The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

The dead are never exactly seen by the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them. They speak of a chill in the air. The mates of the deceased wake from dreams and see a figure standing at the end of their bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus.

The truth was that the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.

As her firstborn, I thought it was me who took away all those dreams of what she had wanted to be.

When I look back now I see that my mother had become—and very quickly after they moved into that house—lonely. Because I was the oldest, I became her closest friend.

He had had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.

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.