Wally dried off, grabbed a clean pair of underwear from her shoulder bag, and put the rest of her clothes back on. At the communal row of sinks, six of them side by side on a sagging fiberglass counter, Wally stood with several other girls—all around her age—brushing their teeth with the plastic-wrapped brushes provided by Harmony and putting on makeup in front of polished metal mirrors that had graffiti messages scratched into them:
Rico does Juanie right, MS13, Sandra is a bitch.
There were dispensers on the wall with free pads, which the girls grabbed by the fistful and stuffed in their bags. From one of the toilet stalls, there came the sounds of a girl quietly weeping. No one paid any attention.
One or two of the girls at the sinks looked fairly healthy and put-together; when they finished with their routines, they could probably pass for regular teens, girls with homes and families and futures. The rest were showing the signs of their difficult street lives. Wally brushed and dried her hair under a hot blower and tied it back in a stub of a ponytail—all her shoulder-length hair would allow—and checked herself out in the mirror. Which one was she, hopeful or hopeless? Staring back at her was a reasonably healthy girl of sixteen, acceptably clean and strong and well fed. Wally could still pass for happy, and she felt encouraged.
Wally’s mascara had washed off in the shower. She pulled out her small makeup bag and began with her eyelashes, striving for the same dark, trashy look that she and Ella had so happily perfected. Soon Wally noticed another one of the girls at the sinks was staring at her intently. The girl was big and heavy—she had at least forty pounds on Wally—with a neglected look, her hair greasy, her face clouded over. One of the hopeless.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” Wally said. Hesitation was weakness.
“You ain’t buy that,” the girl said in a Bronx sneer, nodding at the tube of mascara Wally was applying.
The girl was right. Claire had given it to Wally at the end of their most recent visit, stuffing the tube into Wally’s bag as she walked out the door. Chanel. The one tube was worth more than all the other girls’ possessions combined, and then some. The girl had to believe that Wally had stolen it.
Wally knew how it would go.
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.