The Lovely Bones 13 страница

My mother never lifted her eyes from her book.

“They’re having a ceremony for Susie, ” Lindsey said. “Listen. ” She cracked the window open. In rushed the cold December air and the distant sound of singing.

My mother used all her energy. “We’ve had the memorial, ” she said. “That’s done for me. ”

“What’s done? ”

My mother’s elbows were on the armrests of the yellow winged-back chair.

She leaned slightly forward and her face moved into shadow, making it harder for Lindsey to see the expression on her face. “I don’t believe she’s waiting for us out there. I don’t think lighting candles and doing all that stuff is honoring her memory. There are other ways to honor it. ”

“Like what? ” Lindsey said. She sat cross-legged on the rug in front of my mother, who sat in her chair with her finger marking her place in Moliè re.

“I want to be more than a mother. ”

Lindsey thought she could understand this. She wanted to be more than a girl.

My mother put the Moliè re book on top of the coffee table and scooted forward on the chair until she lowered herself down onto the rug. I was struck by this. My mother did not sit on the floor, she sat at the bill-paying desk or in the wing chairs or sometimes on the end of the couch with Holiday curled up beside her.

She took my sister’s hand in hers.

“Are you going to leave us? ” Lindsey asked.

My mother wobbled. How could she say what she already knew? Instead, she told a lie. “I promise I won’t leave you. ”

What she wanted most was to be that free girl again, stacking china at Wanamaker’s, hiding from her manager the Wedgwood cup with the handle she broke, dreaming of living in Paris like de Beauvoir and Sartre, and going home that day laughing to herself about the nerdy Jack Salmon, who was pretty cute even if he hated smoke. The café s in Paris were full of cigarettes, she’d told him, and he’d seemed impressed. At the end of that summer when she invited him in and they had, both for the first time, made love, she’d smoked a cigarette, and for the joke he said he’d have one too. When she handed him the damaged blue china to use as an ashtray, she used all her favorite words to embellish the story of breaking and then hiding, inside her coat, the now homely Wedgwood cup.

“Come here, baby, ” my mother said, and Lindsey did. She leaned her back into my mother’s chest, and my mother rocked her awkwardly on the rug. “You are doing so well, Lindsey; you are keeping your father alive. ” And they heard his car pull into the drive.

Lindsey let herself be held while my mother thought of Ruana Singh out behind her house, smoking. The sweet scent of Dunhills had drifted out onto the road and taken my mother far away. Her last boyfriend before my father had loved Gauloises. He had been a pretentious little thing, she thought, but he had also been oh-so-serious in a way that let her be oh-so-serious as well.

“Do you see the candles, Mom? ” Lindsey asked, as she stared out the window.

“Go get your father, ” my mother said.

My sister met my father in the mud room, hanging up his keys and coat. Yes, they would go, he said. Of course they would go.

“Daddy! ” My brother called from the second floor, where my sister and father went to meet him.

“Your call, ” my father said as Buckley bodychecked him.

“I’m tired of protecting him, ” Lindsey said. “It doesn’t feel real not to include him. Susie’s gone. He knows that. ”

My brother stared up at her.

“There is a party for Susie, ” Lindsey said. “And me and Daddy are taking you. ”

“Is Mommy sick? ” Buckley asked.

Lindsey didn’t want to lie to him, but she also felt it was an accurate description of what she knew.

“Yes. ”

Lindsey agreed to meet our father downstairs while she brought Buckley into his room to change his clothes.

“I see her, you know, ” Buckley said, and Lindsey looked at him.

“She comes and talks to me, and spends time with me when you’re at soccer. ” Lindsey didn’t know what to say, but she reached out and grabbed him and squeezed him to her, the way he often squeezed Holiday.

“You are so special, ” she said to my brother. “I’ll always be here, no matter what. ”

My father made his slow way down the stairs, his left hand tightening on the wooden banister, until he reached the flagstone landing.

