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Summary
Chapters 20–22
Chapter 20
Harvey arrives at a Connecticut shack where he once killed a woman. The body is gone, so Harvey falls asleep beside the empty grave. Susie, like Len, now keeps a list of the living whom she celebrates and longs to help. Over the years, Len has added material to Susie’s file: a possible alias, another victim, and Susie’s keystone charm. He wants to return the charm to Jack, hoping it will speed Jack’s recovery.
Abigail fills Jack’s hospital room with daffodils. The rest of the family has returned home but she lingers at the hospital. She wanders through a parking lot, ending up in a diner. There, a strange man frightens her and makes her want to return to California. Abigail goes back to Jack’s room and lays her head on his pillow. Once they are asleep, Susie whispers to them. In the shack, Harvey dreams of Lindsey in her soccer jersey, a dream that recurs whenever he feels threatened.
Jack wakes and thinks about how much he wants to hold his wife and how important it is that Abigail be herself. Susie slips into the room, appreciating how her father always made her feel loved. Abigail awakens and asks him why he hasn’t fled Norristown to start a new life. Looking at the daffodils, he says that he gives his dead daughter flowers instead, which Abigail finds difficult to hear. He asks if she’ll stay and, despite her previous resolve, she says she will, at least for now. They briefly discuss her California life, and he says that Susie has been in the room with them. Abigail admits that she sees Susie everywhere, and they kiss and cry.
Chapter 21
Susie watches Ray sleeping and remembers her grandmother telling her to have fun when kissing him.
Ruth tells Ray that the sinkhole is going to be filled in. They visit it, and while there, Ruth sees Susie standing at its edge. She asks Susie if she wants something, a question that Susie mulls in heaven. There, she watches her family and Harvey, who is visiting his old neighborhood. Lindsey is home alone and Susie fears for her because Harvey watches her through the window, calculating his chances and remembering the past. A police cruiser stops Harvey in the Salmons’ neighborhood because someone had reported a suspicious vehicle. He’s told to leave. As Harvey passes the sinkhole, Ruth has a vision of Harvey’s victims climbing into his car and wrapping themselves around him in red gowns, before she passes out.
Having dispatched the police, Harvey decides to drive to the sinkhole. He drives past Ruth, who sees the women in red. She passes out and Susie falls to Earth.
Chapter 22
Susie wakes in Ruth’s body. She senses Ruth trying to escape her body and attempts, unsuccessfully, to stop her. Susie remains alone in Ruth’s body. For Susie, it is “the sweetest thing” to be alive again, so she ignores Franny’s calls from heaven. Ray helps her up and Susie looks at him, also seeing women celebrating Ruth in heaven.
Ray notices a change and asks what’s happened. They kiss and Susie feels what it is like to be caressed with tenderness, not brutality. She tells him that when he kisses her, she sees heaven, and asks him to have sex with her. Ray is disoriented by the many details that Ruth appears to know and, as Susie sheds her clothes, he calls her Susie. They embrace and he realizes that it is not Ruth he holds. Susie admits to having watched him for years and promises him that Ruth will return. They make love tenderly and, after he asks her to stay, they fall asleep.
When Susie wakes, still in Ruth’s body, she understands that she must leave soon. She rouses Ray to ask if he thinks about the dead, not as cadavers but as people. She tells him that the dead are with the living, yet, as he caresses her, she feels herself departing. Before she goes, Susie tries to call home, but Buckley cannot hear her. Leaving Earth is not hard, and Susie happily watches Ray hug a tired but happy Ruth.
Analysis
In these chapters, Susie experiences something her murderer stole from her: sexual pleasure and loving intimacy. When she falls into Ruth’s body, the most impressive of her multiple efforts at crossing the barrier between the living and the dead, she can look at Ray from Earth and feel his touch directly, rather than mediated through Ruth or as a voyeur of Lindsey’s experiences with Samuel. On Earth, she is able to fulfill one of her chief desires: feeling one more time what it is to be fully alive. Yet she does not accomplish this feat on her own. Earlier in the novel, when Susie was able to blow out the candle in her father’s study, she calls this a minor “grace.” Here, however, the efforts of the other victims, dressed in red gowns, make it possible for her to cross over and be briefly with Ray. They swarm Harvey when he lurks in Norristown, and their presence causes Ruth to lose consciousness. Without this community and Ruth’s commitment to her, Susie would not have been able to return to Earth. While the moment might seem supernatural, in other words, it is also an expression of the entirely human need for community and shared forms of care.
While it is Ruth’s connection to Susie that is stressed throughout the novel, Ray, too, has nurtured emotional intimacy with his early love. He’d previously put away her photograph, realizing that it was a poor representation of who she was. He prefers his memories and the sense that she remains with him. He is quick to realize that the woman he is embracing, regardless of her appearance, is Susie, not Ruth. Although they might seem to be minor characters in the novel, Ray and Ruana will both form part of the reassembled body that Susie celebrates at the novel’s end. Her knowledge that the dead share space with the living is, for Ray, an important lesson, destined to make him a more compassionate doctor for people reaching the ends of their mortal lives. While the novel’s commitment to childhood sweethearts—Lindsey marries Samuel and Ray wants Susie to stay, no matter the intervening years—is unrealistic, it follows as a logical consequence of Susie’s age. She and Lindsey both trusted in true love as girls and, as they mature in their different ways, this desire remains unchanged.
As Susie and her family find their way back to shared joys (and sadness), Harvey suffers from hidden and unfelt surveillance, an inversion that makes him more prey than predator. The narrative tension rises as he watches Lindsey from his car, confident in his ability to attack at will. In reality, he’s been watched the entire time and can no longer fool people with feints of innocence. A neighbor has called the police, who send him on his way. That he has taken to visiting the sites where he buried women is now less an expression of power than an attempt to reclaim it. In both cases he is thwarted, first when the corpse is discovered and removed and, later, when his presence inadvertently returns to Susie the most precious thing he stole from her—her life.
The reconciliation between Jack and Abigail in the hospital importantly includes Susie, who watches over them both, but turns more on their abiding love for one another. Abigail recognizes that Pennsylvania feels fundamentally unsafe to her, as if a murderer sits in every diner booth, and Jack realizes that he must allow her the space to be fully herself, not just a mother or a wife. Acceptance is, in other words, not just crucial to the process of grief, but also integral to love. Although Abigail had previously fled to start a new life, she and Jack agree to try to create a new life together in the place where they formerly lived as a family. Jack has a great capacity to make people feel loved, as Susie explains, and he seems ready to devote his attention to the people in his life who are still with him.
