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love?” she asked.
    “Have you seen the swallows?” I asked, ignoring her.
    “Swallows?”
    “Up among the buildings along Washington Street. You can still hear them and see them, even at dusk.”
    “I’d like that,” she said.
    As we turned the corner, entering a street of shadows, she stopped walking. “Do you hear them? The swallows,” she asked.
    I listened to the swarm of small birds, their chatter of “Quick, quick, quick,” their occasional higher-pitched notes of anxiety.
    “There must be thousands of them,” she said. “I come down here all the time, but I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
    “I thought you were a country girl.”
    “I am, but this is the city. I’ve never seen so many birds in the city before.”
    I started to move away.
    “Can’t we stay a few minutes? I want to watch them.”
    Again, I started to move on, but she put her hand on my arm.
    “Please wait,” she said. “Watch them with me.”
    I could feel her trembling. I looked up again at the swallows darting in arcs high above our heads.
    “It’s really cold,” I said. “We should be getting back.”
    Three days later the newspaper reported her death. The medical examiner ruled it a suicide: she had jumped from the roof of her dormitory to the pavement below, he said. She left no note, but the final entry in her diary described her desire to fly among the city’s buildings like the swallows. Metaphor is an integral part of the hypnotic, erotic dance just before violent death. That was true for her, and it will be true for Sarah. My nursing student flew from the roof. Sarah will fly from her body.
    Sarah reminds me of my nursing student. She looks at me with the same obvious interest. And there are other similarities: Sarah has a Robert (a well-armed ex-husband who, for all I know, still fancies himself in love with her), while my nursing student had a stable of boyfriends, one of whomrefused to accept the medical examiner’s ruling. He told the police that he had seen me enter his girlfriend’s dorm on the day she died. He identified me from photos in the college yearbook.
    Men in suits—driving the requisite dark, four-door sedan—paid me a social call. I invited them in, and offered them mugs of coffee (instant, which I kept on hand for unwanted guests).
    “Yes,” I told them. “I was in the building that day. But I wasn’t there to see her. I had stopped by to see a friend, Harold Ford, on the second floor. You’ll have to ask him what time. Early afternoon, I think, but I’m not certain. I hadn’t seen her in three or four days, nor did I want to see her. She was scary. She talked real crazy.”
    Harold remembered my stopping by. He wasn’t sure what time, but he knew that it was the same day the girl dove off the roof. We talked, joked around, and I left. The cops flatly rejected the idea that I—or anyone else, for that matter—was capable of exhibiting such a relaxed, jovial manner just moments before, or after, hurling a young woman off the roof.
    But the boyfriend considered me a malevolent psychopath. He followed me around for days. I tried a gentle, sympathetic confrontation, but he wasn’t having any of it. Finally he made his move.
    He was carrying a Louisville Slugger when he cornered me in the men’s room at the bar.
    “You killed her,” he said.
    “She killed herself.”
    He took a swing. I stepped back, allowed it to pass, then grabbed the fat barrel of the bat and snapped it out of his hands. His momentum left him teetering in my direction, so I shoved him the rest of the way down. It was a tight fit between the wall and commode, but he made it. I lifted the toilet seat.
    “Hands on the porcelain,” I said.
    He was slow—confused—but complied.
    “It’s over,” I said. “The bowl is there to puke in.”
    Then I brought down the bat and broke both his hands.
    He made good use of the bowl, and never followed me again.
    I knew from experience that I would have to be