“But I was little more than a voyeur. I hadn’t earned the right to be ‘emotionally detached.’ I always arrived after the fact, and even then I wasn’t the one lifting those bodies into graves. There was a girl in Kosovo who’d been killed by a land mine. She looked Miranda’s age. Same complexion, same color hair. Maybe the same color of eyes if they’d been open. She lay in a potato field. It had rained and the field had been recently harvested. They searched an hour on top of and then under the mud before they found her right foot.”

I wanted to say something but Allen raised his index finger as though in admonishment.

“For a few seconds I saw that this girl could be my daughter, that this was the world I lived in. I closed my eyes right there at the field’s edge, and, at least for one moment, I didn’t believe I could open them again. It was too awful to look at. I understood something else at that moment as well, something I’d witnessed in Cambodia—women who’d seen so many of their family members and friends die in Pol Pot’s death camps that they had willed themselves blind.”

He blinked as though coming out of a dream.

“And then it was like adjusting the focus on a camera. No, I told myself, this isn’t my world. This has nothing to do with my reality. At that moment the partition came back up. I could see then, see the girl’s body, the search for the foot. I could see it all, and it could touch me no more than if I were watching a movie.”

The mantel clock chimed ten times.

“But that changed when I was in the morgue’s basement and placed my hand on Miranda’s cheek.”

Allen looked at me.

“Do you understand what I mean? I felt death, not just observed it.”

I did understand, because I was with Momma when she died. I had been on one side of the bed and Ben on the other. The doctor had seen her that morning and told us she’d live another day or two, but by early evening her breaths shortened to harsh gasps. Daddy called an ambulance and then called Aunt Margaret. He stayed in the room only until she arrived.

“I can’t watch her die,” he told her. “I just can’t.” He waited on the porch till it was over. But Aunt Margaret was there with us, talking to Momma in a soothing voice, her hand brushing Momma’s hair. Then Momma exhaled one last time, almost like a sigh. I lifted Momma’s wrist to feel her pulse, and her arm felt heavier, as though death gave a body an additional weight to carry.