Lights All Night Long

by Lydia Fitzpatrick

  Ilya stepped closer, the mud releasing his feet with a slurp that sounded like Timofey sucking down the last of his soup. The pipeline was higher than he’d thought it would be. He had to reach up to touch its belly. He put a hand against it and felt cool metal. This was a surprise too. He had thought it would be warm, like a vein, he guessed, with a hot gush of oil inside. Behind him, there was a honk, a scream, laughing. He tried to block it out. He cocked his head and listened, and at first there was nothing but the static inside his head, and then he heard it: a sound like a wave as it crashes over you, a sound that seemed to gain strength as he listened until it was a roar. He pulled his hand away, took a quick step back, and slipped in the mud. He landed on his back. A root jabbed him in the ribs, and his side pulsed with pain, and his arm—the one he’d held up over his head—quivered. He wasn’t sure whether the pipeline had shocked him or just scared him, but as he trekked through the mud back to the party, he had the ridiculous but distinct impression that touching it had been bad luck.

  J.T. wasn’t at the keg any longer, and someone else was sitting in Ilya’s beach chair. Ilya looked up at the bus. A black guy was behind the wheel, and when he saw Ilya, he pulled the handle, and the door creaked open.

  “Russia,” he said. “Welcome. Have a seat.” He smiled and stuck his tongue out, and there was a diamond nestled in the wet center of it, like an enormous pill he was about to swallow.

  Ilya found a seat in the back, where it smelled less strongly of piss. The brown pleather seat had been slashed. Stuffing fluffed out of the cuts. The same stuff they used at the House of Culture to make fake snow for the New Year’s performance. Ilya pulled at it, let it fall and pile on the floor.

  When he looked up again, Sadie was coming down the aisle toward him. She held out a cup of beer.

  “Want this?” she said. “I don’t really drink.”

  Ilya shook his head. “Papa Cam doesn’t allow it?”

  “More like Mama Jamie,” she said. “But that’s not why.”

  “I don’t drink much either. I was just sick in a bush.” He waved a hand toward the brush behind the bus.

  “Is that why you’re all muddy? ‘Vodka is like water,’ huh?” She laughed and set her beer down on the seat next to him. She ran a finger down the cut he’d emptied of stuffing and plucked at its edge, and he had this feeling, like his future was close, like it was idiotic that he had not already scooted over to make room for her, and that if he did, there would be this tiny, celestial click and things would unlock between them, but instead he stayed where he was and said, “My brother isn’t dead. He’s in prison. For murder.”

  Her hand stopped moving. That was the only sign that she’d heard. Her face was shadowed enough that her eyes looked identical, that tiny imperfection erased. “Shit,” she said softly, and then, “Did he do it?”

  Ilya shook his head. He was so grateful for the question that tears clotted his throat and welled, hot and hard, behind his eyes. He looked up at the bus’s ceiling. Someone had graffitied it with swooping letters that looked more Cyrillic than Roman. He bit the inside of his cheek until he could feel the lump of tears loosen and dissolve.

  “No,” Ilya said. “He did drugs. He stole. He was bad. He confessed even, but no, I still don’t think—”

  If he did, his mother had said, and Ilya forced himself to follow the thought to that curve in the road where the snowplow had turned up Yulia Podtochina’s body, to the alley where Olga Nadiova had been dumped, to the clump of trees where Lana had died, and again he could not see Vladimir there. He shook his head. “He didn’t do it,” he said.

  “He’s an addict?”

  Ilya nodded, and she was quiet for a long time. Her curiosity was strange, but he liked it better than pity. Outside a string of headlights made their way down the levee road and the Pound was washed in light and for an instant it looked just as sad as a face under fluorescence. Car doors slammed. Someone—it sounded like J.T.—yelled, “Can we change the fucking song?”

  “The thing is,” Ilya said, “when we were little, we used to talk about coming here together. It was stupid. I mean Vladimir thought he was going to play hockey for Severstal too. Be a big star. Or an oligarch like Fyodor Fetisov. Just stupid things kids think of, but it turned real for me.” Just saying it made his gut burn with the need to vomit again. He swallowed. “And it’s one thing to have him home and me here, but to have him be in prison and me here...”

  “It’s too much,” Sadie said.

  Ilya nodded. “It’s too much.”

