“Obviously she needs food,” said Ella.
Tevin went out and returned fifteen minutes later with two pizzas and a twelve-pack of Dr. Pepper. The crew allowed Wally to eat and relax until she was ready to talk. She forced herself to eat one slice and drink two sodas. The combination of grease, sugar, and caffeine eventually worked for her, and within half an hour Wally felt at least partially revived. She pulled the big padded envelope out of her bag and spread all its contents across the warm marble floor, neatly arranging them in the same order she had found them. The crew knelt on the floor beside her and inspected the items.
First, of course, was the letter. Ella picked it up and, just as she was about to read it out loud, stopped herself and looked to Wally.
“Is it okay?” Ella asked.
Wally nodded yes, actually looking forward to hearing out loud the words that had been crashing around in her head for almost two hours; maybe they would be clearer this way.
“My Dearest Valentina,”
Ella began reading, then gave Wally a questioning look. “Valentina?”
“That’s me,” Wally said. “My Russian name.”
Though all of Wally’s crew knew about her adoption, they hadn’t heard her other name, obviously.
“You never told us that,” Ella said.
“It’s new to me, too,” Wally said. “Kind of.”
“Whoa …” Jake said.
Ella began again, this time with a greater sense of gravity:
“My Dearest Valentina. My greatest hope has been that one day, you and I would face each other, embrace each other, as mother and daughter. If this letter has come to you, that dream will never come true. I am gone. Writing this, my heart breaks …”
Ella choked up a little and she paused her reading. She gave Wally a sympathetic look.
“You okay?” Tevin asked.
“I’m okay,” Wally said.
Ella continued:
“There are so many things I would like to express to you. I fear that you could never forgive me for abandoning you to this world, but I would happily endure your anger just to be with you, for the chance to explain the choices I have made in my life. You can be sure that I have never stopped loving you, that I have forever hoped for the day that we could finally be together and safe. Perhaps in another life. I am so very sorry.”
Ella paused again, a bit overwhelmed, then went on.
“Certainly you are curious about where you are from and who you were born to be. I have included documents here that will help you to understand all things. It is your right to know why our lives were fated to be separate. Please accept the knowledge here as complete, and search no further. Jeopardy and heartache await you if you do not believe this warning. Please, my beautiful Valentina, accept the miracle of your life and go forward in peace and happiness. With my deepest love for you always, Yalena Mayakova.”
The four of them sat in silence for a moment, considering the contents of the note. Each of the others glanced at Wally to see how she was responding. Though she had already read the note on the subway, the emotional impact of the words was still powerful. She felt stricken by the confusing combination of excitement and doubt.
“Holy shit,” said Tevin.
“Where the hell did you get this?” Jake asked.
Wally recounted the events of her afternoon. Tevin, Jake, and Ella took a while to process the story.
“You just walked in there for an ID,” Tevin said, “and an old guy you’ve never seen before gave you this?”
“And his security guy tried to follow me. I don’t know why. I don’t know anything.”
“This is totally out there, Wally,” Jake said.
“Yeah,” she agreed.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Tevin said. “I’d bet the letter is wrong. Your mother—the person who wrote this—the letter makes it sound like she’s dead, but I think she’s actually not.”
“How do you figure that?” Wally challenged him, though she had already reached that same hopeful conclusion herself.
“The envelope has your name on it, so you were meant to get it at some point, right?”
“So …” Wally agreed.
“So the way she’s written it …” Tevin picked up the note and scanned it for the sentence he was thinking about. “Here:
If this letter has come to you, that dream will never come true. I am gone.
See? You’re supposed to get this only after she’s dead. But you ended up in that shop today by accident, so you got it before you were supposed to.”
“How do you know when she was supposed to get it, Tev?” Jake said, always the skeptic. “You’re just guessing. We don’t know how or when any of this should have happened. And all that shit in there looks pretty old. Anything could have happened to this Yalena woman in that time.”
“But what’s wrong with Wally believing it?” Ella protested, giving Jake a nudge.
