my mother said, “but no promises this time.” She waited until Lindsey glanced up and looked at her, her eyes a challenge now as much as the eyes of a child who had grown up fast, run fast since the day the police had said too much blood in the earth, your daughter/sister/child is dead.
“I know what you did.”
“I stand warned.”
My sister hefted the bag.
They heard shouting. Buckley ran out onto the front porch. “Lindsey!” he said, forgetting his serious self, his heavy body buoyant. “Come see what Hal got me!”
He banged. And he banged and he banged and he banged. And Hal was the only one still smiling after five minutes of it. Everyone else had glimpsed the future and it was loud.
“I think now would be a good time to introduce him to the brush,” Grandma Lynn said. Hal obliged.
My mother had handed the daffodils to Grandma Lynn and gone upstairs almost immediately, using the bathroom as an excuse. Everyone knew where she was going: my old room.
She stood at the edge of it, alone, as if she were standing at the edge of the Pacific. It was still lavender. The furniture, save for a reclining chair of my grandmother’s, was unchanged.
“I love you, Susie,” she said.
I had heard these words so many times from my father that it shocked me now; I had been waiting, unknowingly, to hear it from my mother. She had needed the time to know that this love would not destroy her, and I had, I now knew, given her that time, could give it, for it was what I had in great supply.
She noticed a photograph on my old dresser, which Grandma Lynn had put in a gold frame. It was the very first photograph I’d ever taken of her – my secret portrait of Abigail before her family woke and she put on her lipstick. Susie Salmon, wildlife photographer, had captured a woman staring out across her misty suburban lawn.
She used the bathroom, running the tap noisily and disturbing the towels. She knew immediately that her mother had bought these towels – cream, a ridiculous color for towels – and monogrammed – also ridiculous, my mother thought. But then, just as quickly, she laughed at herself. She was beginning to wonder how useful her scorched-earth policy had been to her all these years. Her mother was loving if she was drunk, solid if she was vain. When was it all right to let go not only of the dead but of the living – to learn to accept?
I was not in the bathroom, in the tub, or in the spigot; I did not hold court in the mirror above her head or stand in miniature at the tip of every bristle on Lindsey’s or Buckley’s toothbrush. In some way I could not account for – had they reached a state of bliss? were my parents back together forever? had Buckley begun to tell someone his troubles? would my father’s heart truly heal? – I was done yearning for them, needing them to yearn for me. Though I still would. Though they still would. Always.
Downstairs Hal was holding Buckley’s wrist as it held the brush stick. “Just pass it over the snare lightly.” And Buckley did and looked up at Lindsey sitting across from him on the couch.
“Pretty cool, Buck,” my sister said.
“Like a rattlesnake.”
Hal liked that. “Exactly,” he said, visions of his ultimate jazz combo dancing in his head.
My mother arrived back downstairs. When she entered the room she saw my father first. Silently she tried to let him know she was okay, that she was still breathing the air in, coping with the altitude.
“Okay, everyone!” my grandmother shouted from the kitchen, “Samuel has an announcement to make, so sit down!”
Everyone laughed and before they realigned into their more closed selves – this being together so hard for them even if it was what they all had wanted – Samuel came into the room along with Grandma Lynn. She held a tray of champagne flutes ready to be filled. He glanced at Lindsey briefly.
“Lynn is going to assist me by pouring,” he said.
“Something she’s quite good at,” my mother said.
“Abigail?” Grandma Lynn said.
“Yes?”
“It’s nice to see you too.”
“Go ahead, Samuel,” my father said.
“I wanted to say that I’m happy to be here with you all.”
But Hal knew his brother. “You’re not done, wordsmith. Buck, give him some brush.” This time Hal let Buckley do it without assistance, and my brother backed Samuel up.
“I wanted to say that I’m glad that Mrs. Salmon is home, and that Mr. Salmon is home too, and that I’m honored to be marrying their beautiful daughter.”
“Hear! Hear!” my father said.
My mother stood to hold the tray for Grandma Lynn, and together they distributed the glasses across the room.
As I watched my family sip champagne, I thought about how their lives trailed backward and forward from my death and then, I saw, as Samuel took the daring step of kissing Lindsey in a room full of family, became borne aloft away from it.
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections – sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent – that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.