His approach was loud. My mother took her Moliè re book and crept into the dining room, where he wouldn’t see her. She read her book, standing in the corner of the dining room and hiding from her family. She waited for the front door to open and close.

My neighbors and teachers, friends and family, circled an arbitrary spot not far from where I’d been killed. My father, sister, and brother heard the singing again once they were outside. Everything in my father leaned and pitched toward the warmth and light. He wanted so badly to have me remembered in the minds and hearts of everyone. I knew something as I watched: almost everyone was saying goodbye to me. I was becoming one of many little-girl-losts. They would go back to their homes and put me to rest, a letter from the past never reopened or reread. And I could say goodbye to them, wish them well, bless them somehow for their good thoughts. A handshake in the street, a dropped item picked up and retrieved and handed back, or a friendly wave from a distant window, a nod, a smile, a moment when the eyes lock over the antics of a child.

Ruth saw my three family members first, and she tugged on Ray’s sleeve. “Go help him, ” she whispered. And Ray, who had met my father on his first day of what would prove a long journey to try to find my killer, moved forward. Samuel came away too. Like youthful pastors, they brought my father and sister and brother into the group, which made a wide berth for them and grew silent.

My father had not been outside the house except to drive back and forth to work or sit out in the backyard, for months, nor had he seen his neighbors. Now he looked at them, from face to face, until he realized I had been loved by people he didn’t even recognize. His heart filled up, warm again as it had not been in what seemed so long to him – save small forgotten moments with Buckley, the accidents of love that happened with his son.

He looked at Mr. O’Dwyer. “Stan, ” he said, “Susie used to stand at the front window during the summer and listen to you singing in your yard. She loved it.

Will you sing for us? ”

And in the kind of grace that is granted, but rarely, and not when you wish it most – to save a loved one from dying – Mr. O’Dwyer wobbled only a moment on his first note, then sang loud and clear and fine.

Everyone joined in.

I remembered those summer nights my father spoke of. How the darkness would take forever to come and with it I always hoped for it to cool down. Sometimes, standing at the open window in the front hall, I would feel a breeze, and on that breeze was the music coming from the O’Dwyers’ house. As I listened to Mr.

O’Dwyer run through all the Irish ballads he had ever learned, the breeze would begin to smell of earth and air and a mossy scent that meant only one thing: a thunderstorm.

There was a wonderful temporary hush then, as Lindsey sat in her room on the old couch studying, my father sat in his den reading his books, my mother downstairs doing needlepoint or washing up.

I liked to change into a long cotton nightgown and go out onto the back porch, where, as the rain began falling in heavy drops against the roof, breezes came in the screens from all sides and swept my gown against me. It was warm and wonderful and the lightning would come and, a few moments later, the thunder.

My mother would stand at the open porch door, and, after she said her standard warning, “You’re going to catch your death of cold, ” she grew quiet. We both listened together to the rain pour down and the thunder clap and smelled the earth rising to greet us.

“You look invincible, ” my mother said one night.

I loved these times, when we seemed to feel the same thing. I turned to her, wrapped in my thin gown, and said:

“I am. ”

Snapshots

With the camera my parents gave me, I took dozens of candids of my family. So many that my father forced me to choose which rolls I thought should be developed. As the cost of my obsession mounted, I began keeping two boxes in my closet. “Rolls to be sent out” and “Rolls to hold back. ” It was, my mother said, the only hint of any organizational skills I possessed.

I loved the way the burned-out flashcubes of the Kodak Instamatic marked a moment that had passed, one that would now be gone forever except for a picture. When they were spent, I took the cubed four-corner flashbulbs and passed them from hand to hand until they cooled. The broken filaments of the flash would turn a molten marble blue or sometimes smoke the thin glass black. I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found a way to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it.

On a summer evening in 1975, my mother turned to my father and said:

“Have you ever made love in the ocean? ”

And he said, “No. ”

“Neither have I, ” my mother said. “Let’s pretend it is the ocean and that I am going away and we might never see each other again. ” The next day she left for her father’s cabin in New Hampshire.

