For thirty years, my grandfather kept a baby monitor on in his study. It sat on the floor behind the sofa with its green light steady and its antenna bent from a vacuum. Nobody in that house had needed one since before I could read.
My mother would say, "Dad, it's still on," and he'd say he'd get to it. We all assumed he'd forgotten. I had watched him lose his keys, his glasses, the names of the dogs. A monitor seemed like one more thing.
The summer my cousin Josie turned thirty, he fell in the garden and broke his hip. I was sent to his study for his glasses and his charger. A storm the night before had rattled the house, and the outlet plate beside the desk lay on the floor.
A second receiver sat there, white and yellowed. Its cord didn't run to the monitor. It ran into the open outlet box and down into the wall. The plaster behind it had been cut away years ago, neatly, and patched with a hinged board. Behind the board, on a ledge of two-by-four, sat a cassette recorder with its red light on.
Beside it was a shoebox of tapes, one for each year, all labeled in his handwriting. The oldest was labeled in my grandmother's: *For when it's quiet.*
I took the tape in the machine and drove to the hospital. I set it on his tray table, next to the salt packet...