“It was late in Ruana and Ray's visit when Samuelstarted talking about the gothic revival house that Lindseyand he had found along an overgrown section of Route 30. Ashe told Abigail about it in detail, describing how he hadrealized he wanted to propose to Lindsey and live there withher, Ray found himself asking, "Does it have a big hole inthe ceiling of the back room and cool windows above thefront door?" "Yes," Samuel said, as my father grew alarmed. "But itcan be fixed, Mr. Salmon. I'm sure of it." "Ruth's dad owns that," Ray said. Everyone was quiet for a moment and then Ray continued. "He took out a loan on his business to buy up oldplaces that aren't already slated for destruction. He wantsto restore them," Ray said. "My God," Samuel said. And I was gone.(Susie finnally giving up on earth and moving on)”

“Buckley followed the three of them into the kitchen and asked, as he had at least once a day, “Where’s Susie?”They were silent. Samuel looked at Lindsey.“Buckley,” my father called from the adjoining room, “come play Monopoly with me.”My brother had never been invited to play Monopoly. Everyone said he was too young, but this was the magic of Christmas. He rushed into the family room, and my father picked him up and sat him on his lap.“See this shoe?” my father said.Buckley nodded his head.“I want you to listen to everything I say about it, okay?”“Susie?” my brother asked, somehow connecting the two.“Yes, I’m going to tell you where Susie is.”I began to cry up in heaven. What else was there for me to do?“This shoe was the piece Susie played Monopoly with,” he said. “I play with the car or sometimes the wheelbarrow. Lindsey plays with the iron, and when you mother plays, she likes the cannon.”“Is that a dog?”“Yes, that’s a Scottie.”“Mine!”“Okay,” my father said. He was patient. He had found a way to explain it. He held his son in his lap, and as he spoke, he felt Buckley’s small body on his knee-the very human, very warm, very alive weight of it. It comforted him. “The Scottie will be your piece from now on. Which piece is Susie’s again?”“The shoe?” Buckley asked.“Right, and I’m the car, your sister’s the iron, and your mother is the cannon.”My brother concentrated very hard.“Now let’s put all the pieces on the board, okay? You go ahead and do it for me.”Buckley grabbed a fist of pieces and then another, until all the pieces lay between the Chance and Community Chest cards.“Let’s say the other pieces are our friends?”“Like Nate?”“Right, we’ll make your friend Nate the hat. And the board is the world. Now if I were to tell you that when I rolled the dice, one of the pieces would be taken away, what would that mean?”“They can’t play anymore?”“Right.”“Why?” Buckley asked.He looked up at my father; my father flinched.“Why?” my brother asked again.My father did not want to say “because life is unfair” or “because that’s how it is”. He wanted something neat, something that could explain death to a four-year-old He placed his hand on the small of Buckley’s back.“Susie is dead,” he said now, unable to make it fit in the rules of any game. “Do you know what that means?”Buckley reached over with his hand and covered the shoe. He looked up to see if his answer was right.My father nodded. "You won’t see Susie anymore, honey. None of us will.” My father cried. Buckley looked up into the eyes of our father and did not really understand.Buckley kept the shoe on his dresser, until one day it wasn't there anymore and no amount of looking for it could turn up.”

“It was then that I slipped in the darkness, unable to know if I could be seen.I made myself small in the darkness, unable to know if I could be seen. I had left for hours every day for eight and a half years as I had left my mother or Ruth and Ray, my brother and sister, and certainly Mr. Harvey, but he, I now saw had never left me. His devotion to me had made me know again and again that I had been beloved. In the warm light of my father’s love I had remained Susie Salmon-a girl with my whole life in front of me. “I thought if I was very quiet I would hear you,” he whispered.“If I was still enough you might come back.”

“I had been kissed once by someone I liked. His name was Ray and he was Indian. He had an accent and was dark. I wasn't supposed to like him. Clarissa called his large eyes, with their half closed lids, "freak-a-delic," but he was nice and smart and helped me cheat on my algebra exam while pretending he hadn't. He kissed me by my locker the day before we turned in our photos for the yearbook. When the yearbook came out at the end of the summer, I saw that under his picture he had answered the standard "My heart belongs to" with "Susie Salmon." I guess he had had plans. I remember his lips were chapped.”

“Do you ever think of her?' she asked.They were quiet again. All the time,' Ruth said. A chill ran down my spine. 'Sometimes I think she's lucky, you know. I hate this place.'Me too,' Ray said. 'But I've lived other places. This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one.'You're not implying...'She's in heaven, if you believe in that stuff.'You don't?'I don't think so, no.'I do,' Ruth said. 'I don't mean la-la angel wing crap, but I do think there's a heaven.'Is she happy?'It is heaven, right?'But what does that mean?'The tea was stone-cold and the first bell had already rung. Ruth smiled into her cup. 'Well, as my dad would say, it means she's out of this shithole.'~pgs 82-83”

