“Gideon’s been dead four years.”
She turned the sheet toward me. In re: Vance, minor. Petition for release of sealed placement records. Filed March 11, 2003. Petitioner: G. Vance. Under it, on the purpose line: Birth-family medical history for the minor child.
I read it twice. That spring Gideon had been sleeping badly, standing at the kitchen window at midnight, and when I asked what was wrong he said the business, always the business.
“There’s a release log on the second page,” Ruth said.
Copy released April 2, 2003. Mailed to Vance & Doyle, 14 Ferry Street.
His office. He had a copy in his hands nineteen years before he died, and he never said one word to me.
“The request was withdrawn on March 25,” Ruth said.
“That’s before it was released.”
“Yes.” She slid a copy of the slip across the counter. Request withdrawn. Signed: D. Vance, by C. Alcott, power of attorney.
I could not make the letters mean anything for a moment. Then they did, and the room got very quiet.
“That spring I had my gallbladder out,” I said. “I gave my sister my power of attorney for the accounts, the house, the insurance. Six weeks.”
Ruth waited.
“I never withdrew anything. And there is no affidavit. Check it.”
She checked the index twice, then went downstairs and checked the old book, and came back with her mouth set in a line. “There is no affidavit signed by you anywhere in this docket. Not 1991. Not since.”
I sat in my car with the copies on the passenger seat and the engine off. My husband had asked the court for our son’s records and gotten them. My sister’s handwriting was on the paper that took them back. And the man who told my son I had sworn my own silence had sat at my table and turned his glass a quarter turn.
It was ten past eleven. Corinne keeps the family books at her kitchen table every Monday. I started the car.
Corinne had the ledger open at her kitchen table, the calculator at her elbow. Monday was her day for the family books. I set the withdrawal slip down on top of the column of figures.
She read it with one finger under the line. Request withdrawn. Signed: D. Vance, by C. Alcott.
“I signed it,” she said.
“Say the rest of it.”
“Gideon asked me.” She took her finger off the paper. “No. That isn’t true. He never asked. I offered, and he let me.”
I had told myself on the drive over that the signature could be a clerk’s error. But the A in Alcott had the same slant as the pencil carry-overs in her ledger margin, and I had been looking at those figures for thirty years.
“You had my power of attorney for six weeks,” I said. “You used it on a court file about my son.”
“I used it to keep the book straight.”
“Which book?”
She got up to run water into a kettle she did not need. “A file like that doesn’t stay closed, Delia. Every time a judge opens it, somebody reads it.”
“Reads what?”
“Ask Hollis. He kept a copy of everything.”
The credit union on Market closed at four. I was at the window at ten past one with my key and a story about the deed.
The envelope had been in box 412 since 1995, behind the policy and the deed I had just lied about. The agency’s return address, a 1994 postmark, my name typed under the cellophane window. Inside lay a smaller envelope, sealed, with one word on the flap in pencil. Mother.
Nobody had ever told me to open it. I had spent thirty-two years not being told.
I opened it in the car with the engine running for the heat.
I was seventeen. I watched you carry him out of the room and I read your badge. You said, “You’re doing fine, honey,” and I have thought about that all week.
I asked the agency for the nurse named Vance. They said they couldn’t tell me anything about you. So I’m asking you.
It was signed Nadine Pruitt, in pencil that pressed hard enough to shine.
I sat there with the defroster roaring. In 1991 I had worked all three of Nadine Pruitt’s shifts and signed a home study that did not mention it. I told myself for years that not volunteering a thing is not lying. Her letter took that away in two pages. She had gone looking for the woman who took her son, and I hid the proof rather than let anyone see it.
