The Lovely Bones (3 page)

That was the line my father said to my mother: “Nothing is ever certain.”

For three nights he hadn’t known how to touch my mother or what to say. Before, they had never found themselves broken together.
Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching, to borrow
from the stronger one’s strength. And they had never understood, as they did now, what the word
horror
meant.

“Nothing is ever certain,” my mother said, clinging to it as he had hoped she might.

My mother had been the one who knew the meaning of each charm on my bracelet—where we had gotten it and why I liked it. She
made a meticulous list of what I’d carried and worn. If found miles away and in isolation along a road, these clues might
lead a policeman there to link it to my death.

In my mind I had wavered between the bittersweet joy of seeing my mother name all the things I carried and loved and her futile
hope that these things mattered. That a stranger who found a cartoon character eraser or a rock star button would report it
to the police.

After Len’s phone call, my father reached out his hand and the two of them sat in the bed together, staring straight in front
of them. My mother numbly clinging to this list of things, my father feeling as if he were entering a dark tunnel. At some
point, it began to rain. I could feel them both thinking the same thing then, but neither of them said it. That I was out
there somewhere, in the rain. That they hoped I was safe. That I was dry somewhere, and warm.

Neither of them knew who fell asleep first; their bones aching with exhaustion, they drifted off and woke guiltily at the same
time. The rain, which had changed several times as the temperature dropped, was now hail, and the sound of it, of small stones
of ice hitting the roof above them, woke them together.

They did not speak. They looked at each other in the small light cast from the lamp left on across the room. My mother began
to cry, and my father held her, wiped her tears with the pad of his thumbs as they crested her cheekbones, and kissed her
very gently on the eyes.

I looked away from them then, as they touched. I moved my eyes into the cornfield, seeing if there was anything that in the
morning the police might find. The hail bent the stalks and drove all the animals into their holes. Not so deep beneath the
earth were the warrens of the wild rabbits I loved, the bunnies that ate the vegetables and flowers in the neighborhood nearby
and that sometimes, unwittingly, brought poison home to their dens. Then, inside the earth and so far away from the man or
woman who had laced a garden with toxic bait, an entire family of rabbits would curl into themselves and die.

On the morning of the tenth, my father poured the Scotch down the kitchen sink. Lindsey asked him why.

“I’m afraid I might drink it,” he said.

“What was the phone call?” my sister asked.

“What phone call?”

“I heard you say that thing you always say about Susie’s smile. About stars exploding.”

“Did I say that?”

“You got kind of goofy. It was a cop, wasn’t it?”

“No lies?”

“No lies,” Lindsey agreed.

“They found a body part. It might be Susie’s.”

It was a hard sock in the stomach. “What?”

“Nothing is ever certain,” my father tried.

Lindsey sat down at the kitchen table. “I’m going to be sick,” she said.

“Honey?”

“Dad, I want you to tell me what it was. Which body part, and then I’m going to need to throw up.”

My father got down a large metal mixing bowl. He brought it to the table and placed it near Lindsey before sitting down.

“Okay,” she said. “Tell me.”

“It was an elbow. The Gilberts’ dog found it.”

He held her hand and then she threw up, as she had promised, into the shiny silver bowl.

Later that morning the weather cleared, and not too far from my house the police roped off the cornfield and began their search.
The rain, sleet, snow, and hail melting and mixing had left the ground sodden; still, there was an obvious area where the
earth had been freshly manipulated. They began there and dug.

In places, the lab later found, there was a dense concentration of my blood mixed with the dirt, but at the time, the police
grew more and more frustrated, plying the cold wet ground and looking for girl.

Along the border of the soccer field, a few of my neighbors kept a respectful distance from the police tape, wondering at the
men dressed in heavy blue parkas wielding shovels and rakes like medical tools.

My father and mother remained at home. Lindsey stayed in her room. Buckley was nearby at his friend Nate’s house, where he
spent a lot of time these days. They had told him I was on an extended sleepover at Clarissa’s.

