“My father had not been outside the house except to drive back and forth to work or sit out in the backyard, for months, nor had he seen his neighbors. Now he looked at them, from face to face, until he realized I had been loved by people he didn't even recognize. His heart filled up, warm again as it had not been in what seemed so long to him- save small forgotten moments with Buckley, the accidents of love that happened with his son. ~pgs 209-210; Buckley, Lindsey and Jack on Susie”

“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.”

“My father was too distracted to see anything in this. Mimicking my mother, he taped it to the fridge in the same place Buckley's long-forgotten drawing of the Inbetween had been. But my brother knew something was wrong with his story. Knew it by how his teacher reacted, doing a double take like they did in his comic books. He took the story down and brought it to my old room while Grandma Lynn was downstairs. He folded it into a tiny square and put it inside the now-empty insides of my four poster bed. ~pgs 217-218; Buckley's childhood”

“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.”

“Since then he had taken these photos out too many times to count, but each time he looked into the face of this woman he had felt something growing inside him. It took him a long time to realize what it was. Only recently had his wounded synapses allowed him to name it. He had been falling in love all over again. He didn't understand how two people who were married, who saw each other every day, could forget what each other looked like, but if he had had to name what had happened- this was it. And the last two photos in the roll provided the key. He had come home from work- I remember trying to keep my mother's attention as Holiday barked when he had heard the car pull into the garage. 'He'll come out,' I said. 'Stay still.' And she did. Part of what I loved about photography was the power it gave me over the people on the other side of the camera, even my own parents.Out of the corner of my eye I saw my father walk through the side door into the yard. He carried his slim briefcase, which, years before, Lindsey and I had heatedly investigated only to find very little of interest to us. As he set it down I snapped the last solitary photo of my mother. Already her eyes had begun to seem distracted and anxious, diving under and up into a mask somehow. In the next photo, the mast was almost, but not quite, in place and in the final photo, where my father was leaning slightly down to give her a kiss on the cheek- there it was.'Did I do that to you?' he asked her image as he stared at the pictures of my mother, lined up in a row. 'How did that happen?'~pgs 239-240; Mr. Salmon dealing with the three c's (for families of addicts)- Cause (you didn't cause it), Control (you can't control it), and Cure (you can't cure it)”

“My mother gave Lindsey a meaningful look. 'We are not discussing this further. You can go up to your room and wait or wait with me. Your choice.'Lindsey was dumbfounded. She stared at our mother and knew what she wanted most: to flee, to run out into the cornfield where my father was, where I was, where she felt suddenly that the heart of her family had moved. But Buckley wtood warm against her.~pg 143; Lindsey, Buckley and Mom”

“He sat down among the evidence at a barren communal desk in the basement of the station. He looked through the stack of extra fliers that my father had made up. He had memorized my face, but still he looked at them. He had come to believe that the best hope in my case might be the recent rise in development in the area. With all the land churning and changing, perhaps other clues whould be found that would provide the answer he needed.In the bottom of the box was the bag with my jingle-bell hat. When he'd handled it to my mother, she had collasped on the rug. He still couldn't pinpoint the moment he'd fallen in love with her. I knew it was the day he'd sat in our family room while my mother drew stick figures on butcher paper and Buckley and Nate slept toe to toe on the couch. I felt sorry for him. He had tried to solve my murder and he failed. He had tried to love my mother and he had failed.Len looked at the drawing of the cornfield that Lindsey had stolen and forced himself to acknowledge this: in his cautiousness, he had allowed a murderer to get away. He could not shake his guilt. He knew, if no one else did, that by being with my mother in the mall that day he was the one to blame for George Harvey's freedom.He took his wallet out of his back pocket and laid down the photos of all the unsolved cases he had ever worked on. Among them were his wife's. He turned them all face-down. 'Gone,' he wrote on each one of them. He would no longer wait for a date to mark an understanding of who or why or how. He would never understand all the reasons why his wife had killed herself. He would never understand how so many children went missing. He placed these photos in the box with my evidence and turned the lights off in the cold room.”