Light from Distant Stars

by Shawn Smucker

  “Cohen,” Beth says. “It’s your father. It’s Calvin.”

  Cohen nods, and relief rushes over him. Finally this part will be over. Finally someone has found his father and has reported it and he can be brought into the situation naturally. Finally he is allowed to know what he already knows.

  “What?” Cohen asks, trying to sound surprised. “What about him?” It’s very difficult sounding surprised when you know what’s coming. You have to be a fine actor to pull that one off, and Cohen is no actor. In fact, he’s a terrible liar. He walks up to Kaye’s car and motions for her to roll the window down. He wants to be able to tell her as soon as he gets the news from Beth.

  Kaye rolls down her window, and the swirling snow blows inside. “Goodness, it’s cold, Cohen. What’s wrong?” she asks, shielding her eyes against the bright white outside the car.

  “It’s Dad,” Cohen says, holding his hand over the phone.

  “What do you mean, it’s Dad?” Kaye asks, going from annoyed to concerned in the space of two seconds flat. Suddenly the snow does not bother her. Suddenly the sleet rat-tat-tapping on the glass windshield and bouncing into the car and glancing off the steering wheel is nothing. The tiny white particles cling to her sweater, her eyelashes, lodging themselves in the space between her fingers.

  Cohen holds up a finger again, and the snowflakes and sleet continue to fill his hair, ricochet off his face. “Beth, what’s wrong?” he asks, waiting for the words, “Your father is dead” or “Your father has died” or “There’s been a terrible accident.” He’s eager for those words so that he can stop pretending. So that he can know, legitimately, what has happened.

  “Cohen, what’s wrong with you?” Beth shouts. “Why won’t you listen to me? Your father is on his way to the hospital! You and Kaye need to go there right away!”

  “Wait,” Cohen says. His face feels suddenly numb. He wonders if this is what it feels like to have a stroke. “Dad’s not—wait. What?”

  “Something happened,” Beth says, and she starts to cry. Her words come out an octave higher. “There was an accident. Or someone did something. No one’s telling me anything. But your dad. He’s . . . You need to get over here. Both of you.”

  “He’s not—dead? Is he?” Cohen asks, and he cannot hide the complete disbelief in his voice.

  “Not yet,” Beth says, taking a deep breath. “Please, Cohen. Please come to the hospital. Hurry.”

  six

  The Old House

  Cohen drives to Saint Mary’s Hospital using back roads to reenter the city, and it’s a draw, really—the time difference between shooting straight into town and winding around the traffic. The fields are cold and wet and seem somehow betrayed by the weather.

  He is driving past the house he grew up in, the house he lived in with his mother and father and sister before things fell apart, and he wonders if maybe this is why he came this way. That was house number one, and the majority of his memories of that house are peaceful, straightforward. There were four of them around the dinner table, four of them waking up in the morning, grumbling and quiet and arguing over cereal or the last piece of toast. Everything was as it should be.

  He slows down, amazed that it still stands alone, that no other houses have been built around it. He glances at the upstairs windows, one of which was his bedroom. He wonders who lives there, if the inside is still the same. Had anyone ever found the treasures he had hidden in the heat registers or retrieved the baseballs accidentally lodged in the second-story gutters?

  His phone rings and he answers. It’s Kaye, driving behind him.

  “What are you doing?” Kaye asks. “Why are you driving so slow?”

  He can tell by the sound of her voice that she’s been crying. “Sorry. I got caught up looking at the old house, to be honest. Sorry.”

  She is silent, and in his rearview mirror he can see her looking off to the side, taking in the old house, wiping tears from her cheeks. When she talks, a deep hesitation pulls on her words, and there is a ready-made apology in case the words are not accepted. “Do you think”—she pauses—“one of us should call Mother?”

  He has to bite his lip to avoid laughing, but it is not a humorous laugh trying to escape. Rather, it is a laugh born of disbelief or cynicism. “No,” he says, and his voice catches. He clears his throat again, coughs. “Not yet. Let’s wait until we know what’s going on.”

