Light from Distant Stars Read online

  A sense of panic rose up in Cohen. He paced out onto the sidewalk, back again, out, back. “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Than said in a grim voice, holding up Hippie’s hand to peer at it.

  She moaned again when he moved it, pulling away. “Than, careful,” she whispered. “I think I have to sit down.”

  Another police car flew past them, siren on, lights flashing.

  “What is going on?” Cohen asked no one in particular. “When it was on me before, it was cold, it hurt, but not like this.”

  A flash of light caught his attention and he looked up at a second-story window in a house across the street. An old woman had pulled back the curtain and looked down at them. She had a round face and her gray hair radiated out around her head like a wiry halo. When she saw Cohen looking up at her, her eyes went wide and she threw the curtain closed.

  “I think we should go,” he said.

  Than muttered something.

  “I can’t, I . . . don’t . . .” Hippie gasped when she spoke, unable to get a full sentence out.

  “Why is this happening?” Cohen aimed his confusion at Than, demanding answers.

  Than shook his head. “Something about the Beast has changed. Maybe it’s dying and its shadow is more powerful. Maybe . . .” He paused. “Maybe Hippie is more vulnerable. I don’t know. It’s like acid on her.”

  “We have to wash it off,” Cohen said.

  They left her there at the edge of the light, and she seemed to be losing her mind. She sat down and moaned and rocked back and forth, side to side, as if the movement kept the worst of the pain at bay. Both scoured the alley for something, anything they could use. Cohen found an empty five-gallon paint bucket. He tripped over it before he saw it, sending it clattering through the alley, its metal handle pinging against the sidewalk.

  “There’s a faucet back here,” Than said. They turned on the water and it came out ice-cold. The bucket filled slowly, the water gurgling and rushing. It had a crack in the bottom, and the water leaked out almost as fast as they could fill it.

  “That’s good,” Than said when the bucket was only half full. He carried it to the edge of the alley, water slipping through the bottom, and set it down beside Hippie, raising her to her knees. When Hippie lifted her hand, the one that had been covered in the shadow, Than paused. Her skin seemed wilted under the tar, as if it had eaten its way inside and corroded her flesh.

  When Cohen realized Than was frozen in place, he crept forward, reached out, and took her blackened hand in his own. “Here,” he whispered. “I’ll do it.”

  He rested the top of her wrist on the edge of the bucket so that her palm faced upward. He had to coax her fist open—at first it was clenched in pain, and as he slipped his thumb under her fingers and gently eased them back, Hippie clenched her teeth and screamed through her closed mouth.

  “It’s okay,” Cohen whispered over and over again. He reached down into the icy water, drew out as much as he could with one cupped hand, and let it drip down. He touched the tar. It sent needles of cold into his own hand, but he kept rubbing and rinsing and scrubbing.

  Soon Hippie went limp, her back against the brick wall. She had passed out. Than sat beside her, propping her up. The water in the bucket was gone, so Cohen went back and refilled it. When he returned, he continued cleaning her hand, whispering the entire time. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  In some places on her hand, like the wrinkles at the base of her fingers and the bent sections of her knuckles, he had to use his fingernail to peel back the Beast’s sludge from her skin. This scraping seemed to disturb her even deep in that unconscious state, and she gave a heavy, hoarse sigh, her head listing from one side to the other. After what seemed like a very long time, he had removed almost all of it.

  What remained in him were questions. Why this effect, when before Hippie had seemed immune to the Beast’s residue? And what if she accidentally bumped against more of it? How would she survive?

  More sirens. Police cars approached. This time there were three of them. They stopped directly in front of the alley, parked in the opposite lane of the one-way street. Than and Cohen watched, trying not to move, as the three officers crawled out of their patrol cars and walked to one of the doors across the street. Two of them stood back as the third knocked loudly, a thudding they could hear where they sat. Any sound they made seemed suddenly amplified. Everything else on the street was silent except the police officer knocking on the door and the beating of their own hearts and the raspy breath of Hippie regaining consciousness.

