Light from Distant Stars Read online

  All was silent. He went up to the second-floor apartment. The kitchen light was on, but no one was there. He found his father on the living room sofa, staring at the floor, a finger’s width of amber-colored liquid at the bottom of a tall drinking glass.

  “Son,” he said in a dim voice.

  “Hey, Dad,” Cohen said hesitantly, waiting.

  “Where’ve you been?” When his father spoke, he didn’t look up from the floor. His words all came out together, without spaces.

  “Out with friends.”

  His father nodded knowingly, as if Cohen had said something so true it hurt. He raised the glass, had second thoughts, lowered it, and held it with two hands between his legs. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?”

  His father chuckled suddenly, and then the humor vanished and he was staring vacantly again. “For what. For what? For everything.”

  Cohen went over and sat on the floor, leaning his back against the wall directly across from his father. Something about the situation opened fourteen-year-old Cohen’s eyes, and he saw his father in a way he never had before. He saw him not as some far-removed god but as a person, a real live flesh-and-blood person. This glimpse of his father intrigued him and frightened him all at once. He wanted to run to his room and lock his door, but he was paralyzed by curiosity.

  “I’m sorry you had to see those children today in the basement,” his father whispered.

  “No,” Cohen said. His father’s words were like a splash of icy water on his head, running down his neck, down his back. “No.”

  “No, no, it’s okay,” his father said, his voice going on in a droning hush. “It’s okay. It’s okay. They’re better off now. They’re in a better place.”

  Cohen felt frozen in place. Now he definitely wanted to run. He needed to leave. He felt the threatening thickening of his throat and knew he might be sick. But he couldn’t move his legs. He kept shaking his head.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?” his father said. “This world. It’s a bad situation. There’s not much in it that doesn’t lead to some kind of disappointment, some kind of sadness. But those kids, they’re okay now.”

  There was a rushing sound in Cohen’s ears. “No,” he mumbled. “No.”

  “Cohen,” his father said. He sounded so far away. He sounded like a lost boy whispering into the woods. “It’s okay. Son. It’s okay. They’re in a better place.”

  Cohen kept shaking his head, but his father wasn’t looking at him. He was only gaining steam, and he picked up his glass, threw the drink down his throat, and pounded the glass back on the coffee table. “But I will tell you this right now. The father who did this is not getting away with it.”

  Cohen looked up, startled at the change in his father. There was a simmering rage there, poorly caged beneath the alcohol. It could slip out if it wanted to—something had opened the lock, knocked the door ajar.

  His father squeezed his eyes closed and shook his head. “They’re looking for him now. He killed them in that fire—it looks intentional—and they’re hunting him down. But my eyes are open too. And if I see him first . . . If I find him . . .” His voice trailed off but found itself again. “I might get him too. I might get him first,” he whispered. “I might. He came around here the other night, looking for his kids, I guess, looking for the bodies. It’s an awful thing. They say he’s mad at me for something, mad that I couldn’t make ’em look better. Couldn’t do an open casket for the family.”

  Cohen’s father choked on something, maybe his drink, maybe his own saliva, maybe regret, and he coughed hard for a long time. When he spoke again, it was in a hoarse mutter. “There was nothing I could do. That was his fault.” Tears came up into his eyes. He looked at Cohen, his eyes pleading for his son to believe him. “Nothing. There was nothing I could do. But if he comes around again, he’ll know.”

  The doorbell to the funeral home rang. Cohen’s father looked up, confused, as if it was the first time he had ever heard such a sound, as if he wasn’t sure what he should do.

  But Cohen didn’t hesitate. “I’ll get it,” he said. His father grunted his assent.

  Cohen jumped up, walked quickly through the apartment door, took the stairs down to the display room, and walked through the loosely arranged coffins without turning on a light. The streetlights cast a yellow glow through the double glass doors at the front, the ones that led directly out onto Duke Street, and in the glow Cohen had a hopeful thought—maybe it was Than and Hippie. Maybe they had found him.

