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She crossed her arms and braced for another inconsequential detail in which others invested meaning. She was a wall. Notebooks and novels were nothing to her. Her daughter might survive without an arm. A lot of blood was a lot of blood. It was not a body. Jack had said it and she believed: Nothing is ever certain.
In this passage from Chapter 2, Abigail differentiates between meaning and certainty to protect her belief that her daughter will come home. Although nine days have elapsed since Susie disappeared, she has determined that only one thing—a body—will convince her of Susie’s death. Inside the fortress or “wall” she has become, Susie is alive. Not only does she stress that pieces of evidence, like notebooks or novels, only accrue “meaning” when people invest them with it, but she also notes that theories can be flawed or uncertain. As part of her grieving process, Abigail will come to accept two things: first, that Susie is, in fact, dead, and second, that she will never know precisely what happened to her. As this passage makes clear, however, profound grief complicates a person’s perception of reality. Later in the chapter, when Len shows her Susie’s jingle-bell hat, Abigail’s “wall” crumbles painfully.
She sat in her room on the couch my parents had given up on and worked on hardening herself. Take deep breaths and hold them. Try to stay still for longer and longer periods of time. Make yourself small and like a stone. Curl the edges of yourself up and fold them under where no one can see.
Lindsey’s response to grief in Chapter 2 is to retreat into a hard, smooth shell, one she likens to a stone. Leaving no crevices where people, or feelings, can enter, and remaining as still as possible, she will hold herself rigid and aloof, protecting herself from the chaotic feelings that her sister’s murder introduces. The passage shifts from Susie’s perspective, where she is unable to share their parents with her sister (she refers to them as “my” parents), to Lindsey’s imperative instructions. Susie’s omniscience means the narrative perspective can range widely, but this is a unique moment where another character’s interior life is directly represented. The sisters were close in age and, as the plot unfolds, Susie will often feel as if she is living through Lindsey’s experiences, but here Lindsey’s grief is unmediated by any other perspective.
I wanted my father’s vigil, his tight love for me. But also I wanted him to go away and leave me be. I was granted one weak grace. Back in the room where the green chair was still warm from his body, I blew that lonely, flickering candle out.
The novel carefully shows that people grieve in different ways and, as a result, they are unable to support one another fully. In this passage from the end of Chapter 11, Susie explains that she needs her father’s “tight love,” but she also finds that it makes her feel claustrophobic. His grief, expressed as a vigil and manifested in the candle he leaves burning in the window, does not leave room for her to experience her own loss. She crosses over from heaven to blow out the candle, a sign that she cannot and will not come back again. She craves his love but also needs for him to accept her death so that she can do the same. The Salmon family is only able to come together again, after many years of separation, once they are able to recognize and honor the different ways they have each grieved Susie’s murder.
