could have lifted it up, made it hop from Boardwalk to Baltic, where I always claimed the better people lived. “That’s because you’re a purple freak,” Lindsey would say. My father would say, “I’m proud I didn’t raise a snob.”
“Railroads, Susie,” he said. “You always liked owning those railroads.”
To accentuate his widow’s peak and tame his cowlick, Samuel Heckler insisted on combing his hair straight back. This made him look, at thirteen and dressed in black leather, like an adolescent vampire.
“Merry Christmas, Lindsey,” he said to my sister, and held out a small box wrapped in blue paper.
I could see it happen: Lindsey’s body began to knot. She was working hard keeping everyone out, everyone, but she found Samuel Heckler cute. Her heart, like an ingredient in a recipe, was reduced, and regardless of my death she was thirteen, he was cute, and he had visited her on Christmas Day.
“I heard you made gifted,” he said to her, because no one was talking. “Me too.”
My mother remembered then, and she switched on her autopilot hostess. “Would you like to come sit?” she managed. “I have some eggnog in the kitchen.”
“That would be wonderful,” Samuel Heckler said and, to Lindsey’s amazement and mine, offered my sister his arm.
“What’s that?” asked Buckley, trailing behind and pointing to what he thought was a suitcase.
“An alto,” Samuel Heckler said.
“What?” asked Buckley.
Lindsey spoke then. “Samuel plays the alto saxophone.”
“Barely,” Samuel said.
My brother did not ask what a saxophone was. He knew what Lindsey was being. She was being what I called snooty-wooty, as in “Buckley, don’t worry, Lindsey’s being snooty-wooty.” Usually I’d tickle him as I said the word, sometimes burrowing into his stomach with my head, butting him and saying “snooty-wooty” over and over until his trills of laughter flowed down over me.
Buckley followed the three of them into the kitchen and asked, as he had at least once a day, “Where’s Susie?”
They were silent. Samuel looked at Lindsey.
“Buckley,” my father called from the adjoining room, “come play Monopoly with me.”
My brother had never been invited to play Monopoly. Everyone said he was too young, but this was the magic of Christmas. He rushed into the family room, and my father picked him up and sat him on his lap.
“See this shoe?” my father said.
Buckley nodded his head.
“I want you to listen to everything I say about it, okay?”
“Susie?” my brother asked, somehow connecting the two.
“Yes, I’m going to tell you where Susie is.”
I began to cry up in heaven. What else was there for me to do?
“This shoe was the piece Susie played Monopoly with,” he said. “I play with the car or sometimes the wheelbarrow. Lindsey plays with the iron, and when your mother plays, she likes the cannon.”
“Is that a dog?”
“Yes, that’s a Scottie.”
“Mine!”
“Okay,” my father said. He was patient. He had found a way to explain it. He held his son in his lap, and as he spoke, he felt Buckley’s small body on his knee – the very human, very warm, very alive weight of it. It comforted him. “The Scottie will be your piece from now on. Which piece is Susie’s again?”
“The shoe,” Buckley said.
“Right, and I’m the car, your sister’s the iron, and your mother is the cannon.”
My brother concentrated very hard.
“Now let’s put all the pieces on the board, okay? You go ahead and do it for me.”
Buckley grabbed a fist of pieces and then another, until all the pieces lay between the Chance and Community Chest cards.
“Let’s say the other pieces are our friends.”
“Like Nate?”
“Right, we’ll make your friend Nate the hat. And the board is the world. Now if I were to tell you that when I rolled the dice, one of the pieces would be taken away, what would that mean?”
“They can’t play anymore?”
“Right.”
“Why?” Buckley asked.
He looked up at my father; my father flinched.
“Why?” my brother asked again.
My father did not want to say “because life is unfair” or “because that’s how it is.” He wanted something neat, something that could explain death to a four-year-old. He placed his hand on the small of Buckley’s back.
“Susie is dead,” he said now, unable to make it fit in the rules of any game. “Do you know what that means?”
Buckley reached over with his hand and covered the shoe. He looked up to see if his answer was right.
My father nodded. “You won’t see Susie anymore, honey. None of us will.” My father cried. Buckley looked up into the eyes of our father and did not fully understand.
Buckley kept the shoe on his dresser, until one day it wasn’t there anymore and no amount of looking for it could turn it up.
In the kitchen my mother finished her eggnog and excused herself. She went into the dining room and counted silverware, methodically laying out the three kinds of forks, the knives, and the spoons, making them “climb the stairs” as she’d been taught when she worked in Wanamaker’s bridal shop before I was born. She wanted a cigarette and for her children who were living to disappear for a little while.
