“Is she still singing?” Cohen asks Kaye as she joins him in the cafeteria.
She nods. He looks through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the ones that look out onto Duke Street, and notices the sky is growing dark yet again. The moon is off to the north in sharp relief, barely visible, tangled up in the sycamore branches. The days keep coming and going, the earth keeps spinning.
“What day is it, anyway?” he asks, taking a bite of an apple, staring into his coffee.
Kaye laughs. “Good question. I can only remember the days because of Johnny’s schedule. Today he had practice, which means it’s . . . Thursday night, I think?”
“Sounds about right. What are you eating?”
“I think it’s oatmeal,” she says, laughing again in a light voice.
“What’s she singing now?” Cohen asks.
Kaye takes a bite of oatmeal, her mouth taking its time with the food, her eyes staring absently at the table. “What isn’t she singing? That’s the question. ‘Amazing Grace.’ ‘How Great Thou Art.’ ‘Great Is Thy Faithfulness.’”
“The classics.”
“I guess so. But also hymns I never heard before, songs I never knew existed.”
“It’s amazing she remembers it all,” Cohen remarks. “She’s never been back to church, has she?”
“We went a few times, you know, after we left. But since then? Not that I know of. I think she would have told me. But a lot of those hymns, as soon as she starts singing, I remember the words too.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Do you sing them at Saint Thomas?”
“Not most of them. They’re a different set of hymns, a different history. That stuff she’s singing, it comes straight from that old church, when Dad was preaching fire and brimstone.”
“The sermons Mother wrote for him,” Kaye says.
“The sermons Mother wrote for him,” Cohen repeats. His words bear the weight of an echo, the way things shouted into a mountain come back to you deeper, slower. He sips his coffee, considers his next sentence. “Honestly? I think it sounds kind of nice.”
Kaye looks at him in surprise. “You do?”
He nods, takes another sip.
“Don’t tell her I said so.” He laughs quietly. “And Dad?”
Kaye looks up at him as if he has charged her with something. Talk of him seems to make her nervous. “Dad?”
“Is he”—Cohen pauses—“still breathing?”
She nods, and Cohen thinks about his own breathing, becomes acutely aware of the movement of his rib cage, the expanding, the contracting, the feel of air moving in and out of him, the coolness of it on the back of his throat, the warmth of it going out. He wonders what it will be like when that stops.
“Have they said anything?”
“Who?”
“The doctors. The nurses.”
“About him dying?” Kaye asks with unusual directness.
“Yeah.”
“No. Without food and water, without the ventilator, they said he probably won’t last the night.”
The night, Cohen thinks. The night. Making it through the night seems to be the goal of everyone there. Make it through the night. See another sunrise. Watch all the light from those distant stars fade and witness the morning creep up over the city, glaring off the cars and the windows and the puddles on flat rooftops.
Who will make it through the night?