The Machine Still Takes Messages

My mother's answering machine is still taking messages, and the newest one is from me, left the night before she died, in her voice, using my name like it was a stranger's.

I should explain, because that sentence cannot be true, and yet here is the machine, blinking its one red light at me the way it has blinked at me every anniversary for seven years, and here is the kitchen, unchanged, and here am I, a grown woman standing in my childhood kitchen with my coat still on, watching a machine that should have been buried with its owner keep a single unplayed message warm for me.

The house has been empty since she died. Not sold, not emptied. That was her instruction, delivered in the way she delivered all her instructions — as if the universe had already agreed with her and I was merely being informed. Don't sell the house, love. Keep it. Somebody should be able to walk in and know I was here. So the house has stayed as it was: the teacup on the drainboard, the calendar stopped on the month she went, the dust gathering in the polite way dust gathers when it knows it is being watched. I come back once a year, on the anniversary, and I do the same things in the same order. I check the taps. I look in the fridge. I throw away whatever has gone bad. And then I sit on the kitchen stool and I play the messages.

The old ones are still there, preserved like flies in amber — my father's voice, my sister's, mine, a whole decade of my life recorded by a machine whose only job was to stand in the hall and wait. Hi, it's Dad, we're going to be late, don't wait up. Julia, it's your sister, call me when you get in. Julia, it's me, I'm at the train station, I'll be home by eight. My mother was a woman who was never home when the phone rang, which is why the machine took so many messages for her, which is why, on the night she finally had something to say, there was a machine standing between her and the saying of it.

I never listen to the new one. For seven years I have stood in this kitchen on the anniversary, and every year the red light is blinking, and every year I play the old messages first — all of them, the whole decade — and then I stand in front of the machine with my finger on the button, and I cannot press it. I have built my whole grief on the assumption that the message will break me, and I have kept it the way you keep a thing in a jar, turning it over, never once opening the lid.

Tonight I am going to press the button. I have decided this the way you decide to do something you have been avoiding for seven years: abruptly, at three in the morning, in a house that is exactly the house I grew up in, standing in my coat like a woman who has forgotten how to take it off.

The machine clicks. There is a hiss, the good hiss of tape, and then the old messages play — Dad, late, don't wait up; my sister, call me; me, at the station, home by eight. I let them run, because they are the sound of the house when it was alive, and because I am still afraid of what comes after.

And then the tape runs out, and the machine rewinds, and there is a moment of silence, and the red light blinks, and I press the button, and the new message plays.

I know before she speaks. The number on the little display is my number. My mother's house number, yes, but also — and this is what stops me, what has always stopped me — it is my number. The machine shows the caller's number, and the number it shows for the last message is the number of this house. She called herself. On the night she died, my mother called her own number and left herself a message. But she did not leave it for herself.

She left it for me. In my voice. Or trying to.

This is the part I have never been able to say out loud. My mother was not a mimic. She was a plain woman from a plain town who said plain things. But the voice on this message is doing a very careful imitation of me — the way I say hi, it's me, the way I trail off at the end of sentences, the way I never say goodbye because I am always half out the door. She is doing my voice the way a child does a parent's voice, with love and with terrible fidelity, and she is not doing it well, and the wrongness of it — the offness — is the most honest thing she ever gave me.

She says: Hi, it's me. I know you're not there. I'm not leaving this for the house, I'm leaving it for you. I'm sorry I was never the mother you deserved. I'm leaving this so you don't have to carry it. You were always the good part. Don't blame the others. It was never them. It was me, and I'm tired, and I'm going to go now, and I want you to know —

The message cuts off. It always cuts off. There is a small sound, a click, and then the machine makes the soft mechanical sigh of a tape that has reached the end and has nothing left to hold. I have heard this cut-off a thousand times in my head, and I have told myself she died before she could finish, that the last sentence is lost, and I have made my peace with that, because not knowing is easier than knowing.

But tonight, standing in the kitchen, I hear something I have never heard before.

After the click — after the tape ends — there is a whisper. It is not on the tape. It comes from somewhere behind me, from the direction of the kitchen doorway, and it is my mother's voice, and it is saying the thing she always said to call me down from wherever I had gone: Come and get it, love. It's getting cold. Not a name. A dinner call. The sound of a house that is supposed to be empty, calling a grown woman in from a childhood she has already lived.