  Through the glass, Cohen saw a single shadow. He paused, took a few more steps, and opened the door.

  “Ava?” he said.

  “Hi, Cohen,” she said, vapor escaping from her mouth with each word.

  twenty-seven

  The Contractions

  Cohen peeks into the room. His father is in the same exact position he was when Cohen left: head slightly tilted forward, arms at his side, feet pointing up at the bottom of the hospital bed. There are new pillows under his arms. His face is somehow older. His sleep seems even deeper, although it might only look that way because the light has changed. The sky is blue through the far window, an icy blue that hints at the edges of spring, and a silvery light trails from it, threading into the room.

  Kaye sleeps in her chair, stirs, and rubs her stomach with both hands without opening her eyes. She lets out an almost silent sigh that turns into a moan. She turns from one side to the other, now facing away from the door. Cohen moves into the room, holding the door handle so it won’t latch loudly. When the door bumps up against the frame, he walks over to his father’s side, pulls up a chair, and sits down.

  The room is outside of time. There is the piercing blue sky, the bright natural light in that half of the room, the unlit shadows falling over him and Kaye and their father. There is the shallow breathing of his father, the labored breathing of Kaye sleeping. There is the barely audible beeping of the machines, the silent drip of the IV, the humming of the blood pressure cuff, inflating again on his father’s bicep, deflating, measuring, silent, letting out a single beep. There is the growth of the twins inside Kaye, their silent adjustments, their preparation for birth.

  Kaye sighs again, and Cohen hears her sit up.

  He looks at her, away from his father. “You okay?”

  “I’m okay.”

  He nods at her stomach with a question on his face.

  “Yeah, I think they’re doing okay too. Nothing serious.”

  “Contractions?” he asks.

  “Nothing serious.”

  “You need to get some rest.”

  “What do you think this is?” she asks.

  “No, I mean rest in a bed. Someplace comfortable. Not all bent up in a chair.”

  Kaye shrugs. “I’m okay. I’ll go home now that you’re here.”

  “Good.”

  The light outside seems so fickle, and the flat, slate-gray clouds return, sliding into place, erasing the blue. Flurries fall again for a minute, and the snow begins in earnest, mixed with a sleet that taps the glass.

  “Ugh,” Kaye groans. “I hate driving in that.”

  “I’ll call you a taxi,” Cohen says, looking back at their father.

  “No, I’ll be fine,” Kaye says, leaning forward in her chair as if about to rise. She stops. “What did the police say?”

  “Nothing, really. Just more of the same. You know.”

  “No, I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

  He shrugs and speaks without turning away from their father. The matte of his bald head looks grayer, reflecting the clouds. Cohen realizes he can’t remember what his father’s eyes look like when they’re open.

  “They told me a lot of the same stuff the doctor told us yesterday.”

  “Did they say how it happened?”

  “Same thing the doctor said. The trocar. Probably an accident.”

  “An accident?”

  “They don’t know. It’s hard to tell. No one else was there,
Kaye. We might never know.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “I think they’re probably right. Could’ve been an accident. Dad’s older, not as careful. Drinks most of the day. He could have been carrying it with him across the room, slipped, came down on it. You know how sharp it is.” He looks at Kaye. She winces. He shrugs again. “Could’ve been.”

  “Or?”

  Cohen swallows hard. “He could’ve killed himself, Kaye.”

  She grimaces. “Like that?”

  “It’s not likely,” he admits. “But possible.”

  “Did someone else do it?”

  “I don’t think there were any signs of a struggle. It wouldn’t be easy to push the trocar in that precisely if you were fighting.”

  Kaye pauses, closes her eyes, and rubs them with her fingers. “It seems a cruel accident if that’s what it was.”

  “But we’ve seen our fair share of those,” he replies.

