Desolate Angel

by Chaz McGee

They treated the body with tender respect, a ritual, I knew, that they believed protected them against their own demise. Yet I also knew that the body was nothing more than chemicals now, that all essence of the young woman was gone. In truth, they were worshipping a god long since departed.

  The old man and his dog had been relegated to the outskirts of the circle where yellow tape held onlookers at bay. The man’s sadness was palpable.

  It was then—in the midst of sorrow and death, like a flower blooming among the ashes in the aftermath of fire—that my life-that-was-not-quite-a-life changed for all eternity. All because of her, a woman I had never seen before.

  She appeared from behind a stand of trees, ducked under the crime scene tape, and stopped to talk to the old man who had found the body. When she placed a hand on his shoulder to steady him, I could feel his trembling as surely as she must feel it. Whatever resolve he had mustered failed in the face of her sympathy, but she understood and was willing to lend him her strength.

  She leaned close to him, murmuring in his ear, then distracted him with rapid questions asked in a detached, official voice. Dredging up memories of authority, the old man reclaimed himself, provided answers, listened closely, and somehow got through it all. He took her business card when it was offered, placing it in his coat pocket for safe-keeping. The woman shook his hand when they were done, knelt to pat the little dog on his head, then helped the old man under the tape and instructed a uniformed guard to escort him down the hill through the darkness. Kindness. She was kindness and she was strength.

  I was fascinated by her by the time she began to pick her way though the weeds, coming ever closer to the body, scrutinizing each patch of ground with the help of a flashlight before she put her foot down on it. As she drew closer, I saw that she was in her mid-thirties and had ordinary brown hair that hung to her shoulders limply. She was neither beautiful nor ugly. She was not quite plain, but she was not quite pretty, either. But her eyes were extraordinary. Dark brown flecked with gold, shining with a resolve that made them glow in the reflection of the lights being set up around the perimeter of the crime scene. Her pants suit fit her stocky body as if it had been sewed onto her, rendering her movements effortlessly athletic.

  She lived in her body, I realized, unlike most of the people I’d scrutinized since my death. I’d come to learn that people were at war with their flesh, that they lived in their heads, or spent too much time with their memories, or lingered over lost dreams like I did. They did their best to ignore the fluids and corpuscles that bound them. But not this woman. She didn’t just live in her body, she celebrated it with the way she moved, every synchronized sweep of muscle a homage to life. I could not take my eyes off of her. She was gloriously, completely, and irresistibly alive.

  She was also all business. She gave no hint of noticing anyone else, not even Danny, as she knelt to examine the body.

  “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie,” Danny said, as if he were ashamed of something.

  She did not respond.

  “Where you been?”

  She did not look up as she answered. “Paperwork. Where have you been?”

  Danny pulled out a mint and popped it into his mouth, a gesture I had seen a thousand times. “Dinner break,” he mumbled.

  “You didn’t get a chance to talk to the old man when you got here?”

  “Thought I’d better guard the body.”

  Ah, yes, Danny, I thought, do guard the body. Keep watch. Mount surveillance. Do whatever it took to do absolutely nothing. I’d been there. I’d done that. I’d perfected the art of nothingness with him and I was ashamed.

  Maggie ignored my old partner. She was shining her flashlight over the dead girl’s body, examining every inch of it, unwilling to concede the interpretation of evidence to the forensic crew. That alone made her a better detective than Danny or I had ever been in all of our years on the force.

  “This poor kid can’t be more than nineteen or twenty,” she said to the techs waiting at a distance. She touched the dead girl’s cheek tenderly. “Make sure you get everything.”

  Most of the forensic techs were new. I’d never seen them before. At least one of them was affronted.

  “When did we ever miss anything?” he complained.

  “I’m going to stand watch while you work anyway,” Maggie said pleasantly. “It helps me put things together. I want you to walk me through everything as you bag it.” She diluted her mistrust with a smile that transformed her face into something close to beautiful. And it worked. The techs went to work efficiently, announcing each find, as Maggie scribbled the details in her notebook.

