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Summary
Chapters 11–13
Chapter 11
It is late summer, and Susie’s case remains unsolved. Abigail trusts the police, but Jack prefers to trust his instincts and continues to spy on Harvey.
Susie visits Harvey’s house and observes the similarities and differences between his house and her own. She notes the stain where her corpse sat in the garage and recalls how he brought a part of her indoors, via her blood on his skin and clothing. She points out his dollhouses and the souvenirs, like her keystone charm, which he sometimes counts. Most are from women or girls he killed. Harvey sets alarms to remind him to do normal things, so that he can fool his neighbors into thinking that he’s a regular person. The house also contains the bones of the neighborhood pets he kills to satisfy his murderous urges.
Jack’s frequent calls about Harvey irritate the police, so Len visits to establish boundaries. He tells Jack he must stop conflating his intuitions with evidence. Back from camp, Lindsey enters the kitchen and accuses Len of giving up on the investigation. As Abigail enters the room, she guides Jack out of it. Susie notes that he observes something unnamed in his wife’s eyes.
That night, as Jack thinks about Abigail’s demeanor with Len, he sees a flashlight moving in the cornfield. Grabbing a baseball bat, he storms out, expecting to confront Harvey. Susie tries to warn him from heaven but cannot. Instead of Harvey, Jack comes upon Clarissa, who has gone to the cornfield to meet her boyfriend. Confused, Jack yells “Susie” and Brian shows up, grabs the bat, and beats him with it. Susie feels conflicted, longing for her father’s love yet wishing he would leave her alone.
Chapter 12
Susie watches her father sleep in the hospital, where he is having his kneecap replaced. Sirens wake the Salmon family and they discover that Jack is missing. They find out about the beating and Abigail heads to the hospital. Lindsey decides to go too, where she sings to her sleeping father. In heaven, Franny tells Susie that, once the dead are finished with the living, those who are alive can go on to new things. She will not say what happens to the dead, however.
Len arrives at the hospital and he and Abigail go outside to smoke. She asks how his wife died, and he shares that she killed herself. He confesses that her suicide and Susie’s murder dominate his thoughts. Finding odd comfort in his use of the word murder, Abigail kisses him. Susie is uncomfortable observing her mother with Len. As she watches her family—Lindsey and her father in the hospital room, her mother distracted and elsewhere—she realizes that heaven has a benefit: she does not need to pick sides. Holly, Franny, and Susie watch souls floating above hospitals, and Franny compares them to snowflakes.
Chapter 13
Back at school, Lindsey navigates a complicated new reputation: she is the sister of a murdered girl, the daughter of a crazy man, and the girlfriend of Samuel. Buckley starts kindergarten, where he stands out from the other children. It is widely known that Susie is his sister, and his sympathetic teacher dotes on him. Abigail roams mentally, thinking about Len. Jack’s injury means he doesn’t have to work for several months, so he spends time with Buckley and Holiday, the family dog. He is relieved to return to work in December.
One day, Jack interrupts Lindsey, who is learning to shave her legs. Over her objections, he offers her shaving tips and tries to talk about Susie. Their conversation turns to Harvey, as they wonder if Susie’s body is in his house. Lindsey asks her father if he wants to get inside Harvey’s house and he won’t answer, although the two have silently reached an agreement.
Grandma Lynn arrives for Thanksgiving and recognizes that there is something wrong with her daughter. She maneuvers Abigail into taking a walk and, although they are not close, shares that Abigail’s father had a long-term affair and that Susie’s death prompted her to mourn him properly. These are surprising moments of truth. Lynn asks her to stop seeing the man, but an evasive Abigail replies by asking if she can use her father’s cabin to get away. The odor of foreign cigarettes lures Abigail to Ruana’s house, where the neighbors smoke in the darkness. Lynn walks home alone and, passing Harvey’s house, feels its malevolent spirit.
Analysis
Almost a year has elapsed since Susie’s death. Those around her feel cornered and frustrated, cracking under the strain of relentless grief. Both Lindsey and Buckley crave anonymity, but the misguided kindness of others, like Buckley’s teacher, means they remain under a spotlight, always seen through the lens of their tragedy. Jack’s insistence that Harvey is guilty drives the police to establish sharp boundaries, which includes telling him that the case is no longer their only priority. Meanwhile, Abigail’s sense of suffocation drives her farther away from Jack and the children and into Len’s arms and the world of books. As her request to use her father’s cabin makes clear, flight is her preferred way of navigating grief. Even before she leaves physically, however, she withdraws emotionally. That she had already done so, as Susie’s picture of the “mother-stranger” reveals, arguably makes this an easier process for her. Indeed, Susie is clear that over the years, Jack had gotten closer to the children while Abigail had moved farther away.
In these chapters, Susie provides a fuller portrait of Abigail, ironically granting her a more solid presence in the novel just as she becomes increasingly spectral to her family. Susie recalls how her mother would tell the sisters stories from Greek mythology while tucking them into bed. Susie lingers with one story in particular, the myth of Persephone. Abducted and raped by Hades, the god of the underworld, Persephone is rescued by her mother, Demeter. But, because she consumed food while in the world of the dead, she is required to return to it for a time each year. She is often called the Queen of the Underworld. This story, which clearly anticipates Susie’s ordeal, also reveals Abigail’s increasing isolation in the suburbs, where she feels buried alive. As Susie thinks about her mother, she realizes that Abigail was desperately lonely, turning to her oldest child for friendship. The plan had been that she would be able to escape when the girls were old enough, but her late, unplanned pregnancy with Buckley ended this dream and Abigail retreated into herself. As she does with her grief early in the novel, Abigail walls her more mysterious and outrageous impulses inside of her, but they burst out in her misery following Susie’s murder.
The dynamic of familiarity and strangeness, emblematized in the “mother-stranger” photograph, likewise characterizes Susie’s visits to Harvey’s house. Built on a model like the one where she lived, Harvey’s house is uncannily like her home but also terribly different. Not only has her blood stained the garage floor, but tiny remnants of Susie were also carried inside on Harvey’s clothes and body. Susie compares the houses, noting that Harvey sleeps in what is Susie’s bedroom in her house, a disturbing parallel. While the Salmon family’s house is full of life and energy, Harvey’s house is empty but for a chair that allows him to watch people unseen. While the family’s life is chaotic, Harvey’s is carefully regulated to produce the illusion of normalcy. Ringing alarm clocks remind him to open and close curtains or to turn off lights. When he is not planning violent perversions of domestic intimacy, Harvey passes his days building structures for children. Dollhouses are the innocent inverse of the horrible spaces he creates to torture women.
Different ways of knowing the truth also emerge as an important element of these chapters. Jack recalls Ruana’s assertion that she would kill the person she was certain murdered her child and wonders what is necessary for such certainty. The way a person outwardly acts and appears, as in the cases of Abigail or Harvey, can be a mask that hides the truth of their character. In such cases, something more than observation and external evidence is necessary. For Jack, that extra something is his intuition. When he and Lindsey discuss Harvey’s house, they share a silent moment of understanding, communicating without words their shared need to search his residence for clues. That his house exudes evil is confirmed by Grandma Lynn, who feels its coldness as she walks past. Another version of truth is revealed in dreams, however, as when Abigail dreams of a dead child who is nonetheless whole. With this dream, she reveals her desire to find Susie, even if doing so requires a funeral rite.