  He hears her rise from her chair, and the filtered gray light grows darker in the room as the sleet stops and the snow falls, heavier now. Cohen glances at the window, and the movement of the snow reminds him of the way it hits a windshield when you’re driving through it. He feels a sense of movement, a sense of falling, as if the hospital room is plummeting through the snow, as if the entire building is falling. It gives him a sense of vertigo, and he looks back at his father’s form under the sheet.

  Kaye walks up behind him and puts her hand on his shoulder. “What aren’t you telling me, Cohen?” she whispers.

  His back stiffens under her touch. But a moment later her hand dashes from his shoulder to her stomach.

  “Oh,” she says, grimacing and bending over slightly.

  “Kaye . . .” he begins.

  “It’s nothing,” she says. “Pre-labor pains.”

  “Pre? How ‘pre’?”

  “What happened, Cohen?” she asks him with a knowing glance.

  He braces himself against the window frame. “Dad and I had an argument Sunday night. I told him some things he didn’t want to hear. He was very, very upset.” Cohen looks at Kaye, feeling drained and weary. “I don’t know. I can’t help but think that it’s connected to this.”

  “What did you argue about?”

  “Me quitting.” He looks at Kaye hesitantly. She sighs. He has talked with her about this before.

  A nurse comes in, the same nurse he saw in the hallway. She gives him the same smile. Cohen looks at Kaye, her deep eyes. This is his sister. When his father dies, she will be all he has left. She and Johnny and the twins on their way. And he’ll be responsible for them somehow; their fates will be tied up with his. Does he have it in him, this kind of responsibility?

  “Get some rest, Kaye,” Cohen says. “Go home. Drive carefully.” He looks up at the clock above the door, his voice catching. He clears his throat. “We can talk about it later. Promise. Now get some rest. I’ll stay with Dad.”

  twenty-eight

  A Choice

  Cohen sits beside his father’s bed, and for a long time there is nothing. No nurses come into the room to check the numbers and write on the clipboards and stare at the IV. No doctors dance around the inevitability of what is to come. The hospital goes on all around him, but he is there inside the cocoon with his father, waiting to emerge, waiting for something to happen.

  The ridge of his father’s arm is right in front of him, and he leans forward, unlatching the guard on the side of the bed and lowering it before hunching even farther forward and resting his forehead on his father’s forearm. It feels soft under the sheet, not sinewy as he remembers it. It seems unbelievably small, this once powerful forearm, and uncharacteristically fragile. He hasn’t noticed this in recent years, the decreasing of his father in old age, but now it seems so obvious. How could he have missed it? How could he not have seen his own father getting old?

  Cohen turns his head so that he’s facing his father’s feet. He closes his eyes.

  There is an image in his mind of how deliberate his father always was when embalming bodies. The methodical care he took to restore them to lifelikeness. The way he turned from a body, taking off his long rubber gloves, sighing with satisfaction. There was something familiar there, something that perhaps reminded his father of preaching a good sermon.

  For the first time since all of this started, since Cohen stepped over the body of his father yesterday, he wishes he could ask one last thing. The disappointment that had haunted Calvin, that had hung like the strands of a spiderweb about his eyes, was it a disappointment he felt in Cohen? Or was he disappointed in himself, that he had somehow let it all happen, had somehow let everything fall apart?

  Cohen feels a hand on his shoulder, and goose bumps slide up his neck. His father is touching him. His eyes pop open, but he doesn’t dare move his head. There, his father’s feet, motionless. There, under his head, his father’s left forearm. There, on his shoulder, his father’s right hand.

  He jumps.

  “Mr. Marah! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  It’s his father’s doctor.

  Cohen shakes his head, trying to regain his sense of being. He clears his throat. “No, I’m sorry. I must have drifted off.”

  “You and your sister have spent a lot of hours here. I can tell your father meant a lot to you.”

  Cohen nods vacantly.

  “I think it’s time we have a frank conversation about your father’s health.”

  Cohen nods again, feeling like a bobblehead doll.

