The Office of Historical Corrections Read online

  One night in November the city was blanketed in unexpected snow. Business operations shut down early. The trains were running slow and cabs were near impossible to flag. Vera wasn’t looking forward to the icy walk from the office to the train, or from the train to her apartment. She accepted Derek and Adam’s invitation to stay the night. They lived on the upper floor of the loft that housed the office. They put William to bed on the couch, and made her toaster pizza and hot chocolate with shots of rum in it. Though she teased them about their bachelor dinner, it felt good going down. It had been months since she’d spent an evening with people her own age.

  Somewhere after their third cup of cocoa, Derek kissed her, or she kissed him, or in any case she spent the night with him, and then the next, and the one after. Within a week she had a toothbrush and a few changes of clothes upstairs in the apartment, and William had a second bed. She saw less and less of the attic in Red Hook, and when she was there she could sometimes see the landlady in the window of the building next door, marking her comings and goings with suspicion.

  In December, they threw a holiday party at the loft. Vera hung garlands and mistletoe and purchased and decorated a small plastic tree. Everyone got drunk on rum-soaked eggnog and, when that ran out, cheap beer. People took slightly pornographic pictures making out under the mistletoe. At a dollar store, Vera had found a box of ornaments that were meant to be written on with permanent marker. She gave one to each of the party guests, and before long the tree was covered in bulbs that said things like New York I love you but you’re bringing me down. William was passed around from person to person like a particularly lifelike doll, and Vera was feeling charitable enough to let him be a part of everyone’s fantasy of domesticity, instead of just hers. People had brought him toys and stuffed animals. Derek bought him a set of wooden blocks. When he presented a second box, Vera started to protest that he was spoiling William, but he indicated it was meant for her. Vera stared for a minute. She’d been counting William’s presents as her own and couldn’t remember when she’d stopped seeing herself as a separate entity. She opened the box Derek had given her, and then put on the glass-beaded necklace it contained. Derek kissed her.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “You love rum,” said Vera.

  “I love you and rum,” said Derek. He kissed her again.

  Later, Vera went into the back room to call her parents. It was an hour earlier on central time, but still past her mother’s bedtime.

  “Why are you waking me up?” her mother asked. “Is everything OK? Why is it so loud?”

  “I love you,” said Vera.

  “Are you drunk?” said her mother. “What are you doing out there?”

  “I’m happy,” said Vera. “I’m not going to call for a while. I just wanted you to know.”

  Keeping William made the past firmly the past, the Vera who’d left home a Vera who couldn’t exist anymore. She committed to the present. She liked waking up with Derek, the feel of something solid beside her. She liked the way he looked at her and the way he was with William and the way he surprised her. She liked the pattern of her life now, the domestic monotony tempered with the rush of feeling always close to the edge of something, the sensation of having the thing she loved and valuing it all the more because she knew it could all go wrong at any minute.

  * * *

  —

  And then everything did. Jacob, one of the couriers, swerved to miss a puddle and slid into an eighteen-wheeler in Manhattan on a rainy day. Jacob was a nineteen-year-old with startlingly blue eyes, an orthodontically perfect smile, a part-time bartending gig, and an unrealized aspiration to be an actor one day. He had been in Vera’s office the day before, picking up a check and giving William a lollipop. He had been at the holiday party a few weeks earlier, drinking flaming tequila shots and kissing a girl with pink highlights and a crescent moon tattooed on the inside of her wrist. There was a somber memorial service, attended by dozens of his friends and fellow couriers, some wearing black bike helmets in solidarity. Vera had bought a black dress and clutched William close to her chest at the service. He had been the only one not crying.

  Jacob’s mother was a doctor in Connecticut. She hired a law firm. The complaint charged the city with failure to institute proper regulations to ensure the safety of bikers. It charged Brooklyn Delivers with being reckless by expecting unreasonable delivery times and overlooking the myriad ways in which their employees violated safety protocols. All of this was true and—in spite of the unenforceable liability waiver that the employees signed—probably actionable. In the somber aftermath of Jacob’s death, Adam and Derek underreacted for the first few weeks. For the better part of a month, they were uncommunicative and high most of the time. Vera stopped spending the night.

