A year to the day after my death, Dr. Singh called to say he would not be home for dinner. But Ruana would do her exercises no matter what. If, as she stretched out on the rug in the one warm spot that the house seemed to hold in the winter, she could not help but turn over and over again her husband’s absences in her mind, she would let them consume her until her body pled for her to let him go and to focus—as she leaned forward, her arms outstretched toward her toes now—and move, to shut her brain off and forget everything but the slight and pleasant yearning of muscles stretching and her own body bending.
Reaching almost to the floor, the window in the dining room was interrupted only by the metal baseboard for the heat, which Ruana liked to keep turned off because the noises it made disturbed her. Outside, she could see the cherry tree, its leaves and flowers all gone. The empty bird feeder swung slightly on its branch.
She stretched until she was quite warm and she’d forgotten herself, and the home she stood in fell away from her. Her age. Her son. But still, creeping in on her was the figure of her husband. She had a premonition. She did not believe it was a woman, or even a student who worshiped him, that made him late more and more often. She knew what it was because it was something she too had had and had severed herself from after having been injured long ago. It was ambition.
She heard sounds now. Holiday barking two streets over and the Gilberts’ dog answering him and Ray moving around upstairs. Blessedly, in another moment, Jethro Tull erupted again, shutting out all else.
Except for the occasional cigarette, which she smoked as secretly as she could so as not to give Ray license, she had kept herself in good health. Many of the women in the neighborhood commented on how well she kept herself and some had asked her if she would mind showing them how, though she had always taken these entreaties merely as their way of making conversation with their lone foreign-born neighbor. But as she sat in Sukhasana and her breath slowed to a deep rhythm, she could not fully release and let go. The niggling idea of what she would do as Ray grew older and her husband worked increasingly long hours crept up the inside of her foot and along her calf to the back of her knee and began to climb into her lap.
The doorbell rang.
Ruana was happy for the escape, and though she was someone to whom order was also a sort of meditation, she hopped up, wrapped a shawl that was hanging on the back of a chair around her waist, and, with Ray’s music barreling down the stairs, walked to the door. She thought only for a moment that it might be a neighbor. A complaining neighbor—the music—and she, dressed in a red leotard and shawl.
Ruth stood on the stoop, holding a grocery sack.
“Hello,” Ruana said. “May I help you?”
“I’m here to see Ray.”
“Come in.”
All of this had to be half-shouted over the noise coming from upstairs. Ruth stepped into the front hall.
“Go on up,” Ruana shouted, pointing to the stairs.
I watched Ruana take in Ruth’s baggy overalls, her turtleneck, her parka. I could start with her, Ruana thought to herself.
Ruth had been standing in the grocery store with her mother when she saw the candles among the paper plates and plastic forks and spoons. At school that day she had been acutely aware of what day it was and even though what she had done so far—lain in bed reading The Bell Jar, helped her mother clean out what her father insisted on calling his toolshed and what she thought of as the poetry shed, and tagged along to the grocery store—hadn’t consisted of anything that might mark the anniversary of my death, she had been determined to do something.
When she saw the candles she knew immediately that she would find her way over to Ray’s house and ask him to come with her. Because of their meetings at the shot-put circle, the kids at school had made them a couple despite all evidence to the contrary. Ruth could draw as many female nudes as she might wish and fashion scarves on her head and write papers on Janis Joplin and loudly protest the oppression of shaving her legs and armpits. In the eyes of her classmates at Fairfax, she remained a weird girl who had been found K-I-S-S-I-N-G a weird boy.
What no one understood—and they could not begin to tell anyone—was that it had been an experiment between them. Ray had kissed only me, and Ruth had never kissed anyone, so, united, they had agreed to kiss each other and see.
“I don’t feel anything,” Ruth had said afterward, as they lay in the maple leaves under a tree behind the teachers’ parking lot.
“I don’t either,” Ray admitted.
