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

itself.
Harvey, Harvey, Harvey.
    In sock feet, Lindsey came silently to the door. She unlocked it as my father drew back and prepared a face that he hoped
     said “Don’t run.”
    “What?” she said. Her face was rigid, an affront. “What is it?”
    “I want to know how you are,” he said. He thought of the curtain falling between him and Mr. Harvey, how a certain capture,
     a lovely blame, was lost to him. He had his family walking through the streets, going to school, passing, on their way, Mr.
     Harvey’s green-shingled house. To get the blood back in his heart he needed his child.
    “I want to be alone,” Lindsey said. “Isn’t that obvious?”
    “I’m here if you need me,” he said.
    “Look, Dad,” my sister said, making her one concession for him, “I’m handling this alone.”
    What could he do with that? He could have broken the code and said, “I’m not, I can’t, don’t make me,” but he stood there
     for a second and then retreated. “I understand,” he said first, although he didn’t.
    I wanted to lift him up, like statues I’d seen in art history books. A woman lifting up a man. The rescue in reverse. Daughter
     to father saying, “It’s okay. You’re okay. Now I won’t let anything hurt.”
    Instead, I watched him as he went to place a call to Len Fenerman.
    The police in those first weeks were almost reverent. Missing dead girls were not a common occurrence in the suburbs. But with
     no leads coming in on where my body was or who had killed me, the police were getting nervous. There was a window of time
     during which physical evidence was usually found; that window grew smaller every day.
    “I don’t want to sound irrational, Detective Fenerman,” my father said.
    “Len, please.” Tucked in the corner of his desk blotter was the school picture Len Fenerman had taken from my mother. He had
     known, before anyone said the words, that I was already dead.
    “I’m certain there’s a man in the neighborhood who knows something,” my father said. He was staring out the window of his
     upstairs den, toward the cornfield. The man who owned it had told the press he was going to let it sit fallow for now.
    “Who is it, and what led you to believe this?” Len Fenerman asked. He chose a stubby, chewed pencil from the front metal lip
     of his desk drawer.
    My father told him about the tent, about how Mr. Harvey had told him to go home, about saying my name, about how weird the
     neighborhood thought Mr. Harvey was with no regular job and no kids.
    “I’ll check it out,” Len Fenerman said, because he had to. That was the role he played in the dance. But what my father had
     given him offered him little or nothing to work with. “Don’t talk to anyone and don’t approach him again,” Len warned.
    When my father hung up the phone he felt strangely empty. Drained, he opened the door to his den and closed it quietly behind
     him. In the hallway, for the second time, he called my mother’s name: “Abigail.”
    She was in the downstairs bathroom, sneaking bites from the macaroons my father’s firm always sent us for Christmas. She ate
     them greedily; they were like suns bursting open in her mouth. The summer she was pregnant with me, she wore one gingham maternity
     dress over and over, refusing to spend money on another, and ate all she wanted, rubbing her belly and saying, “Thank you,
     baby,” as she dribbled chocolate on her breasts.
    There was a knock down low on the door.
    “Momma?” She stuffed the macaroons back in the medicine cabinet, swallowing what was already in her mouth.
    “Momma?” Buckley repeated. His voice was sleepy.
    “Mommmmm-maaa!”
    She despised the word.
    When my mother opened the door, my little brother held on to her knees. Buckley pressed his face into the flesh above them.
    Hearing movement, my father went to meet my mother in the kitchen. Together they took solace in attending to Buckley.
    “Where’s Susie?” Buckley asked as my father