when I was alive. I would have lived more deliberately. I would have banished my regrets and robbed them of their power. I would have been more of a man.
I thought of Bobby Daniels, the young man I’d put in prison for Alissa’s murder. What would it be like to be confined to a room barely larger than a coffin, breathing air thick with hatred spewed from others—others who had killed, maimed, and tortured, poisoning their very humanity—when you knew you had done nothing to be among them?
How could you hold on to your will to live in a world that allowed that to happen? How could you?
I’d never pondered such things before, never given another human being that much thought. But now I could think of nothing else. What had I done? I had taken away a life as surely as some unknown monster had taken the life of the girl sprawled before me.
Bobby Daniels had been Alissa’s boyfriend at the time of her death—and easy to convict. He’d done nothing to protect himself against the probing, the theories, the accusations, the patched-together shreds of physical evidence that bound him to Alissa’s death. We had thrown theory after theory at him, imagined scenarios leading to more scenarios—all of them culminating in Alissa’s violent death. And Bobby Daniels had never once fought back. He’d accepted it all with a numb indifference.
I understood now that, perhaps, he had simply lacked the will to defend himself against the horror that had claimed him without warning. I understood that my self-absorbed heart had blinded me to the pain that other hearts could feel. That Bobby Daniels had been too consumed mourning the loss of Alissa to have noticed what was happening to him.
And I had set this injustice in motion.
The day faded. As the sun started its descent, its light thinned to a pale rose streaked with fingers of gold, an old man in a Burberry raincoat approached through this splendor, laboring up the hill with a sandy-colored dog. The dog was the first to find the dead girl. At first, I thought the creature was barking at me. I had learned soon after my death, while passing by my wife’s cat, that some animals could see me, or at least sense me, and that they sometimes reacted to my presence. Kitzy had hissed at me relentlessly for weeks after my death, and at last, I had returned the favor, taunting her until she rose in a fury of arched back and spitting, a display that earned her a pillow thrown across the room by my unknowing wife. Oh, I had enjoyed that battle many times before the cat had learned to accept me with the same disdain she’d bestowed upon me during my life. I rather missed our feuds once they were gone.
But no, this was not the case now. The little dog ignored me completely. He pulled the leash from the old man’s hands and darted past me to the edge of the clearing. There, he dropped to his belly and crawled to the side of the girl’s body, whimpering for his master to hurry.
The old man pushed through the bushes and discovered the dead girl just as the last rays of afternoon light bathed the clearing in gold, rendering her an offering to the gods. The old man grew still at the sight before him. I could feel his whole being grow heavy with the knowledge that such evil existed.
The old man had been a good man during his many years. I could feel that coming from him, too. He was not equipped for what he saw. I knew this because something astonishing was happening to me, perhaps triggered by my newfound feeling of purpose: memories of the old man’s life unfolded in my mind, as if I were him and he were me. I knew in an instant who he had been and what had mattered to him. I saw a brown-haired woman walking along a beach, beckoning toward him to walk by her side. I saw laughing children running into his open arms, gleeful in the knowledge that they were well loved. I felt his sorrow as a loved one slipped away too young, her face pale against a hospital bed. I saw loyal friends, relatives spanning the generations, dinners filled with conversation and laughter, rooms crammed with books, children growing into adults, more nights, more rooms, more children, more laughter, and always, the man’s grateful presence moving