Light from Distant Stars Read online

  The boy listens to his mother and passes the white fluffy towel to Cohen. Thatcher’s mother hands him the baby, so alive against the whiteness, its mouth open, gums wide, eyes watery and still closed. Then it cries, at first a little bleat like a lamb, but then it turns into a longer sound, a kind of whimpering scream.

  Kaye is a heap on the floor, weary and limp as if she has no bones. “What is it?” she gasps.

  “A boy,” Cohen says, tears breaking his voice and blurring his eyes. “A boy.”

  Kaye laughs a sob and still doesn’t move, and Thatcher’s mother leans in.

  “Rest while you can, honey. You’ve got one more coming, but the second one is a piece of cake. Here.” She takes the baby from Cohen, pulls out a hospital blanket, and wraps the tiny, wriggling thing tighter. Already he is sucking on his bottom lip and his eyes open in tiny slits, like a closed door with light sneaking out the bottom.

  Cohen wonders if this baby boy will remember this somehow, if this moment in time in a hospital closet will lodge itself in the deepest place of his mind and emerge someday—images of these people, this light bulb, this darkness with the slats of light breaking through. Will he remember the metallic smell of blood and the edge of fear everyone else was feeling? Can he sense how desperately they all want him to remain quiet?

  They stay very still, taking Kaye’s lead. She’s on her side, waiting. Thatcher’s mother is standing, holding the baby, swaying back and forth, bumping up and down. Thatcher sits down beside the slats again, the light making lines on his face.

  “You okay?” Cohen asks Kaye in a whisper.

  She nods without opening her eyes.

  Cohen glances up at the bundle of baby, smiles at Thatcher’s mother, moves from beside Kaye to the door, and sits beside Thatcher. “You okay?” he asks the boy.

  “What’s taking the police so long? Where are they?”

  “I’m sure they’re evacuating the building. They’re probably making their way up floor by floor. They’ll be here any minute. Hang in there.”

  “Is your sister okay?”

  “She’s doing great. Almost there.”

  “I’ve seen cows give birth, but I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  “Me neither,” Cohen says. “Pretty intense.”

  “Why do you think he’s doing it?”

  “Who?”

  “My dad. Why do you think he’s doing this? Shooting up the hospital?”

  Cohen pauses, sighs. “I don’t know, Thatcher. I don’t know.”

  “The thing is, my dad, my grandpa, they never even got along. Sometimes I thought they hated each other. They never stopped fighting about the farm, the animals, how things should be. I thought Dad would be relieved when Grandpa died. Not this. I never thought he’d do something like this.”

  Cohen nods. When he speaks, the words come out measured, and his eyes are looking off to a different place. “Fathers and sons, I don’t think they ever really know how to be with one another. My own dad is over there in that room, dying, maybe dead by now, and for the last week I couldn’t even figure out what I’d say to him if he came back for one minute. It’s been a long time since we’ve known how to speak to each other. We never fought, or rarely anyway, not like your dad and grandpa, but . . . I don’t know, I wonder if fathers and sons ever know how to be to each other.”

  “I hate my dad,” Thatcher says, a questioning look on his face, seeking confirmation or rebuke.

  Cohen purses his mouth. “I guess a lot of sons hate their dads at different times.”

  “Do you hate your dad?”

  Cohen shakes his head. “No. I do not.”

  “Did you ever hate him?”

  Cohen thinks for a moment. “I don’t know. I don’t know if hate is the right word.” He thinks back on the nights his father slept drunk on the sofa, never waking. He thinks of how his dad stood in the middle of the road when his mother left. He remembers playing catch with him in the green grass at the old place in the country, the sky blue, the smell of summer, the heat bearing down. “I know I loved him, a lot of the time. But then we lost each other. Maybe he lost me. Maybe I lost him. I don’t know. Maybe that’s the problem with fathers and sons—they lose each other.”

  “What if you want to lose your dad?” Thatcher looks away from Cohen, staring into a dark corner of the closet.