  At home in her attic apartment Vera stayed up some nights, thinking of Jacob’s face the day he’d bent down to give William the lollipop. She thought of his mother’s grief, filtered through legalese. One night she imagined the irrevocable loss of William. Even the flicker of pretending he was gone left her with a feeling so complete and unfamiliar that she was wrecked, lay there sobbing so loudly that William woke up and cried too. She couldn’t bring herself to get up and go to him.

  At the office, she searched for the first time in months for evidence that whoever had lost him wanted to find him. She clicked half-heartedly through pages of missing-child announcements, neither wanting nor expecting to find William’s face. There was photo after photo. A gap-toothed blond boy on his mother’s lap. A cocoa-colored girl with beaded braids, grinning and clutching a teddy bear. A seven-year-old with a pink bike. Some of them, Vera knew from the news, had already been found dead. For the others, she imagined improbable scenarios, scenarios in which people like her had rescued them and taken them off to some other life.

  On the third page of results, she found a bulletin board for parents of missing children, and under the headline my son william—missing since october, Vera finally saw the picture she’d been terrified of seeing: William, the way he’d looked when she found him, his eyes unmistakable. She tried to reason that she’d had her William since August, and so this must be another child, but she read on anyway, sick to her stomach. At the top of the page was his date of birth. He’d be three in April. The man posting the picture said he was William’s father. There was a second picture, of him with William and William’s mother, the same wispy blond woman from what felt like so long ago. It didn’t explain why she wasn’t the one looking for him. It didn’t explain how William had gotten from Chicago, where his father lived, to a bus on the Jersey Turnpike. In the second picture, William was an infant. Both the man and the woman were smiling broadly, their eyes sparkling. At the bottom of the post, the man claiming to be William’s father had listed the numbers for the police tip line and his own cell phone.

  Vera dialed the second number.

  “Hello,” she said. “May I speak to William Charles Sr.?”

  “Speaking,” said a steely voice on the other end.

  “I’m a reporter,” said Vera. “I came across your post about your son. I wondered if I could talk to you about his case?”

  “You in New York?” asked the voice. “Your number came up New York.”

  “Yes. We’re a small paper, but we cover national news sometimes if it’s of interest. I’m doing a series on missing children.”

  “I can barely get the Chicago cops to pay attention, let alone the papers,” said the man.

  “I’m listening,” said Vera.

  “He was supposed to be with his mother and next thing I know she stops letting me talk to him on the phone. She moved to Jersey, to be with some guy, and said she didn’t want me calling. Sometimes I’d call anyway, and get the little girl—not mine, but I’d been around since she was little—and when I’d ask her about William she’d start crying. Then the guy they were living with took off, and my ex turned
up dead. Overdose. Poor kid found her mother like that. They gave her to her grandma, who never liked me any, and she either can’t or won’t say what happened to my boy. All she says is that he wasn’t in the house. But he’s two. How far could he go?”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said Vera.

  “I just want my son.”

  * * *

  —

  For the next week it was Vera who walked around in a fog. Derek and Adam had gone into panic mode. They’d been cooperating while stalling when they could, but Jacob’s mother wouldn’t accept a settlement offer until their financial records had been released in discovery. They were worried that a thorough audit would reveal too many irregularities. On Monday Derek asked Vera to stay late. When they locked up for the day, he led her into the back room.

  “We’re taking off,” he said. “New IDs, enough money to lie low for a while. Eventually we’ll figure something out. There’s a guy with a grow op who thinks everything will be legal soon.”

  “Where?” said Vera. “When?”

  “Cali,” said Derek. “Two weeks. Adam knows a guy.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “You can come with us,” said Derek. “You should probably get out of town for a while anyway.”

