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, b.i.t.c.h," 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 bulls.h.i.t, 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 f.u.c.king 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 cafe 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 pa.s.serby 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-a.s.suredness 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 s.h.i.t 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.

"Is for you," the old man said. "In some years past, there was flooding from pipes. Maybe some damage to your things. Cannot be helped."

Again, Wally opened her mouth to speak, but had no words. She slowly reached out and took the envelope, then turned and walked toward the front door of the shop, stuffing the envelope in her shoulder bag as she went. From behind, the old man spoke, and she turned to hear his words.

"Be careful, vnuchenka," he said. "This world is a wilderness."

Wally nodded absently and turned back toward the door. Disoriented, she pa.s.sed by the security man as she pushed her way out of the shop, making it halfway down the block before she felt faint and realized that she had stopped breathing. She leaned against a store window for a moment, forcing air into her lungs. Wally reached into her bag and pulled out the envelope.

"What the h.e.l.l?" she said out loud, breathlessly, to herself. How had this happened? She had traveled to this random shop for a new ID and instead come into possession of ... what? Something with her Russian name written on it; a name that even Wally herself didn't realize she remembered. What were the odds against such a coincidence? It seemed impossible.

The old man had been right about water damage: two edges of the envelope showed dark water stains where the paper had been immersed for some time. The flap was tied closed with string; Wally unwound the string and began to tear open the flap, but then suddenly stopped herself.

Wally had a sense that she was being watched. She looked up quickly and caught a flash of movement on the sidewalk, thirty yards behind her. As a man ducked into a shop doorway for cover, she thought it might be the burly security man from the shop she had just been in.

Wally stuffed the envelope back in her shoulder bag and moved on down the street. She ducked into a large and busy women's clothing store called Notions, its sign written in both English and Russian. Wally began to peruse the racks as casually as she could manage, given the level of adrenaline now surging through her. As she continued to browse, two stern saleswomen-mother and daughter, by the looks of them-watched her every move with suspicion, ignoring the six or seven other customers in the store. Wally quickly picked out two blouses and headed toward the aisle of changing booths behind a curtain at the rear of the store. As she approached the curtain, the younger saleswoman followed her, taking note of the blouses.

"Two items," the woman said to Wally in a flinty, Slavic tone.

Wally nodded and stepped into the back room where the changing booths were. At the rear wall there was an exit with a sign that read EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY-ALARM WILL SOUND. Without hesitation, Wally reared back and kicked at the bar lock on the exit door, blowing it wide open and sounding the alarm. Before anyone in the store out front could react, Wally ducked into one of the changing booths, shut the door, and stepped up onto the stool inside so that her feet would not be visible from outside the booth.

Soon came the sounds of the saleswomen, rushing into the changing area and yammering excitedly in Russian, cursing Wally as they spotted the wide-open emergency exit and the alleyway beyond. From the booth, Wally could hear the volume of the women's voices diminish as they stepped out into the back alley, looking for her.

Then Wally heard another set of footsteps-heavier, male-approaching hurriedly from the shop floor and pa.s.sing through the changing area, also headed for the emergency exit. As the heavy steps pa.s.sed her booth, Wally opened the booth door just a crack and confirmed the ident.i.ty of her pursuer: it was the security man from the copy shop. He wore an angry expression as he pa.s.sed through the back room and disappeared through the emergency exit. Wally emerged from the changing booth, leaving the blouses behind as she walked through to the front of the store and out onto the street again.

Wally made her way back to the Brighton subway station, using streets off the Avenue and moving quickly, but not so quickly as to attract attention. She hoped that a train would be ready to go-and it was, the last few pa.s.sengers trickling on board just as the doors closed. As the train pulled away, Wally glanced back to the platform where the security man, breathless and enraged, had reached the train moments too late. His eyes scanned the windows of the departing subway cars, but Wally leaned behind the solid wall at the end of the car to avoid detection.

She moved toward the back of the last car, choosing a window seat away from the other pa.s.sengers. She took a moment to catch her breath and collect herself, feeling calmer with every rattle of the elevated subway car that carried her back into Manhattan. She peered into her shoulder bag, where the envelope waited, still unopened.

It was twilight then, and the car's fluorescent panels flickered off and on with every irregular b.u.mp on the train tracks below. Wally reached into her bag and pulled out the mildew-stained envelope. She tore through the flap and pulled out two items: a water-damaged manila file folder that was about a quarter of an inch thick and stuffed with doc.u.ments and a separate brown envelope, small and sealed closed with something rolling around loose inside it.

Wally first opened the small brown envelope, tearing the flap open, and out rolled what looked like a pebble-a single pea-sized stone. On close examination, the "pebble" had a rough outside surface with the slightest hint of reflection coming off it, a faint green glitter. Wally returned the stone to the small envelope, folding it in half twice and then stuffing it in the secure inside pocket of her jacket.

She opened the second item-the manila folder-and saw the extent of the water damage: a collection of official-looking papers, yellowed with age, were almost completely ruined. The ink of the doc.u.ments had bled away and soaked through all the pages so all that remained were a few scattered words-Russian, Cyrillic-which at first glance meant nothing to Wally. A separate item was a stapled set of papers that resembled an old photocopy of a newspaper article, with only a few sentences still legible.

The file included a single photograph that had survived well. It looked to be a surveillance photo, taken from above, of a man walking across a city street. He was st.u.r.dily built, with dark hair and sideburns styled for another era-the eighties, maybe-with dark aviator sungla.s.ses perched on a strong nose. Something about the way the man carried himself was unsettling. Wally looked closely at the man's face-slightly blurred from the poor quality of the security camera image-but his features meant nothing to her.

The final item in the file looked to be completely undamaged. It was a standard-sized mailing envelope, a light blue color that might have been part of a personalized stationery set. There was a faint scent to the envelope. Wally held it to her nose and breathed in, deciding it was an Old World smell, floral and musky. The name Wally was written on the outside of the envelope in a woman's handwriting. Wally paused at the last moment before opening the envelope, suddenly feeling a twinge of dread, but then carefully slit open the flap. She pulled out a note, in English, written in the same woman's handwriting as the outside of the envelope. The beginning of the note read My dearest Valentina. Skipping down to the bottom of the page, Wally read the closing of the letter: With my deepest love for you always, Yalena Mayakova.

"Yalena Mayakova," Wally mouthed the name to herself quietly, in shock and disbelief. At the Ditmas Avenue station, the train dipped down into its dark underground tunnel; by the flickering lights of the train, Wally began to read the letter from her Russian mother.

FOUR.

Wally made it back to the bank by dusk. She felt terrible inside and must have looked that way too, judging by Tevin's reaction when he saw her.

"Did'ja see a ghost or something?" Tevin asked, concerned.

Wally had no answer. She was overwhelmed by the events of the afternoon, and the long subway ride home from Brighton Beach had not helped. It had been too much empty time for her to sit alone, struggling to process the events that had the potential to turn her life upside down. She hated appearing vulnerable in front of her crew, but in this situation there was nothing she could do about it.

"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?"