Maria Teresa Vargas is nine years old.
It is a sunny afternoon in the middle of September and she takes care not to wrinkle the pleats of her blue and green plaid skirt as she waits for her father near the front gates of Our Lady of Mercy elementary school. Teresa leans on the pedestal of the stone statue of Mary, arms braced around her large backpack stuffed full of books. She squints her eyes, scanning every person who passes on the sidewalk, looking specifically for a tall man in a long-sleeved blue work shirt. She nods to her classmates who pass her on the way out. "Bye, Teresa," they call and wave. "See you tomorrow."
As Teresa waits she decides to play her counting cars game. She gives herself two extra counts if the car that passes honks or has music blasting loud enough to make her feel a tremor on the sidewalk. When Teresa feels the bass hum under her soles, she smiles and can almost feel its buzz reverberating up her calves. She never reaches 100 before her father eventually arrives.
Her father is a tall, balding man with long, purposeful strides. His work shirt has a white oval patch over his heart that says "Alejandro." But to Teresa, this man is Papi, and she pushes herself off the pedestal and runs over to him. He gives Teresa a great big hug, and then lifts his eyes to Mary and crosses himself. When Teresa sees him do that, she turns around and observes the stone statue. Mary is draped in a white flowing veil and blue robes, her right hand at her breast and her left extending down, as though she is reaching out to Teresa, inviting her to reach up and take her hand. Teresa's eyes shift towards Mary's face. She sees a smile playing about Mary's lips, and she looks back at her father, who nods his head. So she makes the Sign of the Cross as well.
"Tell me one thing you learned today, m'ija," her father affectionately smiles, as he takes her backpack and they walk to the subway.
"I learned about America's melting pot as part of my social studies lesson."
"Interesting!" her father solemnly nods. "You know, a long time ago, before you or your sister was ever born, your mother and I left our families and our friends in Colombia to come here. It was a hard decision to leave. Your mother, especially, found life here hard to get used to, and she missed everything and everyone back home. It took many months for us to get settled."
"So why did you leave, Papi?" Teresa asks, curious because she knows very little about the reasons her parents had come to New Jersey.
"Because it was our best chance," he says quietly, looking straight ahead. Teresa can see his face take on a look of determination that suited the point of his chin but was at odds with the melancholy in his brown eyes. "No one dreams about wearing a uniform every day and getting grease under your fingernails, and smelling like oil and gasoline, m'ija. Not when you were a lawyer in your former life."
Teresa looks at her father's stained uniform and has only ever seen her father as someone who worked hard and took care of his family.
"But the future is brighter for you and Rosi. What you have in here," he says, gesturing to his head, "no one can ever take away from you." He looks down at Teresa and winks. "I picture you someday in a nice office, wearing professional suits, drinking coffee and having meetings. Never quit learning. If there's anything I would want you to achieve, it's that you finish college and have a good career."
A few weeks later, as usual, Teresa waits under the stone statue of Mary for her father to pick her up. And as usual, she has waved goodbye to her classmates and is up to number 90 in her car counting game. As she tallies car number 110, she grows worried and she stops her game, now scanning the faces of the pedestrians on the sidewalk. Her heart beats faster as, against the glare of the afternoon sun, a tall man steps into view. He is dressed in a long-sleeved blue shirt, but instead of a white oval patch over his heart, he has a silver badge.
Maria Teresa Vargas is thirteen years old.
She is sitting cross-legged on her twin bed, in a bedroom she shares with her older sister Rosealia and her nine-month-old nephew. Although her window is shut, she can hear the sound of sirens and the loud voices of her neighbors outside. She hears her sister announcing her arrival home with a slam of the front door and her mother's raised voice. Teresa searches for a pair of noise-canceling headphones, ones she bought after having saved her allowance for weeks. It is the only thing that allows her to study in peace, allows her to shut out the sounds of the city outside, and the sounds within the paper-thin walls of the cramped apartment. Her mother and sister constantly argue, and when they do, it's not long before her nephew unleashes his own dissonant cries to the disharmony that now rules her home.