  The possibility dangled in front of her like a brass ring. She’d come this far. She could go farther. She could keep William. She could keep Derek. She pictured William all grown up, the chubbiness stretched out of his cheeks. “I grew up on a farm,” he’d say. “I’m pretty sure my parents did something shady for money, but man were they in love.” She tried to picture California but found she didn’t even have an image of it in her mind, only a vague fear of earthquakes.

  “Get me the paperwork,” said Vera. “Let me think about it.”

  She packed what would fit in her suitcase, and sold the rest. When William’s bed was gone she kept him with her, on a blanket on the floor, clinging to him. She gave notice to her landlady and came home from work the next day to find the apartment already being shown to a daunted would-be subletter. At the end of the week, Derek left an envelope on her desk, with a California ID with her picture and the name Jessica. There was also a birth certificate for William, who’d been renamed Joshua. At the office, their days were measured in shredded paper, the whir of the shredding machines a threat and a promise. If everything could be erased, anything could disappear. If you could erase everything, you could start again.

  * * *

  —

  She wanted to see the father before she made any decisions. She equivocated on making Derek any promises. She didn’t love him enough to make up for William’s potential absence, and so she didn’t see the point in pretending. She helped him pack. She kept his necklace around her neck. She buzzed Derek’s locks off with an electric razor. She dyed Adam’s blond hair black. Vera spent Derek and Adam’s last night in New York at the loft with them. She made margaritas. She curled up in Derek’s arms and imagined trying to explain to him how much bigger her guilt was than theirs. She got up before dawn and made them breakfast and kissed Derek goodbye. He offered to leave her with an address of a person he said would be able to tell her where to find them, and she said maybe it was better if he didn’t.

  The next day, she and William got on a bus to Chicago. She bundled him in layers of winter clothing—a turtleneck, a sweater, a hooded jacket, and the hat Derek had bought him. He was uncharacteristically fussy, insisting that he was hot and itchy. One by one the outer layers were removed. From their stopover in Cleveland, Vera called Eileen, a friend in school in Chicago. She hadn’t seen Eileen in years, but they’d gone to high school together, and when she said she needed a place to stay for the night, Eileen offered to come get her at the bus station.

  “My God, you have a kid!” she said when she saw them. “He’s so big.”

  “He’s almost three,” said Vera.

  “How was New York?” asked Eileen.

  “Beautiful,” said Vera. “Exhausting.”

  Eileen brought them back to her one-bedroom apartment in Hyde Park. She pulled out the sofa and told Vera to make herself at home. Vera turned on a cartoon show and combed William’s hair. She kissed the top of his head and told him she loved him. She remembered being a child, seated between her mother’s legs watching TV while her mother parted and braided her hair, and felt, for the first time in years, homesick, sick for everything she could still lose.

  She slept poorly. Over coffee, Vera asked if Eileen could keep an eye on William while she ran a quick errand. Vera took a cab to William’s father’s address. It was an old brick row house, beaten up a bit, but not neglected. The lawn was mowed, and the shutters had been recently painted. She walked around the block a few times and feigned interest in a house for sale across the street. bank owned! read its sign. On her fifth circle around the block, she saw the door to the house open, and the man from the photograph come out, then turn behind him to help an older woman down the stairs. Both of them resembled William. He had a father. He had a grandmother. He had never been hers. They looked up. For a second, Vera thought William Sr. was pointing at her, and she was ready to confess. Then she realized he was pointing past her, at the foreclosed house, its overgrown lawn.

  * * *

  —

  Back at Eileen’s, Vera found William circling the living room, clutching a teddy bear while Eileen typed a paper. Vera made grilled cheese for lunch. She told Eileen that she and William had another bus to catch, all the way to California, and would be gone that evening. In the afternoon, Eileen left for class, and told Vera to lock the door behind her on the way out. Vera hugged her goodbye. Eileen ruffled William’s hair.

