Chapter Text
Alyssa
She may be the face I can't forget
The trace of pleasure or regret
May be my treasure or the price I have to pay
She may be the song the summer sings
May be the chill the autumn brings
May be a hundred different things
Within the measure of a day
- She, Elvis Costello
She touches the little wooden figure, tracing its painted face. The doll in her hands smiles at her, a quaint, shy sort of smile, and she wonders just how its smile can be so lovely when for years, it stood on the shelf and watched its owner die.
Grabbing its head and its robust lower body, she twists and pulls. Inside is another doll. Twist. Pull. Twist. Pull. Was it done? No, not yet. One more time. Twist. A final pull. She places the figures side by side. They wear the same expressions on their identical faces, smiling with their full red lips, long eyelashes curving away from dark blue eyes.
How pretty, she thinks. Just like Mama. And she remembers her Mama, the way she would kiss her nose when she cried, her soft hair enveloping the sides of her face like a protective veil. Her shampoo, she recalls, smelled like sweet alyssum. Patches of white on the ground that appeared in the spring and summer and filled the air with sweetness even when the air was still. She would pretend it was snow, plucking the tiny flowers from the ground and throwing them toward the sky. When some landed in her hair, Mama would laugh, brushing them off with her hands. "Brr, I'm so cold," she'd joke. "Snow in the summer! Not even in Russia did that happen."
She hadn't understood at the time that her Mama was always cold.
Now, the dolls smile at her, and she stares back. For the first time, she notices a tiny flaw on the last doll: its lip twists down on the right side of its face – perhaps due to a tremble of the careful artist's hands – turning the customary smile into a grimace. She pockets it.
Two hours later, she stands at the graveyard beside her Papa as he cries a soldier's cry. His shoulders shake and his hands cover his face, but when he removes them mere minutes later, his face is dry and set like stone. He kneels down and presses a kiss on the gravestone, murmuring words of love that she thinks are pointless; her Mama's already in the ground (and maybe up in the sky like the priest says, but she doesn't believe him, because how could Mama go all the way up there if she couldn't even get out of her bed?).
"Ali, let's go. Let's go home," Papa says, but his feet stay rooted to the ground.
Her hands slip inside the pocket of her modest black dress and touch the doll. She doesn't cry. Not even a soldier's cry, like Papa. She thinks that maybe, somewhere inside of her, a little person is crying for her Mama. But it was her job to not let it show. Mama had said it many times before, while she withered away in the confines of her bed, one skeletal hand scratching at her daughter's cheeks: "Don't you cry, don't you cry." So she smiles and holds her Papa's hand and pulls him away from the dead body in the ground.
She turns five the following week.
Papa tells her that she is named after her grandmother back in Russia. "Алиса Амелина, Alisa Amelina," he says, gesturing to a photo in the family album, "was my mother, your grandmother. She adored you when you were born, said you look – looked – just like your Mama." And no matter how hard she tries, Alisa can't remember her grandmother; she can't remember Russia at all.
She prefers to believe that Mama named her after those small white flowers that bloomed in their garden long ago, and asks Papa to call her 'Alyssa' instead. People at school can't remember the long 'i' anyway, she explains to him. It's easier this way. I'm an American now, aren't I?
After a long pause, he agrees. But when she gets up to go to her room, she notices that his kind eyes have filled with tears. She turns back, suddenly struck with the need to say something just to get rid of that look in his eyes.
"I'll always be Alisa Amelina to you, Papa," she tells him. "But I'll just be Alyssa A. at school, okay?"
He smiles at her and pats his knee. She leans over to give him a kiss.
Her appendix bursts a month after her mother's funeral. She doesn't notice it at first, really. A slight headache in the early evening, a few trips to the bathroom to lean over the toilet. Papa assumes – and so does she – that she's got the stomach flu that's been going around and school and puts her to bed with a hug.
