Light from Distant Stars Read online

  Cohen wanted to dash off, run home, pretend he saw nothing. He was alarmed at the strangeness of how they were situated, how they took up physical space. He was torn between staying and going. Even though all he saw were tangled feet, all he heard were soft whispers, the air was electric with something new, something he had never encountered.

  He took one step closer. He saw an object out of place, discarded on the carpet. Another step closer. It was one of Miss Flynne’s white stockings, the very ones she often took off in Sunday school. It had a flower above the ankle—a rose? a tulip?—and at the top of it, a white ruffle, and below the ruffle, her initials: HMF. He reached down without thinking and snatched the sock up silently, soundlessly. He stuffed it into his pocket as he walked backwards, faster as he went, returning to the center of the sanctuary.

  There was an exit door on the far side of the large room. He could get out there. Would they hear the click of the door as it closed? Maybe, but he would be gone, and they wouldn’t know he had been there. Each stride felt like a leap from here to there. He wasn’t breathing. Faster now. Faster.

  But he heard the sound of people moving, getting up. The sound of clothes pulled over bodies and a belt buckle clanging on itself. He fell to his hands and knees and crawled toward the door, but he heard louder whispers, whispers returning to the volume of normal voices. He rolled under the front pew and lay on his side, remembering Sunday nights, lying there in the heat of a summer evening. He remembered his mother never fanning herself, defying the heat, denying the sweat beading on her forehead, mouthing the words of his father’s sermons. He imagined his father’s words streaming out over everyone, exhorting, pleading.

  He remained on his side under the pew. He thought he heard the main doors to the sanctuary swing shut, the ones he had entered through, but he waited an extra moment before looking out from under the bench.

  Which was good, because his father hadn’t left, so Cohen scurried back under the church bench.

  He watched his father walk to the front, where he stood for a moment, looking up at the ceiling, his hands in his pants pockets, his collared shirt sloppily tucked in, his bald head dull in the dim light. His back was to Cohen, and it seemed a broad back, the strong back of an important man. His father’s shoulders seemed powerful, and for a moment Cohen wondered if he had ever examined his father from that side, when he wasn’t facing him. He could smell his father’s cologne mingling with the scent of the pine polish someone had used to shine the wooden pews.

  If Cohen hadn’t seen what he had seen, he might have thought his father was a priest of old, the way he stood there, powerful, staring up at the ceiling as if he could see right through it, right through even the midday blue sky and deep into a distant universe. Or maybe Cohen would have mistaken him for some kind of angel without wings, a supernatural guardian over the altar. He would have been tempted to crawl out from his hiding place and grab the back of his father’s foot to make sure he was flesh and blood, not principality or power.

  But there was no getting around what he had—and hadn’t—seen. What he hadn’t seen fed his imagination, set up camp in a place that would never be forgotten. These images confused themselves in Cohen’s mind, images of bodiless feet and the togetherness of his father and Miss Flynne in that all-too-tight space and the sound of words that weren’t words and the lumpy presence of the sock he held in his hand.

  He did not move from that spot.

  His father moved, though—fell to his knees in a slow collapse onto the bloodred carpet, still looking up at the ceiling. He fell forward onto the altar.

  Do This in Remembrance of Me.

  Cohen’s father was tall enough so that the front edge of the altar met his chest, and his head and shoulders fell forward, draping themselves on the wood. His head fell into one of the bars of golden light, and the light glared off it. His shoulders shook with sobs, and Cohen watched wide-eyed.

  The sobs went silent after such a short time that Cohen couldn’t be sure he had actually seen his father weeping. He could have easily counted the sobs if he had thought to do so. In the next instant, his father was still kneeling there, but now completely still.

  Time passed. Cohen thought his father might have died, so he rolled slowly backward and rose like an apparition between the first and second pew. He walked up to the front of the sanctuary, stood behind his father, and realized he was asleep. His father had drifted off on the altar. Cohen walked slowly backwards, backwards, backwards, then turned and pushed his way out of the sanctuary, out of that stuffy air, through the loud outer door and into the daylight.