“Did you feel something when you kissed Susie?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“That I wanted more. That night I dreamed of kissing her again and wondered if she was thinking the same thing.”
“And sex?”
“I hadn’t really gotten that far yet,” Ray said. “Now I kiss you and it’s not the same.”
“We could keep trying,” Ruth said. “I’m game if you don’t tell anyone.”
“I thought you liked girls,” Ray said.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Ruth said. “You can pretend I’m Susie and I will too.”
“You are so entirely screwed up,” Ray said, smiling.
“Are you saying you don’t want to?” Ruth teased.
“Show me your drawings again.”
“I may be screwed up,” Ruth said, dragging out her sketchbook from her book bag—it was now full of nudes she’d copied out of Playboy, scaling various parts up or down and adding hair and wrinkles where they had been airbrushed out—“but at least I’m not a perv for charcoal.”
Ray was dancing around his bedroom when Ruth walked in. He wore his glasses, which at school he tried to do without because they were thick and his father had only sprung for the least expensive, hard-to-break frames. He had on a pair of jeans that were baggy and stained and a T-shirt that Ruth imagined, and I knew, had been slept in.
He stopped dancing as soon as he saw her standing at the doorway holding the grocery bag. His hands went up immediately and collected his glasses, and then, not knowing what to do with them, he waved them at her and said, “Hello.”
“Can you turn it down?” Ruth screamed.
“Sure!”
When the noise ceased her ears rang for a second, and in that second she saw something flicker across Ray’s eyes.
He now stood on the other side of the room, and in between them was his bed, where sheets were rumpled and balled and over which hung a drawing Ruth had done of me from memory.
“You hung it up,” Ruth said.
“I think it’s really good.”
“You and me and nobody else.”
“My mom thinks it’s good.”
“She’s intense, Ray,” Ruth said, putting down the bag. “No wonder you’re so freak-a-delic.”
“What’s in the bag?”
“Candles,” said Ruth. “I got them at the grocery store. It’s December sixth.”
“I know.”
“I thought we might go to the cornfield and light them. Say goodbye.”
“How many times can you say it?”
“It was an idea,” Ruth said. “I’ll go alone.”
“No,” Ray said. “I’ll go.”
Ruth sat down in her jacket and overalls and waited for him to change his shirt. She watched him with his back toward her, how thin he was but also how the muscles seemed to pop on his arms the way they were supposed to and the color of his skin, like his mother’s, so much more inviting than her own.
“We can kiss for a while if you want.”
And he turned, grinning. He had begun to like the experiments. He was not thinking of me anymore—though he couldn’t tell that to Ruth.
He liked the way she cursed and hated school. He liked how smart she was and how she tried to pretend that it didn’t matter to her that his father was a doctor (even though not a real doctor, as she pointed out) and her father scavenged old houses, or that the Singhs had rows and rows of books in their house while she was starved for them.
He sat down next to her on the bed.
“Do you want to take your parka off?”
She did.
And so on the anniversary of my death, Ray mashed himself against Ruth and the two of them kissed and at some point she looked him in the face. “Shit!” she said. “I think I feel something.”
When Ray and Ruth arrived at the cornfield, they were silent and he was holding her hand. She didn’t know whether he was holding it because they were observing my death together or because he liked her. Her brain was a storm, her usual insight gone.
Then she saw she had not been the only one to think of me. Hal and Samuel Heckler were standing in the cornfield with their hands jammed in their pockets and their backs turned toward her. Ruth saw yellow daffodils on the ground.
“Did you bring those?” Ruth asked Samuel.
“No,” Hal said, answering for his brother. “They were already here when we got here.”
Mrs. Stead watched from her son’s upstairs bedroom. She decided to throw on her coat and walk out to the field. It was not something she even tried to judge, whether or not she belonged there.
Grace Tarking was walking around the block when she saw Mrs. Stead leaving her house with a poinsettia. They talked briefly in the street. Grace said that she was going to stop at home but she would come and join them.
