I want you to leave now,” she said.

“Abigail?” my father queried.

“I can’t hear anymore.”

“I’m very glad to have the charm, Len,” my father said.

Len doffed an imaginary cap to my father before turning to go. He had made a certain kind of love to my mother before she went away. Sex as an act of willful forgetting. It was the kind he made more and more in the rooms above the barbershop.

I headed south toward Ruth and Ray, but I saw Mr. Harvey instead. He was driving an orange patchwork car that had been pieced together from so many different versions of the same make and model that it looked like Frankenstein’s monster on wheels. A bungee cord held the front hood, which fluttered up and down as it caught the oncoming air.

The engine had resisted anything but a shimmer above the speed limit no matter how hard he pressed the gas pedal. He had slept next to an empty grave, and while he’d been sleeping he had dreamed of the 5! 5! 5!, waking near dawn to make the drive to Pennsylvania.

The edges of Mr. Harvey seemed oddly blurred. For years he had kept at bay the memories of the women he killed, but now, one by one, they were coming back.

The first girl he’d hurt was by accident. He got mad and couldn’t stop himself, or that was how he began to weave it into sense. She stopped going to the high school that they were both enrolled in, but this didn’t seem strange to him. By that time he had moved so many times that he assumed that was what the girl had done. He had regretted it, this quiet, muffled rape of a school friend, but he didn’t see it as something that would stay with either one of them. It was as if something outside him had resulted in the collision of their two bodies one afternoon. For a second afterward, she’d stared. It was bottomless. Then she put on her torn underpants, tucking them into her skirt’s waistband to keep them in place. They didn’t speak, and she left. He cut himself with his penknife along the back of his hand. When his father asked about the blood, there would be a plausible explanation. “See,” he could say, and point to the place on his hand. “It was an accident.”

But his father didn’t ask, and no one came around looking for him. No father or brother or policeman.

Then what I saw was what Mr. Harvey felt beside him. This girl, who had died only a few years later when her brother fell asleep smoking a cigarette. She was sitting in the front seat. I wondered how long it would take before he began to remember me.

The only signs of change since the day Mr. Harvey had delivered me up to the Flanagans’ were the orange pylons set around the lot. That and the evidence that the sinkhole had expanded. The house’s southeast corner sloped downward, and the front porch was quietly sinking into the earth.

As a precaution, Ray parked on the other side of Flat Road, under a section of overgrown shrubbery. Even so, the passenger side skimmed the edge of the pavement. “What happened to the Flanagans?” Ray asked as they got out of his car.

“My father said the corporation that bought the property gave them a settlement and they took off.”

“It’s spooky around here, Ruth,” Ray said.

They crossed the empty road. Above them the sky was a light blue, a few smoky clouds dotting the air. From where they stood they could just make out the back of Hal’s bike shop on the other side of the railroad tracks.

“I wonder if Hal Heckler still owns that?” Ruth said. “I had a crush on him when we were growing up.”

Then she turned toward the lot. They were quiet. Ruth moved in ever-diminishing circles, with the hole and its vague edge as their goal. Ray trailed just behind Ruth as she led the way. If you saw it from a distance, the sinkhole seemed innocuous – like an overgrown mud puddle just starting to dry out. There were spots of grass and weeds surrounding it and then, if you looked close enough, it was as if the earth stopped and a light cocoa-colored flesh began. It was soft and convex, and it drew in items placed on top of it.

“How do you know it won’t swallow us?” Ray asked.

“We’re not heavy enough,” Ruth said.

“Stop if you feel yourself sinking.”

Watching them I remembered holding on to Buckley’s hand the day we went to bury the refrigerator. While my father was talking to Mr. Flanagan, Buckley and I walked up to the point where the earth sloped down and softened, and I swore I felt it give ever so slightly beneath my feet. It had been the same sensation as walking in the graveyard of our church and suddenly sinking into the hollow tunnels that the moles had dug among the headstones.

Ultimately it was the memory of those very moles – and the pictures of their blind, nosy, toothsome selves that I sought out in books – that had made me accept more readily being sunk inside the earth in a heavy metal safe. I was mole-proof, anyway.

Ruth tiptoed up to what she took to be the edge, while I thought of the sound of my father’s laughter on that long-ago day. I made up a story for my brother on the way home. How underneath the sinkhole there was a whole village inside the earth that no one knew about and the people who lived there greeted these appliances like gifts from an Earthly heaven. “When our refrigerator reaches them,” I said, “they will praise us, because they are a race of tiny repairmen who love to put things back together again.” My father’s laughter filled the car.

