The same spring Cohen met Ava, the same spring he took a baseball to the nose and leaked blood all over himself, he walked to his father’s church one day after school, as he sometimes did. He passed their house and kept on for another mile or so, arriving at the church to find the front door unlocked. It was a warm day but the metal was cold. He had to pull with both hands to budge the heavy door, and it made a loud latching sound behind him that echoed in the dim, empty foyer.
There, the doors to the bathrooms. There, the place an usher always stood during the service. There, the double wooden doors that swung open into the sanctuary. The air smelled like pine mingled with the warm scent left behind by a recently used vacuum cleaner, one that had left angled lines in the bloodred carpet. The empty church filled him with a reverent, spooky kind of feeling, and he tried to breathe lightly.
Cohen pulled back the doors that led into the sanctuary and slipped in between them. They closed without a sound behind him. The air was still and warm. Light fell in stretched beams through the tall, narrow windows at the front of the sanctuary, and he walked forward, transfixed. The light seemed somehow solid, like gold bars. He moved silently down the center aisle, past each and every row, holding his breath in the stillness, all the way to the front where there was a rectangular wooden altar with words engraved on it.
Do This in Remembrance of Me.
There, the light fell all the way to the floor.
Small specks of dust floated through the bars of light, and at first Cohen didn’t want to breathe for fear of blowing the holy light away. But then he leaned in close and blew gently, a breath of life, and the tiny dust planets swirled in and out of the light in circular patterns. Cohen smiled. The room was silent.
But wait.
There was one sound.
What was that? It seemed to be off in the distance, something out of place. The dust planets swirled back on themselves in the void of moving air, rushing back at Cohen. But he didn’t notice them anymore. He didn’t move. He listened like a rabbit disturbed by distant sounds. Of what? Wind in the grass? A shadow? His eyes held steady before looking one way, then the other. He took one step back, away from the beam of light.
He followed the sound to the left side of the church, about halfway back. He held out one hand at his side, grazing softly over each and every polished pew. They were made of oak, stained dark brown, and held swirls and patterns like fingerprints in the grain.
It was a small, persistent sound. Air moved through a forgotten window, pushing the white drapes against the paneled walls. But the farther into the shadowy side of the church he went, the clearer the sound became. It was the sound of people. Whispering. Moving. He stopped when he saw the two pairs of feet stretching out from between two pews. One pair of feet wore his father’s shoes, the toes pointing down, and outside of them, toes pointed up, were the exquisitely painted, lime-green toenails of Miss Flynne.
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.