Wally grabbed one of the doughnuts and took a bite. It was partly a stall tactic—she had a decision to make. Wally was all alone in the office, and here was a new walk-in client roughly her own age. It seemed like a perfect opportunity for her to take on a case of her own. Would Lewis sign off on it? Probably not.
“You don’t seem old enough,” Kyle said.
“I’m actually still an intern here,” she said. “You’ll need to talk to one of our caseworkers. Someone should be here soon, if you can hang . . . ”
“Uh, okay.” Kyle checked his cell phone for the time. “I guess so. This place . . . you help people find their biological parents and stuff? Kids who have been adopted?”
“That’s one of the things we do, yeah. We bring people back together who have been separated for all sorts of reasons.”
Kyle just nodded, keeping his eyes on the floor. Apparently, he was in the right place.
Wally checked the time on the wall—10:20 A.M.—and guessed that Lewis wouldn’t be in for a half hour. Both of the other caseworkers, Carmen Black and Peter Maduro, were out in the field, not due back until the end of the week.
Wally turned on her computer and started her usual slog of data entry, but the silence quickly became awkward. There was no harm in having a regular conversation with the guy.
“I’m guessing we’re about the same age,” she said. “You go to school in the city?”
“Sexton,” he said, “since I was five. I’m a junior. But I haven’t been in a week and I’m not going back.”
The sudden force of Kyle’s declaration took Wally by surprise, and she studied him for a moment. The Sexton Academy was a private school on the Upper West Side, and Wally could see that Kyle—a more together version of Kyle than he was right now, anyway—would naturally fit in there. She pictured him in the dark blue blazer, colorfully striped school tie, and light khakis that made up the uniform, a Sexton insignia on the breast pocket of the blazer, of course.
Wally herself grew up in that privileged part of town, and she remembered the Sexton boys making the two-block trek from the school to the athletic-practice fields in Central Park, wearing their full sports gear. Wally could picture Kyle in that scenario too, a lacrosse stick slung over his shoulder with helmet and gloves hanging off the end, striding easily along the city streets with his Prep friends, a mob of handsome, born-to-rule guys with endless wealth and success in their future. Oftentimes, girls from nearby sister schools would linger on Central Park West to flirt with the boys as they ambled by.
Wally wondered what secrets those girls knew about Kyle.
“What about you?” he asked.
“I’m currently reevaluating my educational options.”
“Cool. Me too.”
Another silence fell, but Kyle seemed restless and eager to keep talking.
“My mom, her name was Laura,” he said, clearing his throat. “She died two years ago, a car accident on the Parkway. October sixteenth.”
“Oh . . . that’s awful. I’m really sorry, Kyle.” He was being unexpectedly candid, intriguing Wally but also making her feel a little cautious.
“My father, he’s . . . I’m sorry, he’s a total fucking prick, like a weapons-grade asshole. And he’s probably . . . ” Kyle hesitated, as if nervous about a leap he was about to take. “Not even probably, he’s definitely a dangerous person. So now he tells me that he’s going to marry this new woman. Deandra. Whatever. Some art dealer or something—I met her once for like two minutes. So my dad and I got into it. I mean, I don’t really give a shit who he wants to marry. . . . ”
The words were spilling out of Kyle now, a stream of anger and sadness. His lower lip trembled and his face flushed red in embarrassment. Wally suddenly realized that Kyle wasn’t about to wait for Lewis to arrive—he was plowing forward and laying out his story right now . . . for her. It crossed Wally’s mind that she could stop him, but she didn’t want to.
“It’s like he got over my mother so fast,” Kyle went on. “Really fast, like in days. So we had this fight, and he tells me how I idealized my mom too much and that, by the way, she’s not even really my mother. Then he says he was with another woman before my mom, but she went psycho and took off right after she gave birth to me.”
“That’s a lot for you to hear, all at once,” she said.
“I mean, my old man is a total liar, and I don’t believe anything he said about my birth mother. I want to find out who she is. And meet her, you know? But my father . . . he’ll never let go of me. I know things—about who he is, about things he’s done.”
“What do you mean? What has your father done?”
Kyle just shook his head and looked away, suddenly evasive. Wally began to wonder if Kyle’s situation was more than she could handle. Had she made a mistake by letting him get started?
“You know, Kyle, my boss will be in really soon. Maybe the best thing—”
“How long would it usually take you to find someone?” he asked.
“Uh . . . well, that depends,” she stammered a little, realizing that in his current state of mind, Kyle wasn’t going to be happy with the answer. “Finding your birth mother could be difficult or it could be easy, but there are other issues to work out first—”
“What issues do you mean?” Kyle asked. “You’ll find her for me, right?”
Wally hesitated, and Kyle saw it.
“If your mother can be found, we’ll find her,” Wally assured him, but she heard a twinge of hesitation in her own voice.
Kyle heard it too, and shot her a distrustful look.
“You said that’s what you do here.”
“Yes, but there’s a process to it. The idea is to bring people together in the right way, when they’re ready for it to happen.”