  “Lucky boy you are,” she said. “Such a big trip, for such a little person.”

  The moment Eileen was out the door, Vera set fire to William’s forged birth certificate with a cigarette lighter, afraid she’d be unable to resist the temptation to keep him otherwise. She started a letter three times. On the first attempt, she emphasized that she hadn’t meant to take him, that it felt like he’d been given to her and she just hadn’t questioned it. A paragraph in, she realized this wasn’t her story anymore, that the point was not her own defense. In the second version, she focused on all of William’s milestones: her favorite things about him, his best days—she wanted to show he’d been happy and unharmed, but when she reread the letter it seemed cruel, to emphasize the time his father had missed and wouldn’t get back. In her third and final effort, she tried to account in a matter-of-fact way for the time she’d kept him, to assure his father that she’d done her best not to damage him, that he had not fallen into terrible hands, that he had suffered no irreparable trauma, that she was not a person who would ever harm him, though of course she understood now that she had. She held William in her arms until he fell asleep, then picked him up and tucked him into Eileen’s bed. She texted to confirm Eileen was on her way home. She left the note for William’s father and the note she’d written for Eileen, with William’s father’s name and address, sitting on the coffee table, next to Eileen’s apartment key. She walked three blocks and hailed a cab.

  On the way to the bus station, the city went by in a blur of brick and beige and gray. Vera was startled and shaking. Adam and Derek were waiting until they could be found again, but Vera understood now that she would need to be lost forever, would need to let the whole of the murky country swallow her up. The cabdriver thought she was drunk and kept offering to pull over if she needed to throw up. The third time he offered, she said yes, but when she opened the door and leaned out, nothing came up. There was just the shock of the cold, and the dry empty heave of her belly.

  The Office of Historical Corrections

  Our office was tucked away in a back corridor of one of the city’s labyrinth brutalist buildings, all beige concrete and rows of square windows. I had never minded DC’s lingering architecture; I had been in colle
ge before I understood I was meant to find it ugly and not cozily utilitarian. But I had grown up with the architecture, grown up idealizing people who worked in buildings like mine, and besides, I liked to remember that the term brutalism came not from any aesthetic assessment, but from the French for “raw concrete.” Since starting at the institute, I had formally corrected mistaken claims about the term’s etymology seven times. Small corrections usually made me feel pitiful and pedantic, but I liked making that one, liked to think of us, not just the people in my office, but all of the city’s remaining civil servants, as people trying to make something solid out of what raw material we had been given, liked to think that we were in the right setting to do our jobs.

  Of course, as a field agent, I rarely spent a full day indoors. Often that freedom felt like a luxury, but it was June—not quite the worst of summer, but hot enough that walking my regular daily rounds left me flecked with sweat and constantly looking for excuses to go indoors. Some days I went into shops full of kitsch and corrected souvenirs with their dates wrong just to absorb the air-conditioning. After everything else, I would remember how often I had been bored at the beginning of that summer, how worried I was that our work had become inconsequential, how I had wondered whether I would ever again be a part of anything that mattered.

  The vision for the Institute for Public History that summoned me from my former job as a history professor at GW had been grandiose. An ambitious freshman congresswoman demanded funding to put a public historian in every zip code in the country, a correction for what she called the contemporary crisis of truth. It was pitched as a new public works project for the intellectual class, so many of us lately busy driving cars and delivering groceries and completing tasks on demand to make ends meet. Government jobs would put all those degrees to work and be comparatively lucrative. The congresswoman envisioned a national network of fact-checkers and historians, a friendly citizen army devoted to making the truth so accessible and appealing it could not be ignored. We had started as a research institute, loosely under the direction of the Library of Congress—an NIH for a different sort of public health crisis. We were the solution for decades of bad information and bad faith use of it. Our work was to protect the historical record, not to pick fights (guideline 1) or correct people’s readings of current news (guideline 2).