The next thing she knows, she's curled up and sweating and whimpering in Papa's arms, vomit on her pajamas. She feels as if a fork has been jammed into her bellybutton; she tries to reach down and press to ease the pressure, but the more she moves, the fainter she feels. They end up in the emergency room at 3 a.m. and she wakes up to the bright light of the hospital room four hours later. The doctor smiles at her and commends her tired Papa for getting Alisa to the hospital so quickly.
He says that peritonitis can be fatal. She finds herself wondering what would have happened if Papa had gone out for a night shift that evening, like he often did. Would he have come back to find her pale and still on her bed, lying in a pool of yellow sick? Would he have cried? She doesn't know if he would have. She wasn't Mama, after all.
Papa isn't a bad father. Papa is the best father he could ever be.
He takes her to the zoo and holds her on his shoulders so she can feed the spoiled monkeys; he reads her The Hobbit and The Secret Garden and The Chronicles of Narnia before she can understand all the words, before she can grip the novels in her small hands; he calls his female coworker for advice on how to do his baby daughter's hair for her first day of school (he can only manage a messy ponytail); he cooks alphabet soup and spells out silly words to make her giggle; and he tries, tries, tries so hard to fill the empty space left by her Mama.
So when the bullet shoots through the open window and through Papa's head and into the wall and he collapses into her lap, Alyssa screams. She screams and screams and screams. His body is heavy and his head... oh God, something warm is staining her dress and The Jetsons is playing on TV and he's not moving and she's screaming and –
The next thing she remembers is that it's morning again; the sunlight is shining through the open window and Papa's still on her lap like he's sleeping. She touches his face – a part untouched by the bullet's impact – and feels the coldness under his stubble. She pushes him off her dress – it's ruined now, of course, and it's the dress Mama had bought for her – and goes to the bathroom to wash the dried blood off her hands.
It takes 16 pumps of soap to get it off her palms.
Then she calls the police: 9-1-1, just like they taught her at school. Before they arrive, she goes into her bedroom and opens the drawer to get her little nesting doll. She has a feeling that she will not be coming back.
And she never does.
They send her to the hospital with a kind, tired lady. Mrs Macpherson is her name, and she says that she is deeply sorry, but she will not be able to see her father again. She then waits outside the hospital room as Alyssa is examined, then waits outside another white door as a crooked old man asks her pointless questions.
"Hello, Alisa. I hear you're in second grade. How are you doing in school?" Good.
"How are your friends?" Fine.
"And how are you feeling?" Fine.
"I'm sorry about your father."
"Do you miss your father, Alisa?" My name's Alyssa.
"... All right. My mistake, Alyssa. Do you understand that you will not be able to see him again?" Yes.
"Due to the most unfortunate circumstances, you have no family left who can take you in. You'll be put in with a new family very soon. They'll be very nice. How do you feel about that?"
"Do you have anything you want to ask me?"
"Alrighty. If you ever have any problems, tell Mrs Macpherson. Good-bye, Alisa."
A week later, after she steps inside her first foster home, she notices that there's still some dried blood left under her fingernails. And in the privacy of the bathroom, she cries for her Mama and her Papa and because she just doesn't understand why Mama got sick and why Papa bled and why, just why, that bullet flew in her window that day and took her father away.
Her foster Mama is forty-five years old, and on the third day after Alyssa arrives, she takes her new daughter to the pet store. "I've always wanted a pet myself," foster Mama tells Alyssa, winking, as Alyssa bends down to pet a small grey kitten with dark blue eyes. The kitten purrs under her touch and Alyssa looks up at foster Mama who is chatting with the employee.
"That's a Russian Blue," the sales-person explains, "and that one's the runt of the litter. Cute little guy all the same. 20% off if you buy a litter-box and a carrier along with him."
She names him Lincoln, after her favourite president, and foster Mama gives her an approving nod.
That evening, Alyssa lies on her bedroom carpet and spends two hours trying to teach Lincoln tricks. He meows at her and scratches her arm with his claws, but she loves him all the same.
