倍可親

標題: [聽熱銷小說] 可愛的骨頭 The Lovely Bones [列印本頁]

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 02:57
標題: [聽熱銷小說] 可愛的骨頭 The Lovely Bones

《可愛的骨頭》是一個靈異故事，讓一個遭到綁架、強暴並被殘殺的女孩在天之靈開口講話。

作者以一個女孩清新活潑的口吻，將一樁人間悲劇化作懸疑叢生卻又風趣溫馨、充滿希望的心靈療愈故事。它描述了一個十多歲少女被強姦謀殺后的思維。

敘事者是死者本人，小說第一句話是：「1993年12月6日，我被謀害時不過14歲。」主角講述了她的被害對家庭的影響、警局的調查以及她進入天堂后的情況。作者以14歲女孩蘇茜的眼光自天堂向下俯視，像「一條在天空浮沉的魚」來觀察她離開的世界。當然，見到的不是她樂意看到的景象：母親對她的死悲痛不已；父親毆打她的女友克拉莉莎，認為女兒的死是她的過失。而真正的兇手是鄰居惡少哈維，可警局追捕不力，讓他脫逃，蘇茜在天堂里跟隨觀察著他的行蹤。蘇茜在人間還有好友露絲和一個弟弟，蘇茜的靈魂不斷在他們面前出現。好友露絲則對她始終不忘，長大后一心一意要當罪案審判的見證人。作者最後用蘇茜的口吻向他們告別...

蘇茜被害後上了天堂，在那裡，「生活已是永久的昨日」，她從天上注視著人間親友的悲傷，兇犯的無恥和警員的無能為力。艾麗絲

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 02:58
[B]可愛的骨頭 The Lovely Bones (01-01) [/B]

美國2002年度最暢銷小說奇象

一位新作家的第一部小說售出后馬上升入暢銷書榜第一位，這是美國文壇上罕見的現象。年事尚輕的女作家愛麗斯

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 02:59
[B]可愛的骨頭 The Lovely Bones(01-02)[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200506/200506223464367174.mp3[/MP3]

ec class. My favorite teacher was Mr. Botte, who taught biology and liked to animate the frogs and crawfish we had to dissect by making them dance in their waxed pans.

I wasn't killed by Mr. Botte, by the way. -----1-----. That's the problem. You never know. Mr. Botte came to my memorial (as, may I add, did almost the entire junior high school-I was never so popular) and cried quite a bit. He had a sick kid. We all knew this, so when he laughed at his own jokes, hich were rusty way before I had him, we laughed too, forcing it sometimes just to make him happy. His daughter died a year and a half after I did. She had leukemia, but I never saw her in my heaven.

My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. -----2-----. My murderer believed in old-fashioned things like eggshells and coffee grounds, which he said his own mother had used. My father came home smiling, making jokes about how the man's garden might be beautiful but it would stink to high heaven once a heat wave hit.

But on December 6, 1973, it was snowing, and I took a shortcut through the cornfield back from the junior high. It was dark out because the days were shorter in winter, -----3-----. The snow was falling lightly, like a flurry of small hands, and I was breathing through my nose until it was running so much that I had to open my mouth. Six feet from where Mr. Harvey stood, I stuck my tongue out to taste a snowflake.

"Don't let me startle you," Mr. Harvey said.
-----4-----.
After I was dead I thought about

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 02:59
[B]可愛的骨頭 The Lovely Bones(01-03)[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200506/200506282425021328.mp3[/MP3]

After I was dead I thought about how there had been the light scent of cologne in the air but that I had not been paying attention, -----1-----.
"Mr. Harvey," I said.
"You're the older Salmon girl, right?"
"Yes."
"How are your folks?"
-----2-----, I had never felt comfortable with adults.
"Fine," I said. I was cold, but the natural authority of his age, and the added fact that he was a neighbor and had talked to my father about fertilizer, rooted me to the
spot.
"I've built something back here," he said. "Would you like to see?"
"I'm sort of cold, Mr. Harvey," I said, "and my mom likes me home before dark."
"It's after dark, Susie," he said.
I wish now that I had known this was weird. I had never told him my name. I guess I thought my father had told him one of the embarrassing anecdotes he saw merely as loving testaments to his children. -----3-----, the one that guests would use. He did this to my little sister, Lindsey, thank God. At least I was spared that indignity. But he liked to tell a story about how, once Lindsey was born, I was so jealous that one day while he was on the phone in the other room, I moved down the couch-he could see me from where he stood-and tried to pee on top of Lindsey in her carrier. This story humiliated me every time he told it, to the pastor of our church, to our neighbor Mrs. Stead, -----4----- "Susie has a lot of spunk!"
"Spunk!" my father would say. "Let me tell you about spunk," and he would launch immediately into his Susie-peed-on-Lindsey story.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:00
[B]可愛的骨頭 The Lovely Bones(01-04)[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200506/200506282433107255.mp3[/MP3]

But as it turned out, my father had not mentioned us to Mr. Harvey or told him the Susie-peed-on-Lindsey story.

Mr. Harvey would later say these words to my mother when he ran into her on the street: "I heard about the horrible, horrible tragedy. What was your daughter's name, again?"

"Susie," my mother said, bracing up under the weight of it, a weight that she naively hoped might lighten someday, -----1-----.

Mr. Harvey told her the usual: "I hope they get the bastard. I'm sorry for your loss."

I was in my heaven by that time, fitting my limbs together, and couldn't believe his audacity. "The man has no shame," I said to Franny, my intake counselor. "Exactly," she said, -----2-----.

Mr. Harvey said it would only take a minute, so I followed him a little farther into the cornfield, where fewer stalks were broken off because no one used it as a shortcut to the junior high. My mom had told my baby brother, Buckley, -----3-----. "The corn is for horses, not humans," she said. "Not dogs?" Buckley asked. "No," my mother answered. "Not dinosaurs?" Buckley asked. And it went like that.

"I've made a little hiding place," said Mr. Harvey. He stopped and turned to me.

"I don't see anything," I said. I was aware that Mr. Harvey was looking at me strangely. -----4-----, but they usual

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:01
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(01-05)[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200506/200506282440376012.mp3[/MP3]

but they usually didn't lose their marbles over me when I was wearing my royal blue parka and yellow elephant bell-bottoms. -----1-----.
"You should be more observant, Susie," he said.
I felt like observing my way out of there, but I didn't. Why didn't I? Franny said these questions were fruitless: "You didn't and that's that. Don't mull it over. It does no good. You're dead and you have to accept it."
"Try again," Mr. Harvey said, and he squatted down and knocked against the ground.
"What's that?" I asked.
My ears were freezing. I wouldn't wear the multicolored cap with the pompom and jingle bells that my mother had made me one Christmas. I had shoved it in the pocket of my parka instead.
-----2-----. It felt harder even than frozen earth, which was pretty hard.
"It's wood," Mr. Harvey said. "It keeps the entrance from collapsing. Other than that it's all made out of earth."
"What is it?" I asked. -----3-----. I was like I was in science class: I was curious.
"Come and see."
It was awkward to get into, that much he admitted once we were both inside the hole.
But I was so amazed by how he had made a chimney that would draw smoke out if he ever chose to build a fire that the awkwardness of getting in and out of the hole wasn't even on my mind. -----4-----. The worst I'd had to escape was Artie, a strange-looking kid at school whose father was a mortician. He liked to pretend he was

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:01
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(01-06)[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200507/200507037025156388.mp3[/MP3]

He liked to pretend he was carrying a needle full of embalming fluid around with him. On his notebooks he would draw needles spilling dark drips.
"This is neato!" I said to Mr. Harvey. He could have been the hunchback of Notre Dame, whom we had read about in French class. I didn't care. I completely reverted. I was my brother Buckley on our day-trip to the Museum of Natural History in New York, -----1-----. I hadn't used the word neato in public since elementary school.

"Like taking candy from a baby," Franny said.

I can still see the hole like it was yesterday, and it was. Life is a perpetual

yesterday for us. -----2-----, say, where we kept our boots and slickers and where Mom had managed to fit a washer and dryer, one on top of the other. I could almost stand up in it, but Mr. Harvey had to stoop. He'd created a bench along the sides of it by the way he'd dug it out. He immediately sat down.

"Look around," he said.

-----3-----, the dug-out shelf above him where he had placed matches, a row of batteries, and a battery-powered fluorescent lamp that cast the only light in the room-an eerie light that would make his features hard to see when he was on top of me.

There was a mirror on the shelf, and a razor and shaving cream. I thought that was odd.

Wouldn't he do that at home? But I guess I figured that a man who had a perfectly good split-level and then built an underground room only half a mile away had to be kind of loo-loo. -----4-----: "The man's a character, that's all."

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:02
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(01-07)[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200507/200507037042595421.mp3[/MP3]

So I guess I was thinking that Mr. Harvey was a character, and I liked the room, and it was warm, -----1-----, what the mechanics of the thing wee and where he'd learned to do something like that.
But by the time the Gilberts' dog found my elbow three days later and brought it home with a telling corn husk attached to it, Mr. Harvey had closed it up. I was in transit during this. I didn't get to see him sweat it out, remove the wood reinforcement, bag any evidence along with my body parts, except that elbow. By the time I popped up with enough wherewithal to look down at the goings-on on Earth, I was more concerned with my family than anything else.

-----2-----. Her pale face paler than I had ever seen it. Her blue eyes staring. My father was driven into motion. He wanted to know details and to comb the cornfield along with the cops. I still thank God for a small detective named Len Fenerman. He assigned two uniforms to take my dad into town and have him point out all the places I'd hung out with my friends. -----3-----. No one had told Lindsey, who was thirteen and would have been old enough, or Buckley, who was four and would, to be honest, never fully understand.

Mr. Harvey asked me if I would like a refreshment. That was how he put it. I said I had to go home.

"Be polite and have a Coke," he said. "I'm sure the other kids would."

"What other kids?"

"I built this for the kids in the neighborhood. I thought it could be some sort of clubhouse."

