Cohen walks out of the chapel a few minutes after midnight on Thursday. Could it be Thursday already? Could it be he came to the hospital on Monday afternoon, that his father is still alive, that Ava has returned, that he has seen his mother, that his sister will give birth to twins at any moment? So many things that were incomprehensible only four days before are now spinning his reality into something he can barely recognize.
Confession has left him feeling both lighter and sadder. It’s as if some invisible weight has been lifted, but now that it’s gone he misses it. Perhaps it was the chat he had with Father James about the absence of God. He’s not sure. He’s been thinking those things for a long time—months? years?—but this is the first time he’s ever spoken them. Speaking them felt right.
He has the strange sense he’s being followed. But Duke Street is the same as it has been on nearly every late-night walk he’s taken that week—the streetlights are still, the sidewalks cracked, the air some fresh mix of far-off cigarette smoke, exhaust, and trees moving into this new spring. The sky is as unobservable as ever, lost above the light pollution. The hospital rises a few blocks ahead, the randomly lit windows a modern constellation.
He looks behind him, stops, and listens for footsteps. He turns at the last minute and takes a few quick steps down a narrow alley that’s belching steam from someone’s boiler exhaust. Standing in the quiet darkness and waiting to see if his tail will make themselves known, he wonders if this is what it feels like to be a private investigator, or a criminal. He remembers ducking down an alley like this one so long ago, tracking the Beast.
First there’s a shadow sliding along the pavement. The sound comes next, someone with a light walk, someone quick. He sees a young man with a ball cap.
“Thatcher?”
Thatcher jumps as though he’s been shot. “Oh, man! Mr. Cohen! You scared me to death! What are you doing?”
“What are you doing?”
“I was trying to catch up to you.” Thatcher ducks his head, clearly embarrassed. “I followed you to the church.”
“You what?”
“I know. I was bored and curious. I stayed back pretty far, and when you went inside, I sat on the street around the corner. I was going to say something when you came out, but I fell asleep.”
Cohen laughs and shakes his head. Thatcher grins.
“Not good. Actually, my dad came back—that’s why I was kind of itching to get out of there. But they don’t think Grandpa’ll make it through the night.”
“I’m sorry.”
Thatcher shrugs, doesn’t say anything. His mouth quivers and he clears his throat to chase off the emotion. “What about your dad?”
“Same, I guess. My sister still doesn’t want to take him off life support.”
“Is there a chance he’ll come back?”
“I don’t know, Thatcher. I really don’t know. It doesn’t seem that way.”
The two of them go the rest of the way without speaking, Cohen thinking about death, its approach, the losses to come.
The sound is the first thing Cohen notices.
It’s like a roar that goes on and on, a roar and a sob and a cry all in one, and at first Cohen thinks it’s coming from his father’s room. The first thought he has is that his father has come out of his coma and is in terrible, unrestrained pain. He knows how silly this is even before he arrives at his father’s barely opened door and looks inside. The room is dark. His mother is asleep in one of the armchairs, looking as prim and in control as she does when she’s awake. His sister is standing at the window, staring into the night.
He moves to speak to her but the roar erupts again, and now he realizes it’s coming from Thatcher’s grandfather’s room. Thatcher has already gone in and walked around the bed, and he’s standing at his grandfather’s side, crying softly. The roar fades. There is a moment of silence, the kind that drapes over most nighttime hospitals, and then the sound comes rushing back.
It’s coming from Thatcher’s father. He’s on his knees at the foot of the bed, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, the sleeves rolled up. His ball cap is crumpled in his hands, which are covering his face. His mouth, even in between cries, remains open, saliva escaping in long threads like sap oozing from a tree.
“Ahhhhhhhhhh!” he cries again, bending further under the weight of his anguish. There’s a nurse at the grandfather’s bedside and a nurse behind the father, appearing unsure of what to do. Two more nurses, drawn by the awful shout, nudge Cohen aside and enter the room. A doctor follows.
One of the nurses, the one beside the bed, uses her stethoscope to check for a heartbeat, listening at his wrist, his chest, here and here. She bends down close and listens at the grandfather’s open mouth. She straightens, looks at the man as if saying farewell, makes eye contact with the nurse standing behind Thatcher’s father, and shakes her head, a subtle back-and-forth.
“I’m sorry, young man,” she says quietly to Thatcher. “Your grandfather has died.”
Thatcher nods through tears that fall faster than he can wipe them away. His father begins another roar, but this one—whether due to exhaustion or a lost voice or despair—reaches only the volume of a loud moan. Thatcher looks up at Cohen still standing in the doorway and tries to grin, perhaps to let Cohen know everything will be okay, but it rises lopsided and choked.
The nurses leave one at a time, and Cohen senses their relief. Thatcher’s father radiates an aura of anger and pain. Who knows what this man will do now that the full weight of grief has been lowered on him? Cohen would walk over to Thatcher, except he would have to step over the back of the man’s legs, and it’s not something he wants to do. He wants to keep his distance.
