The Lovely Bones (18 page)

Back then she talked to us about mythology, which she had studied in school. She liked to tell us stories about Persephone
and Zeus. She bought us illustrated books on the Norse gods, which gave us nightmares. She had gotten her master’s in English—having
fought tooth and nail with Grandma Lynn to go so far in school—and still held on to vague ideas of teaching when the two of
us were old enough to be left on our own.

Those bath times blur together, as do all the gods and goddesses, but what I remember most is watching things hit my mother
while I looked at her, how the life she had wanted and the loss of it reached her in waves. As her firstborn, I thought it
was me who took away all those dreams of what she had wanted to be.

My mother would lift Lindsey out of the tub first, dry her, and listen to her chatter about ducks and cuts. Then she would
get me out of the tub and though I tried to be quiet the warm water made my sister and me drunk, and we talked to my mother
about everything that mattered to us. Boys that teased us or how another family down the block had a puppy and why couldn’t
we have one too. She would listen seriously as if she were mentally noting the points of our agenda on a steno pad to which
she would later refer.

“Well, first things first,” she summed up. “Which means a nice nap for the two of you!”

She and I would tuck Lindsey in together. I stood by the bed as she kissed my sister on her forehead and brushed back her
hair from her face. I think competition started there for me. Who got the better kiss, the longer time after the bath with
Mom.

Luckily, I always won this. When I look back now I see that my mother had become—and very quickly after they moved into that
house—lonely. Because I was the oldest, I became her closest friend.

I was too little to know what she was really saying to me, but I loved to be hushed to sleep by the soft lullaby of her words.
One of the blessings of my heaven is that I can go back to these moments, live them again, and be with my mother in a way
I never could have been. I reach my hand across the Inbetween and take the hand of that young lonely mother in mine.

What she said to a four-year-old about Helen of Troy: “A feisty woman who screwed things up.” About Margaret Sanger: “She
was judged by her looks, Susie. Because she looked like a mouse, no one expected her to last.” Gloria Steinem: “I feel horrible,
but I wish she’d trim those nails.” Our neighbors: “An idiot in tight pants; oppressed by that prig of a husband; typically
provincial and judgmental of everyone.”

“Do you know who Persephone is?” she asked me absently one Thursday. But I didn’t answer. By then I’d learned to hush when
she brought me into my room. My sister’s and my time was in the bathroom as we were being toweled off. Lindsey and I could
talk about anything then. In my bedroom it was Mommy’s time.

She took the towel and draped it over the spindle knob of my four-poster bed. “Imagine our neighbor Mrs. Tarking as Persephone,”
she said. She opened the drawer of the dresser and handed me my underpants. She always doled out my clothes piecemeal, not
wanting to pressure me. She understood my needs early. If I was aware I would have to tie laces I would not have been able
to put my feet into socks.

“She’s wearing a long white robe, like a sheet draped over her shoulders, but made out of some nice shiny or light fabric,
like silk. And she has sandals made of gold and she’s surrounded by torches which are light made out of flames…”

She went to the drawer to get my undershirt and absentmindedly put it over my head instead of leaving it to me. Once my mother
was launched I could take advantage of it—be the baby again. I never protested and claimed to be grown up or a big girl. Those
afternoons were about listening to my mysterious mother.

She pulled back the tough-cord Sears bedspread, and I scooted over to the far side along the wall. She always checked her
watch then and afterward she would say, “Just for a little while,” and slide off her shoes and slip in between the sheets
with me.

For both of us it was about getting lost. She got lost in her story. I got lost in her talk.

She would tell me about Persephone’s mother, Demeter, or Cupid and Psyche, and I would listen to her until I fell asleep.
Sometimes my parents’ laughter in the room beside me or the sounds of their late-afternoon lovemaking would wake me up. I
would lie there in half-sleep, listening. I liked to pretend that I was in the warm hold of a ship from one of the stories
my father read to us, and that all of us were on the ocean and the waves were rolling gently up against the sides of the ship.
The laughter, the small sounds of muffled moaning, would usher me back under into sleep.

