Light from Distant Stars Page 7

  More old memories surface. Cohen sees the Beast crawling out from under the car, nearly shapeless, its shadowy limbs somehow present but also formless. He feels again the terror when he realizes it is coming across the street. The fear rises in his throat. He coughs.

  The voice of the priest pushes back those nightmares, his voice gentle and kind. “Come,” he says, clearing his throat. “Have a seat, Cohen.”

  Cohen, without thinking about it, removes his shoes and walks to the front, sits quietly in the chair, and feels an unexpected surge of emotion. Tears, or the beginnings of tears, form in his throat and his eyes. He swallows hard, and he can only say two words. “Father James.”

  “First,” the priest begins, “allow me to read this from The Book of Common Prayer.”

  He pauses and Cohen can hear the rustling of thin pages. There is something there in the air, something quiet and holy. Something he has forgotten or left behind. Again he remembers the stars.

  “Reconciliation of a Penitent,” the priest reads, “or Penance, is the rite in which those who repent of their sins may confess them to God in the presence of a priest, and receive the assurance of pardon and the grace of absolution.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  Through the screen, Cohen can see Father James nod his head. “Confession is a holy sacrament, a physical sign of the unseen sacred. You may begin when you are ready, Cohen.”

  Cohen nods. He feels the presence of so many things—the gentle patience of the priest, the knowledge that only a few blocks away his father is dying, the memory of things from his past. The lingering doubt in God that has followed him his whole life. Night pressing in around the church.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  When Father James speaks, Cohen still can’t see his face clearly through the screen, even though they are close together, but he can picture the priest speaking with his eyes closed as he often does. Every word he speaks is genuine, as if he’s making up the confession script for the very first time, as if no one has ever spoken these words before.

  “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.”

  Cohen crosses himself clumsily and licks his lips, wondering what that would be like, the Lord upon his lips. He remembers Isaiah’s burning coal, Miss Flynne telling them the story with flannel Isaiah on the board alongside a golden-haired angel reaching down, touching his lips with a live ember. He closes his eyes and repeats the words he has come to memorize since joining Father James’s parish a decade 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 . . .”

  Cohen pauses, unsure of how to continue.

  “But especially,” he says, and again he stops. He opens his eyes, staring at the warm rug beneath his feet and then up at the painting of the Christ. The downturned face. The disappointed eyes. The ruby red. The gold flecks. The wall behind the painting is a soft, baby blue, like the sky on a spring day.

  “Go ahead, Cohen,” Father James whispers.

  “But especially,” Cohen says in a voice so quiet it gets lost in the room, “especially in regards to the death of my father.”

  sixteen

  The Final Inning

  Cohen grabbed his mitt, jumped out of the car, and ran across the parking lot to the ballfield. He stopped where the parking lot ended and the wilted grass began and looked back for a moment at his father, who slammed the heavy car door and trudged through the heat waving up off the ground. He walked in a way that was weighed down by early July, with its humidity and long days and the sense it gave them that summer would never end. The world would never cool. Fall and winter and spring were forever banished.

  Calvin wiped the sweat from his head with the white handkerchief he always carried. He started at his forehead and continued down to his face where he dabbed his eyes and cheeks and finally his neck, rough as it was from not shaving. It was Saturday, noon, and he didn’t shave on Saturdays. Cohen didn’t like the way his father looked on those weekend days, unfinished, transient, like a hobo. By the age of nine he had already become more comfortable with the clean-shaven man with the shining head, preaching in a suit, than he was with his Saturday father, the one who walked the house in slippers, stubble rough and clothes sloppy.

  Cohen felt the pull of the ballfield but couldn’t look away from his father. Something about him on that day seemed weary, but not at the beginning of weariness, when it is new and surprising, and not in the middle of weariness, when it seems you have a long way to go and have nearly grown used to it. No, his father seemed end-of-the-line weary, when it appears the hard days of life will never end. He looked like he might collapse at the next step. Or the next one. Or the next. Cohen stood there watching his father cross the parking lot, and he felt weary for him.

