Yellow Mama E zine

Her Name Was Vera

​

by Dale Scherfling

 

         Her name was Vera.

         Vera Hollis, though she'd been trying to forget that last name for years. She had the kind of face that made you think of old movies — not because it was classically beautiful, but because it seemed lit from within, as though the world around her were always slightly overexposed by comparison.

         Her hair was the first thing you noticed. Short, pale blonde — not the fizzy champagne of a showgirl or the platinum of someone trying too hard, but something cooler, more deliberate. Ash-kissed. It swept back from her temples and curled slightly at the nape of her neck, shaped almost like a ducktail — that particular vintage architecture suggesting she'd once been a little dangerous, or had at least wanted to be.

          She was thirty-two, though she carried it the way some women carry a secret — lightly, and with pleasure in the knowing.

          She had a way of holding still that felt like motion.

***

        It started with the cop.

         I never saw where he came from — only the sudden bloom of lights in my mirror, as though he'd materialized specifically to ruin my evening. Route 9, just past the overpass, the road empty in both directions except for the two of us.

        I pulled over.

        He walked to my window with the unhurried confidence of a man who knows time belongs to him. He studied my license longer than necessary, then handed it back.

        "Follow me," he said.

        Not a question. Not an explanation.

         Just that.

        He led me off Route 9 onto a side road I didn't recognize, then into the parking lot of a low municipal building — the kind of place that could have been offices, utilities, permits, or nothing at all. He parked, got out, and gestured for me to wait.

         So I waited.

         He disappeared inside. The windows gave nothing away except flat institutional light. I checked my phone. Vera's last message was an hour old.

where are you.

         A period instead of a question mark. That told me everything about her mood.

         I tried calling. No signal.

          Of course.

        Twenty minutes later the cop came back outside, looked mildly surprised to find me still there, held up one finger in a wait another minute gesture, and went back inside.

          Another forty minutes passed.

         Once, I got out of the car, intending to go inside and explain that someone was waiting for me, that this was becoming ridiculous, that there had to be some misunderstanding.

         The cop appeared in the doorway before I'd taken three steps.

          He shook his head once.

         Slowly.

         I got back in the car.

          By then the frustration had become physical — metallic and close, the feeling of being trapped inside somebody else's timetable with no leverage of your own. I imagined Vera at the bar folding cocktail napkins into smaller and smaller squares. I imagined the gin and tonic with the murdered lime. I imagined the evening narrowing minute by minute the way good things always seem to when circumstances turn against them.

          Eventually, for reasons he never explained, the cop returned my license, told me to drive safe, and left.

          I sat alone in the empty parking lot for a moment with the engine running.

          Then I drove to Vera.

***

          The bar was the kind of place that didn't try because it no longer had to. Dark wood. Low light. A jukebox in the corner leaning toward Patsy Cline whenever nobody fed it anything newer. The kind of bar where a woman could sit alone unbothered provided she had a drink in front of her and an expression discouraging conversation.

          Vera had both.

          She sat at the far end with her coat still hanging from one shoulder like she hadn't decided whether to stay. In front of her sat a gin and tonic with the lime squeezed nearly white and pushed against the side of the glass. She was folding a cocktail napkin into careful smaller squares.

           When I slid onto the stool beside her, she didn't look up immediately.

          That was intentional.

          "You're late," she said.

          "I know."

          "It's been over two hours."

          "Closer to two and a half."

           She looked at me then. Cool eyes, appraising, with something warmer beneath them struggling against irritation.

          "I had one drink to be patient," she said. "Then one drink to stop being patient. I'm working on whatever comes after that."

          "I got stopped. Route 9. Cop pulled me over, then dragged me halfway to nowhere and left me sitting in a parking lot for almost an hour."

          Something in her expression loosened. Not softness exactly, but recognition. Everybody around here understood cops on Route 9.

          "Ticket?"

          "Warning. Eventually."

           She studied me another moment, then lifted her glass.

          "You could have called."

          "No signal."

          The jukebox shifted into something slower.

          "Fine," Vera said finally, with the deliberate weight of someone choosing to let a thing go. Then, almost smiling:

           "Finish my drink. We're leaving."

           She slid the glass toward me.

           The gesture meant several things at once, and I understood all of them.

***

          The amphitheater wasn't what I expected.

          Nothing that night was.

           It was enormous and impossibly bright. After the sodium-orange murk of the parking lot and the dim conspiracy of the bar, the place blazed with flat stadium light that left nowhere to hide. Every face visible. Every expression exposed.

          I stopped just inside the entrance and felt the familiar clench of domestic fear.

My wife would see this.

          I didn't know how I knew. In dreams you simply accept certain facts without evidence. Somewhere there was a television screen. Somewhere my wife would glance up from bed or the couch and suddenly focus on my face in all that merciless light.