  “Everyone loses their dad. It doesn’t matter if you want to or not. It’s finding him again that’s the hard part. I don’t know if that happens very much.”

  The two of them sit there, Cohen listening to the sound of his own breathing. His sister takes a deep breath and sits up, leaning to one side. Thatcher’s mother brings the baby over to Thatcher, hands the bundle to him, and makes small adjustments to how he’s holding him. She’s found a blue hospital pacifier and the baby sucks it rhythmically.

  “There you go,” she whispers. “You keep being good and quiet, little one.”

  “Maybe Mr. Cohen should hold him?” Thatcher says, his voice hesitant.

  “No, he needs to be ready to catch the next one.” She smiles and her voice is light and airy—there’s nothing in her world except the arrival of the next baby. No shooters, no lack of help or clean equipment. She moves like a breeze back to Kaye, again finding towels and various things to use to clean her up.

  “How long will it be? How long does it usually take for the second one to come?” Kaye asks.

  “It could be five minutes. Or it could be an hour.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to be that long.”

  “Listen to your body. It will tell you when.”

  Kaye nods, a grimace full of pain and fear wrinkling her face the way fire wilts paper from behind.

  “Do you feel a contraction coming?”

  Kaye nods again, moving back to all fours. Cohen wonders how she can survive another splitting, another push, another human emerging. She seems to share his doubts, and now she moans without the towel, her voice humming like an electric transformer about to explode. But her cries are weaker, as if she has lost the strength to even feel pain.

  The contraction passes. “Cohen, come hold my leg.” She moves onto her side again.

  “They’re coming this way,” Thatcher hisses. “I can hear them. Quiet!”

  Cohen can hear the men’s distant approach in the silent closet, their voices hollow as if coming from the other end of a long tunnel. The words aren’t clear, but they grow louder. A ventilation fan turns on in the closet, numbing all other sound.

  “Another one.” Kaye’s words are clipped and hard. The leg Cohen holds grows tense, and she presses her heel into the palm of his hand. She cries out again. He holds her knee up and another head appears, another head of dark hair. This time it does not pause at the opening but rushes straight out. Thatcher’s mother guides the screaming baby onto a towel and rests the baby on the floor before grinding at the umbilical cord with a paper scissors. Blood is flowing out of Kaye now, pulsing. Thatcher’s mother encourages her onto her back and presses on her now-gelatinous stomach, and more blood and fluid ooze out.

  “Is this normal?” Cohen asks, feeling woozy. “Isn’t that a lot of blood?”

  Kaye lies there, one arm up over her eyes.

  Thatcher’s mother doesn’t answer Cohen. There is an urgency to her movements. “She still needs to pass the placenta. After that, we’re home.”

  The words are barely out of her mouth when the door swings wide, and there stand Thatcher’s father and uncle, their weapons raised.

  “What in the . . .” Thatcher’s father begins, taking in the scene: Thatcher sitting in the dark corner, hunched over a baby who has now begun to cry; Thatcher’s mother bundling up baby number two, a girl, and handing her to Cohen as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening; Kaye, eyes closed, naked from the waist down and indifferent to the presence of the two armed men.

  The uncle’s eyes nervously scan the puddles of blood on mats, on towels, on the floor. Where they expected to fi
nd a few people hiding, they find life bursting forth, and towels stained, and miracles.

  “So, this is where you’ve been hiding,” Thatcher’s father spits out, and hate rises in his eyes. He looks at Thatcher. “How long did you know about this?”

  Thatcher stares hard at the baby, bobbing him up and down, trying to quiet him.

  “And you. You just can’t leave my family alone.”

  He’s talking to Cohen now, but Cohen is oblivious to everything. He has forgotten his father dying, his mother singing, his sister bleeding. He has forgotten Thatcher holding the other child or even the two armed men or the smell in the closet. He has forgotten everything that has come before and every worry he has about the future. Because there in his hands, the second baby opens her eyes.

