What Wally learned there explained the unfriendly reception at the school’s own site. The Emerson School was a private, K–12, American-run school in Moscow that was named after the distinguished American ambassador and geared toward the needs of the Western diplomatic corps living full time in Russia. The student body consisted mostly of the children of diplomats and business executives from the United States and other Western countries; the security of students would be a priority.
Did Benjamin Hatch teach at the Emerson School during his time in Russia? Did Yalena Mayakova herself have some sort of connection to Emerson as well? If she did, then maybe her relationship with Benjamin Hatch had begun there. If so, maybe Benjamin Hatch had helped Yalena reach America. Maybe Wally’s best chance for getting closer to her mother was to move backward instead of forward, to retrace Yalena’s path to America as a way of finding out why she had left Russia and where she had eventually landed.
It was a lot of maybes. Wally didn’t know for sure if learning more about the Emerson School would bring her closer to finding Yalena here in the States, but this string of possible relationships—from Yalena to the Emerson School to Benjamin Hatch to America—was the only real lead she had. She needed access past the firewall of the Emerson School site.
Of the people in Wally’s life, she knew only one who had the computer skills to penetrate a secure website; before he began his outlaw life on the street, Nick Pierce had been a computer sciences geek in his suburban New Jersey high school. Nick could help Wally; whether or not he
would
was another question. There was bad blood.
Wally tried a few of Nick’s
old squats on the Lower East Side but came up empty—two of them were boarded shut, and a third had been renovated from a thrashed old industrial storage space into expensive loft apartments. She walked south on Avenue B and crossed East Houston toward the place that was her last best chance of finding Nick, the Essex Street subway station.
With each step Wally felt more anxious. If she did find Nick, he would almost definitely be doped up—by the time the crew had split from him, his habit had gotten completely out of control, and Wally had heard word on the street that he was still deep into the sickness. His mood would depend a lot on what he was using that day; crack, heroin, meth, and oxy were possibilities, plus anything else he could get his hands on.
Whichever way he was tweaked, Wally figured Nick would still be plenty angry with her. It had been Nick who had initiated Wally into the life of the streets, who had invited her into his crew and taught her much of what she used every day to survive. But in the end it was Wally who proved to be the stronger person.
The two of them had met a year and a half earlier, months before Wally left home. Wally and Darien, a girlfriend from school, had cut afternoon classes and headed down to the area around NYU to check out some of the cool shops. They bought burritos from a food truck on Waverly and were eating them on a bench in Washington Square Park when they were approached by Nick, who was passing out flyers for a rave that night in Chinatown.
Nick Pierce was handsome back then, tall and lanky in a nice way, with untamed curly dark hair and playful green eyes. He wasn’t even a year older than Wally, but he vibed a kind of easy confidence—and trouble—that was unlike anything Wally knew from the boys at her uptown prep school.
“Come rave tonight, ladies,” Nick said, handing Wally and Darien the flyers, “and your worlds will be rocked.”
“Rocked
how
?” Wally said, not giving away any interest in him. “We’re gonna need specifics.”
“The specifics are that if my friends and I pass out five hundred of these ads, we get into the club for free.”
“And what happens inside?” Wally said.
“That depends,” he said, looking into her. “What do you want?”
Hmm
, thought Wally.
The girls never made it to the rave that night because Darien was, in Wally’s opinion, chickenshit. But from that day on Wally made regular trips to the parks—Washington Square or Tompkins Square—to meet up with Nick and his crew: Sophie, Jake, Ella, Tevin, and a rotating group of other strays. Hanging with her new friends was the opposite of being trapped at home with Claire—relaxed, fun, unstructured, and totally without judgment—and her decision to be with them was the first major choice Wally had ever made for herself. It felt good.
Within six months, Wally had left home to be on the street with the crew full time, and the exciting glow of her relationship with Nick lasted a month, maybe two. Then things went wrong.
