The first thing Gil took out of the coffee can was a cassette tape. It was an ordinary tape, the kind you buy in a plastic case at the drugstore, with a white paper label curling at the edges. In the careful block capitals of Elwin were written two lines. DARLA. TO BE PLAYED WHEN SHE ASKS. Gil laid it on the desk in front of her. Darla looked at it as if it were a small animal that might bite. Then she looked at me, and I reached across the desk and took her hand, which was as cold as a river stone, and held it until the shaking stopped.
There were more of them, forty one tapes in all, laid in the can like eggs in a carton, one for every year since 1983. Under the tapes was a bundle of airmail envelopes tied with fishing line, every one in the same shaky hand of a woman, and a single snapshot of a young woman with long black hair and a Navy sweatshirt, standing beside a radio. On the back, in ballpoint, was written, Ruth, 1983. Gil said his father, Arne, had always kept the can in the safe of his shack. He said Elwin had made his father swear to deliver it in person if he ever stopped answering.
Darla could not speak, so I did. “Gil,” I said, “I think you had better tell us.” He nodded, and sat down on one of the school chairs with his cap between his knees, and told the truth the way the men of the north tell things, in short plain sentences. In March of 1983, a nineteen year old Navy radio operator named Ruth Aquilina was stationed in Anchorage. She was pregnant and frightened and alone. Her parents had disowned her. She called into a ham net one night, crying, asking if anyone in the lower forty eight could help her find a home for a baby.
One voice on a Tuesday night, patient and kind, can carry a child across four thousand miles.
I put my hand to my mouth. I did not need him to go on. I remembered that March, and I remembered it the way you remember an old burn, with a part of the mind that has been trained to avoid it. I had gone into labor six weeks early. The baby boy, whom we had already named Elwin Junior, did not draw breath. I was given a shot and I slept. When I woke, in a morning of gray light, my husband was sitting beside the bed with a bundle in his arms, his face wet. He said, “Della, she is ours.” And I did not ask. I did not ask a single question.
“Mom,” Darla whispered. Her mascara was running down her face. I turned to her and held her by both shoulders, and I said the words I had never said aloud in forty one years. “I knew. I knew the moment I held you that you had not come from me. I had been on that switchboard for eleven years, honey. I plugged the cord for the call from Anchorage myself. I heard the voice of your father on the line, and I heard him weeping. I never told him. I never told anyone. I did not want the gift to be taken back.”
Darla stared at me. Then, without warning, she laughed, a wet, astonished laugh, and threw her arms around my neck and sobbed against my collar. We rocked there in the school chair, two stubborn women in the middle of a community college classroom, and the retired men outside the door cleared their throats and found something to look at in the hall. Gil sat quietly, turning his cap in his hands. After a while, he said, “Ruth is still alive, Mrs. Krusemark. She lives in Anchorage. She is sixty four. She has never missed a Tuesday.”
I did not understand that last part until he explained it. Every Tuesday for forty years, while I did the dishes and thought my husband was talking to strangers in Russia, Elwin had gone into the little room off the kitchen and put on his headphones. He talked to Arne in Nome, and Arne relayed his words by landline to Ruth in Anchorage, and back again. He told her what Darla had done that week. First tooth. First bicycle. The softball game at which she hit a double and cried. He told her about the prom, the graduation, the wedding, the grandchildren. He had kept a mother in the room for forty years who could not be there.
“It was for me,” Darla said quietly. She picked up the cassette and held it against her chest. “Daddy never missed my games, did he? He was telling her all about them afterward.” I said he had never missed one, and he had been up in the bleachers with a transistor radio in his pocket for every inning. She laughed again, through the tears. “I thought he was listening to the Cornhuskers,” she said. “All those years.” Then she was up out of her chair, kissing the dusty cheek of a stranger from Nome, and thanking him.
We played the first tape on the old cassette deck from the classroom closet. The voice was a young woman, rough with nerves, speaking through static. Hello, baby girl. It is March. You are three weeks old. I am so sorry I could not keep you. I have asked a good man to look after you. I hope you learn to ride a bike. I hope you have a mother who sings. I put my hand on the back of the neck of Darla and said, “I sing, honey, when I think no one can hear.” Darla smiled, through all of it, with a face I knew by heart.
I passed my test that night, on the first try. The proctor, a retired postmaster, put the certificate in my hand, and Darla clapped so hard that two men from the back row came in to see what the fuss was about. Gil took us to the Sinclair for pie. He told us that Ruth would love to hear from us, and that his father had saved her radio frequency on a card taped to the wall of the shack. In my pocketbook, I tucked the license, still warm from the printer, and I thought, I will need a call sign. I will use the old one of Elwin.
The next Tuesday night at seven, Darla and I stood in the little room off the kitchen. The tower, forty feet of steel and a bent antenna, stood in the backyard under a half moon. I put on the headphones of Elwin. Darla held the microphone to my mouth. I turned the dial to the frequency on the card, and in the voice of an old switchboard operator, I said, “CQ, CQ, this is Della in Beatrice, Nebraska. Is anyone out there?” For a long moment, there was only static. Then, faint and clear and fifty years young, a woman voice came through: “Beatrice, this is Anchorage. I have been waiting.”