The Voicemails She Never Deleted

By Clara Voss

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I have a password on my phone that nobody in my family knows. It is six digits, and I have never written it down, and if I died tomorrow the only person who could have told them what it was would be my mother. Except my mother has been gone for eleven years.

There are forty-three voicemails on that phone. Forty-three messages my mother, Petra, left me across the last four years of her life, starting from the year my brother Hector set her up with a cell phone at the age of seventy-eight and taught her how to press the big green button. She called me every few days. She left messages in Spanish, in English, in that particular blend of both that only we used, a language that belonged only to the two of us and died with her. She left messages about nothing. About the weather in San Antonio and whether I had eaten enough and a casserole she was making for the church social. She left messages that were mostly silence because she had forgotten she was still recording. She left one message, near the end, that I cannot listen to without needing to sit down first.

I live in a small town in Kansas now, thirty-two years since I moved here for a man I loved and have spent a good portion of those years living beside in a complicated peace. Not resentment, not exactly. More like the steady work of two people who turned out to be different from what they expected but decided to stay anyway. We have a house with a porch and a garden and a church we attend on Sundays and a small-town life that is nothing like the life I imagined when I was twenty and thought I would always live close to my mother. The town is flat. The sky is enormous. The people know your name but not your heart, which is a particular kind of loneliness, and I have lived inside it for three decades.

I charge my phone every single night. I have done this for eleven years. The reason I charge it is not the alarm clock or the weather app. The reason is forty-three voicemails, and the fear, the irrational and completely rational fear, that if the battery dies something will happen to them. That the carrier will finally, after all this time, purge them the way carriers are supposed to purge them. That they will simply be gone one morning, and her voice will be gone with them, and all I will have left is the photographs, which are beautiful and frozen, and the handwriting in old cards, which is hers but silent.

My daughter Yolanda calls it an obsession. She is not wrong.

She is twenty-nine and she is practical in the way that daughters of sentimental women sometimes become, as if the practicality is a correction, a counterweight to something they watched their mothers do and decided not to repeat. She buys sensible shoes and she has a five-year plan and she believes in updating technology on a regular basis because outdated technology is a liability and a security risk. She has told me this many times. She showed me an article about it once on her own phone, which was new and thin and fast and did not have any voicemails on it from anyone who had died.

I should explain what kind of phone I have. It is old. It is embarrassingly, stubbornly old. It is the kind of phone that Yolanda has described, at various family dinners, as a relic, a liability, and once, memorably, as something that belongs in a museum alongside the dinosaurs. I have had this phone for thirteen years. I bought it two years before my mother died and I have never switched it because I cannot switch it. You cannot move voicemails from one phone to another. I have looked into this. I have spent hours over the years looking into it at the kitchen table while everyone else was asleep, searching on the laptop, reading forums where other people asked the same question with the same desperation. There are services that claim to do it but they require connecting your phone to a stranger’s software and trusting that it will work and trusting that nothing will be lost in the transfer and I do not have that kind of trust. I trust this phone. I trust the charge cord and the outlet beside my nightstand and the password I have memorized and never written down.

Or thought I had never written down.

My son Hector, named for my brother the way these things travel through families like a kind of genetic echo, came to visit last November with his wife Bea. They drove from Wichita, which is close enough for guilt and far enough for holidays. Hector is a good son. He has my mother’s broad forehead and her habit of going very quiet when something matters to him, as if the quietness is how he makes room for it. I love him for that. I love that when I see him go still I know something real is happening inside him.

Yolanda came the same weekend. She lives forty minutes away, close enough that she comes by more often but somehow the frequency makes it feel like less. There is a thing between Yolanda and me that I have never been able to name properly. It is not distance, exactly. It is more like two people who are enough alike to recognize each other and enough different to keep a certain careful space. She is efficient with me. She calls when she says she will call and she arrives when she says she will arrive and she stays for exactly as long as she said she would stay. I have spent years trying to decide whether this is love or defense and I think the answer is that it is both, and that the line between them is thinner than I used to believe.

She has told me, kindly, on more than one occasion, that I live too much in the past. She said it once at the kitchen table over coffee and she meant it as a gift, as an observation meant to help me. I smiled and nodded and later that night I played a voicemail from 2016 where my mother described making tamales and I thought: the past is where she is. The past is where her voice still works.

