Lights All Night Long

by Lydia Fitzpatrick

  Ilya gulped the hot, wet air, and let her gain some distance. She took Dumaine Drive to its end, cutting the corner it made with Route 21, and he followed her: past the old fireworks stand where a giant red rocket leaned on one haunch; past a plantation house that floated, gray-blue, down a dirt road; past the hot sauce plant that even at this hour made the air burn, made Ilya’s nostrils sting and his eyes water.

  She walked the white line religiously, like a child might. Tankers rushed by at steady intervals—the time between them the time it took to fill them—and as each approached, she stepped onto the shoulder and froze and the hair twisted up off her head like pale snakes rising up out of a basket. None of the truckers honked. She and he were too small; it was too dark for them to be anything but an aftersight, something to make the truckers rub their eyes and wonder.

  They were headed south. It was the only direction Ilya knew in Leffie because the refinery was at the town’s southern edge, and its light grew brighter and brighter as they walked, and even though he knew the light’s source, even though it was the one thing here that was completely familiar, his brain kept tripping on the fact, telling him that it was morning already and that they should turn around before Papa Cam and Mama Jamie woke up and found them gone.

  Soon it was so bright that if she turned, she’d see him. Plain as day, he thought, which was an expression Mama Jamie used that he was still trying to figure out. Sadie did stop every once in a while to change the song on her iPod, but she didn’t turn. Then the refinery was right before them. The moonscape of it looked just the same as it had in Berlozhniki, and a memory caught Ilya: his mother holding him at their apartment window, telling him what each constellation of lights was—the high, flashing signal lights; the cluster of the cooling tower; the bright pool of the parking lot; the dim scatter of the administrative buildings; and the fires of the stacks, which from afar looked like crowns.

  “That’s where I am,” she’d said. “There. Tam.” Her finger had moved along the glass, tracing the low line of lights that was the cafeteria.

  He wasn’t the sort of child to miss her when she was gone, but still he’d find himself at the window every once in a while, separating lights from the glow. Tam, he’d think. Tam.

  As they got closer, Ilya saw that the lights were configured differently here. Then they were close enough that Ilya could see the structures themselves: the cooling tower, and the guard booth with the dark blotch of a face inside it. He could see the motion of the fire that plumed from each stack, could see that it didn’t look like a crown at all because its shape was always shifting.

  Just before the refinery gate, Sadie turned onto a street of trailers. Some seemed permanent, with foundations and concrete walks and flowerbeds and swing sets and Christmas lights, though it was only September. Others seemed like they could be hitched to a truck and moved the next day. The refinery fence stretched behind them, higher than their roofs by a story at least. Plastic bags were caught in the fence, and they glowed like jellyfish in the purple-blue glare.

  Sadie had slowed down, and Ilya matched her pace. When she stopped completely it was at one of the few trailers with a light on. This trailer had become part of the landscape against its will. A meaty vine enveloped one wall. The cinderblocks that held up each corner had sunk unevenly into the dirt yard, so the trailer listed slightly toward the refinery, as though taking a knee. J.T. would be inside, he thought. Or else it was a neftyanik—a roughneck, they called them here—with muscles and stubble and hands big enough to encircle Sadie’s waist.

  There was a path through the dirt yard, shiny as a scar, that led to the door, but Sadie stayed on the sidewalk, her hands in the pockets of her sweatshirt, her eyes on the window. Whoever was inside stayed inside. Ilya wasn’t close enough to see into the window, and so he crept past Sadie on the opposite side of the street, trying to keep to the shadows of spindly trees and parked trucks. He hunched next to a car under a portico. Sadie was completely still, standing there in the shadow of the trailer. He wanted to see her expression, to know what this was. A vigil, he found himself thinking, and he could smell the wax on Babushka’s fingers, could hear the crack of her knees that meant she’d spent the day at the church, lighting candles for Dedushka and Papa and Vladimir.

