The Lovely Bones

Salmon, the dispatcher said, requesting him.

My father was in surgery, and my mother was pacing back and forth near the nurses’ station. She had driven to the hospital in her raincoat with only her thin summer nightgown beneath it. She had her beating-around-the-yard ballet flats on her feet. She hadn’t bothered to pull her hair back, and there hadn’t been any hair elastics in her pockets or purse. In the dark foggy parking lot of the hospital she had stopped to check her face and applied her stock red lipstick with a practiced hand.

When she saw Len approaching from the end of the long white corridor, she relaxed.

“Abigail,” he said when he grew closer.

“Oh, Len,” she said. Her face puzzled up on what she could say next. His name had been the sigh she needed. Everything that came next was not words.

The nurses at their station turned their heads away as Len and my mother touched hands. They extended this privacy veil habitually, as a matter of course, but even so they could see this man meant something to this woman.

“Let’s talk in the visitors’ area,” Len said and led my mother down the corridor.

As they walked she told him my father was in surgery. He filled her in on what had happened in the cornfield.

“Apparently he said he thought the girl was George Harvey.”

“He thought Clarissa was George Harvey?” My mother stopped, incredulous, just outside the visitors’ area.

“It was dark out, Abigail. I think he only saw the girl’s flashlight. My visit today couldn’t have helped much. He’s convinced that Harvey is involved.”

“Is Clarissa all right?”

“She was treated for scratches and released. She was hysterical. Crying and screaming. It was a horrible coincidence, her being Susie’s friend.”

Hal was slumped down in a darkened corner of the visitors’ area with his feet propped up on the helmet he’d brought for Lindsey. When he heard the voices approaching he stirred.

It was my mother and a cop. He slumped back down and let his shoulder-length hair obscure his face. He was pretty sure my mother wouldn’t remember him.

But she recognized the jacket as Samuel’s and for a moment thought, Samuel’s here, but then thought, His brother.

“Let’s sit,” Len said, indicating the connected modular chairs on the far side of the room.

“I’d rather keep walking,” my mother said. “The doctor said it will be an hour at least before they have anything to tell us.”

“Where to?”

“Do you have cigarettes?”

“You know I do,” Len said, smiling guiltily. He had to seek out her eyes. They weren’t focusing on him. They seemed to be preoccupied, and he wished he could reach up and grab them and train them on the here and now. On him.

“Let’s find an exit, then.”

They found a door to a small concrete balcony near my father’s room. It was a service balcony for a heating unit, so even though it was cramped and slightly chilly, the noise and the hot exhaust of the humming hydrant beside them shut them into a capsule that felt far away. They smoked cigarettes and looked at each other as if they had suddenly and without preparation moved on to a new page, where the pressing business had already been highlighted for prompt attention.

“How did your wife die?” my mother asked.

“Suicide.”

Her hair was covering most of her face, and watching her I was reminded of Clarissa at her most self-conscious. The way she behaved around boys when we went to the mall. She would giggle too much and flash her eyes over at them to see where they were looking. But I was also struck by my mother’s red mouth with the cigarette going up and away from it and smoke trailing out. I had seen this mother only once before – in the photograph. This mother had never had us.

“Why did she kill herself?”

“That’s the question that preoccupies me most when I’m not preoccupied by things like your daughter’s murder.”

A strange smile came across my mother’s face.

“Say that again,” she said.

“What?” Len looked at her smile, wanted to reach out and trace the corners of it with his fingertips.

“My daughter’s murder,” my mother said.

“Abigail, are you okay?”

“No one says it. No one in the neighborhood talks about it. People call it the ‘horrible tragedy’ or some variation on that. I just want it to be spoken out loud by somebody. To have it said aloud. I’m ready – I wasn’t ready before.”

My mother dropped her cigarette onto the concrete and let it burn. She took Len’s face in her hands.

“Say it,” she said.

“Your daughter’s murder.”

“Thank you.”

And I watched that flat red mouth move across an invisible line that separated her from the rest of the world. She pulled Len in to her and slowly kissed him on the mouth. He seemed to hesitate at first. His body tensed, telling him NO, but that NO became vague and cloudy, became air sucked into the intake fan of the humming hydrant beside them. She reached up and unbuttoned her raincoat. He placed his hand against the thin gauzy material of her summer gown.

