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,
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
F O U R
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
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,
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.
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
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
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:
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.
"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
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,
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
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.
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.
"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.
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