I don't think I believed this even then. -----4-----. I imagined he was lonely.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:02
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(01-08)[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200507/200507037053043827.mp3[/MP3]

We had read about men like him in health class. Men who never married and ate frozen meals every night and -----1-----. I felt sorry for him.
"Okay," I said, "I'll have a Coke."
In a little while he said, "Aren't you warm, Susie? Why don't you take off your parka."
I did.
After this he said, "You're very pretty, Susie."
"Thanks," I said, even though he gave me what my friend Clarissa and I had dubbed the skeevies.
"Do you have a boyfriend?"
"No, Mr. Harvey," I said. I swallowed the rest of my Coke, which was a lot, and said, "I got to go, Mr. Harvey. This is a cool place, but I have to go."
He stood up and did his hunchback number by the six dug- in steps that led to the world. "I don't know why you think you're leaving."
-----2-----: Mr. Harvey was no character. He made me feel skeevy and icky now that he was blocking the door.
"Mr. Harvey, I really have to get home."
"Take off your clothes."
"What?"
"Take your clothes off," Mr. Harvey said. "-----3-----."
"I am, Mr. Harvey," I said.
"I want to make sure. Your parents will thank me."
"My parents?"
"They only want good girls," he said.
"Mr. Harvey," I said, "please let me leave."
"-----4-----."
Fitness was not a big thing back then; aerobics was barely a word.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:03
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(01-09)[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200507/200507037054868851.mp3[/MP3]

Girls were supposed to be soft, and only the girls we suspected were butch could climb the ropes at school.
I fought hard. I fought as hard as I could not to let Mr. Harvey hurt me, but my hard-as-I-could was not hard enough, not even close, and I was soon lying down on the ground, in the ground, with him on top of me panting and sweating, having lost his glasses in the struggle.

I was so alive then. I thought it was the worst thing in the world to be lying flat on my back with a sweating man on top of me. -----1-----.

I thought of my mother.

My mother would be checking the dial of the clock on her oven. It was a new oven and she loved that it had a clock on it. "I can time things to the minute," she told her own mother, -----2-----.

She would be worried, but more angry than worried, at my lateness. As my father pulled into the garage, she would rush about, fixing him a cocktail, a dry sherry, and put on an exasperated face: "You know junior high," she would say. "Maybe it's Spring Fling." "Abigail," my father would say, "-----3-----?" Having failed with this, my mother might rush Buckley into the room and say, "

lay with your father," while she ducked into the kitchen and took a nip of sherry for herself.

Mr. Harvey started to press his lips against mine. They were blubbery and wet and I wanted to scream but -----4-----. I had been kissed once by someone I liked. His name was Ray and he was Indian. He had an accent and was dark. I wasn't supposed to like him. Clarissa called his large eyes, with their half-closed lids, "freak-a-delic," but he was nice

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:03
[B]可愛的骨頭(01-10) The Lovely Bones[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200602/200602208171906551.mp3[/MP3]

in what my mother called one of her Jackie Kennedy dresses. She had never understood why unlike the rest of us her mother had no hips-she could slide into a straight-cut dress and fill it out just enough, even at sixty-two, to look perfect in it.
"What are you doing in here?" Lindsey asked.
"I need help with this zipper." Grandma Lynn turned, and Lindsey could see what she had never seen on our own mother. The back of Grandma Lynn's black bra, the top of her half-slip. She walked the step or two over to our grandmother and, trying not to touch anything but the zipper tab, zipped her up.
"How about that hook and eye up there," said Grandma Lynn. "Can you get that?」
There were powdery smells and Chanel No. 5 sprinkled all around our grandmother's neck.
"It's one of the reasons for a man-you can't do this stuff yourself.」
Lindsey was as tall as our grandmother and still growing. As she took the hook and eye in either hand, she saw the fine wisps of dyed blond hair at the base of my grandmother's skull. She saw the downy gray hair trailing along her back and neck. She hooked the dress and then stood there.
"I've forgotten what she looked like," Lindsey said.
"What?" Grandma Lynn turned.
"I can't remember," Lindsey said. "I mean her neck, you know, did I ever look at it?」
"Oh honey," Grandma Lynn said, "come here." She opened up her arms, but Lindsey turned into the closet. "I need to look pretty," she said.
"You are pretty," Grandma Lynn said.
Lindsey couldn't get her breath. One thing Grandma Lynn

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:08
Note that「可愛的骨頭(01-[B]11[/COLOR][/B]) The Lovely Bones」doesn't exist. It seems a mistake in number counting by the author of the original postings. Here I leave this mistake as is.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:08
[B]可愛的骨頭(01-12) The Lovely Bones[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200603/200603068151253152.mp3[/MP3]

Grandma Lynn went into preparation overdrive. She helped Lindsey get the dark blue dress over her head, and then they ran back to Lindsey's room for shoes, and then, finally, in the hallway, under the overhead light, she fixed the smudged eyeliner and mascara on my sister's face. She finished her off with firmly pressed powder, whisking the cotton pad lightly in an upward direction along either side of Lindsey's face. It wasn't until my grandmother came downstairs and my mother commented on the shortness of Lindsey's dress while looking suspiciously at Grandma Lynn that my sister and I realized Grandma Lynn didn't have a spot of makeup on her own face. Buckley rode between them in the back seat, and as they neared the church he looked at Grandma Lynn and asked what she was doing.
"When you don't have time for rouge, this puts a little life into them," she said, and so Buckley copied her and pinched his cheeks.
Samuel Heckler was standing by the stone posts that marked the path to the church door. He was dressed all in black, and beside him his older brother, Hal, stood wearing the beat-up leather jacket Samuel had worn on Christmas Day.
His brother was like a darker print of Samuel. He was tanned, and his face was weathered from riding his motorcycle full-tilt down country roads. As my family approached, Hal turned quickly and walked away.
"This must be Samuel," my grandmother said. "I'm the evil grandma.」
"Shall we go in?" my father said. "It's nice to see you, Samuel.」
Lindsey and Samuel led the way, while my grandmother dropped back and walked on the other side of my mother. A united front.
Detective Fenerman was standing by the doorway in an

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:09
[B]可愛的骨頭(01-13) The Lovely Bones[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200603/200603131463089375.mp3[/MP3]

itchy looking suit. He nodded at my parents and seemed to linger on my mother. "Will you join us?" my father asked.
"Thank you," he said, "but I just want to be in the vicinity." "We appreciate that.」
They walked into the cramped vestibule of our church. I wanted to snake up my father's back, circle his neck, whisper in his ear. But I was already there in his every pore and crevice.
He had woken up with a hangover and turned over on his side to watch my mother's shallow breathing against the pillow. His lovely wife, his lovely girl. He wanted to place his hand on her cheek, smooth her hair back from her face, kiss her-but sleeping, she was at peace. He hadn't woken a day since my death when the day wasn't something to get through. But the truth was, the memorial service day was not the worst kind. At least it was honest. At least it was a day shaped around what they were so preoccupied by: my absence. Today he would not have to pretend he was getting back to normal-whatever normal was. Today he could walk tall with grief and so could Abigail. But he knew that as soon as she woke up he would not really look at her for the rest of the day, not really look into her and see the woman he had known her to be before the day they had taken in the news of my death. At nearly two months, the idea of it as news was fading away in the hearts of all but my family -and Ruth.
She came with her father. They were standing in the corner near the glass case that held a chalice used during the Revolutionary War, when the church had been a hospital.
Mr. and Mrs. Dewitt were making small talk with them. At home on her desk, Mrs. Dewitt had a poem

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:10
[B]可愛的骨頭(01-14) The Lovely Bones[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200603/200603208100121865.mp3[/MP3]

of Ruth's. On Monday she was going to the guidance counselor with it. It was a poem about me.
"My wife seems to agree with Principal Caden," Ruth's father was saying, "that the memorial will help allow the kids to accept it.」
"What do you think?" Mr. Dewitt asked.
"I think let bygones be bygones and leave the family to their own. But Ruthie wanted to come.」
Ruth watched my family greet people and noted in horror my sister's new look. Ruth did not believe in makeup. She thought it demeaned women. Samuel Heckler was holding Lindsey's hand. A word from her readings popped into her head: subjugation. But then I saw her notice Hal Heckler through the window. He was standing out by the oldest graves in the front and pulling on a cigarette butt.
"Ruthie," her father asked, "what is it?」
She focused again and looked at him. "What's what?」
"You were staring off into space just now," he said. "I like the way the graveyard looks.」
"Ah kid, you're my angel," he said. "Let's grab a seat before the good ones get taken.」
Clarissa was there, with a sheepish-looking Brian Nelson, who was wearing a suit of his father's. She made her way up to my family, and when Principal Caden and Mr. Botte saw her they fell away and let her approach.
She shook hands with my father first.
"Hello, Clarissa," he said. "How are you?」
"Okay," she said. "How are you and Mrs. Salmon?」
"We're fine, Clarissa," he said.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:10
[B]可愛的骨頭(01-15) The Lovely Bones[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200603/200603278260045338.mp3[/MP3]

"We're fine, Clarissa," he said.
What an odd lie, I thought.
"Would you like to join us in the family pew?」
"Um"-she looked down at her hands-"I'm with my boyfriend.」
My mother had entered some trancelike state and was staring hard at Clarissa's face. Clarissa was alive and I was dead. Clarissa began to feel it, the eyes boring into her, and she wanted to get away. Then Clarissa saw the dress.
"Hey," she said, reaching out toward my sister.
"What is it, Clarissa?" my mother snapped.
"Um, nothing," she said. She looked at the dress again, knew she could never ask for it back now.
"Abigail?" my father said. He was attuned to her voice, her anger. Something was off.
Grandma Lynn, who stood just a bit behind my mother, winked at Clarissa.
"I was just noticing how good Lindsey looked," Clarissa said. My sister blushed.
The people in the vestibule began to stir and part. It was the Reverend Strick, walking in his vestments toward my parents.
Clarissa faded back to look for Brian Nelson. When she found him, she joined him out among the graves.
Ray Singh stayed away. He said goodbye to me in his own way: by looking at a picture-my studio portrait-that I had given him that fall.
He looked into the eyes of that photograph and saw right through them to the backdrop

