Lights All Night Long

by Lydia Fitzpatrick

  “Who’s that?” Ilya whispered, as Mr. Shilling handed out a quiz on the key battles of the Revolution.

  She shrugged. “This woman from church.”

  J.T., who sat on the other side of Sadie, leaned across the aisle, draped one arm behind Sadie’s back and his other over the drawing, and said, “Next weekend at the Pound, y’all. It’s my birthday.” He was grinning like a child, and Ilya felt a pang of jealousy at how easily he touched Sadie.

  “You’re obsessed with your birthday,” she said.

  “Of course I am,” he said. “Ilya? You coming?”

  Ilya looked at Sadie, and Sadie nodded. “We’ll come.”

  At the front of the room, Shilling said, “There’s a Peppermint Pattie in my drawer for anyone who gets all ten battles in chronological order.”

  “What battles?” J.T. yelled.

  A girl in the front row said, “What if more than one of us does?”

  “Then I would be shocked,” Shilling said, “and you’d split the patty.”

  J.T. shielded his mouth with a hand and whispered, “Who the fuck wants a Peppermint Pattie? Do they even make those anymore?”

  Peppermint Patties had been one of the most coveted candies at the Minutka. Vladimir used to steal them with regularity. “I want it,” Ilya said, and J.T. and Sadie laughed.

  After class, Ilya stayed to receive the patty.

  “Well done,” Shilling said. “Although you’re lucky that, as a rule, I ignore spelling.”

  The patty looked as though it had been in Mr. Shilling’s desk drawer for a decade at least, but it tasted delicious, the filling minty enough to make the inside of Ilya’s mouth snap, to remind him of the way the air tasted in Berlozhniki, on the days when the wind was blowing the refinery’s smoke away from town. He ate the whole thing in a few ferocious bites, and as he dropped the wrapper into the trash can, he saw Sadie’s drawing crumpled at the bottom. He pulled it out. The creases gave the woman a mild harelip and a scar that sliced one eyebrow. Ilya smoothed it as best he could and pressed it between the pages of his history text.

  At church that weekend, Ilya scanned the crowd for the woman, but she wasn’t there. He hadn’t really expected her to be; she hadn’t seemed like a churchgoer. As Pastor Kyle preached—a sermon about forgiveness that somehow tied in to an extended golf metaphor—Ilya closed his eyes, hoping for another clue or, at the least, to be transported back to the Tower like he had been during that first Star Pilgrim service, when he’d heard Vladimir’s voice, the exact gravel of it, as though Vladimir were there next to him. He’d been in America for two weeks, and he’d crossed seventy Gabe Thompsons off his list—almost all of the Gabe Thompsons in the state of California—but there were still hundreds left.

  On one side of him, Sadie picked the paint off her sneakers, scattering silver flakes on the floor. She was singing softly, practicing whatever the choir was performing later. On the other side of him, Papa Cam’s eyebrows knitted in fervent prayer. His meaty hands were clasped between his knees, and Ilya wondered what he could possibly want or need. Babushka would say that that was not what praying was about, that God didn’t listen if you talked to him only when you needed something.

  In the middle of each of the church’s glass walls were fragments of stained glass. They were clustered in abstract patterns like the inside of a kaleidoscope, but still they reminded Ilya of lying on the bed his mother and Babushka shared, looking at the light streaming through the pictures that Babushka had taped over the glass. The pictures from Gabe’s pamphlets. They were still there, he thought, and Babushka had probably kept the pamphlets too, and maybe inside was the name of Gabe’s church.

  That afternoon, he called his mother from the Masons’ kitchen. Her voice, when she answered, sounded very faint, as though she’d been swallowed by some larger creature and was calling out from within its belly.

  “You heard,” she said, and he could tell from her voice that it was nothing good.

  “Heard what?” Ilya said. He tried to keep his own voice steady. Around him the Masons’ predinner preparations raged. Mama Jamie chopped celery with vigor, Marilee whined about setting the table, and Molly did somersaults across the den carpet. Only Sadie seemed to have sensed the import of the call. She was watching him from a stool at the counter, her pencil poised above an algebra equation, her head propped in her palm.