  He ran, and he didn’t stop running, not until he made it to the green grass that led up to his own porch and the whining front door. He felt a strange sensation inside of him, something like anger, something like disdain, and at that age he couldn’t correctly identify it as jealousy. But that’s what it was.

  He was jealous his father had been that close to Miss Flynne. He was jealous she had not chosen him. He was so filled with that aching jealousy and images of legs in between the pews and lime-green nail polish and his father sleeping at the front of the church that he had completely forgotten about the sock still balled up in his pocket.

  eleven

  The Question

  Cohen sits quietly in the hospital cafeteria, staring into his black coffee. There are at least a hundred tables in the sprawling canteen, but there are only a handful of other people in the room, all sitting light-years apart. A woman wearing a navy-blue uniform and a hairnet walks from the kitchen to the food bar, her feet squeaking on the wet floor. A man and woman lean forward over their food trays, whispering to each other. The woman occasionally runs her fingers through her hair while her shoulders sob up and down. Three doctors sit around a table in the far corner, nodding, talking baseball, and grinning. Cohen can smell the pizza growing stale under the heat lamp and sees some kind of suede-colored gravy simmering. Outside the dark, tinted glass, headlights move through the city.

  He becomes strangely aware of all the many floors above him, the weight of sickness, the muted sound of doctors and nurses coming and going through hundreds of rooms. They grab clipboards inside each one, analyze the treatment, proclaim the next phase, discharge the patient, or shake their head and sadly say nothing more can be done. Over and over again, on every floor, this is happening. Cohen feels buried.

  An ambulance siren wails off in the distance, its sound steady and unchanging, as if it’s not coming or going but simply waiting, screaming. Abruptly it stops.

  He watches as Ava takes her coffee from the register over to the condiment station, adds sugar and cream, and stirs it all slowly with a black coffee straw. He wonders about this sudden reappearance of a long-ago friend. How will she go about it? Will she start by being friendly, or will she get straight to the point, interrogate him, ask him the where were you on the night of, and can anyone verify your whereabouts? Cohen thinks she looks worn. Perhaps that’s the word. Or thin, but not physically thin—emotionally thin, like something stretched so tight you can almost see through it. This is the marked difference between the Ava he knew as a child and the Ava who has shown up in his life: a kind of thinness, a life that has been dimmed. But this vanishes or recedes when Ava approaches the orange plastic chair, pulls it out from the table, and sits down.

  “Cohen,” she says, shaking her head as if Cohen has magically appeared in front of her that very moment. She gives a smile filled with so many things that it cannot be anything but real.

  Cohen sees the girl he once knew there in the smile, the pretty nose, the wide eyes. He remembers all the baseball, all the bike rides. He returns the smile, and he, too, feels genuinely happy, if only for a moment.

  “Ava,” he says, and his voice is hoarse. He clears his throat and starts again. “Ava. How are you?”

  She takes a sip of coffee. “Wow, that’s hot. Watch yourself. I’m good. Good. It’s been a long time.”

  “Was it graduation?” Cohe
n asks.

  “Maybe. But even . . .” Her voice trails off.

  Cohen knows what she was going to say, that even then it had been a while since they’d really seen each other, really spent any time together. Or something along those lines. They both know it, so it need not be said.

  “Where do you live?” she asks.

  “Still right here in the city,” Cohen says. “I have an apartment a few blocks away from the funeral home.”

  Ava shakes her head and laughs quietly to herself, and her laugh takes him back thirty years. “It’s a crazy place, this city, isn’t it? I’ve nearly moved back a few times, but it never worked out.”

  “So, where are you?”

  “Over in Middletown. Not far.”

  “But you work here?”

  She nods.

  “Did you ever . . . get married?” Cohen asks hesitantly.