The doctor has somehow managed to remain mostly invisible in the corner, holding a clipboard to his chest—the same doctor Thatcher’s father had charged with killing the old man. He seems smaller somehow, as if all of his authority has been stripped. He seems like a child waiting for discipline to be meted out.
The doctor starts speaking multiple times, and each attempt ends before a sound comes out of his mouth. He adjusts his glasses. Finally he speaks.
“Mr. Nash, I’m very sorry for your loss.”
He takes a step toward Thatcher’s father. Cohen wishes the doctor would walk out. He is willing him to do it, to leave. The air is full of charged molecules waiting to explode, threatening to combust at a wrong word, a sudden move.
Cohen thinks of leaving, only to glance at Thatcher’s face. It’s for Thatcher that he stays.
“Mr. Nash,” the doctor says quietly, “is there anything I can do for you? Anything at all?”
He takes a few more steps so that now he stands beside the grandfather, looking down at Mr. Nash. If someone were to walk in without knowing the situation, they would think Mr. Nash is begging the doctor for forgiveness.
Please get out, Cohen thinks. The words while you can also come to mind.
Mr. Nash lifts his head slowly. “For my loss?”
His eyes are so full of hate that Cohen glances quickly at the doctor, expecting to find him dead, or at least mortally injured. But he’s unhurt, if frozen in place.
“You,” Mr. Nash says. “For my loss?”
The doctor stammers.
Thatcher’s father breathes faster. “You are dead to me.”
The words “to me” come out so quietly that at first they don’t register with Cohen. At first he thinks the man has simply said, “You are dead.”
The doctor nods, a strange signal of assent in the face of those piercing words. He takes an unsteady step toward the wall, as if he’s lost, as if he cannot find the door. Or perhaps he also only heard, “You are dead.” He grabs the door handle and walks out, leaving the room behind.
The presence of death is strong after the doctor leaves, lingering in the corners, hovering below the ceiling. Cohen feels that rush he always does in its presence: first the rush of the funeral director to do what must be done before time beats him to it, but then the rush of awareness at his own mortality. Someday that will be his body lying there, still, no longer breathing, growing cold. Someday. And where will he be?
His body will still be there, but where will he be?
Without thinking, he moves into the room, ignoring the questioning glare of Mr. Nash, steps behind him, and walks around to the other side of the bed. Thatcher glances up at him, and Cohen puts his arm around the young man who now looks more like a boy. He squeezes his shoulder. The two of them stand there staring down at Thatcher’s grandfather.
He is a handsome man even in death. He’s large but not overweight, sturdy from a lifetime spent in open fields. His fingers are thick, his hands coated in cracked calluses. His fingernails are broken, fractured, and cover bruised fingers. He has a gash on the back of his left hand, the shape of a scythe’s blade, deep red. The man’s face is kind and at peace. His white hair congregates in three main tufts: one on each side and one at the top. His false teeth have been taken out, so his mouth is shrunken and powerless.
“Who are you?” Mr. Nash asks, barely opening his mouth with each word.
“Cohen. Cohen Marah.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m a friend of your son. My father is in the next room.”
For a moment Mr. Nash thinks about softening. Cohen sees it, the consideration of retreat, the closing of the mouth, the unfamiliar practice of thinking before speaking. Perhaps he thinks of Cohen as an unlikely ally, someone who can join him on the side of the patients in their war against the medical field.
When Mr. Nash seems to think of no immediate reason to be angry at Cohen, he turns back to Thatcher. “Where were you, boy?” he asks, blame in his voice.
Thatcher looks up, surprised. He doesn’t say anything.
“Don’t look at me like that. Where were you?” The anger is rising, and Cohen knows it’s anger at the doctor and at death and at a life that slips through our fingers so smoothly without leaving a trace. But none of those things are present or tangible—not the doctor, not death, not life—so Mr. Nash’s anger latches on to Thatcher.
“I was out,” Thatcher says, and he has hardened too, in the way a young man will harden when struck too many times. All of his softness has evaporated.
“Out where?” Mr. Nash comes around the bed, now having to peer around Cohen to lock eyes with Thatcher. Without realizing it at first, Cohen has pulled Thatcher closer to his side.
“Out,” Thatcher says.
“With him?”
“No.”
“Then with who?”
“No one. By myself.”
Cohen closes his eyes. For a moment he is a child again and Mr. Nash is the Beast, its hot breath on his neck, its icy shadows clinging to his shoulder and to his hands and knees from where he crawled through the trailer. He feels a strange courage rising in him, something that does not reflect his normal middle-aged complacency. He slowly begins releasing Thatcher. His heart races and a thudding resounds in his throat, his rib cage, the tips of his clenched fists. He opens his eyes.
Mr. Nash is gone. Thatcher stands there, staring up at him.
“Where’d your father go?”
“Out. I don’t know.”
“Any sign of your mother?”
Thatcher’s face crumples. He glances back at his grandfather’s body and shakes his head.