  “The arraignment is set. Four weeks from now. In Syktyvkar.”

  In four weeks Vladimir would have to enter his plea, and given his confession he would likely plead guilty.

  “Can you go?” Ilya said. “Have you gotten to see him?”

  “No,” his mother said. “They still won’t tell me where he’s being held. No one will talk to me, except for Dmitri Malikov.”

  “What does he say?”

  She was quiet for a second, and he got the sense that she was gathering herself. Her voice, when it came, had gone up an octave. “He says that I should focus on you. That you’re our hope. Although sometimes I think I’ve done that for too long already.” She meant this as a reproach to herself, but Ilya couldn’t help but feel the sting of it, as though her hope was a limited commodity that he’d intentionally cornered. “And sometimes I wonder why he confessed at all—”

  “Mama,” Ilya said.

  “He was on drugs, Ilyusha. If he did do these things, it wasn’t him. Not really. Do you remember? How he looked?”

  Ilya did remember. He remembered the ammoniac stench of Vladimir’s crotch. He remembered his mother trying to find a vein in the minefield of Vladimir’s body. He had been pitiful, disgusting. If he did do these things, he thought, and he said, “Mama, he was practically dead.”

  Next to him, Mama Jamie speared a hunk of pork and dropped it into a hot skillet. Droplets of grease splashed Ilya’s arm and left pinpricks of pain.

  “I know,” she said. “I just keep thinking about him as a baby. He always wanted to be held. Cuddle, cuddle, cuddle. All the time. If I put him down, he stretched his arms up to me, and of course I was always having to tell him no. No, Mama has to work. No, not now, Mama has to cook. I think of that and then this, and I just don’t know. . . . How am I supposed to know? What could I have done—” She was choking on the words. Each one like something sharp dragged up her throat.

  At the table, Sadie mouthed, “You OK?” and he realized that he’d been staring at her without seeing her.

  “Listen,” he said. “I need you to do something. I need you to send me one of those pamphlets from the American missionary. Babushka cut the pictures from them for the windows.”

  “Why?” his mother said, and her voice was clear again, and hard. “Don’t you dare get involved. You hear me, Ilyusha? You are there, you are safe. You leave this behind, OK? That is the most important thing.”

  “He might have—”

  “Keep your head down. Do you understand me? Do you know how easy it would be for someone to say you were both involved?”

  “OK,” Ilya said, and he did understand her. He knew that her fear was ingrained. He and Vladimir magnified it, of course, but it had existed before them; her parents had given it to her like an inheritance, something to help her survive the world. But what he wanted to say was: you’re doing it again. Putting me before him. “It’s just a year, Mama,” he said. “Less than that now.”

  “Listen to me. I want you to study, work hard. I don’t want you coming back here ever,” she said. “Ilyusha, I have to go. I’m at work.”

  The dial tone flooded the receiver. His mother was crying now. She’d hung up so he wouldn’t have to hear her, but he could hear her anyway. And he could picture her: in the cafeteria’s dank break room, where the lockers had all been painted primary colors to boost morale. She was sobbing, dabbing at her face with her apron, eyes on the door, because her boss had caught her like this too many times already.

 
Sadie was still looking at him over the counter, her eyes a question. He made some approximation of a smile and held the phone to his ear until the dial tone broke into a pulse loud enough that he was afraid Mama Jamie would hear.

  “Tell me you’re hungry!” Mama Jamie said, when he hung up.

  “I’m hungry,” he said. If he did do these things, he thought.

  Mama Jamie fixed him a plate, and he ate it while Papa Cam talked about a new hire, an engineer whose wife he thought Mama Jamie would like, but whose son was a little off.

  “Please pass the rice,” Molly said. Ilya passed the rice. He thought, If he did.

  “How’s school, Ilya?” Papa Cam said. He must have asked it more than once, because when Ilya said, “It’s fine,” they were all looking at him, the grown-ups and Sadie with concern, Molly and Marilee with amused curiosity, like he was a toy that had short-circuited.

