The Lovely Bones (23 page)

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 flipped 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.

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 turtleneck, 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.