  The police officer waited. He peered through the glass and knocked again, even louder this time. The other two officers turned and looked up and down the street. They seemed bored, preoccupied, looking for something out of order. The police officer raised his hand to knock again, stopped, peered through the glass, and took a half step back. The door opened.

  Cohen looked closer. It was the woman from the window, the one who had looked down at them and thrown the curtain shut.

  “We should go,” Cohen said.

  “Why?” Than asked. Hippie stirred.

  “C’mon,” Cohen hissed, rising carefully. “That woman saw me in the alley. I think she called the police on us.” He felt the grit of the bricks scrape the back of his coat as he pushed himself up. He tried to get farther back into the shadows.

  The woman was nodding to the police. One of the officers took out a small notebook and scribbled some things. The woman pointed across the street to the alley where they sat.

  Than grabbed Hippie’s face between his hands. “Hippie,” he said. “Hippie, get up. Wake up. We have to move, now.”

  She tried to open her eyes, but her lids seemed to weigh a million pounds. Cohen saw the whites of her eyes, two crescent moons. They closed, she shook her head, and her body went limp again.

  Cohen bent over and put his arm under her back. “Help me.”

  Than came in close, and they picked Hippie up, arranged her so that she was between them with one arm around each of them, and started waddling down the narrow alley, her feet dragging beneath her. They got to the back alley and Cohen looked over his shoulder. The three police officers had left the woman at her front door—she peered curiously into the night, craning her neck. They were coming across the empty street, walking toward the alley, and three flashlight beams winked on.

  Cohen and Than dragged Hippie across the narrow street that separated the backs of the houses and farther into the alley, over a grate, past a telephone pole, and into the shadows behind a dumpster.

  A burst of cold air swept through the city. The police officers came deliberately through the shadows.

  “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” Cohen hissed.

  Hippie started reviving. Her feet weren’t dragging anymore. She was walking, albeit with their help. They made it out the other side, all the way to the neighboring street. They turned right and walked quickly, still helping Hippie along.

  “Hey!” a voice shouted. “Wait!”

  Cohen looked back. One of the police officers had come out of the alley, now a block behind them. He motioned for the other two to hurry, and the three of them started jogging lightly in and out of the streetlights. Darkness, light, darkness, light. Their shoes made thudding sounds on the sidewalk. They had not turned off their flashlights, and they made glancing, stabbing beams that bobbed against the houses and the street and the sky.

  “Run,” Cohen said calmly.

  fifty-three

  Singing

  The nurse moves like a spirit, without touching anything, without making a sound, so that Cohen doesn’t realize she’s there until he sees Kaye sit up straight in her chair. She does that when people come into the room, even though it makes her uncomfortable. She doesn’t last long in the chair, so she stands and walks loops around the room, circling past the window that looks out over the bright afternoon, out over the city. She steps gently over Johnny, who has been sleeping off and on. Sh
e passes Cohen and arrives at the foot of the bed where their mother has been sitting all these long hours. Kaye rests her hand on her mother’s shoulder.

  “How are you?” Kaye asks the nurse.

  The nurse gives her a kind smile, and immediately Cohen thinks she has lost someone recently. He can always tell. Maybe it’s from his job, but he can always see it in the eyes. There is something calm there, something placid, as if a great disturbance has passed by but now the surface has regained its balance and is even more calm for the trouble it has gone through.

  “Good morning,” the nurse says. She wears tan slacks and a white collared shirt. Her graying brown hair is pixie short, and her dark eyes are full and round. “I know you’ve signed all the paperwork, but I’d like to talk you through what I’m doing, if that’s okay?”

  Kaye nods, her hand fleeting once again to cover her mouth. Cohen swallows hard. Their mother sits up, an almost imperceptible straightening.

  “First I’m going to remove your father’s breathing tube. This will disconnect him from the ventilator and alleviate any discomfort the tube may be causing him.”