  If he did, he thought. His mother was back in the cafeteria by now, spraying cleaner on the long metal tray tracks that Vladimir and Ilya had loved to run their toy cars down the few times she’d brought them to work. She sprayed and wiped. Her cheeks were splotchy, but she’d washed her face, and it was not so obvious that she’d been crying. Spray and wipe. She had not been caught this time. That was a good thing. Spray, spray, wipe. She wished she’d asked him more about America—what the mother fed him, what school was like, whether he was the smartest there too. She wondered if that other mother thought of her, thought that maybe she was smart like Ilya. Spray and wipe. She did not think of Vladimir. She had given up.

  * * *

  —

  Later, Sadie found him in the basement trying to read an espionage thriller from one of the dusty boxes that lived under the Ping-Pong table. It was the time he usually spent on the Gabe Thompson list, but the phone call with his mother had demoralized him. If he couldn’t convince his mother of Vladimir’s innocence, what were the chances that, even armed with evidence, he could convince the police? Maybe it was hopeless, maybe it was even cowardly, he thought, a way of hiding from life. He thought of all the years he’d spent with the Delta headphones clamped over his ears, of all the times his mother or Babushka or Vladimir had said something to him, and he’d pretended not to see their lips moving. He had liked to think that he was being transported, but maybe he’d just been hiding then too.

  “Hey,” Sadie said.

  He dog-eared his page when she sat beside him, though he’d only read three pages.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  Ilya shrugged. He’d told her that his brother was dead, and it had proved an easy lie to defend. With the exception of that horrible moment at Star Pilgrim, the Masons had tiptoed around his grief, and he’d become sickly comfortable with the duplicity. But now he couldn’t think of any way to explain his mood without revealing that lie.

  “J.T.’s party is tonight,” she said. “I was going to go in a little.”

  Ilya ran his hand over the cover of the book. A man was holding a pistol. It was aimed at the reader, and the letters of the book’s title exploded from its barrel. He thought of his mother’s tiny voice on the telephone and wondered if he’d sounded the same to her.

  “It’s no big deal,” she said. “I’ll tell him you can’t go.”

  “No,” Ilya said, fast, because suddenly the idea of being left down here, of watching the light fade between the deck supports, seemed unbearable. “Let’s go.”

  Sadie told her parents that she was taking Ilya to the movies in Alexandria, and the Masons seemed thrilled, especially when Ilya told them that there wasn’t a movie theater in his town, and that he’d never actually seen a movie on a big screen.

  “Well, this will be a cultural experience for you,” Mama Jamie said. “Take some moolah from my purse, Sadie. Make sure Ilya tries the popcorn.”

  “Do the IMAX,” Papa Cam said, which sounded like complete gibberish.

  As they backed out of the driveway, Ilya said, “What if they ask about the movie?”

  “Say we saw The Fast and the Furious. I saw it with J.T. It’s like one long car chase. And then the good guy wins at the end.” It sounded like something Vladimir would love. “And tell them the acoustics were amazing. My dad’s obsessed with the acoustics at the IMAX.”

  Star Pilgrim and Leffie High were in opposite directions on the same road—Route 21—and they marked the dimensions of Leffie in Ilya’s mind. Now Sadie sped past the high school and into the unknown. Ilya rolled down his window. The air was hot, but Sadie was going fast enough for it to have a cooling effect. She scanned the radio, then settled on something with a cowboy twang. A woman sang about scratching her ex’s car with a key.

  “Is it far?” he asked.

  “The Pound? Not too far. It’s an old impound yard.” She told him that it was a place where cars used to get crushed for scrap metal, but that it had been shut down for a decade, ever since the owner ran away with the football coach’s daughter. Kids from all different schools partied there, and she said there’d even been a guy who lived there for a winter, in the back of an old semi. That would be Vladimir, he thought.

  She turned off of Route 21 onto a smaller road cupped by trees. Every once in a while, back in the woods, windows glowed high up, like they were in treehouses. This wisp of a memory drifted through his mind. A childhood story of fairies living in trees. “What are those lights?” he asked. “Why are they so high?”

  “It’s trailers up on stilts.” Sadie said. “We’re close to the bayou—it floods a lot.”