She celebrates her eighth birthday with her foster Mama and Lincoln and a cake that was baked especially for her. The joyful evening crumples when she turns the TV on to an episode of The Jetsons because she can't stop screaming and she sees blood on her hands and hears the bullet punching through her Papa's skull. Foster Mama holds her in her arms and Lincoln climbs into her lap, but even then, she can't stop shaking.
But eventually.
And slowly.
Things get better.
One morning, foster Mama comes to her with a hesitant smile. "I've got a surprise for you, Alyssa."
And Alyssa, halfway through The Clue in the Jewel Box, her favourite Nancy Drew story, folds in the page and puts it down. "What is it?" she asks, then pauses. "Is school cancelled?"
Foster Mama laughs at the hopeful look on her face. "No, hon. I've got a different sort of surprise for you." She then reveals a folder she'd been hiding behind her back. "After talking with Mrs Macpherson, I've managed to get a hold of your birth certificate, if you'd like to see it."
"Please," Alyssa says, "I'd like to see it."
She spends the rest of the day writing out her initials in her journal – A.G.R.A. – and considers how strange it is that she has never felt like an Alisa in her entire life, and Alyssa feels like a poor substitution. She picks up the Nancy Drew book again, eyes tracing the author's name: Carolyn Keene. It was a fake name, a pseudonym; it had been revealed a couple years back.
Maybe, one day, she could hide under a guise of her own, under a name that fit her as well as Lincoln did in her dress pocket while he slept. But for now, she would live on as Alyssa. Until the name moved on from her, or she moved on from it. Whichever came first.
She develops a fascination for mystery, inspired by the young female detective – and also by the deep desire to solve a haunting question of her own. At Christmas, she asks foster Mama for a beginner's book on codes and symbols. And soon enough, she knows Morse code; her initials were the first thing she learned: dot-dash, dash-dash-dot, dot-dash-dot, dot-dash. Now she can tap out anything, as easily and naturally as water flowing from a tap.
She has been going to the library a lot often these days, working on her research. After school, before dinner, before school, after dinner. Her schoolwork suffers, and foster Mama gently questions her about them.
"Anything bothering you, Alyssa?"
Alyssa shrugs, tapping away at the table in a pattern of dots and dashes.
Foster Mama huffs a breath. "I know that you can do better, Aly. Try your best, okay?"
Dot-dot, dot-dash-dash-dash-dash-dot, dash-dash... A pause. Dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dash-dot, dot-dash-dot, dash-dot-dash-dash.
Sighing, foster Mama shakes her head and smiles. "You know what? I have no idea what you're saying, hon, but just know that I'll always be here if you need to talk." She gives Alyssa's shoulder a final squeeze and heads back to the kitchen.
The next report card gets framed on the wall, a row of red As proudly displayed.
In 5th grade, her class is assigned a family tree.
Mama, she writes first.
Papa, she writes second.
Grandma Alisa Amelina, she writes third, from Russia.
Then she pauses. "Russia," she whispers. "Why did we move from Russia?"
When she gets home after school that day, she heads to her bedroom. It's a simple room; there's a bed covered in a warm quilt, a desk with a built-in bookshelf for her numerous novels, and a dresser for her clothes. The only decoration that makes it uniquely hers, she thinks, is the little nesting doll on top of the dresser. It smiles at her crookedly as she stares at it.
She remembers. Papa's holding her hand. She giggles at the TV. Then the bullet shoots through her open window. Papa jerks and collapses just as quickly, his face a mess of gore. She's frozen, because there's blood in her eyes that wasn't there before, and Papa's still holding her hand. And suddenly she remembers something else she saw in the corner of her eye.
A face in the open window. A man holding a gun peering in, then staring at the little girl beside his target.
He looks shocked. Not overtly; but she can tell from the slight widening of his eyes and the slackness in his jaw. When her mouth opens and she begins to scream, he flees, as if he were never there. The police never found any evidence, she knows. They suspected that it was a bitter coworker who'd lost a job, maybe, or just a random case of violence. Whatever it was, they never followed up on it.
She thinks about the man in the window and his wide eyes. Her fists clench tightly.
Maybe he hadn't known that the man he shot dead was her Papa or that he had a daughter.
