You want it? Come get it, she would say. The girl might hesitate, caught off guard by Wally’s aggression, but she wouldn’t be able to back down in front of the other girls. She would make a move, and Wally would turn her body to the side, crouching down low into an athletic position as she had been taught at the dojo. When the heavy girl was within range, Wally would throw her left fist forward in a feint, then slam her right fist up into the girl’s solar plexus. The girl would drop to the floor of the bathroom, shocked by the terrible pain, panicked and struggling to breathe, afraid that she might be dying.
Imagining the outcome did not make Wally feel strong, only sad for the clueless, desperate girl standing before her.
“Take it,” Wally said, tossing the mascara to the girl.
The tube of Chanel was never Wally’s anyway, not really. She and Ella found their own makeup in dollar store bargain bins, and that was just fine with Wally. She grabbed her bag and left the bathroom, brushing past the startled-looking girl who now clasped a fancy new tube of mascara in her hand. In the hallway, Wally headed for the exit and was almost out the door when she heard her name called out from behind. She turned to find Lois Chao, one of the Harmony House caseworkers, walking quickly down the hall toward her, waving a small piece of paper in the air.
“Hey, Wally,” Lois said, a bit breathless when she caught up with Wally. “How are you doing?”
“I’m good, Lois,” Wally answered curtly, hoping to discourage her from offering a pep talk of some kind.
“You look like you’re in a hurry,” Lois said, reading Wally exactly, “but I told this detective I would give you this. So here.”
Wally took the business card from Lois. The name on it was Detective Atley Greer, NYPD, 20th Precinct. Lois watched for Wally’s reaction and saw the look of concern.
“It didn’t seem like an emergency or anything,” Lois reassured her. “He said he just was looking for information on something. You want to use my office phone?”
“No need. Thanks, Lois.”
“Okay. Stay safe, Wally.” Lois turned away and headed back down the hallway.
Wally’s first impulse was to ignore the message—what good could possibly come from calling a cop?—but her curiosity was piqued, and she remembered that her new smart phone was set to block her number, so there was no risk to her. Wally dialed the number on Detective Greer’s business card. The phone rang three times on the other end, then went to voice mail.
“Uh … hi,” Wally spoke into the cell phone. “This is Wallis Stoneman, returning your … I mean, responding to the message you left for me at Harmony House. I’m not clear what this is about but … maybe I’ll try you back later.”
Wally hung up, suddenly feeling lame for making the call. Maybe I’ll try you back later? Her own words sounded weak to her, and that pissed Wally off. There were a bunch of reasons a New York City cop might want to speak with her, and an emergency situation with Claire was far down on that list. Wally put the detective out of her mind and headed back to the Port Authority, where she boarded the Q train for Brighton Beach.
THREE
Everyone in Wally’s crew knew she was adopted, but Ella was the first one she’d told about it. On a very hot day in July, Wally and Ella had walked in cutoffs and tank tops to the lake in Central Park, where they climbed down the Hernshead rock to the lakeshore. They took off their shoes and soaked their feet in the cool but slightly algae green water.
“I wasn’t cut out for this,” Wally said, fanning herself, the fair skin of her cheeks flushed pink.
“For what?”
“Heat. I’m from Russia,” Wally said matter-of-factly. “It’s always cold and gray there. As far as I know.”
“Your parents are Russian?”
“Yeah. Well … no. Not my American parents.” Wally hesitated a bit, suddenly regretting that she’d brought up the subject at all.
“You mean, you’re adopted?”
“Yeah.”
“From Russia?”
“Uh-huh.”
Ella thought about this for a moment.
“You don’t know who your actual parents are?”
“No.”
Wally looked at her friend and could see that her imagination was already working overtime. Magical thinking was Ella’s specialty.
“Cool …” Ella finally said.
“You think so?”
“Oh yeah. You could be, like, secretly a Russian princess or something.”
“Hmm. I don’t think they make those anymore.”
Wally leaned back against the rocks and closed her eyes, happy to let the subject drop. She had spent a lot of time questioning her origins—had once been obsessed with it, even—but dwelling on those issues had never done her any good. The questions that had been swirling around in her brain for the past six or seven years—Who am I? Where do I belong?—had never been answered, and the resulting frustration had played a large role in her rift with Claire, her adoptive mother.
“Did you always know?” Ella asked, not ready to let go of the subject. “I mean, your parents told you about being adopted, right?”
Wally sat up straight again. She sighed a little, anxious. It seemed like she and Ella were going to have this talk whether she wanted to or not, but at least it was happening with someone she trusted. The fact that she had been adopted had always felt to Wally like something she needed to defend, as if the world might use that one detail of her history to explain and condemn who she was.
“Yeah, they told me where I came from. I mean … I always knew it, in a general sort of way, but it was just an idea, you know? I was a kid and I didn’t really think about it.”
“You’re not a kid now.”
Wally looked out over the lake, remembering, figuring she knew the exact moment when her childhood had ended.
“When I was nine or ten,” Wally said, “I was watching TV after school. Bored, channel surfing, you know. Waiting for dinner. And I stopped on this story in the local news about a fire in a restaurant or something. In that place, Brighton Beach …”
“Out by Coney?”
