The Lovely Bones

from being, at fourteen, intensely lonely.

I watched Ruth approach the soccer field, thinking she was alone. In an old home her father had gone to scavenge, he had found her a treat to go along with her new hobby – an anthology of poems. She held them close.

She saw Ray stand up when she was still some distance away.

“Hello, Ruth Connors!” he called and waved his arms.

Ruth looked over, and his name came into her head: Ray Singh. But she didn’t know much more than that. She had heard the rumors about the police being over at his house, but she believed what her father had said – “No kid did that” – and so she walked over to him.

“I prepared tea and have it in my thermos here,” Ray said. I blushed for him up in heaven. He was smart when it came to Othello, but now he was acting like a geek.

“No thank you,” Ruth said. She stood near him but with a definite few feet more than usual still in between. Her fingernails were pressed into the worn cover of the poetry anthology.

“I was there that day, when you and Susie talked backstage,” Ray said. He held the thermos out to her. She made no move closer and didn’t respond.

“Susie Salmon,” he clarified.

“I know who you mean,” she said.

“Are you going to the memorial service?”

“I didn’t know there was one,” she said.

“I don’t think I’m going.”

I was staring hard at his lips. They were redder than usual from the cold. Ruth took a step forward.

“Do you want some lip balm?” Ruth asked.

Ray lifted his wool gloves up to his lips, where they snagged briefly on the chapped surface that I had kissed. Ruth dug her hands in the peacoat pocket and pulled out her Chap Stick. “Here,” she said, “I have tons of them. You can keep it.”

“That’s so nice,” he said. “Will you at least sit with me until the buses come?”

They sat together on the shot-putters’ cement platform. Again I was seeing something I never would have seen: the two of them together. It made Ray more attractive to me than he had ever been. His eyes were the darkest gray. When I watched him from heaven I did not hesitate to fall inside of them.

It became a ritual for the two of them. On the days that his father taught, Ruth brought him a little bourbon in her father’s flask; otherwise they had sweet tea. They were cold as hell, but that didn’t seem to matter to them.

They talked about what it was like to be a foreigner in Norristown. They read poems aloud from Ruth’s anthology. They talked about how to become what they wanted to be. A doctor for Ray. A painter/poet for Ruth. They made a secret club of the other oddballs they could point out in our class. There were the obvious ones like Mike Bayles, who had taken so much acid no one understood how he was still in school, or Jeremiah, who was from Louisiana and so just as much a foreigner as Ray. Then there were the quiet ones. Artie, who talked excitedly to anyone about the effects of formaldehyde. Harry Orland, who was so painfully shy he wore his gym shorts over his jeans. And Vicki Kurtz, who everyone thought was okay after the death of her mother, but whom Ruth had seen sleeping in a bed of pine needles behind the junior high’s regulating plant. And, sometimes, they would talk about me.

“It’s so strange,” Ruth said. “I mean, it’s like we were in the same class since kindergarten but that day backstage in the auditorium was the first time we ever looked at each other.”

“She was great,” Ray said. He thought of our lips brushing past one another as we stood alone in a column of lockers. How I had smiled with my eyes closed and then almost run away. “Do you think they’ll find him?”

“I guess so. You know, we’re only like one hundred yards away from where it happened.”

“I know,” he said.

They both sat on the thin metal rim of the shot-putters’ brace, holding tea in their gloved hands. The cornfield had become a place no one went. When a ball strayed from the soccer field, a boy took a dare to go in and get it. That morning the sun was slicing right through the dead stalks as it rose, but there was no heat from it.

“I found these here,” she said, indicating the leather gloves.

“Do you ever think about her?” he asked.

They were quiet again.

“All the time,” Ruth said. A chill ran down my spine. “Sometimes I think she’s lucky, you know. I hate this place.”

“Me too,” Ray said. “But I’ve lived other places. This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one.”

“You’re not implying…”

“She’s in heaven, if you believe in that stuff.”

“You don’t?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“I do,” Ruth said. “I don’t mean la-la angel-wing crap, but I do think there’s a heaven.”

“Is she happy?”

“It is heaven, right?”

“But what does that mean?”

The tea was stone-cold and the first bell had already rung. Ruth smiled into her cup. “Well, as my dad would say, it means she’s out of this shithole.”

When my father knocked on the door of Ray Singh’s house, he was struck dumb by Ray’s mother, Ruana. It was not that she was immediately welcoming, and she was far from sunny, but something about her dark hair, and her gray eyes, and even the strange way she seemed to step back from the door once she opened it, all of these things overwhelmed him.

