The Lovely Bones 12 страница

One of the three men was standing in front of the truck. The other two were banging on either side of the truck’s roof, laughing and lolling their tongues.

His mother shook her head vehemently, but this only enraged them. The man blocking the truck started rocking his hips back and forth against the front end, which caused the other two men to laugh harder.

“I’m going to move slow, ” his mother whispered, “and pretend I’m getting out of the truck. I want you to reach forward and turn the keys in the ignition when I say so. ”

He knew he was being told something very important. That she needed him.

Despite her practiced calm, he could hear the metal in her voice, the iron breaking up through fear now.

She smiled at the men, and as they sent up whoops and their bodies relaxed, she used her elbow to knock the gear shift into place. “Now, ” she said in a flat monotone, and George Harvey reached forward and turned the keys. The truck came to life with its rumbling old engine.

The faces of the men changed, fading from an acquisitive joy and then, as she reversed back to a good degree and they stared after her, uncertainty. She switched into drive and screamed, “On the floor! ” to her son. He could feel the bump of the man’s body hitting the truck only a few feet from where he lay curled up inside. Then the body was pitched up onto the roof. It lay there for a second until his mother reversed again. He had had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.

His heart had beat wildly as he watched Lindsey make for the elderberry hedge, but then immediately he had calmed. It was a skill his mother, not his father, had taught him – to take action only after calculating the worst possible outcome of each choice available. He saw the notebook disturbed and the missing page in his sketchbook. He checked the bag with the knife. He took the knife with him to the basement and dropped it down the square hole that was drilled through the foundation. From the metal shelving, he retrieved the group of charms that he kept from the women. He took the Pennsylvania keystone charm from my bracelet and held it in his hand. Good luck. The others he spread out on his white handkerchief, and then he brought the four ends together to form a small hobo sack. He put his hand inside the hole under the foundation and got down on the floor on his stomach to push his arm in all the way to the shoulder. He groped, feeling with the free fingers of his hand as the other held the hobo sack, until he found a rusty jut of a metal support over which the workmen had poured the cement. He hung his trophy bag there and then withdrew his arm and stood. The book of sonnets he had buried earlier that summer in the woods of Valley Forge Park, shedding evidence slowly as he always did; now, he had to hope, not too slowly.

Five minutes at the most had gone by. That could be accounted for by shock and anger. By checking what everyone else thought to be valuables – his cuff links, his cash, his tools. But he knew no more time than that could be overlooked. He had to call the police.

He worked himself up. He paced briefly, drew his breath in and out rapidly, and when the operator answered he set his voice on edge.

“My home has been broken into. I need the police, ” he said, scripting the opening of his version of the story as inside he calculated how quickly he could leave and what he would carry with him.

When my father called the station, he requested Len Fenerman. But Fenerman couldn’t be located. My father was informed that two uniforms had already been sent out to investigate. What they found when Mr. Harvey answered his door was a man who was tearfully upset and who in every aspect, save a certain repellent quality that the officers attributed to the sight of a man allowing himself to cry, seemed to be responding rationally to the reported events.

Even though the information about the drawing Lindsey had taken had come in over the radio, the officers were more impressed by Mr. Harvey’s readily volunteering to have his home searched. He also seemed sincere in his sympathy for the Salmon family.

The officers grew uncomfortable. They searched the house perfunctorily and found nothing except both the evidence of what they took to be extreme loneliness and a room full of beautiful dollhouses on the second floor, where they switched topics and asked him how long he had been building them.

They noticed, they said later, an immediate and friendly change in his demeanor. He went into his bedroom and got the sketchbook, not mentioning any stolen drawing. The police took note of his increasing warmth as he showed them the sketches for the dollhouses. They asked their next question delicately.

“Sir, ” an officer said, “we can take you down to the station for further questioning, and you do have the right to have a lawyer present but –” Mr. Harvey interrupted him. “I would be happy to answer anything here. I am the wronged party, though I have no wish to press charges against that poor girl. ”

“The young woman that broke in, ” the other officer began, “she did take something. It was a drawing of the cornfield and a sort of structure in it …” The way it hit Harvey, the officers would tell Detective Fenerman, was all at once and very convincing. He had an explanation that fit so perfectly, they did not see him as a flight risk – largely because they did not see him first and foremost as a murderer.

“Oh, the poor girl, ” he said. He placed his fingers to his pursed lips. He turned to his sketchbook and nipped through it until he came to a drawing that was very much like the one Lindsey had taken.

“There, it was a drawing similar to this one, correct? ” The officers – now audience – nodded. “I was trying to figure it out, ” Mr. Harvey confessed. “I admit the horror of it has obsessed me. I think everyone in the neighborhood has tried to think how they could have prevented it. Why they didn’t hear something, see something. I mean, surely the girl screamed.

