The Lovely Bones

Susie awakes in Ruth’s body with Ray standing over her. She realizes that this was Ruth’s wish: for Susie to have some time on Earth. Ruth arrives in heaven, where her fan club celebrates her. Ray quickly realizes that something is different about Ruth, and when Susie tells Ray to kiss her, he does so. The two walk to the car and kiss again, which is what Susie has always longed for in heaven: to feel real tenderness instead of the hurt of her rape. Susie tells Ray to drive to Hal’s nearby home, and as they drive, Susie is struck by the idea that, if she lived, she could have made a choice to leave town and go to another place. She wonders if what she was missing in heaven was “a wanderlust that came from letting go” (305).

At Hal’s, Susie invites Ray to join her in the shower, and as he does, Ray inadvertently calls her Susie. She confirms that it’s her, and the two make love several times. Susie describes her heaven to him and confirms that the spirits of the dead are always around, telling him to read Ruth’s journals. Susie calls home, but before she can say anything, she and Ruth switch places again. Ruth wakes up and hugs Ray, neither ready to say aloud what happened to them. Ruth is overjoyed at being able to help Susie, and Ray is now open to the possibilities of life beyond death.

Ruth and Ray go to the Singhs’ house, where they fall asleep together. Waking up in the middle of the night, Ray reads Ruth’s journal, which contains her visions of the murdered women and girls. Ruth wakes up as he does so and says that she has so much to tell him. Ruana, after seeing Ray and Ruth sleeping together, begins to think about divorce, which she has avoided for several years. In the morning, she invites Ray and Ruth to come with her to drop off a pie for the Salmons, but Ruth says she has to go somewhere alone.

The hospital discharges Jack, and as Susie watches her family leave together, she “knew that they were meant to be there, the four of them together, alone” (314). Although it is still weeks before his birthday, Hal and Samuel bring Buckley his gift—a drum set—while the family is returning from the hospital. As Lynn gets the brothers water, she briefly sees Susie standing outside, beside Buckley’s garden shed, but decides not to tell anyone. Susie has come to love her grandmother even more in her death and decides that “if the worst of what she left on Earth was a legacy of inebriated support, it was a good legacy in [her] book” (316).

Susie watches as the family pulls into the driveway and wonders if this is what she has been waiting for—the family coming home, not to her, but to one another. Abigail thinks that she might be able to survive being home with her family again. Lindsey asks Abigail if she is going to hurt Jack again (insinuating that she knows about the affair), and Abigail says that she’ll do everything she can but won’t promise this time. Upon returning, Abigail immediately goes up to Susie’s old room, where the furniture has been unchanged except for the addition of Lynn’s recliner. She finally says, “I love you, Susie,” and it shocks Susie that she “had been waiting, unknowingly, to hear it from [her] mother” (317).

Abigail sees that Lynn has framed the secret photograph Susie took of her. She realizes how much Lynn has done to keep the household in her absence and regrets her scorched-earth policy towards her mother. Susie, watching this, also comes to accept that although things are not perfect, she is done yearning for her family and needing them to yearn for her. As Abigail returns downstairs, Susie sees “the lovely bones” (320) of connections that have grown in her absence.

Ray and Ruana come to leave a pie on the doorstep, and the Salmons invite them in. Abigail goes down to speak to Ruana, asking her if her husband is working again, and the two make plans to smoke cigarettes together again. Later in the evening, Samuel begins talking about the house that he and Lindsey found and want to restore. Ray realizes that Ruth’s dad owns the property, having started a business to buy up and restore old homes in the area before the increasing development of the area destroys them.

Susie watches Ruth return to the cornfield. She realizes that Ruth will always think of her, but that there was no longer anything she could do. Susie knows that Ruth will always be a woman haunted, first by accident but now by choice. Susie then disappears from her heaven.

Susie moves on to another part of heaven, although she still occasionally goes back to check in on her family and friends. Susie calls this new place the “wide-wide Heaven,” in contrast to her small-heaven. It is comfortable and filled with the small joys that she couldn’t imagine in her small-heaven.

Grandma Lynn dies a few years later and spends her time in her small-heaven drinking with celebrities. Lindsey and Samuel are married and move into their dream house, which Mr. Connors agrees to sell to them if Samuel pays in labor as the first employee of his restoration business. Despite a lack of plumbing and electricity, they live there happily as Mr. Connors restores the house with the assistance of Samuel and Buckley. Meanwhile, Lindsey attends graduate school to become a therapist, and later becomes pregnant with a daughter. Abigail and Jack stay together and donate Susie and Lynn’s things to Goodwill. Ray becomes a doctor, and “even if surrounding him were the serious surgeons and scientists who ruled over a world of black and white” (324) he maintains a belief in the possibilities of the supernatural. Ruth stays in NYC, where she continues to write down what she sees, wanting everyone to know that the dead talk and laugh with us.

One day in winter, while Susie is watching the earth, she sees Harvey emerge from a greyhound bus and go into a diner. Inside, he watches a teenage girl for several hours, and then follows her out when she leaves to smoke behind the bus station, which is beside a large ravine. The girl is creeped-out by Harvey and leaves, but before he can follow her, an icicle falls causing Harvey to lose his balance and fall into the ravine. His body is not found for several weeks.

Many years later, Susie watches Lindsey with her now 10-year-old daughter, Abigail Suzanne. Lindsey has finally been able to leave Susie in her memories, where she is meant to be. A couple who has recently moved to a new Norristown development finds Susie’s old charm bracelet. They examine in, thinking that the little girl who wore it must be all grown up by now. Susie then ends the book by wishing the reader “a long and happy life” (328).