It had begun to snow outside. It was the first snow since my death, and this was not lost on my father.
“I can hear you, honey,” he said to me, even though I wasn’t talking. “What is it?”
I focused very hard on the dead geranium in his line of vision. I thought if I could make it bloom he would have his answer. In my heaven it bloomed. In my heaven geranium petals swirled in eddies up to my waist. On Earth nothing happened.
But through the snow I noticed this: my father was looking toward the green house in a new way. He had begun to wonder.
Inside, Mr. Harvey had donned a heavy flannel shirt, but what my father noticed first was what he carried in his arms: a stack of white cotton sheets.
“What are those for?” my father asked. Suddenly he could not stop seeing my face.
“Tarps,” said Mr. Harvey. When he handed a stack to my father, the back of his hand touched my father’s fingers. It was like an electric shock.
“You know something,” my father said.
He met my father’s eyes, held them, but did not speak.
They worked together, the snow falling, almost wafting, down. And as my father moved, his adrenaline raced. He checked what he knew. Had anyone asked this man where he was the day I disappeared? Had anyone seen this man in the cornfield? He knew his neighbors had been questioned. Methodically, the police had gone from door to door.
My father and Mr. Harvey spread the sheets over the domed arch, anchoring them along the square formed by the crossbars that linked the forked posts. Then they hung the remaining sheets straight down from these crossbars so that the bottoms of the sheets brushed the ground.
By the time they had finished, the snow sat gingerly on the covered arches. It filled in the hollows of my father’s shirt and lay in a line across the top of his belt. I ached. I realized I would never rush out into the snow with Holiday again, would never push Lindsey on a sled, would never teach, against my better judgment, my little brother how to compact snow by shaping it against the base of his palm. I stood alone in a sea of bright petals. On Earth the snowflakes fell soft and blameless, a curtain descending.
Standing inside the tent, Mr. Harvey thought of how the virgin bride would be brought to a member of the Imezzureg on a camel. When my father made a move toward him, Mr. Harvey put his palm up.
“That’s enough now,” he said. “Why don’t you go on home?”
The time had come for my father to think of something to say. But all he could think of was this: “Susie,” he whispered, the second syllable whipped like a snake.
“We’ve just built a tent,” Mr. Harvey said. “The neighbors saw us. We’re friends now.”
“You know something,” my father said.
“Go home. I can’t help you.”
Mr. Harvey did not smile or step forward. He retreated into the bridal tent and let the final monogrammed white cotton sheet fall down.
Five
Part of me wished swift vengeance, wanted my father to turn into the man he could never have been – a man violent in rage. That’s what you see in movies, that’s what happens in the books people read. An everyman takes a gun or a knife and stalks the murderer of his family; he does a Bronson on them and everyone cheers.
What it was like:
Every day he got up. Before sleep wore off, he was who he used to be. Then, as his consciousness woke, it was as if poison seeped in. At first he couldn’t even get up. He lay there under a heavy weight. But then only movement could save him, and he moved and he moved and he moved, no movement being enough to make up for it. The guilt on him, the hand of God pressing down on him, saying, You were not there when your daughter needed you.
Before my father left for Mr. Harvey’s, my mother had been sitting in the front hall next to the statue they’d bought of St. Francis. She was gone when he came back. He’d called for her, said her name three times, said it like a wish that she would not appear, and then he ascended the steps to his den to jot things down in a small spiral notebook: “A drinker? Get him drunk. Maybe he’s a talker.” He wrote this next: “I think Susie watches me.” I was ecstatic in heaven. I hugged Holly, I hugged Franny. My father knew, I thought.
Then Lindsey slammed the front door more loudly than usual, and my father was glad for the noise. He was afraid of going further in his notes, of writing the words down. The slamming door echoed down the strange afternoon he’d spent and brought him into the present, into activity, where he needed to be so he would not drown. I understood this – I’m not saying I didn’t resent it, that it didn’t remind me of sitting at the dinner table and having to listen to Lindsey tell my parents about the test she’d done so well on, or about how the history teacher was going to recommend her for the district honors council, but Lindsey was living, and the living deserved attention too.
She stomped up the stairs. Her clogs slammed against the pine boards of the staircase and shook the house.
I may have begrudged her my father’s attention, but I respected her way of handling things. Of everyone in the family, it was Lindsey who had to deal with what Holly called the Walking Dead Syndrome – when other people see the dead person and don’t see you.
When people looked at Lindsey, even my father and mother, they saw me. Even Lindsey was not immune. She avoided mirrors. She now took her showers in the dark.
She would leave the dark shower and feel her way over to the towel rack. She would be safe in the dark – the moist steam from the shower still rising off the tiles encased her. If the house was quiet or if she heard murmurs below her, she knew she would be undisturbed. This was when she could think of me and she did so in two ways: she either thought Susie, just that one word, and cried there, letting her tears roll down her already damp cheeks, knowing no one would see her, no one would quantify this dangerous substance as grief, or she would imagine me running, imagine me getting away, imagine herself being taken instead, fighting until she was free. She fought back the constant question, Where is Susie now?
My father listened to Lindsey in her room. Bang, the door was slammed shut. Thump, her books were thrown down. Squeak, she fell onto her bed. Her clogs, boom, boom, were kicked off onto the floor. A few minutes later he stood outside her door.
“Lindsey,” he said upon knocking.
There was no answer.
“Lindsey, can I come in?”
“Go away,” came her resolute answer.
“Come on now, honey,” he pleaded.
“Go away!”
“Lindsey,” my father said, sucking in his breath, “why can’t you let me in?” He placed his forehead gently against the bedroom door. The wood felt cool and, for a second, he forgot the pounding of his temples, the suspicion he now held that kept repeating itself. Harvey, Harvey, Harvey.
In sock feet, Lindsey came silently to the door. She unlocked it as my father drew back and prepared a face that he hoped said “Don’t run.”
“What?” she said. Her face was rigid, an affront. “What is it?”
“I want to know how you are,” he said. He thought of the curtain falling between him and Mr. Harvey, how a certain capture, a lovely blame, was lost to him. He had his family walking through the streets, going to school, passing, on their way, Mr. Harvey’s green-shingled house. To get the blood back in his heart he needed his child.
“I want to be alone,” Lindsey said. “Isn’t that obvious?”
“I’m here if you need me,” he said.
“Look, Dad,” my sister said, making her one concession for him, “I’m handling this alone.”