had a crush on Susie,” Lindsey said.
“I know.”
“Does he talk about her?” Lindsey took a long thin stick and poked it through the mesh.
“He’s asked about you, actually,” Samuel said.
“What did you tell him?”
“That you’re okay, that you’ll be okay.”
The mice kept running from the stick into the corner, where they crawled on top of one another in a useless effort to flee. “Let’s build a mousetrap with a little purple velvet couch in it and we can rig up a latch so that when they sit on the couch, a door drops and little balls of cheese fall down. We can call it Wild Rodent Kingdom.”
Samuel didn’t press my sister like the adults did. He would talk in detail about mouse couch upholstery instead.
By that summer I had begun to spend less time watching from the gazebo because I could still see Earth as I walked the fields of heaven. The night would come and the javelin-throwers and shot-putters would leave for other heavens. Heavens where a girl like me didn’t fit in. Were they horrific, these other heavens? Worse than feeling so solitary among one’s living, growing peers? Or were they the stuff I dreamed about? Where you could be caught in a Norman Rockwell world forever. Turkey constantly being brought to a table full of family. A wry and twinkling relative carving up the bird.
If I walked too far and wondered loud enough the fields would change. I could look down and see horse corn and I could hear it then – singing – a kind of low humming and moaning warning me back from the edge. My head would throb and the sky would darken and it would be that night again, that perpetual yesterday lived again. My soul solidifying, growing heavy. I came up to the lip of my grave this way many times but had yet to stare in.
I did begin to wonder what the word
“You can have that,” Franny said to me. “Plenty of people do.”
“How do you make the switch?” I asked.
“It’s not as easy as you might think,” she said. “You have to stop desiring certain answers.”
“I don’t get it.”
“If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vacuum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling,” she said, “you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth.”
This seemed impossible to me.
Ruth crept into Lindsey’s dorm that night.
“I had a dream about her,” she whispered to my sister.
Lindsey blinked sleepily at her. “Susie?” she asked.
“I’m sorry about the incident in the dining hall,” Ruth said.
Lindsey was on the bottom of a three-tiered aluminum bunk bed. Her neighbor directly above her stirred.
“Can I get into bed with you?” Ruth asked.
Lindsey nodded.
Ruth crawled in next to Lindsey in the narrow sliver of the bed.
“What happened in your dream?” Lindsey whispered.
Ruth told her, turning her face so that Lindsey’s eyes could make out the silhouette of Ruth’s nose and lips and forehead. “I was inside the earth,” Ruth said, “and Susie walked over me in the cornfield. I could feel her walking over me. I called out to her but my mouth filled with dirt. She couldn’t hear me no matter how much I tried to yell. Then I woke up.”
“I don’t dream about her,” Lindsey said. “I have nightmares about rats nibbling at the ends of my hair.”
Ruth liked the comfort she felt next to my sister – the heat their bodies created.
“Are you in love with Samuel?”
“Yes.”
“Do you miss Susie?”
Because it was dark, because Ruth was facing away from her, because Ruth was almost a stranger, Lindsey said what she felt. “More than anyone will ever know.”
The principal of Devon Junior High was called away on a family matter, and it was left up to the newly appointed assistant principal of Chester Springs School to create, overnight, that year’s challenge. She wanted to do something different from mousetraps.
CAN YOU GET AWAY WITH CRIME? HOW TO COMMIT THE PERFECT MURDER, announced her hurriedly drawn-up flier.
The kids loved it. The musicians and poets, the History Heads and artists, were teeming and bubbling about how to begin. They shoveled down their bacon and eggs at breakfast and compared the great unsolved murders of the past or thought of ordinary objects that could be used for fatal wounds. They began to think of whom they could plot to kill. It was all in good fun until 7:15, when my sister walked in.
Artie watched her get in line. She was still unaware, just picking up on the excitement in the air – figuring the mousetrap competition had been announced.
He kept his eye on Lindsey and saw the closest flier was posted at the end of the food line over the utensils tray. He was listening to a story about Jack the Ripper that someone at the table was relaying. He stood to return his tray.
When he reached my sister, he cleared his throat. All my hopes were pinned on this wobbly boy. “Catch her,” I said. A prayer going down to Earth.
“Lindsey,” Artie said.
Lindsey looked at him. “Yes?”
Behind the counter the army cook held out a spoon full of scrambled eggs to plop on her tray.