  “Can you help him?” she said. “I mean, if he didn’t do it, there’s someone out there who did, right?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “When I first got here, I thought I found a clue.” He told her about the picture of Lana wearing Gabe’s hat. He told her about the list he’d made from the White Pages, about cross-referencing it with Mormon churches, and checking VKontakte and the newspaper.

  “Will you show me the picture?” she said.

  He nodded. He thought he’d fallen in love with her that night in the kitchen when she’d told him to stop being an asshole, but the feeling was suddenly different. It was bigger and painfully urgent and held within it was the knowledge of the loneliness she might erase. He scooted over, and she sat beside him.

  The door to the bus squeaked open, and a boy boarded with a semiconscious girl riding on his back.

  “That’ll be twenty-five cents,” the kid with the tongue piercing said.

  “Shut the fuck up, Tyrese,” the boy said, and as he walked down the aisle, the girl roused herself and began nibbling his ear.

  “I wondered what you were doing in the basement every night,” Sadie said. “My parents think you have a girlfriend that you’re always emailing.”

  “No,” he said. “No girlfriend.”

  The boy walked past them, his hands gripping the girl’s thighs so tight that she squealed. He flopped her into a seat behind them and then lowered himself down on top of her, and Ilya looked away.

  “I thought you’d be angry that I lied,” he said.

  “Promise not to do it again,” she said in a voice that was mock stern.

  “I promise,” he said.

  Then Sadie said, “You know the Masons aren’t my real parents.”

  “They aren’t your parents.” He said it slowly, hating the way English sometimes made him sound like a dim parrot, repeating what she’d said.

  “Nope. Do I look like them? Don’t say yes.” She smiled.

  “No,” he said. “Not at all. Are your parents dead?” His inflection must have been off because there was a twitch of hurt on her face.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know anything about my dad. My mom’s alive. She gave me up for adoption. She got pregnant in high school, and Mama Jamie worked at the school then—as a guidance counselor or spiritual adviser or something—and she convinced my mom not to have an abortion. And my mom didn’t, and Jamie thought that was it. She’d saved one soul and one life. I’m sure she felt pretty smug about it. Only I guess my mom must have sucked at being a mom, because when I was four she found Jamie and basically blamed her for my existence and begged her to take me. I got this from her—” Sadie pointed at her eye. “She wasn’t aiming at me or anything. She wasn’t that bad. She just threw a bottle and missed the trash can.” She spoke fast, smoothly, with this hint of metal in her voice. And something in the story—the laziness, maybe, of that missed throw—made it clear to him that the woman in the trailer was Sadie’s mother.

  “So you’re like Durashka. You’re a rescue,” he said, which was a word the Masons had taught him.

  She laughed. “That’s not really a word you use with people. But yeah, I guess I am. And you are too.” She was quiet for a second. “We should go soon. Just in case they check the movie times.”

  She didn’t move and neither di
d he, and then she turned, and he thought she was going to say something else, but instead she leaned in and kissed him. Her teeth hit his—there was this tiny click—and the back of his head bounced against the seat. He felt the warm melt of her mouth. For a second there was just the sensation of it. For a second his mind was blank, and then he became terribly aware of his hands. They felt feverish, bloated, and he had no idea where to put them. And his tongue. Hers had touched his, and he did not know whether to reciprocate or whether to let it lie in his mouth like a slug. His lips, thank God, seemed to move of their own accord. The drunk girl moaned audibly behind them. Sadie smiled—he could feel it, not see it—and as quickly as it had begun, the kiss ended. She pulled away. Ilya closed his mouth. Blood had rushed to his lips and his dick and the rest of him was limp and possibly paralyzed. She was still smiling, a lasting sort of smile that he hadn’t known she had.

  “I’ve been wanting to do that,” she said, and she grabbed his hand and led him back to the car.

  * * *

  —

  She drove home a different way, on a road that followed the pipeline. There was a fence now, the pipeline unfurling behind it, and Ilya thought of his arm and how it had quivered. He imagined the pipeline curling toward him, a long silver finger, and he felt another jolt of fear, but then it curved away from him across a flat stretch of water.

  “That’s Weeks Bay,” she said. “Cam took me fishing out there when I was little. You can’t go now ’cause of the pipeline.”

