That made Trey stop. It was Marshall who trailed me, all the way to the edge. I stepped up onto the carousel’s tilted floor, and the heap resolved itself into her form.

“Bree!” my husband called, a warning tone.

“I have to,” I said. I went closer.

She lay coiled on her side by the felled lion with his paint-peeled rose wreath, and her body had that heavy stillness that only comes to the dead. One arm was hooked around his pole, the hand a gnarled bird’s claw, clutching nothing. Her mouth hung slack, her cheek resting in a pool of bloody foam that was already drying. Her face was red, and her gold-brown eyes were shiny and open and empty.

I was filled with such a savage joy then. I wanted to scream until my raw throat gave out entirely. I wanted to kick at her corpse and beat her helpless stillness with my hands. I did none of this. I only looked down, my chest heaving. Looked closer.

Her dress had come up as she flailed. Her naked legs were pale, mottled with age spots and thick veins. One foot had kicked out far enough to be in sunlight, which lit up a floss of thin hairs on her shin. She wore old-fashioned cotton drawers. They were white, with small pink flowers, like a child might wear.

All the violence left me. This lifeless shape had once owned the raspy voice I’d obeyed. This lifeless shape had once owned me. She was truly gone, and if there was a hell, then she was writhing in it, trapped in an eternal rage at the sight of my son and my husband standing together near the edge of the woods, whole.

I hoped God was more merciful than that. I didn’t want her ghostly eyes watching from any kind of beyond. I hoped she was in a quiet darkness. I hoped she was at last at peace.

The sirens were close, now. I reached out and pulled her dress down, gently, covering her underwear and the sad, wattled flesh of her thighs, hanging loose from her frail bones.

“Don’t touch her,” Marshall said, too late.

“Bree,” Trey said again, and this time I got up and went to wait with him.

Marshall stuck by me, talking. “You know what to tell them?” I nodded. “Short sentences. Answer only what they ask. It’s good to cry and ask for breaks. It’s good to say ‘I’m not sure’ and ‘I’m so upset and tired’ and that it’s all a blur.”

I turned to him. “Marshall. I got it.”