Packed into that battery compartment, where the batteries should have been, wrapped tight in paper gone brittle and brown, was a photograph. I unwrapped it in my lap and had to set the radio down on the table, because I was looking at a part of my father he had carried against his body for fifty years and never shown a living soul.
It was a young woman. Vietnamese, maybe twenty, standing in a doorway in a plain dress, squinting and half smiling at whoever held the camera. On the back, in my father young handwriting, was a name I could not pronounce and could not stop staring at, and a single line. My whole heart, Da Nang.
My father had loved someone over there. Before my mother, before me, before the fifty years of silence, there had been a girl in a doorway in Da Nang who was his whole heart, and something had happened to her, or to them, in a war that took everything and gave nothing back, and he came home and never said one word about any of it, not the fighting and not the loving, because they were the same wound.
And the radio. I finally understood the radio.
He kept it near him every day of my life and never once turned it on. I always thought that was strange. Now I know. Over there, a radio was how you kept a scrap of the world close in the dark. He had brought it home meaning to keep her close the same way, and then he could not bear to play it, because the only station he wanted was gone, on the far side of the earth and the far side of the years, and silence was the last thing he had that still held her.
I could not say her name out loud for fifty years, so I kept her where a voice would have been, and I kept the voice turned off, and that was the only way I knew how to carry her and still get up in the morning.
That is not his note. He left no note. That is only what I understood, sitting there, holding the photograph of a woman I will never meet who was loved by my father more than he was ever able to say to any of us, including, God forgive me, maybe including my mother, who loved him through fifty years of a silence she must have felt the shape of and never once got to see inside.
I have not decided yet whether to try to find out what became of her, or whether some doors are meant to stay closed. But I put fresh batteries in that radio, and one evening I turned it on, low, the way he never could, and I let it play into the room for him. For both of them. For the boy from here and the girl from Da Nang, and the fifty silent years he spent carrying her home the only way a broken man knew how.