“Ruthie,” Ray said, “that’s close enough.”

Ruth’s toes were on the soft part, her heels were on the hard, and there was a sense as I watched her that she might point her fingers and raise her arms and dive right in to be beside me. But Ray came up behind her.

“Apparently,” he said, “the earth’s throat burps.”

All three of us watched the corner of something metal as it rose.

“The great Maytag of ’sixty-nine,” Ray said.

But it was not a washer or a safe. It was an old red gas stove, moving slow.

“Do you ever think about where Susie Salmon’s body ended up?” asked Ruth.

I wanted to walk out from underneath the overgrown shrubs that half-hid their ice blue car and cross the road and walk down into the hole and back up and tap her gently on the shoulder and say, “It’s me! You’ve done it! Bingo! Score!”

“No,” Ray said. “I leave that to you.”

“Everything is changing here now. Every time I come back something is gone that made it not just every other place in the country,” she said.

“Do you want to go inside the house?” Ray asked, but he was thinking of me. How his crush had come when he was thirteen. He had seen me walking home from school ahead of him, and it was a series of simple things: my awkward plaid skirt, my peacoat covered in Holiday’s fur, the way what I thought of as my mousy brown hair caught the afternoon sun so that the light moved fluidly from spot to spot as we walked home, one behind the other. And then, a few days later, when he had stood in social science class and accidentally read from his paper on Jane Eyre instead of the War of 1812 – I had looked at him in a way he thought was nice.

Ray walked toward the house that would soon be demolished, and that had already been stripped of any valuable doorknobs and faucets late one night by Mr. Connors, but Ruth stayed by the sinkhole. Ray was already inside the house when it happened. As clear as day, she saw me standing there beside her, looking at the spot Mr. Harvey had dumped me.

“Susie,” Ruth said, feeling my presence even more solidly when she said my name.

But I said nothing.

“I’ve written poems for you,” Ruth said, trying to get me to stay with her. What she had wished for her whole life happening, finally. “Don’t you want anything, Susie?” she asked.

Then I vanished.

Ruth stood there reeling, waiting in the gray light of the Pennsylvania sun. And her question rang in my ears: “Don’t you want anything?”

On the other side of the railroad tracks, Hal’s shop was deserted. He had taken the day off and brought Samuel and Buckley to a bike show in Radnor. I could see Buckley’s hands move over the curved front-wheel casing of a red minibike. It would be his birthday soon, and Hal and Samuel watched him. Hal had wanted to give Samuel’s old alto sax to my brother, but my Grandma Lynn had intervened. “He needs to bang on things, honey,” she said. “Save the subtle stuff.” So Hal and Samuel had chipped in together and bought my brother a secondhand set of drums.

Grandma Lynn was at the mall trying to find simple yet elegant clothes that she might convince my mother to wear. With fingers made dexterous from years of practice, she pulled a near-navy dress from a rack of black. I could see the woman near her alight on the dress in greenish envy.

At the hospital, my mother was reading aloud to my father from a day-old Evening Bulletin, and he was watching her lips move and not really listening. Wanting to kiss her instead.

And Lindsey.

I could see Mr. Harvey take the turn into my old neighborhood in broad daylight, past caring who spotted him, even depending on his standard invisibility – here, in the neighborhood where so many had said they would never forget him, had always thought of him as strange, had come easily to suspect that the dead wife he spoke of by alternate names had been one of his victims.

Lindsey was at home alone.

Mr. Harvey drove by Nate’s house inside the anchor area of the development. Nate’s mother was picking the wilted blossoms from her front kidney-shaped flower bed. She looked up when the car passed. She saw the unfamiliar, patched-together car and imagined it was a college friend of one of the older children home for the summer. She had not seen Mr. Harvey in the driver’s seat. He turned left onto the lower road, which circled around to his old street. Holiday whined at my feet, the same kind of sick, low moan he would let out when we drove him to the vet.

Ruana Singh had her back to him. I saw her through the dining room window, alphabetizing stacks of new books and placing them in carefully kept bookshelves. There were children out in their yards on swings and pogo sticks and chasing one another with water pistols. A neighborhood full of potential victims.

