Desolate Angel Read Online Free Page A

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