But why shoot him dead in the first place?
By age 11, she can speak in awkward Russian, understand it a little better, but read it perfectly fine.
One day, when she goes to buy the weekly Russian newspaper from the small shop down the road, she bumps into a man by the stand who stares inquisitively at her selection.
"You read that newspaper?" he asks her in Russian. He looks like he hasn't shaved in a while.
"I try my best," she enunciates, shrugging.
The man seems amused at her effort. "I see you haven't been learning for long?"
"No. I do not have anybody with whom to practice."
"I could help you," he says, munching on a candy bar.
"Would you?"
"Are you free now?"
"Yes," she replies without hesitation. "Will you help me?"
"If you'd like."
She gets home at seven in the evening, and foster Mama's waiting for her at the front door, foot tapping, lines of stress on her forehead. "Where have you been, young lady? You went out at four to get a newspaper. Last time I checked, it doesn't take three hours to get the paper. What have you got to say for yourself?"
She thinks about it for a second. No matter how understanding foster Mama was, she doubts that she would understand her meeting up with a grown man to practice Russian.
So she apologizes. "Sorry, I didn't mean to make you worry or anything. I met a friend and we were talking for a while. Lost track of time. But I'll make dinner."
Foster Mama sighs, fondly exasperated, and gestures for Alyssa to come in. "I already made dinner. Try not to lose track of time again, all right, darling?"
She agrees.
The next time she meets up with Taras, she wears two watches: one on her left wrist, one on her right. She doesn't want to disappoint her foster Mama.
By age 12, she can speak in Russian like a native, understand it even better, and read it perfectly fine.
Maybe it's because of her past. The mystery of where she came from and who her parents really were and why things happened the way they did. But she takes comfort in words.
She sees patterns in words, their roots, their meanings. They connect in her mind like puzzle pieces and god, when something clicks, really clicks in her head, she can barely describe the elation she feels.
And that's not the only way they comfort her.
When foster Mama tells her that she's proud, when she engulfs her in a hug and murmurs "good work" and "I always knew you could do it", she feels as if she could walk on water if she tried.
When Taras starts talking and she replies and they talk for hours on end and she doesn't even realize they're speaking Russian and he ruffles her hair and praises her – "You're improving every day, my girl" – she grins, forgetting for a moment why she's learning Russian in the first place.
When she lies in her bed, staring up at the ceiling, mouthing the word over and over again: убийца.
She graduates high school in '91. Alisa Amelina, Class of 1991, her diploma reads. She keeps the piece of parchment in her hands all neatly tied up and brings it to the hospital. "Look, Mom, I graduated," she whispers, gently pressing it into the frail hands of her mother (and just when she stopped being foster Mama, Alyssa doesn't remember).
"Oh, honey! I wish I could have been there. All the same, I'm so glad... so glad that I got to see you turn into a wonderful young woman. Oh, hon."
She doesn't tell her of the full-tuition scholarship offer she's received just that morning: four full years of funded courses and residency. Doesn't tell Mom that she's been offered an internship as an interpreter at the international relations department in Washington. Because for now, all that matters is giggling with her mother about old Lincoln and talking about how their homemade cranberry loaf had won first place last year at the fair.
And as if she'd timed it that way, as if she'd held on just long enough to see her daughter graduate, Mom passes away the same year. Breast cancer.
She is walking down the street with her headphones on her ears and her mind in another world entire – when she slams into a terribly expensive suit. And the tall man wearing it. The impact sends the wire spectacles on his face flying to the ground, and she scrambles to pick them up, flushing.
"Sorry about that, Mister," she apologizes, holding the spectacles out to the suited man. He silently reaches out a manicured thumb and index finger to pluck them from her hand as if she's something repulsive. She can't help feel slightly offended, and so she chances a glance up at the man's face.
He's peering down at her, the spectacles back on his nose. Without thinking about it, she takes a step back, and he smiles. There's something uncomfortable, unsettling about his gaze, the blankness of his clear grey eyes, and she does not want to be under it any longer. So she steps around him and makes busy of playing the next song on her Walkman when he begins to speak.