          "Go ahead," I told Vera quietly.

           She looked at me and understood immediately. Something crossed her face — not quite hurt, not quite amusement, but something living uneasily between the two.

Then she walked ahead into the brightness, her ash-blonde hair catching the light like something from an old film, while I remained near the shadows at the edge of the entrance, feeling the smallness of the situation I'd made for myself.

           Then I saw Danny.

          Or someone close enough to Danny that the distinction no longer mattered. Every time I looked directly at him the details shifted slightly, but the essential thing remained: Danny laughing easily, completely at home in himself, radiating the harmlessness of a man with nothing to conceal.

          My wife liked Danny.

          More importantly, she had no reason not to.

          He spotted me and grinned, spreading his arms in that universal look who it is gesture, and something in my chest loosened.

          We walked into the amphitheater together laughing about something I no longer remember, shoulders nearly touching, just two old friends arriving at the same place by coincidence.

          The most innocent picture imaginable.

          I felt the invisible camera find me and then lose interest.

           Nothing to see here.

           The nervousness never disappeared entirely. It simply faded into a manageable hum.

           Another bullet, I thought.

           Dodged.

***

           The room was impossibly large in the way only dream spaces can be. The ceiling vanished upward into something darker than shadow but not quite night. Across the vast floor, arranged in rising semicircles like some deranged Roman amphitheater, were beds.

            Dozens of them.

           Maybe hundreds.

           Each occupied.

           The lighting had softened somehow, losing the harsh glare of the stadium for something dimmer and more forgiving. Couples lay together beneath anonymous white motel sheets, each bed its own private country.

          The strange thing was the silence.

          No voices. No rustling. No creaking springs.

          Just the muffled stillness of a room insulated by secrets.

          We were somewhere in the lower tiers. The pillow beneath my head was too flat. Vera's warmth beside me felt more real than anything else in the room.

          Then she went suddenly still.

          Not restful stillness.

          Alarm.

          "Oh God," she whispered. "Oh God. That's my husband."

           I didn't move.

          Couldn't.

           He was one row beneath us, almost directly behind our bed, positioned absurdly close, like the head of a table. A woman lay beside him and the two of them remained absorbed in their own sealed-off world.

          Vera pressed herself against me and we lay motionless together, barely breathing, practicing the desperate art of not existing.

         For a while it worked.

         Then, like these things always do, it stopped working.

***

          I was already crossing the parking lot when I heard them behind me.

           The asphalt was cracked and pale beneath sodium lights. The air smelled like rain waiting to happen.

          I didn't turn around.

          I knew better.

          I heard his footsteps first — deliberate, unhurried. Worse than running would have been. Then Vera's quicker steps struggling to keep pace beside him. No yelling. No scene. Just the terrible efficiency of a married couple moving through a parking lot while one of them no longer had any choices left.

          I heard the truck door open.

          A half-spoken protest from Vera.

          A soft grunt of effort as he pushed her up and inside.

          The door shut with the finality of a period.

          The engine started.

           I kept walking.

           Steady. Casual. The walk of a man trying not to appear as though he is escaping.

           Then the world began to thin around me.

           The parking lot lost its sharpness first. The cars seemed less solid. The orange sodium glow softened and spread. Even the sound of the truck engine faded less into distance than into absence.

           I kept walking.

          And somewhere between one step and the next, I understood.

          The relief was immediate and physical, a knot loosening from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. I almost laughed.

          The cop. The bar. The amphitheater. The endless tiers of beds. Vera's husband walking behind us through the lot.

         None of it real.

          I was home.

          In my own bed. In my own room. In the ordinary dark of an ordinary night.

          Free.

         The word arrived with almost ridiculous joy, and for a moment I simply lay there savoring it — the uncomplicated relief of a man handed back his life intact.

         Then, curling softly around the edges of that relief, came Vera.

         The ash-blonde hair. The squashed and murdered lime. The way she understood things without explanation. The warmth of her beside me beneath those impossible motel sheets.

          None of it had happened.

          All of it was mine.

          I smiled into the dark and kept the secret as sleep carried me back under.

​

      Dale Scherfling is a newspaper veteran of 30 years, serving as a sportswriter, columnist, editor, and photographer and a retired Navy journalist and photographer. His work has appeared in Third Act Magazine, Does It Have Pockets Magazine, Lost Blonde Literary, All Hands Magazine, Pacific Crossroads, Daily Californian, Naval Aviation Magazine, Propeller Magazine, and Buckeye Guard Magazine. He is the recipient of three U.S. Army Front Page Journalism Awards. He is also a college lecturer and photography and music instructor.

​

     Asher Tures is a Georgia-based artist and writer with a passion for art history, disability studies, and math. He primarily works with colored pencil and marker.