“My little brother's greatest fear was that the one person who meant so much to him would go away. He loved Lindsey and Grandma Lynn and Samuel and Hal, but my father kept him stepping lightly, son gingerly monitoring father every morning and every evening as if, without such vigilance, he would lose him.We stood- the dead child and the living- on either side of my father, both wanting the same thing. To have him to ourselves forver. To please us both was an impossibility....'Please don't let Daddy die, Susie,' he whispered. 'I need him.'When I left my brother, I walked out past the gazebo and under the lights hanging down like berries, and I saw the brick paths branching out as I advanced.I walked until the bricks turned to flat stones and then to small, sharp rocks and then to nothing but churned earth for miles adn miles around me. I stood there. I had been in heaven long enough to know that something would be revealed. And as the light began to fade and the sky to turn a dark, sweet blue as it had on the night of my death, I saw something walking into view, so far away I could not at first make out if it was man or woman, child or adult. But as moonlight reached this figure I could make out a man and, frightened now, my breathing shallow, I raced just far enough to see. Was it my father? Was it what I had wanted all this time so deperately?'Susie,' the man said as I approached and then stopped a few feet from where he stood. He raised his arms up toward me. 'Remember?' he said.I found myself small again, age six and in a living room in Illinois. Now, as I had done then, I placed my feet on top of his feet.'Granddaddy,' I said.And because we were all alone and both in heaven, I was light enough to move as I had moved when I was six and in a living room in Illinois. Now, as I had done then, I placed my feet on top of his feet.'Granddaddy,' I said.And because we were all alone and both in heaven, I was light enough to move as I had moved when I was six and he was fifty-six and my father had taken us to visit. We danced so slowly to a song that on Earth had always made my grandfather cry.'Do you remember?' he asked.'Barber!''Adagio for Strings,' he said.But as we danced and spun- none of the herky-jerky awkwardness of Earth- what I remembered was how I'd found him crying to this music and asked him why.'Sometimes you cry,' Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.' He had held me against him then, just briefly, and then I had run outside to play again with Lindsey in what seemed like my grandfather's huge backyard. We didn't speak any more that night, but we danced for hours in that timeless blue light. I knew as we danced that something was happening on Earth and in heaven. A shifting. The sort of slow-to-sudden movement that we'd read about in science class one year. Seismic, impossible, a rending and tearing of time and space. I pressed myself into my grandfather's chest and smelled the old-man smell of him, the mothball version of my own father, the blood on Earth, the sky in heaven. The kumquat, skunk, grade-A tobacco.When the music stopped, it cold have been forever since we'd begun. My grandfateher took a step back, and the light grew yellow at his back.'I'm going,' he said.'Where?' I asked.'Don't worry, sweetheart. You're so close.'He turned and walked away, disappearing rapidly into spots and dust. Infinity.”

“Those clothes are Susie's,' my father said calmly when he reached him.Buckley looked down at my blackwatch dress that he held in his hand.My father stepped closer, took the dress from my brother, and then, without speaking, he gathered the rest of my clothes, which Buckley had piled on the lawn. As he turned in silence toward the house, hardly breathing, clutching my clothes to him, it sparked.I was the only one to see the colors. Just near Buckley's ears and on the tips of his cheeks and chin he was a little orange somehow, a little red.Why can't I use them?' he asked.It landed in my father's back like a fist.Why can't I use those clothes to stake my tomatoes?'My father turned around. He saw his son standing there, behind him the perfect plot of muddy, churned-up earth spotted with tiny seedlings. 'How can you ask me that question?'You have to choose. It's not fair,' my brother said.Buck?' My father held my clothes against his chest.I watched Buckley flare and light. Behind him was the sun of the goldenrod hedge, twice as tall as it had been at my death.I'm tired of it!' Buckley blared. 'Keesha's dad died and she's okay?'Is Keesha a girl at school?'Yes!'My father was frozen. He could feel the dew that had gathered on his bare ankles and feet, could feel the ground underneath him, cold and moist and stirring with possibility.I'm sorry. When did this happen?'That's not the point, Dad! You don't get it.' Buckley turned around on his heel and started stomping the tender tomato shoots with his foot.Buck, stop!' my father cried.My brother turned.You don't get it, Dad,' he said.I'm sorry,' my father said. These are Susie's clothes and I just... It may not make sense, but they're hers-something she wore.'...You act like she was yours only!'Tell me what you want to say. What's this about your friend Keesha's dad?'Put the clothes down.'My father laid them gently on the ground.It isn't about Keesha's dad.'Tell me what it is about.' My father was now all immediacy. He went back to the place he had been after his knee surgery, coming up out of the druggie sleep of painkillers to see his then-five-year-old son sitting near him, waiting for his eyes to flicker open so he could say, 'Peek-a-boo, Daddy.'She's dead.'It never ceased to hurt. 'I know that.'But you don't act that way.' Keesha's dad died when she was six. Keesha said she barely even thinks of him.'She will,' my father said.But what about us?'Who?'Us, Dad. Me and Lindsey. Mom left becasue she couldn't take it.'Calm down, Buck,' my father said. He was being as generous as he could as the air from his lungs evaporated out into his chest. Then a little voice in him said, Let go, let go, let go. 'What?' my father said.I didn't say anything.'Let go. Let go. Let go.I'm sorry,' my father said. 'I'm not feeling very well.' His feet had grown unbelievably cold in the damp grass. His chest felt hollow, bugs flying around an excavated cavity. There was an echo in there, and it drummed up into his ears. Let go.My father dropped down to his knees. His arm began to tingle on and off as if it had fallen asleep. Pins and needles up and down. My brother rushed to him. Dad?'Son.' There was a quaver in his voice and a grasping outward toward my brother.I'll get Grandma.' And Buckley ran.My father whispered faintly as he lay on his side with his face twisted in the direction of my old clothes: 'You can never choose. I've loved all three of you.”