The firefighter who lifted me out of the coal chute was a broad shouldered young man named Marcus Dolan, with soot on his cheek and a flashlight strapped to his helmet. He wrapped me in a gray blanket the size of a bedspread and carried me across the frozen lawn as if I weighed nothing at all. Behind him the whole of 6th Avenue was lit up like a carnival, red lights and white lights and the blue flicker of the police. I coughed until I thought my ribs would crack. Then he set me down on the back step of an ambulance and said, “Mrs. Kowalczyk, you are going to be all right. Your son called us.”
I stared at him. I was seventy four years old and had been awake since three in the morning. I had crawled down my own back stairs on my bottom like a baby, and I was sure I had misheard. “My son,” I said slowly, “was on the porch telling a man to wait an hour.” Marcus Dolan crouched in front of me. “Ma am, we got the call at 3:41,” he said. “A man shouting, there is gas in the house, my mother is in the basement, please hurry. He was crying. He is over there.” He pointed across the yard with his chin.
Kevin was sitting on the bumper of a second ambulance with a paramedic holding a mask to his face. He wore only his undershirt and jeans. His hair was standing straight up and his hands were shaking so hard that the oxygen tubing trembled. When he saw me looking, he tried to stand and could not. He put his face in his hands and sobbed. I had not seen my son cry since the funeral of his father, and the sound went through me like a nail through a board.
The police sergeant told me the rest in pieces, over the next hour, in the back of a patrol car with the heater running. Kevin owed money to a man named Donnie Falco, who ran a card game behind a tire shop in Johnstown. It was a lot of money, close to ninety thousand dollars, and Falco had told him how to make it disappear. An old house. An old furnace. A mother with a life insurance policy and a deed. Falco had been on the phone with him on the porch that night, urging him on.
A man can stand at the edge of the worst thing he has ever planned and still be pulled back by the sound of the footsteps of his own mother.
“Your son told us everything,” the sergeant said. “He said he got as far as your bedroom door. He said he was going to lock you in and walk out and let it happen. Then he opened it and saw the bed empty, and he realized you had known the whole time. He said, I saw my mother, in that moment, the way she looked when I was six and fell out of the apple tree. And he could not do it. He ran down the stairs and shut off the gas main with his bare hands.” I closed my eyes. I thought of the wrench lying on the kitchen floor.
Kevin had stopped the leak with eleven minutes to spare, the fire captain said. In another quarter hour, a spark from the furnace pilot would have taken the whole row. The captain said it was the most dangerous thing a man could have done, running into a house full of gas to turn a valve, and also the only thing that saved the three families on either side of us. Kevin had not thought about any of that. He had been thinking about me, shouting my name through the dark, until the firefighters pulled him out and found the coal chute open.
They arrested him at dawn. I asked the sergeant to let me speak to my son first, and after a long conversation with his lieutenant, he did. We stood by the ambulance, Kevin in a blanket, me in mine. I told him I had heard every word he said on the porch. I told him I had not taken the blue pills. He laughed, a horrible broken laugh, and said, “Of course you did not, Ma. You never do anything anybody tells you.” Then he knelt on the frozen grass and put his forehead against my knees.
I did not forgive him that morning. I want to be honest about that. A mother can love a child with her whole heart and still not be able to say the words. I put my hand on his head, the way I had when he was little, and I said, “You will tell the truth to the police. All of it. About Falco, the game, the money. And then you will go where they send you, and you will get well.” He nodded against my knees. “Yes, Ma,” he said. “Yes.”
Donnie Falco was arrested the same afternoon, in his office behind the tire shop, with a notebook of debts and a pistol. Kevin testified against him. The judge, an old Altoona man who had once been a friend of Stan, gave my son seven years with a recommendation for treatment, which would have been twenty without the cooperation and the gas valve. I sat in the front row of the courtroom with my church purse on my lap. Kevin looked back at me once, over his shoulder, as they led him out.
I visit him on the first Sunday of every month, at the state prison in Huntingdon, with a thermos of coffee I am not allowed to bring. He has a job in the carpentry shop. He has lost forty pounds and put on a kind of quiet that I did not know he had. Last month he handed me a small wooden box he had made, with a hinged lid and a smooth pine bottom. “For your flashlight, Ma,” he said. “So you always know where it is.”
The coal chute is closed now with a new steel door that Stan would have approved of. I had a plaque screwed to it, small and brass. It says, For Marcus Dolan, and for the three minutes it took a frightened man to remember that he was somebody son. Every first of November, when the first cold night comes to Altoona, I make a pot of coffee and sit in the kitchen with the back door unlocked, and I leave the light on in the hall, just in case.