“Right. Brighton Beach is totally Russian. On the TV news you could see it, the store signs in both Russian and English, people in the background shouting in Russian as the firemen were hosing down half the block. And I couldn’t stop looking at all of it. It was totally strange but familiar at the same time, if that makes any sense at all.”
“But you’d never been there? Freaky.”
“I tried talking to my mom about it, but she got all weird. It was so obvious that she’d be happy for me to just forget that there was that other part of my life. That made me really mad. It was five years—half of my life, by then—and she acted like the whole idea of it was radioactive or something.”
“I bet she was scared,” Ella said.
The suggestion surprised Wally. “Scared of what?”
“Losing you, I guess. Like you’d decide you weren’t really hers.”
Wally thought about this for a moment, and the idea of it seemed so simple and true. Of course Claire had been terrified. How had Wally never figured that out on her own? Ella had done it in thirty seconds.
“You’re scary, Ella,” Wally said.
“True dat.”
And isn’t that what happened in the end, Wally thought, Claire had lost her? Or maybe that had yet to be decided. Wally didn’t know.
“My mother wanted me to stop thinking about the Russian stuff—maybe because she was scared, like you said—but there was no way, you know? The idea of it kept swirling around in my head. There were people in the building who knew me back then, when I first arrived in the States, so I asked them what I was like.”
Ella and the others knew Wally came from a wealthy home, but until then she had never shared any real specifics about that part of her life. She told Ella about talking to Raoul, the young doorman who had stood in the front lobby her entire life, and Johanna, who was the super’s wife and did almost
everything around the house for the Stonemans. The two of them had said basically the same thing: Wally was a totally Russian little kid when she arrived, but she had adapted quickly to her new life; within two or three months she was as American as any kid in the building. Johanna remembered—sympathetically, Wally could tell—a Russian song that little five-year-old Wally would sing to herself in the bathtub, but Johanna said that before long it was replaced with other nursery rhymes in English, and that was that.
“It was like a forced amnesia,” Wally said. “That’s what my parents really wanted, to wipe out everything that came before.”
“Harsh.”
“Yeah. When I started figuring that stuff out, it was the beginning of bad times between me and my mother. I guess it was catching, too, because my parents ended up splitting around then.”
Wally felt herself getting sad, but she wasn’t about to make a big deal about it. Ella had lived most of her life in Queens welfare hotels, the only child of a messed-up drunk of a mother. Her father was serving twenty years in Rahway for armed robbery. Ella had only met him once—on prison visitation when she was seven—and he had told her never to come back. The mother’s boyfriend of ten years—a vulgar and violent housing cop from Inwood—would come after Ella hard every night, after the mother had drunk herself into a stupor. He had a small camera that he used to take pictures of Ella and of himself raping her, animal that he was. For Ella it got to the point where she would shut out the pain and just stare at the ceiling, counting the flashes, waiting for them to stop. The most she ever counted was forty-seven.
Compared to that, Wally knew her own history was a carnival ride, and it burned her to think of Ella being so viciously abused. Maybe one day, she and the crew should drop in on the mother’s boyfriend and teach him something about accountability. The thought cheered Wally up a little.
“Where’s your dad?” Ella asked. “I mean, your adopted father.”
“He moved back to Virginia,” Wally said, “where he’s from. For a while he called a lot and came back here for some visits, but then he got caught up in his life down there. He has a new wife and two new kids—their own. The fact is, he and I aren’t really even related. We were thrown together, just an accident like a car wreck. We don’t share blood. It’s over.”
Wally had shocked herself with the coldness in her voice, but obviously Ella could see her friend’s pain.
“Don’t be so sure,” Ella said. “You and I don’t share blood, but you’re my sister forever.”
The two girls shared a look.
“You’re not gonna make me cry, bitch,” Wally said.
Ella smiled. “What happened after?”
Wally sighed. “Meanness, awfulness. Years of it. By me, by my mom.” Wally paused. “I guess I needed someone to blame for Dad leaving, so Mom took the hit for that. It was really bad. It felt like everything in my life was a lie … just bullshit, a made-up story. And my mom wouldn’t hear any of it, wouldn’t talk about it. I think she actually wanted to be closer to me, but at the same time couldn’t stop shutting me out. Weird. And I was fucking up in so many ways. At school, everywhere. That went on for a long time. I was spending half my time out on the street when I first met Nick, and then you guys. …”
Ella smiled broadly at this.
“Yay,” she said, with the kind of glimmer in her eye that she usually reserved for cupcakes and Jake.
“Yeah,” Wally said, and managed a smile for Ella. “Yay for us.”
For a few minutes, the two of them splashed their toes gently in the water of the lake, cooling down just a little as the summer sun edged lower in the sky.
“And it all kind of started because of that random TV news story you saw about Brighton Beach …”
“Yeah,” Wally said. “I guess that’s right.”
“Did you ever actually go there?”
“No. I never did.”
