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 not 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.