The Office of Historical Corrections Read online

  In any case, the obvious thing was to go to the police, to let them straighten the whole thing out. But there was this little boy, who was holding on to Vera with his left hand while he sucked the thumb on his right. And there was this duffel bag, where, between two layers of clothing, wrapped in a layer of plastic, and then a layer of gift wrap, Vera had carefully placed a package containing twenty thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine. It was the last favor she was ever doing for Josh, and new as she was to this, she knew better than to walk into a police station with it.

  “What’s your name, sweetie?” Vera asked the little boy. He shook his head. She scanned him for signs of a name tag, finally finding one on the inner lining of his T-shirt—someone had scrawled william, in black Sharpie, on the tag inside.

  “Come on, William,” Vera said. “Let’s get something to eat.”

  * * *

  —

  Vera took him to a McDonald’s and watched him nibble at his French fries and chicken nuggets. She considered dropping him off on the steps of a police station and just walking away, but that felt fraught with unsavory possibilities. He might follow her and get more lost than he already was. Someone might see her leaving him and try to stop her. There’d be more questions asked than she had answers for. She had one thousand dollars in cash tucked into the lining of her handbag, and when she went to drop this package off tomorrow she’d have ten thousand dollars more, and her whole life in front of her.

  The year before she’d dropped out, she’d fulfilled her university’s mandatory community service requirement by working with a literacy program at a women’s prison. There were women not much older than she was doing ten years for holding, selling, transporting—mostly their boyfriends’ drugs. A classmate said once that they’d bargained their lives for a few thousand dollars, which just emphasized for Vera how much the classmate had missed the point—most of these women weren’t getting money in the first place. They’d done it for love.

  Fuck love. This was not a love story. Josh was in his late thirties, already balding and prone to wearing button-down Hawaiian print shirts. He’d half-heartedly hit on Vera once, but even he couldn’t take the flirtation seriously enough to be offended by her rejection. He owned the record store, which had been a hardware store until his father died. For at least the last decade he’d been making more money selling pot and small-time quantities of pills out of the back room than he had selling records out of the front room; not because he’d started selling more drugs but because people had stopped buying music. Until now, Vera had strictly worked the front-room business, maintaining plausible deniability of whatever else her employer was doing. She kept a blank face while ringing up music of questionable taste, pornographic album covers, actual pornography, and cigarettes that twentysomething men purchased for the fourteen-year-old girls lingering outside. Vera got good at pretending not to notice people who didn’t want to be seen.

  The revival downtown had been promising her for years sputtered and stopped when the recession hit. Even after she’d dropped out of school, it had seemed better to stay put than to go an hour backward and end up at home again. Her father had suggested she get her cosmetology degree and work at the nail salon that had opened in town, and Vera said, You want me to get a job literally watching paint dry? When she called her parents back to apologize for her tone, she made it sound like Josh’s store was really something and she had big plans, when in fact every day she felt like she had less energy to even imagine what better version of herself she might become.

  Beneath the renovated downtown lofts that nobody had moved into were boarded-up windows that were supposed to be art galleries. The stoners who hung around the record shop were positively comforting in comparison to the kids who hung out in the downtown parking lots tweaking, flashing her the singed remainders of their teeth. Josh had refinanced the shop and then blew the money on a bad investment and had trouble paying the mortgage. Vera worked there for two years and made minimum wage the whole time. She had no savings and Josh knew it; he had more than once spotted her a twenty for lunch and dinner when it was close to payday and he saw she wasn’t eating anything. Through someone he knew he’d gotten ahold of this drug, which was not meth, which was not heroin, which was a flittery thing, a onetime thing. He wasn’t going to chance selling it in his own backyard—the cops had let him slide on the weed, but they were getting antsy. He knew a guy in New York though, and all she had to do was get it there and she could take a fee. Josh would get out of hot water with the lender, and she could get the hell out of Missouri and not look back.

  When William had finished eating, Vera took his hand again and went outside to a pay phone. She called the phone number she had seen on the side of a city bus, and made an anonymous tip that a woman and a little girl may have been hurt near exit 9 of the Jersey Turnpike. No, she didn’t know their names. No, she didn’t know where they were coming from or where they were going. No, she couldn’t say why she thought they might be in danger. No, she couldn’t stay on the line. She caught a cab, checked into a hotel, put the baby to bed, and called her mother to tell her everything was fine.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, she took the train to the address Josh had given her. She took William with her because she wasn’t sure what else to do with him. The building was unspectacular from the outside, a grim brownstone. She rang the buzzer twice. On the second buzz, a female voice answered and asked who it was.

  “I’m Vera,” she said. “Josh sent me.”

  The door buzzed open. Vera walked up the narrow stairwell and opened the door in front of her. She thought at first she must have written the number down wrong. She was in an office—polished hardwood floors, bright accent colors on the walls, sunlight coming in through the loft windows, a sleek red couch, and a waiting area near a front desk. A woman with a blond-streaked ponytail sat behind it. A sign on the wall behind her read brooklyn delivers.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “I need to talk to Derek. My name’s Vera.”

