By Ella Ramsey, Northend Agent’s
Marva Combs discovered the radio in the attic of her grandmother’s house one Tuesday in October, buried beneath a cardboard box of church fans and several issues of Jet magazine dating back to 1987. The wood of the radio felt warm, despite the chill of the attic, and it was missing numbers on its face, replaced instead by a word etched into the material above the tuning knob. HOME.
She almost left the radio behind. She had a pickup truck to load and only three more houses left to clean out before the estate sale on Saturday. Still, something pulled her down the ladder to fetch it, holding it as if it were going to break.
That evening, in the tiny apartment she rented off Blue Hills Avenue, she plugged it in.
It hummed for a while. Then a voice came through loud and clear, as if the speaker was in the room.
“Marva. Found it quicker than we expected you would.”
She dropped a spoon into the sink. It knew her name.
“Who is this?” she asked, edging toward the door.
“This is Nettie. Your great-great-grandmother. Built this radio in 1961, in the basement of the Faith AME church on Nelson Street. I was part of a group with two other women whose names didn’t get into any of the books written back then. We were trying to signal the future. Looks like it worked.”
Marva dropped into a chair hard. She’d been told all her life about Nettie, the great-great-grandmother who’d worked at the Colt factory during the war and disappeared from the family tales somewhere around the beginning of the sixties. Her grandmother would get quiet whenever the name came up.
“You’re telling me this is a time machine,” Marva said. “A radio.”
“No. This is a signal,” Nettie said. “We couldn’t send people backward or forward through time. Lord knows we tried. All we could do was put a message in the universe, one for the right ears. Go to Keney Park. Get there before the sun rises tomorrow. Bring the radio.”
Marva didn’t get much sleep that night. She kept thinking of three women in a church basement on Nelson Street, soldering wires by the light of a few candles, since no laboratory would take them on. Half of the establishments on the North End that Nettie would have been familar with had closed down over the years, cash-checkers and vacant lots where the weeds had come through the concrete. But Keney Park, yes, that place was still the four hundred acres of forest it had always been.
At 5:40 the next morning, Marva found herself at Keney Park, the radio balanced against her hip as if it was a baby. Frost covered the ground. No one else was in the park except for a man walking a dog around the golf course, too far away to notice her.
“Turn the dial slowly,” said Nettie’s voice, “Past HOME to the left.”
Marva obeyed. She watched as the air in front of her began to distort, like looking through hot air on asphalt in July, but it was thirty-eight degrees out. Something materialized in the distortion – not quite a person. A window without any kind of frame showed Marva a park transformed. Copper-colored buildings took the place of the old picnic pavilion, and children zoomed past her on things that looked almost like bicycles, giggling as if it were no big deal. Marva could not stop staring at that. To them, none of this was magic. This was Tuesday.
“That’s 2087,” said Nettie. “Or one version of it. The one where our hard work led somewhere. It continued, generation after generation, and did not get forgotten or sold or erased from history.”
“Why should you show me this?” Marva asked.
“To show you you’re at a crossroads, and you don’t even realize it. There’s a plan to sell the lot on Barbour Street where your grandmother’s shop used to stand. You’ve got a meeting about it on Thursday.” Nettie paused. “Whatever you say in that meeting is small and large at the same time.”
Marva stood there a long time, watching children who might never be born play in a park she had walked through countless times before. The window dissolved, and it became nothing more than frost and green and Tuesday morning in Hartford.
She carried the radio back the same way she brought it down from the attic, wrapping one arm around it as if she would lose it at any second. She didn’t plug it in again that week. She didn’t have to. Thursday came around, and Marva said whatever she needed to say at that meeting, and it didn’t feel like history in the moment. It felt like being late for work, annoyed about parking and scared she would screw it up.
Nettie never explained to Marva how a radio waited sixty years for the right kitchen. Marva stopped hoping she would. Some mornings, Marva just made her coffee and left the radio unplugged on the counter with that word in the wood. HOME. She’d get to it later.