  She stood watch for hours as they scraped, plucked, pulled, and bagged. She stood watch with a stillness that approached mine. I could not bear to leave her. She exuded the life that I had lost and a purposefulness I found breathtaking. She epitomized all that I had wanted to be then given up on being. As time passed, I found her plainness to be exquisite. Her ordinary features formed a perfect blank canvas for the nuanced expressions that played across her face as she worked.

  During those hours, my attention wavered from Maggie only once—when Alissa Hayes emerged from where she had been waiting inside the nearby grove, less certain than me that her presence could not be detected by the living. She paused in front of me, her eyes filling with tears. Her mouth moved, but, still, no sound came from her. I could not understand what it was that she was trying to tell me. She held a hand out, shoulder high, then pointed toward herself. I shook my head, not understanding, wondering anew why our paths had crossed here. It was not just her old boyfriend, languishing in jail. It was something else. I was still missing something.

  But I did not miss the irony: I was a ghost haunted by another ghost.

  Alissa stared at me. I could feel her despair. But her thoughts were cloaked in darkness. I tried to communicate, but could not penetrate beyond. She turned abruptly, frustrated, and disappeared down the hill, her departure marked only by me.

  Maggie never looked up. She had never stopped watching the body as it was processed, photographed, and finally, moved. Danny had long since trudged down the hill, having never even taken his notebook from his breast pocket.

  And, I realized, having never once said a word to his new partner about the connection between this murder scene and Alissa Hayes so long ago. Had he truly not noticed the similarities? Was he that far gone?

  Or had he simply been unwilling to admit to Maggie that he—that we—had made a terrible mistake?

  Maggie gave no notice of Danny’s leaving. She had eyes for the dead girl only. When the body was finally lifted onto a gurney, Maggie examined the spot in the weeds where the girl had lain. She got down on her knees, joining the forensic techs, running her fingers over the ground, placing the flat of her palm against the earth as if she was gauging the heartbeat of the world itself. When they were done, she let the others go, but seemed reluctant to leave the scene herself. She walked toward me and I froze. But she did not sense my presence. She sat down on the log next to me, inches away, her hands placed neatly on her knees as she stared straight ahead, absorbing the stillness of the night.

  An exquisite shock ran though me. I experienced a sensation like that of losing my breath. It was the closest to being human I had felt in six months. I stood abruptly, fearful of her nearness, but she did not react. I touched her hair. Not a muscle twitched. Her head was tipped back now, her face to the stars, her features still. Was she searching the heavens? Smelling the air? Listening for the sounds of another?

  She was alone except for a uniformed officer who stood guard further down the hill. Being alone did not seem to bother her. Unlike every other human I had watched over the last six months, she fit her solitude and her solitude fit her.

  I touched her shoulders, unable to resist. She shivered and pulled a cell phone from her pocket. With the press of a button, she had someone on the line. I wondered if it was a lover.

  “It’s me,” she said. “It’s a bad one t
his time. A student, I think.”

  She was silent as she listened. “Yes, I was careful. No, he didn’t stay long. It’s going to be up to me.”

  She was silent again, then said, “I never knew the guy. But I doubt he was as bad as Bonaventura. I don’t think anyone could be as bad as Bonaventura.”

  She shook her head in response to something she heard. “I’m not going to judge him,” she said. “He did the best he could. Let him rest in peace.”

  She mumbled a good-bye and stored the phone back in her pocket as a shameful realization washed over my being: Maggie had been talking about me.

  Chapter 5

  I could not bear Maggie’s sympathy—nor the thought of what she might think of me when she found out I’d helped convict an innocent man. I had to make it right. I could not leave a man in prison for a crime he did not commit. Nor could I allow the evil I had felt in the clearing on the hill to roam free.