And I realize, standing there, that the machine has been lying to me, or I have been lying to myself, and it is the same thing. The message is not seven years old. I have checked the number, and I have checked the tape, and I have never been able to admit what the tape tells me. The message is from tonight. It is timed to the minute I walked through the front door. My mother called herself seven years ago and left a message that has been waiting, patiently, in a machine, for the only person it was ever meant for to walk back into the room — and it is not a recording anymore.

It is a conversation. She has been leaving me the same message every year, on the same night, at the same minute, and she is not trying to leave. She is trying to finish the sentence.

— and I want you to know, the message says, and the tape ends, and she cannot finish it, because a machine can only hold what a living voice puts into it, and a living voice has to stop for breath, and a dead woman does not breathe, and so she has been coming back, every year, to the machine that still takes her messages, to try to finish the sentence that was cut off by her own dying. She will not be done until she has said it. She will not be done until I am standing in the kitchen, not with my coat on, not afraid, and I say the one thing she recorded herself trying to say and could not.

I thought I knew what it was. For seven years I have told myself she was waiting for me to let her go, the way you release a thing you love into the dark. That was the story I told myself, and the story was very kind, and the story was mine.

But the message is not finished yet.

The red light blinks again. Not the old blink, the slow pulse of a machine keeping a message warm. This is a new message, arriving now, in real time, and the number on the display is this house, and I can hear her breathing on the line — not the tape, the line — and she is not waiting for me to let her go.

She is waiting for me to take the phone.

The machine clicks, and the tape is very quiet, and my mother's voice comes through, live, from a line that has been dead for seven years, and she finishes the sentence. The whole of it. And the sentence was not what I thought.

"— and I want you to know, I wasn't asking you to let me go. I was never asking that. Someone has to take the calls, love. That's the job. That's the whole job. I did it for your father, and for your sister, and for you — every ring, every night, I was the one who answered. I was so tired, and I thought if I could just hear you say you'd take it, I could finally rest. But you kept coming back and playing them and leaving. So I kept the machine alive, and I practiced your voice so you would come when I called it, and I have been waiting seven years for you to say the one thing that would let me put the phone down. It's your turn, Julia. Say you've got it. Say you're here. Say you'll take the calls."

And there it is. Seven years of grief, and it was never a goodbye. It was an inheritance. The message was never asking me to let her go. It was asking me to take her place — to be the one who stands in the kitchen and answers, the one who is never allowed to put the phone down. She has been trying to hand me the phone, and I have been standing here for seven years with my finger on the button, telling myself I was too afraid to hear the last thing she said, when the truth is I was too afraid to hear the first thing she asked.

I say it. I have a wife and a daughter and a life that has nothing to do with this kitchen, and I stand in my mother's kitchen at three in the morning, in my coat, and I say, into the dead line, "I've got it, Mum. I'm here. You can put the phone down."

The red light goes out. Not blinking. Out. The little red eye that has been keeping her message warm for seven years goes dark, and the machine makes one final soft mechanical sigh, like a breath let out at the end of a long night, and the kitchen is quiet — truly quiet, for the first time since I was a child — and I know, the way you know your own hand, that my mother is finally gone.

And the phone rings.

It is my own house. My own number, my own kitchen, four hours away, where my wife is asleep and my daughter is asleep and the phone is ringing on the wall and no one is getting up to answer it, because they are waiting for me, because that is the job, and I am the one who took it. The line is open. I can hear it ringing, all that distance, the way you hear a thing you are bound to answer.

I am going home now. I am putting on my coat properly and I am walking out of my mother's kitchen and down to the car, and I am going to drive four hours to my own house, and the phone is going to ring, and I am going to answer it. That is what the person who takes the messages does. She taught me the whole job, and I spent seven years pretending I never heard her ask, and tonight I finally said the words, and now the job is mine, and it does not end.

The machine is dark. The house is quiet. I am the one who answers now.

— The End · The Machine Still Takes Messages, from The Dark Threshold by Alden Cross