I knew where my body was but I could not tell them. I watched and waited to see what they would see. And then, like a thunderbolt,
late in the afternoon, a policeman held up his earth-caked fist and shouted.

“Over here!” he said, and the other officers ran to surround him.

The neighbors had gone home except for Mrs. Stead. After conferring around the discovering policeman, Detective Fenerman broke
their dark huddle and approached her.

“Mrs. Stead?” he said over the tape that separated them.

“Yes.”

“You have a child in the school?”

“Yes.”

“Could you come with me, please?”

A young officer led Mrs. Stead under the police tape and over the bumpy, churned-up cornfield to where the rest of the men stood.

“Mrs. Stead,” Len Fenerman said, “does this look familiar?” He held up a paperback copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird.
“Do they read this at the school?”

“Yes,” she said, her face draining of color as she said the small word.

“Do you mind if I ask you…” he began.

“Ninth grade,” she said, looking into Len Fenerman’s slate blue eyes. “Susie’s grade.” She was a therapist and relied on her
ability to hear bad news and discuss rationally the difficult details of her patients’ lives, but she found herself leaning
into the young policeman who had led her over. I could feel her wishing that she had gone home when the other neighbors had
left, wishing that she was in the living room with her husband, or out in the backyard with her son.

“Who teaches the class?”

“Mrs. Dewitt,” Mrs. Stead said. “The kids find it a real relief after
Othello.
”

“Othello?”

“Yes,” she said, her knowledge of the school suddenly very important right now—all the policemen listening. “Mrs. Dewitt likes
to modulate her reading list, and she does a big push right before Christmas with Shakespeare. Then she passes out Harper
Lee as a reward. If Susie was carrying around
To Kill a Mockingbird
it means she must have turned in her paper on
Othello
already.”

All of this checked out.

The police made calls. I watched the circle widen. Mrs. Dewitt had my paper. Eventually, she sent it back to my parents, unmarked,
through the mail. “Thought you would want to have this,” Mrs. Dewitt had written on a note attached to it. “I’m so very very
sorry.” Lindsey inherited the paper because it was too painful for my mother to read. “The Ostracized: One Man Alone,” I had
called it. Lindsey had suggested “The Ostracized,” and I made up the other half. My sister punched three holes down the side
of it and fastened each carefully handwritten page into an empty notebook. She put it in her closet under her Barbie case
and the box that held her perfect-condition Raggedy Ann and Andy that I’d envied.

Detective Fenerman called my parents. They had found a schoolbook, they believed, that might have been given to me that last
day.

“But it could be anyone’s,” my father said to my mother as they began another restless vigil. “Or she could have dropped it
along the way.”

Evidence was mounting, but they refused to believe.

Two days later, on December twelfth, the police found my notes from Mr. Botte’s class. Animals had carried off the notebook
from its original burial site—the dirt did not match the surrounding samples, but the graph paper, with its scribbled theories
that I could never understand but still dutifully recorded, had been found when a cat knocked down a crow’s nest. Shreds of
the paper were laced among the leaves and twigs. The police unbraided the graph paper, along with strips of another kind of
paper, thinner and brittle, that had no lines.

The girl who lived in the house where the tree stood recognized some of the handwriting. It was not my writing, but the writing
of the boy who had a crush on me: Ray Singh. On his mother’s special rice paper Ray had written me a love note, which I never
read. He had tucked it into my notebook during our Wednesday lab. His hand was distinct. When the officers came they had to
piece together the scraps of my biology notebook and of Ray Singh’s love note.

“Ray is not feeling well,” his mother said when a detective called his house and asked to speak to him. But they found out
what they needed from her. Ray nodded to her as she repeated the policeman’s questions to her son. Yes, he had written Susie
Salmon a love note. Yes, he had put it in her notebook after Mr. Botte had asked her to collect the pop quiz. Yes, he had
called himself the Moor.

Ray Singh became the first suspect.