My father looked at the daughter who was standing there in front of him. The shadow daughter was gone.
With the promise that Hal would teach him to do drum rolls after dinner, Buckley put up his brush and drumsticks, and the seven of them began to trail through the kitchen into the dining room, where Samuel and Grandma Lynn had used the good plates to serve her trademark Stouffer’s frozen ziti and Sara Lee frozen cheesecake.
“Someone’s outside,” Hal said, spotting a man through the window. “It’s Ray Singh!”
“Let him in,” my mother said.
“He’s leaving.”
All of them save my father and grandmother, who stayed together in the dining room, began to go after him.
“Hey, Ray!” Hal said, opening the door and nearly stepping directly in the pie. “Wait up!”
Ray turned. His mother was in the car with the engine running.
“We didn’t mean to interrupt,” Ray said now to Hal. Lindsey and Samuel and Buckley and a woman he recognized as Mrs. Salmon were all crowded together on the porch.
“Is that Ruana?” my mother called. “Please ask her in.”
“Really, that’s fine,” Ray said and made no move to come closer. He wondered,
Lindsey and Samuel broke away from the group and came toward him.
By that time my mother had walked down the front path to the driveway and was leaning in the car window talking to Ruana.
Ray glanced at his mother as she opened the car door to go inside the house. “Anything but pie for the two of us,” she said to my mother as they walked up the path.
“Is Dr. Singh working?” my mother asked.
“As usual,” Ruana said. She watched to see Ray walking, with Lindsey and Samuel, through the door of the house. “Will you come smoke stinky cigarettes with me again?”
“It’s a date,” my mother said.
“Ray, welcome, sit,” my father said when he saw him coming through the living room. He had a special place in his heart for the boy who had loved his daughter, but Buckley swooped into the chair next to my father before anyone else could get to him.
Lindsey and Samuel found two straight chairs from the living room and brought them in to sit by the sideboard. Ruana sat between Grandma Lynn and my mother and Hal sat alone on one end.
I realized then that they would not know when I was gone, just as they could not know sometimes how heavily I had hovered in a particular room. Buckley had talked to me and I had talked back. Even if I hadn’t thought I’d been talking to him, I had. I became manifest in whatever way they wanted me to be.
And there she was again, alone and walking out in the cornfield while everyone else I cared for sat together in one room. She would always feel me and think of me. I could see that, but there was no longer anything I could do. Ruth had been a girl haunted and now she would be a woman haunted. First by accident and now by choice. All of it, the story of my life and death, was hers if she chose to tell it, even to one person at a time.
It was late in Ruana and Ray’s visit when Samuel started talking about the gothic revival house that Lindsey and he had found along an overgrown section of Route 30. As he told Abigail about it in detail, describing how he had realized he wanted to propose to Lindsey and live there with her, Ray found himself asking, “Does it have a big hole in the ceiling of the back room and cool windows above the front door?”
“Yes,” Samuel said, as my father grew alarmed. “But it can be fixed, Mr. Salmon. I’m sure of it.”
“Ruth’s dad owns that,” Ray said.
Everyone was quiet for a moment and then Ray continued.
“He took out a loan on his business to buy up old places that aren’t already slated for destruction. He wants to restore them,” Ray said.
“My God,” Samuel said.
And I was gone.
You don’t notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You’re not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out. Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room.
Grandma Lynn died several years later, but I have yet to see her here. I imagine her tying it on in her heaven, drinking mint juleps with Tennessee Williams and Dean Martin. She’ll be here in her own sweet time, I’m sure.
If I’m to be honest with you, I still sneak away to watch my family sometimes. I can’t help it, and sometimes they still think of me. They can’t help it.
After Lindsey and Samuel got married they sat in the empty house on Route 30 and drank champagne. The branches of the overgrown trees had grown into the upstairs windows, and they huddled beneath them, knowing the branches would have to be cut. Ruth’s father had promised he would sell the house to them only if Samuel paid him in labor as his first employee in a restoration business. By the end of that summer, Mr. Connors had cleared the lot with the help of Samuel and Buckley and set up a trailer, which during the day would be his work quarters and at night could be Lindsey’s study room.
In the beginning it was uncomfortable, the lack of plumbing and electricity, and having to go home
