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focus, slumped against the wall, his head forward on his chest.
    Scraping her knees against dirty floorboards, Kate got a hand under his chin, lifted his head, listened– Yes, he’s breathing –fumbled in her bag for a mentholated Chap Stick, got it under his nose.
    He blinked.
    “Jesus–Willie! Are you all right? What happened?”
    There were tears in his startling green eyes.
    Kate followed his line of vision to the open apartment door. She turned back, gazed into his eyes, and in that one terrible moment she knew.
    She pulled herself up and took the necessary steps toward the open door, that smell coming at her.
    The Marilyn Monroe pillow was poking out from under the couch. Oh, God. Oh, Jesus. Please. Please. Please. Let me be wrong. Kate covered her nose with her arm, leaned against a wall for support, and then she was turning, taking in the dark vertical streaks and splatters of blood on the opposite wall, and lifting her feet from something thick and sticky on the floor, trying to make sense of the twisted leg jutting out from the space between the sink and the refrigerator. And then there was Elena’s face. Elena’s beautiful face–or what was left of it.
    Kate turned away fast, spinning, heart pounding, the smell of death so thick it sucked the oxygen from her lungs. No. No. No. She squeezed her eyes shut. The bad scene hovered behind her. But no. She would not look, would not validate it. Oh, God. This isn’t happening. I’m saving children now, not losing them.
    She was glued against the wall, the ability to put one foot in front of the other impossible.
    She was too late. Again.
    Waves of impotence and despair rippled through her, explosions, like tiny firecrackers, jitterbugged all over her body–fingers, toes, arms, legs, torso. Her organs felt as though they were imploding and exploding all at once. For a moment Kate truly believed she would die. Yes. Let me die. Hail Marys, bits of the Lord’s Prayer, fragments of Sunday-morning service in Latin that she didn’t think she knew were buzzing in her head.
    She swiped the tears from her cheeks, opened her eyes.
    Just that one garish pillow out of place on a bare wood floor. The place was too damn neat, that was for sure. As if nothing had happened here. No blood on the living room floor or walls.
    In the bedroom–How did she get there? She had no memory of moving. The patchwork quilt was folded neatly at the foot of the bed. Above it one of Willie’s early works, a small assemblage where he’d taken a page of Elena’s handwritten music, cut it up, rearranged the notes, glued and sealed them onto fragments of metal and wood, glazed over them so that you could just make them out. It was so damn beautiful, Kate was crying again, feeling as though her heart were being pulverized. She swallowed hard, looked away, noted that the gate on the tiny bedroom window was locked and secure.
    At the doorway to the living room she hesitated, prayed. Maybe that fierce, punishing God, the one she was schooled on, would perform one of his miracles and it would not be Elena.
    But no. Once again, he’d let her down. For even now, with the body so bloated with gases, Elena’s face was recognizable.
    My God. How many stabs does it take to kill one girl ?
    Kate fought the sickness rising in her, tried to count them, but couldn’t; Elena’s torn clothes were so blood-soaked that it looked like one huge wound.
    Her eyes followed the vertical streaks of blood on the wall down to the floor where Elena had slid and bled to death.
    Just a body.
    Just a body.
    Just a body.
    A mantra Kate repeated to forget this was Elena, her little girl. Just a body. Just a body. Just a body. Again and again, in her mind, and aloud: “Just a body . . .” as she backed out of the apartment, careful not to touch anything, almost not breathing.
    Outside, Willie sat on the front stoop while Kate finished calling the police. That vision he’d had earlier–the slicing arm, a scream–was