“That sweet boy?” my mother said to my father.

“Ray Singh is nice,” my sister said in a monotone at dinner that night.

I watched my family and knew they knew. It was not Ray Singh.

The police descended on his house, leaning heavily on him, insinuating things. They were fueled by the guilt they read into
Ray’s dark skin, by the rage they felt at his manner, and by his beautiful yet too exotic and unavailable mother. But Ray
had an alibi. A whole host of nations could be called to testify on his behalf. His father, who taught postcolonial history
at Penn, had urged his son to represent the teenage experience at a lecture he gave at the International House on the day
I died.

At first Ray’s absence from school had been seen as evidence of his guilt, but once the police were presented with a list of
forty-five attendees who had seen Ray speak at “Suburbia: The American Experience,” they had to concede his innocence. The
police stood outside the Singh house and snapped small twigs from the hedges. It would have been so easy, so magical, their
answer literally falling out of the sky from a tree. But rumors spread and, in school, what little headway Ray had made socially
was reversed. He began to go home immediately after school.

All this made me crazy. Watching but not being able to steer the police toward the green house so close to my parents, where
Mr. Harvey sat carving finials for a gothic dollhouse he was building. He watched the news and scanned the papers, but he wore
his own innocence like a comfortable old coat. There had been a riot inside him and now there was calm.

I tried to take solace in Holiday, our dog. I missed him in a way I hadn’t yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister
and brother. That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again; it might sound silly
but I didn’t believe it, would not believe it. Holiday stayed with Lindsey at night, stood by my father each time he answered
the door to a new unknown. Gladly partook of any clandestine eating on the part of my mother. Let Buckley pull his tail and
ears inside the house of locked doors.

There was too much blood in the earth.

On December fifteenth, among the knocks on the door that signaled to my family that they must numb themselves further before
opening their house to strangers—the kind but awkward neighbors, the bumbling but cruel reporters—came the one that made my
father finally believe.

It was Len Fenerman, who had been so kind to him, and a uniform.

They came inside, by now familiar enough with the house to know that my mother preferred them to come in and say what they
had to say in the living room so that my sister and brother would not overhear.

“We’ve found a personal item that we believe to be Susie’s,” Len said. Len was careful. I could see him calculating his words.
He made sure to specify so that my parents would be relieved of their first thought—that the police had found my body, that
I was, for certain, dead.

“What?” my mother said impatiently. She crossed her arms and braced for another inconsequential detail in which others invested
meaning. She was a wall. Notebooks and novels were nothing to her. Her daughter might survive without an arm. A lot of blood
was a lot of blood. It was not a body. Jack had said it and she believed: Nothing is ever certain.

But when they held up the evidence bag with my hat inside, something broke in her. The fine wall of leaden crystal that had
protected her heart—somehow numbed her into disbelief—shattered.

“The pompom,” Lindsey said. She had crept into the living room from the kitchen. No one had seen her come in but me.

My mother made a sound and reached out her hand. The sound was a metallic squeak, a human-as-machine breaking down, uttering
last sounds before the whole engine locks.

“We’ve tested the fibers,” Len said. “It appears whoever accosted Susie used this during the crime.”

“What?” my father asked. He was powerless. He was being told something he could not comprehend.

“As a way to keep her quiet.”

“What?”

“It is covered with her saliva,” the uniformed officer, who had been silent until now, volunteered. “He gagged her with it.”

My mother grabbed it out of Len Fenerman’s hands, and the bells she had sewn into the pompom sounded as she landed on her
knees. She bent over the hat she had made me.

I saw Lindsey stiffen at the door. Our parents were unrecognizable to her; everything was unrecognizable.

My father led the well-meaning Len Fenerman and the uniformed officer to the front door.

“Mr. Salmon,” Len Fenerman said, “with the amount of blood we’ve found, and the violence I’m afraid it implies, as well as
other material evidence we’ve discussed, we must work with the assumption that your daughter has been killed.”