Light from Distant Stars Read online

  “Hippie?” he called back over his shoulder.

  He thought he should leave. But there in the small room, under the window without a curtain, was a leaning desk. One of the back legs was missing, and it had been propped up against the wall. Gray winter light glared off the light wood. Besides the desk, the room was empty, not that there would have been room for any other furniture. The floor was some kind of fake laminate made to look like hardwood. It creaked and moaned under his feet.

  Dirt smudged the window in round dots, the dusty remains of some other day’s raindrops. Cohen ran his hand over the desk’s smooth top. An urge came over him, and he opened the top right drawer. It made a scraping sound as if the runners were broken. There were some old receipts there, disorganized, torn. Balled-up gum wrappers. An empty cigarette pack.

  He pushed the drawer closed, looked over his shoulder, and opened the bottom drawer. Empty.

  “Than?” he shouted over his shoulder. He could still hear Than in the back bedroom. It sounded like he was sliding metal hangers along a clothes rack. “Hippie?”

  Cohen opened the top left drawer, the smallest of all. There was another empty cigarette pack. He picked it up and looked inside, the plastic crinkling in his hands. He set it down on top of the smooth wood, pushed the drawer closed, and opened the bottom left drawer. He stared down into its depths.

  This drawer was full of envelopes stuffed with old yellowed things like coupons, more receipts, and paper clips. It held a pair of scissors, a stapler, a yellow fly swatter, and blue glass cleaner, now leaning and leaking onto all the other things. And under it all, buried in the mess, was a shoebox.

  He gently removed everything and stacked it in a line on the desktop. He handled each and every object as if it was part of a bomb that would explode with any jarring, any shaking. The plastic bottle of glass cleaner was sticky on the outside. He hated that. He hated having a mess on his fingertips. The fly swatter still had insect guts on it. The stapler was jammed—he knew because he tried to shoot a staple out into midair.

  He pulled the shoebox out with two hands, placed it on the desk among everything else, and stared at it for a moment. He was convinced, for no particular reason, that something living resided on the inside, and he waited for this unknown thing to move the lid. The box was navy blue with an American flag on the front and back. The lid had a single white stripe down the middle, and the corners were worn and broken so that it didn’t sit quite right on the box. He pushed the lid aside.

  Inside the box were random, unmatched socks. Children’s socks and adult tube socks. Dress socks and even a few long women’s stockings. He pushed them here and there, hesitantly stirring them in the box with his index finger to better see what else might be inside. He was worried that a mouse might have made its home there. But as he moved them to the side and his hand went deeper into the shoebox, he felt something cold, something hard, something that was most definitely not a sock. He grabbed it and lifted it out. It was heavy and dangled from his hand, and he held it like a live thing.

  It was a revolver.

  He had never held a gun before, unless you count the BB gun he almost never used, the one propped in the back of his closet. He stared quietly at it, wondering if it was loaded. He took it in the palm of his hand, the black metal curving. He pointed it at the window and closed one eye, lining up the sight with the other eye. He imagined seeing the Beast and following it in his sight as it crept down the path among the briars. He found its head there somewhere in its shadowy mass.

  Bang.

  “That’s it,” Than said, startling Cohen, who jumped and nearly dropped the gun.

  “Hey!” He took a deep breath, shaking his head. “Why are you sneaking around like that?”

  “That’s it,” Than said again. “You found it.”

  “This?”

  Than nodded. He held out his hand.

  Cohen gave him the gun without thinking twice. Than flicked out the cylinder and spun it. Each chamber was empty, like a vacant eye socket.

  “In there?” Than asked, motioning to the shoebox full of socks.

  Cohen nodded.

  Than shook his head and laughed to himself, and he seemed less a boy than a wizened old man. “I looked in that desk last time,” he said, laughing again. “But I didn’t look in the shoebox.”

  He reached into the shoebox and felt around beneath the socks. Cohen heard the sound of metal things clinking together like a wind chime. Than pulled out a handful of bullets. He stuffed one in each empty chamber, and they clicked into place.

  “Well,” Than said, and that was it. Cohen kept waiting to see what was to come of this find, what it meant, where it would take them. But Than said nothing more.

  “Where’s Hippie?” Cohen asked.

  Than looked up at him, and most of the questions in his eyes about Cohen had left. But there were still a few in there, and they made him squint. “Outside.”

  The two boys stared at each other, Cohen with his back to the window, Than with the gun in his right hand and a fistful of bullets in the other. They seemed to reach some kind of understanding, a mutual agreement that while they did not like each other, they had clearly been brought together for some reason.

  Than seemed to soften. He looked over his shoulder before speaking. “Look, this needs to stay in here.” He paused. “In case we find the Beast. In case we need it.” He gave Cohen a knowing look. “Just in case. But the thing is, we can’t carry it around, and we can’t tell Hippie about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “She hates this kind of stuff. It will only upset her. Promise me.”

  Cohen sighed. “So where do we keep it?”

  Than looked around the room. The sun had dropped lower outside, and the whole trailer was beginning to feel more like a cave than a house. Long shadows of old trees leaned down the hill.

