The Lovely Bones

I hated our split-level on Earth. I hated my parents’ furniture, and how our house looked out onto another house and another house and another – an echo of sameness riding up over the hill. Our duplex looked out onto a park, and in the distance, just close enough to know we weren’t alone, but not too close, we could see the lights of other houses.

Eventually I began to desire more. What I found strange was how much I desired to know what I had not known on Earth. I wanted to be allowed to grow up.

“People grow up by living,” I said to Fra

“That’s out,” she said.

“Can we at least watch the living?” asked Holly.

“You already do,” she said.

“I think she means whole lives,” I said, “from begi

“You won’t experience it,” Fra

“Thank you, Brain Central,” I said, but our heavens began to grow.

There was the high school still, all the Fairfax architecture, but now there were roads leading out.

“Walk the paths,” Fra

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.

My father was the one who took the phone call on December ninth. It was the begi

My father stood in the kitchen and a sickening shiver overtook him. How could he tell that to Abigail?

“So you can’t be certain that she’s dead?” he asked.

“Nothing is ever certain,” Len Fenerman said.

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 tu

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 bu

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.