Chapter 74: The Box in Berwyn
My father’s house is a brick two-flat off Ridgeland with a concrete stoop and a hydrangea nobody has ever pruned correctly.
He is in residential care in Oak Park. Four thousand one hundred a month, and that does not include the hairdresser.
I rent the upstairs to a couple who teach in Cicero. The downstairs is exactly as it was the day the ambulance came, plus eleven boxes of mine.
I drove out on the eighth of November with Marco in the passenger seat.
He insisted. I understood by then that his insisting was a form of apology for the tank.
Then he said, “You kept the old recorder.”
“I keep everything,” I said. “It’s a defect.”
“It isn’t,” he said.
The downstairs smelled of cold plaster and of the lavender sachets my father bought four for a dollar at a church sale.
The boxes were in the back bedroom. I had labeled them in marker in the winter of 2024, when I still believed labelling would save me time later.
SCHOOL. SCHOOL 2. KITCHEN. DAD PAPERS. WINTER. SHOES. BLACKWOOD. MISC. FRAGILE.
BLACKWOOD was fourth in a stack of five, which meant lifting three boxes of my father’s tax returns while Marco held a phone light.
It weighed almost nothing.
Inside: two navy agency tunics, size small, never returned. A laminated ID with a photograph of me at twenty-four looking nineteen. Three spiral notebooks. A charger.
A zip bag of AAA batteries, dead.
And the recorder.
It is a Sony, gray, the size of a chocolate bar, with a rubberised strip down one side gone tacky the way rubber does.
At the bottom of the carton there was a sandwich bag with four microSD cards in it and a note in my own handwriting.
It said BACKUP 1–4 and nothing else.
No dates. Twenty-four-year-old me had not imagined needing dates.
Marco held the bag up to the window light.
“Four cards.”
“They’re eight gigabyte,” I said. “They were cheap. I bought a five-pack.”
I would like to say I felt something standing there. I did not.
I felt like a tired woman in a cold room holding a sandwich bag.
The feeling came later, all at once, and it did not come in Berwyn.
We took the whole box, and the notebooks too, which mattered more than I expected, because paper carries dates whether or not a machine does.
On the way back Marco asked what I expected to be on them.
“Nothing,” I said. “Feeds. Ounces. Me saying the time.”
“Then why are we doing this?”
I thought about it for the length of the Eisenhower.
“Because everything else got thrown away,” I said, “and this didn’t, because nobody knew it existed. Including me.”
He drove for a while. “That’s the best reason I’ve heard all year,” he said.
We did not take the material back to the house. That was his rule and he was right about it.
His sister has a two-bedroom in Berwyn Gardens with a spare room she uses for ironing.
She agreed to a folding table and a lamp and me there some evenings, in exchange for nothing. I have never forgotten it.
We set up on the ninth. Folding table, desk lamp, my laptop, a card reader, a legal pad, and a mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST GOLFER.
The first thing I did was try to turn the recorder on.
It did nothing. I put in two fresh batteries from a Walgreens on Cermak and it did nothing again.
Marco opened the battery door properly and showed me the contacts, which had a pale crust on them like salt.
One of the old cells had leaked at some point during the eighteen months it sat in a cold house.
He cleaned the contacts with a cotton bud and white vinegar, then with rubbing alcohol, then dried them.
The screen came on. It said, in gray segments, 01-01 00:00.
The internal clock had reset to zero.
I did not yet understand what that was going to cost me. I understood that the machine was alive.
There were files on it. The display said 118.
Marco put his hand flat on the table.
“Don’t play anything here,” he said. “Copy first. Copy twice. Then play.”
“You’ve done this before.”
“I’ve watched people not do it before,” he said.
We copied the internal memory to my laptop, then to an external drive, then to a second drive I bought that night for fifty-nine dollars.
Then the four cards, one at a time, while I wrote the counts on the legal pad as they came across.
Card one, 402. Card two, 388. Card three, 411. Card four, 96. Plus 118 on the device.
One thousand four hundred and fifteen files.
I sat back in a folding chair in a stranger’s ironing room and looked at that number.
Then Marco opened the first folder to check the copy had worked.
Every file date on the screen said 01 January 2013.