“I’m Artie, from your sister’s grade.”
“I don’t need any coffins,” Lindsey said, moving her tray down the metalwork to where there was orange juice and apple juice in big plastic pitchers.
“What?”
“Samuel told me you were building balsa wood coffins for the mice this year. I don’t want any.”
“They changed the competition,” he said.
That morning Lindsey had decided she would take the bottom off of Clarissa’s dress. It would be perfect for the mouse couch.
“To what?”
“Do you want to go outside?” Artie used his body to shadow her and block her passage to the utensils. “Lindsey,” he blurted. “The competition is about murder.”
She stared at him.
Lindsey held on to her tray. She kept her eyes locked on Artie.
“I wanted to tell you before you read the flier,” he said.
Samuel rushed into the tent.
“What’s going on?” Lindsey looked helplessly at Samuel.
“This year’s competition is how to commit the perfect murder,” Samuel said.
Samuel and I saw the tremor. The inside shakeoff of her heart. She was getting so good the cracks and fissures were smaller and smaller Soon, like a sleight-of-hand trick perfected, no one would see her do it. She could shut out the whole world, including herself.
“I’m fine,” she said.
But Samuel knew she wasn’t.
He and Artie watched her back as she departed.
“I was trying to warn her,” Artie said weakly.
Artie returned to his table. He drew hypodermics, one after another. His pen pressed harder and harder as he colored in the embalming fluid inside, as he perfected the trajectory of the three drops squirting out.
“You kill people by stabbing and cutting and shooting,” Ruth said. “It’s sick.”
“Agreed,” Artie said.
Samuel had taken my sister away to talk. Artie had seen Ruth at one of the outside picnic tables with her big blank book.
“But there are good reasons to kill,” Ruth said.
“Who do you think did it?” Artie asked. He sat on the bench and braced his feet up under the table on the crossbar.
Ruth sat almost motionless, right leg crossed over left, but her foot jiggled ceaselessly.
“How did you hear?” she asked.
“My father told us,” Artie said. “He called my sister and me into the family room and made us sit down.”
“Shit, what did he say?”
“First he said that horrible things happened in the world and my sister said, ‘Vietnam,’ and he was quiet because they always fight about that whenever it comes up. So he said, ‘No, honey, horrible things happen close to home, to people we know.’ She thought it was one of her friends.”
Ruth felt a raindrop.
“Then my dad broke down and said a little girl had been killed. I was the one who asked who. I mean, when he said ‘little girl,’ I pictured
It was a definite drop, and they began to land on the redwood tabletop.
“Do you want to go in?” Artie asked.
“Everyone else will be inside,” Ruth said.
“I know.”
“Let’s get wet.”
They sat still for a while and watched the drops fall around them, heard the sound against the leaves of the tree above.
“I knew she was dead. I sensed it,” Ruth said, “but then I saw a mention of it in my dad’s paper and I was sure. They didn’t use her name at first. Just ‘Girl, fourteen.’ I asked my dad for the page but he wouldn’t give it to me. I mean, who else and her sister hadn’t been in school all week?”
“I wonder who told Lindsey?” Artie said. The rain picked up. Artie slipped underneath the table. “We’re going to get soaked,” he yelled up.
And then as quickly as the rain had started, it ceased. Sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. “I think she listens,” she said, too softly to be heard.
It became common knowledge at the symposium who my sister was and how I had died.
“Imagine being stabbed,” someone said.
“No thanks.”
“I think it’s cool.”
“Think of it – she’s famous.”
“Some way to get famous. I’d rather win the Nobel Prize.”
“Does anyone know what she wanted to be?”
“I dare you to ask Lindsey.”
And they listed the dead they knew.
Grandmother, grandfather, uncle, aunt, some had a parent, rarer was a sister or brother lost young to an illness – a heart irregularity – leukemia – an unpronounceable disease. No one knew anyone who had been murdered. But now they knew me.
Under a rowboat that was too old and worn to float, Lindsey lay down on the earth with Samuel Heckler, and he held her.
“You know I’m okay,” she said, her eyes dry. “I think Artie was trying to help me,” she offered.
“You can stop now, Lindsey,” he said. “We’ll just lie here and wait until things quiet down.”
Samuel’s back was flush against the ground, and he brought my sister close into his body to protect her from the dampness of the quick summer rain. Their breath began to heat the small space beneath the