  “Hey, where are you guys at?” Hippie shouted in through the front door. “We should get going. It’ll be dark soon.”

  Than stared at Cohen as if waiting for him to suddenly shout out that they had found the gun. When Cohen didn’t say anything—in fact, he stood there holding his breath—Than shouted back, “Be right out.”

  Than walked over to a small heat register in the floor, the kind that lifts up out of the hole. There were no screws holding it down and it came up easily out of its metal sleeve. He put the revolver down inside the vent, and Cohen heard it ping against the metal air duct. Than looked over his shoulder one more time. He put the remaining bullets inside one of the socks and lowered it down beside the gun, then slipped the register back into place.

  “Got it?” he asked Cohen, and Cohen couldn’t tell exactly what he meant by the question. He could have been asking, “You understand not to tell Hippie, right?” or “You see where I put it, right?” or “You do know if you do anything I don’t like, I’ll shoot you, right?” But Cohen nodded, because sometimes the only answer is yes.

  The two walked back out through the front door frame—the door was still on the ground—into the light of that gray day, and after the darkness of the trailer, even the slate sky seemed to glow. A cold wind swept through the forest, rustling the winter branches, moving the brambles to rasp against one another.

  Hippie looked up at them.

  “Nothing,” Than said quietly, brushing past her and starting back up the winding trail that split the thorns.

  She looked at Cohen. He shrugged.

  The three of them moved through the blackberry brambles like shadows. Once at the top, as they walked back through the woods toward town, Than moved ahead. Hippie slowed and Cohen drew up beside her.

  “Was that your house?” Cohen asked Hippie in a timid voice.

  Hippie nodded, staring off into the distance. She turned and looked at Cohen, and her eyes were like steel. “We have to find that thing. We have to stop it before it does anything like this again.”

  Hippie’s glaring eyes startled Cohen, and he nodded without saying a word, hi
s mouth hanging partially open. He licked his lips—they were suddenly dry, brittle in the cold. He swallowed. Hippie turned away from him, and the look on her face was both regal and childlike. Her pronouncement made her seem older than she was.

  “We have to find that thing,” she muttered again, and Than looked back at them. He reached up and tried to hold down the unruly patch of hair at the back of his head, but as soon as he moved his hand, the hair stood back up.

  By the time they got back to the train tracks and walked over them, back into territory Cohen was familiar with, he had drifted into the lead. Than had paused to stare up into the sky. The tops of the trees started waving again, this time in long, bowing motions as if they were sweeping the sky clean. Cohen hadn’t thought it possible when he had run up into the woods only a few hours earlier, but he was ready to go home.

  The gun was part of the reason for this. He was glad for every step between him and it. He felt as though he had been given a head start, and now the gun would come after him, that shiny blackness, that cold, hard steel, those handfuls of bullets. They would come slowly out of the trailer after the sun had set, sneaking through the dark like a mean dog that had slipped its leash. Yes, he was glad Than had left it in the trailer. He only wished he would have found a screw to fasten the air vent in place. A screw, he thought, could have kept it there, could have kept the gun from following him.

  But there was happiness inside him too, happiness that he had found friends. When his father had been found out, when they had left the church, Cohen lost most of the friends he had. And now Sundays were quiet and slow, or spent at a stranger’s burial while his father presided as funeral director.

  He missed Ava. He still thought about her. It was good to have friends again. Even if one of them was like Than.

  The wind flared up again, swirling the winter smells of cold, dead leaves and things waiting for spring. They parted without saying goodbye, the three young people, and Cohen found his bike and pedaled furiously for home.

  twenty-five

  The Missing Mother

  Cohen emerges out of the funeral home basement and into the bright day, shedding his meeting with Ava and the detective like a thin skin. He takes deep breaths of the early spring air, and his body aches with weariness. He reassures himself he can sleep that day in the hospital room, once Kaye goes home and it’s only him and his father. He has not yet spent time alone in the room with him. He wonders what it might feel like.

  “Cohen!” a voice calls out, and he turns to find Ava walking fast to catch up.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Mind if I walk with you?” Ava asks, settling in beside him.

  “No.”

  “I’m . . .” she starts, and then she stops.

  He tries not to look at her, tries not to give her the satisfaction of him wanting to know what she was going to say. He can feel her looking at him, and she begins again.

  “I’m sorry about the things I said last night in the cafeteria. I didn’t mean to imply that I thought you’re capable of killing your father.” The words come out like a prepared speech. Cohen wonders if she’s been thinking her way through them only this morning, or if she was up in the night rehearsing, rewording.

  “We’re all capable of terrible things,” he replies.

  “I know. I see it almost every day.”

  “I could be responsible for my father’s death, even if I didn’t push that trocar into him. Which I didn’t do, by the way.”

  She looks at him again, and this time he glances over, meets her gaze.

  “We can kill people without ever touching them. Those things I said to my father on Sunday night? I think they killed him.”

  “You think he committed suicide?”

  Cohen sighs and shakes his head back and forth slowly. “I don’t know. But he was alive on Sunday night, before I said what I said. I saw how my words ate him up. The next time I saw him, he was . . . well, you’ve seen him. My words did that. I don’t have any doubt.”

