Valentina didn’t know her birthday. As an infant, her mother stuffed her into a turnstile at the Brooklyn Monastery of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the nuns’ main interface with the outside world. Maybe she gave the delivery bell a tug before she fled, or maybe the sisters heard a baby’s sobs. All Mother Superior remembered was that it was raining. The girls who knew their birthdays received sugarcoated almonds. Valentina received hers on the anniversary of her abandonment. Stale and chalky, she tossed them when backs were turned.

Some of the girls suckled at their mothers’ breasts, the most important thing in her life, and been orphaned when she died. In the monastery, they’d become souls to save, guided more than loved, and they longed for a mother replacement.

Valentina hadn’t been important enough to keep. Some priority trumped her – shame, poverty, drug addiction, or the convenience of her mother’s latest lover. Was she her mother’s gambit to wrangle marriage from her father? If so, it was clear now that he didn’t want her mother, at least not with a baby. Perhaps her mother was Catholic and believed relinquishing a child was the lesser sin. She wondered how many half-brothers and sisters her father bred along the way.

Valentina grew up amid damp, chilly, thick stone walls and stained-glass images that dimmed sunlight. She allowed her black hair to grow long, in contrast to the nuns, some of whom shaved their heads. Scrawny in her early years, her figure developed as she got older, and she sensed the stares of nuns who averted their glance when she turned.

In her teens, she fielded subtle suggestions from the diminishing number of cloistered women in brown-and-white habits to join their vocation. The nuns knitted quilts, selling them to support the monastery. They weren’t allowed to access social media, which could draw them away from prayer and tempt them out of the cloistered life. Computers and smart phones were also forbidden to them. Valentina was assigned to keep their records on a donated Apple Macintosh. Internet access became her spyglass on the outside world, and she spent hours at the terminal, even discovering the Dark Web.

At fifteen, she attempted her first escape. The exhaust filled air of the Brooklyn streets smelled like Paradise. Sleeping in a carboard box that night, she got picked up among the other homeless. The cops told her she was lucky to be found and brought back. The nuns scolded her naiveté – for deciding to confront a dangerous world on her own.

At seventeen, she fled and didn’t return. She found a maid’s job with a broom closet-sized room provided off the books at the Wayfarer Motel, a greasy-sheet joint that rented by the hour. She took the surname of Esposito, “exposed” in Italian, the name assigned to abandoned infants in Italy. When asked about her parents, she changed the subject.

In the evenings, she wandered Flatbush, East New York, and Bensonhurst, fantasizing that she was conceived in one of the brownstones. She imagined finding her mother, older, regretful, throwing herself at Valentina’s feet and begging for forgiveness. Except that Valentina resided in the monastery a long time, and her mother never showed up.

How does a person abandon an infant and never look back? They were callous, incapable of love. One day she’d find her mother and ask her. The worst part? Valentina worried she’d become hard, just like her.

She lost her virginity at the Wayfarer when a client in his thirties, blond with a crooked smile, had lingered when she arrived to clean his room.

“Hi, beautiful.”

Flattery got her into bed, the twenty dollars he left on the dresser triggered thoughts of supplementing her income. The motel manager demanded a kickback from her tricks. After her first, she insisted the johns use protection. Pregnancy would’ve been disastrous, would have forced her to answer the questions: Would she be nurturing to make up for what she never received? Like her mother, would she put the child up for adoption? Was she even capable of love? That was her mindset before the incident with her last trick.

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