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:11
[B]可愛的骨頭(01-16) The Lovely Bones[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200604/200604038252303169.mp3[/MP3]

of marbleized suede every kid had to sit in front of under a hot light. What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone. He knew that no one ever really looked the way they did in photos. He knew he didn't look as wild or as frightened as he did in his own. He came to realize something as he stared at my photo-that it was not me. I was in the air around him, I was in the cold mornings he had now with Ruth, I was in the quiet time he spent alone between studying. I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow, to set me free. He didn't want to burn my photo or toss it away, but he didn't want to look at me anymore, either. I watched him as he placed the photograph in one of the giant volumes of Indian poetry in which he and his mother had pressed dozens of fragile flowers that were slowly turning to dust.
At the service they said nice things about me. Reverend Strick. Principal Caden. Mrs. Dewitt. But my father and mother sat through it numbed. Samuel kept squeezing Lindsey's hand, but she didn't seem to notice him. She barely blinked. Buckley sat in a small suit borrowed for the occasion from Nate, who had attended a wedding that year. He fidgeted and watched my father. It was Grandma Lynn who did the most important thing that day.
During the final hymn, as my family stood, she leaned over to Lindsey and whispered, "By the door, that's him.」
Lindsey looked over.
Standing just behind Len Fenerman, who was now inside the doorway and singing along, stood a man from the neighborhood. He was dressed more casually than anyone else, wearing flannellined khaki trousers and a heavy flannel shirt.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:11
[B]可愛的骨頭(01-17) The Lovely Bones[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200604/200604109081753149.mp3[/MP3]

khaki trousers and a heavy flannel shirt.
For a moment Lindsey thought she recognized him.
Their eyes locked. Then she passed out.
In all the commotion of attending to her, George Harvey slipped between the Revolutionary War gravestones behind the church and walked away without being noticed.

T E N

At the statewide Gifted Symposium each summer, the gifted kids from seventh to ninth grade would get together for a four-week retreat to, as I always thought of it, hang out in the trees and pick one another's brains. Around the campfire they sang oratorios instead of folk songs. In the girls' showers they would swoon over the physique of Jacques d'Amboise or the frontal lobe of John Kenneth Galbraith.
But even the gifted had their cliques. There were the Science Nerds and the Math Brains. They formed the superior, if somewhat socially crippled, highest rung of the gifted ladder. Then came the History Heads, who knew the birth and death dates of every historical figure anyone had ever heard of. They would pass by the other campers voicing cryptic, seemingly meaningless life spans: "1769 to 1821," "1770 to 1831." When Lindsey passed the History Heads she would think the answers to herself. "Napoleon." "Hegel.」
There were also the Masters of Arcane Knowledge.
Everyone begrudged their presence among the gifteds. These were the kids that could break down an engine and build it back again -no diagrams or instructions needed. They understood things in a real, not theoretical, way. They seemed not to care about their grades.
Samuel was a Master.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:12
[B]可愛的骨頭(01-18) The Lovely Bones[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200604/200604178025082927.mp3[/MP3]

His heroes were Richard Feynman and his brother, Hal. Hal had dropped out of high school and now ran the bike shop near the sinkhole, where he serviced everyone from Hell's Angels to the elderly who rode motorized scooters around the parking lots of their retirement homes. Hal smoked, lived at home over the Hecklers' garage, and conducted a variety of romances in the back of his shop.
When people asked Hal when he was going to grow up, he said, "Never." Inspired by this, when the teachers asked Samuel what he wanted to be, he would say: "I don't know. I just turned fourteen.」
Almost fifteen now, Ruth Connors knew. Out in the aluminum toolshed behind her house, surrounded by the doorknobs and hardware her father had found in old houses slated for demolition, Ruth sat in the darkness and concentrated until she came away with a headache. She would run into the house, past the living room, where her father sat reading, and up to her room, where in fits and bursts she would write her poetry. "Being Susie " "After Death," "In Pieces," "Beside Her Now," and her favorite -the one she was most proud of and carried with her to the symposium folded and refolded so often that the creases were close to cuts - "The Lip of the Grave.」
Ruth had to be driven to the symposium because that morning, when the bus was leaving, she was still at home with an acute attack of gastritis. She was trying weird allvegetable regimes and the night before had eaten a whole head of cabbage for dinner. Her mother refused to kowtow to the vegetarianism Ruth had taken up after my death.
"This is not Susie, for Chrissakes!" her mother would say, plunking down an inch-thick sirloin in front of her daughter.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:12
[B]可愛的骨頭(01-19) The Lovely Bones[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200604/200604248052752916.mp3[/MP3]

an inch-thick sirloin in front of her daughter.
Her father drove her first to the hospital at three A.M. and then to the symposium, stopping home on the way to pick up the bag her mother had packed and left at the end of their driveway.
As the car pulled up into the camp, Ruth scanned the crowd of kids lining up for nametags. She spotted my sister among an allmale group of Masters. Lindsey had avoided putting her last name on her nametag, choosing to draw a fish instead. She wasn't exactly lying that way, but she hoped to meet a few kids from the surrounding schools who didn't know the story of my death or at least wouldn't connect her to it.
All spring she'd worn the half-a-heart pendant while Samuel wore the other half. They were shy about their affection for each other. They did not hold hands in the hallways at school, and they did not pass notes. They sat together at lunch; Samuel walked her home. On her fourteenth birthday he brought her a cupcake with a candle in it. Other than that, they melted into the gendersubdivided world of their peers.
The following morning Ruth was up early. Like Lindsey, Ruth was a floater at gifted camp. She didn't belong to any one group. She had gone on a nature walk and collected plants and flowers she needed help naming. When she didn't like the answers one of the Science Nerds provided, she decided to start naming the plants and flowers herself. She drew a picture of the leaf or blossom in her journal, and then what sex she thought it was, and then gave it a name like "Jim" for a simple-leaved plant and "

asha" for a more downy flower.
By the time Lindsey stumbled into the dining hall, Ruth was in line for a second helping of eggs and sausage. She had made a big stink about no meat at home and she had to hold to it, but no one at the symposium knew of the oath she'd sworn.
Ruth hadn't talked to

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:13
[B]可愛的骨頭(01-20) The Lovely Bones[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200605/200605019412348891.mp3[/MP3]

Ruth hadn't talked to my sister since before my death, and then it was only to excuse herself in the hallway at school. But she'd seen Lindsey walking home with Samuel and seen her smile with him. She watched as my sister said yes to pancakes and no to everything else. She had tried to imagine herself being my sister as she had spent time imagining being me.
As Lindsey walked blindly to the next open spot in line, Ruth interceded. "What's the fish for?" Ruth asked, nodding her head toward my sister's nametag. "Are you religious?」
"Notice the direction of the fish," Lindsey said, wishing simultaneously that they had vanilla puddings at breakfast. They would go great with her pancakes.
"Ruth Connors, poet," Ruth said, by way of introduction. "Lindsey," Lindsey said.
"Salmon, right?」
"

lease don't," Lindsey said, and for a second Ruth could feel the feeling a little more vividly-what it was like to claim me. How people looked at Lindsey and imagined a girl covered in blood.
Even among the gifteds, who distinguished themselves by doing things differently, people paired off within the first few days. It was mostly pairs of boys or pairs of girls-few serious relationships had begun by fourteen-but there was one exception that year. Lindsey and Samuel.
"K-I-S-S-I-N-G!" greeted them wherever they went.
Unchaperoned, and with the heat of the summer, something grew in them like weeds. It was lust. I'd never felt it so purely or seen it move so hotly into someone I knew. Someone whose gene pool I shared.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:13
[B]可愛的骨頭(01-21) The Lovely Bones[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200605/2006050810063217240.mp3[/MP3]

They were careful and followed the rules. No counselor could say he had flashed a light under the denser shrubbery by the boys' dorm and found Salmon and Heckler going at it.
They set up little meetings outside in back of the cafeteria or by a certain tree that they'd marked up high with their initials. They kissed. They wanted to do more but couldn't.
Samuel wanted it to be special. He was aware that it should be perfect. Lindsey just wanted to get it over with. Have it behind her so she could achieve adulthood-transcend the place and the time. She thought of sex as the Star Trek transport. You vaporized and found yourself navigating another planet within the second or two it took to realign.
"They're going to do it," Ruth wrote in her journal. I had pinned hopes on Ruth's writing everything down. She told her journal about me passing by her in the parking lot, about how on that night I had touched her-literally, she felt, reached out. What I had looked like then. How she dreamed about me. How she had fashioned the idea that a spirit could be a sort of second skin for someone, a protective layer somehow. How maybe if she was assiduous she could free us both. I would read over her shoulder as she wrote down her thoughts and wonder if anyone might believe her one day.
When she was imagining me, she felt better, less alone, more connected to something out there. To someone out there.
She saw the cornfield in her dreams, and a new world opening, a world where maybe she could find a foothold too.
"You're a really good poet, Ruth," she imagined me saying, and her journal would release her into a daydrenn of being such a good poet that her words had the power to resurrect me.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:14
[B]可愛的骨頭(01-22) The Lovely Bones[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200605/200605158105448785.mp3[/MP3]

his mother said when a detective called his house and asked to speak to him. -----1-----. Ray nodded to her as she repeated the policeman's questions to her son. Yes, he had written Susie Salmon a love note. Yes, he had put it in her notebook after Mr. Botte had asked her to collect the pop quiz. Yes, he had called himself the Moor.
Ray Singh became the first suspect.
"That sweet boy?" my mother said to my father.
"Ray Singh is nice," -----2-----.
I watched my family and knew they knew. It was not Ray Singh.
The police descended on his house, leaning heavily on him, insinuating things. They were fueled by the guilt they read into Ray's dark skin, by the rage they felt at his manner, and by his beautiful yet too exotic and unavailable mother. But Ray had an alibi. A whole host of nations could be called to testify on his behalf. His father, who taught postcolonial history at Penn, had urged his son to represent the teenage experience at a lecture he gave at the International House on the day I died.
-----3-----, but once the police were presented with a list of forty-five attendees who had seen Ray speak at "Suburbia: The American Experience," they had to concede his innocence. The police stood outside the Singh house and snapped small twigs from the hedges. It would have been so easy, so magical, their answer literally falling out of the sky from a tree. But rumors spread and, in school, -----4-----. He began to go home immediately after school.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-5-23 03:14
[B]可愛的骨頭(01-23) The Lovely Bones[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200605/200605228300475512.mp3[/MP3]

All this made me crazy. Watching but not being able to steer the police toward the green house so close to my parents, where Mr. Harvey sat carving finials for a gothic dollhouse he was building. He watched the news and scanned the papers, -----1-----. There had been a riot inside him and now there was calm.
I tried to take solace in Holiday, our dog. I missed him in a way I hadn't yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother. That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again; it might sound silly but I didn't believe it, would not believe it. Holiday stayed with Lindsey at night, -----2-----. Gladly partook of any clandestine eating on the part of my mother. Let Buckley pull his tail and ears inside the house of locked doors.
There was too much blood in the earth.
On December fifteenth, among the knocks on the door that signaled to my family that they must numb themselves further before opening their house to strangers -the kind but awkward neighbors, the bumbling but cruel reporters - -----3-----.
It was Len Fenerman, who had been so kind to him, and a uniform.
They came inside, by now familiar enough with the house to know that -----4----- so that my sister and brother would not overhear.
"We've found a personal item that we believe to be Susie's," Len said. Len was careful. I could see him calculating his words. He made sure to specify so that my parents would be relieved of their first thought-that the police had found my body,

作者: Pure 時間: 2006-5-23 03:32
Thanks, Adelyn!

