Light from Distant Stars Read online

  “Father James? Is that you?”

  “I’m sorry, Cohen,” the priest says, and there is mild amusement in his voice.

  “You scared me.”

  “You entered rather suddenly yourself.”

  “Why are you here?” Cohen walks over and sits in the chair on the near side of the screen. It’s almost like talking to himself.

  “I couldn’t sleep. And I thought you might come back again tonight.”

  “What if I hadn’t?”

  There is a gentle movement on the other side of the screen, an obscured shrug, a barely audible chuckle. “I’m a priest. I’m always waiting for something. Usually I’m waiting for God, but sometimes other things, or people.”

  “How long have you been waiting?”

  The priest sighs. “I am always waiting, Cohen. I will always wait for you.”

  Something about the priest’s words or the way he says them brings tears to Cohen’s eyes. He clears his throat unsuccessfully, clears it again, louder this time. He sniffs, wipes those seeds of tears from his eyes with his index fingers.

  “I’m sorry. Okay.” He takes a deep breath, and the words come out shaky, hesitant. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  “The Lord be in your heart and mind, Cohen, and upon your lips, that you may truly and humbly confess your sins: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Cohen says, and even though he stares at the black screen, he is envisioning so many other things: the pallid look of his father on the bed, the trail of shadows the Beast left behind when he was a child, the young man whose grandfather is dying in the neighboring hospital room. He thinks of Kaye and Ava and the police detective who obviously thinks he killed his father, a charge Cohen finds difficult to dispute. He remembers the blood he wiped off his shoe and then onto the sycamore tree. He remembers every Sunday school story he ever heard, and the obtuse angle of Miss Flynne’s feet as they stuck out from between the pews on that afternoon so long ago.

  “I confess to the Almighty God, to his Church, and to you, that I have sinned by my own fault in thought, word, and deed, in things done and left undone, but especially in regards to . . .” He sticks in the same spot once again. He licks his lips. “But especially in regards to the death of my father.”

  “Cohen,” Father James says, and the sadness is so heavy in his voice that it threatens to grind everything to a halt. He says every word as if it is his last. “Cohen. What are you saying? I implore you, tell me the truth, so that your confession may be acceptable and your absolution complete.”

  Cohen nods absently, still staring at the screen. “The doctor has said we have to remove him from life support.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Cohen gives a cynical smile. “Me too. You know, Father, my dad and I, we’ve not been great friends through the years. I’ve seen a lot of things a kid should never see.”

  He feels like he can’t catch his breath, as if he is the little boy staring at his father drunk and asleep on the couch.

  “My father’s accident, all of this, it’s not anything I ever wanted. Not really.”

  “But you are . . . involved?” Father James says quietly in a voice that is barely a question. “You were involved in his accident.”

  “I am concerned that something I said may have led him to try to take his own life. I don’t know, I can’t be sure. But I have to be involved now. That’s the point. My sister and I have to decide about taking him off life support.” Cohen clears his throat. “For these and all other sins which I cannot now remember, I am truly sorry. I pray God to have mercy on me. I firmly intend amendment of life, and I humbly beg forgiveness of God and his Church, and ask you for counsel, direction, and absolution.”

  There is silence. Not even the heater kicks on to stir the pages of the open Bible. The Christ in the painting does not move, does not even breathe.

  Perhaps death has already come.

  Father James is motionless behind the screen, like the dark cloud in space, the one inside a supernova left behind after a star explodes. And because Cohen cannot see his mouth through the screen, it is a shadow speaking. It is a voice coming out of nothing.

  “Cohen, I will be here waiting.”

  The silence eats its way inside of Cohen. He cannot bear it. “Father.”

  Silence.

  “Father,” he begins again, falters.

  Silence.

  “Father, are there things that cannot be forgiven?”

  “From Romans: ‘For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’”

  “What about the blaspheming of the Holy Spirit?”

  “Ah, yes. From Mark: ‘Truly I tell you, people can be forgiven all their sins and every slander they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.’”

  “What do you think that is, blaspheming the Spirit?”

  Cohen expects a straightforward answer, something directly from a book, but Father James surprises him. He gives a kind laugh, a laugh full of curiosity and hope.

  “There are many interpretations,” he says quietly, and Cohen can tell by his voice that he’s still smiling. “Is this what you’ve come to talk about this late at night? The blasphemy of the Holy Spirit?”

  “No, Father. I already know what that is.”

  “You do?” the priest asks, surprise in his voice.

  “Yes. The only things that cannot be forgiven are things done to a child. Those sins go on and on; they plant their seeds and wreak their havoc for generations. These things done to children, that’s the blasphemy. That’s the unforgivable sin.”

  For a moment it feels like the screen has been removed. They are one person, knowing everything that has ever happened to the other.

  “I’m sorry, Cohen.”

  Cohen feels a stab of surprise. “So you know,” he says.

  “I do not know,” the priest replies, and his voice slides out of a man weighed down by too many confessions. “But I have known . . . many things. I can imagine. Maybe that is enough.”

  “Maybe.”