Nick had always smoked a fair amount of weed, but at some point he had started doing meth—in secret from the crew—and almost overnight he was hard-core hooked. To pay for his fresh habit, Nick began putting the entire crew at risk—especially Sophie—by involving them in street scams and drug rip-offs that would eventually get them busted or worse.
Wally had stood by at first, watching what was going on but without the will to change it. She felt indebted to Nick for welcoming her into the crew and for her “street” education, and at the time she was at least halfway in love with him. For a while those were good enough reasons to stay silent, but Wally had her limits. She reached a point where she even considered abandoning the crew and moving back home with Claire, but things turned out differently.
One afternoon, down in the Grand Central tunnels, Wally discovered Nick sharing a crack pipe with Ella and Jake, their first time doing anything harder than booze or weed. It was a perfect strategy for Nick: if other members of the crew were using with him, they would share his desperation for dope and would go along with his increasingly reckless schemes for making money.
Wally had gone ballistic. In her rage she actually attacked Nick physically and had kicked his ass. Nick the half-gone doper had been no contest for angry Wally and her martial arts training, despite the size difference between them. Wally’s defiance forced the rest of the crew to choose between her and Nick, and they didn’t hesitate to follow Wally out the door.
“Get clean and you can come back with us,” Wally had said, her last words to Nick. Generous, she thought.
“Fuck you, Wally,” Nick had answered, his lip bleeding and his ego crushed. “You’ll never make it.”
Those last words were spoken without conviction; it was obvious to Nick and everyone else what Wally was capable of, and she had proved it every day since then. With the exception of Sophie, Wally had kept the crew clean and safe, and she had long since forgotten the idea of returning to her life with Claire.
Wally made it down
to the Essex Street subway platform and—when she was sure she wasn’t being observed by any of the IRT employees—jumped off the south platform and hurried into the darkness of the abandoned trolley stop that had stood there empty for decades. The place was dark and filthy with grime, its corroded walls covered with generations of graffiti tags. The acrid smell of piss and shit and vomit hung thick and sweet in the air, and Wally had to suppress an urge to puke.
Wally pulled out a flashlight and made her way toward the old boiler room at the far end of the station. She now felt an eager little rush in her belly to go along with all the anxiety and had to admit to herself that despite the disgusting location she found herself in, part of her was actually looking forward to seeing Nick, to sharing with him her excitement over the search for Yalena. She knew she was being ridiculous, of course, but some part of her held on to the hope that he had managed to turn his life around, that she would miraculously find the old Nick waiting for her.
Wally entered the boiler room, and those foolish, delusional thoughts were chased away. Three or four burned-down candles dimly lit the squalid space. Grimy old heating ducts covered the ceiling and walls, all of them rusted through. Four or five ratty and molded mattresses covered about half of the floor space, surrounded by discarded needles and broken glass pipes. Two young girls in jeans and greasy down parkas were huddled together on one of the mattresses, asleep or drugged out or both, an old moving blanket wrapped around them against the cold air.
Nick was the only other person in the room, sitting upright on one of the mattresses with his back against one of the rotted ducts, smoking a cigarette. His frame was skeletal now, his hair cropped close and those green eyes sunk deep in a perpetual shadow. A ghostly post-binge aura hung off him.
Wally’s heart sank at the sight.
Nick stared at her blankly for a moment, looking a little confused before realizing that it was her. He didn’t smile.
“Oh, fuck,” he said, his voice lazy and hoarse from the pipe. “Are you kidding me? Wallis, you bitch, hello. Please leave now and stay the fuck away from me forever.”
“I need something, Nick,” Wally said, and Nick laughed out loud.
“Of course you do,” he said. “Always the practical one. No social visit, this. How are the kids? Will you grant me visitation?”
“Everyone’s good,” she said. “Clean.”
“Well, good for you. A nice, clean, presentable crew. Hmm … have you taken them home yet, to meet Claire? No? Well, then, not
that
clean, huh? Not
that
presentable. But who is?”
