The Office of Historical Corrections(31)

When she got back on the bus, the little boy was still sitting in the seat beside her. Vera felt more charitably toward him now that she had seen how easy it was to walk away. She made faces at him that made him giggle. She tried to engage him in a game of patty-cake, but he seemed more interested in the clapping than the repetition.

When the bus finally pulled into Port Authority, Vera squeezed past the boy’s seat to retrieve her duffel bag from the overhead bin. As she scrunched her face at the weight of the bag, the boy began to giggle again. She smiled back at him, then looked over her shoulder for his mother and sister. The people in the back of the bus were walking off one by one, but there was no sign of the blond woman or her daughter. Thinking maybe they’d somehow passed her already, Vera picked up the little boy, balancing him on her hip, and rushed off the bus, into the parking lot. No mother. She put the boy down and watched the rest of the passengers exit the bus, until it sat there, empty. Still no mother.

“Excuse me,” Vera said to a heavyset older woman. “Did you see a blond woman and a little girl? They were just on the bus with us.”

“Woman on the cell phone?”

“Yeah,” said Vera.

“Think they got off in Jersey. Sounded like someone was supposed to meet her there.” The woman grabbed her suitcase from beside the bus and walked off.

Vera looked around at the rapidly dispersing passengers, wondering what the hell was wrong with them that none of them had noticed a child being abandoned. But as she unintentionally tightened her grip on his hand, Vera realized that to the crowd it looked like he’d been her little boy all along. In the lazy American vernacular of appearances, Vera, with her color and hair that matched his, looked more like his mother or sister than his own mother and sister did. Had that been why the mother had chosen her? Maybe she’d intended to leave him all along. Or maybe something terrible had happened to her at the rest stop, she’d been dragged off by a stranger and was hoping someone would notice she was missing before it was too late. Or maybe she’d just gotten distracted, smoking a cigarette for too long, and was now frantic because the bus had left without her.

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.