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.
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.
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.
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,
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
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
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
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.
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
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?"
"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.
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
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 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
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
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."
"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.
狗仔卡
樓主
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.