  Cohen looks out through the small windows toward the city street. A single car goes by, the sound of it so far away. The empty late-night moments come, one after the other, one after the other, and he wishes he could sit here for the rest of his life.

  “Very well. I will absolve you of the sins you have confessed.”

  “What of those I have not?”

  Another silence. Another age. Father James does not answer his question.

  “Our Lord Jesus Christ who has left power to his Church to absolve all sinners who truly repent and believe in him, of his great mercy forgive you all your offenses; and by his authority committed to me, I absolve you from all your sins.” Father James pauses, then reiterates, “All your sins.” He pauses again. “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Cohen whispers.

  “The Lord has put away all your sins,” the priest says.

  “Thanks be to God,” Cohen says.

  “Go in peace,” the priest whispers, “and pray for me, a sinner.”

  Cohen stands and hurries out without looking back. He has been away from his father for too long. What if he’s gone?

  thirty-six

  The Visitor

  Cohen’s walk turns gradually to a fast walk, then to a slow jog. Anxiety pushes him. He never should have left his father alone. He knows this now. There’s an aching sort of foreboding at the edge of his mind, something he can’t get a good look at, but it’s still there, still gnawing away. He shakes his head to clear the fog, the weariness. Sleep. He needs to sleep.

  He jogs for a block or two and gets close to the
hospital—he can see it rising, a shining tower, the white lights and layered parking garage—but he has to stop jogging. He’s not in shape. His lungs burn. He leans against the streetlight while waiting for the signal to turn.

  Inside the hospital, Cohen walks the long, dim hallways and rides the elevator up. Ding. He walks out into the hallway and sees the night nurses on duty. They glance up, recognize him, smile or nod or look away. The same anxiety rises again as he gets close to his father’s room. What if he died while Cohen was gone? What if his sister came back and found him missing? What if the doctor was able to take his father off life support without the family’s permission? He never should have left.

  The door to his father’s room is wide open, and he rounds the corner quickly. Where has the time gone? It’s two in the morning. Of what day? Wednesday. Or Tuesday? No, Wednesday. He’s almost positive it’s Wednesday morning. He’ll check on his father, and he decides if everything is okay he’ll go down to the cafeteria, see if he can dig up some coffee, maybe a donut.

  He walks into his father’s room and stops. His heart races. There’s a strange red haze gathering in the corners of his vision, a humming in his ears that started far away and now resembles the approach of a crashing wave.

  “Cohen?” a voice says, and he realizes it’s Kaye and she’s standing over by the window. But he cannot look away from the woman there in front of him, standing at the foot of his father’s bed, taking in his father. She looks old, but sharp and hard as he remembers her.

  “Cohen? Where were you?” Kaye says, concern creeping in around the margins of her voice. “We were worried.”

  He does not, cannot, reply. He must focus on breathing. Inhale and let the air out. He squeezes his eyes shut. Opens them. She is still standing there.

  He’s tired. So tired. And the exhaustion moves through him like a chill.

  When Kaye speaks again, there is a slight shaking in each word, the way teacups rattle in their saucers when an earthquake begins. “Cohen? Aren’t you going to say hello to Mother?”

  thirty-seven

  The Ice in the Shadows

  Than, Hippie, and Cohen walked back and forth along the sidewalk outside the funeral home for a long time that night, and if someone had seen them, they would have been intrigued by the scene: three children, sometimes walking, sometimes crawling, sometimes swiping their fingers along the cement as if trying to swab something from a crime scene with their own skin. Cars drove past but no one stopped. The streetlights watched, and the bony trees shushed them in a cold wind. A dead branch high in the sycamore tree hung precariously by a thread of sinewy, torn wood, and it knocked, knocked, knocked against the trunk, trying to break free. Cohen went inside, up the stairs, and put on a coat. He stared at his father sleeping on the couch again. He didn’t stay there long, only long enough to wish yet again that his father cared where he was going.

  It took his eyes a minute to adjust when he got back outside, and at first he couldn’t find Than and Hippie. They had wandered down the street. Than was on his hands and knees, staring hard at the sidewalk, his gaze sweeping side to side. Hippie, as usual, stood with her hands deep in her pockets, staring up at the night sky, waiting.

  Cohen walked quietly toward them, not wanting to arouse the ire of Than. When he was still a little ways off, he reached out his hand absently and let his fingers skim the side of the building. He felt the roughness of the brick, the grit of the mortar, the specks of dust that crumbled and fell to the ground in the wake of his movement. At the corner of the building where it went back into the alley, his fingers slowed on something sticky.

  “Ugh,” he groaned, pulling his hand away, nearly wiping it on his coat. He stopped.

  “Hippie!” he shouted, turning his hand toward the light. Before Than and Hippie got there, he knew what it was, not because he could see it clearly in the dim glow of the streetlights but because of how it felt on his fingers. There was a coldness to it that spread inside his skin, infiltrated his blood, spread up almost to his wrist, as if the shadow were inside his blood and pumping itself toward his heart. For a moment he panicked, frozen in place.

  Than grabbed him by the forearm and twisted it so he could see Cohen’s fingers in the light. “Where?” he asked, looking closer.