That same summer, Lindsey or Buckley or my father would open the front door and find a casserole or a bundt cake on the front stoop. Sometimes an apple pie

– my father’s favorite. The food was unpredictable. The casseroles Mrs. Stead made were horrible. The bundt cakes Mrs. Gilbert made were overly moist but bearable. The apple pies from Ruana: heaven on Earth.

In his study during the long nights after my mother left, my father would try to lose himself by rereading passages from the Civil War letters of Mary Chestnut to her husband. He tried to let go of any blame, of any hope, but it was impossible. He did manage a small smile once.

“Ruana Singh bakes a mean apple pie, ” he wrote in his notebook.

In the fall he picked up the phone one afternoon to hear Grandma Lynn.

“Jack, ” my grandmother announced, “I am thinking of coming to stay. ” My father was silent, but the line was riddled with his hesitation.

“I would like to make myself available to you and the children. I’ve been knocking around in this mausoleum long enough. ”

“Lynn, we’re just beginning to start over again, ” he stammered. Still, he couldn’t depend on Nate’s mother to watch Buckley forever. Four months after my mother left, her temporary absence was beginning to take on the feel of permanence.

My grandmother insisted. I watched her resist the remaining slug of vodka in her glass. “I will contain my drinking until” – she thought hard here – “after five o’clock, and, ” she said, “what the hell, I’ll stop altogether if you should find it necessary. ”

“Do you know what you’re saying? ”

My grandmother felt a clarity from her phone hand down to her pump-encased feet. “Yes, I do. I think. ”

It was only after he got off the phone that he let himself wonder, Where will we PUT her?

It was obvious to everyone.

By December 1975, a year had passed since Mr. Harvey had packed his bags, but there was still no sign of him. For a while, until the tape dirtied or the paper tore, store owners kept a scratchy sketch of him taped to their windows. Lindsey and Samuel walked in the neighborhood or hung out at Hal’s bike shop. She wouldn’t go to the diner where the other kids went. The owner of the diner was a law and order man. He had blown up the sketch of George Harvey to twice its size and taped it to the front door. He willingly gave the grisly details to any customer who asked – young girl, cornfield, found only an elbow.

Finally Lindsey asked Hal to give her a ride to the police station. She wanted to know what exactly they were doing.

They bid farewell to Samuel at the bike shop and Hal gave Lindsey a ride through a wet December snow.

From the start, Lindsey’s youth and purpose had caught the police off guard.

As more and more of them realized who she was, they gave her a wider and wider berth. Here was this girl, focused, mad, fifteen. Her breasts were perfect small cups, her legs gangly but curved, her eyes like flint and flower petals.

While Lindsey and Hal waited outside the captain’s office on a wooden bench, she thought she saw something across the room that she recognized. It was on Detective Fenerman’s desk and it stood out in the room because of its color. What her mother had always distinguished as Chinese red, a harsher red than rose red, it was the red of classic lipsticks, rarely found in nature. Our mother was proud of her ability to wear Chinese red, noting each time she tied a particular scarf around her neck that it was a color even Grandma Lynn dared not wear.

“Hal, ” she said, every muscle tense as she stared at the increasingly familiar object on Fenerman’s desk.

“Yes. ”

“Do you see that red cloth? ”

“Yes. ”

“Can you go and get it for me? ”

When Hal looked at her, she said: “I think it’s my mother’s. ” As Hal stood to retrieve it, Len entered the squad room from behind where Lindsey sat. He tapped her on the shoulder just as he realized what Hal was doing. Lindsey and Detective Fenerman stared at each other.

“Why do you have my mother’s scarf? ”

He stumbled. “She might have left it in my car one day. ” Lindsey stood and faced him. She was clear-eyed and driving fast toward the worst news yet. “What was she doing in your car? ”

“Hello, Hal, ” Len said.

