Danny Bonaventura. He had been the last person to see me alive, but I did not remember anything about my death except his face looming over mine. Unlike earlier memories, the final moments of that night remained a mystery. I remembered only that Danny and I had gone to the row house to interrupt a drug buy involving a murder suspect. I remembered that Danny had been tipped at the last minute and we had rushed there without backup, against regulations, hoping to nail a man we knew was responsible for seven deaths. My desire to apprehend him had been real. I was never callous, even in my last, most shameful days. I still clung to the thought that I was one of the good guys. That night, I’d figured I might get lucky and do some good, without a whole lot of effort, maybe even in time to stop off for a drink afterward.

Instead, I had died. My life had simply—and suddenly—ended. I still did not understand how.

I’d been drunk, of course, deep in the alcoholic fog of my life, my judgment perpetually impaired and my desire to stay in that fog overwhelming all other priorities. But I was not convinced my drunkenness had been a factor in my death. Why could I not remember?

I remembered a chilly darkness in the room. I remembered the scuttling of rats across the linoleum floor as they made their way through the garbage that drug users leave behind: stained mattresses scavenged from the streets, old needles, cheap wine bottles, used condoms, candy wrappers. I remembered the smell of the alcove where I waited. It reeked of urine and mold and the whiskey sweat that rose from my skin. I also remembered the whisper of Danny’s voice next to me and his familiar, bourbon-soaked breath. But then I remembered nothing, except for Danny bending over me, his nose swollen from years of drinking, his sparse ginger-colored hair gleaming with sweat and grease. After that, my old life had faded, pulling in like the aperture of a camera closing on a brightly lit scene, leaving no room for details.

To have lived my life as a drunk was bad enough, but to have died as a drunk as well? What a waste. I had missed even that most pathetic of endings.

I could remember nothing more until I’d found myself standing, unseen, at the back of a room, observing my own funeral, knowing, somehow, that I was dead. It was a real Tom Sawyer moment, if Tom Sawyer had lived in Hell.

There was Connie, sitting rigid, her face reflecting her inability to understand what she was truly feeling. Relief, I suspected, just as I suspected that the only real sorrow she might feel was for my sons, who sat on either side of her, solemn and confused.

As each person who had been tapped for the job of eulogizing my sorry ass rose to remember me, the blatant untruth of their words hit me with a cruel clarity. These were the people I was supposed to have loved, but I had not loved them enough. And, yet, they could not face up to my failure to do so. They chose to remember a different reality. It was a bitter pill to be redeemed by their generosity. A state beyond sobriety had come to me in death and I no longer possessed the comfort of illusions. I saw them not as my loved ones, but as a parade of the betrayed. And I heard every word they spoke not as a tribute, but as a rebuke for what I had failed to do. I wanted to die as I listened. But that comfort, too, had been taken from me. I was already dead.

I had blown it all, even my own death. And my partner Danny had been a partner in that final failure. That the last thing I’d seen in life was his face seemed a travesty to me. He had appreciated life far less than I had—why should he now get to symbolize it for me?

But as I watched him struggle up the hill, I was beginning to understand that we neither choose nor deserve our path in life. That the best we can do is to keep going through the days that open up before us. My path had led me to my death, a death forever tied to Danny, and now Danny’s path was leading him here, to this clearing filled with yet more death.

I wondered if Danny was losing it completely. He wore no tie and his badge dangled carelessly from the stained lapel of a too-tight navy jacket. His breath was little more than ragged gusts as he rested after laboring up the hill. The paramedics passed him easily, though he’d had a head start: they were not necessarily younger, not all of them, but they were clearly far more fit.

Not that haste yielded them any benefit. The paramedics saw at once that their presence at the scene was useless. They turned back and acquiesced to those whose job it was to help the dead.

Helping the dead. That had been my job once and I had failed at it. To now be an observer, to have the luxury of sobriety and an undefined understanding of the people who moved before me made this death scene seem completely new, though I had been at dozens such scenes while alive. I sat on a log and balanced my chin on my hands, like a spectator in the front row of a theater, watching my old coworkers move about.

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 this 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.