  Ilya kept waiting for the door to open or for a car to pull up, but after thirty minutes—or maybe it was longer, maybe it was an hour; the light made it hard to measure time—Sadie left. She walked back the way she’d come, and Ilya crossed the street and stood in the spot where she’d stood and looked in the window just as she had.

  A woman was sitting inside on a couch. She looked a little like Yulia Podtochina, with her blond hair and her wide-set eyes. Or maybe it was just her air of hopelessness that reminded him of Yulia. She was braless, her breasts tiny, nipples aggressive and pressing at the thin cotton of a tank top. Her feet were tucked up under her, and she was watching something on TV that made her smile in a wry sort of way, like she’d been in the characters’ shoes, knew just what sorts of problems they were facing, and knew too that they didn’t stand a chance.

  Hanging askew behind her head was a poster of a woman standing over a vent, her white dress blowing up to her crotch. A pack of cigarettes rested on the arm of the couch. The woman smoked one, letting the ash get long. She hunched forward, out of Ilya’s view, and for a minute all he could see was the top of her head, and then she reclined again with a pink glass pipe in her hand. She put her lips to it, lit it, took a hit, then another, all the while keeping her attention on the show. Her face relaxed. It lost the wryness and the hopelessness, and, as Ilya watched, the drug animated her. It brought a beauty to her wide mouth, a flush to her cheeks, and glitter to her eyes.

  He was about to go when he heard the woman’s voice.

  “Come on,” she said, in a croak that gained strength. “Come the fuck on.”

  She stood and stepped toward the window, and for a second Ilya thought that she’d seen him and was about to confront him. He stumbled back into the street, just as she reached out and gave the TV a thwack.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said, with a tone like she’d wrangled an especially difficult child into submission.

  Ilya was back at the Masons’ an hour later. The house was quiet and dark, and he wondered if Sadie was sleeping or awake and thinking of the woman. Who was the woman to her? He thought of the drug and the way it had seemed to bring her to life; he thought of Sadie’s empty room, the black cross over her bed, her nails bitten to nubs, the pages and pages of portraits. He knew that it should not have come as a surprise to him that Sadie had secrets, but his own secrets had made him myopic, made him forget that the world, even America, was a tangle of lives, all twisted and bent.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Maria Mikhailovna’s building was on the square, one of the new ones that had gone up along with the refinery, when it seemed as though Berlozhniki’s time had finally come. It was tall and slim in defiance of the squat practicality of the kommunalkas, and it was the only building in Berlozhniki with an elevator. When Vladimir and Ilya were young, before Ilya knew a word of English, they would lurk outside the building. If the custodian left the service door propped open after his afternoon smoke, they’d sneak in and ride the elevator. What a thrill it was, to press a button and see it light up, to hear a whoosh and feel the ground move under your feet. Usually they’d have five minutes, maybe ten, before the custodian kicked them out, calling them little thugs or golovorezy, which did not have the sting he intended because Vladimir and all of his friends wanted, badly, to be gangsters.

  One afternoon, when the custodian seemed to have disappeared altogether, they snuck in and pressed a button with PH on it. The elevator climbed and climbed and then it dinged and the doors parted to reveal another door made of thick, brushed metal.

  “Where’s the hall?” Ilya had asked.

  “It’s the penthouse. Some badass
has the whole floor,” Vladimir said. He reached out and touched the door. “Bet you anything it’s bulletproof.”

  The elevator hesitated there, shaking slightly, and then it dinged and the doors slid shut, and it descended again. In awe over the revelation that one individual might own an entire floor, they didn’t immediately realize that the L button was glowing and that the elevator was not descending of its own accord. It had been summoned. The floors whizzed by, and this was usually Ilya’s favorite part of the ride, when it seemed like the elevator could not possibly stop in time, and a delicious terror would fly up his spine. But the terror was not delicious this time. Vladimir began madly pressing buttons, trying to pick a floor that they hadn’t already passed, but the elevator was quicker than him. Then it slowed, its cables smooth and silent, and stopped. The L above the door lit up. The elevator dinged once more, this beautiful impassive note, and the doors opened.