  I would need help to make it right. But who among the living could help me? Not my wife. I had tried to communicate with her for months and failed. Maggie had not seen me, either. No one living had, except for the dying boy, that one time. Who, then, could help me set things right?

  With shame, I recognized my best hope—the person I had been most like when I was alive—and set out to find him.

  I discovered Danny in Shenanigan’s, a dive bar off La-Salle Street a few blocks from the house where Connie and my sons lived. Danny and I used to stop there for a pop whenever we got called out on a run. It was a low-rent hole-in-the-wall, filled with old men pickling themselves to death and tired women who looked older than they were, yet probably felt even older than that.

  I used to feel so at home when I pushed through the front door. The warm air would wrap around me, beckoning me inside. The old men would look up and call out my name, gesturing for me to join them. I was a hero in there, a man not yet put out to pasture. I had thought of the bar as a cocoon that protected me from the disappointments waiting outside its doors.

  Now it seemed like little more than a waiting room for death, a place of false hope and seductive inertia. A place where life leaked away and people squandered the time they had left. A place to give up, then deaden yourself against the knowledge that you had given up.

  The air was suffocating, heavy with the smell of unwashed clothing and stale beer. The regulars sat hunched on their stools, staring into glasses of liquor or beer, occasionally glancing up at an old television that flickered images without sound. Even time seemed to slow in some cruel show of power. So you wanted it all to end? Well, sit down, buster, and take a number. Because you’ve got a long wait ahead of you.

  Danny sat at the far end of the bar. It was not yet ten o’clock in the morning, but he had three empty shot glasses arranged in front of him and two more on deck. He’d taken a break from the bourbon to nurse a pint of beer. I remembered just how the beer tasted: slightly bitter, slightly flat—as vaguely disappointing as the life you were trying to forget.

  Had I really looked that beaten down when I had been one of them?

  Danny spoke to no one. He never even looked up. I waited, perched on an empty stool nearby, trying to get a sense of what he was thinking, what he was feeling, trying to find a way in that I could connect to. All I could discern was blackness, as cold and unfathomable as the bottom of the sea. I knew I would never be able to penetrate his thoughts. He was too far gone. To me and to the world. He would be of no help in bringing justice to Alissa Hayes and the girl who now lay on a steel slab in the morgue, name unknown, attended to by strangers. I could not even tell if Danny saw the connection between the old and new murders.

  Danny was darkness. Danny was lost to me.

  I checked out the other customers. There were half a dozen patrons this early in the day, only one of them a woman. She was drinking alone in a corner, smoking cigarette after cigarette, determined to fill her body with enough poison to take her away from whatever it was that caused her such pain. Watching her, I experienced a stab of compassion so acute it was as if a knife blade had penetrated the core of my heart and scooped out a slice to offer her. I was filled with a deep and abiding love for what she had given the world and failed to receive in return.

  As I stared at her, a scene unfolded in my mind. I was sharing in her memories: a not-yet-middle-aged woman, beauty fading from neglect, sitting by the bedside of a dying old man. She is holding his hand and murmuring away his fears, assuring him that he does not need to be afraid, she will stay with him and he will not be alone. His terror leaves him and the old man closes his eyes, finding refuge in the sleep of the comforted. There is love in the room, as tangible as the handmade quilt folded over the end of the bed. But I know, as surely as anything I have ever known, that when the old man dies and finds his peace, his love for his dutiful daughter will die with him—and she will be the one left alone.

  Just as I reached the end of this memory with her, the woman in the bar looked up at me, as if I’d spoken to her. Had she seen me? Could she feel me there? I waited, stunned. But, no, she glanced down, shaking it off, then picked up a shot glass of amber liquid and drained it. The moment had passed. Our connection was severed.

  We were both left alone.

  No one here would be of help to me. While I had once treasured the warm glow that the shots of bourbon gave me and thought of them as blessed release, I saw now that the more these people drank, the denser the air around them grew, until they were trapped in a carapace of hopelessness that was closer to death than to living.