“Now here, ” he said to the two men, pointing to his drawing with a pen.

“Forgive me, but I think in structures, and after hearing about how much blood there was in the cornfield and the churned-up nature of that area where it was found, I decided that perhaps …” He looked at them, checking their eyes. Both officers were following him. They wanted to follow him. They had had no leads, no body, no clues. Perhaps this strange man had a workable theory. “Well, that the person who did it had built something underground, a hole, and then I confess I began to worry at it and detail it the way I do the dollhouses, and I gave it a chimney and a shelf, and, well, that’s just my habit. ” He paused. “I have a lot of time to myself. ”

“So, did it work out? ” one of the two officers asked.

“I always did think I had something there. ”

“Why didn’t you call us? ”

“I wasn’t bringing back their daughter. When Detective Fenerman interviewed me I mentioned how I suspected the Ellis boy, and I turned out to be dead wrong. I didn’t want to meddle with any more of my amateur theories. ” The officers apologized for the fact that the following day Detective Fenerman would be calling again, most likely wanting to go over the same material. See the sketchbook, hear Mr. Harvey’s assertions about the cornfield. All of this Mr.

Harvey took as part of being a dutiful civilian, even if it had been he who was victimized. The officers documented my sister’s path of break-in from the basement window and then out through the bedroom window. They discussed the damages, which Mr. Harvey said he would take care of out-of-pocket, stressing his awareness of the overwhelming grief the Salmon father had displayed several months ago, and how it now seemed to be infecting the poor girl’s sister.

I saw the chances of Mr. Harvey’s capture diminish as I watched the end of my family as I had known it ignite.

After picking up Buckley from Nate’s house, my mother stopped at a payphone outside the 7-Eleven on Route 30. She told Len to meet her at a loud and raucous store in the mall near the grocery store. He left immediately. As he pulled out of his driveway, the phone in his house was ringing but he didn’t hear it. He was inside the capsule of his car, thinking of my mother, of how wrong it all was and then of how he could not say no to her for reasons he couldn’t hold on to long enough to analyze or disclaim.

My mother drove the short distance from the grocery store to the mall and led Buckley by the hand through the glass doors to a sunken circle where parents could leave their children to play while they shopped.

Buckley was elated. “The circle! Can I? ” he said, as he saw his peers jumping off the jungle gym and turning somersaults on the rubber-covered floor.

“Do you really want to, honey? ” she asked him.

“Please, ” he said.

She phrased it as a motherly concession. “All right, ” she said. And he went off in the direction of a red metal slide. “Be good, ” she called after him. She had never allowed him to play there without her.

She left his name with the monitor who watched over the play circle and said that she would be shopping on the lower level near Wanamaker’s.

While Mr. Harvey was explaining his theory of my murder, my mother felt a hand brush across the back of her shoulders inside a trashy store called Spencer’s. She turned with expectant relief, only to see Len Fenerman’s back as he made his way out of the store. Passing glow-in-the-dark masks, black plastic eight balls, fuzzy troll keychains, and a large laughing skull, my mother followed after him.

He did not turn around. She kept following him, at first excited and then annoyed. In between footfalls there was enough time to think, and she did not want to think.

Finally, she saw him unlock a white door that was set flush into the wall, which she had never noticed before.

She could tell by the noises up ahead in the dark corridor that Len had brought her into the inner workings of the mall – the air filtration system or the water pumping plant. She didn’t care. In the darkness she imagined herself to be within her own heart, and a vision of the enlarged drawing from her doctor’s office entered her head and simultaneously she saw my father, in his paper gown and black socks, perched on the edge of the examining table as the doctor had explained to them the dangers of congestive heart failure. Just as she was about to let go into grief, cry out, and stumble and fall into confusion, she came to the end of the corridor. It opened into a huge room three stories high that throbbed and buzzed and throughout which there were tiny lights mounted higgledy-piggledy on metal tanks and drums. She paused and listened for any sound other than the deafening thrumming of air being sucked out of the mall and reconditioned to be pushed back in. Nothing.

I saw Len before she did. Standing alone in the almost-darkness he watched her for a moment, locating the need in her eyes. He was sorry for my father, for my family, but he fell into those eyes. “I could drown in those eyes, Abigail, ” he wanted to say to her, but he knew that this he would not be allowed.

My mother began to make out more and more shapes within the bright interconnected jumble of metal, and for a moment I could feel the room begin to be enough for her, the foreign territory enough to soothe her. It was the feeling of being unreachable.

