The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold Read Free Book Online Page A

smoothing it. It was ugly and precious all at once. 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, her mouth still open and her hand still holding the picture.
     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 else—someone 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, they
     would spend time trying to move forward. 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—and at night he built the ships or read Civil
     War books to unwind. 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, as if my mother had a sixth sense for things that didn’t include her. 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, voilà, 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. After trying
     to create enough enthusiasm for all three of them, 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—rows and rows of them we had collected for our future shipbuilding. In the closet were more ships—the ships
     he had built with his own