  These thoughts slowed him down as he turned and walked into the grass. A line of parents had already formed, some in lawn chairs, some standing with arms crossed, all of them ready for this season to be over. The mothers read magazines or did crossword puzzles, and the fathers spoke to each other about the heat and how high the corn had grown, and it being only the middle of July.

  Cohen put on his glove.

  He stopped, frozen in place, barely inside the chain-link infield fence.

  “Hey, Cohen!” Ava shouted, but he didn’t look up.

  It wasn’t in his glove. He had left it in his glove, but it wasn’t there. He bit his lip. He searched around in his mind, trying to remember where he had left Miss Flynne’s sock.

  He ran back past the line of lawn chair parents, back past his lumbering, Saturday morning father, into the parking lot toward the car. Calvin stopped, watched Cohen go past, and didn’t say a word.

  Cohen got to the car, yanked open the door, and looked on the floor of the passenger side and under the seat and, for good measure but no good reason, in the back seat and all through the driver’s side, but it wasn’t there. The sock was nowhere. But it wasn’t nowhere—it was somewhere, and that’s what concerned him, the somewhere it might have ended up.

  Cohen held his baseball glove on the crown of his head, pulled it down with worry, and thought back through the morning. Had he tucked it under his pillow? Left it under the dresser? That would be the best possibility, but he thought he remembered fishing it out from there. Had it fallen out of his glove when he was eating breakfast or walking to the car? Was it lying in their yard, a white flag, a shouting witness? He could imagine it there, limp, patient, the letters looking up at the hazy summer sky.

  HMF.

  He ran back to where his father stood. “Dad,” he said, breathless, “we have to go home.” It was a prayer, a plea.

  The team had already assembled on the bench, the coach shouting out positions and batting order. The game was about to begin.

  “What?”

  “We have to go home. I’m not feeling well. We have to go.”

  “Cohen, this is your last game. You look fine. What’s wrong?”

  “I just . . . Dad, we have to go.”

  His father stared at him, squinting in the sun. He stood there like a statue, a pillar. He reached into his deep pocket and drew out the hanky again, wiping his head, his eyes, his cheeks, his neck. He was shaking his head slowly before he even finished cleaning away the sweat.

  “Cohen, it’s your last game. I don’t know what you’re up to, but we’re not leaving, not now.”

  A voice from the bench. “Cohen Marah, second base, batting sixth!”

  “Did you hear that, Son? Now get out there. Stop this nonsense. We’ll be home soon enough, and then you can do whatever it is you so badly need to do.”

  “But . . .”

  His father didn’t say anything, but his stare deepened. Cohen turned, shoulders sagging, and drifted in the dir
ection of second base.

  “Hurry up!” his father shouted behind him. “Get out there!”

  “Hustle, Cohen!” his coach echoed.

  But Cohen couldn’t hustle. He couldn’t hurry. The weight of every bad thing that could happen in his life pulled down on him. What if his mother found the sock?

  The July humidity rose from the grass, and the air smelled of the deepest greens, the kind that settled in among forest shadows. The sky was a molten white with small patches of blue.

  The game started and Cohen scanned the hill by the VFW, waiting for his mother’s car to come down from the main road. The longer it took her, the heavier the sense of dread in his gut. It was a churning, poisonous thing. She was rarely early, but she was at every game by the end of the first inning. He kept looking over at the lane, so often, in fact, that he missed a first-inning grounder hit his way. He never missed grounders. They were his specialty.

  “Stay in the game, Cohen! Keep your glove down! Bend your knees!” his coach shouted.

  “Pay attention!” his father yelled.

  “Hang in there, Cohen. You got this,” Ava said from first, questions on her face, a quiet curiosity in her voice.

