On the night the man died in the chapel of their funeral home, Cohen sat for a long time by the upstairs window, staring out at the sycamore trees, watching the snow fade and the cars trickle by one at a time. He opened the window an inch and the cold air poured in, and he could hear the cars then, the endless shushing sound their tires made as they drove south, as if trying to convince him not to tell the secret.
Because of everything that had happened and everything that had come to an end, he felt like his life was beginning again. A life without Than and Hippie, a life without the Beast. A life without Ava, who had seen what he had done. He put his head down on the windowsill and stared up through the tree branches, and as the morning sifted down toward him he fell asleep.
When he woke, he didn’t move, because he felt someone staring at him. It was like when they had first moved there and he always felt the eyes of the dead following him through the apartment. He cycled through all that had happened the night before, all that he had lost, and only after he got his bearings on the world did he raise his head, turn, and look toward his father’s bedroom.
There stood Calvin, staring back at him. Cohen waited for it—the anger, the judgment, the shouting. But his father didn’t move from where he stood, and soon Cohen realized why. His dad didn’t know if he was real.
“Hi,” Cohen said, trying to break through the curtain of silence between them, trying to reassure his father that he was flesh and blood.
“Cohen,” his father said, but that was all.
Cohen.
“I’m sorry,” Cohen said, apologizing without meaning to. In all the plans he had formed regarding the next time he saw his father, in all the ways he had considered things playing out, offering an apology had never entered his imagination. The words simply spilled out.
But his father shook his head. “Please don’t leave like that again.” Calvin walked slowly across the room to where Cohen sat. He cupped his hand around the back of Cohen’s neck, and with his other hand he stroked Cohen’s hair back out of his eyes. “Please don’t disappear.”
Twice in two sentences his father used that word. Please. Cohen caught a sob, somehow kept the tears from falling, but a little hiccup still escaped. He leaned into the weight of his father’s hand and closed his eyes. His father sighed but didn’t say anything, just kept pushing Cohen’s hair out of his eyes.
“Dad,” he said, determined to say the words before he lost the will, “there’s a dead man in the chapel. The man you warned me about.”
His father’s fingers froze somewhere around his temple, and a few strands of his hair fell back in place on his forehead. Again Cohen waited. When his father didn’t move, Cohen stood, the weight of his father’s hands heavy on his neck and head until they fell away, listless. Cohen didn’t say anything. Without looking, he reached back and took his father’s large hand, then walked through the door and down the stairs.
Cohen paused outside the chapel door. He pursed his lips, pushed the door open, and walked to the front of the chapel to where the one small spotlight shone down on the pulpit. His father followed him silently all the way to the front of the chapel, where the dead man sprawled out on the floor, his head still propped against the wall. The bleeding had stopped, his skin a pale white in the dim light.
Cohen and his father stood there. Cohen waited for whatever was to come. He did not look at his father, though Calvin had drawn up beside him. He could feel his presence. He wanted him to say something.
“I shot him, Dad. I killed him.”
Calvin didn’t say a thing. And he wouldn’t say a word to Cohen again, not that whole long day. He turned and walked out of the chapel, and Cohen wondered where his father had gone. Back up to his room to drink this problem away like he did every other one? Up to the living room to call the police? The emptiness in the chapel, the loneliness, nearly drove Cohen to run again, out the glass doors, up the pre-dawn street, far away this time, never to return.
But a loud bump sounded against the chapel door, and Cohen looked over his shoulder in time to see a coffin coming in, the least expensive one they had. His father pushed it through on a cart, banged into a few of the chapel chairs as he made a wide turn, and moved it toward the front.
He still didn’t say a word to Cohen, but he went to work. He opened the coffin, picked up the dead man under the shoulders, and somehow wrestled him into the coffin, a grappling that had him grunting and breathing hard. Afterward there was blood on Calvin’s shirt, so he unbuttoned it, balled it up, and placed it at the feet of the corpse. He pulled a utility knife out of his pocket and cut a large square patch out of the chapel carpet, the section that had blood on it. He turned it into a tight roll and wedged it into the coffin beside the man.
Last, he saw the gun. He picked it up, stared at it for a moment, and slipped it into his pants pocket. He pushed the coffin into the display area, and Cohen followed him, unable to speak. His father locked the coffin and parked it beside the glass doors before returning upstairs. When he came down, he had a bucket of soapy water, and he cleaned off the door frame, the chapel wall, and the area outside the glass doors.
Cohen watched the entire time. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to do. His legs were so tired. He realized he was hungry. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten, or what it had been.
His father went upstairs again. Light was creeping into the city, coming up over the buildings, lining the leaves. What Cohen could see of the sky in the east was clear and emerged slowly from black to navy to blue. He heard his father upstairs talking on the phone, only a few sentences, and when he came down ten minutes later he was dressed in his funeral clothes—black suit, shined shoes, black tie. The only thing that was different was that his head wasn’t freshly shaven, as it always was on mornings he went to work.
Calvin looked at Cohen and still didn’t speak. They stood there in the light of dawn, a father and a son. Cohen felt like he knew this man even less than he ever had before.
His father’s gaze left his eyes and swept down over his clothes. He turned and unlocked the coffin, then came over and took Cohen’s jacket from him. He lifted Cohen’s shirt up over his head, took his shoes and his socks and his jeans, and put it all in the coffin. Cohen stood there in his underwear, cold and uncertain.
His father took in a breath to speak, stopped, shook his head. He put his hand on Cohen’s cold shoulder, and he squeezed it once before going outside and pulling the hearse to the front of the funeral home. He propped open the glass doors, pushed the coffin onto the sidewalk, and loaded it into the hearse.
He drove away, Cohen went upstairs, and they never spoke of that night again.
One week later, on the front page of the local newspaper, Cohen read an article that listed the man as missing and reviewed his alleged offenses. One month later, a smaller article, embedded deep in the paper so that Cohen almost didn’t see it, asked again for any information related to his disappearance.
After that, nothing.