When Cohen crept upstairs after dark, bruised and aching from the Beast, he found his father asleep on the sofa. There were cans on the window ledge above the couch and a lone glass tumbler on the coffee table with a thin golden skin coating the inside. Cohen limped over and picked it up, hobbled to the kitchen sink, and turned it upside down. Only a few drops fell out, but it gave him a certain satisfaction, emptying the glass before his father could. He moved to put it down, but he was distracted, still trembling, and his hand hit the faucet, knocking the glass into the sink where it shattered with a sound that split the air.
His father moaned from the sofa. Cleaning up the glass was the last thing Cohen felt like doing, but he thought if his father came into the kitchen in the state he was in, he might very well slice himself open. So he carefully pushed the shards into the corner of the sink with a towel, bunched everything together, and threw it in the trash, towel and all.
The air in the apartment was cold and thin, like the atmosphere at the top of a mountain. Light shone through the windows, pale and anemic. He wondered if his father had turned the thermostat down again. He was always complaining that he was hot while Cohen walked the house in layers, trying to stay warm.
Cohen went to the bathroom and cleaned himself up, washing his face with icy water, putting a bandage on his hand, and swishing the blood out of his mouth. He reached gingerly inside and felt the tooth, one of his molars. It wiggled. He groaned. It would have to come out. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and leaned against the wall. He reached in and pulled on the tooth. Once. Twice. Again. Finally it made a grinding scrape and he felt a snap as it gave way. The pain made his vision cloud over.
The hole in his gum where the tooth used to be oozed blood, and he kept spitting it into the sink, gargling water, spitting, gargling. Trying not to choke. He remembered the baseball he’d taken to the nose when he was young, that old familiar taste of blood. When the bleeding slowed, he crammed some paper towels into the back corner of his mouth and cleaned the sink and the mirror and turned out the light. He was so tired.
He walked over to the sofa where his father still slept and nudged his shoulder with one hand. “Dad,” he said, his voice muffled by the paper towel still in his mouth.
Nothing.
“Dad,” he said louder, shaking harder, but his father didn’t respond. He was far away at the end of a dark tunnel, at the bottom of a well, out of reach. Cohen clenched his jaw and rubbed his cheek, feeling where the tooth used to be. He walked over to the wall opposite the sofa, sat down, and waited.
He realized he wanted more than anything in the world for his father to be concerned by his injuries, even to be angry. Cohen would take anything—derision, fury, sadness, empathy. Especially empathy. Someone else’s hand on his bruises, someone else giving him a glass of water, someone else folding a cold cloth and draping it over his forehead or gently packing the hole in his gums with cotton gauze. But his father slept and the room grew dark and Cohen sat with his back to the wall.
Then, movement.
His father moaned, came up from that faraway place. He moved his mouth and licked his lips like a man waking in a desert, and his hand blindly swept the table, reaching for the glass. When it encountered nothing but flat space, he stopped, and for a moment Cohen thought he had fallen asleep again. There was another distant moan, another drawing together of his mouth, now trying to find saliva. Calvin put his elbows on the sofa and sat up halfway, squinting in the dim light that came through the window. He tapped each and every can, a gentle snapping motion with his index finger, hoping that one of them was not empty, but each one leaned lightly, a few falling over and rolling aimlessly on the window ledge.
“Dad,” Cohen said, this time in a quiet voice, nearly a whisper, but his father heard him and turned in his direction. He stared into the shadows, squinted his eyes as if the darkness was light. When he saw Cohen, a kind of remembering flooded his face. Yes, of course, the look seemed to say. I have a son.
“Cohen,” his father said, or at least tried to say, but the word stuck in his dry throat. He rubbed his neck.
Cohen retrieved a glass of water from the kitchen, and his father drank it all down without stopping. When he finished, he took a quick gasp of air, sat up slowly, and placed the glass on the coffee table.
“Cohen,” he said again, nearly finding his normal voice.
“Hi, Dad.” Cohen hoped his father would see his wounds, his bruises, his pain, but it was dark in the room, and they could barely see each other through the half-light.
His father nodded, pondering some faraway thought. “Oh,” he said quietly, as if to himself. He looked at Cohen sideways, out of the corner of his eye, and Cohen sat down on the sofa beside him.
“The police came,” Calvin said.
Cohen felt like he was under a spotlight. Did someone find out about the Beast? The gun? Did someone tell his father they saw him riding his bike out of town? He was fourteen. He didn’t have an accurate sense of the kind of things police got involved with.
“Really?” he managed to squeak out.
His father nodded, turned to him in the dark room, and stared directly at him. “You need to be careful. They’re still looking. They think the father . . . he might still be . . . coming by here again.”
Cohen nodded, a wave of confusion moving through him. He remembered what his father had told him when he’d returned that night.
It’s okay. Son. It’s okay. They’re in a better place.
A better place.
He realized he was still nodding, mindlessly moving his head up and down. He stopped.
“Are you okay?” his father asked, suddenly aware that something was wrong. But it was a concern that came too late.
“I’m fine,” Cohen said in a monotone voice. “I wrecked my bike, but I’m okay.”
They sat there in the dark together for a long time, both of them awake and not saying anything. Cohen realized he felt like he understood his father better in those moments of quiet, when he had no expectations, than he did when he wanted his father to say something in particular or ask about him or show some tangible sign of caring. In the silence, he could hear his father’s thick breathing; he could hear the movement of his father’s fingernails on his shirt as he scratched his shoulder; he could hear the rumbling of hunger in his father’s stomach.
But in the silence, he also felt like they were moving further and further apart.
Calvin stood slowly, Poseidon rising up out of the water, pillows falling to the side and the blanket slipping to the floor. His shadow lumbered along the wall as he walked into the kitchen, barely lifting his feet, his soles making sliding sounds on the floor.
Cohen didn’t move, except when his fingertips touched his tender jaw or his tongue hesitantly explored the soft hole hiding under the wad of paper towels in his mouth. He leaned his head back on the sofa and could almost see the night sky through the window. Living in the city meant there were rarely visible stars, but there was always a glow, the culmination of streetlights and office lights and passing cars. There were always sounds too: the wheezing of a truck as it labored to a stop at the next traffic light, the squeaking of old brakes, the throbbing beat of rap music thudding its way from a car with a custom exhaust.
He heard his father rumble through the cupboards, doors slamming, glasses colliding. The silverware drawer opened, and his father came out and sat at the couch, a plate of food in front of him on the coffee table.
“Why’s it always so dark in here?” he muttered.
Suddenly Cohen didn’t want his father to see his bruises. He didn’t want his father to have the satisfaction of worry, because now it would mean nothing to Cohen. It was too late. It was always too late. He went to the door, trying to hide his limp.
“Where are you going?” his father asked, taking a large bite.
“I’ll be back,” Cohen said over his shoulder, and again he wanted his father to stop him, to care about where he was going enough to press for information.
But the only thing he heard was the fork hitting the plate, loud chewing, liquid gathering at the bottom of a new glass.