The conversation about the phone started on Saturday morning. I was standing at the stove making eggs and Yolanda was at the kitchen table with her coffee, the window behind her showing the bare November field, and she mentioned, casually and lightly, that she had looked into a phone upgrade plan for me and the carrier was running a promotion and she could handle the whole transfer herself, she had done it twice for friends, it only took about an hour, and I would end up with a phone that actually worked and a battery that lasted the whole day.

I said I did not need a new phone.

She said my phone was thirteen years old.

I said I was aware of that.

She said the battery was failing, which was true. She said the camera did not work well in low light, which was also true. She said I was missing security updates that mattered for my banking apps, which was probably true as well. None of it was the point and I could not tell her what the point was because I had never told anyone what the point was.

Hector came in from the back porch where he had been watching the birds at my feeder. Bea came downstairs from the guest room with her hair still damp. We ate eggs and talked about Hector’s job and Bea’s sister’s new baby and the price of gas on the highway, and nobody mentioned the phone again, and I thought it was finished. That is the particular mistake I keep making in my life: thinking things are finished.

That afternoon Bea asked if I needed help at the church bazaar and I said yes because I always say yes because I am sixty-two years old and still find it difficult to accept help gracefully but I am working on it. Yolanda decided to stay home. She said she was tired from the drive, which was forty minutes, but I did not say that. We drove to the church, Bea and I, and I spent three hours helping arrange the baked goods table and the handmade quilt raffle and the silent auction for a set of dishes someone had donated. It was the kind of afternoon I have had hundreds of times in this town, unremarkable and quietly pleasant, and I drove home in the blue November dusk feeling the particular satisfaction of having been useful.

When I came through the front door they were in the living room. Yolanda and Hector side by side on the couch, Hector with his hands on his knees, Yolanda with her coffee mug. My old phone was on the coffee table. A new phone was beside it, screen lit and alive and waiting.

“We got you set up,” Yolanda said. “Hector found your password in the notes on the old phone.”

I had written it down. I had told myself I would never write it down and then I had written it down in a note titled “plumber” because I was terrified of forgetting it, and I had done such a good job of tucking it away that I forgot it was there, and now my son had found it and used it and they had gone into my phone while I was at the church arranging dishes for a raffle.

“The contacts all transferred,” Hector said. “Photos too, all of them. There were a couple of apps that didn’t carry over automatically but I can re-download those for you. Same number, same carrier.”

I picked up the old phone.

“The voicemails,” I said.

The room went still.

Yolanda and Hector looked at each other. It was a quick look, the kind of look siblings exchange when something has gone sideways in a way they had not prepared for.

“They don’t transfer,” Yolanda said. “I looked it up before we started. Voicemails are stored on the carrier server, not the phone itself, and there’s no way to migrate them between devices. Most carriers purge them after thirty to sixty days anyway.”

“Mine have been there for eleven years,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “That’s unusual. They shouldn’t really still be there.”

I was holding the phone in both hands. I want to describe how that felt but the best I can do is this: like holding a door shut against something very large. Like the phone was the only thing between me and a room that did not have her in it.

“Did you listen to them,” I said.

“No.” Yolanda said it quickly. “We didn’t play them. We were going to ask you about it, but we thought the transfer might handle it automatically, and when it didn’t I looked it up, and we were going to tell you when you got back.”

Hector said, “We didn’t know they were important.”

I sat down in the armchair beside the window. The armchair that had been there since we moved in and that I have recovered once and that my husband has said twice we should replace and that I will probably never replace as long as I live in this house.

Yolanda said, gently, “Mom. They’re voicemails. They’re eleven years old.”

She was not saying it to be cruel. I know my daughter and I know when she is being cruel and she was not being cruel. She was being practical. She was offering me the reasonable frame around an unreasonable attachment, the way she has done many times with many things, the way I did when I was twenty-nine and thought the unreasonable was something you outgrew.

I stood up and I went to my bedroom and I closed the door.

I sat on the edge of the bed with the old phone in my lap. I put in my earbuds, the old wired kind that still work with the old phone. And I pressed play on the first message.

