The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

and a battery-powered fluorescent lamp that cast the only light in the room—an eerie light that would make his features hard to see when he was on top of me.

The end came anyway.

Franny, my intake counselor, became our guide. Franny was old enough to be our mother—mid-forties—and it took Holly and me a while to figure out that this had been something we wanted: our mothers.

Sometimes Holly seemed like she wasn’t paying attention, and other times she was gone when I went looking for her. That was when she went to a part of heaven we didn’t share. I missed her then, but it was an odd sort of missing because by then I knew the meaning of forever.

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.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

“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.” Lindsey overheard what she already knew, had known since five days before, when my father told her about my elbow. My mother began to wail.

Into the deep ruff of fur surrounding the dog’s neck, my father would let himself cry.

I like to think I hadn’t robbed her of everything.

Inside, my sister’s heart closed like a fist. “I’d say it would be pretty hard to play soccer on the soccer field when it’s approximately twenty feet from where my sister was supposedly murdered.” Score!

I sat in the gazebo in the main square of my heaven (our neighbors, the O’Dwyers, had had a gazebo; I had grown up jealous for one), and watched my sister rage.

Mrs. Bethel Utemeyer, the oldest resident of my heaven, would bring out her violin. Holly tread lightly on her horn. They would do a duet. One woman old and silent, one woman not past girl yet. Back and forth, a crazy schizoid solace they’d create.