A nine-year-old saying: Grandpa, it’s me. Mom says we’re not allowed to call you anymore but I got the number off the fridge. I’m okay. Don’t be sad. Then a pause, and some breathing, and then — clear as anything, in a voice I have not had since I was a child — I’ll call you when I’m bigger. And then the click of a nine-year-old hanging up a kitchen phone before anyone catches him.
I have no memory of it. None. But I know the number came off the fridge because I can see the fridge, and I know my mother’s mother had a father none of us ever met, and I know that in 1994 something happened that turned into thirty-one years of a subject that did not exist in our house. The first voice on the tape is my mother in the same year, four minutes earlier, saying something short and hard that I’m not going to write down.
He kept the machine. Not the tape — the whole machine, beige and cigarette-stained, for three decades, because I suspect he was frightened of what a cassette would do sitting loose in a drawer. And he wrote a sticky note with a timestamp on it, which means he knew exactly where on that tape the thing was, which means he’d found it again more than once over thirty-one years.
He died in April. The package was mailed by a woman who cleaned out his apartment — I found her eventually, and she said there was an envelope taped to the machine with my mother’s old address on it in the same blocky capitals, ready to go, and she’d simply done what it said. He’d had my mother’s address. He’d had it for years. He never used it for anything except one padded envelope that he addressed and then didn’t send, and left where somebody would find it. I was nine and I told him I’d call him when I was bigger, and I never did, and he kept the machine.