  “That’s not killing someone,” Ava says. Her words are quiet and earnest. “That’s not your fault, Cohen. We can’t control how people respond to the way we live our lives. Besides, it looks like an accident to me.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, I’ve never seen someone kill themselves with one of those things. There are much easier ways.” Her voice trails off, and Cohen can tell she doesn’t want to talk about it.

  The two of them stop at the corner of Duke and Frederick, staring up at the hospital building, waiting to cross Frederick Street.

  Finally Ava speaks. “I’m going to go, Cohen,” she says, sounding like she doesn’t think she should be there.

  “You’re welcome to come up if you’d like.”

  “No, but I will come and visit again.” She reaches up and holds Cohen by the arm, above his elbow. It is an unexpected, intimate touch. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said those things last night.”

  He watches her turn and go back the way they came and then walks the rest of the way to the hospital. He passes three or four rooms that have their doors open—inside each one is an elderly man or woman, most of them asleep with their mouths open. They do not have visitors. A nurse makes eye contact with Cohen and smiles, walks past him into one of the rooms.

  As he approaches his father’s closed door, he sees the boy wearing the same John Deere ball cap, sitting on the tile floor, his back against the small space of wall between his grandfather’s door and Calvin’s.

  “Hey,” Cohen says to him.

  “Hey.”

  Cohen stops and looks down at the boy. He seems softer on that day, worn down, perhaps by a lack of sleep or another confrontation with his father. Who knows.

  “How’s your grandfather?” Cohen asks.

  “He’s gonna die,” the boy says, staring straight ahead.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing for you to be sorry about. He’s old.” In a strange moment of wisdom, the boy looks up at Cohen. “We’re all gonna die. You know that, right?”

  Cohen gives a sad smile. “I’m a funeral director. I’m well aware of the fact.”

  The boy looks away. “How’s your dad?”

  “He’s probably going to die too.”

  “Probably?” the boy asks, allowing himself the luxury of a slight, wry grin.

  “Well, you know. Soon. Anytime.”

  The boy scrunches up his mouth and nods, as if he’s seen every weary thing in the world and this is the truth of it.

  “Is your dad here?” Cohen asks.

  “Nope.”

  “Your mom?”

  The boy laughs quietly to himself. “She took off. No one knows where.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean she’s gone. Last night she went to bed, this morning she wasn’t in the house.”

  “Really?” Cohen asks. “Does she do that often?”

  The boy looks up at Cohen and there is worry in his eyes, behind the haughty carelessness he tries to wear on his face. “Nope. Never.”

  “Any idea where she went?”

  The boy shakes his head. “No one knows. Looked everywhere. Dad’s really losing it, first with the doctor basically killing Grandpa, and now Mom taking off.” Concern fills his voice. “You see him, you walk in the other direction, you hear, mister?”

  “I’m Cohen, by the way,” Cohen says, reaching his hand down to the boy. “You don’t have to call me mister.”

  The boy hesitates, then reaches his own hand up. It’s small and callused.

  “Thatcher,” the boy says, nodding.

  “Why are you sitting out here, Thatcher?”

  The boy purses his lips and moves his head back and forth in a nonnegotiable no. “I’m not sitting in there, not while Grandpa’s dying. I don’t want to be there when it happens. Not by myself.”

  “It’s nothing to be afraid of,” Cohen says. “I’ve seen a lot of people die.”

  “I haven’t s
een it, not once, and I don’t want to see it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Something’s going to leave him, his soul or whatever, when he dies, and I don’t want to be there when that happens.”

  “Fair enough.”

  The two of them pause, Cohen with his hand on the door, Thatcher with his back against the wall, eyes staring straight ahead as they were when Cohen first walked up.

  “What’s your mother do, Thatcher?” Cohen asks, not sure where the question came from.

  “My mom? She’s a nurse.”

  “And what’s your dad think about her being gone?”

  “Dad? He’s mad at her, real mad, even though she didn’t do anything. After what this doctor did, he’s mad at every doctor and nurse in the world. I guess he took it out on her pretty good last night.”

  “Did he take it out on you too?”

  “Maybe,” Thatcher says, shrugging off Cohen’s concern. “I hope he doesn’t find Mom. I hope she runs and runs all the way out of here, as far as she can.”

  Cohen takes a deep breath. “I have to go in here, Thatcher. My sister needs a break. But if you need anything, let me know. I’ll be sitting in here most of the day, and through the night too.”

  Thatcher nods. He looks like he might say something but he doesn’t, so Cohen goes into his father’s room.

  twenty-six

  The Doorbell

  Cohen parked his bike in the alley that ran along the funeral home and stopped for a minute, holding his breath to see if he could hear his father moving around inside. Nothing. The sun had sifted its way down through the buildings, down through the trees, and the streetlights came on randomly in the near dark, some of them emitting a low buzz before flickering to life.

  During his ride home, thoughts had circled around in Cohen’s mind, but one more than the others: whether he would ever see Hippie and Than again. He wondered where they lived, who they were. He left his bike and walked around to the back door, crept inside, let the door latch quietly behind him, and listened again.