But then my mother’s escape, her half-measure return to the outside world, had been smashed when I was ten and Lindsey nine.
She’d missed her period and had taken the fateful car trip to the doctor. Underneath her smile and exclamations to my sister
and me were fissures that led somewhere deep inside her. But because I didn’t want to, because I was a child, I chose not to
follow them. I grabbed the smile like a prize and entered the land of wonder of whether I would be the sister to a little
boy or to a little girl.

If I had paid attention, I would have noticed signs. Now I see the shifting, how the stack of books on my parents’ bedside
table changed from catalogs for local colleges, encyclopedias of mythology, novels by James, Eliot, and Dickens, to the works
of Dr. Spock. Then came gardening books and cookbooks until for her birthday two months before I died, I thought the perfect
gift was
Better Homes and Gardens Guide to Entertaining.
When she realized she was pregnant the third time, she sealed the more mysterious mother off. Bottled up for years behind
that wall, that needy part of her had grown, not shrunk, and in Len, the greed to get out, to smash, destroy, rescind, overtook
her. Her body led, and in its wake would be the pieces left to her.

It was not easy for me to witness, but I did.

Their first embrace was hurried, fumbled, passionate.

“Abigail,” Len said, his two hands now on either side of her waist underneath the coat, the gauzy gown barely a veil between
them. “Think of what you’re doing.”

“I’m tired of thinking,” she said. Her hair was floating above her head because of the fan beside them—in an aureole. Len blinked
as he looked at her. Marvelous, dangerous, wild.

“Your husband,” he said.

“Kiss me,” she said. “Please.”

I was watching a beg for leniency on my mother’s part. My mother was moving physically through time to flee from me. I could
not hold her back.

Len kissed her forehead hard and closed his eyes. She took his hand and placed it on her breast. She whispered in his ear.
I knew what was happening. Her rage, her loss, her despair. The whole life lost tumbling out in an arc on that roof, clogging
up her being. She needed Len to drive the dead daughter out.

He pushed her back into the stucco surface of the wall as they kissed, and my mother held on to him as if on the other side
of his kiss there could be a new life.

* * *

On my way home from the junior high, I would sometimes stop at the edge of our property and watch my mother ride the ride-on
mower, looping in and out among the pine trees, and I could remember then how she used to whistle in the mornings as she made
her tea and how my father, rushing home on Thursdays, would bring her marigolds and her face would light up yellowy in delight.
They had been deeply, separately, wholly in love—apart from her children my mother could reclaim this love, but with them
she began to drift. It was my father who grew toward us as the years went by; it was my mother who grew away.

Beside his hospital bed, Lindsey had fallen asleep while holding our father’s hand. My mother, still mussed, passed by Hal
Heckler in the visitors’ area, and a moment later so did Len. Hal didn’t need more than this. He grabbed his helmet and went
off down the hall.

After a brief visit to the ladies’ room, my mother was heading in the direction of my father’s room when Hal stopped her.

“Your daughter’s in there,” Hal called out. She turned.

“Hal Heckler,” he said, “Samuel’s brother. I was at the memorial service.”

“Oh, yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you.”

“Not your job,” he said.

There was an awkward pause.

“So, Lindsey called me and I brought her here an hour ago.”

“Oh.”

“Buckley’s with a neighbor,” he said.

“Oh.” She was staring at him. In her eyes she was climbing back to the surface. She used his face to climb back to.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m a little upset—that’s understandable, right?”

“Perfectly,” he said, speaking slowly. “I just wanted to let you know that your daughter is in there with your husband. I’ll
be in the visitors’ area if you need me.”

“Thank you,” she said. She watched him turn away and paused for a moment to listen to the worn heels of his motorcycle boots
reverberate down the linoleum hall.

She caught herself then, shook herself back to where she was, never guessing for a second that that had been Hal’s purpose
in greeting her.