  The woman hit a button on the phone. A few seconds later, a man with short dreads and a T-shirt featuring a band she’d never heard of came out to greet her, a perplexed look on his face.

  “I’m Vera,” she said again.

  Derek stared at William, who Vera had propped up on her hip.

  “You brought a baby?” he asked.

  “He’s two,” Vera said, as if this were an adequate explanation.

  “Hold on.” Derek disappeared into the back room, but before the door shut behind him, Vera could hear him say, “Who the fuck are we dealing with? He sent a girl with a kid.”

  A second man, this one with scruffy blond hair and thick black-framed glasses, came out of the room.

  “I’m Adam,” he said. “Josh sent you?”

  “Yes,” said Vera. She gestured toward William. “I’m sorry about him. I didn’t know where else to leave him. I just got here yesterday.”

  “It’s cool. You want to leave him out here for a minute? Liz can keep an eye on him.”

  Vera eyed the woman behind the desk. She hadn’t looked up from the computer screen. Vera deposited William on the floor and followed Adam to the back room, which looked like a more posh version of the front room—hardwood floors, plush couches, walls of file cabinets.

  “This is not what I was expecting,” she said to Adam.

  “We’re a courier service,” said Adam. “We deliver things. Mostly documents and packages for small businesses. Sometimes not.”

  “Oh,” said Vera.

  “You’re not what we were expecting either,” said Derek.

  “Sorry,” said Vera.

  “I didn’t say it was a bad thing. Just, Adam met Josh a while back on a road trip. From what he described, you don’t really seem like the kind of girl he’d be hanging around with. That his kid?”

  �
�No,” said Vera.

  “A woman of few words,” said Adam. “It’s a good instinct.”

  They finished their transaction quickly, without any of the sinister fanfare Vera had anticipated. Josh’s money was wired. She put her cash in the bag where the drugs had been. She walked out to find William safely where she’d left him, and exited the building feeling an anticlimactic sense of relief.

  * * *

  —

  Vera opened a bank account and deposited two thousand dollars. She sat in a coffee shop with William, calling through the rentals section on Craigslist. A few hours later, a Russian woman in Red Hook rented her an attic apartment. Vera had a list of friends willing to serve as fake landlord references, but the woman asked few questions once it became clear to her that Vera planned to pay both the first month’s rent and the security deposit in cash. The first night in the apartment, they slept on the floor. She watched the rise and fall of William’s chest, the delicate flaring of his tiny nostrils. He’ll need a bed, she thought, and as soon as she thought it, she realized that the idea of giving him back had gone out the window. He would be hers unless and until someone took him away.

  For the time being, William seemed like less trouble than anything else she’d gotten herself into. He was quiet, he was happy, and he imposed a certain order on her life. Meals had to be eaten at set times. There was bedtime, and time for waking up. Vera rented a U-Haul and picked up furniture around the city. When she went to buy a baby bed from a woman in Park Slope, the woman cooed over William and threw in a stroller for fifty bucks. By the end of the week, the apartment was in order and the money was half gone.

  Vera had intended all along to look for a job once she got here, but now there was the problem of having William. She couldn’t very well take him along for interviews, or even to drop off résumés, because what if they wanted to talk to her then and there? Formal day care seemed likely to involve more paperwork than she currently possessed, which meant she’d need a babysitter, which meant she’d need to spend some time figuring out whom to trust with him. She felt a pang of guilt at her nervousness about leaving him with a stranger. After all, what was she? She googled “William,” “missing child,” and “New Jersey,” setting the dates within the past month, and found no evidence that anyone was looking for him.

  On Sunday, Vera took William for a walk in Prospect Park. She bought him an ice pop from one of the street vendors. While she sat in the grass with him, feeding him ice and singing, to the best of her abilities, “Little Bunny Foo Foo,” she heard a voice call her name. She turned around to see the man with the short dreads approaching her.

  “Vera, right?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” said Vera. “Derek?”

  He nodded. “So you’re sticking around?”

  “Hopefully for good. I was just doing a favor on my way out here.”

  “Expensive favor.”

  Vera shrugged.

  “So what’s your son’s name?”

  “William,” Vera answered without hesitation, though she had not yet used the word son in reference to him. Derek sat down and began to play peekaboo with him.

  “His dad around?”

  “You see anyone but me around?”

  “OK then,” said Derek. William uncovered his face and looked disappointed that Derek had stopped playing with him. Derek reached out and tickled William’s belly until he laughed his high-pitched baby giggle.

  “You know anyone who’s good with kids?” Vera asked.

  “I’m not good enough?” Derek laughed. “I thought little man and I were getting along fine.”

  “I need someone to watch him,” said Vera. “I need to find a job.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I used to be a cashier.”

  “Just a cashier, or you kept records?”

  “I kept records.”

  “You ever answer phones?”

  “When they ring.”

  “Look,” said Derek. “Our receptionist just quit. She’s moving to LA. You interested? You answer phones, you file papers, you schedule pickups and deliveries, and ninety-five percent of what we do is legal.”

