De wijde hemel

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood, a man my mother liked for his border flowers and my father once discussed fertilizer with. I was taking a shortcut home through the cornfield when he coaxed me into a small room he'd dug in the earth, a hiding place he said he'd built for the neighborhood kids. It was warm inside, away from the falling snow, and I was curious. But then he said, “Take off your clothes.” I fought, but I was just a girl. The last thing I heard on Earth was the weak tinkling of the jingle bells on the hat my mother had made me, the one he stuffed in my mouth to keep me quiet.

From my new home, I watched. It was a heaven of my own design, with high school buildings where we never had to go to class and soccer goalposts in the distance. I had a roommate named Holly and an intake counselor named Franny, but mostly I had Earth. I saw my family reeling from my absence. My mother, Abigail, sat numbly in a chair by the front door, while my father, Jack, was driven into motion, a frantic energy possessing him. He went door to door with my school picture, his hope a flickering, painful light. My little sister, Lindsey, just thirteen, built a wall of silence and sit-ups around herself, and my four-year-old brother, Buckley, just knew I was gone. “Wheres Susie?” he would ask, a question that hung in the air of our house like a ghost.

My father knew, with an instinct no one could shake, who had done it. George Harvey. He began a quiet, obsessive watch on the green-shingled house down the street. He saw Mr. Harvey building a strange bridal tent in his backyard and went to help, hoping to glean some clue. All he felt was a cold certainty that left him breathless. He tried to tell the police, but they saw only a grieving father, desperate for a villain. The neighbors saw a man unraveling. My father's grief became a solitary vigil, a candle burning in the window of his den, where he smashed the ships-in-bottles we had built together, and in every shard of broken glass, for a single moment, he saw my face.

Life, however, tried to push its way back in. My grandmother, Lynn, arrived in a limousine, draped in mink and trailing the scent of champagne. She barged into our silent house and, in all her obnoxious finery, dragged the light back in. She gave my mother a makeover, turning a moment of protest into one of weeping laughter. She saw a flicker of first love in Lindsey's eyes and announced it to the room, giving my sister permission to feel something other than sorrow. For a little while, the house felt less like a tomb. But the shadows were long. One night, my father, believing he saw Mr. Harvey's flashlight in the cornfield, took a baseball bat and went out to find him. Instead, he stumbled upon my friend Clarissa and her boyfriend, Brian Nelson. In the confusion and darkness, he screamed my name, and Brian, thinking him a monster, beat him nearly to death.

With my father in the hospital, his certainty about Mr. Harvey now dismissed as delusion, Lindsey took the burden onto herself. She began casing the green house, her daily soccer runs a cover for her surveillance. One afternoon, she saw him leave. She broke a basement window and slipped inside the sterile, empty shell of his house - a dark mirror of our own. Upstairs, in a room that would have been mine, she found his sketchbook. Just as she heard his car pull into the driveway, she saw it: a detailed drawing of the underground den, with the words “Stolfuz cornfield” scrawled beside it. As Mr. Harvey bounded up the stairs, she smashed a window screen, rolled off the porch roof, and ran, the crumpled drawing clutched in her hand. She had proof. But it was too late. He saw her, the number 5 on her soccer shirt screaming at him as she fled. That night, he quietly packed a bag and vanished.

The years that followed were a slow, painful unraveling. My mother, unable to live inside the walls of our grief, had a brief, desperate affair with the detective on my case and then fled to California, seeking an anonymity she could breathe in. My father was left to raise Lindsey and Buckley alone, his heart a hollowed-out cavern. Lindsey and her first love, Samuel Heckler, went off to college together, their bond forged in the aftermath of my death. Buckley grew up in a house haunted by my absence, building a fort in the backyard as a shrine he didn't know he was making. He saw me sometimes, a sisterly ghost who was both a comfort and a curse.

I watched them all, but I also watched Ruth Connors, the strange, artistic girl I had accidentally touched with my soul as I left Earth. She had become a woman who saw the dead, who walked the streets of New York City documenting the places where girls and women had been violently lost. She kept journals filled with their stories, a lonely chronicler of ghosts. And I watched Ray Singh, the boy who had given me my first and only kiss. He went to medical school, his life moving forward, but he kept my school photo tucked inside a book of poetry, a memory of a love that never had the chance to be.

One day, I felt an impossible pull, a yearning so strong it tore the fabric of my heaven. Ruth was visiting home and was drawn to the sinkhole where my body had been dumped. As she stood at its edge, she saw me. At that same moment, Mr. Harvey, on one of his furtive returns to the area, drove past. The convergence was too much. Ruth collapsed, her soul flying upward as mine fell to Earth. For a brief, miraculous time, I was inside her body. I felt the sun on my skin, the ground beneath my feet. Ray was there, and when he looked into Ruth's eyes, he saw me. "Susie?" he whispered. I was granted the one wish I had held for so long. We made love in the back of Hal Heckler's bike shop. It was not a violent claiming, but a gentle, human touch. It was the life I never had.

When I returned to my heaven, it was wider and more peaceful. I had let go. On Earth, my mother came home to my father's side after he suffered a heart attack. Standing in his hospital room, they found each other again, not as the people they were before I died, but as the people they had become. They learned to live in the face of it. Mr. Harvey, years later, met his own end when an icicle fell from a roof, knocking him into a ravine where his body lay undiscovered for weeks.

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I was gone. Lindsey and Samuel married and had a daughter of their own. My parents found a quiet way to be together. Buckley learned to beat his own rhythm on a set of drums. I watched them from my wide, wide heaven. I saw a man find my charm bracelet in the mud of a construction site. "This little girl's grown up by now," his wife said. Almost. Not quite. I wish you all a long and happy life.