Hal held the scarf in his hand. Lindsey grabbed it away, her voice growing angry. “Why do you have my mother’s scarf? ”

And though Len was the detective, Hal saw it first – it arched over her like a rainbow – Prisma Color understanding. The way it happened in algebra class or English when my sister was the first person to figure out the sum of x or point out the double entendres to her peers. Hal put his hand on Lindsey’s shoulder to guide her. “We should go, ” he said.

And later she cried out her disbelief to Samuel in the back room of the bike shop.

When my brother turned seven, he built a fort for me. It was something the two of us had said we would always do together and something my father could not bring himself to do. It reminded him too much of building the tent with the disappeared Mr. Harvey.

A family with five little girls had moved into Mr. Harvey’s house. Laughter traveled over into my father’s study from the built-in pool they had poured the spring after George Harvey ran. The sound of little girls – girls to spare.

The cruelty of it became like glass shattering in my father’s ears. In the spring of 1976, with my mother gone, he would shut the window of his den on even the hottest evenings to avoid the sound. He watched his solitary little boy in among the three pussy-willow bushes, talking to himself. Buckley had brought empty terracotta pots from the garage. He hauled the boot scraper out from where it lay forgotten at the side of the house. Anything to make walls for the fort. With the help of Samuel and Hal and Lindsey, he edged two huge boulders from the front of the driveway into the backyard. This was such an unexpected windfall that it prompted Samuel to ask, “How are you going to make a roof? ” And Buckley looked at him in wonder as Hal mentally scanned the contents of his bike shop and remembered two scrap sheets of corrugated tin he had leaning up against the back wall.

So one hot night my father looked down and didn’t see his son anymore.

Buckley was nestled inside his fort. On his hands and knees, he would pull the terra-cotta pots in after him and then prop a board against them that reached almost up to the wavy roof. Just enough light came in to read by. Hal had obliged him and painted in big black spray paint letters KEEP OUT on one side of the plywood door.

Mostly he read the Avengers and the X-Men. He dreamed of being Wolverine, who had a skeleton made of the strongest metal in the universe and who could heal from any wound overnight. At the oddest moments he would think about me, miss my voice, wish I would come out from the house and pound on the roof of his fort and demand to be let in. Sometimes he wished Samuel and Lindsey hung out more or that my father would play with him as he once had. Play without that always-worried look underneath the smile, that desperate worry that surrounded everything now like an invisible force field. But my brother would not let himself miss my mother. He tunneled into stories where weak men changed into strong half-animals or used eye beams or magic hammers to power through steel or climb up the sides of skyscrapers. He was the Hulk when angry and Spidey the rest of the time. When he felt his heart hurt he turned into something stronger than a little boy, and he grew up this way. A heart that flashed from heart to stone, heart to stone. As I watched I thought of what Grandma Lynn liked to say when Lindsey and I rolled our eyes or grimaced behind her back.

“Watch out what faces you make. You’ll freeze that way. ” One day, Buckley came home from the second grade with a story he’d written:

“Once upon a time there was a kid named Billy. He liked to explore. He saw a hole and went inside but he never came out. The End. ” My father was too distracted to see anything in this. Mimicking my mother, he taped it to the fridge in the same place Buckley’s long-forgotten drawing of the Inbetween had been. But my brother knew something was wrong with his story.

Knew it by how his teacher had reacted, doing a double take like they did in his comic books. He took the story down and brought it to my old room while Grandma Lynn was downstairs. He folded it into a tiny square and put it inside the now-empty insides of my four-poster bed.

On a hot day in the fall of 1976, Len Fenerman visited the large safety box in the evidence room. The bones of the neighborhood animals he had found in Mr.