  Cohen passed the time by sinking down inside himself—it was the only place he could go. The second inning ended and the third inning started and still there was no sign of his mother and Kaye. His at-bats were distracted strikeouts, and seconds after he returned to the bench he couldn’t have recalled a thing about them. Cohen returned to the field, sure something had gone terribly wrong. He thought he might throw up on the infield, and he considered it, wondering if it might be his only ticket home, his only chance to get back and make things right before everything veered off the tracks.

  The heat bore down on everyone. The home plate umpire became overheated and kept walking over to the visiting team’s bench every other batter, breathing heavy and dumping water on his head and red face. Under his arms, his shirt was dark and soaked. Before Cohen’s team got their second out that inning, the umpire fainted, sort of folded in on himself and drifted forward, nearly crushing their undersized catcher. Both coaches ran onto the field and knelt over the man, and for a few glorious minutes the chatter among Cohen’s teammates was that the game would be called. They couldn’t continue without an umpire. They could all go home, and Cohen could find that stupid sock and burn it or chuck it in the creek or tuck it in something and throw it away, because nothing in the world was worth this amount of dread. He imagined the relief he would feel at church the next day, the sock discarded, the anxiety gone.

  The umpire walked gingerly back to his car, refusing help, drifting in and out of parking spaces until he found his own vehicle. The teams’ coaches seemed resigned to the game’s ending, everyone saying what a shame it was the season had to end this way, but to Cohen’s horror, his father walked over to where they were talking.

  Cohen’s feet were glued to the ground, and he was very aware of each drop of sweat as it trickled down his temples, his cheeks, his nose, his chin. What strange twist was this?

  His father volunteered to take the umpire’s place. His father, while being a dedicated baseball man, had never umpired a game before in his life. But there he was, pulling on the huge padded chest protector like a reverse turtle shell, slipping the black umpire mask onto his face, cleaning off home plate with a tiny brush so that a small cloud of tan dust rose around him, before he squatted down behind the catcher and started calling balls and strikes.

  Where was Cohen’s mother?

  What was his father doing?

  What strange apocalypse was unfolding in front of him?

  Inning after inning passed, and his mother’s continued absence was the confirmation of his greatest and most horrible nightmares. She had never completely missed any of his games before. She had found the sock. She was on her way to kill his father. She had committed suicide, her body in the basement. Kaye was on the run. He should be too. He eyed the cornfield, wondering if he could get lost in it.

  His father, meanwhile, seemed to be enjoying himself, and he was doing a capable job, his strike zone acceptable to both batters and pitchers alike. His authority as a pastor found a strange companion in the world of being an umpire, and when he shouted “Strike!” or “He’s out!” his voice was remarkably reminiscent of those Sunday night services when he tried to preach the lost home. Every pitch was a prayer, and he answered in an even voice. In between innings, he removed his mask and wiped his face and head and neck with his handkerchief. At first Cohen thought his father was simply squinting, but when he looked closer, he was taken aback.

  His father was grinning. As if he was enjoying himself. Cohen had never seen his father grin before, not like that. His father smiled, yes, especially when speaking with parishioners and sometimes even while he preached or told a story. He laughed occasionally, usually at Kaye when she said something clever—often his father’s laughs were mirrored by his mother’s flatline look of disapproval. But Cohen had never seen him grin, not like that, and he certainly didn’t expect it in the midst of the heat and the sun and the dust. Grinning. Like a boy.

  “Cohen!” the coach called out as they took the field for the last inning. “Take the mound.”

  Cohen’s heart stopped. His coach wanted him to pitch? When his father was the home plate umpire?

  Cohen weighed his options. He could run away, and immediately this seemed the most viable choice. Running meant he wouldn’t have to explain himself to anyone. He could pretend to pass out, the second victim of heat stroke on that hot July day. But he wasn’t sure of his ability to fake unconsciousness. He could refuse his coach.

  But Ava was there, smiling her encouragement, handing him the ball. She was running back to first base, already shouting for him. And so he found himself stepping onto the mound.

