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
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.
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
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
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."
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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
狗仔卡
提升卡
置頂卡
沉默卡
喧囂卡
變色卡
搶沙發
樓主
lay with your father," while she ducked into the kitchen and took a nip of sherry for herself.