Grace made two phone calls, one to her boyfriend, who lived a short distance away in a slightly richer area, and one to the Gilberts. They had not yet recovered from their strange role in the discovery of my death—their faithful lab having found the first evidence. Grace offered to escort them, since they were older and cutting across neighbors’ lawns and over the bumpy earth of the cornfield would be a challenge to them, but yes, Mr. Gilbert had said, he wanted to come. They needed this, he told Grace Tarking, his wife particularly—though I could see how crushed he was. He always covered his pain by being attentive to his wife. Though they had thought briefly of giving their dog away, he was too much comfort to both of them.
Mr. Gilbert wondered if Ray, who ran errands for them and was a sweet boy who had been badly judged, knew, and so he called the Singh household. Ruana said she suspected her son must already be there but that she would be along herself.
Lindsey was looking out the window when she saw Grace Tarking with her arm in Mrs. Gilbert’s and Grace’s boyfriend steadying Mr. Gilbert as the four of them cut across the O’Dwyers’ lawn.
“Something’s going on in the cornfield, Mom,” she said.
My mother was reading Molière, whom she had studied so intensely in college but hadn’t looked at since. Beside her were the books that had marked her as an avant-garde undergraduate: Sartre, Colette, Proust, Flaubert. She had pulled them off the shelves in her bedroom and promised herself she would reread them that year.
“I’m not interested,” she said to Lindsey, “but I’m sure your father will be when he gets home. Why don’t you go up and play with your brother?”
My sister had dutifully hovered for weeks now, paying court to our mother regardless of the signals she gave. There was something on the other side of the icy surface. Lindsey was sure of it. She stayed by my mother, sitting by her chair and watching our neighbors outside the window.
* * *
By the time darkness fell, the candles the latecomers had had the foresight to bring lit the cornfield. It seemed like everyone I’d ever known or sat next to in a classroom from kindergarten to eighth grade was there. Mr. Botte saw that something was happening when he’d come out of the school after preparing his classroom for the next day’s annual animal digestion experiment. He’d strolled over, and, when he realized what it was, he let himself back into the school and made some calls. There had been a secretary who had been overcome by my death. She came with her son. There had been some teachers who hadn’t come to the official school memorial.
The rumors of Mr. Harvey’s suspected guilt had begun to make their way from neighbor to neighbor on Thanksgiving night. By the next afternoon it was the only thing the neighbors could talk about—was it possible? Could that strange man who had lived so quietly among them have killed Susie Salmon? But no one had dared approach my family to find out the details. Cousins of friends or fathers of the boys who cut their lawn were asked if they knew anything. Anyone who might know what the police were doing had been buddied up to in the past week, and so my memorial was both a way to mark my memory and a way for the neighbors to seek comfort from one another. A murderer had lived among them, passed them on the street, bought Girl Scout cookies from their daughters and magazine subscriptions from their sons.
In my heaven I buzzed with heat and energy as more and more people reached the cornfield and lit their candles and began to hum a low, dirgelike song for which Mr. O’Dwyer called back to the distant memory of his Dublin grandfather. My neighbors were awkward at first, but the secretary from the school clung to Mr. O’Dwyer as his voice gave forth, and she added her less melodious one. Ruana Singh stood stiffly in an outer circle away from her son. Dr. Singh had called as she was leaving to say he would be sleeping overnight in his office. But other fathers, coming home from their offices, parked their cars in their driveways only to get out and follow their neighbors. How could they both work to support their families and watch their children to make sure they were safe? As a group they would learn it was impossible, no matter how many rules they laid down. What had happened to me could happen to anyone.
No one had called my house. My family was left undisturbed. The impenetrable barrier that surrounded the shingles, the chimney, the woodpile, the driveway, the fence, was like a layer of clear ice that coated the trees when it rained and then froze. Our house looked the same as every other one on the block, but it was not the same. Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.