  “What will we do without him?” Kaye asks, and her voice disintegrates.

  “Listen,” he says, surprised at how convincing he can be. He nearly believes himself. “It’s going to be okay. It is. No matter what. You have to be strong, Kaye, for Johnny and for me. I need you to be strong for me. Do you hear me? I can’t do this. Not alone.”

  She doesn’t say anything, but he looks at her again in his rearview mirror and can see her head moving straight up and down, up and down.

  “Okay.” She sniffs loudly, taking a deep breath. He wonders if she’s looking for that same place inside of herself, the place she used to go during their father’s long and heavy summer sermons, the place where time could not wear her down.

  “Okay,” she says again.

  He edges his car forward, and his mind wanders elsewhere, and soon he’s approaching the funeral home in the small city, the funeral home their family owns, only a few blocks from the hospital. He thinks about finding his father in the basement, now hours in the past. It’s hard to believe all these things have happened today. And so much more to come. He wants it all to be over. He wants to be three months from now, or six, when everything is sorted out and life is swinging back into something like normal, and the pit of anxiety in his stomach is gone.

  He stops the car again, this time at the red light beside the apartment and funeral home, where he and his father lived after his mother left with Kaye, where his father still lives. He can see the window that looks out from what had been his bedroom.

  He notices the street corner with the navy-blue postbox standing in the narrow grass strip separating the street from the sidewalk. It is directly opposite the funeral home, and it stands there like an old watchman, some kind of sentry. It’s like the guard who never leaves the tomb of the unknown soldier.

  That was it.

  That was the very spot where he first saw the Beast, where it crawled out from under those nighttime shadows and came at their apartment, furtive and floating and dark, the stuff of childhood nightmares.

  Only, it hadn’t been a nightmare. It had been real.

  seven

  The Detective

  His phone rings again. Kaye blows her horn.

  “I’m sorry.” He winces, cutting off Kaye’s pleading. “I’m sorry. I got distracted again. I’ll drive. I’m driving.”

  He pulls away from the traffic light by the funeral home, but he can’t help looking in the rearview mirror at the spot where he first saw that thing, that darkness. It looks so normal, the grass frosted by the earlier snow, the blue United States Postal Service box standing there, unassuming. There’s a boy pushing his bike along the sidewalk, taking his time. The boy reminds Cohen of himself at that age.

  Cohen parks across the street from the hospital and realizes he will need to act urgently now. He will need to present the world with a Cohen who knows nothing, a Cohen who wants to know as quickly as possible what has happened to his father.

  “You are an impossible driver, do you know that?” Kaye blurts, pulling out a handkerchief and blowing her nose before crossing the street with Cohen, pulling Johnny behind her. The boy takes fast steps in order to keep up, still in his baseball uniform with a borrowed coat that has sleeves reaching down past his fingertips. His cleats make a clacking sound on the wet street.

  Cohen doesn’t answer. They all walk through the emergency entrance, skimming the ground, barely touching the shining floors of the hospital.

  “I’m sure he’s okay, right? Don’t you think so, Cohen?”

  Cohen walks straight to the receptionist, still no
t looking at Kaye. “We’re here to see my father,” he says. “Calvin Marah?”

  The woman says his father’s room number. Cohen, Kaye, and Johnny stand beside the elevator, wait impatiently, and consider the stairs. Just as they decide to take the steps, the elevator dings and the doors slide open. On the way up, Kaye paces in the tight space, her right arm resting on her large stomach, her left hand cupped over her mouth. Two steps this way, that way, this way.

  “What could possibly have happened?” she asks herself, pacing and talking, her voice muffled by her fingers. “Beth didn’t tell you anything? Nothing? Did he have a heart attack? Stroke?” Two steps this way, two steps that way.

  Johnny stares at her as if waiting for her to explode. Cohen reaches over and puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Johnny. It’s going to be okay.”

  Will it though? he wonders. Will it?