Harvey’s crawlspace were there, along with the lab confirmation of evidence of quicklime. He had supervised the investigation, but no matter how much they dug, or how deep, no other bones or bodies had been found on his property. The blood stain on the floor of his garage was my only calling card. Len had spent weeks, then months, poring over a xerox of the sketch Lindsey had stolen. He had led a team back into the field, and they had dug and then dug again. Finally they found an old Coke bottle at the opposite end of the field. There it was, a solid link: fingerprints matching Mr. Harvey’s prints, which were all over his house, and fingerprints matching those on my birth certificate. There was no question in his mind: Jack Salmon had been right from the beginning.

But no matter how hard he looked for the man himself, it was as if George Harvey had evaporated into thin air when he hit the property line. He could find no records with that name attached. Officially, he did not exist.

What he had left behind were his dollhouses. So Len called the man who sold them for him, and who took commissions from select stores, and the wealthy people who ordered replicas of their own homes. Nothing. He had called the makers of the miniature chairs, the tiny doors and windows with beveled glass and brass hardware, and the manufacturer of the cloth shrubs and trees. Nothing.

He sat down among the evidence at a barren communal desk in the basement of the station. He looked through the stack of extra fliers that my father had made up. He had memorized my face, but still he looked at them. He had come to believe that the best hope in my case might be the recent rise in development in the area. With all the land churning and changing, perhaps other clues would be found that would provide the answer he needed.

In the bottom of the box was the bag with my jingle-bell hat. When he’d handed it to my mother, she had collapsed on the rug. He still couldn’t pinpoint the moment he’d fallen in love with her. I knew it was the day he’d sat in our family room while my mother drew stick figures on butcher paper and Buckley and Nate slept toe to toe on the couch. I felt sorry for him. He had tried to solve my murder and he had failed. He had tried to love my mother and he had failed.

Len looked at the drawing of the cornfield that Lindsey had stolen and forced himself to acknowledge this: in his cautiousness, he had allowed a murderer to get away. He could not shake his guilt. He knew, if no one else did, that by being with my mother in the mall that day he was the one to blame for George Harvey’s freedom.

He took his wallet out of his back pocket and laid down the photos of all the unsolved cases he had ever worked on. Among them was his wife’s. He turned them all face-down. “Gone, ” he wrote on each one of them. He would no longer wait for a date to mark an understanding of who or why or how. He would never understand all the reasons why his wife had killed herself. He would never understand how so many children went missing. He placed these photos in the box with my evidence and turned the lights off in the cold room.

But he did not know this:

In Connecticut on September 10, 1976, a hunter on his way back to his car saw something shiny on the ground. My Pennsylvania keystone charm. Then he saw that the ground nearby had been partially dug up by a bear. Exposed by the bear were the unmistakable bones of a child’s foot.

My mother made it through only one winter in New Hampshire before she got the idea of driving all the way to California. It was something she had always thought she would do but had never done. A man she met in New Hampshire had told her about the work to be had in wineries in the valleys above San Francisco. It was easy to get, it was physical, and it could be, if you wanted it to be, very anonymous. All three sounded good to her.

This man had also wanted to sleep with her, but she said no. By then, she knew this wasn’t the road out anymore. From the first night with Len in the innards of the mall she had known the two of them weren’t building anything.

She could not even really feel him.

She packed her bags for California and sent cards to my brother and sister from every town she stopped in. “Hello, I’m in Dayton. Ohio’s state bird is the cardinal. ” “Reached the Mississippi last night at sunset. It certainly is a big river. ” In Arizona, when she was eight states beyond the farthest she had ever been, she paid for her room and brought a bucket of ice with her from the machine outside. The next day she would reach California, and to celebrate she had bought herself a bottle of champagne. She thought of what the man in New Hampshire had said, how he had spent one whole year scraping the mold out of the giant casks that held wine. He had lain flat on his back and had to use a knife to peel back the layers of mold. The mold had the color and consistency of liver, and no matter how hard he bathed he would still attract fruit flies for hours afterward.

She sipped champagne from a plastic cup and looked at herself in the mirror.

She forced herself to look.