  The refinery was on the other side, its lights long on the water, and Ilya imagined the fish, swimming all night long in the brightness. He wondered how they’d adapt to it, whether their eyes would shrink from the light until they’d turned into a different species entirely.

  It wasn’t until they’d pulled back into the Masons’ driveway that Ilya thought to ask, “What about J.T.?” and as he asked the question, he imagined J.T. watching them kiss through the bus windows. He imagined J.T. at school on Monday, marching down the hallway toward him.

  “What about J.T.?” she said.

  “I thought he was—”

  “He’s my cousin. My actual cousin. He’s the only one that knows about my mom besides the Masons. And you.”

  “That’s good news,” Ilya said, and Sadie laughed and this time he leaned in and kissed her.

  That night his email to Vladimir was a long one. Ilya told him about the party, about kissing Sadie, about her adoption and her mother and that J.T., that miracle of high school muscle, was her cousin and nothing more. He asked Vladimir what it would be like tomorrow, whether he could assume that she would kiss him again, or whether it might be a discrete occurrence. Any suggestions, he asked, for where to put my hands when we kiss? And he smiled because he could hear what Vladimir’s answer would be: Down her pants, durashka. He told Vladimir about the pipeline, about how he’d actually touched it and that the oil had sounded like blood does in your temples. His whole body was throbbing with the night, with the excitement of it, and then there it was again: the blinking cursor, Vladimir’s life. I heard about the arraignment, he wrote. Please, he wrote, please don’t say you did something you didn’t.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In Berlozhniki that last winter, birch trees slashed the horizon. Wind coaxed the snow into twisters, and Babushka murmured about snow children and snyeg demons and what it meant when the sun didn’t appear for seven days straight. Babushka seemed to be the only person who had not forgotten about Yulia Podtochina. Some nights, she claimed to feel Yulia’s spirit slipping under the door and whispering in her ear. Some days she said that Yulia left her handprints on the mirror in the bathroom.

  In theory, Ilya had everything to be happy about. He’d be in America in less than a year. He’d taken practice boards with Maria Mikhailovna and scored close to perfect. The actual boards were only a month away, and that should have been all he thought about, but he kept picturing Vladimir on that bench with Sergey. The two of them leaning toward each other. Vladimir holding the lighter and Sergey the cigarette. The gesture old and practiced, like they were bratya, like they were actual brothers, and Ilya was nothing to them at all. And he kept seeing Vladimir running in Dmitri’s headlights. What if he’d slipped? he thought, over and over, panic bubbling in his gut until he’d replayed the night to its end: Dmitri turning into the kommunalkas, his headlights shining on nothing but the snow falling as endlessly and innocently as ever.

  One day he came home from school to find Babushka crying on the couch. Timofey was sitting next to her, looking small and a little lost. He patted her knee and murmured, “Tchoo, tchoo,” which was exactly what Babushka used to whisper to Ilya and Vladimir when they skinned their knees or needed garlic in their ears to get rid of an ache.

  “What is it?” Ilya said, though he knew: Vladimir was hurt. He’d broken something, had wound up in the clinic or prison or dead.

  “We were robbed,” Babushka said.

  The apartment looked as it always looked: clean but cluttered. His mother and Babushka were neat, but they could not bear to throw things away, and so every surface—the counters, the kitchen table, the top of the TV—had the feeling of space about to be engulfed. Ilya looked at the door. The lock was cheap—it would pop out with one knock from a hammer. But it was in place.

  “What did they take?”

  “The samovar, your mother’s spoon, her rings, your grandfather’s medals, the vouchers—” She stopped, and Ilya thought a new wave of tears might come, but she swallowed and was quiet.

  Timofey patted her knee. “They left the TV, though,” he said, “and the stove and the space heater. The important things.”

  “Those are not the important things,” Babushka said. “They were probably too lazy to carry the TV down the stairs.”

  “It’s true,” Timofey said. “Even thugs are lazy nowadays.”

  The medals were his grandfather’s—“For Distinguished Labor” and “Veteran of Labor”—and Babushka had kept them in a tiny felt satchel inside a box of Q-tips in the drawer by her bed. His mother’s silver spoon—with the unknown initials carved in the handle—lived in a dusty depression above the kitchen cabinets along with the vouchers that they’d been given during perestroika without ever being told how to exchange them. The samovar was nestled in the depths under his mother and Babushka’s bed, hidden from the world by a warren of shoeboxes full of pictures and newspaper clippings and socks that needed mending and summer clothes that they never ever wore. Everything that had been stolen had been precious and nearly impossible to find.