If it had not been for Len’s hand stretching out and grazing her fingers with the tips of his own, I might have kept her to myself there. The room could have remained simply a brief vacation from her life as Mrs. Salmon.

But he did touch her, and she did turn. Still, she could not really look at him.

He accepted this absence on her part.

I swirled as I watched it and held on to the bench in the gazebo, gulping air.

She could never know, I thought, that while she was clutching Len’s hair and he was reaching his hand around to the small of her back, bringing her in closer, that the man who had murdered me was escorting two officers out his front door.

I felt the kisses as they came down my mother’s neck and onto her chest, like the small, light feet of mice, and like the flower petals falling that they were.

Ruinous and marvelous all at once. They were whispers calling her away from me and from her family and from her grief. She followed with her body.

While Len took her hand and brought her away from the wall into the tangle of pipes where the noise overhead added its chorus, Mr. Harvey began to pack his belongings; my brother met a small girl playing Hula-Hoop in the circle; my sister and Samuel lay beside each other on her bed, fully dressed and nervous; my grandmother downed three shots in the empty dining room. My father watched the phone.

My mother grabbed at Len’s coat and shirt greedily, and he helped her. He watched as she tugged at her own clothes, pulling her sweater over her head, then her mother-jumper, and her turtleneck, until she was left in her underpants and camisole. He stared at her.

Samuel kissed the back of my sister’s neck. She smelled of soap and Bactine, and he wanted, even then, never to leave her.

Len was about to say something; I could see my mother notice his lips just as they parted. She shut her eyes and commanded the world to shut up – screaming the words inside her skull. She opened her eyes again and looked at him. He was silent, his mouth set. She took her cotton camisole over the top of her head and stepped out of her underwear. My mother had my body as it would never become. But she had her own moonlit skin, her ocean eyes. She was hollow and lost and abandoned up.

Mr. Harvey left his house for the final time while my mother was granted her most temporal wish. To find a doorway out of her ruined heart, in merciful adultery.

Sixteen

A year to the day after my death, Dr. Singh called to say he would not be home for dinner. But Ruana would do her exercises no matter what. If, as she stretched out on the rug in the one warm spot that the house seemed to hold in the winter, she could not help but turn over and over again her husband’s absences in her mind, she would let them consume her until her body pled for her to let him go and to focus – as she leaned forward, her arms outstretched toward her toes now

– and move, to shut her brain off and forget everything but the slight and pleasant yearning of muscles stretching and her own body bending.

Reaching almost to the floor, the window in the dining room was interrupted only by the metal baseboard for the heat, which Ruana liked to keep turned off because the noises it made disturbed her. Outside, she could see the cherry tree, its leaves and flowers all gone. The empty bird feeder swung slightly on its branch.

She stretched until she was quite warm and she’d forgotten herself, and the home she stood in fell away from her. Her age. Her son. But still, creeping in on her was the figure of her husband. She had a premonition. She did not believe it was a woman, or even a student who worshiped him, that made him late more and more often. She knew what it was because it was something she too had had and had severed herself from after having been injured long ago. It was ambition.

She heard sounds now. Holiday barking two streets over and the Gilberts’ dog answering him and Ray moving around upstairs. Blessedly, in another moment, Jethro Tull erupted again, shutting out all else.

Except for the occasional cigarette, which she smoked as secretly as she could so as not to give Ray license, she had kept herself in good health. Many of the women in the neighborhood commented on how well she kept herself and some had asked her if she would mind showing them how, though she had always taken these entreaties merely as their way of making conversation with their lone foreign-born neighbor. But as she sat in Sukhasana and her breath slowed to a deep rhythm, she could not fully release and let go. The niggling idea of what she would do as Ray grew older and her husband worked increasingly long hours crept up the inside of her foot and along her calf to the back of her knee and began to climb into her lap.

The doorbell rang.

Ruana was happy for the escape, and though she was someone to whom order was also a sort of meditation, she hopped up, wrapped a shawl that was hanging on the back of a chair around her waist, and, with Ray’s music barreling down the stairs, walked to the door. She thought only for a moment that it might be a neighbor. A complaining neighbor – the music – and she, dressed in a red leotard and shawl.

Ruth stood on the stoop, holding a grocery sack.

“Hello, ” Ruana said. “May I help you? ”

“I’m here to see Ray. ”

“Come in. ”

All of this had to be half-shouted over the noise coming from upstairs. Ruth stepped into the front hall.

“Go on up, ” Ruana shouted, pointing to the stairs.

I watched Ruana take in Ruth’s baggy overalls, her turdeneck, her parka. I could start with her, Ruana thought to herself.

