The Lovely Bones

“I’d like you to come say goodbye,” he said. He smelled of a perfume sweeter than what my mother sometimes wore, and the sting of it in my nose, and my sense of exclusion, made me want to cry. “You can come too,” he said to me, extending his hands so we would flank him in the aisle.

It wasn’t Mrs. Utemeyer. It was something else. But it was Mrs. Utemeyer too. I tried to keep my eyes focused on the gleaming gold rings on her fingers.

“Mother,” Mr. Utemeyer said, “I brought the little girl you called Natalie.”

Lindsey and I both admitted later that we expected Mrs. Utemeyer to speak and that we had decided, individually, that if she did we were going to grab the other one and run like hell.

An excruciating second or two and it was over and we were released back to our mother and father.

I wasn’t very surprised when I first saw Mrs. Bethel Utemeyer in my heaven, nor was I shocked when Holly and I found her walking hand in hand with a small blond girl she introduced as her daughter, Natalie.

The morning of my memorial Lindsey stayed in her room for as long as she could. She didn’t want my mother to see the still-applied makeup until it would be too late to make her wash it off. She had also told herself it would be okay to take a dress from my closet. That I wouldn’t mind.

But it was weird to watch.

She opened the door to my room, a vault that by February was being disturbed more and more, though no one, not my mother or father, nor Buckley or Lindsey, confessed to entering, nor to taking things that they didn’t plan on returning. They were blind to the clues that each of them came and visited me there. Any disturbance, even if it could not possibly be blamed on Holiday, was blamed on him.

Lindsey wanted to look nice for Samuel. She opened the double doors to my closet and reviewed the mess. I hadn’t been exactly orderly, so every time my mother told us to clean up, I’d shoved whatever was on the floor or bed into my closet.

Lindsey had always wanted the clothes I owned first-run but had gotten them all as hand-me-downs.

“Gosh,” she said, whispering into the darkness of my closet. She realized with guilt and glee that everything she saw before her was hers now.

“Hello? Knock-knock,” said Grandma Ly

Lindsey jumped.

“Sorry to disturb you, hon,” she said. “I thought I heard you in here.”

My grandmother stood in what my mother called one of her Jackie Ke

“What are you doing in here?” Lindsey asked.

“I need help with this zipper.” Grandma Ly

“How about that hook and eye up there,” said Grandma Ly

There were powdery smells and Chanel No. 5 sprinkled all around our grandmother’s neck.

“It’s one of the reasons for a man – you can’t do this stuff yourself.”

Lindsey was as tall as our grandmother and still growing. As he took the hook and eye in either hand, she saw the fine wisps of dyed blond hair at the base of my grandmother’s skull. She saw the downy gray hair trailing along her back and neck. She hooked the dress and then stood there.

“I’ve forgotten what she looked like,” Lindsey said.

“What?” Grandma Ly

“I can’t remember,” Lindsey said. “I mean her neck, you know, did I ever look at it?”

“Oh honey,” Grandma Ly

“I need to look pretty,” she said.

“You are pretty,” Grandma Ly

Lindsey couldn’t get her breath. One thing Grandma Ly

“We’ll find you a nice outfit in here,” Grandma Ly

As she considered my separates, plucked and posed them against my sister’s torso, she talked:

“Your mother’s a wreck, Lindsey. I’ve never seen her like this before.”

“Grandma.”

“Hush, I’m thinking.” She held up my favorite church dress. It was blackwatch wool with a Peter Pan collar. I liked it mostly because the skirt was so big I could sit in the pew cross-legged and flounce the hem down to the ground. “Where did she get this sack?” my grandmother asked. “Your dad, he’s a mess too, but he’s mad about it.”

“Who was that man you asked Mom about?”

She stiffened on the question. “What man?”

“You asked Mom if Dad still was saying that that man did it. What man?”

“Voila!” Grandma Ly

“It’s so short,” Lindsey said.

“I’m shocked at your mother,” Grandma Ly

My father called up from the hallway that he expected everyone downstairs in ten minutes.

Grandma Ly

“When you don’t have time for rouge, this puts a little life into them,” she said, and so Buckley copied her and pinched his cheeks.

Samuel Heckler was standing by the stone posts that marked the path to the church door. He was dressed all in black, and beside him his older brother, Hal, stood wearing the beat-up leather jacket Samuel had worn on Christmas Day.

His brother was like a darker print of Samuel. He was ta

“This must be Samuel,” my grandmother said. “I’m the evil grandma.”

“Shall we go in?” my father said. “It’s nice to see you, Samuel.”

Lindsey and Samuel led the way, while my grandmother dropped back and walked on the other side of my mother. A united front.

Detective Fenerman was standing by the doorway in an itchy-looking suit. He nodded at my parents and seemed to linger on my mother. “Will you join us?” my father asked.

“Thank you,” he said, “but I just want to be in the vicinity.”

“We appreciate that.”

They walked into the cramped vestibule of our church. I wanted to snake up my father’s back, circle his neck, whisper in his ear. But I was already there in his every pore and crevice.

He had woken up with a hangover and turned over on his side to watch my mother’s shallow breathing against the pillow. His lovely wife, his lovely girl. He wanted to place his hand on her cheek, smooth her hair back from her face, kiss her – but sleeping, she was at peace. He hadn’t woken a day since my death when the day wasn’t something to get through. But the truth was, the memorial service day was not the worst kind. At least it was honest. At least it was a day shaped around what they were so preoccupied by: my absence. Today he would not have to pretend he was getting back to normal – whatever normal was. Today he could walk tall with grief and so could Abigail. But he knew that as soon as she woke up he would not really look at her for the rest of the day, not really look into her and see the woman he had known her to be before the day they had taken in the news of my death. At nearly two months, the idea of it as news was fading away in the hearts of all but my family – and Ruth.