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Summary
Chapters 8–10
Chapter 8
Harvey often dreams about buildings in places like Yugoslavia and Norway, as well as about violence. Susie’s heavenly omniscience allows her to see him as an infant and child. Harvey’s father constructed things and taught these skills to his son. When he has violent dreams, he looks at his father’s old notebooks, trying to force himself to be and feel different. His last memory of his mother is of her running away from their truck, dressed in white, and his father commenting that she would never return.
Chapter 9
Grandma Lynn arrives for Susie’s memorial and immediately demands a drink. From heaven Susie notes that her grandmother’s excesses were always a bad thing in the past, but after Susie’s murder, her grandmother’s presence in the house has become a source of light. As Lynn does Abigail’s makeup, Lindsey asks for makeup lessons. Lynn realizes Lindsey has a boyfriend, and as she gets increasingly drunk, she gives Lindsey an outrageous makeover. In the bathroom, Lindsey wipes off the excess makeup to reveal the face of a competent adult.
Susie remembers the first dead person she ever saw, Mrs. Bethel Utemeyer, who arrives in her heaven, holding her young daughter’s hand.
Lindsey goes into Susie’s room to find something to wear to the memorial. Grandma Lynn joins her and picks out a dark blue minidress, which Susie notes belongs to her close friend Clarissa. At the church, they see Samuel and his brother Hal waiting by the door. Len is there to observe the proceedings. Jack is hungover but relieved that his grief is appropriate for this day, at least. Ruth attends the service, but Ray does not. Instead, he stays home and looks at Susie’s picture, deciding that she is more in the air around him than in the picture, so he slips it between the pages of a volume of Indian poetry.
Grandma Lynn notices that George Harvey is at the service and tells Lindsey that he is the man by the door in the back. Lindsey looks at him and faints. In the commotion, Mr. Harvey slips away.
Chapter 10
Each summer, there is a statewide gathering for “gifted” children, a category which includes Lindsey, Samuel, and Ruth. When Ruth arrives, she sees Lindsey with Samuel. Ruth says hello at breakfast and asks about Lindsey’s nametag, on which Lindsey has drawn a fish, hoping not to be recognized as the sister of a murdered girl.
Lindsey and Samuel explore the physical dimensions of their relationship. Both want to have sex. Samuel, who has long been ready to be with Lindsey, feels their first time should be perfect, but Lindsey is less concerned with the perfect time or place. She wants to get her first time over with. Ruth writes about Lindsey and Samuel in her journal, as well as about Susie, which helps her feel less alone and lets Susie feels that she still exists on Earth. Susie can see into Ruth’s desires, including her desire to disappear into other women.
The symposium’s final week is devoted to group projects. In heaven, Susie feels lonely and thinks that heaven should include dancing with her favorite grandfather. Franny tells her that such a heaven is possible, but only if she stops desiring answers about why she was murdered. If she gives up on Earth, she could have a different heaven, but making that choice seems impossible to Susie.
Lindsey tells Ruth that she misses Susie more than anyone will ever know. A personnel change results in a change to the final project, from building a better mousetrap to planning a perfect murder. When Lindsey arrives for breakfast, it no longer seems fun to anyone. Artie, another camper, is lonely, and Susie notes that loneliness is not limited to Earth; people in heaven feel lonely too. Artie and Ruth discuss how they learned about the murder. Under a rowboat, Lindsey and Samuel hide from the world and, because she is ready, they have sex. Susie notes that people in heaven also play “How to Commit the Perfect Murder,” and she always picks the icicle as the perfect murder weapon.
Analysis
These chapters offer a glimpse into Harvey’s childhood. Although Susie narrates, her tone is more neutral as she observes Harvey’s parents and considers his close relationship with his mother. Where often the narrative voice conveys Susie’s youth and inexperience, that is not evident when she talks about Harvey. Simultaneously, however, her voice betrays empathy for the abandonment of Harvey’s mother. No explanation is offered for why she left—only the image of her running away from the family’s truck, dressed in white. Harvey dreams of this moment often, although at the time he watched her go impassively. His composure is likened to a stone, a comparison that hints at the danger Lindsey risks in trying to harden herself to manage her grief. The only thing Harvey’s mother leaves him is an amber necklace. Created from fossilized resin, the necklace contains an insect, caught for all time in a golden cage. This necklace is not so different from the snow globe of the novel’s prologue: an unchanging creature is caught inside a static world for eternity. When given to someone tormented by “not still” dreams, such an object accrues dangerous connotations.
Another crucial topic that emerges in this section is the likening of murder to a game. At the symposium, the final project has for years been a competition to build a better mousetrap. The campers eagerly discuss how they might better kill mice, although Lindsey prefers to focus her group’s attention on making tiny divans on which the mice might lounge. In the summer of 1974, however, the plan changes at the last minute and the campers are instead instructed to plan the perfect murder. There is a ripple of concern that Lindsey will be upset by this assignment—and she is—but more important is the fact that something which Harvey undertakes with deadly results has become a form of amusement for children. Here, as throughout the novel, there is a failure to take evil seriously. In this case, the staff never pauses to consider that murder could affect the lives of “gifted” children. Susie explains that inventing a perfect murder is a game they play in heaven, but as everyone there is already dead (some of them by murder), it resonates differently. Her weapon of choice is always the icicle because it melts and leaves no evidence.
When Lindsey and Samuel kiss, Susie is excited to live vicariously through her sister. When they have sex for the first time at the symposium, however, Susie feels a new distance emerging between herself and her sister. Susie describes sexual intercourse as a walled space, a clear echo of the hole where she was raped and murdered. Her place is drenched in blood and gore, devoid of anything but violence. In contrast, Susie depicts the place where Lindsey has sex as dominated by a window, allowing light to stream in along with new perspectives for her to see and enjoy. Where Susie had begged Harvey to stop, Lindsey consents, telling Samuel that she is prepared for them to take this step. Emphasizing these differences, Susie notes that her sister has “sailed” away, moving lightly and without effort on the wind. The verb communicates both the freedom of Lindsey’s experience and the ease with which these differences put Lindsey and Susie on different paths.
In these sections, Susie also begins to ask more about the nature of heaven itself. She feels too lonely and left behind for her current environment to really be heaven. A real heaven, she insists to Franny, would contain people she loved, like her grandfather. Watching others leave for their private worlds in the evenings, she also wonders if there are heavens that are horrible or violent. This latter question goes unanswered in the novel, which is insistently undogmatic about the afterlife and about possible eternal punishment, but Franny does tell her that her heaven can change, becoming more aligned with what she describes. For that to happen, Susie must stop desiring answers to the question of why she was murdered. If she lets go of Earth and of the things that happened to her there, as well as how people feel about the “vacuum” her absence creates, her feelings will shift from loneliness and sadness to joy. Franny admits that it is hard to accomplish, but Susie replies that it is impossible. For her to grow in heaven, however, this is what she must do, and this section juxtaposes Susie’s struggle to mature with Lindsey’s. Where the younger sister is “ready,” the dead sister is not.
