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Summary
Chapters 17–19
Chapter 17
Susie has grown accustomed to watching Lindsey and no longer feels jealous of what her younger sister has been able to do. Now 21, Lindsey has graduated from college and she and Samuel ride his motorcycle home. Heavy rain forces them to stop and take shelter in a dilapidated nineteenth-century Victorian house. It has been abused over the years and Samuel notes that it’s a tragedy that someone lit a fire on the living room floor. Enraptured by its beauty, he asserts that he wants to buy and restore the house—and that he wants to marry Lindsey.
Jack worries because Lindsey has still not arrived home. He looks at recently developed photos that Susie had taken and wonders if it was his fault that Abigail looks so changed in them. At the Victorian house, Samuel and Lindsey decide to run the rest of the way home to spare the family’s concern and to share the news of their engagement. Susie appears in the corner as the family celebrates, and Buckley sees her. Tired of watching her family, Susie rides trains and sits in Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, recalling the times when she made ships in bottles with her father.
Chapter 18
In New York, Ruth receives news that the Norristown sinkhole is going to be filled in. She enjoys the anonymity of the city, where she finds places where women or girls had been killed. Susie explains that this makes Ruth a celebrity in heaven, and sometimes she joins Ruth on her walks, reading her friend’s journal.
Jack has a fight with Buckley and then has a serious heart attack. Susie dances with her grandfather in heaven. He then announces that he’s going, tells her not to worry, and promises that she too is close.
Chapter 19
At the California winery where she works, Abigail receives news of an emergency at home. She calls the hospital and learns that Jack has been admitted. Abigail departs for Philadelphia immediately. During a layover in Chicago, she takes Susie’s class picture from her wallet and props it against a struggling tree outside of the airport before heading back in to catch her plane. Susie observes that her mother is heavy with dread during the flight.
When she deplanes, Abigail is met by Lindsey, Samuel, and Buckley. The tense silence is broken by short sentences, until Buckley angrily curses her. She hides her face and tries to silence her sobs. At the hospital, Abigail is overcome with memories: of her sexual encounter with Len, of her mother’s shoes, of her husband’s presence. Jack calls her by a nickname, Ocean Eyes, and she puts her hand on his cheek. Grandma Lynn intercepts a nurse who was taking a message to Jack from Len. She puts the note in her purse.
Analysis
Hearts, both joined and broken, are central images to these chapters. Ever since Samuel arrived at the Salmon house in 1973 with a heart necklace for Lindsey, they have been in a relationship, and now he wants to marry her and join their hearts together forever. When he proposes, Lindsey happily accepts. But Jack’s heart is broken, and not just because his daughter was murdered. He misses Abigail, whom he has come to love more over the years (in part because of Susie’s photographs), and he wonders if he caused the sadness that he sees in them. His broken heart is literalized when, after a fight with Buckley, he suffers a heart attack. Yet this physical expression of his emotional heartache creates the conditions for healing when Abigail returns to Pennsylvania to see him. She still loves Jack and, although she is scared of everything it means, decides to stay with him and try to rebuild their relationship.
In returning home, Abigail must confront the living children she’s abandoned and the dead child from whom she has tried to flee. Placing Susie’s photograph under a tree at the Chicago airport, she leaves behind the frozen image on which she relied to avoid confronting her daughter’s murder. When she gets off the plane and realizes that she only barely recognizes her two living children, it becomes clear that she has protected herself by fixating on a picture of Susie to the detriment of her other children. The anger that Buckley and Lindsey feel makes her hide her face in both sadness and shame, strong feelings she fears might lead her to flee again. Love, however, proves stronger than both in the end, and her mother provides quiet assistance by preventing Len from intruding on Abigail and Jack’s reunion.
Two characters who have been less central to the narrative—Buckley and Samuel—come into sharper focus in these sections. Because Buckley was so young when Susie died, his incomprehension was more innocent (and thus less painful) than others’. He did not know that Susie’s body had been dismembered. But now he is close to the age that Susie had been when she was murdered, and he feels anger that his father continues to reserve much of his love for his dead sister. The fight between Buckley and Jack is about Susie but, as the son accuses his father of taking Susie’s Monopoly token, it becomes clear that Buckley is really upset that his father still mourns her. He wants Jack to pay more attention to the living. Buckley expresses his need for nurture by gardening.
Samuel, too, is drawn to the act of nurturing, but he finds his life’s work in the idea of renovating a decrepit house. When he and Lindsey stumble on the Victorian house, he is immediately struck by the building’s character and period detail. He laments the poor treatment it has received—someone had even lit a fire on its hardwood floors—and tells Lindsey that he wants to repair the house, get married, and live in it together. From his first gift to Lindsey, two matching halves of a heart, to the house that he wants to repair, Samuel is a builder. Although Harvey’s father was also a builder, Samuel’s warmth and kindness endow his work and character with qualities that sustain rather than destroy.
