I picked one up. The tape inside was dark and worn. She had listened to these. She had sat somewhere with these tapes and heard herself back.
That was when it hit me that I did not own a tape player. I set the cassette down and opened the second box with more tapes. Some burned CDs with dates in the same handwriting were also tucked inside. Underneath those, folded in on themselves the way you fold something you are trying to contain, were pieces of loose-leaf notebook paper.
I unfolded the first one, because the handwriting was not my mother’s and I’d grown curious as to why she had held on to it.
Celeste,
I have been trying to figure out how to say this for three weeks and I think the only way to say it is to write it down, because when I try to say it out loud you start talking about a record and I lose my nerve. I think you know what I mean. I think you have known for a while and you have been letting me find my way to it in my own time, which is either patience or cruelty depending on how you look at it. I amgoing to find out which.
I sat with that longer than I meant to and then I reached for another.
You played Patrice Rushen last night and I know that was for me. Don’t tell me it wasn’t. I was listening.
Another.
Nova is four months old. She looks exactly like you. I know that is not what you want to hear right now and I know I’m not supposed to say anything that sounds like I’m trying to make this easier for myself. I’m not trying to do that. I’m just telling you that she looks exactly like you. I’m sorry I am writing this in a letter instead of saying it to you in person and that I understand why you don’t want me to.
I set that one down carefully.
I sat on the floor with the letters spread around me. My mother had kept all of them—inside the tapes that held her voice, she had kept his. I did not know what to do with that.
I had grown up with an absence so longstanding it had become the shape of normal, the silence where a father would have been, something I had stopped noticing by the time I was old enough to notice anything. My mother had not explained and I had not asked. Auntie Rhonda also had not offered. The wordShawnexisted only in the way certain words do when everyone has agreed not to say them.
She had not thrown any of it away. She had folded it into these boxes. Into her voice.
Whatever she had played on those nights was on these tapes and I had no way to hear it. She was gone. I could not ask her what she had been thinking when sherecorded them, or whether they had been for him or for herself or even for me, some version of me she had not met yet. The daughter who would one day sit on the floor with these boxes and try to understand who her mother had been before she was my mother.
I sat there for a long time then I picked up my phone.
I do not know exactly why I called him. I just know I was crying before he picked up, which I had not planned, and that when he answered I could not get a full sentence out.
“Nova. What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” I said. “I found something. I’m fine. I found these tapes, my mom’s tapes, she recorded her radio sets, and there are letters inside the boxes, from my dad, and I can’t play them and I don’t know why that’s the part that’s making me cry.”
A quiet beat.
“That’s not stupid.”
“I know,” I said, even though I had just said the opposite.
“Are you home?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
He did not ask anything else.
I folded the letters back the way I had found them, slid them into the box, and carried both boxes into my room. I set them on the floor beside the bed and got under the covers without changing my clothes, which I recognized as a certain kind of feeling. The tapes and the letters were there within reach, close enough to touch if I needed them.
I finally fell asleep, which was before he arrived. I know because I did not hear the door.
What I remember is waking to a hand moving slow along my back, steady, not trying to wake me, just there. I stayed still and let it register. The dark quiet of the house. His hand, certain and unhurried. Then he shifted. A soft knock of something being set down. The rustling of trying to put a plug into the wall. That’s when I turned.
Deion was crouched beside the bed with an old boombox. It had weight to it, a tape deck in the front and CD player on top. He looked up when I moved.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.