“Are you going to open your gift?” Samuel Heckler asked my sister.
They stood at the counter, leaning against the dishwasher and the drawers that held napkins and towels. In the room to their right sat my father and brother; on the other side of the kitchen, my mother was thinking Wedgwood Florentine, Cobalt Blue; Royal Worcester, Mountbatten; Lenox, Eternal.
Lindsey smiled and pulled at the white ribbon on top of the box.
“My mom did the ribbon for me,” Samuel Heckler said.
She tore the blue paper away from the black velvet box. Carefully she held it in her palm once the paper was off. In heaven I was excited. When Lindsey and I played Barbies, Barbie and Ken got married at sixteen. To us there was only one true love in everyone’s life; we had no concept of compromise, or retrys.
“Open it,” Samuel Heckler said.
“I’m scared.”
“Don’t be.”
He put his hand on her forearm and – Wow! – what I felt when he did that. Lindsey had a cute boy in the kitchen, vampire or no! This was news, this was a bulletin – I was suddenly privy to everything. She never would have told me any of this stuff.
What the box held was typical or disappointing or miraculous depending on the eye. It was typical because he was a thirteen-year-old boy, or it was disappointing because it was not a wedding ring, or it was miraculous. He’d given her a half a heart. It was gold and from inside his Hukapoo shirt, he pulled out the other side. It hung around his neck on a rawhide cord.
Lindsey’s face flushed; mine flushed up in heaven.
I forgot my father in the family room and my mother counting silver. I saw Lindsey move toward Samuel Heckler. She kissed him; it was glorious. I was almost alive again.
Six
Two weeks before my death, I left the house later than usual, and by the time I reached the school, the blacktop circle where the school buses usually hovered was empty.
A hall monitor from the discipline office would write down your name if you tried to get in the front doors after the first bell rang, and I didn’t want to be paged during class to come and sit on the hard bench outside Mr. Peterford’s room, where, it was widely known, he would bend you over and paddle your behind with a board. He’d asked the shop teacher to drill holes into it for less wind resistance on the downstroke and more pain when it landed against your jeans.
I had never been late enough or done anything bad enough to meet the board, but in my mind as in every other kid’s I could visualize it so well my butt would sting. Clarissa had told me that the baby stoners, as they were called in junior high, used the back door to the stage, which was always left open by Cleo, the janitor, who had dropped out of high school as a full-blown stoner.
So that day I crept into the backstage area, watching my step, careful not to trip over the various cords and wires. I paused near some scaffolding and put down my book bag to brush my hair. I’d taken to leaving the house in the jingle-bell cap and then switching, as soon as I gained cover behind the O’Dwyers’ house, to an old black watch cap of my father’s. All this left my hair full of static electricity, and my first stop was usually the girls’ room, where I would brush it flat.
“You are beautiful, Susie Salmon.”
I heard the voice but could not place it immediately. I looked around me.
“Here,” the voice said.
I looked up and saw the head and torso of Ray Singh leaning out over the top of the scaffold above me.
“Hello,” he said.
I knew Ray Singh had a crush on me. He had moved from England the year before but Clarissa said he was born in India. 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. Plus, he seemed eight hundred times smarter than the rest of us, and he had a crush on me. What I finally realized were affectations – the smoking jacket that he sometimes wore to school and his foreign cigarettes, which were actually his mother’s – I thought were evidence of his higher breeding. He knew and saw things that the rest of us didn’t see. That morning when he spoke to me from above, my heart plunged to the floor.
“Hasn’t the first bell rung?” I asked.
“I have Mr. Morton for homeroom,” he said. This explained everything. Mr. Morton had a perpetual hangover, which was at its peak during homeroom. He never called roll.
“What are you doing up there?”
“Climb up and see,” he said, removing his head and shoulders from my view.
I hesitated.
“Come on, Susie.”
It was my one day in life of being a bad kid – of at least feigning the moves. I placed my foot on the bottom rung of the scaffold and reached my arms up to the first crossbar.
“Bring your stuff,” Ray advised.
I went back for my book bag and then climbed unsteadily up.
“Let me help you,” he said and put his hands under my armpits, which, even though covered by my winter parka, I was self-conscious about. I sat for a moment with my feet dangling over the side.
“Tuck them in,” he said. “That way no one will see us.”
I did what he told me, and then I stared at him for a moment. I felt suddenly stupid – unsure of why I was there.
“Will you stay up here all day?” I asked.
“Just until English class is over.”
“You’re cutting English!” It was as if he said he’d robbed a bank.
“I’ve seen every Shakespeare play put on by the