My mother was, in her need, irresistible. As a child I had seen her effect on men. When we were in grocery stores, stockers volunteered to find the items on her list and would help us out to the car. Like Ruana Singh, she was known as one of the pretty mothers in the neighborhood; no man who met her could help but smile. When she asked a question, their beating hearts gave in.

But still, it had only ever been my father who stretched her laughter out into the rooms of the house and made it okay, somehow, for her to let go.

By tacking on extra hours here and there and skipping lunches, my father had managed to come home early from work every Thursday when we were little. But whereas the weekends were family time, they called that day “Mommy and Daddy time.” Lindsey and I thought of it as good-girl time. It meant no peeps out of us as we stayed quiet on the other side of the house, while we used my father’s then sparsely filled den as our playroom.

My mother would start preparing us around two.

“Bath time,” she sang, as if she were saying we could go out to play. And in the beginning that was how it felt. All three of us would rush up to our rooms and put on bathrobes. We would meet in the hallway – three girls – and my mother would take us by the hands and lead us into our pink bathroom.

Back then she talked to us about mythology, which she had studied in school. She liked to tell us stories about Persephone and Zeus. She bought us illustrated books on the Norse gods, which gave us nightmares. She had gotten her master’s in English – having fought tooth and nail with Grandma Lynn to go so far in school – and still held on to vague ideas of teaching when the two of us were old enough to be left on our own.

Those bath times blur together, as do all the gods and goddesses, but what I remember most is watching things hit my mother while I looked at her, how the life she had wanted and the loss of it reached her in waves. As her firstborn, I thought it was me who took away all those dreams of what she had wanted to be.

My mother would lift Lindsey out of the tub first, dry her, and listen to her chatter about ducks and cuts. Then she would get me out of the tub and though I tried to be quiet the warm water made my sister and me drunk, and we talked to my mother about everything that mattered to us. Boys that teased us or how another family down the block had a puppy and why couldn’t we have one too. She would listen seriously as if she were mentally noting the points of our agenda on a steno pad to which she would later refer.

“Well, first things first,” she summed up. “Which means a nice nap for the two of you!”

She and I would tuck Lindsey in together. I stood by the bed as she kissed my sister on her forehead and brushed back her hair from her face. I think competition started there for me. Who got the better kiss, the longer time after the bath with Mom.

Luckily, I always won this. When I look back now I see that my mother had become – and very quickly after they moved into that house – lonely. Because I was the oldest, I became her closest friend.

I was too little to know what she was really saying to me, but I loved to be hushed to sleep by the soft lullaby of her words. One of the blessings of my heaven is that I can go back to these moments, live them again, and be with my mother in a way I never could have been. I reach my hand across the Inbetween and take the hand of that young lonely mother in mine.

What she said to a four-year-old about Helen of Troy: “A feisty woman who screwed things up.” About Margaret Sanger: “She was judged by her looks, Susie. Because she looked like a mouse, no one expected her to last.” Gloria Steinem: “I feel horrible, but I wish she’d trim those nails.” Our neighbors: “An idiot in tight pants; oppressed by that prig of a husband; typically provincial and judgmental of everyone.”

“Do you know who Persephone is?” she asked me absently one Thursday. But I didn’t answer. By then I’d learned to hush when she brought me into my room. My sister’s and my time was in the bathroom as we were being toweled off. Lindsey and I could talk about anything then. In my bedroom it was Mommy’s time.

She took the towel and draped it over the spindle knob of my four-poster bed. “Imagine our neighbor Mrs. Tarking as Persephone,” she said. She opened the drawer of the dresser and handed me my underpants. She always doled out my clothes piecemeal, not wanting to pressure me. She understood my needs early. If I was aware I would have to tie laces I would not have been able to put my feet into socks.

“She’s wearing a long white robe, like a sheet draped over her shoulders, but made out of some nice shiny or light fabric, like silk. And she has sandals made of gold and she’s surrounded by torches which are light made out of flames…”

She went to the drawer to get my undershirt and absentmindedly put it over my head instead of leaving it to me. Once my mother was launched I could take advantage of it – be the baby again. I never protested and claimed to be grown up or a big girl. Those afternoons were about listening to my mysterious mother.

She pulled back the tough-cord Sears bedspread, and I scooted over to the far side along the wall. She always checked her watch then and afterward she would say, “Just for a little while,” and slide off her shoes and slip in between the sheets with me.

For both of us it was about getting lost. She got lost in her story. I got lost in her talk.

She would tell me about Persephone’s mother, Demeter, or Cupid and Psyche, and I