Susie Salmon

When my mother came to my room, I realized that all this time, I'd been waiting for her. I had been waiting so long, I was afraid she wouldn't come.

Nobody notices when we leave. I mean, the moment when we really choose to go. At best you might feel a whisper, or the wave of a whisper, undulating down. My name is Salmon, like the fish. First name: Susie. I was 14 years old, when I was murdered, on December 6, 1973. I was here for a moment. And then I was gone. I wish you all a long and happy life.

There was one thing my murderer didn't understand; he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence. The connections, sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent., that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it.

My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. I took his photo once as he talked to my parents about his border flowers. I was aiming for the bushes when he got in the way. He stepped out of nowhere and ruined the shot. He ruined a lot of things.

When I was alive, I never hated anyone. But now hate was all that I had.

Grandma Lynn predicted I would live a long life because I had saved my brother. As usual, Grandma Lynn was wrong.

I remember being really small; too small to see over the edge of a table. There was a snow globe, and I remember the penguin who lived inside the globe. He was all alone in there, and I worried for him.

I was slipping away, that's what it felt like, life was leaving me, but I wasn't afraid; then I remembered: "There was something I was meant to do; somewhere I was meant to be."

I was in the blue horizon between heaven and earth. The days were unchanging and every night I dream the same dream. The smell of damp earth. The scream no one heard. The sound of my heart beating like a hammer against cloth and I would hear them calling, the voices of the dead. I wanted to follow them to find a way out but I would always come back to the same door. And I was afraid. I knew if I went in there I would never come out.

My murderer could live in one moment for a long time. He could feed off the memory, over and over again. He was animal. Faceless. Infinite. But then he would feel it, the emptiness returning, and the need would rise in him again.

Holly said there was a wide, wide heaven beyond everything we knew; where there was no cornfield, no memory, no grave… but I wasn't looking beyond yet, I was still looking back.

Always, I would watch Ray; I was in the air around him, I was in the cold winter mornings he spent with Ruth Connors; and sometimes Ray would think of me, but he began to wonder maybe it was time to put that memory away, maybe it was time to let me go.

When people asked my mother, she always said she had two children.

You realize by the time I see my photos, I'm gonna be middle-aged.

For now, I'd have to make do with Grace Tarking.