The Lovely Bones (26 page)

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—tiny upscale towns where everyone was a stranger—and,
no matter how hard she tried to focus on the hopeful unfamiliar, when she walked inside a gift shop or café the four walls
around her would begin to breathe like a lung. She would feel it then, creeping up the side of her calves and into her gut,
the onslaught, the grief coming, the tears like a small relentless army approaching the front lines of her eyes, and she would
breathe in, taking a large gulp of air to try to stop herself from crying in a public place. She asked for coffee and toast
in a restaurant and buttered it with tears. She went into a flower shop and asked for daffodils, and when there were none she
felt robbed. It was such a small wish—a bright yellow flower.

The first impromptu memorial in the cornfield opened in my father the need for more. Yearly now, he organized a memorial, to
which fewer and fewer neighbors and friends came. There were the regulars, like Ruth, and the Gilberts, but more and more
the group was filled out by kids from the high school who, as time went by, knew only my name and even that only as a large
dark rumor invoked as a warning to any student that might prove too much a loner. Especially girls.

Each time my name was said by these strangers it felt like a pinprick. It was not the pleasant sensation that it could be
when my father said it or when Ruth wrote it in her journal. It was the sensation of being simultaneously resurrected and
buried within the same breath. As if in an economics class I had been ushered over into a column of transmutable commodities:
the Murdered. A few teachers, like Mr. Botte, remembered me as a real girl. Sometimes on his lunch hour he would go and sit
in his red Fiat and think about the daughter he had lost to leukemia. In the distance, out past his window, the cornfield loomed.
Often, he would say a prayer for me.

In just a few short years, Ray Singh grew so handsome that a spell radiated from him when he walked into a crowd. His adult
face had still not settled on him, but, now that he was seventeen, it was just around the corner. He exuded a dreamy asexuality
that made him attractive to both men and women, with his long lashes and hooded eyelids, his thick black hair, and the same
delicate features that were still a boy’s.

I would watch Ray with a longing different from that which I had for anyone else. A longing to touch and hold him, to understand
the very body that he examined with the coldest of eyes. He would sit at his desk and read his favorite book—
Gray’s Anatomy
—and depending on what he was reading about he would use his fingers to palpate his carotid artery or his thumb to press down
and follow the longest muscle in his body—the sartorius, which ran from the outside of his hip to the inside of his knee.
His thinness was a boon to him then, the bones and muscles clearly distinguished beneath the skin.

By the time he packed his bags for Penn, he had committed so many words and their definitions to memory that I grew worried.
With all that, how could his mind contain anything else? Ruth’s friendship, his mother’s love, my memory would be pushed to
the back as he made way for the eye’s crystalline lens and its capsule, the semicircular canals of the ear, or my favorite,
the qualities of the sympathetic nervous system.

I need not have worried. Ruana cast about the house for something, anything, that her son might bring with him that was equal
in heft and weight to
Gray’s
and that would, she hoped, keep the flower-gathering side of him alive. Without his knowing, she tucked the book of Indian
poetry into his luggage. Inside was the long-forgotten photo of me. When he unpacked inside Hill House dormitory, my picture
fell on the floor by his bed. Despite how he could dissect it—the vessels of the globe of my eye, the surgical anatomy of my
nasal fossae, the light tincture of my epidermis—he could not avoid them, the lips he had once kissed.

In June 1977, on the day of what would have been my graduation, Ruth and Ray were already gone. The day classes ended at Fairfax,
Ruth moved to New York City with her mother’s old red suitcase full of new black clothes. Having graduated early, Ray was
already at the end of his freshman year at Penn.

In our kitchen that same day, Grandma Lynn gave Buckley a book on gardening. She told him about how plants came from seeds.
That radishes, which he hated, grew fastest, but that flowers, which he loved, could grow from seeds as well. And she began
to teach him the names: zinnias and marigolds, pansies and lilacs, carnations and petunias, and morning glory vines.

* * *

Occasionally my mother called from California. My parents had hurried and difficult conversations. She asked after Buckley
and Lindsey and Holiday. She asked how the house was holding up and whether there was anything he needed to tell her.

“We still miss you,” he said in December 1977, when the leaves had all fallen and been blown or raked away but even still,
with the ground waiting to receive it, there had been no snow.