The nightstand of my aunt was a small maple thing with a drawer that stuck, and I had to work the knob with both hands before it slid open. I had not been in her bedroom since the funeral. The window was still cracked an inch, as she always kept it, and the sound of the ocean came in with the smell of salt and sunscreen and old cigarettes. In the drawer, wrapped in a faded dish towel with a pattern of lighthouses, lay a bundle that was heavier than I expected. I sat on the edge of her bed and unwound the cloth.
Inside were three things. A cassette Walkman, silver, scratched, the kind teenagers carried in the nineties, with the headphones coiled neatly around it. A manila envelope, sealed, with my name on it in the loopy handwriting of Aunt Marge. And a small leather wallet with a driver license inside, the photo of a smiling boy with dark curly hair and a gap between his front teeth. Michael J. Faulkner. Born 1977. I knew the name from the card Catherine had given me. I held the license to the light. My hands would not stop shaking.
I opened the envelope. It held six handwritten pages and a notarized affidavit dated 2018. Laura, hon, it began. If you are reading this, I am gone, and I am so sorry to leave you with it. I should have told you years ago. I should have told everybody. But I was a coward, and I am telling you now. On the Fourth of July, 1996, your father, my brother Frank, was drinking at a bar on the boardwalk. He was thirty seven. He decided to drive his truck out onto the pier to watch the fireworks. I begged him not to.
I put the pages down on the bed. My father had died in 2012, when I was thirty, after a long illness I did not like to remember. He was a loud, big, loving man, a house painter who sang old Sinatra songs in the shower. He had always been the center of the room. I could not imagine the man in these pages. I picked them up again. The truck was moving slowly, Marge wrote, on the planks, and there were a lot of people. A boy was standing near the railing. Frank never saw him. The bumper caught him. He went over the side.
The most patient love is the kind that waits twenty eight years beside a silent telephone, hoping someone will finally pick up.
Marge had been walking behind the truck, having followed her brother out. She saw it all. She ran to the rail and saw the boy in the dark water, and she screamed for help. By the time the lifeguards arrived, he was gone. Frank had sobered instantly. He drove away. That night, he sat in the kitchen of Marge with his head in his hands and begged her to say nothing. He swore he would turn himself in in the morning. But in the morning he could not do it, and the boy was a drowning, a tragedy, an accident on the pier, and no one had seen the truck.
“I should have gone to the police,” Marge wrote. “I told myself he was my baby brother, that he would kill himself if I turned him in, and I believed it. But the mother of that boy has never slept a night since, and I knew her name, because I read it in the paper. I looked her up. Every Sunday for twenty eight years I went to that pier and fed the birds and called her house. I never had the courage to speak. Each ring was an apology. Each one was a prayer. Each one was a cowardice, and I know it.”
The affidavit was the last page. In it, in the plain language of a legal paper, my aunt swore to everything, the date, the truck, the pier, the name of the driver. A notary in Salisbury had stamped it and signed it. Under that, in her own hand, she had added a line. Give this to Catherine. Tell her I have been calling every Sunday to say what I could not. I sat very still, my heart pounding, and looked at the light moving on the wall. Then I did the only thing I could think of.
I drove to the pier that evening with the Walkman and the license and the affidavit in a paper bag on the seat beside me. The sun was low and the boardwalk was golden. Catherine was waiting at the end of the pier in her gray coat, as she had promised, with her silver hair blowing across her face. I walked out to her. I did not say a word. I handed her the paper bag, and she took it with both hands, and she looked at me with an expression I will never forget. It was the look of someone who has been drowning a very long time.
She read the pages standing up, in the wind, with the seabirds crying. When she reached the end, she folded them very carefully and held them against her chest. “Twenty eight years,” she said, in a thin, clear voice. “I did not know whether to hate her or thank her.” She turned and looked at the old glass booth by the bait shop. “She called me every Sunday and never said a word. Do you know I used to sit by the telephone? Every Sunday at three. I could not make myself pick it up.”
I told her that I was sorry, for my father and for my aunt, for everything. Catherine shook her head. She said that I was not responsible for the choices of the dead. She took my hand and said that it would be hard, and that she would need time, but that she had come to the pier for a reason. She had come to learn what had happened to her boy. And now she knew, and she could stop looking. She had her answer, at last. It was not an easy answer, but it was an end.
The next Sunday at three, I took a quarter from my pocket and walked to the old pay phone in its folding glass door. I dialed the number from a slip of paper in the handwriting of my aunt. It rang once. Twice. On the third ring, a voice answered. “Hello, Laura.” I could not speak. I stood there with my hand on the glass, tears running down my face, while the seabirds wheeled and cried around me. “Hello, Catherine,” I said at last. “I am calling to say that I am sorry.” And she said, very softly, “I know. Stay on the line.”