When the sky had turned a dappled rose, Lindsey realized what was happening. My mother never lifted her eyes from her book.
“They’re having a ceremony for Susie,” Lindsey said. “Listen.” She cracked the window open. In rushed the cold December air and the distant sound of singing.
My mother used all her energy. “We’ve had the memorial,” she said. “That’s done for me.”
“What’s done?”
My mother’s elbows were on the armrests of the yellow winged-back chair. She leaned slightly forward and her face moved into shadow, making it harder for Lindsey to see the expression on her face. “I don’t believe she’s waiting for us out there. I don’t think lighting candles and doing all that stuff is honoring her memory. There are other ways to honor it.”
“Like what?” Lindsey said. She sat cross-legged on the rug in front of my mother, who sat in her chair with her finger marking her place in Molière.
“I want to be more than a mother.”
Lindsey thought she could understand this. She wanted to be more than a girl.
My mother put the Molière book on top of the coffee table and scooted forward on the chair until she lowered herself down onto the rug. I was struck by this. My mother did not sit on the floor, she sat at the bill-paying desk or in the wing chairs or sometimes on the end of the couch with Holiday curled up beside her.
She took my sister’s hand in hers.
“Are you going to leave us?” Lindsey asked.
My mother wobbled. How could she say what she already knew? Instead, she told a lie. “I promise I won’t leave you.”
What she wanted most was to be that free girl again, stacking china at Wanamaker’s, hiding from her manager the Wedgwood cup with the handle she broke, dreaming of living in Paris like de Beauvoir and Sartre, and going home that day laughing to herself about the nerdy Jack Salmon, who was pretty cute even if he hated smoke. The cafés in Paris were full of cigarettes, she’d told him, and he’d seemed impressed. At the end of that summer when she invited him in and they had, both for the first time, made love, she’d smoked a cigarette, and for the joke he said he’d have one too. When she handed him the damaged blue china to use as an ashtray, she used all her favorite words to embellish the story of breaking and then hiding, inside her coat, the now homely Wedgwood cup.
“Come here, baby,” my mother said, and Lindsey did. She leaned her back into my mother’s chest, and my mother rocked her awkwardly on the rug. “You are doing so well, Lindsey; you are keeping your father alive.” And they heard his car pull into the drive.
Lindsey let herself be held while my mother thought of Ruana Singh out behind her house, smoking. The sweet scent of Dunhills had drifted out onto the road and taken my mother far away. Her last boyfriend before my father had loved Gauloises. He had been a pretentious little thing, she thought, but he had also been oh-so-serious in a way that let her be oh-so-serious as well.
“Do you see the candles, Mom?” Lindsey asked, as she stared out the window.
“Go get your father,” my mother said.
My sister met my father in the mud room, hanging up his keys and coat. Yes, they would go, he said. Of course they would go.
“Daddy!” My brother called from the second floor, where my sister and father went to meet him.
“Your call,” my father said as Buckley bodychecked him.
“I’m tired of protecting him,” Lindsey said. “It doesn’t feel real not to include him. Susie’s gone. He knows that.”
My brother stared up at her.
“There is a party for Susie,” Lindsey said. “And me and Daddy are taking you.”
“Is Mommy sick?” Buckley asked.
Lindsey didn’t want to lie to him, but she also felt it was an accurate description of what she knew.
“Yes.”
Lindsey agreed to meet our father downstairs while she brought Buckley into his room to change his clothes.
“I see her, you know,” Buckley said, and Lindsey looked at him.
“She comes and talks to me, and spends time with me when you’re at soccer.”
Lindsey didn’t know what to say, but she reached out and grabbed him and squeezed him to her, the way he often squeezed Holiday.
“You are so special,” she said to my brother. “I’ll always be here, no matter what.”
My father made his slow way down the stairs, his left hand tightening on the wooden banister, until he reached the flagstone landing.