He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.
Alice SeboldIt was Buckley, as my father and sister joined the group and listened to Grandma Lynn’s countless toasts, who saw me. He saw me standing under the rustic colonial clock and stared. He was drinking champagne. There were strings coming out from all around me, reaching out, waving in the air. Someone passed him a brownie. He held it in his hand but did not eat. He saw my shape and face, which had not changed-the hair still parted down the middle, the chest still flat and hips undeveloped-and wanted to call out my name. It was only a moment, and then I was gone.
Alice SeboldThe sun came through the branches of the tree above her, and Ruth looked up past them. "I think she listens," she said, too softly to be heard.
Alice SeboldShe was unaware that she was somewhat of a celebrity up in heaven. I had told people about her, what she did, how she observed moments of silence up and down the city and wrote small individual prayers in her journal, and the story had travelled so quickly that women lined up to know she had found where they’d been killed. She had fans in heaven.....
Meanwhile, for us, she was doing important work, work that most people on Earth were too frightened even too contemplate.
Above his bed the clock ticked off the minutes and I thought of the game Lindsey and I had played in the yard together: “he loves me/he loves me not” picked out on daisy’s petals. I could hear the clock casting my own two greatest wishes back to me in the same rhythm: “Die for me/don’t die for me, die for me/don’t die for me.” I could not help myself, it seemed, as I tore at his weakening heart. If he died, I would have him forever. Was this so wrong to want?
We stood-the dead child and living-on either side of my father, both wanting the same thing. To have him to ourselves forever. To please us both was an impossibility.
I was not in the bathroom, in the tub, or in the spigot; I did not hold court in the mirror above her head or stand in miniature at the tip of every bristle on Lindsey's or Buckley's toothbrush. In some way I could not account for- had they reached a state of bliss? were my parents back together forever? had Buckley begun to tell someone his troubles? would my father's heart truly heal?- I was done yearning for them, needing them to yearn for me. Though I still would. Though they still would. Always.
Alice SeboldAlmost everyone in heaven has someone on Earth they watch, a loved one, a friend or even a stranger who was once kind, who offered warm food or a bright smile when one of us had needed it. And when I wasn’t watching I could hear the others talking to those they loved on Earth: just as fruitlessly as me, I’m afraid. A one-sided card cajoling and coaching of the young, a one way loving and desiring of their mates, a single-sided card that could never get signed.
Alice SeboldWhen they reached the lobby and the doors opened I knew they were meant to be there, the four of them, alone.
Alice SeboldIt was then that I slipped in the darkness, unable to know if I could be seen.
I made myself small in the darkness, unable to know if I could be seen. I had left for hours every day for eight and a half years as I had left my mother or Ruth and Ray, my brother and sister, and certainly Mr. Harvey, but he, I now saw had never left me. His devotion to me had made me know again and again that I had been beloved. In the warm light of my father’s love I had remained Susie Salmon-a girl with my whole life in front of me.
“I thought if I was very quiet I would hear you,” he whispered.
“If I was still enough you might come back.
Since their first kiss in our kitchen two weeks after my death, I had known that he was - as my sister and I had giggled with our Barbies or while watching Bobby Sherman on TV - her one and only. Samuel had pressed himself into her need and the cement between the two of them had begun to set immediately. They had gone to Temple together, side by side. He had hated it and she had pushed him through. She had loved it and this had allowed him to survive.
Alice SeboldStichwörter: love
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