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-10 12:59
You are welcome!

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-10 13:02
[B]可愛的骨頭 The Lovely Bones(01-24) [/B]
　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200507/200507276243198234.mp3[/MP3]

that I was, for certain, dead.
"What?" my mother said impatiently. She crossed her arms and braced for another inconsequential detail in which others invested meaning. She was a wall. Notebooks and novels were nothing to her. Her daughter might survive without an arm. A lot of blood was a lot of blood. It was not a body. Jack had said it and she believed: Nothing is ever certain.
But when they held up the evidence bag with my hat inside, something broke in her. -----1------somehow numbed her into disbelief-shattered.
"The pompom," Lindsey said. She had crept into the living room from the kitchen. No one had seen her come in but me.
My mother made a sound and reached out her hand. The sound was a metallic squeak, a human-as-machine breaking down, -----2-----.
"We've tested the fibers," Len said. "It appears whoever accosted Susie used this during the crime."
"What?" my father asked. He was powerless. -----3-----.
"As a way to keep her quiet."
"What?"
"It is covered with her saliva," the uniformed officer, who had been silent until now, volunteered. "He gagged her with it."
My mother grabbed it out of Len Fenerman's hands, and the bells she had sewn into the pompom sounded as she landed on her knees. She bent over the hat she had made me.
I saw Lindsey stiffen at the door. -----4-----; everything was unrecognizable.
My father led the well-meaning Len Fenerman

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-10 13:09
[B]可愛的骨頭 The Lovely Bones(01-25) [/B]
　
[mp3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200507/200507276244682645.mp3[/mp3]

Len Fenerman and the uniformed officer to the front door.
"Mr. Salmon," Len Fenerman said, "with the amount of blood we've found, and the violence I'm it implies, as well as other material evidence we've discussed, -----1-----."
Lindsey overheard what she already knew, had known since five days before, when my father told her about my elbow. My mother began to wail.
"-----2-----," Fenerman said.
"But there is no body," my father tried.

"All evidence points to your daughter's death. I'm very sorry."
The uniformed officer had been staring to the right of my father's pleading eyes. I wondered if that was something they'd taught him in school. But Len Fenerman met my father's gaze. "-----3-----," he said.
By the time my father turned back to the living room, he was too devastated to reach out to my mother sitting on the carpet or my sister's hardened form nearby. He could not let them see him. He mounted the stairs, thinking of Holiday on the rug in the study. He had last seen him there. Into the deep ruff of fur surrounding the dog's neck, my father would let himself cry.

That afternoon the three of them crept forward in silence, as if the sound of footsteps might confirm the news. Nate's mother knocked on the door to return Buckley. No one answered. She stepped away, knowing something had changed inside the house, -----4-----. She made herself my brother's co-conspirator, telling him they would go out for ice cream and ruin his appetite.
At four, my mother and father ended up

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-10 13:09
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(01-26)[/B]
　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200507/200507276245573270.mp3[/MP3]

and father ended up standing in the same room downstairs. They had come in from opposite doorways.
My mother looked at my father: "Mother," she said, and he nodded his head. -----1-----, my mother's mother, Grandma Lynn.
I worried that my sister, left alone, would do something rash. She sat in her room on the old couch my parents had given up on and worked on hardening herself. Take deep breaths and hold them. Try to stay still for longer and longer periods of time. Make yourself small and like a stone. Curl the edges of yourself up and fold them under where no one can see.
My mother told her it was her choice whether she wanted to return to school before Christmas-there was only one week left-but Lindsey chose to go.
On Monday, in homeroom, -----2-----.
"The principal would like to see you, dear," Mrs. Dewitt confided in a hush.
My sister did not look at Mrs. Dewitt when she was speaking. She was perfecting the art of talking to someone while looking through them. -----3-----. Mrs. Dewitt was also the English teacher, but more importantly she was married to Mr. Dewitt, who coached boys' soccer and had encouraged Lindsey to try out for his team. My sister liked the Dewitts, but that morning she began looking into the eyes of only those people she could fight against.
As she gathered her things, she heard whispers everywhere. She was certain that right before she left the room Danny Clarke had whispered something to Sylvia Henley. -----4-----. They did this, she believed, so that on their way to pick it up and back again, they could say

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-10 13:12
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(01-27) [/B]
　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200507/200507276250732670.mp3[/MP3]

they could say a word or two to their neighbor about the dead girl's sister.
Lindsey walked through the hallways and in and out of the rows of lockers-dodging anyone who might be near. I wished I could walk with her, mimic the principal and -----1-----: "Your principal is your pal with principles!" I would whine in her ear, cracking her up.
But while she was blessed with empty halls, when she reached the main office she was cursed with the drippy looks of consoling secretaries. No matter. She had prepared herself at home in her bedroom. -----2-----.
"Lindsey," Principal Caden said, "I received a call from the police this morning. I'm sorry to hear of your loss."
She looked right at him. -----3-----. "What exactly is my loss?"
Mr. Caden felt he needed to address issues of children's crises directly. He walked out from behind his desk and ushered Lindsey onto what was commonly referred to by the students as The Sofa. Eventually he would replace The Sofa with two chairs, -----4-----, `It is not good to have a sofa here- chairs are better. Sofas send the wrong message.
Mr. Caden sat on The Sofa and so did my sister. I like to think she was a little thrilled, in that moment, no matter how upset, to be on The Sofa itself. I like to think I hadn't robbed her of everything.
"We're here to help in any way we can," Mr. Caden said. He was doing his best.
"I'm fine," she said.
"Would you like to talk about it?"
"What?" Lindsey asked.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-10 13:12
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(01-28)[/B]
　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200507/200507276251906058.mp3[/MP3]

Lindsey asked. She was being what my father called "petulant," as in, "Susie, don't speak to me in that petulant tone."
"Your loss," he said. He reached out to touch my sister's knee. His hand was like a brand burning into her.
"I wasn't aware I had lost anything," she said, and in a Herculean effort -----1-----.
Mr. Caden didn't know what to say. He had had Vicki Kurtz fall apart in his arms the year before. It had been difficult, yes, but now, in hindsight, Vicki Kurtz and her dead mother seemed an artfully handled crisis. He had led Vicki Kurtz to the couch-no, no, Vicki had just gone right over and sat down on it-he had said, "I'm sorry for your loss," and Vicki Kurtz had burst like an overinflated balloon. He held her in his arms as she sobbed, and sobbed, -----2-----.
But Lindsey Salmon was another thing altogether. She was gifted, one of the twenty students from his school who had been selected for the statewide Gifted Symposium. The only trouble in her file was a slight altercation early in the year when a teacher reprimanded her for bringing obscene literature-Fear of Flying-into the classroom.
"Make her laugh," I wanted to say to him. "Bring her to a Marx Brothers movie, sit on a fart cushion, -----3-----! " All I could do was talk, but no one on Earth could hear me.

-----4-----. I liked to suggest to Lindsey that I was much more pissed off by her hair than by my

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-10 13:13
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(01-29) [/B]
　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200507/200507276253026381.mp3[/MP3]

than by my dumbo status. We had both been born with masses of blond hair, but mine quickly fell out and was replaced with a grudging growth of mousy brown. -----1-----. She was the only true blonde in our family.
But once called gifted, it had spurred her on to live up to the name. She locked herself in her bedroom and read big books. When I read Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, she read Camus's Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. She might not have gotten most of it, but she carried it around, -----2-----.
"What I'm saying, Lindsey, is that we all miss Susie," Mr. Caden said.
She did not respond.
"She was very bright," he tried.
She stared blankly back at him.
"It's on your shoulders now." He had no idea what he was saying, -----3-----. "You're the only Salmon girl now."
Nothing.

"You know who came in to see me this morning?" Mr. Caden had held back his big finish, the one he was sure would work. "Mr. Dewitt. He's considering coaching a girls' team," Mr. Caden said. "The idea is all centered around you. He's watched how good you are, as competitive as his boys, and -----4-----. What do you say?"
Inside, my sister's heart closed like a fist. "I'd say it would be pretty hard to play soccer on the soccer field when it's approximately twenty feet from where my sister was supposedly murdered. "
Score!
Mr. Caden's mouth opened and he stared at her. "Anything else?"

