"I see," he said, and he did.

"I came to visit you," Laura said. "I came to sit and hear you talk to me."

"Delighted to have you. What should I talk about?"

"Something alive. The theater, or subway fares or labor unions, or books, or baseball, or foreign relations, or the going price of bananas. Talk to me, please, about anything at all, so long as it's alive."

Mr. Rebeck's brows consulted each other as he tried to think of a subject, but Laura interpreted the frown as an expression of puzzlement and went on, "Because I'm going to have to make a choice very soon, and I want to be sure it's the right one."

She paused, and her hands moved in her lap like captured butterflies. "Death has been very good to me," she said finally. "Do you know what I can do now?" Mr. Rebeck shook his head.

"I can think myself places. I can go back and forth across this cemetery seven times, from gate to gate, and be back here before you can snap your fingers. I can ride in the caretakers' truck, in a space barely big enough for two people, and hear the men talking. All I have to do is let my body drop from me as if it were a wet bathing suit, and then I'm me and I can go where I want to go."

"Except out of the cemetery," Mr. Rebeck said.

"How did you know?"

"It works that way for all ghosts. You can go anywhere, except away from the place where your body is buried. I suppose there's a reason for it."

"I thought it was just me," Laura said. "I thought perhaps you had to want to go back very badly before the gate would let you pass."

She looked past him, and he knew that she was staring at the lion-heads on the mausoleum door. "It doesn't matter. There's nothing I want to see. I like it better this way. Nobody can see me, you know. Not even you, unless I want you to. I've sat and watched you for hours"—Mr. Rebeck started—"and you read, and sometimes you have put your book down and looked at me and didn't know I was there. You were humming to yourself."

"I can see you now," Mr. Rebeck said.

"Sometimes I put my body back on. But not as often as I used to. It feels tight on me and makes me walk slowly. It always did. Someday, someday soon, I may just leave it and not come back."

"Where is the choice, then?"

Laura's hands stopped moving in her lap, and she looked away from Mr. Rebeck. "Because I might be wrong," she said softly, "and Michael might be a little bit right, even if he is a fool."

She turned back to Mr. Rebeck. "This is very much like the last minute before you fall asleep at night. You close your eyes and everything seems to be rushing away from you, and you're sinking backward and down—like a subway when you're in a local and an express goes by so fast that your train really appears to be going backward. You just let yourself fall with it, and it's easy and comfortable and quite wonderful. But you keep yourself awake until you make sure that everything's all right; that the lights are out and the door is locked, that you did everything you meant to do that day, that nothing's left unfinished.

"Well, I don't feel right. I keep thinking that I've left a door open somewhere." She put a hand out to touch his own, and Mr. Rebeck felt a cold breeze drying the July sweat on the back of his hand before she moved away.

"Do you want me to talk about live things now?" he asked. "I've remembered something."

"Yes, please," said Laura. And Mr. Rebeck sat with his legs tucked under him and his eyes holding the delicate tracings of iris and pupil and eyelash that had been Laura's eyes, and he told her about a zoo he had visited more than twenty years before. He told Laura about a hippopotamus that would munch on the same tiny square of chocolate for almost an hour, rolling it around in its mouth with its eyes shut tight; and an immensely fat orangutan that sat sleeping in a puddle of its own flesh; and a monkey that tossed itself carelessly around the cage like a spool of red ribbon; about two white wolves; and about the people that had been at the zoo. He made them up for her; they weren't too good because it had been a long time, but Laura seemed satisfied. Suddenly she pointed over his shoulder and said, "The raven's coming—and Michael."

Mr. Rebeck turned his head and saw the raven in the sky and Michael coming slowly down the path, stepping on twigs and not breaking them.

The raven seemed reluctant to land, but he finally did, dropping a battered roast-beef sandwich into Mr. Rebeck's lap just before he touched the ground. He seemed a little unsteady on his feet, Mr. Rebeck thought, but his eyes glittered and he carried his head like the cocked hammer of a gun.

"All I could get," he said, gesturing at the sandwich with his beak.

"Just one?"

"Things are tough all over."

"I was joking." Mr. Rebeck unwrapped the torn waxed paper. "This will be fine." He pulled a strip of meat from the sandwich and offered it to the raven, who shook his head. "Uh-uh. Found a robin's nest this morning."

Mr. Rebeck ate the meat himself, but Laura made a small sound of horror. "You ate—" She could not finish.

The raven turned to look at her. "Morning," he said cheerfully. "Didn't notice you."

Laura remained still, but she seemed to have drawn miles away from the man and the bird. "You ate a robin's eggs—"

"Egg," said the raven. "More than one egg in the morning and I get the hiccups." He made a casual grab at a grasshopper, headed it off with his beak a couple of times, and then let it escape into the grass.

Laura's hands cupped around each other, as if she were shielding something blue and fragile. "But they're so pretty, and so harmless!"

"So?" The raven canted his head slightly to one side. "And a hen's Public Enemy Number One?"

"It's not the same thing. It's not the same thing at all."

"Damn right it isn't. Nobody ever says, 'Look, it's spring! I just saw the first hen.' You ever hear a song about when the red, red hen comes bob, bob, bobbing along? Hell, you give a smart bird like the buzzard half the publicity a robin gets, and he'd be the national bird inside of a year."

His voice dropped back to its normal range. "People root for the goddamnedest birds. You see a robin murdering a worm, and right away it's 'Hold the fort, redbreast! Help is on the way! Wait'll I find my old army rifle and we'll fight the monster off! You and me, bird! Shoulder to shoulder! To the death!' But you seen an owl having breakfast off a field mouse and you form a committee to march on Washington and make them pass a law saying from now on owls can only eat cabbage and apple pie.

"Take a worm now. All right, they aren't brilliant, but they work hard. Your average worm is a nice enough little guy, a kind of small businessman. He's quiet, he's good for the soil, he doesn't bother anybody, he leads a good, dull life—and the poor bastard is a three-to-one bet to wind up on the end of some kid's hook if the robins don't get him. And that's all right, because he's slimy and he can't sing either. But a kid shoots a robin with a slingshot and forty years later he writes in his autobiography how he didn't know the meaning of death till then. Or you take squirrels." His eyes brightened perceptibly. "The way I feel about shooting squirrels—"

"But you eat worms," Laura pointed out.

"Sure. But at least I don't call in the photographers." Michael reached them then, and Mr. Rebeck was suddenly aware of the disparity between his walk and Laura's. Laura moved like a dandelion plume on a day wrinkled with small winds, barely touching the ground. When she did, it seemed accidental and meaningless, for she left no footprints even in the softest earth, and no pebbles sprang aside from her feet. Whether she stood on the ground, on a tree limb, or on a rose's smallest thorn, she was separate from the ground or the branch or the thorn.