  Ilya saw the man’s shoes first—slick and pointy and dark green, like they had been made with the skin of some fantastic jungle snake. On each there was a thin metal buckle shaped like a bone. He was in a suit, an anomaly in Berlozhniki, and an overcoat. Ilya did not see his face—there wasn’t time, because as the man stepped into the elevator, Ilya darted past him and ran for the door. Vladimir was behind him for a second, but the man must have caught him, because by the time Ilya yanked open the service door, he was alone.

  “Vlad!” Ilya yelled, just as Vladimir staggered out of the elevator.

  Ilya heard the man say “Scum,” softly, and then the doors slid shut.

  Under Vladimir’s eye, blood pearled from a long cut, and as they pushed through the door and out into the snow, the blood began to roll down his cheek in fat droplets.

  “He hit you?” Ilya said.

  Vladimir winced and wiped at his cheek with the cuff of his sweatshirt. “He had this fucking ring on. With this fat diamond.”

  Ilya had never seen Vladimir hurt before, not really, and his anger was sharp and sudden, a pain in his belly as though the man had cut him there. “Let’s get him back,” Ilya said. “Put shit in the elevator, or—”

  “Nah,” Vladimir said, “let’s go.”

  Once they’d rounded the corner and the building was out of sight, Vladimir squatted down so that his eyes were level with Ilya’s. He turned and showed Ilya his cheek. Up close the cut was messy, the flesh snagged, the skin around it fattening. “Clean me up,” Vladimir said. “I don’t want Babushka freaking out.”

  So Ilya melted snow in his palm, wet the cuff of his sweatshirt, and dabbed the blood away as gently as he could.

  “You know what?” Ilya said.

  Vladimir shook his head.

  “He’s probably still in the elevator. You pressed every fucking button.”

  “It’ll take him an hour to get to the top,” Vladimir said, smiling. Somehow he’d decided that the man lived in the penthouse.

  That had been a decade ago, but as Ilya pressed the button to call the elevator, he had the strange sense that the man would still be in it, the panel ablaze, every button lit, as though he’d been trapped there in life just as he had been in Ilya’s memory. The PH button was still there, and Ilya was tempted, but he pushed the 7 for Maria Mikhailovna’s floor. The button lit up, the elevator whirred and lifted, and Ilya felt a bit of that old thrill, or he remembered it, which was not so different.

  “I’m making macaroni and cheese,” Maria Mikhailovna said when she opened the door. “And french fries and apple pie. To celebrate. I had to use syr though, and the Americans use American cheese, so it won’t be quite authentic.”

  “American cheese,” a voice said behind her. “That’s got to be an oxymoron.”

  Maria Mikhailovna smiled and stepped aside to reveal a small, fair man—barely bigger than she was—with glasses identical to hers. Her husband was a policeman, Ilya knew, but he didn’t look the part. From the way Vladimir talked about policemen, Ilya had assumed that they were universally terrible, that they lived to spoil fun and besmirch human rights, infractions that Vladimir gave equal weight, but Maria Mikhailovna’s husband had this lively expression, his cheeks high and bright, like they were readying themselves for a laugh.

  “Dmitri Ivanovich,” he said, and he held a hand out, and Ilya shook it.

  “The cynic,” Maria Mikhailovna said. She had a glass of wine in her hand, and there was a shine to her voice that it didn’t have in the classroom. Ilya wondered if it was because he wasn’t used to hearing her speak Russian or if she was truly that excited to have him here.

  “I know you two would rather be speaking English, but mine’s no good,” Dmitri said.

  “No,” Maria Mikhailovna said, “it’s worse than no good. It’s hopeless. He only knows the words he shouldn’t, Ilya. I’ve tried to teach him, but he has such trouble paying attention.”

  “It’s true,” Dmitri said. “When I was young, English was just a liability.”

