Thirty-Two Seconds

The recording is thirty-two seconds long.

Marguerite knows this the way she knows her own pulse. She has listened to it, at a conservative estimate, four thousand times, and she could tell you where every breath falls.

It begins with a click. Then eleven seconds of nothing — not silence, exactly, but the particular textured nothing of a room with a person in it. Then her mother says: Are you recording? Is it on? I can never tell with these.

Then a laugh, four syllables long.

Then: Well. Anyway. I wanted you to have my voice.

Then a pause of six seconds — the longest six seconds Marguerite has ever known — and then the click again, and then it is over.

The tape was in a shoebox with three buttons and a library card. It had no label. Her mother had died in March and it was August before Marguerite found it, and by then she had already begun the slow work of forgetting how the voice sounded, which is the second death and the one nobody warns you about.

For a year she rationed it. Once a week, on Sundays, like a church she did not otherwise attend.

Then twice a week. Then most evenings. Then, for a period she is not proud of, on a loop while she slept.

Her therapist used a word she did not like. Marguerite pointed out that people keep photographs. Her therapist said that people do not generally sleep beneath a photograph projected onto the ceiling at a volume of sixty decibels, and Marguerite conceded the point but did not change the practice.

What she has never told anyone — not the therapist, not her brother, not the man she nearly married — is the thing about the six seconds.

At the end, after I wanted you to have my voice, there is that six-second pause before the click. And in the pause there is a sound. It is very faint. For the first two years she thought it was tape hiss, or a lorry outside, or the fridge.

It is not any of those.

It is her mother, saying something else. Two words. Quiet, and turned away from the microphone, and buried under the hiss so completely that Marguerite has spent four years and roughly nine hundred pounds on audio software trying to lift them out.

Last month she finally succeeded.

She has not listened to the cleaned file. It sits on her desktop in a folder called later, and every evening she opens the folder and looks at it and closes the folder again.

Because here is what Marguerite has worked out, slowly, over four thousand listens:

Her mother made this tape in a room with the door shut, on a machine she did not understand, for a daughter she had not spoken to in nine years. She said I wanted you to have my voice. And then she said two more words, and then she stopped the tape and put it in a shoebox with three buttons and a library card, and she never sent it, and she never mentioned it, and she died.

Whatever those two words are, her mother chose not to give them to her.

Marguerite has the file. She could know by Tuesday.

She opens the folder again. She looks at it.

She closes the folder.