  “Mr. Marah . . .”

  “Please, call me Cohen. My father is Mr. Marah.”

  “Of course. Cohen.” Dr. Stevens pauses, and when he speaks Cohen can tell the words are familiar to him, the way a prayer becomes rote. “Your father is not going to recover.”

  Cohen stares out the window. “Yes,” he says in a whisper. “Yes, I know. I didn’t expect him to last this long.” He says the last sentence almost as if he’s trying to reassure the doctor that he has done a fine job, that none of this is his fault.

  “You and your sister need to have a conversation about when the right time might be to remove life support.”

  “Yes,” Cohen says. He walks to the window and looks out over the city, the city that for so many years brought their dead to his father. The city that handed over its bodies for his father to remake one last time, to present as if they were sleeping. He feels tears rising along with another layer of weariness, and he tries to push it all back in with the heels of his hands, pressing them up against the bones around his eyes. He realizes he’s crying not at the death of his father but at the passing of a man who had shrunk from his life and lived it out mostly drunk in a second-floor apartment, burying his neighbors. And they never even knew him.

  “She’ll be back in the morning, I believe,” Cohen says, his voice halting like a drunken man finding his footing. “My sister, that is. We’ll talk about it then and let you know.”

  “Thank you for understanding,” the doctor says. “I’ll come by in the morning.”

  Cohen watches a new round of snow fall on the city. A west wind kicks in and for a moment the snow moves sideways along the glass. When he turns to ask a question, he realizes the doctor is gone.

  It’s only him and his father.

  twenty-nine

  Appeared and Disappeared

  “Ava, what are you doing here?”

  Cohen moved through the glass doors of the funeral home and sat down on the sidewalk. Ava leaned her bike against the funeral home brick and sat down beside him. It was so dark. The streetlights hummed. Cohen pulled his arms across his chest—he hadn’t grabbed a coat, and the air was freezing.

  “My family moved into the city,” Ava said. “About six blocks away. It didn’t take me long to ride my bike here. I didn’t even know if you’d be here, but it was the only place I thought to look.”

  A siren sounded in the distance, and the sound always made Cohen suddenly aware of the world around h
im, the fact that others were living, breathing, experiencing a very different reality from his.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “I like your bike.”

  “Thanks,” she said, brightening. “My dad got it for me to make up for moving here. He said I could get to know the city.”

  “You shouldn’t be out at night, not by yourself,” Cohen admonished.

  “I guess it got late fast,” Ava said, unconcerned. “It gets dark quick.”

  Cohen couldn’t figure out why he suddenly felt like he wanted to be mean. He knew she reminded him of the day his mother left, and that was something he didn’t want to think about. And he didn’t want to talk about his parents—not his mom, who he had only seen a few times since those days, or his dad, who was apparently too far gone to get off the sofa and come downstairs to see who rang the bell.

  “Still play ball?” he asked.

  “Softball,” she said. “They don’t let girls play baseball in middle school.”

  “Why, ’cause you’re better than everyone else?” It made him mad thinking she wasn’t allowed to play, and the meanness he had felt evaporated.

  She grinned. “Yeah, probably.”

  They sat there quietly for what felt like a long time, cars occasionally passing, the streetlights flickering, humming. A couple walked past them holding hands. A kid their age rode his skateboard in the middle of the street, skipping up onto the sidewalk to avoid oncoming cars, the wheels making rhythmic clacks as they passed over the sidewalk seams.

  “Do you like it here?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “It’s okay.”

  “Do you . . . have any friends?”

  He thought of Than and Hippie, the closest thing he had to friends in the half decade he’d lived in the city. He didn’t want to tell her about them, although he didn’t know why.

  He shrugged again. “Not really.”

  She stood up and dusted off her jeans, pulled her bike away from the wall, swung one leg over it effortlessly. He watched her closely out of the corner of his eye. She moved even more gracefully than he remembered. She was prettier than he recalled.