Chapter 9
NOVA
I found them on a Saturday, a few weeks before the Archive was set to open.
I had been meaning to go through the storage closet on the third floor since I moved in.
The house my grandparents had left my mom had accumulated things the way houses did when people lived fully inside them, boxes of photographs and old appliances and the sediment of a life that had not been sorted because there was always more living to do first.
After she died, I had moved it all in without opening any of it, because opening things required decisions about what to keep and what to release, and I had not been ready for either. I had not been ready for two years.
The morning I finally opened the closet, I told myself I was looking for an extra blanket.
(I was not looking for an extra blanket.)
In the back of the closet, behind the photographs and the extra linens, were two shoeboxes I had not seen before.
They weren’t sneaker boxes. They were the smaller kind, from a department store, the lids slightly warped from age.
I brought them into the third-floor room, sat on the floor, and opened the first one.
That was when I saw all of these cassette tapes. It had to be a dozen, maybe more, packed in tight, each labeled in my mother’s handwriting. Labels carefully describing Friday nights, Saturday nights, and her other radio sets. That was when I realized she had recorded herself.
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 am going 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 word Shawn existed 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 she recorded 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.
“You’re lucky you have a friend who loves a good throwback,” he said, lifting it slightly. “I swung by Jerome’s after we left Leon’s. Jerome had this in his garage. I owe him twenty dollars and an explanation I did not give him.”
I looked at him, then at the boxes on the floor. I had cried into the phone about cassette tapes and he had gone and found a way to play them like that was the only solution that made sense.
He stood.
“You okay?”
“Yes.”
He nodded once. “Goodnight, then.”
“Wait.”
I looked at the space beside me.
“Can you stay?”
He paused. Not long, just enough for the question to be real.
Something shifted in his face, careful and contained, and then settled.
He stepped out of his shoes, shrugged off his jacket, and laid it over the chair.
He came around to the other side of the bed and lay on top of the covers, leaving space between us that felt intentional and not.
I reached into the box and found a tape. Held it up to read the label in the dark. Her handwriting. A Friday night, the year before I was born.
I leaned over and pressed it into the machine. There was a soft mechanical hesitation, a click, then the low hiss of tape.
Then her voice. “Good evening, Philadelphia.”
I had heard my mother’s voice my entire life, but never like this. Not in a room like this, with someone else hearing her with me. I did not turn my head. I was aware of him anyway, the way you become aware of something once you stop pretending it isn’t there.
He did not speak. He did not need to. He lay beside me in the dark while my mother filled the room, while she moved through songs and silence and whatever she had been carrying on those nights, and for the first time it felt like I was hearing her in real time instead of remembering her after the fact.
The tape ran. At some point it ended. I did not get up to flip it.
At some point after that, I fell asleep.
Just before then, his breathing, beside me, was slow and even. The boxes still open on the floor. My mother’s voice now something I could return to instead of something I had lost.
I was not ready to know all of it, but I knew where it was now and that changed something… not everything. But enough that I knew, even before I could name it, that the way I had been holding certain things in place was not going to work much longer.
I closed my eyes. I did not reach for him. I did not move away, either. And that, more than anything else, felt new.
Auntie Rhonda called at six forty-five to say she needed a hand, which in her language was not a request so much as a notice that something was already in motion and I was expected to join it.
I answered by getting up and getting dressed, because I had never once successfully said no to her and had long since stopped pretending that was an option worth testing.
It had been one of those weeks at work where everything I had built into something steady decided to remind me it could just as easily come undone.
Three insurance submissions came back with revised codes no one had thought to notice.
Crystal handled two before I even made it in on Wednesday and left the third on my desk with a note that said this one is personal, which meant it would require both of us and a level of patience neither of us had planned for that day.
We got through it by four. Dr. Adeyemi brought us lunch from the Dominican jawn down the block, which our office appreciated.
By the time I reached Auntie Rhonda’s, the house already carried that early holiday vibe, not loud, not rushed, just full in a way that told you people were coming and had been coming for years. That’s because today was our annual Friendsgiving, though nobody called it that out loud.