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-10 13:13
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(01-30)[/B]
　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200507/200507276254007632.mp3[/MP3]

"Anything else?" Lindsey asked.
"No, 1. .." Mr. Caden reached out his hand again. -----1-----. "I want you to know how sorry we are," he said.
"I'm late for first period," she said.
In that moment she reminded me of a character in the Westerns my father loved, the ones we watched together on latenight TV. There was always a man who, after he shot his gun, -----2-----.
Lindsey got up and took the walk out of Principal Caden's office slow. The walks away were her only rest time. Secretaries were on the other side of the door, teachers were at the front of the class, students in every desk, our parents at home, police coming by. She would not break. I watched her, felt the lines she repeated over and over again in her head. Fine. All of it is fine. I was dead, but that was something that happened all the time-people died. As she left the outer office that day, -----3-----, but she was focusing on their misapplied lipstick or two-piece paisley crepe de chine instead.
At home that night she lay on the floor of her room and braced her feet under her bureau. She did ten sets of sit-ups. Then she got into push-up position. Not the girl's kind. Mr. Dewitt had told her about the kind he had done in the Marines, head-up, or onehanded, clapping between. After she did ten push-ups, -----4-----. She did biceps curls until her arms ached. She focused only on her breathing.The in.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-10 13:14
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(01-31) [/B]
　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200508/200508096500766319.mp3[/MP3]

The in. The out.

I sat in the gazebo in the main square of my heaven (our neighbors, the O'Dwyers, had had a gazebo; I had grown up jealous for one), and watched my sister rage.
Hours before I died, my mother hung on the refrigerator a picture that Buckley had drawn. -----1-----. In the days that followed I watched my family walk back and forth past that drawing and I became convinced that that thick blue line was a real place-an Inbetween, where heaven's horizon met Earth's. I wanted to go there into the cornflower blue of Crayola, the royal, the turquoise, the sky.

-----2-----. Riches in furry packages. Dogs.
Every day in my heaven tiny dogs and big dogs, dogs of every kind, ran through the park outside my room. When I opened the door I saw them fat and happy, skinny and hairy, lean and hairless even. Pitbulls rolled on their backs, the nipples of the females distended and dark, begging for their pups to come and suckle them, happy in the sun. Bassets tripped over their ears, ambling forward, nudging the rumps of dachshunds, the ankles of greyhounds, and the heads of the Pekingese. And when Holly took her tenor sax, -----3-----, and played the blues, the hounds all ran to form her chorus.
On their haunches they sat wailing. Other doors opened then, -----4-----. I would step outside, Holly would go into an endless encore, the sun going down, and we would dance with the dogs-all of us together. We chased

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-10 13:14
[B]可愛的骨頭 The Lovely Bones(01-32) [/B]
　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200508/200508096501642871.mp3[/MP3]

We chased them, they chased us. We circled tail to tail. We wore spotted gowns, flowered gowns, striped gowns, plain. -----1-----. The dancing stopped. We froze.

Mrs. Bethel Utemeyer, the oldest resident of my heaven, would bring out her violin. Holly trod lightly on her horn. They would do a duet. -----2-----. Back and forth, a crazy schizoid solace they'd create.

-----3-----. The song reverberated until Holly, for a final time, passed the tune over, and Mrs. Utemeyer, quiet, upright, historical, finished with a jig.

The house asleep by then; this was my Evensong.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-10 13:15

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-10 13:16
[B]可愛的骨頭 The Lovely Bones(02-01)[/B]
　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200508/200508169562612448.mp3[/MP3]

[B]T H R E E[/B]

The odd thing about Earth was what we saw when we looked down. Besides the initial view that you might suspect, the old ants-from-the-skyscraper phenomenon, -----1-----.
Holly and I could be scanning Earth, alighting on one scene or another for a second or two, looking for the unexpected in the most mundane moment. And a soul would run by a living being, touch them softly on the shoulder or cheek, and continue on its way to heaven. The dead are never exactly seen by the living, -----2-----. They speak of a chill in the air. The mates of the deceased wake from dreams and see a figure standing at the end of their bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus.
On my way out of Earth, I touched a girl named Ruth.
She went to my school but we'd never been close. She was standing in my path that night when my soul shrieked out of Earth. I could not help but graze her. Once released from life, having lost it in such violence, I couldn't calculate my steps. I didn't have time for contemplation. In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, -----3-----, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from where you are.
Like a phone call from the jail cell, I brushed by Ruth Connors-wrong number, accidental call. I saw her standing there near Mr. Botte's red and rusted Fiat. When I streaked by her, my hand leapt out to touch her, touch the last face, feel the last connection to Earth in this not-so-standardissue teenage girl.
On the morning of December seventh, -----4-----. When her mother asked her what she meant, Ruth said, "I was crossing through the faculty parking lot, and suddenly, down out of the soccer field, I saw a pale running ghost coming toward me.
Mrs. Connors stirred the hardening oatmeal in its pot.
She watched her daughter gesticulating with the long thin fingers of her hands-hands she had inherited from her father.
"It was female, I could sense that," Ruth said. "It flew up out of the field. Its eyes were hollow. It had a thin white veil over its body, as light as cheesecloth. I could see its face

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-10 13:17
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(02-02)[/B]
　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200508/200508169564756268.mp3[/MP3]

face through it, the features coining up through it, the nose, the eyes, the face, the hair.」
Her mother took the oatmeal off the stove and lowered the flame. "Ruth," she said, "-----1-----.」
Ruth took the cue to shut up. She did not mention the dream that was not a dream again, even ten days later, when the story of my death began to travel through the halls of the school, receiving add-on nuances as all good horror stories do. They were hardpressed, my peers, to make the horror any more horrible than it was. But the details were still missing------2-----. Devil Worship. Midnight. Ray Singh.
Try as I might, I could not point Ruth strongly enough to what no one had found: my silver charm bracelet. I thought it might help her. It lay exposed, waiting for a hand to reach out, a hand that would recognize it and think, Clue. But it was no longer in the cornfield.
Ruth began writing poetry. If her mother or her more approachable teachers did not want to hear the darker reality she had experienced, she would cloak this reality in poetry.
How I wished Ruth could have gone to my family and talked to them. In all likelihood, no one but my sister would have even known her name. -----3-----. She was the girl who, when a volleyball sailed in her direction, cowered where she stood while the ball hit the gymnasium floor beside her, and her teammates and the gym teacher tried hard not to groan.
As my mother sat in the straight-backed chair in our hallway, watching my father run in and out on his various errands of responsibility -he would now be hyperaware of the movements and the whereabouts of his young son, of his wife, and of his remaining daughter-Ruth took our accidental meeting in the school parking lot and went underground.
She went through old yearbooks and found my class photos, as well as any activities photos like Chem Club, and cut them out with her mother's swan-shaped embroidery scissors. Even as her obsession grew I remained wary of her, -----4-----.
It was my friend Clarissa and Brian Nelson. I'd dubbed Brian "the scarecrow" because even though he had incredible shoulders that all the girls mooned over, his face reminded me of a burlap sack stuffed with straw. He wore a floppy leather

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-10 13:17
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(02-03)[/B]
　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200508/200508169571585974.mp3[/MP3]

hippie hat and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes in the student smoking lounge. According to my mother, Clarissa's penchant for baby blue eye shadow was an early warning sign, but I'd always liked her for just this reason. -----1-----: she lightened her long hair, she wore platform shoes, she smoked cigarettes after school.
Ruth came upon the two of them, but they didn't see her. She had a pile of huge books she had borrowed from Mrs. Kaplan, the social science teacher. They were all early feminist texts, and she held them with their spines resting against her stomach so that no one could see what they were. Her father, a building contractor, had made her a gift of two super-strong elastic book bands. Ruth had placed two of them around the volumes she planned to read over vacation.
Clarissa and Brian were giggling. His hand was inside her shirt. As he inched it up, her giggling increased, but she thwarted his advances each time by twisting or moving an inch or two away. Ruth stood apart from this, as she did most things. -----2-----, head down eyes averted, but everyone knew Clarissa had been my friend. So she watched.
"Come on, honey," Brian said, "just a little mound of love. Just one.
I noticed Ruth's lip curl in disgust. Mine was curling up in heaven.
"Brian, I can't. Not here."
"How 'bout out in the cornfield?" he whispered.
Clarissa giggled nervously but nuzzled the space between his neck and shoulder. For now, she would deny him.
After that, Clarissa's locker was burgled.
Gone were her scrapbook, -----3-----, and Brian's stash of marijuana, which he had hid den there without Clarissa's knowledge.
Ruth, who had never been high, spent that night emptying out the tobacco from her mother's long brown More 100s and stuffing them with pot. She sat in the toolshed with a flashlight, looking at photos of me and smoking more grass than even the potheads at school could suck down.
Mrs. Connors, standing at the kitchen window doing dishes, caught a whiff of the scent coming from the toolshed.
"I think Ruth is making friends at school," she said to her husband, who sat over his copy of the Evening Bulletin with a cup of coffee. -----4-----.
"Good," he said.
"Maybe there's hope for her yet."

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-10 13:18
[B]可愛的骨頭( The Lovely Bones02-04) [/B]
　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200508/200508169573857773.mp3[/MP3]

"Always," he said.
When Ruth tottered in later that night, her eves bleary from using the flashlight and from the eight More cigarettes she'd smoked, her mother greeted her with a smile and told her there was blueberry pie in the kitchen. It took a few days and some non-Susie-Salmon-focused research, but Ruth discovered why she had eaten the entire pie in one sitting.
The air in my heaven often smelled like skunk-just a hint of it. -----1-----.
When I breathed it in, I could feel the scent as well as smell it. It was the animal's fear and power mixed together to form a pungent, lingering musk. In Franny's heaven it smelled like pure, grade-A tobacco. In Holly's it smelled like kumquats.
I would sit whole days and nights in the gazebo and watch. See Clarissa spin away from me, toward the comfort of Brian. See Ruth staring at her from behind a corner near the home ec room or outside the cafeteria near the nurse's station. At the start, -----2-----. I would watch the assistant football coach leave anonymous chocolates for the married science teacher, or the head of the cheerleading squad trying to capture the attention of the kid who had been expelled so many times, from so many schools, even he had lost count. I watched the art teacher make love to his girlfriend in the kiln room and the principal moon over the assistant football coach. I concluded that this assistant football coach was a stud in the world of Kennet Junior High, even if his square jaw left me cold.
On the way back to the duplex each night -----3-----. The globes of light hung down in an arc from an iron post. I had remembered them because when I saw the play with my family, I thought of them as giant, heavy berries full of light. I made a game in heaven of positioning myself so that my shadow plucked the berries as I made my way home.
After watching Ruth one night I met Franny in the midst of this. The square was deserted, and leaves began to swirl around in an eddy up ahead. I stood and looked at her------4-----.
"Why are you shivering?" Franny asked.
And though the air was damp and chilly I could not say that that was why.
"I can't help thinking of my mother," I said.
Franny took my left hand in both of hers and smiled.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-10 13:18
[B]可愛的骨頭 The Lovely Bones(02-05) [/B]
　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200508/200508169580253042.mp3[/MP3]