  Maria Mikhailovna ushered Ilya inside. Her apartment was not much larger than Ilya’s, but it was much nicer, and only she and Dmitri lived there. In the living room, there was an enormous single-pane window with a view down Ulitsa Lenina so clear that it was as though the glass did not exist. Windows in the kommunalkas were often papered over in the winter, rags stuffed in the gaps in the sill, and still the cold seeped in, but Maria Mikhailovna’s apartment was warm. There was the whoosh of central air, like they were inside a living, breathing lung, and the light had this rich, amber glow that came, Ilya realized, from lampshades.

  Dmitri was putting a CD into a stereo flanked on all sides by bookcases. The CD clicked and the sound of some stringed instrument floated into the air, and the notes were so clear and singular and free of static that they made Ilya feel as though he were hearing music for the first time. Their tree was already up for New Year’s, the branches drooping with tiny glass snow maidens and wooden stars, and its lights were doubled in the window.

  Ilya imagined Vladimir taking all this in—the tray of radishes and bread and butter, the tiny bowl of caviar, the pretty light, and the kvass that Maria Mikhailovna was handing him now, in a glass that looked like it was made of crystal. Vladimir would mock it all, no doubt. He’d want something stronger to drink; he’d ask if they had any rap or punk or club music.

  “It’s so hard for me to believe that you two haven’t met,” Maria Mikhailovna said. She took her husband’s hand, and Ilya could see that for a moment she wanted to take his hand too. Her generosity had been a part of his life for so long that he hardly thought about it, and it occurred to him now that perhaps he gave her something too. She and her husband looked small under these high ceilings, and he wondered if they had wanted children of their own, whether that was something they’d had to give up on.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, Ilya Alexandrovich,” Dmitri said. “You’ve made Maria very proud.”

  “I hope I do as well as she expects,” Ilya said.

  “You’ll do wonderfully,” she said. “I have a surprise tonight—besides the macaroni and cheese—I’ve gotten the surname of the host family.” She waited a second, her eyes bright. “The Ma-sons.”

  “Ma-sons,” Ilya said.

  “It’s spelled like ‘ma’ and ‘sons’ put together.”

  “What are their given names?”

  “Cam and Jamie. Only I can’t figure out who’s the man and who’s the woman.” Maria Mikhailovna giggled.

  “Come-on jam-eee,” Dmitri said. “There are no patronymics?”

  “No, sweetheart,” she said. “That would certainly make it easier, wouldn’t it?”

  “Jamie has to be the man,” Ilya said. “A diminutive for James. Like James Bond. King James.”

  “Maybe, but ‘Cam’? It’s manly for a woman, no?” Maria Mikhailovna said. “And they have three children.”

  Ilya had tried over and over to imagine what his ho
st family might be like. Sometimes he pictured Michael and Stephanie waiting for him in the airport. Stephanie would be holding a picnic basket, her breasts as pointy as ever in her sweater, and she’d suggest that they go to the beach for the day, and Michael in his glasses would agree. Sometimes it’d be Jean-Claude and his girlfriend from the unlabeled VHS, their lives happily domestic now that Jean-Claude had defeated the mob boss. He’d never imagined kids, though, and he didn’t know whether the idea thrilled him or terrified him.

  “What are the children’s names?” Ilya said.

  “They didn’t say.”

  “Probably equally ugly,” Dmitri said. “Are you hoping for girls? Full immersion, right?”

  Ilya’s cheeks prickled at the thought of living in a house with an American girl and all the intimacy that entailed: eating off the same plates, showering in the same shower.

  “Dmitri,” Maria Mikhailovna said. “He’s not there to meet girls.”

  “Of course he is,” Dmitri said.

  In the kitchen, a buzzer sounded, and Maria Mikhailovna leapt up and ran for the stove.

  Dmitri leaned toward Ilya and put a hand on his thigh, and his posture reminded Ilya of pictures he’d seen of politicians in the thick of deals. “I bought us frozen pelmeni,” he said, “just in case the macaroni doesn’t work out.”