  Ilya dragged his crate out from under the couch. His clothes were all still there. His textbooks and exam prep books, his skates, and the decade-old New York City travel guide that he’d found at the bookshop and bought himself for his birthday were too, but his tape player was gone, and the Delta headphones, and all of the Michael & Stephanie tapes.

  “Did they take anything of yours?” Babushka said.

  Behind her legs, he could see Vladimir’s crate. It had been completely emptied.

  “No,” he said, because she looked so forlorn. “Everything’s still here.”

  “That’s a relief,” she said. “They probably wouldn’t know what to do with a book if it hit them in the nose.”

  Ilya stood. His chest was tight. It must have taken Vladimir a half hour to catalogue exactly what they had that was worth taking, and to gather it all, and at the thought Ilya could feel blood pumping in his hands, as though they were growing rapidly, and he wanted desperately to use them on something, to punch the wall or splinter the door, the way men did in movies. “I’ll go ask if anyone saw anything,” he said.

  “No,” Babushka said, with enough force that Ilya understood that she suspected Vladimir too. “We don’t want the police mixed up in this. It’s not worth it. You hear? Ilya?”

  Ilya nodded.

  “Will you put on the k
ettle?” Babushka said.

  Ilya filled the kettle from the pitcher on the counter and lit the stove. He watched the flame, and after a minute he could feel his hands relaxing, shrinking back to normal.

  On the couch, Timofey said, “At least they didn’t take the kettle.”

  “Pravda,” Babushka said. “We have the kettle.”

  * * *

  —

  Weeks passed. On New Year’s, Medvedev gave his speech, with the Kremlin ablaze behind him. Babushka kept saying that at least they still had their TV, that at least they got to watch the speech.

  “Right,” Ilya’s mother said, “what luck,” and she disappeared into the bedroom, and then Babushka fell asleep, and Ilya muted the TV and listened to the sound of fireworks cracking in the sky.

  Ilya didn’t see Vladimir in town anymore, and sometimes he wondered if he’d left Berlozhniki entirely. He imagined Vladimir and Sergey clinging to the back of one of the semis that braved the roads all winter. Sergey claimed that his older brother had done that once, though his brother had been in Berlozhniki for as long as Ilya could remember, working at an auto shop, father to three kids who’d all inherited his and Sergey’s skin, which was as patchy as a rotten potato.

  The more Ilya thought about Vladimir, about the stolen tapes, about the fact that he had mustered the energy to rob them but had not bothered to try to see Ilya in almost three months, the larger his hurt grew, and over time he found that he could cook it into hatred. He should have hated Vladimir, of course, but it was hard to hate someone whom you never saw, so instead he hated his mother. He hated the way her eyes turned down at the corners. The noisy way she ate. The fatness of her ass. The skinniness of her legs. She couldn’t say his name without it sounding like a plea. He hated her blind hope and stupid trust. There were other mothers, he knew, who helped their children with schoolwork, who did not stink of yeast and sleep all day. Grigori Alexandrov’s mother had written out a five-year study schedule as soon as his talent in math had become apparent; Ilya’s mother did not even know the date of the boards, though that did not stop her from applying pressure that Ilya didn’t need. And there was the way she had picked him as the smart one and defined Vladimir by default: the idiot, the failure, trouble through and through. In more rational moments, he remembered the folder of math homework, the term card filled with 1s, the fact that Vladimir had said he would try and had not. He remembered that Vladimir had left of his own accord, but what sort of mother let her son leave? Why had she not gone to find him? And would she have if Ilya and his promise had never existed? At the hot center of his anger was a fact that he tried his best to ignore: Vladimir had not been home since the night Maria Mikhailovna had told them about the exchange. Vladimir had not wanted to be left, and when Ilya thought of that night, he hoped that he had looked his brother in the eyes, that he had at least considered not abandoning him, but of course that wasn’t the case. He’d said, “Yes,” more loudly and clearly than he’d said those first words of English nearly a decade before.