  There’s a reason hospital descriptions are cliché, and that’s because they all really do smell the same, sound the same, look the same. There is the neatness of a nice hotel but overlaid with a kind of sterility. The lights are a shade brighter than anyone would like. All shoes squeak on the shining floors.

  Cohen feels like he shouldn’t be there—he always feels that way in hospitals, even though he spends more time there than most people. Usually, though, he is in the morgue, in the basement with the dead, not on the floors with the nearly dead or dying or recovering. A hospital seems too important a place for someone to simply walk in and out as they wish. He would have felt better if there was a metal detector to go through or if a security guard gave him a quick pat down. In a place where people die or are brought back from death or walk along the line between life and death, it seemed to him that you couldn’t be too careful. There should be some kind of protocol. There should be standards for who is allowed in.

  An image flashes through his mind of his father’s bald head resting on the funeral home basement floor. He squeezes his eyes shut, feeling like he might pass out. He wonders if that would be good, if that would demonstrate some kind of emotion consistent with these events. Kaye reaches up and puts her arm around his shoulders, and he can tell that she, too, is struggling. She’s leaning on him. They’re leaning on each other.

  They walk out of the elevator and find their father’s room. Johnny has drifted into the wake behind them. Cohen and Kaye stand there for a moment, staring at the closed door that leads into their father’s hospital room.

  “Should we go in, Co?” she asks, looking up into his face. He looks down into hers, finds the face of his big sister at the end of one of her weekend visits from Mom’s house, asking him if he was doing okay—no, really, are you doing okay? You can always come home with us, you know? And he has the same old feeling he always had with her: a strong desire to tell her the truth about what was really going on in his life, yet always coupled with a complete inability to do so.

  A rustle of movement on the other side of Kaye catches his attention. But why? Nurses move here and there, pulling carts and pushing IV trolleys. Doctors go from room to room. The red second hand on the otherwise black-and-white clock slides in a gliding motion around the circle. There is plenty of movement on that floor, outside of his father’s room. So why does one particular rising catch his attention?

  The movement is that of a woman standing up from a waiting room seat, part of a row of chairs against the wall. She wears a long black trench coat that reaches to her calves, and under that a professional outfit—slacks and a button-down shirt. Her fingers are laced together in front of her, and she wrings them tighter together as if she’s nervous, as if her hands need to be drained dry. She nods at Cohen. He has a strange feeling that she expects him to recognize her, and even more odd, he does recognize her. He nods back, thinking hard.

  “Cohen Marah?” Her voice is smooth and kind, and it catches in the middle of his last name. She has a pretty nose and wide-set eyes and short brown hair.

  Cohen nods. “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “C’mon, Co,” Kaye says. “We have to go in. We have to see Dad.”

  He nods to her, and he is aware of how much nodding he does, how much acquiescing. “Sure. Let’s go.” He turns back to the woman he knows he should know. “I’ll just be a second.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” she says. “I have a few questions for you, if that’s okay?”

  And even though the woman’s last sentence comes out like a question, Cohen senses it’s not a question. In fact, it is the opposite of a question. It’s a demand. The way the woman says “I have a few questions for you” sends a jolt through Cohen’s body. All at once he realizes what the woman does, and it takes everything in him not to run. She’s a detective, he realizes, or a police officer.

  He’s like a deer when a twig breaks in the undergrowth. He takes a deliberate, steady breath, tries to slow the blinking of his eyes. He becomes very aware of every muscle in his face, his swallowing, his breathing. Breathing. He realizes he isn’t breathing. He takes a deep breath, sighs, hoping that it sounds like the sad sigh of a man going in to see his father for the last time. What if she has already spoken to the neighbors, and they’ve told her about the loud fight between him and his father? What if she noticed the sliver missing from the round pool of blood and tracked it to his shoe?

  Why does he feel so guilty?

  It comes to him the way a star first appears in the darkening sky.

  “Ava?” Cohen asks quietly, and he says the name the same way you say a new word in a different language, a word you’ve never said before. And when he says her name he speaks a million things into existence: memories and emotions and regrets. It’s all there around his head, a cloud, a nebula. All issuing forth with the speaking of a name.

