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

father, ships he had built alone, and then those we had made together. Some were perfect, but their
     sails browned; some had sagged or toppled over after years. Then there was the one that had burst into flames in the week before
     my death.
    He smashed that one first.
    My heart seized up. He turned and saw all the others, all the years they marked and the hands that had held them. His dead
     father’s, his dead child’s. I watched him as he smashed the rest. He christened the walls and wooden chair with the news of
     my death, and afterward he stood in the guest room/den surrounded by green glass. The bottles, all of them, lay broken on
     the floor, the sails and boat bodies strewn among them. He stood in the wreckage. It was then that, without knowing how, I
     revealed myself. In every piece of glass, in every shard and sliver, I cast my face. My father glanced down and around him,
     his eyes roving across the room. Wild. It was just for a second, and then I was gone. He was quiet for a moment, and then
     he laughed—a howl coming up from the bottom of his stomach. He laughed so loud and deep, I shook with it in my heaven.
    He left the room and went down the two doors to my bedroom. The hallway was tiny, my door like all the others, hollow enough
     to easily punch a fist through. He was about to smash the mirror over my dresser, rip the wallpaper down with his nails, but
     instead he fell against my bed, sobbing, and balled the lavender sheets up in his hands.
    “Daddy?” Buckley said. My brother held the doorknob with his hand.
    My father turned but was unable to stop his tears. He slid to the floor with the sheets still in his fists, and then he opened
     up his arms. He had to ask my brother twice, which he had never had to do before, but Buckley came to him.
    My father wrapped my brother inside the sheets that smelled of me. He remembered the day I’d begged him to paint and paper
     my room purple. Remembered moving in the old
National Geographics
to the bottom shelves of my bookcases. (I had wanted to steep myself in wildlife photography.) Remembered when there was
     just one child in the house for the briefest of time until Lindsey arrived.
    “You are so special to me, little man,” my father said, clinging to him.
    Buckley drew back and stared at my father’s creased face, the fine bright spots of tears at the corners of his eyes. He nodded
     seriously and kissed my father’s cheek. Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child
     took with an adult.
    My father draped the sheets around Buckley’s shoulders and remembered how I would fall out of the tall four-poster bed and
     onto the rug, never waking up. Sitting in his study in his green chair and reading a book, he would be startled by the sound
     of my body landing. He would get up and walk the short distance to my bedroom. He liked to watch me sleeping soundly, unchecked
     by nightmare or even hardwood floor. He swore in those moments that his children would be kings or rulers or artists or doctors
     or wildlife photographers. Anything they dreamed they could be.
    A few months before I died, he had found me like this, but tucked inside my sheets with me was Buckley, in his pajamas, with
     his bear, curled up against my back, sucking sleepily on his thumb. My father had felt in that moment the first flicker of the
     strange sad mortality of being a father. His life had given birth to three children, so the number calmed him. No matter what
     happened to Abigail or to him, the three would have one another. In that way the line he had begun seemed immortal to him,
     like a strong steel filament threading into the future, continuing past him no matter where he might fall off. Even in deep
     snowy old age.
    He would find his Susie now inside his young son. Give that love to the living. He told himself this—spoke it aloud inside
     his brain—but my presence was like a tug on him, it dragged him back back back. He