The Lovely Bones Read Free Page B

they did it. To know the secrets. Then we can
     pretend better.”
    “You won’t experience it,” Franny clarified.
    “Thank you, Brain Central,” I said, but our heavens began to grow.
    There was the high school still, all the Fairfax architecture, but now there were roads leading out.
    “Walk the paths,” Franny said, “and you’ll find what you need.”
    So that’s when Holly and I set out. Our heaven had an ice cream shop where, when you asked for peppermint stick ice cream,
     no one ever said, “It’s seasonal”; it had a newspaper where our pictures appeared a lot and made us look important; it had
     real men in it and beautiful women too, because Holly and I were devoted to fashion magazines. Sometimes Holly seemed like
     she wasn’t paying attention, and other times she was gone when I went looking for her. That was when she went to a part of
     heaven we didn’t share. I missed her then, but it was an odd sort of missing because by then I knew the meaning of forever.
    I could not have what I wanted most: Mr. Harvey dead and me living. Heaven wasn’t perfect. But I came to believe that if I
     watched closely, and desired, I might change the lives of those I loved on Earth.
    My father was the one who took the phone call on December ninth. It was the beginning of the end. He gave the police my blood
     type, had to describe the lightness of my skin. They asked him if I had any identifying features. He began to describe my
     face in detail, getting lost in it. Detective Fenerman let him go on, the next news too horrible to interrupt with. But then
     he said it: “Mr. Salmon, we have found only a body part.”
    My father stood in the kitchen and a sickening shiver overtook him. How could he tell that to Abigail?
    “So you can’t be certain that she’s dead?” he asked.
    “Nothing is ever certain,” Len Fenerman said.
    That was the line my father said to my mother: “Nothing is ever certain.”
    For three nights he hadn’t known how to touch my mother or what to say. Before, they had never found themselves broken together.
     Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching, to borrow
     from the stronger one’s strength. And they had never understood, as they did now, what the word
horror
meant.
    “Nothing is ever certain,” my mother said, clinging to it as he had hoped she might.
    My mother had been the one who knew the meaning of each charm on my bracelet—where we had gotten it and why I liked it. She
     made a meticulous list of what I’d carried and worn. If found miles away and in isolation along a road, these clues might
     lead a policeman there to link it to my death.
    In my mind I had wavered between the bittersweet joy of seeing my mother name all the things I carried and loved and her futile
     hope that these things mattered. That a stranger who found a cartoon character eraser or a rock star button would report it
     to the police.
    After Len’s phone call, my father reached out his hand and the two of them sat in the bed together, staring straight in front
     of them. My mother numbly clinging to this list of things, my father feeling as if he were entering a dark tunnel. At some
     point, it began to rain. I could feel them both thinking the same thing then, but neither of them said it. That I was out
     there somewhere, in the rain. That they hoped I was safe. That I was dry somewhere, and warm.
    Neither of them knew who fell asleep first; their bones aching with exhaustion, they drifted off and woke guiltily at the same
     time. The rain, which had changed several times as the temperature dropped, was now hail, and the sound of it, of small stones
     of ice hitting the roof above them, woke them together.
    They did not speak. They looked at each other in the small light cast from the lamp left on across the room. My mother began
     to cry, and my father held her, wiped her tears with the pad of his thumbs as they crested her