Vera’s Choice

It started because of a sandwich, which is the kind of detail that makes people think a thing is small. It was the second week of October and Bram was eleven and I was ten, and there was a plate on the counter with one sandwich on it left over from the lunches, and he decided it was his, and I made the mistake of being in the room.

He did not hit me with his hand. He had a bat that he kept behind the basement door, aluminum, the kind you buy for a boy who is going to be a great athlete and is not going to be anything, and he swung it at me across the kitchen and caught me on the upper arm and the ribs. The first one I remember as a sound. The second one is the one that made the room go white at the edges. I got my hands on the barrel. That is the part people never believe and it is the part that is true: I got both hands on the aluminum and I pushed the bat back into him, and then he let go, and then I swung it.

I swung it once. It took him across the left forearm and he went down against the dishwasher with his mouth open and made a sound like a tire, and then he was on the linoleum holding his own arm and calling for his mother, and I was standing in the middle of the kitchen with the bat in both hands, deaf in one ear, bleeding from my mouth, and I remember thinking very clearly: now I have done something.

Vera came in and the room reorganized itself around her. That is the only way I can describe it. She looked at Bram, then at me, then at the bat, and asked me one question: “Did you hit him with that?”

I said yes. I want to put down that I said yes immediately, and that I have never once regretted it.

Bram’s forearm had a fracture in it. I know this because I heard two women on the phone say the word, and then Dr. Reyes came and worked on his arm at the kitchen table while I sat in the hall and listened to Bram cry, which he was doing loudly and continuously and for the rest of his life.

That night Vera put me in the cold cellar. Not for an hour. I was down there until the pipes above the door had stopped their knocking, which meant it was past midnight, and then the hook did not lift. She left me with a bucket and the coat I was wearing and nothing else, and I sat on the bottom step and I did the inventory, and I want to record what the inventory said: two jars, one bag of potatoes, one bucket, and a door with the latch on the wrong side.

In the morning I heard her feet on the floor above. She opened the door with the hook, looked down at me the way a person looks into a well to see whether it needs doing, and said I was not to come up until I had learned the difference between what had happened and what I was going to tell people.

Then I was in the back bedroom three days. This is where she was smart, and I have never known whether it was on purpose. On the third day she called Dr. Reyes to the house to look at me, and he came up the stairs two at a time, and the fact that he came two at a time is a thing I have kept for thirty years, because in that house nobody came up the stairs two at a time.

He was a small man with glasses and he asked me four questions and then said, “Show me your arm.”

I showed him. There is not much to see on a child’s ribs. What he said, when he went down to the kitchen, was loud enough to come through the floor: “That woman’s child has a broken arm and this one has a bruise the size of a plate, and you will tell me what happened here or I will make a phone call.”

I did not know what the phone call was. I learned later that he meant the county. And Vera, who was very good at this, began to talk, and I heard through the floor a version of the story in which I was a girl who had come into her house with a defect, and in which the defect was that I lied.

She said the word about four times. She was not shouting. She had taken out the sound of it and made it reasonable. “She lies the way water runs, Doctor. She told her teachers at school that she lived with us and liked it.”

That was true, which is the part that still makes me want to sit down. I had said that at school, in the first month, to a teacher who asked. I was eight. It is the only lie I can remember telling in that house, and it was told to protect the people who were feeding me, and Vera had kept it in the drawer with the receipts and taken it out now to use against me, and she used it so well that by the time Dr. Reyes came down the stairs he looked at me for the first time the way the house looked at me, and I understood that the count had changed: now it was four to one, and one of the four was a doctor.

He did make his phone call. I believe he made it. But it went somewhere inside a system, into a folder, into the category of a family having a hard year, and nothing came of it, and I have thought about Dr. Reyes for thirty years with a complicated heart. He said one more thing to me before he left, at the front door, with Vera ten feet away: “You keep your hands off that boy.”

And that was the only part of the day that was fair, because it was exactly the thing I had wanted to do since I was eight, and it took Dr. Reyes, who was on their side, about nine seconds to give me a rule I could actually keep.

Reverend Elmer Crane came in December.

He was the man who ran a place called Ellerslie, ninety minutes south, near a town called Bliss, and it took me years to understand that when a man like that drives ninety minutes to a house, he is not looking for a child, he is looking for a vacancy.

He sat in the front room and asked me questions with a smile on. I remember the smile. It was the smile of a man who has decided that his own kindness is a documented fact.

“Do you say your prayers, Ruth?”

I said I did.

“Do you love our Lord?”

I said I did.

“Did you strike your cousin with a bat?”

I said I did.

He turned to Vera, and he asked his real question, and he asked it the way a man asks about the weather: “Does this child have a habit of lying?”

Vera had been waiting for that question since October. She took four seconds to arrange herself, which I watched her do, and then she said yes.

I have been in a lot of rooms since. I have been in a courthouse in Ontario County and a boardroom in Canandaigua and a hearing in Albany about that bridge, and I have never once, in any of them, heard anything as clean as that yes. She did not say too much. She did not say too little. She gave him the one word he had come for, and then she offered him coffee, and he took it, and they talked about the church for twenty minutes. He was not looking at me anymore. I was the vacancy, and the vacancy had been confirmed by the only person in the room with standing.

That is what I have wanted to explain to people who ask me why I did not tell someone. Nobody in that house was ever violent with a witness present. They were violent in the kitchen and reasonable on the phone. The lie I told at eight went in the drawer and came out in December, and by December the doctor had already been neutralized and the minister had already been fed. There was nothing left in the room but the count.

I left on the ninth of January. Marcie made me a sandwich and stood in the kitchen folding the wax paper over it with her fingers, and then she did the thing with her palm between my shoulders, and then she took a twenty and a twenty and a ten out of her apron and put them in the sandwich bag and said, “Don’t you let them hold your mail.”

She meant it as a joke, and nobody in that house ever wrote to me: not a card, not a dollar, in nine years, and I checked every week, because I had been told the mail was a thing that could be held.

Vera saw me to the door. She had a list of things she wanted said and she said two of them. The first was that she had done her duty and that God had seen it. The second was, “When you are grown and you have a family of your own, you’ll understand why I could not keep a girl who lies.”

Then she stood on the step with her hand on the inside door, and I stood at the bottom, and I was ten years old, and I did the arithmetic one more time, and I gave her nothing. I did not say thank you. I did not say goodbye. I remember I looked at her shoes.

The bus station was in downtown Buffalo and the bus to Bliss went through three towns and I had a window seat on the left side, and here is the truth about what I felt, which I have never dressed up for anybody: I was not sad. I had a sandwich in my lap and sixty dollars and nobody in front of me and nobody behind me, and the house on Ridge Lane went small in the window the way a house does when it is no longer the place where you are kept, and I ate the whole sandwich before Hamburg and I did not cry and I have never cried about that house in my life.

What I did was count. Three winters, one address, two jars, one hook on the wrong side of a door — and one piece of information I had picked up in the kitchen from Marcie, which was this: the post office will forward your mail.

It was a small thing. It was the only thing I owned that nobody could take, because nobody had bothered to look for it.