Read Online The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold - Free Book Online Page A

my father to turn into the man he could never have been—a man violent in rage. That’s
     what you see in movies, that’s what happens in the books people read. An everyman takes a gun or a knife and stalks the murderer
     of his family; he does a Bronson on them and everyone cheers.
    What it
was
like:
    Every day he got up. Before sleep wore off, he was who he used to be. Then, as his consciousness woke, it was as if poison
     seeped in. At first he couldn’t even get up. He lay there under a heavy weight. But then only movement could save him, and
     he moved and he moved and he moved, no movement being enough to make up for it. The guilt on him, the hand of God pressing
     down on him, saying,
You were not there when your daughter needed you.
    Before my father left for Mr. Harvey’s, my mother had been sitting in the front hall next to the statue they’d bought of St.
     Francis. She was gone when he came back. He’d called for her, said her name three times, said it like a wish that she would
     not appear, and then he ascended the steps to his den to jot things down in a small spiral notebook: “A drinker? Get him drunk.
     Maybe he’s a talker.” He wrote this next: “I think Susie watches me.” I was ecstatic in heaven. I hugged Holly, I hugged Franny.
     My father knew, I thought.
    Then Lindsey slammed the front door more loudly than usual, and my father was glad for the noise. He was afraid of going further
     in his notes, of writing the words down. The slamming door echoed down the strange afternoon he’d spent and brought him into
     the present, into activity, where he needed to be so he would not drown. I understood this—I’m not saying I didn’t resent
     it, that it didn’t remind me of sitting at the dinner table and having to listen to Lindsey tell my parents about the test
     she’d done so well on, or about how the history teacher was going to recommend her for the district honors council, but Lindsey
     was living, and the living deserved attention too.
    She stomped up the stairs. Her clogs slammed against the pine boards of the staircase and shook the house.
    I may have begrudged her my father’s attention, but I respected her way of handling things. Of everyone in the family, it
     was Lindsey who had to deal with what Holly called the Walking Dead Syndrome—when other people see the dead person and don’t
     see you.
    When people looked at Lindsey, even my father and mother, they saw me. Even Lindsey was not immune. She avoided mirrors. She
     now took her showers in the dark.
    She would leave the dark shower and feel her way over to the towel rack. She would be safe in the dark—the moist steam from
     the shower still rising off the tiles encased her. If the house was quiet or if she heard murmurs below her, she knew she
     would be undisturbed. This was when she could think of me and she did so in two ways: she either thought
Susie,
just that one word, and cried there, letting her tears roll down her already damp cheeks, knowing no one would see her, no
     one would quantify this dangerous substance as grief, or she would imagine me running, imagine me getting away, imagine herself
     being taken instead, fighting until she was free. She fought back the constant question,
Where is Susie now?
    My father listened to Lindsey in her room. Bang, the door was slammed shut. Thump, her books were thrown down. Squeak, she
     fell onto her bed. Her clogs, boom, boom, were kicked off onto the floor. A few minutes later he stood outside her door.
    “Lindsey,” he said upon knocking.
    There was no answer.
    “Lindsey, can I come in?”
    “Go away,” came her resolute answer.
    “Come on now, honey,” he pleaded.
    “Go away!”
    “Lindsey,” my father said, sucking in his breath, “why can’t you let me in?” He placed his forehead gently against the bedroom
     door. The wood felt cool and, for a second, he forgot the pounding of his temples, the suspicion he now held that kept repeating