  The woman nods, smiling, and for a moment she seems genuinely happy to see Cohen, or perhaps she’s surprised that he recognizes her. But her face changes as she remembers the circumstances, the dying man in the room, and her smile dwindles into sympathy and something else. Something else.

  “Can we grab a coffee later?” Ava asks.

  “Okay. Sure,” Cohen mumbles, feeling himself veer off track. “I’ll only be a moment. I need to find out about my father.” His voice trembles. He turns away from Ava, puts his hand on the latch that opens the door, and pushes. He enters the room with Kaye looking up at him, her eyes asking questions. Johnny is right behind them, looking over his shoulder at the woman.

  Walking away from Ava, leaving her in the hallway, is one of the greatest reliefs of Cohen’s life.

  eight

  The Bloody Nose

  Cohen doesn’t remember with any precision the first time he held a baseball, the first time he stared, mesmerized, at the pattern of 108 red stitches holding together two strips of worn white horsehide. Because of those seams, the ball did not roll smoothly across the linoleum kitchen floor; rather, it lurched and leaned this way, that way, like someone trying to find their balance on a moving platform. He crawled after it, pushed it ahead, and watched it bobble along. He lifted it, tried to put it in his mouth, slobbered on it. For him, the baseball was part of being.

  At three or four years of age, Cohen tried to catch the hardball as his father tossed it into his waiting arms. Calvin did not believe in starting with a Wiffle ball or a tennis ball—no, it was a real, standard-sized hardball from the very beginning. He tossed it to Cohen carefully, gingerly, the way you might throw an egg.

  “Hold your arms out,” Calvin said softly, stretching Cohen’s arms taut, pushing them together, and tossing the ball so that it balanced between his milky elbows. It was less a matter of Cohen catching than it was of Calvin throwing the ball accurately into his surprised limbs, but with each catch, Cohen grew to love the game more, this game of catch, this game that connected him with his father. When he caught the ball, his normally serious father smiled. That was all the reason he needed to love the game.

  At the age of five, Cohen had his first glove, and he grew used to the rough inside
edges against his fingers, the way it grew softer with time, the sound of the ball nestling into the webbed pocket, sometimes with a smack, sometimes with an oomph, sometimes like a punch in the gut. He threw the ball well by that age, and he felt like something special, hurling that orb through space.

  “Good throw!” his father always said, sometimes pretending the force of the throw had stung his hand. “Yow!” he would cry.

  “Nice catch!” Calvin shouted with each snag, or “Well, good try” with every drop. But the drops came few and far between by the time Cohen was six. The two of them would stand in the front yard of their home in the country, tossing the ball back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. It was like a conversation without words, except for his father’s “Good throw!” and “Yow!” and “Nice catch!” and “Well, good try.” It was how they connected, this ball circling, spinning through the air, a small world traveling back and forth at gentle speeds, the leather sound of a catch, the light grunt that came after a hard throw.

  His father had taught him how to turn his glove: palm up to catch the ball if it arrived at stomach height or lower, and palm forward if the ball came in at chest height or higher. There was always the arc of the ball, the speed of its approach, the background of the large oak trees or a passing car or the great blue sky. Sometimes he peeked up at the house windows and saw his mother staring down at them, arms crossed, before looking quickly away.

  He had his first baseball practice the spring after he turned nine. It took place on the ball diamond at the bottom of the hill behind the VFW. In those days, ballfields were not as immaculately kept—fathers mowed the outfield on their days off only after the grass was long enough to lose a ball in, and they dragged the dirt smooth around the infield with a section of chain-link fence weighed down with a handful of bricks pulled behind an old riding mower. In those days, a few weeds peeked through, and when he and his father walked quietly up to the third-base line, the infield was already filled with other eight- and nine-year-olds playing catch. Most of the throws were short or long or hit kids on the head or the leg or the chest. There were a few precious catches. For the most part, it was chaos.