I wanted to kiss her lightly on the cheek or have her hold me, but instead I watched her walk off in front of me, saw her blue dress trail away. I knew that she was not my mother; I could not play pretend.
I turned around and went back to the gazebo. ------1-----, lifting, ever so slightly, the ends of my hair. I thought of spider webs in the morning, how they held small jewels of dew, how, with a light movement of the wrist, I used to destroy them without thinking.
On the morning of my eleventh birthday I had woken up very early. No one else was up, or so I thought. ------2-----, where I assumed my presents would be. But there was nothing there. Same table as yesterday. But as I turned around I saw it lying on my mother's desk in the living room. The fancy desk with an always-clean surface. "The billpaying desk" was what they called it. Swaddled in tissue paper but not yet wrapped was a camera -what I had asked for with a tinge of whining in my voice, so sure they would not get it for me. I went over to it and stared down. It was an Instamatic, and lying beside it were three cartridges of film and a box of four square flashbulbs. It was my first machine, ------3-----. A wildlife photographer.
I looked around. No one. I saw through the front blinds, which my mother always kept at a half-slant- "inviting but discreet" - that Grace Tarking, who lived down the street and went to a private school, was walking with ankle weights strapped to her feet. Hurriedly I loaded the camera and I began to stalk Grace Tarking as I would, I imagined, when I grew older, stalk wild elephants and rhinos. Here I hid behind blinds and windows, there it would be high reeds. I was quiet, what I thought of as stealthy, gathering the long hem of my flannel nightgown up in my free hand. I traced her movements past our living room, front hall, into the den on the other side. ------4------I would run into the backyard, where I could see her with no barriers.
So I ran on tiptoe into the back of the house, only to find the door to the porch wide open.
When I saw my mother, I forgot all about Grace Tarking.
I wish I could explain it better than this,

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-18 11:24
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(02-06)[/B]
　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200508/200508253162589081.mp3[/MP3]

it better than this, but I had never seen her sitting so still, so not there somehow. Outside the screened-in porch ------1-----. In her hand she held a saucer and in the saucer was her customary cup of coffee.
That morning there were no lipstick marks because there was no lipstick until she put it on for.
. . who? I had never thought to ask the question. My father? Us? Holiday was sitting near the birdbath, panting happily, but he did not notice me. He was watching my mother. She had a stare that stretched to infinity. She was, in that moment, not my mother but something separate from me. ------2----- and saw the soft powdery skin of her face-powdery without makeup-soft without help. Her eyebrows and eyes were a set-piece together.
"Ocean Eyes," my father called her when he wanted one of her chocolate-covered cherries, which she kept hidden in the liquor cabinet as her private treat. And now I understood the name. I had thought it was because they were blue, but now I saw it was ------3-----. I had an instinct then, not a developed thought, and it was that, before Holiday saw and smelled me, before the dewy mist hovering over the grass evaporated and the mother inside her woke as it did every morning, I should take a photograph with my new camera.
When the roll came back from the Kodak plant in a special heavy envelope, I could see the difference immediately. There was only one picture in which my mother was Abigail. It was that first one, the one taken of her unawares, the one captured before the click startled her into the mother of the birthday girl, owner of the happy dog, wife to the loving man, and mother again to another girl and a cherished boy. Homemaker. Gardener. Sunny neighbor. My mother's eyes were oceans, and inside them there was loss. ------4-----, but that was the only day I had. Once upon Earth I saw her as Abigail, and then I let it slip effortlessly back-my fascination held in check by wanting her to be that mother and envelop me as that mother.
I was in the gazebo thinking of the photo, thinking of

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-18 11:25
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(02-07)[/B]
　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200508/200508253165012533.mp3[/MP3]

my mother, when Lindsey got up in the middle of the night and crept across the hall. I watched her as I would a burglar circling a house in a movie. I knew when she turned the knob to my room it would give. I knew she would get in, but what would she do in there? Already my private territory had become a no man's land in the middle of our house. My mother had not touched it. ------1-----. My flowered hippo lay among the sheets and pillows, and so did an outfit I'd discarded before I chose the yellow bell-bottoms.
Lindsey walked across the soft rug and touched the navy skirt and red and blue crocheted vest that were two separate, heatedly despised balls. She had an orange and green vest made from the same pattern. She took the vest and spread it out flat on the bed, smoothing it. ------2-----. I could see that. She petted it.
Lindsey traced the outline of the gold tray I kept on my dresser, filled with pins from elections and school. My favorite was a pink pin that said "Hippy-Dippy Says Love," which I'd found in the school parking lot but had had to promise my mother I wouldn't wear. I kept a lot of pins on that tray and pinned to a giant felt banner from Indiana University, where my father had gone to school. I thought she would steal them-take one or two to wear-but she didn't.
She didn't even pick them up. She just swept her fingertips over everything on the tray. Then she saw it, a tiny white corner sticking out from underneath. She pulled.
It was the picture.
A deep breath rushed out of her, and she sat down on the floor, ------3-----. The tethers were rushing and whipping around her, like a canvas tent come loose from its stakes. She too, like me until the morning of that photograph, had never seen the mother-stranger. She had seen the photos right after. My mother looking tired but smiling. My mother and Holiday standing in front of the dogwood tree as the sun shot through her robe and gown. But I had wanted to be the only one in the house that knew my mother was also someone elsesomeone mysterious and unknown to us.
The first time I broke through, it was an accident. It was December 23, 1973.
Buckley was sleeping. My mother had taken Lindsey to the dentist. That week they had agreed that each day, as a family, ------4-----. My father had assigned himself the task of cleaning the upstairs guest room, which long ago had become his den.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-18 11:26
[B]可愛的骨頭 The Lovely Bones(02-08)[/B]
　
[mp3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200508/200508253170937594.mp3[/mp3]

His own father had taught him how to build ships in bottles. They were something my mother, sister, and brother couldn't care less about. It was something I adored. The den was full of them.
All day at work he counted numbers-due diligence for a Chadds Ford insurance firm-------1-----. He would call me in whenever he was ready to raise the sail. By then the ship would have been glued fast to the bottom of the bottle. I would come in and my father would ask me to shut the door.
Often, it seemed, the dinner bell rang immediately, ------2-----.
But when this sense failed her, my job was to hold the bottle for him.
"Stay steady," he'd say. "You're my first mate."
Gently he would draw the one string that still reached out of the bottle's neck, and, voila, the sails all rose, from simple mast to clipper ship. We had our boat. I couldn't clap because I held the bottle, but I always wanted to. My father worked quickly then, burning the end of the string off inside the bottle with a coat hanger he'd heated over a candle. If he did it improperly, the ship would be ruined, or, worse still, the tiny paper sails would catch on fire and suddenly, in a giant whoosh, I would be holding a bottle of flames in my hands.
Eventually my father built a balsa wood stand to replace me. Lindsey and Buckley didn't share my fascination.
------3-----, he gave up and retreated to his den. One ship in a bottle was equal to any other as far as the rest of my family was concerned.
But as he cleaned that day he talked to me.
"Susie, my baby, my little sailor girl," he said, "you always liked these smaller ones."
I watched him as he lined up the ships in bottles on his desk, bringing them over from the shelves where they usually sat. He used an old shirt of my mother's that had been ripped into rags and began dusting the shelves. Under his desk there were empty bottles - ------4-----. In the closet were more ships-the ships he had built with his own father, ships he had built alone, and then those we had made together. Some were perfect, but their sails browned; some had sagged or toppled over after years. Then there was the one that had burst into flames in the week before my death.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-18 11:26
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(02-09)[/B]
　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200508/200508253184465670.mp3[/MP3]

He smashed that one first.
My heart seized up. He turned and saw all the others, -------1-----.
His dead father's, his dead child's. I watched him as he smashed the rest. He christened the walls and wooden chair with the news of my death, and afterward he stood in the guest room/den surrounded by green glass. The bottles, all of them, lay broken on the floor, the sails and boat bodies strewn among them. He stood in the wreckage. It was then that, without knowing how, I revealed myself. In every piece of glass, in every shard and sliver, I cast my face. My father glanced down and around him, his eyes roving across the room. Wild. It was just for a second, and then I was gone. He was quiet for a moment, and then he laughed-a howl coming up from the bottom of his stomach. He laughed so loud and deep, I shook with it in my heaven.
He left the room and went down the two doors to my bed room. The hallway was tiny, my door like all the others, -------2-----. He was about to smash the mirror over my dresser, rip the wallpaper down with his nails, but instead he fell against my bed, sobbing, and balled the lavender sheets up in his hands.
"Daddy?" Buckley said. My brother held the doorknob with his hand.
My father turned but was unable to stop his tears. He slid to the floor with the sheets still in his fists, and then he opened up his arms. He had to ask my brother twice, which he had never had to do before, but Buckley came to him.
My father wrapped my brother inside the sheets that smelled of me. -------3-----. Remembered moving in the old National Geographics to the bottom shelves of my bookcases.
(I had wanted to steep myself in wildlife photography.) Remembered when there was just one child in the house for the briefest of time until Lindsey arrived.
"You are so special to me, little man," my father said, clinging to him.
Buckley drew back and stared at my father's creased face, the fine bright spots of tears at the corners of his eyes. He nodded seriously and kissed my father's cheek.
-------4-----; the care a child took with an adult.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-18 11:27
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(02-10)[/B]
　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200508/200508253192454629.mp3[/MP3]

My father draped the sheets around Buckley's shoulders and remembered how I would fall out of the tall four-poster bed and onto the rug, never waking up. Sitting in his study in his green chair and reading a book, -------1-----. He would get up and walk the short distance to my bedroom. He liked to watch me sleeping soundly, unchecked by nightmare or even hardwood floor. He swore in those moments that his children would be kings or rulers or artists or doctors or wildlife photographers. Anything they dreamed they could be.
A few months before I died, he had found me like this, but tucked inside my sheets with me was Buckley, in his pajamas, with his bear, curled up against my back, sucking sleepily on his thumb. My father had felt in that moment the first flicker of the strange sad mortality of being a father. His life had given birth to three children, so the number calmed him. No matter what happened to Abigail or to him, the three would have one another. -------2-----, like a strong steel filament threading into the future, continuing past him no matter where he might fall off. Even in deep snowy old age.
He would find his Susie now inside his young son. Give that love to the living. He told himself this -spoke it aloud inside his brain-but my presence was like a tug on him, it dragged him back back back. He stared at the small boy he held in his arms. "Who are you?" he found himself asking. "Where did you come from?"
I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. -------3-----, it seemed, murky and blurred.