Inside the room it was dark now, the fluorescent light behind my father flickering so slightly it lit only the most obvious
masses in the room. My sister was in a chair pulled up alongside the bed, her head resting on the side of it with her hand
extended out to touch my father. My father, deep under, was lying on his back. My mother could not know that I was there with
them, that here were the four of us so changed now from the days when she tucked Lindsey and me into bed and went to make
love to her husband, our father. Now she saw the pieces. She saw that my sister and father, together, had become a piece.
She was glad of it.

I had played a hide-and-seek game of love with my mother as I grew up, courting her attention and approval in a way that I
had never had to with my father.

I didn’t have to play hide-and-seek anymore. As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one
of the things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.

Late at night the air above hospitals and senior citizen homes was often thick and fast with souls. Holly and I watched sometimes
on the nights when sleep was lost to us. We came to realize how these deaths seemed choreographed from somewhere far away.
Not our heaven. And so we began to suspect that there was a place more all-encompassing than where we were.

Franny came to watch with us in the beginning.

“It’s one of my secret pleasures,” she admitted. “After all these years I still love to watch the souls that float and spin
in masses, all of them clamoring at once inside the air.”

“I don’t see anything,” I said that first time.

“Watch closely,” she said, “and hush.”

But I felt them before I saw them, small warm sparks along my arms. Then there they were, fireflies lighting up and expanding
in howls and swirls as they abandoned human flesh.

“Like snowflakes,” Franny said, “none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before.”

W
hen she returned to junior high in the fall of 1974, Lindsey was not only the sister of the murdered girl but the child of
a “crackpot,” “nutcase,” “looney-tunes,” and the latter hurt her more because it wasn’t true.

The rumors Lindsey and Samuel heard in the first weeks of the school year wove in and out of the rows of student lockers like
the most persistent of snakes. Now the swirl had grown to include Brian Nelson and Clarissa who, thankfully, had both entered
the high school that year. At Fairfax Brian and Clarissa clung to each other, exploiting what had happened to them, using
my fa-ther’s debasement as a varnish of cool they could coat themselves with by retelling throughout the school what had happened
that night in the cornfield.

Ray and Ruth walked by on the inside of the glass wall that looked out on the outdoor lounge. On the false boulders where
the supposed bad kids sat, they would see Brian holding court. His walk that year went from anxious scarecrow to masculine
strut. Clarissa, giggly with both fear and lust, had unlocked her privates and slept with Brian. However haphazardly, everyone
I’d known was growing up.

Buckley entered kindergarten that year and immediately arrived home with a crush on his teacher, Miss Koekle. She held his
hand so gently whenever she had to lead him to the bathroom or help explain an assignment that her force was irresistible.
In one way he profited—she would often sneak him an extra cookie or a softer sit-upon—but in another he was held aloft and
apart from his fellow kindergartners. By my death he was made different among the one group—children—in which he might have
been anonymous.

Samuel would walk Lindsey home and then go down the main road and thumb his way to Hal’s bike shop. He counted on buddies
of his brother’s to recognize him, and he reached his destination in various pasted-together bikes and trucks that Hal would
fine-tune for the driver when they pulled up.

He did not go inside our house for a while. No one but family did. By October my father was just beginning to get up and around.
His doctors had told him that his right leg would always be stiff, but if he stretched and stayed limber it wouldn’t present
too much of an obstacle. “No running bases, but everything else,” the surgeon said the morning after his surgery, when my
father woke to find Lindsey beside him and my mother standing by the window staring out at the parking lot.

Buckley went right from basking in the shine of Miss Koekle home to burrow in the empty cave of my father’s heart. He asked
ceaseless questions about the “fake knee,” and my father warmed to him.

“The knee came from outer space,” my father would say. “They brought pieces of the moon back and carved them up and now they
use them for things like this.”

“Wow,” Buckley would say, grinning. “When can Nate see?”