The Office of Historical Corrections(35)

“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.