Teresa no longer attends private school, as her widowed mother moved them from Jersey to the Bronx a few months after the death of her father. He was shot down in the street like a common dog—by suspected gangbangers who pumped six bullets into his body. And in the space of an afternoon, Teresa's idyllic childhood had been shattered and her beloved Papi gone. Her environment has morphed from a quiet, tree-lined avenue of row houses with neatly manicured lawns to a trash-littered street with brick buildings tagged in the multi-colored hues that marked gang territory. On the front stoops of these buildings guys loiter as though they have all the time in the world; their garrulous laughter and banter competing with the sounds of bachata or salsa beats. Her neighborhood is a desolate wilderness of poverty where her family struggles to survive. Her mother works two jobs—she is a house cleaner by day and then works the night housekeeping shift at the Marriott. Teresa has learned to become self-sufficient: she goes straight home from school every day, eats a junk food snack while watching TV, and then spends the rest of her evening doing homework. She has clung to this routine for the past four years—no one picks her up from school anymore, not even her sister, who can't care about what she does when she's saddled with a fatherless baby. But Teresa vows never to end up like her. She loves baby Pacquito, but she cannot see herself as ever the type to marry, settle, and have children.
Besides, Teresa has plans with her life. The first of which is to grow up and close her father's unsolved case herself: by hunting down the gangbangers who killed him.
Maria Teresa Vargas is nineteen years old.
She has graduated from high school with honors. Over the past four years, her overworked and uninspired teachers had basically phoned it in, but luckily for Teresa, her education had not stopped in the classroom. She has always remembered her father's words about the importance of learning and she didn't want to let him down. Not only did she work hard at school, but she also read voraciously on her own, particularly books on criminal justice and psychology.
Though she has tried valiantly to win a full college scholarship, she has only garnered a partial one, and her mother cannot afford to provide Teresa with the rest of her tuition. Teresa is determined, though, and she fills out all the necessary applications for a student loan. For one semester, she is a declared Criminal Justice major at New York University. But Teresa's college studies are cut short as her mother sickens with a terminal illness, and once again, Teresa has to deal with the loss of another parent.
On her mother's deathbed, Teresa pulls a chair close and holds her mother's cold hand. "I don't want you to go, Mama," she says, her eyes brimming with tears that now threaten to fall. She feels a sense of unease press upon her, which causes her to feel desperate and panicked. "What am I going to do without you?"
Her mother sees the raw terror that is registered on her younger daughter's face. There is a flicker of pity in her eyes and she squeezes Teresa's hand. "You will do what you have always done, m'ija. You are brave—you must go on. My life is over, but yours is not. Promise me…" A cough interrupts her hoarse whisper.
"I will do anything for you, Mama." Teresa cannot bear to see her mother lying weak and fragile and she buries her face in the quilt.
"Papi was the one who always openly encouraged you, praised you. He was never shy about showing his love and pride for you and Rosi. I wasn't as vocal with my expressions of love, but I cannot go without you knowing that I have always felt the same way. Your sister…she has chosen a different path. But you, my Maritess, you have so much potential. You are so smart and passionate, you can do anything you set your mind to. Please promise me that you will never give up on school. Please…."
"Yes, Mama, I promise," Teresa responds as her mother closes her eyes and then stills.
Teresa buries her mother in a plot right next to her father, and as she exits Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Cemetery she raises her eyes up to the stone statue of Mary looking down at her. Mary is familiarly draped in the white flowing veil and blue robes, her right hand is still resting at her breast and her left extending down, still reaching out to Teresa, inviting her to reach up and take her hand. Teresa's eyes shift towards Mary's face, and she ignores the smile on her lips. She can taste the bile that rises in the back of her throat and she has to take a breath and swallow so that she doesn't break down. She does not cross herself, nor does she feel merciful, and from that day forward she no longer calls herself Maria Teresa, but Tess.
