Ultimately it was the memory of those very moles—and the pictures of their blind, nosy, toothsome selves that I sought out
in books—that had made me accept more readily being sunk inside the earth in a heavy metal safe. I was mole-proof, anyway.
Ruth tiptoed up to what she took to be the edge, while I thought of the sound of my father’s laughter on that long-ago day.
I made up a story for my brother on the way home. How underneath the sinkhole there was a whole village inside the earth that
no one knew about and the people who lived there greeted these appliances like gifts from an Earthly heaven. “When our refrigerator
reaches them,” I said, “they will praise us, because they are a race of tiny repairmen who love to put things back together
again.” My father’s laughter filled the car.
“Ruthie,” Ray said, “that’s close enough.”
Ruth’s toes were on the soft part, her heels were on the hard, and there was a sense as I watched her that she might point
her fingers and raise her arms and dive right in to be beside me. But Ray came up behind her.
“Apparently,” he said, “the earth’s throat burps.”
All three of us watched the corner of something metal as it rose.
“The great Maytag of ’sixty-nine,” Ray said.
But it was not a washer or a safe. It was an old red gas stove, moving slow.
“Do you ever think about where Susie Salmon’s body ended up?” asked Ruth.
I wanted to walk out from underneath the overgrown shrubs that half-hid their ice blue car and cross the road and walk down
into the hole and back up and tap her gently on the shoulder and say, “It’s me! You’ve done it! Bingo! Score!”
“No,” Ray said. “I leave that to you.”
“Everything is changing here now. Every time I come back something is gone that made it not just every other place in the
country,” she said.
“Do you want to go inside the house?” Ray asked, but he was thinking of me. How his crush had come when he was thirteen. He
had seen me walking home from school ahead of him, and it was a series of simple things: my awkward plaid skirt, my peacoat
covered in Holiday’s fur, the way what I thought of as my mousy brown hair caught the afternoon sun so that the light moved
fluidly from spot to spot as we walked home, one behind the other. And then, a few days later, when he had stood in social
science class and accidentally read from his paper on
Jane Eyre
instead of the War of 1812—I had looked at him in a way he thought was nice.
Ray walked toward the house that would soon be demolished, and that had already been stripped of any valuable doorknobs and
faucets late one night by Mr. Connors, but Ruth stayed by the sinkhole. Ray was already inside the house when it happened.
As clear as day, she saw me standing there beside her, looking at the spot Mr. Harvey had dumped me.
“Susie,” Ruth said, feeling my presence even more solidly when she said my name.
But I said nothing.
“I’ve written poems for you,” Ruth said, trying to get me to stay with her. What she had wished for her whole life happening,
finally. “Don’t you want anything, Susie?” she asked.
Then I vanished.
Ruth stood there reeling, waiting in the gray light of the Pennsylvania sun. And her question rang in my ears: “Don’t you
want anything?”
On the other side of the railroad tracks, Hal’s shop was deserted. He had taken the day off and brought Samuel and Buckley
to a bike show in Radnor. I could see Buckley’s hands move over the curved front-wheel casing of a red minibike. It would
be his birthday soon, and Hal and Samuel watched him. Hal had wanted to give Samuel’s old alto sax to my brother, but my Grandma
Lynn had intervened. “He needs to bang on things, honey,” she said. “Save the subtle stuff.” So Hal and Samuel had chipped
in together and bought my brother a secondhand set of drums.
Grandma Lynn was at the mall trying to find simple yet elegant clothes that she might convince my mother to wear. With fingers
made dexterous from years of practice, she pulled a near-navy dress from a rack of black. I could see the woman near her alight
on the dress in greenish envy.
At the hospital, my mother was reading aloud to my father from a day-old
Evening Bulletin,
and he was watching her lips move and not really listening. Wanting to kiss her instead.
And Lindsey.
I could see Mr. Harvey take the turn into my old neighborhood in broad daylight, past caring who spotted him, even depending
on his standard invisibility—here, in the neighborhood where so many had said they would never forget him, had always thought
of him as strange, had come easily to suspect that the dead wife he spoke of by alternate names had been one of his victims.