  I had to get out of there.

  I escaped and stood outside on the sidewalk, waiting for Danny to leave. I knew he would have to report to the station eventually, even with his new partner, Maggie, picking up the slack. But when he finally stumbled out half an hour later, he did not head to his car. He turned down the block and walked toward my old neighborhood, causing curtains to flutter in windows as he staggered past. I followed him, the tail end of an invisible parade, watching the gloomy cloud he carried from the bar lighten in the light of a crisp winter day.

  When he reached my block, he leaned against a tree several houses down from my yard and stared at my front door. I knew no one was home. Connie was still at work, the boys still at school.

  Why was he here?

  Did Danny miss me that much?

  I would be astonished if that was the case. Though we’d had a friendship right out of the academy, after his divorce he had withdrawn into a sullenness that had persisted ever since. He had talked very little over our years together, done even less, disappeared often, and seldom expressed an opinion about the cases we were given. If I was unmotivated, Danny was petrified, light-years ahead of me when it came to inertia. No wonder we had been sloppy and closed so few cases while working together.

  I had no illusions. Danny had not cared for me.

  I could do nothing but wait while he stared at my house, grappling with unknown desires. Nearly half an hour passed before I saw what Danny had been waiting for: my wife’s car pulled up in our driveway, all the way up to the top of it, near the side door, in a place that had been cluttered with bicycles and sports equipment when I was alive. Connie climbed out of the driver’s side, then the passenger door opened and a man I had never seen before stepped out. He was tall and trim, with graying hair, and wore gold-rimmed glasses that made him look kind. He was a few years older than Connie. He followed her to the side of the house, his back turned to the neighbors as she fumbled to unlock the back door and let them both inside.

  What was my wife doing at home in the middle of the day? Who was this man?

  Danny stayed in the shadows of his watching place, but I had no such scruples. Invisibility has its advantages and I was curious. What secret lives we all lead, I thought.

  I approached the kitchen door with no sense of guilt, nor could I feel any sense of jealousy, either. Such worldly feelings had apparently left me, along with resentment and the other petty emotions that erode our abil
ity to love.

  If someone else loved Connie, I would be glad for her. I had loved my wife once, and I felt a need, still, to look after her and my sons as best I could, perhaps to make up for how little I had looked after them when I was alive. Besides, I understood that I was gone from her life and that what she now thought of me was irrelevant. Connie’s life went on—and she deserved to be loved in a way I had never been able to give her.

  I stayed only long enough to see that this man had been in my home before. He was not a stranger passing through. He belonged. Connie left him alone in the kitchen, yet he moved from cabinet to table to refrigerator with ease, pulling out plates and glasses, pouring wine, setting out a platter of cheese and slicing a pear while he waited for my wife to reappear. When she returned, she was wearing a pale blue nightgown and a matching robe edged with lace.

  “I knew you would look beautiful in it,” the man said to her. He pulled her to him and buried his face in her hair, uncaring that it was streaked with gray, seeing only my wife’s beauty.

  Connie put her arms around him and they kissed, then the man laughed and picked up a slice of pear. He fed Connie half, and ate the rest himself. “Are you happy?” he asked.

  She nodded, beyond words, and my heart swelled with joy for my wife. I had never seen her look so beautiful; I had never felt her feel so beautiful before.

  “How long do we have?” the man asked. I could tell that he was a kind man, a man unencumbered by lies or other obligations. A man with the freedom to think of nothing at this moment but my wife, and her loveliness, and the time they had together.

  “The boys will be home in two hours,” she said. “You must have all your clothes back on by then.” She laughed. “They’ll be happy you’re back in town.”

  He bent down and kissed her, enfolding her in his arms, and I knew the time had come for me to leave. This was no longer my life and this scene was not destined to be my memory.

  It was time to let Connie go. Forever.