The Lovely Bones

Exactly one year from Susie’s death, Dr. Singh calls Ruana to tell her that he will not be home for dinner. She knows it’s not an affair that is making him late more often: “[I]t was something she too […] had severed herself from after having been injured long ago. It was ambition” (199). As she does Yoga and wonders about what she will do with Ray soon to leave and her husband working more, Ruth rings the doorbell to see Ray.

Because they have been spending so much time together, the other kids at school labeled Ruth and Ray as a couple, “despite all evidence to the contrary” (200). They have started kissing as an experiment—since Ray had only kissed Susie, and Ruth had kissed no-one—but don’t feel anything when they do. During one of their experiments, Ruth morbidly jokes that they should both pretend they’re kissing Susie instead.

Ruth enters while Ray is dancing to music in his room. She tells him that she wants to light candles in the cornfield to say goodbye to Susie. As they walk there, they notice that Samuel and Hal are already at the cornfield. Word spreads, and eventually much of the neighborhood heads to the cornfield for an impromptu memorial. Abigail, reading literature and philosophy she hasn’t touched since her university, says she isn’t interested in attending. Lindsey, “sure there was something on the other side of the icy surface” (204), stays with Abigail and watches out the window. Abigail tells Lindsey she is going to honor Susie’s memory by becoming more than a mother and promises she won’t leave them, but inside Abigail wishes she was a free girl who dreamed of Paris, like she used to be.

By the evening, most of the people Susie ever knew are gathered for a candlelight vigil, and rumors swirl that Harvey, who has disappeared, was Susie’s killer. Jack, who has not seen his neighbors for months, joins the memorial. His heart warms when he realizes people he didn’t even recognize loved Susie. 

Susie recalls how she took so many pictures with her camera that Jack forced her to choose which rolls he would develop.

In the summer of 1975, Abigail and Jack have sex, and Abigail leaves for her father’s cabin in New Hampshire the next day. In the fall, Lynn calls and says that she is going to come back to help Jack look after the kids, even offering to cut back or stop her drinking outright. Jack accepts, and Lynn moves into Susie’s room. In the winter, Lindsey goes to the police station to ask about the investigation. While waiting, she sees a scarf on Fenerman’s desk that belonged to Abigail and realizes that the two had an affair.

A family with five girls moves into Harvey’s old house, and Jack keeps the windows shut even on the hottest days to avoid the cruelty of having to listen to the little girls playing. Buckley, now 7, builds a fort, which he and Susie always said they were going to do. Inside, he reads comic books while wishing that Lindsey and Samuel hung out with him more. He also wishes that his father would play with him like he used to, but he does not allow himself to miss Abigail: “When he felt his heart hurt he turned into something stronger than a little boy, and he grew up this way. A heart that flashed from heart to stone, heart to stone” (217).

In Fall 1976, Fenerman re-examines the evidence from Harvey’s house. Despite finding the animal bones, the police found neither human bones nor bodies on the property. However, upon re-examining the cornfield, the police find a coke bottle that has the fingerprints of both Harvey and Susie, which confirms in Fenerman’s mind that Jack has been right all along. The police found no trace of Harvey after he fled town, but Fenerman believes they may catch a break due to the ongoing development of the area. He feels intense guilt over his failure to solve the murder and how he allowed Harvey to slip away due to being with Abigail at the mall. Fenerman takes out all the photos of his unsolved cases and writes “gone” on the back of them:

He would no longer wait for a date to mark an understanding of who or why or how. He would never understand all the reasons why his wife had killed herself. He would never understand how so many children went missing (219).

Abigail only makes it through one winter in New Hampshire before she decides to move to California to work at a winery. She drives across the country, sending postcards to Lindsey and Buckley as she travels. Upon reaching the ocean in California, Abigail climbs down to the water, obsessed with the “pure baptismal goal” (222) of putting her feet in the ocean. Upon climbing down, she sees a baby alone on the beach, before realizing that there are people on the cliffs filming an ad for something. She laughs, thinking that nobody, no matter how prepared, could save the baby from drowning if there was a freak accident. Abigail gets a job at a winery and never pursues her dreams of teaching.

Every year, Jack organizes a memorial for Susie in the cornfield, to which fewer and fewer people attend. Lynn gives Buckley a book on gardening on what would have been the day of Susie’s graduation, and she starts teaching him the names of the plants. Susie watches Ray blossom into a handsome adult and longs to touch and hold him. He graduates from high school early and goes to Penn State to study medicine. As he leaves, Ruana hides the book of Indian poetry containing Susie’s picture in his luggage. Ruth moves to NYC immediately after graduation. She gets a job at a bar and spends her free time walking around the city “sure that women were being murdered wherever she went” (226). Ruth is convinced that she has a second sight to see dead women and children but doesn’t know what to do besides take copious notes whenever she has a vision.

Harvey has been traveling up and down the east coast and occasionally returns to Norristown, where there has been significantly more residential development. In December, Fenerman gets a call from a detective in Delaware who has found a murdered girl that they connected to several other murders, including Susie’s. Hal has also been using his biker connections to investigate Harvey’s whereabouts. One evening, a man tells him how a man who built dollhouses murdered his mother, and Hal calls Fenerman.

Susie watches as the years pass and dreams about the life she could have had. But every night, she always watches Jack in his study. She takes snapshots from her constant observation to trace how all these events come back to a single source. This way, she can never lose these moments. One evening, Susie sees Holiday, who had never left Jack’s side and watched over Buckley, playing in heaven. Holiday is so excited to see Susie that he knocks her over.