"The rather violent death of your father hurt you, I see," he murmurs. He has a strange lilt to his voice, and she stares at him with wide eyes. "And your closest friend, a Russian expatriate. Interesting." A part of her mind identifies his accent as Danish.
Another part sees her father's bloody face.
He chuckles softly at her shocked expression. "And you have no idea why he died, do you, my girl?" He says it in the same casual tone as one would say, "You have no idea what McDonald's puts in their hamburgers, do you?"
She whispers, "No," and she hates herself for sounding so small. But she hates this man's smile even more.
"Maybe if you knew the truth," he says, then pauses. "Yes... it would be such fun to see your little face when I tell you that..." Trailing off, he seems to reconsider his words. "Well, I might just let you figure it out on your own."
Her hands itch to grab his collar and pull him down to her level – to demand how he knows what he's insinuating, since she's never told anyone, anyone, about the exact events of that day – but she doesn't. She was powerless. And, to her self-disgust, she feels like she would do anything he asked of her if only he could tell her more.
She says roughly, "Tell me whatever you want to say."
He hums for a moment, considering, then takes his spectacles off. "Then I want you," he says, "to lick these clean. You made them fall, now you lick them clean." He holds them out to her.
"What?" she laughs incredulously. Surely she must have heard him incorrectly? But he is still holding out the spectacles, still looking at her with a expectant expression.
When she doesn't take them, he sighs as if in disappointment, then puts them back on. "Actions have consequences, Miss... Amelina. You would do well to learn that." He starts to walk away.
And she hates it and she hates it and she hates it but – "Give me the spectacles."
People continue to move past them on the busy street, unaware and unseeing.
Every nerve is trembling in disgust as she brings the glasses to her mouth. When she tries to hand them back after licking the outer side, he calmly gestures for her to lick the inside as well, and so she does. She almost throws them into his hand when he reaches out.
To her horror, instead of wearing them right away, he brings the spectacles straight to his mouth. Lick. Lick. Lick. Lick. He smacks his lips. "Interesting," he murmurs, and she feels her gorge rise. Trembling, she opens her mouth to curse, to say something – when he lets the spectacles slip from his bony fingers and onto the pavement.
"Oops," he says without remorse. "I guess you'll have to clean them again."
She breathes out in disbelief. "What?"
"Pick them up and clean them again."
"No," she says, shaking her head.
"Do it."
"No." Not this time. No more.
He tilts his head to the side. "So be it."
She makes no move to stop him as he walks past her again, as briskly and calmly as if nothing had happened. But she can't help but grit out a final question at his back: "Who the hell are you?"
Her fists clench as he merely turns his head to the side to answer. There is a smile on the visible side of his face.
"I'm merely a businessman."
When the thin figure disappears down the road, she stares for a beat longer then turns back around.
The spectacles glint ominously on the sidewalk where they fell; and however irrational the feeling, she feels naked under its gaze.
She steps forward and cracks them under her feet.
At the job fair, she finds herself at the CIA recruitment table.
There is a small smattering of people lingering at the sides, intimidated by the two stone-faced representatives. They sit, backs straight, at the display – a man and woman, as plain as their ironed, unassuming black suits. She approaches them without hesitation.
They look up. The man smirks. She stares back at him calmly. She knows that he sees but a naive, blonde, blue-eyed girl – barely 5'3", barely tall enough to reach his wide shoulders. The woman, however, looks at her with curiosity.
"Major?" she asks. Her nametag reads Miller.
"Linguistics," Alyssa replies. "And Russian."
The man looks interested, now. He puts down his pen and raises a dark eyebrow. "Russian, eh? How well can you speak it?"
"Quite well."
"We don't need people who can speak 'quite well'."
She smiles. "Very well."
The year she graduates, she is accepted into the agency. First, as a linguist. Then, as the years go by and she begins to yearn for something more, she applies again for the position of Operation Officer.
She is accepted. And at age 25, she is one of the youngest in her team.
tbc.