  Cohen stares at his father, at his chest rising and falling, lifting the sheet and lowering it. It’s a movement so predictable, so monotonous, that it seems like it could go on and on into eternity. Cohen remembers coming into the living room late on a Saturday afternoon when he was a child, before his parents divorced, before everything that happened. His father was asleep on the sofa, his fingers still green from cleaning out the lawn mower, shards of grass clinging to his scalp, his ears. He was wearing a white T-shirt and dirty jeans, and his socks were on the floor beside him. His bare feet were a ghostly white. Cohen had stood beside his father for a long time, watching his chest rise and fall.

  “Will he stop . . . breathing?” Kaye whispers from behind her hand, as if she does not want her mother to hear the question.

  “He might,” the nurse explains in a kind voice. “Or he may go on breathing for some time.”

  Kaye nods a jerky okay, wipes a lone tear from her cheek. It leaves a wet mark, a glistening smudge. Cohen covers the distance between them, reaches up, and wipes away the remnants of her tear. Kaye puts her hand on his shoulder, gives him a half smile, and looks down at their mother sitting in front of them.

  That’s when he hears it: music. Is it singing? Is it coming from the television? He looks over his shoulder, but the TV is off. He looks around the ceiling for speakers but doesn’t see any. He realizes his mother is singing softly to herself, barely moving her mouth. He turns his head so that his face is toward Kaye and his ear is closer to his mother. What is she singing?

  “While we walk the pilgrim pathway

  Clouds will overspread the sky,

  But when traveling days are over

  Not a shadow, not a sigh.

  “When we all get to heaven,

  What a day of rejoicing that will be!

  When we all see Jesus,

  We’ll sing and shout the victory.”

  Kaye looks over at him and they lock eyes. He mouths a question silently. “Do you hear her?”

  Kaye leans closer, nods, smiles, more tears rising.

  “Okay,” the nurse says. “Your father is disconnected from the ventilator.”

  Kaye’s glance changes quickly to panic. “He is?”

  “Yes.”

  Cohen and Kaye move as close as they can to their father. This is it. This is the end.

  Seconds go by. Minutes pass.

  “Is he still breathing?” Kaye asks.

  The nurse bends down close to Calvin, placing one hand on his chest. She turns her ear so that it’s only inches from his mouth. “He is still breathing, yes, and he doesn’t seem to be labored by it.”

  Kaye looks at Cohen. He smiles and nods at her.

  “I’m also going to remove his feeding tube.” When the nurse says this, Cohen’s mother’s voice seems to go up a level in volume. Barely noticeable, but louder.

  “I know this has been a difficult decision for you,” the nurse says quietly, her hands busy. “But it won’t put your father in any pain. Often, receiving food in your last days or hours can only cause more discomfort.”

  “We are dead to the world and its pleasure,

  Our affections are centered above,

  Where we own such a wonderful treasure,

  ’Tis a home in the city of love.”

  Cohen clears his throat gently and looks at Kaye, hoping she’ll say something to their mother, maybe ask her to quiet down a bit. He knows she won’t listen to him. But Kaye is staring at their father, lost, somewhere else.

  “When we get home we’ll shout and sing

  The praises of our Redeemer and King,

  And make the heavenly arches ring

  With the songs of home, sweet home.”

  Cohen glances at the nurse, embarrassed that she might hear. He puts his hand on his mother’s shoulder, hoping to stir her out of her singing reverie, but when his fingers find the soft fabric of her shirt, a pulse of memory and sadness works its way through him. He can feel her slender collarbone, the hollow in the cleft of it. She is fragile. He has never realized this about his mother before, never once seen her as anything besides steel and iron and cold, hard rock.

  And then, as he becomes more and more conscious of the feel of his mother’s clavicle under the pads of his fingers, another realization comes. She will die. Her stony countenance will fade into a placid resignation. And it will be only him and Kaye.

  He is not a middle-aged man anymore, not in that moment—he is a little boy comforting his mom. His hand, which he first lifted to chide her, remains there, and instead of embarrassment at her singing, he feels a certain acceptance, as if for the first time in many years she is giving him a gift he has the ability to accept.

