The Lovely Bones

Across from her a little girl had strayed from the blanket where her na

In moments like this she thought of all the little girls who grew into adulthood and old age as a sort of cipher alphabet for all of those who didn’t. Their lives would somehow be inextricably attached to all the girls who had been killed. It was then, as the na

She could tell by the clothes that it had happened some time ago, but that was all. There was nothing else – no na

I stayed with Ruth. Her journal open, she wrote it down. “Time? Little girl in C.P. strays toward bushes. White lace collar, fancy.” She closed the journal and tucked it into her bag. Close at hand was a place that soothed her. The penguin house at the zoo.

We spent the afternoon together there, Ruth sitting on the carpeted seat that ran the length of the exhibit, her black clothes making only her face and hands visible in the room. The penguins tottered and clucked and dived, slipping off the habitat rocks like amiable hams but living under water like tuxedoed muscles. Children shouted and screamed and pressed their faces against the glass. Ruth counted the living just as much as she counted the dead, and in the close confines of the penguin house the joyous screams of the children echoed off the walls with such vibrancy that, for a little while, she could drown out the other kinds of screams.

That weekend my brother woke early, as he always did. He was in the seventh grade and bought his lunch at school and was on the debate team and, like Ruth had been, was always picked either last or second to last in gym. He had not taken to athletics as Lindsey had. He practiced instead what Grandma Ly

When he had asked my father that year if he could reclaim the garden my mother had once kept, my father had said, “Sure, Buck, go crazy.”

And he had. He had gone extraordinarily, insanely crazy, reading old Burpee catalogs at night when he was unable to sleep and sca

He didn’t like what he read in books. He saw no reason to keep flowers separated from tomatoes and herbs segregated in a corner. He had slowly planted the whole garden with a spade, daily begging my father to bring him seeds and taking trips to the grocery with Grandma Ly

But my grandmother was preparing for the moment when he realized that they couldn’t grow all together and that some seeds would not come up at certain times, that the fine downy tendrils of cucumber might be abruptly stopped by the thickening underground bosses of carrot and potato, that the parsley might be camouflaged by the more recalcitrant weeds, and bugs that hopped about could blight the tender flowers. But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone.

Buckley was hauling up a box of clothes from the basement and into the kitchen when my father came down for his coffee.

“What ya got there, Farmer Buck?” my father said. He had always been at his best in the morning.

“I’m making stakes for my tomato plants,” my brother said.

“Are they even above ground yet?”

My father stood in the kitchen in his blue terry-cloth robe and bare feet. He poured his coffee from the coffee maker that Grandma Ly

“I just saw them this morning,” my brother said, beaming. “They curl up like a hand unfolding.”

It wasn’t until my father was repeating this description to Grandma Ly

My father put down his coffee. He walked out through the screened-in porch and strode forward, calling Buckley’s name.

“What is it, Dad?” He was alert to my father’s tone.

“Those clothes are Susie’s,” my father said calmly when he reached him.

Buckley looked down at my blackwatch dress that he held in his hand.

My father stepped closer, took the dress from my brother, and then, without speaking, he gathered the rest of my clothes, which Buckley had piled on the lawn. As he turned in silence toward the house, hardly breathing, clutching my clothes to him, it sparked.

I was the only one to see the colors. Just near Buckley’s ears and on the tips of his cheeks and chin he was a little orange somehow, a little red.

“Why can’t I use them?” he asked.

It landed in my father’s back like a fist.

“Why can’t I use those clothes to stake my tomatoes?”

My father turned around. He saw his son standing there, behind him the perfect plot of muddy, churned-up earth spotted with tiny seedlings. “How can you ask me that question?”

“You have to choose. It’s not fair,” my brother said.

“Buck?” My father held my clothes against his chest.

I watched Buckley flare and light. Behind him was the sun of the goldenrod hedge, twice as tall as it had been at my death.

“I’m tired of it!” Buckley blared. “Keesha’s dad died and she’s okay!”

“Is Keesha a girl at school?”

“Yes!”

My father was frozen. He could feel the dew that had gathered on his bare ankles and feet, could feel the ground underneath him, cold and moist and stirring with possibility.

“I’m sorry. When did this happen?”

“That’s not the point, Dad! You don’t get it.” Buckley turned around on his heel and started stomping the tender tomato shoots with his foot.

“Buck, stop!” my father cried.

My brother turned.

“You don’t get it, Dad,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” my father said. “These are Susie’s clothes and I just… It may not make sense, but they’re hers – something she wore.”

“You took the shoe, didn’t you?” my brother said. He had stopped crying now.

“What?”

“You took the shoe. You took it from my room.”

“Buckley, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I saved the Monopoly shoe and then it was gone. You took it! You act like she was yours only!”