I have been listening to it my whole life.
Not always consciously. The way you listen to something that has always been there, the way the sound of a river is something you hear when you arrive at it but stop hearing once you are living beside it, absorbed into the background of the ordinary, always present, not noticed until the moment you imagine it absent. I have been hearing her voice my whole life and I have not always been hearing it, and I am trying now to hear it, the way you try to hear the river once you understand it will not always be there.
The specific quality of it.
The way it rises at the end of a question that is not really a question, that is an invitation, that is saying: I want to know what you think about this and I am making it a question to give you room to disagree. The way it goes dry when something is funny and she does not want to be seen to find it funny before you do. The way it slows when she is tired, which I can detect now with a precision I did not have at thirty, which comes from decades of calibration, from knowing the version of her voice that is clear-day and the version that is not-quite-today and the version that is: I am glad you called.
I am glad she called.
Every time. Even the calls that are disorienting, where the voice is the same voice but the words have come loose from their moorings, where she calls me by the wrong name or cannot find what she is reaching for and I can hear the reaching, the slight pause that is the gap where the word should be, the way she navigates around it or stops and waits for me to come to where she is. Even those calls. The voice is there. The voice is still hers in all the ways that matter, the quality and the warmth and the particular frequency that has been the frequency of home my entire life.
I pick up every time.
Not out of duty. Out of the understanding that the calls are numbered now, not the calls this week, but all the calls, the total remaining, and I do not know the total but I know it is a number rather than infinite, and every call I pick up is one I have, one that is in the record, one more instance of her voice in my ear saying my name in the voice that means: you are mine and I am glad you exist and I am calling because you are the one I call.
I pick up. I always pick up. I will always pick up.