  Ava laughs again, that quiet, pleasant laugh, and she shakes her head, shrugs.

  “Twice,” she says, and there it is: a hint of sadness in her voice, probably something a complete stranger wouldn’t have noticed. “And twice divorced. I guess I’m not much of a keeper.”

  Cohen tries to give her a look that is both understanding and full of consolation. “I doubt that’s the case.” He takes a sip of his coffee and doesn’t want to put the paper cup down.

  “You?” Ava asks. “Is there a beautiful Mrs. Cohen Marah at home bouncing babies? Herding the children? Bringing up the next in a long line of baseball-playing funeral directors?”

  Cohen chuckles. “Nah, couldn’t find the time.”

  “Really?” she asks, staring at him over her cup. She takes a sip. “Cohen the bachelor.” She says the words like a newspaper headline.

  “I’m too selfish,” he says, shrugging. “Any kids?”

  “One,” Ava says, and the word slips out like a sigh. “A son. He’s in high school. Spends most of the time with his father. My schedule is . . . inconsistent. He’s a wonderful son, though. A wonderful boy.”

  “Does he play baseball?”

  Ava’s smile turns quizzical, melancholy. “Yes,” she says slowly, quietly, in a new tone. “Yes. He does. Actually, first base.”

  Something like contentment drifts around them. Cohen is almost relieved that one of them had a son who’s playing baseball.

  “My nephew plays,” Cohen offers, shrugging. “But he’s young. Who knows if it will stick.”

  “It’ll stick,” Ava says. “It’s in his blood.”

  Cohen hears the screeching sound of the couple at the other end of the cafeteria pushing their chairs back from their table, the clattering sound of a metal spoon falling to the floor. They walk the long length of the room, leave their trays on the counter, and slip back into the hospital’s thoroughfares.

  Cohen takes a long drink of his coffee. “Your parents okay?”

  “My parents are fine.”

  Immediately Cohen realizes he shouldn’t have asked, because the next logical question would be for Ava to return the question, to ask if Cohen’s parents are okay, which they obviously are not. Or at least his father is not okay, and the fact that his mother isn’t there either means they’re estranged or she’s dead. It is a conversational dead end.

  For a while, the two of them stare into their coffee. Ava traces a crack in the table with her finger. She looks like she’s been working for many, many consecutive hours. Maybe consecutive days.

  “Cohen, we both know why I’m here.”

  Cohen frowns. “Do we?” he asks in a voice that’s almost a whisper.

  He has this sudden image of his father lying on the floor of the funeral home basement surrounded by that saintly ring of blood, his bald head shining. He can feel the blood on his fingertip from where he wiped the sole of his shoe. He rubs his fingers together beneath the table. He wonders if it’s still there, that barely visible shade of pink, the red filling in his swirling fingerprints.

  “I wish we’d be seeing each other under different circumstances,” Ava says, now looking directly into his eyes.

  Cohen clears his throat again and Ava waits for him to speak.

  “Things could be better,” he jokes, but his words fall flat.

  “I’m going to talk to my boss about recusing myself from the investigation,” Ava says. “I didn’t realize it was you. I even saw your father’s name on the report and it didn’t hit me. I guess I always thought of him simply as Cohen’s dad. I don’t know if I could have even told you his first name.”

  Cohen nods again. Now he is far away, years away. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t hear. But he feels he should say something, feels he should make some kind of effort. It seems kind of her to step aside, kind of her to tell him that much.

  He blurts the first question that comes to his mind. “How long have you been, you know, doing this?”

  “You mean how long have I been a police detective?” she asks, smiling. “I started right after college. I was a state trooper for six years. Now, detective for, oh, I don’t know. I lost count.”

  “What’s your gut tell you?” Cohen asks, staring into Ava’s eyes.

  “What do you mean?” she asks.

  “What’s your gut tell you?” He shrugs, looking away nervously.

  She shakes her head. “I don’t . . .”

