The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

I could not have what I wanted most: Mr. Harvey dead and me living. Heaven wasn’t perfect. But I came to believe that if I watched closely, and desired, I might change the lives of those I loved on Earth.

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.

Evidence was mounting, but they refused to believe.

The dead are never exactly seen by the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them.

In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from where you are.

No matter what happened to Abigail or to him, the three would have one another. In that way the line he had begun seemed immortal to him, like a strong steel filament threading into the future, continuing past him no matter where he might fall off. Even in deep snowy old age.

After the house changed hands, the new owners tsk-tsked at the dark spot on the floor of their garage. As she brought prospective buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag Mr. Harvey carried and spilling onto the concrete. The beginning of my secret signals to the world.

That’s how they operated. They didn’t shut down their desire to know just because the smell was bad or the object was dangerous. They hunted. So did I.

That someone could have the face of one country and the voice of another and then move to a third was too incredible for me to fathom. It made him immediately cool.

I hate this place.” “Me too,” Ray said. “But I’ve lived other places. This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one.”

He hadn’t woken a day since my death when the day wasn’t something to get through.

They formed the superior, if somewhat socially crippled, highest rung of the gifted ladder.

At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.

Knowing, the deep-soul knowing that my father had, was not, in the law’s more literal mind, incontrovertible proof.

He was beginning to understand: you were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.

It was my father who grew toward us as the years went by; it was my mother who grew away.

My mother had my body as it would never become.

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.

How could they both work to support their families and watch their children to make sure they were safe? As a group they would learn it was impossible, no matter how many rules they laid down. What had happened to me could happen to anyone.

Each time my name was said by these strangers it felt like a pinprick.

It was the sensation of being simultaneously resurrected and buried within the same breath.

No one could have predicted how my loss would change small moments on Earth.

It was like reaction time in the insurance claims he reviewed. There was an average number of seconds for most people between when they saw something coming—another car, a rock rolling down an embankment—and when they reacted.

this way the sight and smell of the real, of the imagined, and of the remembered all came together for me.

They were all things she would not give away in New York, where she watched others tell their drunken bar stories, prostituting their families and their traumas for popularity and booze.

“booze affects material as it does people.”

For my mother, connecting her life to his capture and punishment spoke more about choosing to live with the enemy than about having to learn to live in the world without me.

“Nothing is ever certain,” Len said. And the echo rang in her ears again.

was this same phrase that my father had borrowed to soothe his family. It was a cruel phrase that preyed on hope.

a queasy mother and a cop—it was a convergence of luck that had kept my sister safe so far. Every day a question mark.

I had never been touched like this. I had only been hurt by hands past all tenderness.

It was an anticipation born of trust.

I kissed him across the line of his backbone and blessed each knot of muscle, each mole and blemish.

If the worst of what she left on Earth was a legacy of inebriated support, it was a good legacy in my book.

When my father’s car pulled into the drive, I was beginning to wonder if this had been what I’d been waiting for, for my family to come home, not to me anymore but to one another with me gone.

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent—that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.

Ruth had been a girl haunted and now she would be a woman haunted. First by accident and now by choice. All of it, the story of my life and death, was hers if she chose to tell it, even to one person at a time.

My father dreamed that one day he might teach another child to love ships in bottles. He knew there would be both sadness and joy in it; that it would always hold an echo of me.

Marveling was what she mostly did after she came back—at the twists life took.

Her fingers twisted inside the gloves as she thought about the clients she saw in her practice each day—how to help them make sense of the cards life had dealt them, how to ease their pain.