  They passed a clearing, and Ilya saw one of the trailers now, a box of light over a box of shadow. A handful of cars were parked under it. A spindly ramp climbed to the door, which was open. Ilya stared inside. It was empty as far as he could tell, but he thought of that other trailer, of the woman Sadie watched, and then the trees took over again. The blacktop gave out to a rutted dirt road, and Ilya couldn’t see the water, but he could sense that they were near it. The bugs’ chant got denser, and there was a new salty stickiness to the air.

  The Pound sounded like the Tower, and when they got there, Ilya could see that it was. Oil-drum fires were scattered among cars in various phases of decay. Faces flared above the flames. There was an enormous school bus, spotted like a banana with rust. Its windows were filled with silhouettes. There were kids on the edge of the party too, and they looked like nothing more than dark on dark, the suggestion of movement, like creatures swimming in the deep. Sadie parked next to an enormous black truck. Its doors were flung open, the stereo roared, and a girl in the truck bed twisted and writhed to the music.

  Sadie led him toward the bus, stepping over spare tires and a rogue engine and bumpers that had been crushed and splintered, their sharp ends glinting. J.T. was standing by a keg, wearing a hat that said RISE UP. Three other guys sat in beach chairs with girls on their laps.

  “No way!” J.T. said, when he saw Ilya. “You came. Now that is a birthday honor. You want a beer? Or I got some vodka for you. That’s like the national drink, right?”

  “Sure,” Ilya said.

  “Lady Sadie?” J.T. said. He put an arm around her shoulder and kissed the top of her head, and Ilya looked away.

  “I’ll have a beer.”

  “Prudent as always,” J.T. said.

  J.T. gave Ilya the vodka in a tiny paper cup, the kind Marilee and Molly used each night to rinse their mouths after brushing their teeth. The vodka was warm and singed Ilya’s stomach, but he managed to drink it with a straight face and say, “Tastes like water.”

  “Damn straight,” J.T. said. He handed Sadie a beer. “So you’re drinking tonight? What would Papa Cam say?”

  “He’d quote Corinthians at me,” she said.

  Ilya and Sadie found vacant beach chairs and for a while they sat and listened to J.T. and the other guys—all basketball players, Ilya learned—talk about the various perversions of thei
r coach. At one point, Sadie leaned over and said, “What did your mom say on the phone?”

  He wanted to tell her the truth. He needed someone to know. Needed her to know, he realized, but the conversation had lulled and J.T. was looking at him like he was the punch line of a joke.

  “Nothing really,” he said.

  He took another shot and another, and then he drank a beer so light and flat that it actually did taste like water. He’d been drunk twice in his life before this: the night at the Tower and the day he flew to America, and in all three instances the accompanying sense of depersonalization was both terrifying and calming.

  “In Russia on your birthday someone has to yank your ears,” Ilya said, after someone had sung J.T. “Happy Birthday.” It was the sort of detail about home that he was normally loath to share.

  “Yank my ears?”

  Ilya nodded. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen,” J.T. said.

  “Then your ears get yanked sixteen times,” Ilya said. “Plus one more for good fortune.”

  Two girls Ilya recognized from gym class were filling their beers at the keg, and J.T. said, “Can I get them to yank something else?”

  Ilya looked at Sadie, wondering if this sort of talk would upset her, but Sadie was talking to another girl. Suddenly the other girl stood and grabbed Sadie by the hand, and Sadie said, “We’ll be back,” and they walked off toward the pickup truck.

  J.T. had started talking with the girls about whether they’d rather bone Mr. Shilling or Principal Gibbons. Someone passed Ilya the vodka bottle, and he took a sip and passed it on. A wave of nausea crested in his gut whenever he tried to focus on the conversation. He stood, thinking motion might help, and managed to make it to the thicket behind the bus before vomiting. He retched until his stomach felt tight and empty and his vision cleared.

  As he straightened, something glinted in the trees. A cool, lunar glow. He walked a few meters farther into the brush, thinking of the fairy story again, of lights leading some woeful soul into a bog. When his shoes sank into mud, he stopped and stared and eventually the silvery patch resolved and gained dimension: it was the pipeline, bending and twisting, catching the faint light of the moon wherever it emerged from the overgrowth.