Lindsey was at home alone.
Mr. Harvey drove by Nate’s house inside the anchor area of the development. Nate’s mother was picking the wilted blossoms
from her front kidney-shaped flower bed. She looked up when the car passed. She saw the unfamiliar, patched-together car and
imagined it was a college friend of one of the older children home for the summer. She had not seen Mr. Harvey in the driver’s
seat. He turned left onto the lower road, which circled around to his old street. Holiday whined at my feet, the same kind
of sick, low moan he would let out when we drove him to the vet.
Ruana Singh had her back to him. I saw her through the dining room window, alphabetizing stacks of new books and placing them
in carefully kept bookshelves. There were children out in their yards on swings and pogo sticks and chasing one another with
water pistols. A neighborhood full of potential victims.
He rounded the curve at the bottom of our road and passed the small municipal park across from where the Gilberts lived. They
were both inside, Mr. Gilbert now infirm. Then he saw his old house, no longer green, though to my family and me it would always
be “the green house.” The new owners had painted it a lavendery mauve and installed a pool and, just off to the side, near
the basement window, a gazebo made out of redwood, which overflowed with hanging ivy and children’s toys. The front flower beds
had been paved over when they expanded their front walk, and they had screened in the front porch with frost-resistant glass,
behind which he saw an office of some sort. He heard the sound of girls laughing out in the backyard, and a woman came out
of the front door carrying a pair of pruning shears and wearing a sun hat. She stared at the man sitting in his orange car
and felt something kick inside her—the queasy kick of an empty womb. She turned abruptly and went back inside, peering at
him from behind her window. Waiting.
He drove down the road a few houses further.
There she was, my precious sister. He could see her in the upstairs window of our house. She had cut all her hair off and
grown thinner in the intervening years, but it was her, sitting at the drafting board she used as a desk and reading a psychology
book.
It was then that I began to see them coming down the road.
While he scanned the windows of my old house and wondered where the other members of my family were—whether my father’s leg
still made him hobble—I saw the final vestiges of the animals and the women taking leave of Mr. Harvey’s house. They straggled
forward together. He watched my sister and thought of the sheets he had draped on the poles of the bridal tent. He had stared
right in my father’s eyes that day as he said my name. And the dog—the one that barked outside his house—the dog was surely
dead by now.
Lindsey moved in the window, and I watched him watching her. She stood up and turned around, going farther into the room to
a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. She reached up and brought another book down. As she came back to the desk and he lingered on
her face, his rearview mirror suddenly filled with a black-and-white cruising slowly up the street behind him.
He knew he could not outrace them. He sat in his car and prepared the last vestiges of the face he had been giving authorities
for decades—the face of a bland man they might pity or despise but never blame. As the officer pulled alongside him, the women
slipped in the windows and the cats curled around his ankles.
“Are you lost?” the young policeman asked when he was flush with the orange car.
“I used to live here,” Mr. Harvey said. I shook with it. He had chosen to tell the truth.
“We got a call, suspicious vehicle.”
“I see they’re building something in the old cornfield,” Mr. Harvey said. And I knew that part of me could join the others
then, swoop down in pieces, each body part he had claimed raining down inside his car.
“They’re expanding the school.”
“I thought the neighborhood looked more prosperous,” he said wistfully.
“Perhaps you should move along,” the officer said. He was embarrassed for Mr. Harvey in his patched-up car, but I saw him jot
the license plate down.
“I didn’t mean to scare anyone.”
Mr. Harvey was a pro, but in that moment I didn’t care. With each section of road he covered, I focused on Lindsey inside
reading her textbooks, on the facts jumping up from the pages and into her brain, on how smart she was and how whole. At Temple
she had decided to be a therapist. And I thought of the mix of air that was our front yard, which was daylight, a queasy mother
and a cop—it was a convergence of luck that had kept my sister safe so far. Every day a question mark.
Ruth did not tell Ray what had happened. She promised herself she would write it in her journal first. When they crossed the
road back to the car, Ray saw something violet in the scrub halfway up a high dirt berm that had been dumped there by a construction
crew.