  The baby’s face is unnaturally calm, her tongue rising to curiously feel her own lips, tasting the air. It’s the movement of a trout gently touching the surface of the water, wondering at this strange other world. She strains to move her arms, but she doesn’t fight. Thatcher’s mother has wrapped her snug, and she resettles into that tightness. She lets out a kind of yawn without opening her mouth. And still Cohen stares at her eyes.

  They’re green with flecks of dark brown. They’re peaceful and loving. They’re the eyes he saw at his last confession, the eyes in the painting of the crucified Christ. Cohen cannot look away.

  “I’m talking to you.”

  Cohen barely hears the voice. He is captivated by the love and inquisitiveness he sees in those eyes. He keeps his face close to the baby because he knows her early vision is blurry, shortsighted in these first hours. Perhaps she can’t even see him. He moves closer until his nose touches the baby’s. Her eyes are so close. Inside of them he sees another universe, stars being born and dying, galaxies revolving, light moving from one end of everything that exists to the other, lonely comets streaking icy paths through empty space. Everything that has ever been is caught up in the matter of that universe, and it is all there in those eyes, inches from his own.

  How long! he marvels. How long it takes the light to reach us!

  “I said, I’m talking to you.”

  He looks up and feels nothing but elation, nothing but absolute intoxication at the growing understanding that he is alive. He is here. He exists. Nothing about the scene around him can deaden this new sense. Not the frantic nature of Thatcher’s mother’s movements as she continues soaking up more blood. Not the white translucence of Kaye’s skin or the way her limp arm falls from her eyes and drifts aimlessly, unconsciously, to a resting point on the floor. Not even the gun held by Thatcher’s father as it turns toward him, the black hole at the end of the barrel something he will look into, a future he is no longer afraid of.

  He stares up into the man’s eyes and sees the vacancy there, the loss, the anger. He gives him a smile that, without the benefit of knowing Cohen’s recent realization, could easily be interpreted as a sad smile.

  Cohen looks away, back into the eyes of the baby in his arms, and waits.

  There is the volley of gunfire.

  Thatcher’s mother screams.

  Thatcher shouts, but it’s more like one of Kaye’s long, unending moans. He turns his body to shield the twin he’s holding.

  Cohen is surprised. He feels nothing. He looks around the room. In the doorway he sees the bodies of Thatcher’s father and uncle. The father is motionless, moaning, but a fading moan, one that sounds like the release of every last thing. The uncle’s leg twitches once, twice. A shudder runs through his arms.

  Cohen hears the sound of a dozen or more boots, their scuffing unmistakable, loud in the silence. There is the clatter of weapons being kicked out of lifeless hands, spinning across the waxed hospital floor, and colliding with the wall. Shouts. Shadowy figures in black body armor staring into the closet.

  One of the men lifts his hand and raises a visor-like mask. “Hold your fire,” he says in a firm voice. “Hold your fire.”

  Ava’s face appears in the doorway, filled with concern. She scans the scene, taking it all in, and when she sees Cohen, her mouth opens slightly. “Cohen,” she whispers, clearly not knowing what to say next.

  Cohen smiles at her and looks back into the face of the child he’s holding.

  He weeps.

  sixty-one

  All the Hidden Things

  On the night the man died in the chapel of their funeral home, Cohen sat for a long time by the upstairs window, staring out at the sycamore trees, watching the snow fade and the cars trickle by one at a time. He opened the window an inch and the cold air poured in, and he could hear the cars then, the endless shushing sound their tires made as they drove south, as if trying to convince him not to tell the secret.

  Because of everything that had happened and everything that had come to an end, he felt like his life was beginning again. A life without Than and Hippie, a life without the Beast. A life without Ava, who had seen what he had done. He put his head down on the windowsill and stared up through the tree branches, and as the morning sifted down toward him he fell asleep.

  When he woke, he didn’t move, because he felt someone staring at him. It was like when they had first moved there and he always felt the eyes of the dead following him through the apartment. He cycled through all that had happened the night before, all that he had lost, and only after he got his bearings on the world did he raise his head, turn, and look toward his father’s bedroom.

  There stood Calvin, staring back at him. Cohen waited for it—the anger, the judgment, the shouting. But his father didn’t move from where he stood, and soon Cohen realized why. His dad didn’t know if he was real.