  He was mindful of each breath. He tried to rub the sweat off his forehead and cheeks with the back of his gloved hand but only succeeded in spreading it around, stinging the corners of his eyes. He swallowed hard. The baseball felt heavy, unwieldy, as if it were growing in his hands. He took another deep breath, went into his windup, and pitched the ball.

  The batter didn’t swing, although it was a lovely pitch on the inside half of the plate, about belt high.

  “Ball one,” his father said.

  Cohen, catching the ball thrown back to him, did a double take. That was a perfect strike—the way it had left his hand, flown through the air, and nestled into the catcher’s mitt, with the catcher barely having to move his hand to catch it. What was his father doing?

  Now anger nestled in with the nerves and the doubt and the desire not to be on the pitcher’s mound on that hot July day. What was wrong with his father, that he would call a perfect strike a ball?

  Cohen reached back, threw the next pitch, grunted as it left his hand. He watched it spin toward the catcher, again belt high, this time on the outside half of the plate. The batter didn’t swing.

  “Ball two,” his father said, and Cohen stood there for a long moment staring at the umpire, the decision maker, his own father. Another perfectly thrown pitch. Another strike. Yet he had called it a ball. Again.

  Cohen reached up and caught the ball the catcher returned to him, but he didn’t turn to go back to the mound, not at first. He stood there staring at his father, shouts and protests and complaints lodging behind his tongue, waiting to erupt from his throat.

  “Play ball,” his father said tersely.

  Cohen said nothing. He turned. He got ready to throw another pitch.

  “You got this, Cohen!” Ava said.

  “Right down the middle, Cohen!” his coach shouted.

  A group of birds darted overhead, making for the fields and the waist-high corn. A sudden breeze blew, rustling the stalks, heaving the flat clouds across the metallic sky, kicking up dust. The sun glared from behind those clouds, a bright presence that took up half the sky. Cohen reached back and threw another pitch.

  T
his last pitch—and it would end up being Cohen’s last pitch of the game, the last pitch of the season, the last pitch of his entirely too brief baseball career—was perfect, a fastball right down the middle of the plate. He had managed to harness the anger, the frustration, and all those pent-up words in the back of his throat and direct it into that final pitch. He expected the batter to swing at such a perfect pitch, but he didn’t. He stood there and stared as the ball sailed into the catcher’s mitt and made a satisfying pop.

  Cohen waited for the strike call.

  “Ball three,” his father said in an almost disinterested voice.

  “What?” Cohen shouted, and everyone on the field stared at him, the nine-year-old pitcher arguing with the umpire. Kids his age never argued with umpires.

  The fathers stopped talking about the corn, and the mothers looked up over the edges of their magazines. His father didn’t say anything in response, but his back stiffened, and he flipped up his mask so that it rested on top of his head. The two of them stood there staring at each other through the dust and the wind and the heat.

  The catcher didn’t seem to know what to do so he threw the ball back, but Cohen didn’t even try to catch it. He was still staring at his father. The ball drifted over his shoulder, thudded behind him, and rolled into the grass. Cohen kept staring at his father. He reached up and pushed the brim of his ball cap back, but he didn’t look away.

  Cohen could have gone on indefinitely, staring his father down. He knew he had been wronged; he knew the universe was on his side, and that sense of righteousness filled him with resolve. The birds left the sky a clean slate, and still he didn’t move. The clouds drifted from west to east and the corn grew, and still he stared at his father.

  “Play! Ball!” his father said again, taking off the mask and squeezing it in white-knuckled intensity.

  But it was too late. All of it was too late. Cohen had thrown his last pitch. Something else was coming, a different kind of fury altogether, and its first movement caught Cohen’s eye. He looked up the lane that led from the VFW down to the ballfield, and there came his mother’s car over the hill, an old Volkswagen Rabbit, silver, the sunlight glaring from the windshield.