“That’s periwinkle,” he said to Ruth. “I’m going to clip some for my mom.”
“Cool, take your time,” Ruth said.
Ray ducked into the underbrush by the driver’s side and climbed up to the periwinkle while Ruth stood by the car. Ray wasn’t
thinking of me anymore. He was thinking of his mother’s smiles. The surest way to get them was to find her wildflowers like
this, to bring them home to her and watch her as she pressed them, first opening their petals flat against the black and white
of dictionaries or reference books. Ray walked to the top of the berm and disappeared over the side in hopes of finding more.
It was only then that I felt a prickle along my spine, when I saw his body suddenly vanish on the other side. I heard Holiday,
his fear lodged low and deep in his throat, and realized it could not have been Lindsey for whom he had whined. Mr. Harvey
crested the top of Eels Rod Pike and saw the sinkhole and the orange pylons that matched his car. He had dumped a body there.
He remembered his mother’s amber pendant, and how when she had handed it to him it was still warm.
Ruth saw the women stuffed in the car in blood-colored gowns. She began walking toward them. On that same road where I had
been buried, Mr. Harvey passed by Ruth. All she could see were the women. Then: blackout.
That was the moment I fell to Earth.
R
uth collapsing into the road. Of this I was aware. Mr. Harvey sailing away unwatched, unloved, unbidden—this I lost.
Helplessly I tipped, my balance gone. I fell through the open doorway of the gazebo, across the lawn and out past the farthest
boundary of the heaven I had lived in all these years.
I heard Ray screaming in the air above me, his voice shouting in an arc of sound. “Ruth, are you okay?” And then he reached
her and grabbed on.
“Ruth, Ruth,” he yelled. “What happened?”
And I was in Ruth’s eyes and I was looking up. I could feel the arch of her back against the pavement, and scrapes inside
her clothes where flesh had been torn away by the gravel’s sharp edges. I felt every sensation—the warmth of the sun, the smell
of the asphalt—but I could not see Ruth.
I heard Ruth’s lungs bubbling, a giddiness there in her stomach, but air still filling her lungs. Then tension stretching out
the body. Her body. Ray above, his eyes—gray, pulsing, looking up and down the road hopelessly for help that was not coming.
He had not seen the car but had come through the scrub delighted, carrying a bouquet of wildflowers for his mother, and there
was Ruth, lying in the road.
Ruth pushed up against her skin, wanting out. She was fighting to leave and I was inside now, struggling with her. I willed
her back, willed that divine impossible, but she wanted out. There was nothing and no one that could keep her down. Flying.
I watched as I had so many times from heaven, but this time it was a blur beside me. It was lust and rage yearning upward.
“Ruth,” Ray said. “Can you hear me, Ruth?”
Right before she closed her eyes and all the lights went out and the world was frantic, I looked into Ray Singh’s gray eyes,
at his dark skin, at his lips I had once kissed. Then, like a hand unclasping from a tight lock, Ruth passed by him.
Ray’s eyes bid me forward while the watching streamed out of me and gave way to a pitiful desire. To be alive again on this
Earth. Not to watch from above but to be—the sweetest thing—beside.
Somewhere in the blue blue Inbetween I had seen her—Ruth streaking by me as I fell to Earth. But she was no shadow of a human
form, no ghost. She was a smart girl breaking all the rules.
And I was in her body.
I heard a voice calling me from heaven. It was Franny’s. She ran toward the gazebo, calling my name. Holiday was barking so
loud that his voice would catch and round in the base of his throat with no break. Then, suddenly, Franny and Holiday were
gone and all was silent. I felt something holding me down, and I felt a hand in mine. My ears were like oceans in which what
I had known, voices, faces, facts, began to drown. I opened my eyes for the first time since I had died and saw gray eyes looking
back at me. I was still as I came to realize that the marvelous weight weighing me down was the weight of the human body.
I tried to speak.
“Don’t,” Ray said. “What happened?”
I died, I wanted to tell him. How do you say, “I died and now I’m back among the living”?