  “Hi,” Cohen said, trying to break through the curtain of silence between them, trying to reassure his father that he was flesh and blood.

  “Cohen,” his father said, but that was all.

  Cohen.

  “I’m sorry,” Cohen said, apologizing without meaning to. In all the plans he had formed regarding the next time he saw his father, in all the ways he had considered things playing out, offering an apology had never entered his imagination. The words simply spilled out.

  But his father shook his head. “Please don’t leave like that again.” Calvin walked slowly across the room to where Cohen sat. He cupped his hand around the back of Cohen’s neck, and with his other hand he stroked Cohen’s hair back out of his eyes. “Please don’t disappear.”

  Twice in two sentences his father used that word. Please. Cohen caught a sob, somehow kept the tears from falling, but a little hiccup still escaped. He leaned into the weight of his father’s hand and closed his eyes. His father sighed but didn’t say anything, just kept pushing Cohen’s hair out of his eyes.

  “Dad,” he said, determined to say the words before he lost the will, “there’s a dead man in the chapel. The man you warned me about.”

  His father’s fingers froze somewhere around his temple, and a few strands of his hair fell back in place on his forehead. Again Cohen waited. When his father didn’t move, Cohen stood, the weight of his father’s hands heavy on his neck and head until they fell away, listless. Cohen didn’t say anything. Without looking, he reached back and took his father’s large hand, then walked through the door and down the stairs.

  Cohen paused outside the chapel door. He pursed his lips, pushed the door open, and walked to the front of the chapel to where the one small spotlight shone down on the pulpit. His father followed him silently all the way to the front of the chapel, where the dead man sprawled out on the floor, his head still propped against the wall. The bleeding had stopped, his skin a pale white in the dim light.

  Cohen and his father stood there. Cohen waited for whatever was to come. He did not look at his father, though Calvin had drawn up beside him. He could feel his presence. He wanted him to say something.

  “I shot him, Dad. I killed him.”

  Calvin didn’t say a thing. And he wouldn’t say a word to Cohen again, not that whole long day. He turned and walked
out of the chapel, and Cohen wondered where his father had gone. Back up to his room to drink this problem away like he did every other one? Up to the living room to call the police? The emptiness in the chapel, the loneliness, nearly drove Cohen to run again, out the glass doors, up the pre-dawn street, far away this time, never to return.

  But a loud bump sounded against the chapel door, and Cohen looked over his shoulder in time to see a coffin coming in, the least expensive one they had. His father pushed it through on a cart, banged into a few of the chapel chairs as he made a wide turn, and moved it toward the front.

  He still didn’t say a word to Cohen, but he went to work. He opened the coffin, picked up the dead man under the shoulders, and somehow wrestled him into the coffin, a grappling that had him grunting and breathing hard. Afterward there was blood on Calvin’s shirt, so he unbuttoned it, balled it up, and placed it at the feet of the corpse. He pulled a utility knife out of his pocket and cut a large square patch out of the chapel carpet, the section that had blood on it. He turned it into a tight roll and wedged it into the coffin beside the man.

  Last, he saw the gun. He picked it up, stared at it for a moment, and slipped it into his pants pocket. He pushed the coffin into the display area, and Cohen followed him, unable to speak. His father locked the coffin and parked it beside the glass doors before returning upstairs. When he came down, he had a bucket of soapy water, and he cleaned off the door frame, the chapel wall, and the area outside the glass doors.

  Cohen watched the entire time. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to do. His legs were so tired. He realized he was hungry. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten, or what it had been.

  His father went upstairs again. Light was creeping into the city, coming up over the buildings, lining the leaves. What Cohen could see of the sky in the east was clear and emerged slowly from black to navy to blue. He heard his father upstairs talking on the phone, only a few sentences, and when he came down ten minutes later he was dressed in his funeral clothes—black suit, shined shoes, black tie. The only thing that was different was that his head wasn’t freshly shaven, as it always was on mornings he went to work.