“If it’s bullshit, I’d say there’s plenty wrong,” Jake said.
It was a strange experience for Wally to sit in on this debate, listening to the crew debate the question without her. Part of her wanted to jump in and insist that Yalena was alive, but she didn’t know the truth of it any more than the others did.
“I’d bet something else …” Tevin said.
“This oughta be good,” Jake sneered.
“It is,” Tevin said. “I think Yalena is somewhere nearby. Or she was when she wrote this letter.”
“Why would you say that?” Wally asked.
“First of all,” Tevin said, “how else did the envelope end up in the U.S.? In Brighton Beach?”
“And look what she called you,” Ella said, obviously agreeing with Tevin.
Beautiful Valentina.
She wrote that. She’s seen you, Wally. How beautiful you are.”
“
Please
. Every mother says that about every kid,” Jake insisted, but Wally could feel those words hang darkly over the crew—even Jake. Each of them had painful histories with their own parents; kind and loving words were never guaranteed.
Ella shook off the gloom of the moment, defying Jake’s cynicism.
“She’s alive and she’s been watching over you.” Ella spoke those words in a whisper, infusing them with a romantic, storybook essence. “That’s what I think.”
Magical Ella
, thought Wally, though she wanted to believe it herself.
“But if you’re right,” Wally said calmly, determined to be rational, “and she was near, why wouldn’t she have contacted me?”
“It’s got something to do with the guy in the picture,” said Tevin.
They all looked again at the photograph that had been included in the package: the man in aviator sunglasses, crossing an unnamed street in what could be most any metropolitan area in the world. He looked to be about forty years old, though there was no telling how long ago the photo itself had been taken. He had the solid build of a physical laborer and his dark hair was cropped close. Looking at the photograph again now, Wally noticed a dark patch of skin on his neck, partially obscured by the collar of his shirt. A tattoo.
“What about him?” Wally said.
“He’s a scary one,” said Ella.
“There’s something else here,” said Tevin, pointing at the underside of the photograph.
Wally took the photo from Tevin and found a faded notation on the underside, in pencil, written in the same hand as the letter from Yalena Mayakova.
“This is a most dangerous man,”
Wally read the note aloud, a chill passing through her as the words crossed her lips.
“He has driven us apart. If you see him, you must run.”
Hours later
, Wally lay awake in her sleeping space high above the bank floor, staring up at the dark ceiling. As cars passed by outside, their headlights swept into the bank and flickered on the Trojan War mosaic, briefly giving life to the ancient heroes before leaving them dark again.
Was it possible, Wally wondered, to want something your entire life—desperately—without consciously knowing it? That was how she felt when she first read the line in her mother’s note:
My greatest hope has been that you and I would one day embrace as mother and daughter.
Wally shared that furious need for completeness, now more than ever. All her life Wally had felt abandoned, had assumed that she had been an unwanted child tossed aside by unloving parents. Now it seemed—if the letter from her mother could be believed—that the opposite was true. Little Wally—little
Valentina
—had been cherished.
Something else about the Brighton event occurred to her, but only many hours later: when speaking her Russian name aloud—Valentina—Wally had pronounced the
V
sound somewhere between a
V
and a
W
, which she knew was common among some native speakers of Russian. Claire had never really explained why she had chosen the name Wallis, but now it seemed self-evident: Wally was to Wallis as Vally was to Valentina. With the mixed pronunciation of the
W
and
V
, the nicknames were virtually the same in both languages. Claire had chosen the name Wallis as a way of connecting Wally’s Russian and American identities, possibly to help give the five-year-old Wally a sense of continuity, easing her abrupt transition from one culture to another. It was a small thing, maybe, but all these years later Wally was grateful for the gesture, and grateful for the reminder that whatever their differences, Claire did love Wally, did care for her in every way she was able.
Wally heard Tevin’s footsteps approach on the dark walkway. He sat down beside her, cross-legged.
“You okay?” he asked. “Long day …”
“Yeah.” Wally managed a wry chuckle. “It’s all so crazy.”
