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on the living room couch as if in a coffin, fully dressed, hands laced across his chest. He stared at the ceiling, trying to grasp the new realities of his life. He couldn’t get his mind around the monumentality of his loss. He was falling into darkness, with no idea of its depth. Canned laughter emanated from Nick at Nite at hypnotic intervals. He tuned out everything but its sound. Laughter still exists, he thought. If I need to remember that, I can turn on the little box and there it is.
    Sometime around 3:00 A . M . Dray awakened him, trudging to the couch, trailing the comforter. She crawled on top of him and burrowed into his neck.
    “Timothy Rackley,” she said, her voice soft and sleep-heavy.
    He stroked her hair gently, then pulled it up and rubbed the soft nape of her neck. They slept entwined in a restless embrace.

4
    TIM OPENED HIS eyes and felt dread descend on him before he could even put a name to it. He swung his legs off the couch and set his feet on the floor. Dray was in the kitchen, rustling.
    He didn’t just remember his grief, he relearned it. For several minutes he sat on the couch, slumped forward, arms angled out in anticipation of his rise. Paralyzed with sorrow. Unable to bear a single movement. He focused on his breathing. If he could draw three breaths, then he’d be able to draw three more, and life could go on as such, in three-breath increments.
    Finally he mustered the strength to stand. Walking back to the shower, he tried not to think about his daughter’s theatrical heaviness when he carried her along this same path from TV to bedroom at night. Her head tilted back, eyes squeezed shut, tongue stuck out the side of her mouth like a drunk cartoon character’s. Trying to steal a few extra minutes of tube time by feigning sleep.
    In daylight her death had taken on a reality. It lived in the house with them, in the dust on the floors, the blankness of the ceilings, the soft, unanswered noises of his movement past her room.
    After a scorching shower, he dressed and walked back to the kitchen.
    Dray sat at the table, sipping coffee, her eyes swollen, her hair flat on one side. The cordless phone sat on the table beside her. “Well,” she said, “I just got off the phone with the DA. It looks like you guys didn’t screw up the case against Kindell.”
    “Good. That’s good.”
    They studied each other for a moment. She held her arms out like a child wanting to be hugged, and Tim walked into her embrace. She buried her head in his stomach, and he scrunched her hair in the back. She groaned.
    He slid down into the chair next to her.
    Black half-moons stood out beneath her eyes. “Motherfucking asshole prick cocksucking goddamned fucked-up pile of miserable shit,” she said.
    “Yeah,” Tim said.
    “They have Kindell at county. He’s got three priors—a weenie wagger and two lewd acts with a minor. All girls under the age of ten. Three slaps on the wrist. Last time out he pled. Judge found him not guilty by reason of insanity. NGI bought him a year and a half at Patton, padded walls and warm food.” She spoke quickly, getting it out.
    “And the case?”
    “He completely clammed up at the station—wouldn’t talk no matter how hard they pressed—but there’s evidence all over his little shack. They got a blood match this A . M . from the…from the hacksaw….” She leaned over and gagged, her spine arching through twodry heaves.
    Tim held her hair back gently, but she brought nothing up. She shoved herself upright in her chair, wiped her mouth, gave a great, halting exhale, then it was back to business. “The DA’s hammering him, filing special circumstances. The arraignment’s tomorrow.” She spun her coffee mug, then spun it again.
    “We still have an accomplice out there who they need to track down.”
    “Someone in on the kill who knew how to cover his tracks in ways Kindell didn’t.”
    “Or a partnership gone bad, or a double-cross.”
    “Or, as the DA seems