Tess Vargas is twenty-five years old.
She has been honorably discharged by the U.S. Army. She has undergone a different kind of education: one that forces her to navigate male-dominated circles and steel herself against both actual and perceived slights. When she enlisted she had felt so much pent-up anger—at the loss of her parents, the suspension of her studies—and becoming an Army recruit was the perfect way to unleash her frustrations. It has given her the benefits of attaining skills that are not in books: skills such as weapons and hand-to-hand combat training. Every punch, kick, and takedown she executes is honed to precision, and the more fluid her moves become, the more confidence she feels. And confidence and a strong mental attitude are the only ways to deal with the mind games and the sexual harassment from fellow male recruits and even some superior officers. Her height gives her a slight advantage—her Amazonian build puts her eye-to-eye with the men, and when she stares them down, the taunts aimed at her do not last very long. Eventually Tess earns a reputation as the freakishly tall bitch no one wants to mess with. It is a trait that helps her survive as a beat cop, and as David Wollansky's partner.
David Wollansky is third-generation NYPD. He is slick and handsome, and when Tess first meets him, she feels a slight rise in her temperature and a quickening of her heartbeat. She shakes his hand and she does not fail to notice the dimple in his square jaw and his dazzling smile.
"Well aren't you a pretty thing?" he says, and his hand doesn't quite let go of hers as his eyes lasciviously rake over her entire body, lingering over her breasts.
Tess knows how it is to be objectified and disrespected; the NYPD is not that much different from the U.S. Army. But she plays the game, because she knows by now that the paths to her goals are never straight. She also knows that Wollansky's inside connections could take her farther than if she had to wait until she was near retirement to make detective. So Tess softens her expression and she smiles back at David. For two years she lets him take the lead—at work and in his bed—until finally she has shaken the right hands and racked up enough hours to take the detectives' test.
When Tess is promoted, she holds her detective's badge in the palm of her hand. It is small, but is weighted enough for her to realize that what she's achieved is solid. She is in her bedroom, and her eyes fall on an old family photograph, one that was taken of her at five years old, Rosealia, and her father at the beach. Her mother had taken the photograph of her father lying on his side on a beach blanket, his head propped up by his hand. She and Rosealia are posing behind him, their forearms resting on their father's rib and hip, and Tess smiles as she sees this little version of herself looking as though she is going to dive over her father's body. As she stares at the photo, her fingers close over her badge, and she places the framed photo back on her dresser. She feels a lightness in her heart, a sign that both her parents are smiling down on her and her achievement today.
Tess Vargas is twenty-eight years old.
She is one of the precinct's top homicide detectives, and she's earned a reputation for being tough and smart about closing her cases. The hours are crap on her social life but she enjoys her work so much that she almost doesn't care. Her job is not glamorous—the bad guys aren't even as exciting as cop shows on TV make them out to be. The seedy johns and madams, psychotic copycat murderers, and threatened teen pop stars are few and far between. Her cases are more about ordinary people who choose to do the wrong thing: self-indulgent editors, dancers with hidden pasts, people driven by greed and who commit murder to keep living a privileged and comfortable life.
Now that she has made detective, she has thrown Wollansky over and is paired with Catherine Chandler. As far back as she can remember Tess has never had a real friend—the type of friend that she can confide in and even talk about guys with. Cat has a delicate beauty that Tess sees has not gone unnoticed by the men at the precinct, but she does not mind. She is more the throw-on-clean-clothes type and her favorite accessories are her badge and sidearm.
For the first time in a long time, Tess feels a kind of serenity in her life. By no means has she achieved all her life goals, for there is more to do and more to achieve. But from where she stands at the moment, she likes to believe that she has made her parents proud. And that with every change she's had to undergo, every roadblock she's had to surmount, she's come out a better, stronger person for it.