Cohen emerges out of the funeral home basement and into the bright day, shedding his meeting with Ava and the detective like a thin skin. He takes deep breaths of the early spring air, and his body aches with weariness. He reassures himself he can sleep that day in the hospital room, once Kaye goes home and it’s only him and his father. He has not yet spent time alone in the room with him. He wonders what it might feel like.
“Cohen!” a voice calls out, and he turns to find Ava walking fast to catch up.
“Hey,” he says.
“Mind if I walk with you?” Ava asks, settling in beside him.
“No.”
“I’m . . .” she starts, and then she stops.
He tries not to look at her, tries not to give her the satisfaction of him wanting to know what she was going to say. He can feel her looking at him, and she begins again.
“I’m sorry about the things I said last night in the cafeteria. I didn’t mean to imply that I thought you’re capable of killing your father.” The words come out like a prepared speech. Cohen wonders if she’s been thinking her way through them only this morning, or if she was up in the night rehearsing, rewording.
“We’re all capable of terrible things,” he replies.
“I know. I see it almost every day.”
“I could be responsible for my father’s death, even if I didn’t push that trocar into him. Which I didn’t do, by the way.”
She looks at him again, and this time he glances over, meets her gaze.
“We can kill people without ever touching them. Those things I said to my father on Sunday night? I think they killed him.”
“You think he committed suicide?”
Cohen sighs and shakes his head back and forth slowly. “I don’t know. But he was alive on Sunday night, before I said what I said. I saw how my words ate him up. The next time I saw him, he was . . . well, you’ve seen him. My words did that. I don’t have any doubt.”
“That’s not killing someone,” Ava says. Her words are quiet and earnest. “That’s not your fault, Cohen. We can’t control how people respond to the way we live our lives. Besides, it looks like an accident to me.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, I’ve never seen someone kill themselves with one of those things. There are much easier ways.” Her voice trails off, and Cohen can tell she doesn’t want to talk about it.
The two of them stop at the corner of Duke and Frederick, staring up at the hospital building, waiting to cross Frederick Street.
Finally Ava speaks. “I’m going to go, Cohen,” she says, sounding like she doesn’t think she should be there.
“You’re welcome to come up if you’d like.”
“No, but I will come and visit again.” She reaches up and holds Cohen by the arm, above his elbow. It is an unexpected, intimate touch. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said those things last night.”
He watches her turn and go back the way they came and then walks the rest of the way to the hospital. He passes three or four rooms that have their doors open—inside each one is an elderly man or woman, most of them asleep with their mouths open. They do not have visitors. A nurse makes eye contact with Cohen and smiles, walks past him into one of the rooms.
As he approaches his father’s closed door, he sees the boy wearing the same John Deere ball cap, sitting on the tile floor, his back against the small space of wall between his grandfather’s door and Calvin’s.
“Hey,” Cohen says to him.
“Hey.”
Cohen stops and looks down at the boy. He seems softer on that day, worn down, perhaps by a lack of sleep or another confrontation with his father. Who knows.
“How’s your grandfather?” Cohen asks.
“He’s gonna die,” the boy says, staring straight ahead.
“Nothing for you to be sorry about. He’s old.” In a strange moment of wisdom, the boy looks up at Cohen. “We’re all gonna die. You know that, right?”
Cohen gives a sad smile. “I’m a funeral director. I’m well aware of the fact.”
The boy looks away. “How’s your dad?”
“He’s probably going to die too.”
“Probably?” the boy asks, allowing himself the luxury of a slight, wry grin.
“Well, you know. Soon. Anytime.”
The boy scrunches up his mouth and nods, as if he’s seen every weary thing in the world and this is the truth of it.
“Is your dad here?” Cohen asks.
“Nope.”
“Your mom?”
The boy laughs quietly to himself. “She took off. No one knows where.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she’s gone. Last night she went to bed, this morning she wasn’t in the house.”
“Really?” Cohen asks. “Does she do that often?”
The boy looks up at Cohen and there is worry in his eyes, behind the haughty carelessness he tries to wear on his face. “Nope. Never.”
“Any idea where she went?”
The boy shakes his head. “No one knows. Looked everywhere. Dad’s really losing it, first with the doctor basically killing Grandpa, and now Mom taking off.” Concern fills his voice. “You see him, you walk in the other direction, you hear, mister?”
“I’m Cohen, by the way,” Cohen says, reaching his hand down to the boy. “You don’t have to call me mister.”
The boy hesitates, then reaches his own hand up. It’s small and callused.
“Thatcher,” the boy says, nodding.
“Why are you sitting out here, Thatcher?”
The boy purses his lips and moves his head back and forth in a nonnegotiable no. “I’m not sitting in there, not while Grandpa’s dying. I don’t want to be there when it happens. Not by myself.”
“It’s nothing to be afraid of,” Cohen says. “I’ve seen a lot of people die.”
“I haven’t seen it, not once, and I don’t want to see it.”
“Why not?”
“Something’s going to leave him, his soul or whatever, when he dies, and I don’t want to be there when that happens.”
“Fair enough.”
The two of them pause, Cohen with his hand on the door, Thatcher with his back against the wall, eyes staring straight ahead as they were when Cohen first walked up.
“What’s your mother do, Thatcher?” Cohen asks, not sure where the question came from.
“My mom? She’s a nurse.”
“And what’s your dad think about her being gone?”
“Dad? He’s mad at her, real mad, even though she didn’t do anything. After what this doctor did, he’s mad at every doctor and nurse in the world. I guess he took it out on her pretty good last night.”
“Did he take it out on you too?”
“Maybe,” Thatcher says, shrugging off Cohen’s concern. “I hope he doesn’t find Mom. I hope she runs and runs all the way out of here, as far as she can.”
Cohen takes a deep breath. “I have to go in here, Thatcher. My sister needs a break. But if you need anything, let me know. I’ll be sitting in here most of the day, and through the night too.”
Thatcher nods. He looks like he might say something but he doesn’t, so Cohen goes into his father’s room.