June, twelve years ago, before she got sick, before any of us knew anything was wrong. She was calling from her kitchen in San Antonio and you could hear it, the specific sound of that kitchen, the tick of the clock she kept on the wall by the window, the low hum of the refrigerator, sounds I grew up with and have not heard in eleven years except here, in this phone, in these forty-three messages.

She said: “Dolores. Mija. The most beautiful thing. A hummingbird at the feeder, do you know how long I have had that feeder and never once seen a hummingbird? And this morning there he was.” She described it the way she described everything, slowly and with great care, the way she described a sunset or a new recipe, as if the details were gifts she was handing over one at a time. The colors of the bird. The way it hovered and then tilted and then was gone. She said she thought of me immediately and she did not know why, just that she saw it and thought of Dolores, and she called because she wanted me to know that when she saw the most beautiful thing her first thought was of me.

Then she said she loved me. And she hung up.

I sat there on the edge of my bed in the November dark and the clock on my nightstand said four-forty-seven and through the wall I could hear the low sounds of my children in the living room, Hector’s quiet voice and Yolanda’s quieter response.

Yolanda knocked on my door twenty minutes later. I heard her footsteps in the hall, the particular pattern of them, which I have known since she learned to walk.

I told her to come in.

She stood in the doorway for a moment looking at me. Then she came and sat on the bed beside me. Not too close. She left space, the way she does, giving me room. She looked at the old phone in my hands. She did not say anything.

“Your grandmother called me every few days,” I said. “From the time your uncle set her up with a phone until she passed. She left messages about nothing. About hummingbirds and what she was cooking and how she was sleeping. I kept all of them.”

Yolanda was very still.

“Forty-three messages,” I said. “I have listened to them so many times I have most of them memorized. But memorized is not the same as hearing her say it. It is not the same as her voice.”

She said, “I didn’t know.”

“Nobody knew,” I said. “I didn’t tell anyone.”

She said, quietly, “Why not?”

I had thought about this over the years. I had worked through several explanations that were all partly true. That grief is private. That I did not want to perform it. That speaking it aloud would change its nature, turn a secret intimacy into something on display.

But sitting there with Yolanda beside me I understood something I had not let myself understand before. It was not just grief. It was trust. Or the absence of it. I did not believe anyone else could hold these messages carefully enough. I did not believe anyone would understand what they were, which was not data, not audio files, not a collection of old recordings, but my mother, alive, every time I pressed play. I did not believe anyone would understand that I was not grieving her. I was keeping her. And I was afraid that if I told anyone, they would offer me the reasonable frame, the gentle suggestion to let go, to move forward, to recognize that what I was holding was a ghost and not a woman.

I looked at my daughter sitting there with her hands folded in her lap and her jaw set in the way it gets when she is working through something.

“I didn’t think anyone would understand,” I said. “I didn’t think I could explain what they were to me.”

“What are they,” she said.

I picked up the phone. I played the hummingbird one.

When it ended, Yolanda had her hand over her mouth.

“She sounds exactly like I remember,” she said. She said it the way you say something that surprises you. She had been six when my mother died. She had memories of her but the way a child’s memories of old people often are: impressions, textures, the smell of a kitchen, the sound of a name said a certain way. She had not heard her voice in twenty-three years.

“That’s her everyday voice,” I said. “That’s just her calling.”

I played another one. The one from two years before she died, one of the good days in a stretch that had started to have bad days in it, when the good ones stood out differently than they used to. She was calling from her kitchen again. She said: “Dolores. I was thinking about you in the white dress. Your quinceañera. You were so beautiful and so nervous. You kept tugging at the skirt and I kept telling you to stop and you kept doing it anyway.” She laughed. I know her laugh from before I could understand language. “I still have that photograph. I am looking at it right now, right here on the shelf.” A pause. “You are still beautiful. Even when you are nervous. Do not forget that.”

Yolanda made a sound beside me. Not a word. Just a sound.

We did not look at each other for a moment. We sat with my mother’s voice in the room.

I played the one where she fell asleep. That one always startled me the first few times I played it, before I knew what was coming. She started leaving a message about a neighbor’s dog and then the message went very quiet and then there was breathing, slow and regular. About three minutes of breathing. And then a shuffling sound and a surprised “Hello? Hello?” and then her realizing she was still in a message and saying “Dios mio” in the exasperated way she said it when she had done something absurd, and then a laugh. Her real laugh, the one that was mostly breath, the one that meant she found herself genuinely funny.