Ruth had been standing in the grocery store with her mother when she saw the candles among the paper plates and plastic forks and spoons. At school that day she had been acutely aware of what day it was and even though what she had done so far – lain in bed reading The Bell Jar, helped her mother clean out what her father insisted on calling his toolshed and what she thought of as the poetry shed, and tagged along to the grocery store – hadn’t consisted of anything that might mark the anniversary of my death, she had been determined to do something.

When she saw the candles she knew immediately that she would find her way over to Ray’s house and ask him to come with her. Because of their meetings at the shot-put circle, the kids at school had made them a couple despite all evidence to the contrary. Ruth could draw as many female nudes as she might wish and fashion scarves on her head and write papers on Janis Joplin and loudly protest the oppression of shaving her legs and armpits. In the eyes of her classmates at Fairfax, she remained a weird girl who had been found K-I-S-S-I-N-G a weird boy.

What no one understood – and they could not begin to tell anyone – was that it had been an experiment between them. Ray had kissed only me, and Ruth had never kissed anyone, so, united, they had agreed to kiss each other and see.

“I don’t feel anything, ” Ruth had said afterward, as they lay in the maple leaves under a tree behind the teachers’ parking lot.

“I don’t either, ” Ray admitted.

“Did you feel something when you kissed Susie? ”

“Yes. ”

“What? ”

“That I wanted more. That night I dreamed of kissing her again and wondered if she was thinking the same thing. ”

“And sex? ”

“I hadn’t really gotten that far yet, ” Ray said. “Now I kiss you and it’s not the same. ”

“We could keep trying, ” Ruth said. “I’m game if you don’t tell anyone. ”

“I thought you liked girls, ” Ray said.

“I’ll make you a deal, ” Ruth said. “You can pretend I’m Susie and I will too. ”

“You are so entirely screwed up, ” Ray said, smiling.

“Are you saying you don’t want to? ” Ruth teased.

“Show me your drawings again. ”

“I may be screwed up, ” Ruth said, dragging out her sketchbook from her book bag – it was now full of nudes she’d copied out of Playboy, scaling various parts up or down and adding hair and wrinkles where they had been airbrushed out –

“but at least I’m not a perv for charcoal. ”

Ray was dancing around his bedroom when Ruth walked in. He wore his glasses, which at school he tried to do without because they were thick and his father had only sprung for the least expensive, hard-to-break frames. He had on a pair of jeans that were baggy and stained and a T-shirt that Ruth imagined, and I knew, had been slept in.

He stopped dancing as soon as he saw her standing at the doorway holding the grocery bag. His hands went up immediately and collected his glasses, and then, not knowing what to do with them, he waved them at her and said, “Hello. ”

“Can you turn it down? ” Ruth screamed.

“Sure! ”

When the noise ceased her ears rang for a second, and in that second she saw something flicker across Ray’s eyes.

He now stood on the other side of the room, and in between them was his bed, where sheets were rumpled and balled and over which hung a drawing Ruth had done of me from memory.

“You hung it up, ” Ruth said.

“I think it’s really good. ”

“You and me and nobody else. ”

“My mom thinks it’s good. ”

“She’s intense, Ray, ” Ruth said, putting down the bag. “No wonder you’re so freak-a-delic. ”

“What’s in the bag? ”

“Candles, ” said Ruth. “I got them at the grocery store. It’s December sixth. ”

“I know. ”

“I thought we might go to the cornfield and light them. Say goodbye. ”

“How many times can you say it? ”

“It was an idea, ” Ruth said. “I’ll go alone. ”

“No, ” Ray said. “I’ll go. ”

Ruth sat down in her jacket and overalls and waited for him to change his shirt. She watched him with his back toward her, how thin he was but also how the muscles seemed to pop on his arms the way they were supposed to and the color of his skin, like his mother’s, so much more inviting than her own.

“We can kiss for a while if you want. ”

And he turned, grinning. He had begun to like the experiments. He was not thinking of me anymore – though he couldn’t tell that to Ruth.

He liked the way she cursed and hated school. He liked how smart she was and how she tried to pretend that it didn’t matter to her that his father was a doctor (even though not a real doctor, as she pointed out) and her father scavenged old houses, or that the Singhs had rows and rows of books in their house while she was starved for them.

He sat down next to her on the bed.

“Do you want to take your parka off? ”

She did.

And so on the anniversary of my death, Ray mashed himself against Ruth and the two of them kissed and at some point she looked him in the face. “Shit! ” she said. “I think I feel something. ”

When Ray and Ruth arrived at the cornfield, they were silent and he was holding her hand. She didn’t know whether he was holding it because they were observing my death together or because he liked her. Her brain was a storm, her usual insight gone.