He rounded the curve at the bottom of our road and passed the small municipal park across from where the Gilberts lived. They were both inside, Mr. Gilbert now infirm. Then he saw his old house, no longer green, though to my family and me it would always be “the green house.” The new owners had painted it a lavendery mauve and installed a pool and, just off to the side, near the basement window, a gazebo made out of redwood, which overflowed with hanging ivy and children’s toys. The front flower beds had been paved over when they expanded their front walk, and they had screened in the front porch with frost-resistant glass, behind which he saw an office of some sort. He heard the sound of girls laughing out in the backyard, and a woman came out of the front door carrying a pair of pruning shears and wearing a sun hat. She stared at the man sitting in his orange car and felt something kick inside her – the queasy kick of an empty womb. She turned abruptly and went back inside, peering at him from behind her window. Waiting.

He drove down the road a few houses further.

There she was, my precious sister. He could see her in the upstairs window of our house. She had cut all her hair off and grown thinner in the intervening years, but it was her, sitting at the drafting board she used as a desk and reading a psychology book.

It was then that I began to see them coming down the road.

While he scanned the windows of my old house and wondered where the other members of my family were – whether my father’s leg still made him hobble – I saw the final vestiges of the animals and the women taking leave of Mr. Harvey’s house. They straggled forward together. He watched my sister and thought of the sheets he had draped on the poles of the bridal tent. He had stared right in my father’s eyes that day as he said my name. And the dog – the one that barked outside his house – the dog was surely dead by now.

Lindsey moved in the window, and I watched him watching her. She stood up and turned around, going farther into the room to a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. She reached up and brought another book down. As she came back to the desk and he lingered on her face, his rearview mirror suddenly filled with a black-and-white cruising slowly up the street behind him.

He knew he could not outrace them. He sat in his car and prepared the last vestiges of the face he had been giving authorities for decades – the face of a bland man they might pity or despise but never blame. As the officer pulled alongside him, the women slipped in the windows and the cats curled around his ankles.

“Are you lost?” the young policeman asked when he was flush with the orange car.

“I used to live here,” Mr. Harvey said. I shook with it. He had chosen to tell the truth.

“We got a call, suspicious vehicle.”

“I see they’re building something in the old cornfield,” Mr. Harvey said. And I knew that part of me could join the others then, swoop down in pieces, each body part he had claimed raining down inside his car.

“They’re expanding the school.”

“I thought the neighborhood looked more prosperous,” he said wistfully.

“Perhaps you should move along,” the officer said. He was embarrassed for Mr. Harvey in his patched-up car, but I saw him jot the license plate down.

“I didn’t mean to scare anyone.”

Mr. Harvey was a pro, but in that moment I didn’t care. With each section of road he covered, I focused on Lindsey inside reading her textbooks, on the facts jumping up from the pages and into her brain, on how smart she was and how whole. At Temple she had decided to be a therapist. And I thought of the mix of air that was our front yard, which was daylight, a queasy mother and a cop – it was a convergence of luck that had kept my sister safe so far. Every day a question mark.

Ruth did not tell Ray what had happened. She promised herself she would write it in her journal first. When they crossed the road back to the car, Ray saw something violet in the scrub halfway up a high dirt berm that had been dumped there by a construction crew.

“That’s periwinkle,” he said to Ruth. “I’m going to clip some for my mom.”

“Cool, take your time,” Ruth said.

Ray ducked into the underbrush by the driver’s side and climbed up to the periwinkle while Ruth stood by the car. Ray wasn’t thinking of me anymore. He was thinking of his mother’s smiles. The surest way to get them was to find her wildflowers like this, to bring them home to her and watch her as she pressed them, first opening their petals flat against the black and white of dictionaries or reference books. Ray walked to the top of the berm and disappeared over the side in hopes of finding more.

It was only then that I felt a prickle along my spine, when I saw his body suddenly vanish on the other side. I heard Holiday, his fear lodged low and deep in his throat, and realized it could not have been Lindsey for whom he had whined. Mr. Harvey crested the top of Eels Rod Pike and saw the sinkhole and the orange pylons that matched his car. He had dumped a body there. He remembered his mother’s amber pendant, and how when she had handed it to him it was still warm.

Ruth saw the women stuffed in the car in blood-colored gowns. She began walking toward them. On that same road where I had been buried, Mr. Harvey passed by Ruth. All she could see were the women. Then: blackout.

That was the moment I fell to Earth.