  Cohen laughs quietly to himself. It sounds more like a series of gentle sniffs. “Do you think I did it?”

  She crosses her arms, sighs, and sits back in her seat. Her face hardens slightly, and she returns Cohen’s stare. Her eyes go flat, from glossy to matte in the time it takes him to put his coffee down. Her mouth has straightened out. She seems to be taking everything in—not only Cohen but the doctors who have finished their food and now lean back in their plastic chairs, arms crossed. The woman who has taken away the pizza. The three old women who enter. Everything is entering some sort of calculator, the equations are forming, the x’s and y’s transforming into values on either side.

  This is a different Ava, Cohen thinks.

  “When I sit here? Talking to you?” she says, and every sentence is a question now. “When I see my old friend? Drinking coffee?”

  Cohen waits for her to continue.

  “No. I don’t think you did it. We don’t suspect any foul play,” Ava says. “Of course, everything must be taken into account. But it’s looking like either an accident or a suicide.” She says the last word quietly, reverently.

  Cohen nods, shrugs. “All day, I’ve felt like it was my fault. Like I killed my father. Not physically. But still, it feels like my fault.”

  The two sit there without saying a word. Cohen can hear the kitchen staff in the back, cleaning up. The sound of spraying water. The sound of dishes rattling together.

  “Can I ask you something, Cohen? Something I’ve been thinking about for a long time?”

  He nods. He knows where the conversation is headed.

  “Do you remember the winter of 1989?” Ava asks. “December? Just before Christmas? Because I do.”

  Cohen nods. Of course he remembers.

  “I never would have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself,” Ava says, and now she is talking to herself as much as to him. “Sometimes I’m still not sure if I really saw it.” She stands up. “Did I see it, Cohen? Was that real? Because if it was real, if I saw what I saw?” She shrugs.

  It’s like an old dream to him now, something he has pushed down and out of his mind for decades. But she’s a detective now. She would be interested in tying up those sorts of loose ends.

  Ava turns to walk away, but she stands there for another moment, perhaps waiting for Cohen to say something. Cohen isn’t sure what he could say that would fill that silence in the right way.

  Thank you?

  Goodbye?

  I can explain what you saw in December of 1989?

  He doesn’t look up again until he hears the swinging door squeak in its movement behind Ava at the other end of the empty cafeteria.

  twelve
/>
  A Letter

  July 17, 1984

  Dear Co,

  I’m sorry. That’s all I can say. I’m sorry. I feel absolutely awful about what happened. I had no idea that’s what Mom was planning to do, and I wouldn’t have come along if I knew, or maybe if I knew I would have run ahead and warned you. At least we wouldn’t have had to see it. But I didn’t know. I thought we were just going to your baseball game.

  I should have known, though. I should have known when I saw that look in her eyes all morning. She was in an absolute trance. She was so distracted, she burned all the breakfast food—the toast and the eggs. I cleaned it all up because after she burned it she walked into the living room and sat on the sofa, staring out the window. The house was full of smoke. The clothes I wore that day still stink.

  Mom hasn’t moved much since we got here. She mostly sits in this little green armchair we bought at Goodwill and stares out the window. The windows here don’t have screens, and I’m always killing flies or bees that have come in. But she stares at the cars that go by outside. It’s loud here. I miss our house. I miss the country.

  Has Dad said anything to you since THE DAY? I often wonder what he thinks about all this. Does he tell you anything? I can’t imagine him actually talking. He never has. But you know that. It must be quiet in the house, unless he’s changed. I wonder if he’s changed, now that it’s just you and him. I hope he’s changed.

  Oh, I’m so sorry. What an embarrassment.

  I sometimes wonder how we were born into this. I look around at my new friends here in the city, and so many of them—not all of them, of course, some have parents even worse than ours—have parents who are normal, who don’t shout at each other in public, who are still married, and they eat meals together and both parents come to parent-teacher conferences. What happened to us? I mean, I know what happened. But why? Why us?