Mr. Harvey would later say these words to my mother when he ran into her on the street: “I heard about the horrible, horrible tragedy. What was your daughter’s name, again?”
“Susie,” my mother said, bracing up under the weight of it, a weight that she naïvely hoped might lighten someday, not knowing that it would only go on to hurt in new and varied ways for the rest of her life.
Mr. Harvey told her the usual: “I hope they get the bastard. I’m sorry for your loss.”
I was in my heaven by that time, fitting my limbs together, and couldn’t believe his audacity. “The man has no shame,” I said to Franny, my intake counselor. “Exactly,” she said, and made her point as simply as that. There wasn’t a lot of bullshit in my heaven.
Mr. Harvey said it would only take a minute, so I followed him a little farther into the cornfield, where fewer stalks were broken off because no one used it as a shortcut to the junior high. My mom had told my baby brother, Buckley, that the corn in the field was inedible when he asked why no one from the neighborhood ate it. “The corn is for horses, not humans,” she said. “Not dogs?” Buckley asked. “No,” my mother answered. “Not dinosaurs?” Buckley asked. And it went like that.
“I’ve made a little hiding place,” said Mr. Harvey.
He stopped and turned to me.
“I don’t see anything,” I said. I was aware that Mr. Harvey was looking at me strangely. I’d had older men look at me that way since I’d lost my baby fat, but they usually didn’t lose their marbles over me when I was wearing my royal blue parka and yellow elephant bell-bottoms. His glasses were small and round with gold frames, and his eyes looked out over them and at me.
“You should be more observant, Susie,” he said.
I felt like observing my way out of there, but I didn’t. Why didn’t I? Franny said these questions were fruitless: “You didn’t and that’s that. Don’t mull it over. It does no good. You’re dead and you have to accept it.”
“Try again,” Mr. Harvey said, and he squatted down and knocked against the ground.
“What’s that?” I asked.
My ears were freezing. I wouldn’t wear the multicolored cap with the pompom and jingle bells that my mother had made me one Christmas. I had shoved it in the pocket of my parka instead.
I remember that I went over and stomped on the ground near him. It felt harder even than frozen earth, which was pretty hard.
“It’s wood,” Mr. Harvey said. “It keeps the entrance from collapsing. Other than that it’s all made out of earth.”