  “Yes, we’ll gather at the river,

  The beautiful, the beautiful river;

  Gather with the saints at the river

  That flows by the throne of God.”

  fifty-four

  Back to Where It Started

  “Stop right where you are!” the police officer shouted, and in that moment, in that precise moment, as the night looked down on them and no one came outside and no one drove by, fourteen-year-old Cohen remembered he still had the gun in his coat. Instinctively he found the flapping slit of his pocket and reached inside. He and Than ran with Hippie laboring on between them. Clouds rolled in from the southwest, swallowing the moon and taking on a threaded silver lining.

  “Stop!” the police officer yelled again, and this time, for some unknown reason, Cohen stopped. Both of his hands went into his coat pockets. He could feel the smooth, cold metal of the handgun, out of place in a world with so many rough edges. The trigger was there too, though he didn’t let his finger remain on it. He was afraid of what might happen if he did.

  Than and Hippie’s running petered out when they realized Cohen had stopped. Than bent over, breathing heavily. Hippie fell to the ground and sat, drawing her knees up to her chest, resting her forehead on them. Cohen wasn’t sure, but he thought she might be crying.

  “Put your hands where I can see them!” the police officer shouted. His voice seemed to be the only thing on the street, the only sound in the world.

  Cohen watched as Than rotated with slow steps, still bent at the waist, still gasping for breath. Hippie slid around on her backside until she faced the police officers. She was holding her hand again, as if the pain hadn’t completely gone away.

  Cohen was about to turn around, was practically in the act, when he stopped. He saw something on the ground.

  “I said, put your hands where I can see them!”

  There. Between Than and Hippie. He had missed it at first because he thought it was a shadow on the sidewalk, but he could tell it wasn’t. It was a mark left behind by the Beast. This was its trail. This was where it had gone.

  He glanced at Than. They made eye contact. Cohen looked quickly at the shadow
-trail, and Than’s glance followed. Hippie did not look up. Her forehead stayed on her knees.

  Cohen glanced over his shoulder, surprised at many things. The police officers stood much farther away than he had originally thought, nearly a block behind. They pointed their weapons at him and Than and Hippie. He was surprised to see that some neighbors had woken up and come out onto their porches, and now they stood there, watching. Snow started falling from the clouds that had eaten the moon, a snow that first fell lazy and meandering, spaced so far apart.

  That’s when the storm blew in. Thick snow swirled on a north wind, blowing the blizzard into the faces of the police officers. The one in front, the one who had done the shouting, hid his face in the crook of his hand and yelled something, but Cohen couldn’t understand it.

  “I think we should run,” Than shouted through the storm. Hippie stood to her feet.

  “Okay,” Cohen said. He could barely see the officers through the falling snow, but they seemed to be walking closer.

  “Ready, Hippie?” Than asked. “On three. One. Two. Three.”

  They ran, the shouts of the police officers following them, faint and ineffective in the wind and the snow. Cohen overtook Than and Hippie and led the way, darting down a side alley, nearly slipping on a wide, deep puddle of black. He slowed for a moment, staring. It was the Beast’s shadow-trail. He kept running. He didn’t look back.

  They came to a wide street. The wind was stronger there in the open, and the snow stung his face. Hippie was behind him somewhere.

  “Hippie!” Cohen shouted into the storm, but the wind swallowed his voice. Then he saw her. She stopped, disoriented, weak, her arms hanging limp at her sides. He could tell she was about to sit again. He ran back, grabbed her arm, and dragged her along. The three of them walked forward together, slowly, through the blizzard.

  All the running, the turning back on their own trail, the cutting through alleys, the low visibility, had turned Cohen around and left him confused as to exactly where in the city they were. But in a moment, when the storm slowed and there were spaces between the snow, he looked up ahead and recognized the street. It was Duke. They were coming up on the funeral home, back to where it had all started. And as they drew closer, he saw smears of black tar on the glass doors.