The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold Read Free Book Online

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. As I watched her receding form I had a brainstorm—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, but I had never seen her
     sitting so still, so
not there
somehow. Outside the screened-in porch she was sitting on an aluminum fold-out chair that was facing the backyard. 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. I looked at what I had never
     seen as anything but Mom 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 because they were bottomless in a way that I found frightening. 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. I thought I had my whole life to understand them, 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. My bed was still unmade from the hurried morning of my death.
     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,