Wally rode the Q train to Brighton Beach, a journey of over fifty minutes. She exited the Brighton station—feeling a little anxious—and headed toward the address Panama had given her, the source for good IDs. It was mid-afternoon on a warm day, so the shops on the Avenue were doing brisk business. There were neighborhood grocers stocked with specialty food items from Russia, stores carrying Russian music and books, and several boutiques featuring women’s fashions noticeably different from clothing sold in American stores—shinier, with vaguely foreign colors and fabrics. It was a weird experience for Wally. This was her first visit to Brighton Beach, and the place seemed strange and exciting and familiar all at the same time.
She strolled the Avenue, gazing through café windows as some of the locals peered back at her over the tops of Russian language newspapers. She drifted anonymously around the park near the beach, where groups of Russian-speaking men smoked, argued loudly, and played chess. She stopped to watch a pickup basketball game played by teenage boys who looked like they could be her distant cousins. She felt an inexplicable urge to call out to them as if they were old friends she hadn’t seen in years, and imagined what it would be like if they turned to see her and smiled with happy recognition.
Wally moved along with the local women as they strolled through an open-air produce market; two old women argued over something, and she understood, somehow, that they were talking about tomatoes. It was only the occasional word that came to her among the flood of an otherwise impenetrable language, but … it still felt to Wally as if a hidden part of her mind had been awakened.
After exploring the area for twenty minutes or so, Wally found the shop she was looking for: the sign above the address read MISZIC & SONS. The shop’s window signs read CHECKS CASHED, FAX CENTER, NOTARY PUBLIC, and P.O. BOXES AVAILABLE, with Russian translations—in Cyrillic—beneath them. A squat, barrel-chested man seemed to be serving some sort of security function for the shop; he stood outside the front door, regarding every passerby with suspicion. He gave Wally a quick look but otherwise ignored her as she entered.
Inside, there were a few copy machines to one side and crowded shelves of inventory, mostly office supplies. At the back of the shop was a wide counter with a man on duty wearing a green woolen cardigan two sizes too big for his bony shoulders. He was probably no older than sixty, but he looked thirty years older than that, with permanent, dark bags sagging under his eyes, his fingers deeply stained with nicotine. A wall of locked mailboxes stood behind him.
“What you want?” he asked Wally, barely interested.
Wally reached into her pocket and pulled out her legitimate ID—listing her as sixteen years old—and placed it on the counter. She wanted her new, fake ID to contain all the same information except her date of birth.
As the old man looked down at the details on the ID, an odd change in his expression took place. Before Wally could tell him what she was there for, he spoke.
“Wallis Stoneman,” he said, reading the name with a thick Slavic accent.
“Yeah,” Wally answered, starting to feel anxious; hearing her name spoken aloud by this stranger was frightening in a way that she could not explain.
“Da,” he said, looking up and examining the features of Wally’s face. “I see it. Now you are supposed to tell me your real name.”
“Like you said,” Wally answered, confused. “It’s Wallis Stoneman.”
“Nyet,” the man said.
“Uh … yeah, it is,” she said. “Maybe I’m in the wrong place. I was told you could—”
“You are in right place, which you know,” the old man said with a calm self-assuredness that Wally found annoying.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Wally said, frustrated.
The old man sighed.
“And again,” he said, in Russian this time, “I need for you to answer this old man. A teper skazhi mnye kak tebya po-nastoyaschemu zovut?”
Wally almost answered, as if her tongue had a mind of its own. It was an eerie, frightening sensation.
“I’m sorry, but …” she said.
“Dvortchka,” responded the old man, insistent. “Tell me your name.”
Wally felt her face flush with anger; she hated more than anything to be patronized by adults, and something in the old man’s tone sounded to her like smugness. When she looked at him again, however, she saw something else in his expression—what was it? Empathy? Concern? Who was this old man and why would he give any kind of a shit about her? Wally was about to repeat her name, stubbornly, but something else happened instead; another answer came to her, a name that seemed to have a will all its own—a will to be spoken—and Wally was unable to resist the force of it.
“Valentina.” Wally spoke quietly, with a flawless Russian accent.
“The valiant,” said the old man, nodding. “Yes?”
“Valentina Mayakova,” Wally said, bewildered by the sounds as they tumbled out from deep inside her. It was a name she had not spoken or heard in eleven years. She suddenly had the feeling that by saying the name out loud, she had betrayed a trust—that at some time deep in her past she had promised to hold the name inside and keep it there.
“Da,” the old man said. “Valentina Mayakova.”
He rose from his stool and hobbled toward a door behind the counter. He was gone for perhaps a minute, leaving Wally behind, confused. She wanted more than anything to run—her fight-or-flight instincts were telling her to get out of the store immediately—but she could not bring herself to leave before the strange scenario had played itself out. So she waited for only a minute—which felt like an hour. As she stood in confused silence, the security man entered the store from the street and stood near the door, the full weight of his cold gaze directed toward her. Wally wondered what he saw when he looked at her; his expression told her nothing.
The old man finally returned, carrying a large padded envelope. He placed the envelope on the counter and slid it toward Wally. Wallis Stoneman was written on the outside and beneath it two more words written in Cyrillic letters. Wally knew—somehow—that her Russian name was written there. There were brownish-green mildew marks on most of the envelope.
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