The Lovely Bones: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

Early that morning, the sleeping Salmon family is awakened by police sirens down the street. Abigail instructs Lindsey to go wake Jack, who she assumes has fallen asleep in his study, but Lindsey finds that her father is missing. Abigail knows suddenly that Jack has gone off after Harvey and gotten himself into trouble, and speaks derisively of his foolishness. Lindsey insists they go out and find him, but Abigail refuses to let her. Soon, a call comes in, alerting Abigail that Jack has been beaten with his own baseball bat and is in the hospital, having surgery on his knee. Abigail leaves Lindsey and Buckley alone in the house to go to her husband’s side.

Lindsey calls Buckley’s friend’s Nate’s mother, who comes to take Buckley. She then calls Samuel, who sends his brother Hal to pick Lindsey up on his motorcycle and bring her to the hospital. When Lindsey walks into Jack’s room at the hospital, Abigail is not there. Lindsey, crying, comforts her sleeping father, and sings him a song that he used to sing to her and Susie at bedtime.

Susie backtracks in time to the moment Abigail got to the hospital. Upon arrival, Abigail finds her husband still in surgery, and immediately puts a call through to the police, requesting Len Fenerman join her at the hospital. Abigail paces near the nurse’s station, wearing only a thin nightgown beneath her raincoat. As Len comes down the hallway, Abigail feels a rush of relief. He approaches her, and they touch hands, then retreat to the visitors’ area to talk. Abigail explains what has happened—Jack followed Clarissa, thinking she was George Harvey. As Abigail and Len enter the visitors’ area, she spots Hal Heckler sitting there, and recognizes him as Samuel’s brother. Though Len wants to sit down, Abigail insists they go outside for a cigarette.

Out on a small concrete balcony, Len and Abigail smoke together. Abigail asks Len how his wife died, and he tells her that she committed suicide. As Susie watches her mother and Len converse, she sees her as the version of her mother from the photograph—the version of her mother who had never had Susie, Lindsey, and Buckley. Abigail asks Len why his wife killed herself, and he tells her that though he does not know, it is the question that most often runs through his brain when he is not thinking of her daughter’s murder. Abigail asks him to say the words again—no one, she says, ever says the word murder, and she is grateful for Len’s honest words. Abigail then takes Len’s face in her hands and asks him to say the words again. He does, and then Abigail leans over and kisses him on the mouth.

Susie remembers, when she was alive, seeing the effect Abigail had on men. She recalls that on Thursdays, her father would come home early, and he and Abigail would have “Mommy and Daddy time:” on Thursday afternoons, Lindsey and Susie were told to stay quiet on the opposite side of the house. Susie recalls how one afternoon, when tucking her in for a nap before Mommy and Daddy time, her mother told her the story of Persephone and Demeter. Later, Susie was woken from her nap by the muffled sounds of her parents’ lovemaking, but the gentle sounds of their laughter and moaning “usher[ed] her back under into sleep.”

Susie remembers how, when her mother realized that she was pregnant with Buckley, she sealed the more mysterious parts of herself off. Susie realizes, watching her mother and Len embrace one another, that her mother has been “bottled up for years behind that wall,” and the needy part of her has grown, rather than shrunk. Len pulls away from Abigail, and asks her to think of her husband and consider what she’s doing, but Abigail only takes Len’s hand and places it on her breast. Susie realizes that Abigail needs Len “to drive the dead daughter out.” As Abigail and Len resume kissing, Susie watches her mother “h[o]ld o to him as if on the other side of his kiss there could be a new life.”

Hal Heckler, still in the visitor’s area, watches Abigail and Len—hair and clothes mussed—walk back down the hall toward Jack’s room. Farther down the hall, Hal stops Abigail just before she goes into Jack’s room, letting her know that Lindsey is in there. He lets her know that he brought Lindsey over, and that Buckley is safe with a neighbor. Hal asks Abigail if she’s okay, and she says that she is, though she still feels as if she is “climbing back to the surface” after her encounter with Len. Abigail enters the room, and sees Lindsey asleep in a chair next to Jack’s bed. Susie watches from heaven, resolving not to “divide [her] family in [her] heart,” though they are clearly divided on earth.

Susie watches the air above the hospital, which is “thick” with souls departing earth. Holly and Susie think that these deaths seem “choreographed from far away,” and wonder if there is a heaven even larger and more all-encompassing than theirs. Franny joins them, and confesses that watching souls clamor to depart the Earth is her “secret pleasure.” The souls of the dead are like snowflakes, she says: “none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before.”