  “The corner,” Cohen said, still afraid of what the strange substance was doing to him. The tips of his fingers, where the black tar stuck, ached with cold, as if liquid ice had been spread along his hand. He couldn’t bend his fingers at the knuckles. His wrist felt slightly swollen. And he couldn’t tell if it was his imagination or not, this sensation that the cold was creeping farther up, farther in. The bone in his arm felt brittle, like a long icicle hanging from the eaves.

  Than dropped Cohen’s arm and stared at the corner of the building where he had wiped his fingers.

  “Here,” Hippie said in a quiet voice. She held out a white handkerchief, tinted golden in the streetlights. He reached for it, then paused. It looked so clean. He didn’t want to mess it up.

  “Go ahead,” Hippie said, reaching out farther, and he took it. He wiped the shadow from his fingers quickly, and most of the cold evaporated as he removed it. But there was still a residual sense of numbness. He shook his hand to try to restore circulation, squeezed it into a fist over and over as if that was the problem, as if his hand had only fallen asleep or lost feeling after he’d played outside in the snow. He handed the handkerchief back to Hippie, and she folded it in on itself.

  She moved in closer. “You didn’t get it all,” she said in a chiding, motherly voice. She held his hand in hers and gracefully, slowly rubbed each finger with the clean side of the handkerchief until all of the shadow had been removed.

  “Thank you,” he whispered.

  “Are you two lovebirds finished?” Than shouted from somewhere in the alley.

  “What?” Cohen protested a little too vehemently.

  “Than!” Hippie shouted, happiness in her voice.

  The two of them wandered through the dark toward Than. Behind the funeral home, where the backs of city homes lined up like forgotten faces, they found Than, and he pointed at the ground. Another swipe of darkness, this time a broad stroke like paint from a wide brush. They stared knowingly at each other and went deeper into the alley, walking closer together now, feeling a bond in the uncertainty of what might happen. Than led the way.

  They went through the alley to the next street over. This was a busier street, a main thoroughfare from the north end of the city to the south. It was better lit, and they could see the black splotches and dashes plainly, like Morse code.

  From there, the Beast seemed to have wandered aimlessly through the city, circling blocks and cutting through alleys before finding its bearings on New Street and shooting straight out of town, into the country. They followed the Beast’s shadow tracks, and the night watched them. Soon they all knew where the tracks were leading.

  They stared at the path through the woods, the one that led over the train tracks, meandered through blackberry brambles, and ended with melted children’s toys and a blackened, burned-out trailer. Eventually the three of them stood at the top of the bowl-shaped valley, side by side, and the blackberry stems weaved this way and that in a middle-of-the-night wind that tried to bring back winter. Cohen pulled his shoulders up, withdrew deeper inside his coat. Hippie took a deep breath and let out a steaming stream of hot air. Only Than seemed unaffected by the temperature, the wind, how dark the night was.

  “Let’s go,” he said quietly, starting down the circular path through the thorns, bent at the waist, trying to stay low.

  Hippie glanced at Cohen as if she wanted to tell him to go home. But she didn’t say anything. Finally she nodded at him and followed Than. Cohen watched them go. He looked up at the stars, bright in a sky that the wind had swept clean. He shook his head, taking one step after another, following the other two down, winding closer to the trailer and finding it hard to believe this person walking willingly towar
d the Beast was him.

  The trailer’s windows were dark like gaping wounds.

  thirty-eight

  The Kite

  “Hello,” Cohen’s mother says, looking away from him and back down at his father.

  He can’t tell for sure who she is talking to, him or his father. He stands there, unsure what to do. He wants to turn and leave, walk out the door. He hasn’t seen her for years. Decades? Yes, decades.

  But something holds him there in the doorway. He wonders what it is. He knows it’s not love that keeps him there—he feels nothing for the woman at the foot of his father’s bed, the woman with white hair, the same piercing green eyes, the same rock jaw, and the same mist of firm opinions swirling around her head like clouds around the upper reaches of the world’s highest peak. He knows if he stays he will be subjected to them, their lightning crashes, their thunderous rolling. But still he stays.

  “Hi, Kaye,” he says, not knowing what else to say, and Kaye seems to take his words as a peace offering. She comes all the way from the other side of the room, all the way from where the dark night spills in through the window, all the way to him. She wraps him in her arms. He returns the hug and holds her for an extra moment, if only to give himself more time to think about what to do, how to respond to the presence of this other person.

  Kaye pulls away and looks up at him.

  He sighs. “I’m sorry.”

  She nods, looking like she might break.

  “How is he?” Cohen asks.

  She nods again, her mouth twitching. She raises her hand to cover it, shaking her head back and forth.

  “I talked to the doctor,” Cohen says, looking into her eyes, then away, then back at her. He thinks she might be the most beautiful thing in his life. “They want us to consider taking him off life support.”

  Kaye gasps, turns, moves to their mother’s side. She covers her face with both hands and cries in absolute silence. Cohen feels strangely unmoved, and he glances at his mother to see how the news affects her, how the weeping of her daughter affects her, but she stands there stoic as ever, and he wonders if she’s even heard him.