Yolanda laughed. I laughed. We sat on my bed laughing at my dead mother falling asleep in a voicemail and it was one of the best moments I have had in this house in years.

And then I played the last one.

I had never played it for anyone. I had listened to it alone in the dark in this room many times over eleven years, and each time I had the same physical response: a tightening in the chest, a slowing of the breath, the sensation of having to hold very still to receive it properly. It is four minutes and eleven seconds long, which is the longest voicemail she ever left.

She left it three weeks before she died. She was home that day, one of the last days they let her be home, and her voice was thin. I know the word thin does not quite do it but I do not have a better word. It was thinner and slower than her usual voice, and underneath it you could hear the effort of keeping it steady, which was my mother’s whole personality distilled into sound: the insistence on steadiness even when steadiness cost her something.

She said: “Dolores. I have been trying to think about what I want to say to you and I keep waiting to say it in person but your brother tells me I should stop waiting for the right moment because the right moment is whatever moment I have. So.” A long, slow breath. “You were my most difficult child. You know this. You have always known this. You were stubborn and you were too emotional and you asked too many questions about everything and you loved things too hard and none of that was easy for me when you were young.” Another breath. “But you were also the one who called me back. Every time I called you, you called me back. Your brother, your sisters, sometimes I wait days. You always call back. The same day, usually. Sometimes the same hour.” A pause. “That is not nothing, mija. I want you to hear me say that. That is not nothing. That is everything.”

She was quiet for a moment and you could hear the house around her, the San Antonio house, the clock and the refrigerator and a car passing on the street outside.

“I am not going to be here much longer,” she said. “I know this. I am not afraid of it. But I want you to know that of all the things I did in my life, having you was the best thing. You and your brother and your sisters, yes, but you, Dolores. You were first. You were the one who made me a mother. And I never said that to you enough, I never said it the right way, and I am saying it now in a voicemail because your brother says don’t wait for the right moment.” A sound that might have been a laugh, small and tired. “I love you. Call me back.”

We were both crying. I was not watching Yolanda but I could hear her beside me, her breath catching and releasing, and I did not try to manage it. I let it be what it was. Four minutes and eleven seconds and twenty-three years of distance and sixty-two years of being my mother’s most difficult child and twenty-three years of missing her voice, and I let all of it be in the room at once.

We sat there for a long time. Through the window the November sky was going dark at the edges, the particular Kansas dark that comes in from the flat horizon like something spreading. The garden was bare. The feeder was empty.

“The one who called back,” Yolanda said, finally.

“I always called her back,” I said. “I don’t know why I did. I just did.”

A silence.

“I don’t always call you back right away,” Yolanda said.

I looked at her.

She was not looking at me. She was looking at the phone in my hands. Her jaw was set in the way it gets when she is working through something she does not quite want to say.

“You call back,” I said. “You always call back.”

“Not always the same day,” she said. “Sometimes it’s a couple of days.”

“A couple of days is fine,” I said. “The calling back is the thing. The calling back is what she meant.”

She made a small sound. Not quite a laugh. Not quite not.

I reached over and I took her hand. She let me. We sat like that for a while, her hand in mine, the old phone between us, my mother’s voice still present in the air of my room the way a voice stays after a recording ends, the way a silence that was recently a sound is different from a silence that was always quiet.

Hector appeared in the doorway at some point. He stood there with his wide, quiet forehead and his hands in his pockets, taking in his mother and his sister on the bed. I told him to come sit down. I told him about the voicemails, all of it, why I kept them, why I had never said anything, what was in them. He sat at the foot of the bed near my feet and listened without interrupting, which is his way. When I finished he said, “I didn’t know she called you that often.” I said she called me every few days. He said “I didn’t know she was that kind of caller.” I said she was that kind of caller with me. He nodded slowly and went quiet and I watched his face settle into the particular expression of a person absorbing something that changes the shape of something they already knew.

Bea made dinner that night. Soup from things she found in my refrigerator, which is a skill I have always admired, the ability to look at a refrigerator and find a meal where I would have found only ingredients. We sat around the table and ate and nobody mentioned the phone. Nobody mentioned the upgrade or the transfer or whether I was going to switch. The new phone sat on the coffee table in the other room, screen dark now.