She remembered sitting in our living room then, with me and my sister, my brother and father, on the first New Year’s Eve that all five of us had stayed up.

She had shaped the day around making sure Buckley got enough sleep.

When he woke up after dark he was sure that someone better than Santa would come that night. In his mind he held a big bang image of the ultimate holiday, when he would be transported to toyland.

Hours later, as he yawned and leaned into my mother’s lap and she finger-combed his hair, my father ducked into the kitchen to make cocoa and my sister and I served German chocolate cake. When the clock struck twelve and there was only distant screaming and a few guns shot into the air in our neighborhood, my brother was unbelieving. Disappointment so swiftly and thoroughly overtook him that my mother was at a loss for what to do. She thought of it as sort of an infant Peggy Lee’s “Is that all there is? ” and then bawling.

She remembered my father had lifted Buckley up into his arms and started singing. The rest of us joined in. “Let ole acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind, should ole acquaintance be forgot and days of auld lang syne! ” And Buckley had stared at us. He captured the foreign words like bubbles floating above him in the air. “Lang syne? ” he said with a look of wonder.

“What does that mean? ” I asked my parents.

“The old days, ” my father said.

“Days long past, ” my mother said. But then, suddenly, she had started pinching the crumbs of her cake together on her plate.

“Hey, Ocean Eyes, ” my father said. “Where’d you go on us? ” And she remembered that she had met his question with a closing off, as though her spirit had a tap – twist to the right and she was up on her feet asking me to help her clean up.

In the fall of 1976, when she reached California, she drove directly to the beach and stopped her car. She felt like she had driven through nothing but families for four days – squabbling families, bawling families, screaming families, families under the miraculous strain of the day by day – and she was relieved to see the waves from the windshield of her car. She couldn’t help thinking of the books she had read in college. The Awakening. And what had happened to one writer, Virginia Woolf. It all seemed so wonderful back then – filmy and romantic

– stones in the pocket, walk into the waves.

She climbed down the cliffs after tying her sweater loosely around her waist.

Down below she could see nothing but jagged rocks and waves. She was careful, but I watched her feet more than the view she saw – I worried about her slipping.

My mother’s desire to reach those waves, touch her feet to another ocean on the other side of the country, was all she was thinking of – the pure baptismal goal of it. Whoosh and you can start over again. Or was life more like the horrible game in gym that has you running from one side of an enclosed space to another, picking up and setting down wooden blocks without end? She was thinking reach the waves, the waves, the waves, and I was watching her feet navigate the rocks, and when we heard her we did so together – looking up in shock.

It was a baby on the beach.

In among the rocks was a sandy cove, my mother now saw, and crawling across the sand on a blanket was a baby in knitted pink cap and singlet and boots. She was alone on the blanket with a stuffed white toy – my mother thought a lamb.

With their backs to my mother as she descended were a group of adults –

very official and frantic-looking – wearing black and navy with cool slants to their hats and boots. Then my wildlife photographer’s eye saw the tripods and silver circles rimmed by wire, which, when a young man moved them left or right, bounced light off or on the baby on her blanket.

My mother started laughing, but only one assistant turned to notice her up among the rocks; everyone else was too busy. This was an ad for something, I imagined, but what? New fresh infant girls to replace your own? As my mother laughed and I watched her face light up, I also saw it fall into strange lines.

She saw the waves behind the girl child and how both beautiful and intoxicating they were – they could sweep up so softly and remove this girl from the beach. All the stylish people could chase after her, but she would drown in a moment – no one, not even a mother who had every nerve attuned to anticipate disaster, could have saved her if the waves leapt up, if life went on as usual and freak accidents peppered a calm shore.

That same week she found work at the Krusoe Winery, in a valley above the bay. She wrote my sister and brother postcards filled with the bright fragments of her life, hoping in a postcard’s limited space she would sound cheery.

On her days off, she would walk down the streets of Sausalito or Santa Rosa –

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