“You think it’s real? The letter and everything?”
“I don’t know,” Wally said at first, then, “I want it to be.”
“What’re you gonna do?”
“I’m going to look for her,” Wally said. Just saying the words made her feel warm … not quite happy, exactly, but strong.
“Cool,” Tevin said. “We’ll all look together.”
Wally smiled. “Thanks, Tev.”
“Maybe we even need it.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “After a while, having something to run away from ain’t enough. I think you gotta have something to run toward too. You ever feel that?”
“Yeah, I do,” Wally said, and she did. She’d been feeling it herself for some time but never thought it out loud. She and the crew had worked out how to survive on their own, so what were they supposed to do next?
Wally could feel that Tevin had something to say, something important, but didn’t know how to begin. Wally searched his eyes, but Tevin broke her gaze. The moment passed.
“G’night,” he said. He rose and headed back down the walkway.
“’Night, Tev,” Wally said after him, and all at once Wally was exhausted. She wrapped herself tightly inside her wool and flannel bedroll and lay on her back, gazing up at the dark ceiling. A memory crept in slowly, vaguely … maybe sparked by the Russians conversations she had heard in Brighton that day. There had been a song, a lullaby. She had once known it by heart, but now it lurked in the distance, teasing her. Where had she heard it? What were the words? The idea of summoning them frightened her, but the impulse was irresistible. She moved her lips and the lyrics stumbled out uncertainly,
“Puskai prïdet pora prosit’sia. Drug druga …”
Wally stopped after those few words, frustrated that she was unable to remember more and left clueless about what the lyrics meant. In the end, she was lulled to sleep not by the song, but by her own exhaustion.
First thing the next morning
—Monday—Wally came down from her walkway and woke the others, kneeling down on the floor of the bank beside them.
“I left something out before,” she said, and brought out the smaller envelope with the odd, glittery stone inside. Tevin, Jake, and Ella looked at the unremarkable stone on her hand.
“I don’t get it,” said Ella.
Wally shrugged. “Neither do I, but there’s gotta be a reason she put this in with all the rest, right?”
“I guess,” said Tevin. “Yeah. Gotta be.”
“Anyway,” said Wally, “it’s a place to start.”
The others agreed sleepily. Once they’d gotten their shit halfway together, they took the A train south to the Drop-In Center on 30th Street and 8th Avenue, where they got free coffee and scrambled eggs, then hiked back uptown on Avenue of the Americas to 47th Street. Looking east, they saw the Manhattan Diamond District spread out before them, dozens of gem dealers stretching for blocks. To Wally and the others, all the shops looked the same.
“Where do we start?” she asked.
Ella pointed to a storefront that read H
AMLISCH
B
ROTHERS
.
“I have always preferred Hamlisch Brothers,” said Ella, dramatically raising her hand to her forehead as if she was about to execute a royal swoon. “I simply will NOT wear jewels from any other.”
The others agreed and headed for Ella’s preferred diamond merchant, ignoring the suspicious looks they received from a klatch of Hasidic merchants gathered on the sidewalk out front, sipping coffee and gearing up for a day of commerce.
Wally tried to open the door of the Hamlisch Brothers shop, but it was locked. At the counter inside, the young proprietor looked up toward the door, appraising Wally and the others and apparently not liking what he saw. He shook his head no.
“Asshole!” Jake said, insulted on behalf of all of them. He grabbed the door handle and rattled it loudly, sneering at the guy. “Open the damn door!”
Wally saw the merchant reach under the counter—for a gun? An alarm button?—and she pulled Jake back.
“Easy, big dog,” she said.
“Screw him,” said Jake. “There are a hundred other shops here.”
“And all their doors will be locked, like his.”
Jake heard her and reluctantly shrugged in agreement.
Wally reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out the small brown envelope from the Brighton file. She opened the flap and let the single stone roll out into her hand, then rapped lightly on the glass door. When the merchant looked up again, Wally held the stone up between her thumb and forefinger for him to see. The man squinted, then moved to the door for a closer look.