MacBook purchased in 2013 flashing question mark need to recover data. I believe it is updated to the extent possible

I am assuming that you tried all of the steps in the following support article:

• If your Mac starts up to a question mark - Apple Support

If so, if you boot up this notebook in Recovery Mode, and then, use the Disk Utility to attempt to repair the startup drive ... and it shows that it has errors ... it may be corrupted or damaged. My suggestion is to try the repair several times. If, after doing so, it still shows errors, then you have gone as far as you can to get this resolved yourself.

If the data on that drive is critical to you, you basically have two choices left:

1. Replace the drive, and restore the data from a backup.
2. Take the notebook to a data restore specialist to have them attempt to recover it. Note that this option could prove to be very costly.

That's what running the Disk Utility in Recovery Mode is support to resolve. While in this mode, the utility will be able to attempt to "fix" the startup disk. Whereas, it couldn't if you used in when booting up normally.

There were no MacBooks available in 2013, so you might want to re-post in the proper forum area for either MacBook Air or MacBook Pro.