More than half of the reunions between separated family members ended badly, even in the best of circumstances. From what Wally could tell, Kyle’s circumstances were complicated, maybe even explosive.
“But I am ready,” Kyle said as if she were accusing him of something.
“You’re in a rough place right now,” Wally said. “I get that. But you need to understand something: finding your birth mother won’t solve the problems you’re having at home. Things are going badly with your father, and you’re reaching out for something that feels like a solution. I get that, but you have some steps to take first—”
“What are you talking about?” Kyle cut her off.
“There’s a therapist we refer a lot of clients to, and she’s really good. There are ways to get you into a safer living situation, also.” She could see that Kyle was struggling to understand what she was saying. “We have strong connections at Social Services, plus some private groups that help out in these situations. A friend of mine is with the NYPD, so we can—”
“A cop? Why?”
“To start with, I think that bruise on your face was made by a closed fist. You’ve described your father as dangerous and violent.”
Kyle was silent for a moment, his jaw clenched in anger.
“This was a mistake,” he said, rising quickly to his feet. “I’m sorry I wasted your time.”
He headed for the door.
Wally felt a stab of panic—she stood and went after him.
“Please don’t go,” Wally said. “This is my fault. My boss will be here soon. . . . ” She reached out and tried to hold Kyle by the arm, but he shrugged her off.
“Forget everything I told you.”
Kyle rushed out of the office. Wally ran after him as he made his way down the hall.
“I promise we can help you, Kyle!” she called out, feeling desperate now.
But Kyle never looked back. Wally watched helplessly as he hurried down the main stairs and disappeared from view. Shit!
2.
LEWIS DIDN’T ARRIVE UNTIL ALMOST NOON.
“Hello, Wallis,” he said as he entered, his faint Australian accent lending him a jaunty, gentlemanly air. He hung his fedora and overcoat on the hat rack by the door. For a man somewhere in his late eighties—he refused to verify his exact age—Lewis was still strong and sharp. His taste in clothes had frozen in limbo somewhere in the early fifties; he always dressed like a detective in an old black-and-white Humphrey Bogart film.
Wally could almost feel herself radiating an aura of guilt.
“Uh oh,” Lewis said when he turned to face her. “How bad is it?”
“Pretty bad,” she said, anxiously flicking the corner of the musty old case file she was working on.
Lewis sighed, and turned to retrieve his hat and coat from the rack.
“Come along. Everything goes down better with dumplings.”
There was a Mandarin place with pretty good dim sum on Second Avenue that Lewis loved. The place was loud and steamy and already crowded when they arrived, but the staff treated Lewis with deference—he and Wally were given a table immediately, and a quick nod to his favorite waitress was all it took to order two lunch specials.
“Tell me,” Lewis said as soon as their order was placed.
“We had a walk-in this morning,” she began, already dreading his reaction. “Carmen wasn’t in yet, and the guy was in rough shape. More than anything, I think he needed someone to talk to.”
“Wallis,” Lewis gave her an exasperated look, “please tell me you didn’t do the interview.”
“No!” she exclaimed. “Not intentionally. But we were sitting there waiting, and he just started talking.”
Lewis sighed. “And what happened?”
Wally described the entire session with Kyle. She kept checking Lewis for his reaction, but his expression revealed nothing. Lewis had heard a million tragic stories in his years with the Society. It took a lot to impress him.
“I see,” he said evenly, when she was done.
His calm demeanor only made Wally more anxious about what he was thinking. She caught herself holding her breath in anticipation and let it out.
“And how would you grade your performance?” he finally said.
“Well, the session ended with him running out on me. I never had him fill out a bio sheet, so I don’t know his full name or any other specifics that would help us follow up,” Wally said, feeling even more ashamed as she heard herself listing her failures. “He was upset when we started, but worse when he left. He might actually be in danger, and now there’s nothing I can do to change that.”
“Rough morning,” Lewis said. “And a little bizarre, don’t you think?”
“I guess,” Wally said, though she hadn’t seen it that way, before. “Yeah, he was a little ‘out there.’ Whatever’s going on has got him incredibly stressed. But that was no reason for me to fumble it so badly. I think I’d give myself an F.”
“I think that’s about right,” said Lewis. “On the bright side, you now have a better appreciation for how fragile the process can be.”
“Lucky me.”
Their food arrived, and they began eating in silence. Wally, however, soon lost her appetite. After slowly consuming half his plate of dumplings, Lewis dabbed his mouth with his napkin and studied her for a moment.
“So,” he said, “your failures are obvious. Tell me what you did right.”
“Uh . . . ” Wally tried to think, but she was still too upset to dissect the situation objectively.
“Very well,” Lewis said. “Allow me. First, you showed confidence in your ability to do this job. That’s something to build on, even if that confidence was premature. Second, from what you’ve said about Kyle, you made a correct assessment of his state of mind. The turmoil in his life would make him a bad candidate for our process at this point, and you were right to be direct with him about that.”
