My Wife Threw Away the Only Tapes of My Daughter’s Dead Mother — Then I Found Where She Really Hid Them

Part 1

Two weeks before my daughter’s eighteenth birthday, I climbed into the closet to find the box.

It was a plain shoebox with a strip of masking tape across the lid, the word NADIA written in my handwriting from sixteen years ago.

Inside were seven VHS tapes.

Each one held footage of my first wife, Diane, during her pregnancy.

We had filmed everything — the morning she first showed, the afternoon she cried laughing at a lopsided casserole she was trying to make from a cookbook her mother gave her, the night she pressed her palm to her stomach and spoke directly into the lens as if she already knew our daughter could hear.

Diane died when Nadia was two years old.

A drunk driver hit her on the highway, three miles from her mother’s house, on a Tuesday evening when the sky was still pink.

Nadia has never heard her mother’s voice.

She has never seen her mother’s face move.

She has never watched her mother laugh, or cry, or reach for a hand just off-camera.

Sixteen years I kept those tapes safe, and sixteen years I waited for this birthday to give them to her.

So when I reached into that closet and my hand found nothing but the corner of an old shoebox, my whole body went still.

I checked the shelf twice.

I got down on my hands and knees and searched the floor.

I went through every box on every shelf in that closet, and then through the hall closet, and then through the storage room downstairs.

Nothing.

Sandra was on the couch when I came downstairs.

She had the television on low.

She looked up at me the way you look at someone when you already know what they are going to ask.

I stood in the doorway and I asked her where the box was.

She told me she had thrown it away.

Not with anger, not with tears — she said it the way you would say you had taken out the recycling.

She said I talked about Diane too much.

She said it was time for me to move on, and she had given me a head start.

I felt the floor shift under me.

I am not a person who yells.

I grew up in a quiet house and I have spent my whole adult life trying to keep things steady for Nadia.

But something came out of me in that kitchen that I do not recognize when I look back at it.

I told Sandra those tapes were not mine to throw away.

I told her they belonged to an eighteen-year-old girl who had been crying since she could form words because she never got to meet her mother.

Sandra started apologizing then, backing toward the wall, her hands coming up.

I locked myself in our bedroom.

I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark with my phone in my lap, and I tried to think of what Diane’s voice sounded like, and I could not pull it up cleanly anymore.

That terrified me more than anything else that day.

By the next morning Sandra was texting our friends — Craig and Brenda, people we had known for years — and asking them to reach out and tell me I was overreacting.

Craig texted me to say Diane had been gone for over a decade.

Brenda said Sandra was a wreck and that I needed to come out of that room.

I turned the phone face-down on the dresser.

Trash day was not until Thursday.

It was still Tuesday.

I pulled on a coat and I went outside in the dark and I opened every trash can on the property.

I turned them over.

I went through the kitchen bin bag by bag with a flashlight.

Nothing.

Just coffee grounds, a torn cereal box, three empty sauce jars.

The tapes were not in the trash.

My heart was hammering when I came back inside, because I already knew what that meant.

They were not gone.

She had lied about throwing them away, the same way she had delivered the news with a neutral face on the couch.

She had moved them somewhere.

She had hidden them from me, in my own house, while I sat in our bedroom falling apart.

I knocked on the bedroom door — she had retreated in there by then — and when she answered I did not raise my voice.

I told her, very quietly, that I wanted to know exactly where the tapes were, and that if she did not tell me, I was calling a divorce attorney in the morning.

She looked at me for a long moment.

And then she told me they were in her car.

She had moved them to her car the same morning she told me she had thrown them away, because she knew I would check the trash.

She had sat there for two days texting mutual friends to tell me I was overreacting, while the tapes were in her car, while she planned to let Thursday come and the truck take them.

She had planned all of it.

I walked past her, down the stairs, out the front door, and straight to her car.

I popped the trunk with the spare key.

The box was there, sitting in the corner next to a reusable grocery bag, the masking tape strip still reading NADIA in my handwriting.

I carried it inside and up to my office and I locked the door.

I held it in my lap for a long time.

Then I started up my old computer and I started looking for any software that could convert VHS to digital, because I am never putting these in a place where someone else can reach them again.

Nadia does not know any of this happened.

She does not know her mother’s tapes were in Sandra’s trunk for two days.

She does not know that Thursday almost took everything.

And now I have to figure out what I am going to do about the woman who put them there.