[B]F O U R[/B]

In the hours after I was murdered, as my mother made phone calls and my father -------4-----, Mr. Harvey had collapsed the hole in the cornfield and carried away a sack filled with my body parts. He passed within two houses of where my father stood talking to Mr. and Mrs. Tarking. He kept to the property line in between two rows of warring hedge-the O'Dwyers' boxwood and the Steads' goldenrod. His body brushed past the sturdy green leaves, leaving traces of me behind him, smells the Gilberts' dog would pick up and follow to find my elbow, smells the sleet and rain of the next three days would wash away before police dogs could even

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-18 11:27
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(02-11) [/B]
　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200508/200508253194710972.mp3[/MP3]

before police dogs could even be thought of. He carried me back to his house, where, while he went inside to wash up, I waited for him.
After the house changed hands, the new owners tsk-tsked at the dark spot on the floor of their garage. As she brought prospective buyers through, the realtor said it was an oil stain, but it was me, seeping out of the bag Mr.
Harvey carried and spilling onto the concrete. -------1-----.
It would be some time before I realized what you've undoubtedly already assumed, that I wasn't the first girl he'd killed. He knew to remove my body from the field. He knew to watch the weather and to kill during an arc of lightto- heavy precipitation because that would rob the police of evidence. -------2-----. He forgot my elbow, he used a cloth sack for a bloody body, and if someone, anyone, had been watching, maybe they would have thought it strange to see their neighbor walk a property line that was a tight fit, even for children who liked to pretend the warring hedges were a hideout.
As he scoured his body in the hot water of his suburban bathroom-one with the identical layout to the one Lindsey, Buckley, and I shared-his movements were slow, not anxious.
He felt a calm flood him. -------3----- and he felt thoughts of me then. My muffled scream in his ear. My delicious death moan. The glorious white flesh that had never seen the sun, like an infant's, and then split, so perfectly, with the blade of his knife. He shivered under the heat, a prickling pleasure creating goose bumps up and down his arms and legs. He had put me in the waxy cloth sack and thrown in the shaving cream and razor from the mud ledge, his book of sonnets, and finally the bloody knife.
They were tumbled together with my knees, fingers, and toes, but he made a note to extract them before my blood grew too sticky later that night. The sonnets and the knife, at least, he saved.
At Evensong, there were all sorts of dogs. And some of them, the ones I liked best, -------4-----. If it was vivid enough, if they couldn't identify it immediately, or if, as the case may be, they knew exactly what it was-their brains going, "Um steak tartare"-they'd track it until they came to the object itself. In the face of the real article,

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-18 11:28
[B]可愛的骨頭 The Lovely Bones (02-12)[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200508/200508253204528130.mp3[/MP3]

the true story, they decided then what to do. That's how they operated. They didn't shut down their desire -------1-----.
They hunted. So did I.
Mr. Harvey took the waxy orange sack of my remains to a sinkhole eight miles from our neighborhood, an area that until recently had been desolate save for the railroad tracks and a nearby motorcycle repair shop. In his car he played a radio station that looped Christmas carols during the month of December. He whistled inside his huge station wagon and congratulated himself, felt full-up. Apple pie, cheeseburger, ice cream, coffee. Full. Better and better he was getting now, never using an old pattern that would bore him but making each kill a surprise to himself, a gift to himself.
The air inside the station wagon was cold and fragile.
I could see the moist air when he exhaled, -------2-----.
He drove the reed-thin road that cut between two new industrial lots. The wagon fishtailed coming up out of a particularly deep pothole, and the safe that held the sack that held my body smashed against the inside hub of the wagon's back wheel, cracking the plastic. "Damn," Mr. Harvey said. But he picked up his whistling again without pause.
I had a memory of going down this road with my father at the wheel and Buckley sitting nestled against me -one seat belt serving the two of us-in an illegal joyride away from the house.
My father had asked -------3-----.
"The earth will swallow it!" he said. He put on his hat and the dark cordovan gloves I coveted. I knew gloves meant you were an adult and mittens meant you weren't. (For Christmas 1973, my mother had bought me a pair of gloves.
Lindsey ended up with them, but she knew they were mine. She left them at the edge of the cornfield one day on her way home from school. She was always doing that-bringing me things.) "The earth has a mouth?" Buckley asked.
"-------4-----," my father said.
"Jack," my mother said, laughing, "stop it. Do you know I caught him outside growling at the snapdragons?"
"I'll go," I said. My father had told me that there was an abandoned underground mine and it had collapsed to create a sinkhole. I didn't care; I liked to see the earth swallow something as much as the next kid.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-18 11:28
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(02-13)[/B]

[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200508/200508253212845385.mp3[/MP3]

to see the earth swallow something as much as the next kid.
So when I watched Mr. Harvey take me out to the sinkhole, I couldn't help but think how smart he was. How he put the bag in a metal safe, placing me in the middle of all that weight.
It was late when he got there, and he left the safe in his Wagoneer while he approached the house of the Flanagans, who lived on the property where the sinkhole was. The Flanagans made their living by charging people to dump their appliances.
Mr. Harvey knocked on the door of the small white house and a woman came to answer it. -------1----- and hit Mr. Harvey's nose as it trailed out from the back of the house. He could see a man in the kitchen.
"Good evening, sir," Mrs. Flanagan said. "Got an item?"
"Back of my wagon," Mr. Harvey said. He was ready with a twenty-dollar bill.
"What you got in there, a dead body?" she joked.
It was the last thing on her mind. She lived in a warm if small house. She had a husband who was always home to fix things and to be sweet on her because he never had to work, and she had a son who -------2-----.
Mr. Harvey smiled, and, as I watched his smile break across his face, I would not look away.
"Old safe of my father's, finally got it out here," he said. "Been meaning to do it for years. No one remembers the combination." "Anything in it?" she asked.
"Stale air."
"Back her up then. You need any help?" "That would be lovely," he said.
The Flanagans never suspected for a moment that -------3----- - MISSING, FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED; ELBOW FOUND BY NEIGHBORING DOG; GIRL, 14, BELIEVED KILLED IN STOLFUZ CORNFIELD; WARNINGS TO OTHER YOUNG WOMEN; TOWNSHIP TO REZONE ADJOINING LOTS TO HIGH SCHOOL; LINDSEY SALMON, SISTER OF DEAD GIRL, GIVES VALEDICTORIAN SPEECH-could have been in the gray metal safe that a lonely man brought over one night and paid them twenty dollars to sink.
On the way back to the wagon Mr. Harvey put his hands in his pockets. There was my silver charm bracelet. -------4-----. Had no memory of thrusting it into the pocket of his clean pants. He finge8:40 2005-9-12red it, the fleshy pad of his index finger finding the smooth gold metal of the Pennsylvania keystone, the back of the ballet slipper, the tiny hole of the minuscule thimble, and the spokes of the bicycle with wheels

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-18 11:33
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(02-14)[/B]
　　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200508/200508253222181251.mp3[/MP3]

that worked. Down Route 202, he pulled over on the shoulder, ate a liverwurst sandwich he'd prepared earlier that day, then drove to an industrial park they were building south of Downingtown. No one was on the construction lot. -------1-----. He parked his car near a Port-o- John. His excuse was prepared in the unlikely event that he needed one.
It was this part of the aftermath that I thought of when I thought of Mr. Harvey-how he wandered the muddy excavations and got lost among the dormant bulldozers, their monstrous bulk frightening in the dark. -------2-----, and out in this open area Mr. Harvey could see for miles. I chose to stand with him, to see those miles ahead as he saw them. I wanted to go where he would go. The snow had stopped. There was wind. He walked into what his builder's instincts told him would soon be a false pond, and he stood there and fingered the charms one last time. He liked the Pennsylvania keystone, which my father had had engraved with my initials my favorite was the tiny bike-and he pulled it off and placed it in his pocket. He threw the bracelet, with its remaining charms, into the soon-to-be man-made lake.
Two days before Christmas, I watched Mr. Harvey read a book on the Dogon and Bambara of Mali. I saw the bright spark of an idea when -------3-----. He decided he wanted to build again, to experiment as he had with the hole, and he settled on a ceremonial tent like the ones described in his reading.
He would gather the simple materials and raise it in a few hours in his backyard.
After smashing all the ships in bottles, my father found him there.
It was cold out, but Mr. Harvey wore only a thin cotton shirt. He had turned thirty-six that year and was experimenting with hard contacts. -------4-----, and many people, my father among them, believed he had taken to drink.
"What's this?" my father asked.
Despite the Salmon men's heart disease, my father was hardy. He was a bigger man than Mr. Harvey, so when he walked around the front of the green shingled house and into the backyard, where he saw Harvey erecting things that looked like goalposts, he seemed bluff and able. He was buzzing from having seen me in the shattered glass. I watched him cut through the lawn, ambling as school kids did on their way toward the high school. He stopped

