I sat in the family room of the funeral home with my hands in my lap and listened to Eric Novak finish telling me what my father had done. It was a small, horrible story, as these things always are. A man in a motel room with a woman who was not his wife. A boy at the door with a pizza and a receipt, recognizing his own mother. A man in a towel with panic in his eyes. And a car in the dark with its brights on, coming up behind a delivery boy on a back road outside Pittston. I felt as though I were reading the life of someone else.
“Kathy, I am not here for revenge,” Eric said. “I want you to hear that first. Your father has been dead for years, and your mother did what she could. All my life I wondered who did it, and when I woke up, all I had was a bumper sticker in my head.” He looked at the cane in his hands. “Your mother told me the rest, in bits and pieces, over seventeen years, reading to me. She never knew I could hear. I did. Every word. I heard her say she was sorry, over and over, to a man who could not answer.”
I put my hand over my mouth. All those Wednesdays. I had been so angry at my mother for the drives to Wilkes Barre, for the newspaper in the car, for the closed door of her bedroom on the nights she came home late, when my father was lying sick in the next room. I had thought she was neglecting us. Instead she was paying a debt that was not hers. The debt of a man who would never pay it. She had been driving forty miles for seventeen years to look at the face of the boy her husband tried to kill.
Some people read aloud not to be heard but to hold a door open, and one day someone finally walks through it.
“She told me one more thing,” Eric said. “She said your father confessed to her on his deathbed. He asked her to forgive him, and she said she would try. And then she told him he was going to have to wait for me to wake up and forgive him himself.” He smiled sadly. “That was the sentence I heard, Kathy. That was the first thing I ever understood after seventeen years in the dark. She said, you will have to wait for Eric. And I thought, who is Eric? Then, slowly, I thought, I am.”
Eric took out a small blue notebook from his coat pocket. It was the kind a child would use, spiral bound, with a faded cover. He opened it to the first page. In handwriting I recognized, tidy and upright, was a list of names. The pizza shop. The motel. The date. The license plate of the car of my father. “Your mother wrote this in February of 2002,” he said, “two days after the accident, and she gave it to the chaplain at the hospital in a sealed envelope. She asked him to keep it until I woke up. He retired in 2010, and left it with the next one.”
I held the notebook. At the bottom of the last page, my mother had written a sentence in pencil, pressed hard into the paper. “I am sorry for what my family did to yours. I will sit with your son as long as it takes.” I closed my eyes. I did not know how to live with it, the weight of her loyalty, the weight of what she had carried, how long she had borne it without a word. I said, “Eric, what do you want me to do? Tell me. I will do it.”
He thought about it for a long time. Then he said, “There is a woman in a nursing home in Dunmore. Her name is Joan Novak. She is eighty one years old and she has not spoken to me since I woke up. She does not know how. She was in that room, too, Kathy, and she has believed for twenty three years that it was her fault.” He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I think she and I would both like to hear the voice of your mother one more time. I wondered if you would read to her.”
I went the following Wednesday, with Eric, with a newspaper from that morning, and with a thermos of tea. Joan was in a wheelchair by the window, small and white haired, her hands in her lap. When she saw her son she began to tremble. He crossed the room and knelt and put his forehead against her knee, and she put her hand on his hair and said his name over and over. Eventually she looked up and saw me. I could not tell which of us was more frightened. Then I opened the paper and began to read.
I read the front page. I read the sports. I read the obituaries, because that is how my mother always ended. When I reached the last column Joan reached across and took my wrist in her thin fingers and said, “Your mother sat in that chair for six months after my husband died. I never knew who she was. She never told me.” She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “She was a better woman than any of us. She kept going to the end.” I told her I knew. I said I was only just learning how much.
We still go on Wednesdays. Eric drives, because he finally has the strength to, and I bring the paper and the tea. Some weeks Joan listens with her eyes closed and sometimes she tells us stories about the old neighborhood, her husband, her son as a boy. Last week she asked me to read the box scores, because they were the favorite of Eric, and halfway through the Pirates game she began to laugh. It was the first time I had ever heard it. It sounded like a window opening. My mother would have loved that sound.