The greatest power Nick held over Wally was his instinctive knowledge that her relationship with Claire was the key to everything, the soft underbelly of Wally’s well-defended psyche. His remark about the dichotomy of her two separate lives found its target. The guilt over her split from Claire still burned, as did the shame over how she protected that side of her life from the crew and vice versa.
“I think about Claire a lot,” Nick said with a playful grin that looked macabre on his sunken features. Whatever dope was still rushing through his system seemed to kick in as he railed on. “That look on her face when she walked in on the two of us, naked on your little twin bed with the frilly pink quilt and that heap of Barbies or stuffed animals or whatever girlish bullshit came with your life of privilege.” His expression turned dark as he spoke. “You think I don’t know how you’d planned it all, how you worked it out so that Claire was sure to walk in on us there, fucking, and go completely apeshit? You were miserable in that life—alone in that apartment with her—and you wanted an excuse to run. Her rage gave you that excuse, and just like that you were gone.”
His words burned all the more in that they were pretty much true; Wally knew that now, even if she had done all of it subconsciously at the time.
“I’m still embarrassed,” he railed, “for my role in your chickenshit little drama—”
“Poor Nick,”
Wally cut him off angrily, almost spitting her words. “You were just a victim, I suppose? Right. As if I could ever make you do something you didn’t want to.”
“I’ve thought a lot about that day,” he went on, ignoring her, “and I think I get it now. You grew up in a family that was based on lies, Wally, maybe a lot of little ones or even one huge crushing one. I think you were terrified to hear the truth from Claire. Maybe you thought it might tear you both apart, who knows? I swear to God, I would give anything to be there when you finally hear it.”
“Congratulations to you, Nick,” Wally answered, the words catching in her throat, full of anger and shame. “No one knows better than you how messed up I am. And still you were so careless with me, so willing to shit all over everything we had for … what? The pipe? The spike? Or what have we moved on to now? Drain cleaner?”
“There she is,” Nick almost shouted, seeming gratified at the acid tone in her voice. “That’s my beautiful, angry girl.” And at that his head bent down halfway, as if spewing all those accusations had taken every ounce of energy he had left. “Tell me what the fuck you want,” he mumbled, “and then get out of here.”
Wally wanted to be gone too, and so she quickly explained everything she knew about the Emerson School, their website, how she thought there might be information there that could help her find her Russian mother. Wally watched Nick as he took all of it in, coldly, as if the story was not about her but instead a stranger, someone he’d never cared about. His indifference was heartbreaking.
“Well, I should be flattered,” he said weakly, as if he might drift off to sleep at any moment.
“Yeah? Why’s that, Nick?”
“Because the answer is so easy. You obviously didn’t come all this way for that. You’re here because you wanted to see me, even if it was just to find out if I was still breathing. Very sweet.”
He managed to raise his head a little, waiting for an answer, and Wally felt those eyes reach out and hold her again, like the old days, a faint trace of life and love still there.
“Yeah, I did,” Wally admitted. “I wanted to see you.” And it was true. She felt tears choking up inside her, but fought them back.
“There, don’t cry,” Nick said with a knowing smile. “Fight it.”
She composed herself—as if at his command—and waited.
“Here,” he said, and rattled off a list of ten possible passwords, which Wally hastily scribbled on a piece of notepaper.
“You just know it, like that?” she asked, bewildered. “You don’t need to hack the site?”
Nick scoffed. “Those sites are designed for stupid people to use. Technology-challenged old people. They would never remember a secure password. I predict the first one on the list will be it.”
The first password he had named was EmersonAlum.
“Get the fuck out now,” Nick said.
Wally hesitated, thinking there might still be some air to clear between them, but if there was, she couldn’t get a handle on it.
“Bye, Nick,” she said, heading back toward the open doorway.
“It’s Tevin, right?” he said behind her. “Even back then, it seemed like there might be something there.”
Nick’s perception was sharp, another callback to his old self. Wally was not surprised.
“Not really,” she answered, turning back to him. “Not yet.”
“Give it time,” he said, his eyelids drooping. “I always liked that kid.”