He had heard the offhand comments the police made about her. To their mind she was cold and snobbish, condescending, odd. And so that was what he imagined he would find.

“Come in and sit,” she’d said to him when he pronounced his name. Her eyes, on the word Salmon, had gone from closed to open doorways – dark rooms where he wanted to travel firsthand.

He almost lost his balance as she led him into the small cramped front room of their house. There were books on the floor with their spines facing up. They came out three rows deep from the wall. She was wearing a yellow sari and what looked like gold lame capri pants underneath. Her feet were bare. She padded across the wall-to-wall and stopped at the couch. “Something to drink?” she asked, and he nodded his head.

“Hot or cold?”

“Hot.”

As she turned the corner into a room he couldn’t see, he sat down on the brown plaid couch. The windows across from him under which the books were lined were draped with long muslin curtains, which the harsh daylight outside had to fight to filter through. He felt suddenly very warm, almost close to forgetting why that morning he had double-checked the Singhs’ address.

A little while later, as my father was thinking of how tired he was and how he had promised my mother to pick up some long- held dry cleaning, Mrs. Singh returned with tea on a tray and put it down on the carpet in front of him.

“We don’t have much furniture, I’m afraid. Dr. Singh is still looking for tenure.”

She went into an adjoining room and brought back a purple floor pillow for herself, which she placed on the floor to face him.

“Dr. Singh is a professor?” my father asked, though he knew this already, knew more than he was comfortable with about this beautiful woman and her sparsely furnished home.

“Yes,” she said, and poured the tea. It was quiet. She held out a cup to him, and as he took it she said, “Ray was with him the day your daughter was killed.”

He wanted to fall over into her.

“That must be why you’ve come,” she continued.

“Yes,” he said, “I want to talk to him.”

“He’s at school right now,” she said. “You know that.” Her legs in the gold pants were tucked to her side. The nails on her toes were long and unpolished, their surface gnarled from years of dancing.

“I wanted to come by and assure you I mean him no harm,” my father said. I watched him. I had never seen him like this before. The words fell out of him like burdens he was delivering, backlogged verbs and nouns, but he was watching her feet curl against the dun-colored rug and the way the small pool of numbed light from the curtains touched her right cheek.

“He did nothing wrong and loved your little girl. A schoolboy crush, but still.”

Schoolboy crushes happened all the time to Ray’s mother. The teenager who delivered the paper would pause on his bike, hoping that she would be near the door when she heard the thump of the Philadelphia Inquirer hit the porch. That she would come out and, if she did, that she would wave. She didn’t even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house – it was the eyes, her dancer’s carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.

When the police had come they had stumbled into the dark front hall in search of a killer, but before Ray even reached the top of the stairs, Ruana had so confused them that they were agreeing to tea and sitting on silk pillows. They had expected her to fall into the grooves of the patter they relied on with all attractive women, but she only grew more erect in posture as they tried harder and harder to ingratiate themselves, and she stood upright by the windows while they questioned her son.

“I’m glad Susie had a nice boy like her,” my father said. “I’ll thank your son for that.”

She smiled, not showing teeth.

“He wrote her a love note,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I wish I had known enough to do the same,” he said. “Tell her I loved her on that last day.”

“Yes.”

“But your son did.”

“Yes.”

They stared at each other for a moment.

“You must have driven the policemen nuts,” he said and smiled more to himself than to her.

“They came to accuse Ray,” she said. “I wasn’t concerned with how they felt about me.”

“I imagine it’s been hard for him,” my father said.

“No, I won’t allow that,” she said sternly and placed her cup back on the tray. “You cannot have sympathy for Ray or for us.”

My father tried to stutter out a protest.

She placed her hand in the air. “You have lost a daughter and come here for some purpose. I will allow you that and that only, but trying to understand our lives, no.”

“I didn’t mean to offend,” he said. “I only…”

Again, the hand up.

“Ray will be home in twenty minutes. I will talk to him first and prepare him, then you may talk to my son about your daughter.”

“What did I say?”

“I like that we don’t have much furniture. It allows me to think that someday we might pack up and leave.”

“I hope you’ll stay,” my father said. He said it because he had been trained to be polite from an early age, a training he passed on to me, but he also said it because part of him wanted more of her, this cold woman who was not exactly cold, this