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-18 11:33
[B]可愛的骨頭 The Lovely Bones (02-15)[/B]
　　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200508/200508253231310938.mp3[/MP3]

just short of brushing Mr. Harvey's elderberry hedge with his palm.
"What's this?" he asked again.
Mr. Harvey stopped long enough to look at him and then turned back to his work.
"A mat tent."
"What's that?"
"Mr. Salmon," he said, "I'm sorry for your loss."
Drawing himself up, my father gave back what the ritual demanded.
"Thank you." It was like a rock perched in his throat.
There was a moment of quiet, and then Mr. Harvey, -------1-----, asked him if he wanted to help. So it was that, from heaven, I watched my father build a tent with the man who'd killed me.
My father did not learn much. He learned how to lash arch pieces onto pronged posts and to weave more slender rods through these pieces to form semiarches in the other direction. He learned to gather the ends of these rods and lash them to the crossbars. He learned he was doing this because Mr. Harvey had been reading about the Imezzureg tribe and had wanted to replicate their tents. He stood, confirmed in the neighborhood opinion that the man was odd.
So far, that was all.
But when the basic structure was done-a one-hour job - -------2-----. My father assumed it was breaktime. That Mr. Harvey had gone in to get coffee or brew a pot of tea.
He was wrong. Mr. Harvey went into the house and up the stairs to check on the carving knife that he had put in his bedroom. It was still in the nightstand, on top of which he kept his sketch pad where, often, in the middle of the night, -------3-----. He looked inside a crumpled paper grocery sack. My blood on the blade had turned black. Remembering it, remembering his act in the hole, made him remember what he had read about a particular tribe in southern Ayr. How, when a tent was made for a newly married couple, the women of the tribe made the sheet that would cover it as beautiful as they could.
It had begun to snow outside. It was the first snow since my death, and this was not lost on my father.
"I can hear you, honey," he said to me, even though I wasn't talking. "What is it?"
I focused very hard on the dead geranium in his line of vision. -------4-----. In my heaven it bloomed. In my heaven geranium petals swirled in eddies up to my waist, On Earth nothing happened.
But through the snow I noticed this:

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-18 11:34
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(02-16)[/B]
　　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200509/200509158110489743.mp3[/MP3]

my father was looking toward the green house in a new way. He had begun to wonder.
Inside, Mr. Harvey had donned a heavy flannel shirt, but what my father noticed first was what he carried in his arms: a stack of white cotton sheets.
"What are those for?" my father asked. Suddenly he could not stop seeing my face.
"Tarps," said Mr. Harvey. When he handed a stack to my father, the back of his hand touched my father's fingers. It was like an electric shock.
"You know something," my father said.
He met my father's eyes, held them, but did not speak.
They worked together, the snow falling, almost wafting, down. And as my father moved, his adrenaline raced. He checked what he knew. -------1-----? Had anyone seen this man in the cornfield? He knew his neighbors had been questioned.
Methodically, the police had gone from door to door.
My father and Mr. Harvey spread the sheets over the domed arch, anchoring them along the square formed by the crossbars that linked the forked posts. Then they hung the remaining sheets straight down from these crossbars so that the bottoms of the sheets brushed the ground.
By the time they had finished, -------2-----. It filled in the hollows of my father's shirt and lay in a line across the top of his belt. I ached.
I realized I would never rush out into the snow with Holiday again, would never push Lindsey on a sled, would never teach, against my better judgment, my little brother how to compact snow by shaping it against the base of his palm. I stood alone in a sea of bright petals. -------3-----, a curtain descending.
Standing inside the tent, Mr. Harvey thought of how the virgin bride would be brought to a member of the Imezzureg on a camel. When my father made a move toward him, Mr.Harvey put his palm up.
"That's enough now," he said. "Why don't you go on home?"
-------4-----. But all he could think of was this: "Susie," he whispered, the second syllable whipped like a snake.
"We've just built a tent," Mr. Harvey said. "The neighbors saw us. We're friends now."
"You know something," my father said.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-18 11:35
[B]可愛的骨頭 The Lovely Bones(02-17)[/B]
　　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200509/200509158112194424.mp3[/MP3]

"You know something," my father said.
"Go home. I can't help you."
Mr. Harvey did not smile or step forward. He retreated into the bridal tent and let the final monogrammed white cotton sheet fall down.

F I V E

Part of me wished swift vengeance, -------1----- -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, -------2-----. 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, -------3-----, 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 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, -------4-----. 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

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-18 11:35
[B]可愛的骨頭 The Lovely Bones(02-18)[/B]
　　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200509/200509158113328812.mp3[/MP3]

staircase and shook the house.
I may have begrudged her my father's attention, -------1-----. 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. -------2-----: 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. -------3-----.
"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, -------4-----. 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,

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-18 11:36
[B]可愛的骨頭 The Lovely Bones(02-19)[/B]
　　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200509/200509158115805346.mp3[/MP3]

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. -------1-----.
"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," -------2-----. "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.
-------3-----. 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. -------4-----, 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

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-18 11:36
[B]可愛的骨頭 The Lovely Bones(02-20)[/B]
　　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200509/200509158121011648.mp3[/MP3]

had given him offered him little or nothing to work with. "Don't talk to anyone and don't approach him again," Len warned.
-------1------. 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.
-------2------.
"Momma?" She stuffed the macaroons back in the medicine cabinet, swallowing what was already in her mouth.
"Momma?" Buckley repeated. His voice was sleepy.
`ommmmm-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 spread Fluffernutter on wheat bread. He made three. One for himself, one for my mother, and one for his four-year-old son.
"Did you put away your game?" my father asked Buckley, wondering why he persisted in avoiding the topic with the one person who approached it head-on.
"What's wrong with Mommy?" Buckley asked. Together they watched my mother, -------3------.
"How would you like to go to the zoo this week?" my father asked. He hated himself for it. Hated the bribe and the tease the deceit. But how could he tell his son that, somewhere, his big sister might lie in pieces? But Buckley heard the word zoo and all that it meant which to him was largely Monkeys! -and he began on the rippling path to forgetting for one more day. The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He knew I was away, -------4------.
When Len Fenerman had gone door to door in the neighborhood he had found nothing remarkable at George Harvey's.

可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(02-21)
　　
http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200509/200509158122875649.mp3

Mr. Harvey was a single man who, it was said, had meant to move in with his wife. She had died sometime before this. He built dollhouses for specialty stores and kept to himself. That was all anyone knew. -------1------, the sympathy of the neighborhood had always been with him. Each split-level contained a narrative. To Len Fenerman especially, George Harvey's seemed a compelling one.
No, Harvey said, he didn't know the Salmons well. Had seen the children. Everyone knew who had children and who didn't, he noted, his head hanging down and to the left a bit. "You can see the toys in the yard. The houses are always more lively," he noted, his voice halting.
"I understand you had a conversation with Mr. Salmon re cently," Len said on his second trip to the dark green house. "Yes, is there something wrong?" Mr. Harvey asked. He squinted at Len but then had to pause. "Let me get my glasses," he said. "-------2------." "Second Empire?" Len asked.
"Now that my Christmas orders are done, I can experiment," Mr. Harvey said. Len followed him into the back, where a dining table was pushed against a wall. Dozens of small lengths of what looked like miniature wainscoting were lined up on top of it.
A little strange, Fenerman thought, but it doesn't make the man a murderer.
Mr. Harvey got his glasses and immediately opened up.
"Yes, Mr. Salmon was on one of his walks and he helped me build the bridal tent."
"The bridal tent?"
"Each year it's something I do for Leah," he said. "My wife. I'm a widower."
-------3------. "So I understand," he said.
"I feel terrible about what happened to that girl," Mr.
Harvey said. "I tried to express that to Mr. Salmon. But I know from experience that nothing makes sense at a time like this."
"So you erect this tent every year?" Len Fenerman asked. -------4------.
"In the past, I've done it inside, but I tried to do it outside this year. We were married in the winter. Until the snow picked up, I thought it would work."
"Where inside?"
"The basement. I can show you if you want.

作者: Adelyn 時間: 2006-6-18 11:37
[B]可愛的骨頭The Lovely Bones(02-22) [/B]
　
[MP3]http://image.hjbbs.com/file/200509/200509158123852249.mp3[/MP3]

"The basement. I can show you if you want. I have all of Leah's things down there still."
But Len did not go further.
"I've intruded enough," he said. "-------1------."
"How's your investigation coming?" Mr. Harvey asked.
"Are you finding anything?"
Len never liked questions like this, though he supposed they were the right of the people whose lives he was invading. "-------2------," he said.
"If they want to be found, that is." It was cryptic, sort of a Confucius-says answer, but it worked on almost every civilian. "Have you talked to the Ellis boy?" Mr. Harvey asked. "We talked to the family."
"He's hurt some animals in the neighborhood, I hear."
"He sounds like a bad kid, I grant you," said Len, "-------3------."
"Witnesses?"
"Yes."
"That's my only idea," Mr. Harvey said. "I wish I could do more.
Len felt him to be sincere.
"He's certainly a bit tweaked at an angle," Len said when he called my father, "but I have nothing on him." "What did he say about the tent?"
"That he built it for Leah, his wife."
"I remember Mrs. Stead told Abigail his wife's name was Sophie," my father said.
Len checked his notes. "No, Leah. I wrote it down."
My father doubted himself. Where had he gotten the name Sophie? He was sure he had heard it too, but that was years ago, at a block party, where the names of children and wives flew about like confetti between the stories people told to be neighborly and the introductions to infants and strangers too vague to remember the following day.
He did remember that Mr. Harvey had not come to the block party. He had never come to any of them. -------4------ but not by my father's own standards. He had never felt completely comfortable at these forced efforts of conviviality himself.
My father wrote "Leah?" in his book. Then he wrote, "Sophie?" Though unaware of it, he had begun a list of the dead.

作者: huanjue.6341 時間: 2006-10-28 18:01

基本沒太聽懂Because my english is so poor!有沒有人解釋一下為什麼叫可愛的骨頭！
有沒有能和我英語聊天的，我的ＱＱ：３３７８６２２５１，歡迎你的加入！

作者: angelo391969 時間: 2006-10-29 03:13
i'll take time to read it by my ears.

作者: elmo898 時間: 2007-4-20 03:14

作者: mengxxy 時間: 2007-4-23 18:53
好貼，頂

歡迎光臨倍可親 (https://big5.backchina.com/)