  “And the other five percent?”

  “Is why you’d be making twenty dollars an hour instead of eleven. We try not to get in the middle of the messy stuff. We get everything in small quantities here and there and then we overcharge for it because there’s a market of kids who want their drugs but are too lazy or scared to find their own dealer. We’re middlemen, basically. Not even middlemen, because we don’t even do that much buying straight from the source. We mostly stay under the radar.”

  “What about William?”

  “As long as he doesn’t fuss, you can bring him until you find someone to watch him.”

  William grinned, and then covered his mouth with his grape ice–stained fingers, as if to show how unfussy he could be.

  * * *

  —

  So just like that, Vera’s life fell into place, or out of it. She worked seven to four at the office, answering phones, filing papers, keeping two sets of books. She learned the last receptionist’s filing system—the bike messengers without a C next to their names were only to carry documents and other innocuous packages for businesses that needed to get something from one part of the city to another before the end of the business day. The ones with a C could make both regular deliveries and irregular deliveries. She liked the messengers—they came in and out of the office to pick up assignments, packages, schedules, checks. They consulted with each other about the fastest routes and the best bike locks. They called her, sometimes, sheepish and lost in a city that some of them knew in their blood and others were perpetually perplexed by, even as they pretended that no address daunted them. They were her age, or even younger, and they all had something urgent to be doing with their lives, only it hadn’t happened yet.

  They competed against one another and their own personal bests to set records for transit time. They were paid by the number of deliveries they made. She could identify some of them by their scars—the accident scrapes and scratches or, in one case, the thin jagged line left by a bike thief’s knife. Most of the messengers were oblivious to William’s presence, but a few gave him candy if they had it or sat down on the floor and played with him while they waited for Vera to finish doing what they needed done. Since no one seemed fazed by William’s presence in the office, least of all William, the idea of finding him a babysitter gradually faded away. One day she came into the office and found a playpen behind the desk, with a note on it from Adam and Derek, and the matter seemed settled.

  Adam and Derek had grown on her. They were only a few years older than Vera was, but they seemed younger sometimes, both prone to fits of silliness and then mercurial sulking. They’d been friends since high school, somewhere in the Jersey suburbs, and sometimes they spoke their own language, comprised entirely of shared memories. They claimed to live untethered lives, apparently oblivious to how helpless they would each be without the other. Adam always left a coffee on Vera’s desk in the morning. Derek made her playlists or left her notes with her name drawn in fanciful script. A few years ago, Derek had been trying to start a graphic design business, about five years too late. Adam had been a bike messenger, who figured that if he were the person running things instead of the person delivering things, he could make more money without damn near killing himself in city traffic. Adam convinced Derek that he could turn his design business into a courier business if Adam went in for half, which, thanks to a loan from an uncle, he did. After a rough first year, they started splitting their business between legal and illegal goods, and three years later, here they were.

  And now here was Vera, wiping her old life clean. She could have explained New York, probably even the job, maybe even the money, but there was no accounting for William. She deleted her Facebook page. She closed her
old email account and opened a new one that only people who knew her now were aware of. She canceled her old cell phone service and bought a new phone. She called her mother once a week, using a phone card and a pay phone at the laundromat. I’m fine, she said, over and over again. I love you. I don’t know when I’m coming home to visit.

  William began to talk more, and Vera took a certain pride in hearing him say her name. He called her Ve-ra and not Ma-ma, which seemed only fair, and which she explained by telling people she’d felt too young to be anybody’s mama when she had him. She read him bedtime stories at night and taught him his colors and letters. She had no one to ask how to do this right. At the first threat of snow, Derek bought him a winter hat, which Vera interpreted as part friendly gesture, part admonishment.

  That night she gave William a bath with lilac baby soap. She washed his curly hair and his chubby body. He splashed in the bathtub.

  “Are you happy?” Vera asked. “Am I taking good care of you?”

  He flashed his baby teeth at her. Vera scooped him into a towel, dried, lotioned, and powdered him, and put him in his fleece pajamas. He fell asleep with his head nestled into the crook of her neck. Even as kids, some girls were about babies the way other girls were about bands or horses or witchcraft, but Vera had never been like that. Babies were loud and sticky, and part of why she’d started college in the first place was sex ed made it seem like it was one or the other—either you got a degree or an infant would be assigned to you. On the same block as Josh’s record store there’d been a coffee shop where one of the girls who worked there brought her toddler sometimes. The owner told her not to, and whenever she saw his car go past to pull into the parking lot, she’d run out the front door of her shop and into the front door of Josh’s and leave her son to sit until her boss left. Josh didn’t care because the girl was pretty, and anyway he didn’t do shit but plop the little boy in a corner. It was Vera who’d have to play games with him and turn safety hazards into toys, and even though she tried, he always just started screaming, and wouldn’t stop until his mother got back. He wouldn’t even smile for her. That William was so calm with her seemed like its own argument, like the universe telling her he belonged with her.