After dinner we stayed at the table for a long time the way people do when they do not want the evening to end. Hector told a story about our mother from when he was a child, something I had never heard, a story about her finding a stray cat and secretly feeding it for a year before our father noticed. We all laughed. Bea asked questions about what she was like and we answered them, Hector and I, passing the story back and forth between us the way siblings do, each one holding a different part.

And then Yolanda did something I did not expect.

She reached into her bag and got out her own phone. She scrolled through it for a minute, scrolling back through something, and then she turned the phone around and showed me the screen. It was her voicemail inbox. She had a message saved from me. One message, dated almost a year ago to the day, last December. I had called to tell her about a cedar waxwing I had seen in the garden, which is unusual for this part of Kansas and which had startled me when it landed on the bare branch outside my kitchen window. I had called and left a message because I wanted to tell someone and she was the one I called. I did not remember leaving it. I had no memory of it at all.

She had saved it.

She had not deleted it.

I looked at her across the table.

She said, “I save the ones where you sound like yourself. Not leaving information. Not checking in. Just talking.”

I did not know what to say. There are moments in a life when a sentence rearranges something inside you, and this was one of them. My practical daughter with her five-year plan had been saving my voicemails. She had been saving the ones where I talked about birds in my garden the way my mother talked about hummingbirds at her feeder. She had been doing this in her own quiet phone without telling me, the same way I had been doing it, without telling anyone.

We looked at each other across the dinner table for a moment and something passed between us that I do not know how to name except to say it felt like recognition. Not new recognition. Like finding something you forgot you knew.

I kept the old phone. I will probably always keep it. It sits on my nightstand where it has always sat, charged every night, and when I cannot sleep I sometimes put in the earbuds and listen to one of the forty-three messages, not always the last one, sometimes just the hummingbird one or the one about the quinceañera photograph. I keep it the way you keep anything that holds a living voice: carefully, privately, charged.

But I gave Yolanda the password.

I showed her the messages on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks later when she came to visit, sat her down in the kitchen with coffee and walked her through them one by one. I told her which ones to start with if anything ever happens to me. I told her the order that makes sense, the way the story of my mother’s last four years unfolds across them, the hummingbird near the beginning and the quinceañera in the middle and the last one at the end. I told her not to start with the last one. I told her to work up to it.

She said she would.

I believe her.

There is a voicemail I have not left for Yolanda yet. I have been composing it in my head for weeks, the way I used to compose letters before everything became a text, drafting and revising in the margins of other things. I know what I want to say. I know how I want to say it. I am not waiting for the right moment because my brother Hector said do not wait for the right moment and my mother listened to him and I am listening to her.

What my mother said in that last message, the thing she said after she told me I was her most difficult child, after she told me the calling back was everything, is the thing I am trying to say to Yolanda. I want her to have it in her phone the way I have my mother’s voice in mine. I want her to be able to press play on a bad day twenty years from now and hear me say it.

What she said was this: “You were the one who made me a mother. And I never told you that enough.”

I have been telling Yolanda pieces of it for twenty-nine years. I have said I love you on the phone and I have mailed her cards on her birthday and I have driven forty minutes to bring her soup when she was sick and I have done all of it in the way that mothers do things, which is quietly and practically and without expectation. I have not told her what she made me.

She made me a mother too. She was first. She was the one who taught me what it was to hold a person outside your own body and realize that the world had just become impossibly dangerous and impossibly beautiful at the same time. She was the one who made me understand why my own mother called every few days about nothing, about hummingbirds, about old photographs on the shelf. She made me the kind of person who saves a voice on a phone and charges it every night because the voice is irreplaceable. She made me someone who knows what it means to be called back.

I am going to call her next week. I am going to say something about the garden, about what is coming up through the frozen ground now that it is warming, or about something I saw on the highway on the way to the grocery store. Something ordinary. Something that made me think of her. And at the end, before I hang up, I am going to say the part I have been working up to.

I am not going to wait for the right moment. The right moment is whatever moment I have.

She will save it. I know she will save it. And someday, when I am gone and the world is quieter without me in it, she will press play in a dark room somewhere and she will hear me say her name and she will know that the first thing I thought of when I saw something beautiful was her.

That is not nothing, mija.

That is everything.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.