“Okay,” Wally said, grateful that Lewis was being generous with her.
“What you’re doing right now is a bigger mistake than all the rest,” Lewis added.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re beating yourself up. You think you broke this young man, but in fact he was already a train wreck when he walked through the door. Do you understand?”
“Maybe. But I still feel like I let him down.” Wally wasn’t willing to let herself off so easily.
“I understand, but there must be boundaries. Kyle’s well-being is not your own personal responsibility. We have to maintain a certain distance, the way a good surgeon might with a patient he finds on his operating table. It’s why doctors aren’t supposed to practice medicine on people they have a personal relationship with—because their emotions might compromise their ability to do their job. Doesn’t that make sense?”
“Yeah, I guess so. . . . ”
“And this is a philosophy you can apply in your personal life, as well.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m referring to Tiger.”
The mention of her Russian brother caught Wally by surprise. On her own time, she had used some of the Society’s resources in an effort to find him, wherever in the world he was. So far she hadn’t had any luck, but she would never stop looking.
“Lewis—”
“I know you’re preoccupied with the idea of finding your brother, and you’ve been using some of the Society’s assets in an effort to locate him.”
“I should have told you—”
He held up his hand to stop her. “I don’t object. I hope you find him, of course.”
“Thank you,” Wally said.
“Your brother is on your mind a great deal.”
“All the time,” Wally said.
Lewis knew more details about Wally’s life—her entire life—than anyone else in the world. He was the one person she could talk to frankly about everything.
“Lewis,” she continued, “I think a lot about how luck plays such a huge role in how our lives turn out, and we have no control over that. Tiger and I are brother and sister—same genes, same parents—but I grew up on the Upper West Side, with every imaginable advantage in life. Tiger basically raised himself on the street—”
“You were on the street also, Wally.”
“By choice,” she said adamantly. “That’s the difference. He became a hard, violent person because that was the only way he could survive. It isn’t fair.”
“You want to find him and help him.”
“I want to find him. I don’t know if he would accept help from anyone, least of all me. If I had the chance, though, I think I could even things out a little. Maybe tip the scales back in his favor.”
“And what else?”
What else did Wally want? She wanted to turn back time. She wanted her mother, Claire, to be alive again. She wanted Shelter Island never to have happened.
She wanted the nightmares to stop.
“I don’t know what I want,” she said.
“All right. But as you try to figure that out, I want you to remember something. This applies to Kyle, and even to your own brother: however pure your intentions are, no one can fix another person, not really.”
3.
WALLY GRABBED THE SUBWAY BACK TO GREENPOINT and dragged her exhausted self the two blocks from the station to her address near McCarren Park. It was a renovated three-story industrial building, a beehive of former sweatshops converted into a dozen small lofts. Wally’s one-bedroom unit was on the roof. It had the smallest square footage of all the spaces but the luxury of an airy rooftop that was hers alone.
A sweet, mossy aroma emanated from the turtle tank, greeting her as soon as she walked through the door. She needed to feed Tevin, a baby snapping turtle that had already grown two inches since she’d b
ought him on impulse from the pet store a month earlier. The smell of the tank had gotten stronger over the past few weeks. Wally would have to clean out the habitat soon, before it went completely native with algae and other disgusting things.
She grabbed a chunk of frozen fish from the freezer and set it on the rock island at the center of the large tank, but Tevin remained motionless, floating on the surface of the water and ignoring the food. He kept his cold, inscrutable gaze fixed on Wally, and she imagined he was more interested in eating one of her fingers—or even her nose—than what he’d been offered. With jaws as powerful as a pit bull’s, young Tevin was fully capable of harvesting one of Wally’s body parts.
“You’re welcome, beast,” Wally said.
Wally threw off her work clothes and pulled on stretchy black yoga pants, an oversized green sweatshirt, and sheepskin boots, happy to be comfortable and warm after a difficult day. She made a cup of hot chocolate and opened the sliding door onto the rooftop deck, where she sat down at the used set of wrought-iron patio furniture that she had bought—along with most of the loft’s furniture—from a local thrift shop.
Like the rest of the loft space, the deck seemed only halfway put together—Wally had signed the lease only three months earlier, once she had finally admitted to herself that she could not live in the fancy Upper West Side apartment she’d inherited after her mother’s death. There were painful memories that came with that place, of course, but it was more than that—her mother’s old apartment was very upscale and luxurious, and Wally felt she hadn’t done anything to deserve that kind of lifestyle.
Along the perimeter of the roof were half a dozen new planter boxes with big, unopened bags of fresh potting soil waiting beside them. A local nursery had delivered it all for her, but nothing was planted in them yet. When it had come time to choose, Wally stood before the massive, confusing display of seeds at the nursery, paralyzed by indecision. Was she a flower person, a vegetable person, an herb person, or what? All three? Each packet of seeds came with a chart of its particular seasonal planting schedule, and the information overload had forced Wally’s brain to shut down.
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