Then she saw she had not been the only one to think of me. Hal and Samuel Heckler were standing in the cornfield with their hands jammed in their pockets and their backs turned toward her. Ruth saw yellow daffodils on the ground.

“Did you bring those? ” Ruth asked Samuel.

“No, ” Hal said, answering for his brother. “They were already here when we got here. ”

Mrs. Stead watched from her son’s upstairs bedroom. She decided to throw on her coat and walk out to the field. It was not something she even tried to judge, whether or not she belonged there.

Grace Tarking was walking around the block when she saw Mrs. Stead leaving her house with a poinsettia. They talked briefly in the street. Grace said that she was going to stop at home but she would come and join them.

Grace made two phone calls, one to her boyfriend, who lived a short distance away in a slightly richer area, and one to the Gilberts. They had not yet recovered from their strange role in the discovery of my death – their faithful lab having found the first evidence. Grace offered to escort them, since they were older and cutting across neighbors’ lawns and over the bumpy earth of the cornfield would be a challenge to them, but yes, Mr. Gilbert had said, he wanted to come. They needed this, he told Grace Tarking, his wife particularly – though I could see how crushed he was. He always covered his pain by being attentive to his wife.

Though they had thought briefly of giving their dog away, he was too much comfort to both of them.

Mr. Gilbert wondered if Ray, who ran errands for them and was a sweet boy who had been badly judged, knew, and so he called the Singh household. Ruana said she suspected her son must already be there but that she would be along herself.

Lindsey was looking out the window when she saw Grace Tarking with her arm in Mrs. Gilbert’s and Grace’s boyfriend steadying Mr. Gilbert as the four of them cut across the O’Dwyers’ lawn.

“Something’s going on in the cornfield, Mom, ” she said.

My mother was reading Moliè re, whom she had studied so intensely in college but hadn’t looked at since. Beside her were the books that had marked her as an avant-garde undergraduate: Sartre, Colette, Proust, Flaubert. She had pulled them off the shelves in her bedroom and promised herself she would reread them that year.

“I’m not interested, ” she said to Lindsey, “but I’m sure your father will be when he gets home. Why don’t you go up and play with your brother? ” My sister had dutifully hovered for weeks now, paying court to our mother regardless of the signals she gave. There was something on the other side of the icy surface. Lindsey was sure of it. She stayed by my mother, sitting by her chair and watching our neighbors outside the window.

By the time darkness fell, the candles the latecomers had had the foresight to bring lit the cornfield. It seemed like everyone I’d ever known or sat next to in a classroom from kindergarten to eighth grade was there. Mr. Botte saw that something was happening when he’d come out of the school after preparing his classroom for the next day’s annual animal digestion experiment. He’d strolled over, and, when he realized what it was, he let himself back into the school and made some calls. There had been a secretary who had been overcome by my death. She came with her son. There had been some teachers who hadn’t come to the official school memorial.

The rumors of Mr. Harvey’s suspected guilt had begun to make their way from neighbor to neighbor on Thanksgiving night. By the next afternoon it was the only thing the neighbors could talk about – was it possible? Could that strange man who had lived so quietly among them have killed Susie Salmon? But no one had dared approach my family to find out the details. Cousins of friends or fathers of the boys who cut their lawn were asked if they knew anything. Anyone who might know what the police were doing had been buddied up to in the past week, and so my memorial was both a way to mark my memory and a way for the neighbors to seek comfort from one another. A murderer had lived among them, passed them on the street, bought Girl Scout cookies from their daughters and magazine subscriptions from their sons.

In my heaven I buzzed with heat and energy as more and more people reached the cornfield and lit their candles and began to hum a low, dirgelike song for which Mr. O’Dwyer called back to the distant memory of his Dublin grandfather. My neighbors were awkward at first, but the secretary from the school clung to Mr. O’Dwyer as his voice gave forth, and she added her less melodious one. Ruana Singh stood stiffly in an outer circle away from her son. Dr.

Singh had called as she was leaving to say he would be sleeping overnight in his office. But other fathers, coming home from their offices, parked their cars in their driveways only to get out and follow their neighbors. How could they both work to support their families and watch their children to make sure they were safe? As a group they would learn it was impossible, no matter how many rules they laid down. What had happened to me could happen to anyone.

No one had called my house. My family was left undisturbed. The impenetrable barrier that surrounded the shingles, the chimney, the woodpile, the driveway, the fence, was like a layer of clear ice that coated the trees when it rained and then froze. Our house looked the same as every other one on the block, but it was not the same. Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.

When the sky had turned a dappled rose, Lindsey realized what was happening.

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