Lights All Night Long

by Lydia Fitzpatrick

  Ilya listened until the parts of the story seemed dissociated from the story itself, until they were rendered nonsensical, then he clicked open his email and wrote another message to Vladimir. He wanted to tell him everything that had happened with Gabe. He thought that Vladimir might see something in it that Ilya could not, but the police would be reading Vladimir’s email. He didn’t tell Vladimir about Sadie in the forest either, because he was afraid that Vladimir would somehow divine the feeling that had come upon Ilya afterward. It was not quite contentment, but something akin to it. Like he’d compartmentalized his fear, his worry, like he’d somehow compartmentalized Vladimir himself. He had known that it was a temporary containment, a pill he’d swallowed, the membrane thinning, the drug soon to hit him again, hitting him now, as he wrote the same, tired message. I know you didn’t do it, and then, because he wanted Vladimir to feel his desperation, he wrote, but I don’t know how to help you.

  That night, for the first time, he dreamt of Sadie instead of Vladimir. He was sliding his hand into the waistband of her jeans. They were in the forest again, and he was too terrified to actually put his fingers inside her, so he rubbed at the cotton of her underwear until it dampened. That was right, he knew, and so he pulled her underwear down and touched the hot, damp pulse of her until she arched her neck and her body tightened. Her nails dug into his arm and he kept going, afraid to stop, until she pulled his hand away. She smiled at him, an embarrassed smile, and then they plucked leaves and pine needles off each other’s clothes and hiked back up the trail to the campsite, where J.T. waited with burgers and beers and a knowing look.

  He woke up throbbing, and as soon as Sadie had turned off Dumaine Drive toward school, he started to kiss her, and they found a lot behind the discount grocery store, and then it was all happening again, as it had in the dream, and in the forest, and it wasn’t until Ilya got to school—and saw that every locker and door, every millimeter of wall space, had been papered with posters for the Homecoming Dance, which was on the same day as the arraignment—that Ilya thought of Vladimir.

  The next week was like that. Ilya managed not to think of Vladimir for longer and longer stretches. A half hour here. An hour there. It was easiest when he was with Sadie, but he started to throw himself into his studies too. Into the thick of quadratic equations, the joy of isolating and solving for x. Into the components of a cell: the mitochondria and villi and endoplasmic reticulum, each with its own tiny, vital function.

  It rained that week, and there was a comfort in sitting next to Miss Janet in the front office, in listening to the clack of her keyboard or the quiet rasp of her nail file. To avoid the rain, he skipped his usual Bojangles’ chicken box in favor of cookie packets from the vending machine, but that Friday the weather cleared a bit, and he trekked through the soggy woods. The woman at the register—Sharice, her nametag read—treated him with the same disdain she doled out to all the Leffie High students, who made out in the booths and left ketchup smeared on the tables, pee on the toilet seats, and more work in general for Sharice. At first Ilya had appreciated being included in her curled-lip nonresponsiveness, but over the weeks it had worn on him. He’d thought of his mother, endlessly plating pirozhki for the neftyaniki, wiping trays and spraying floors, and he’d wondered if she gave them the same face that Sharice gave him. He’d tried to treat her with extra politeness. He’d used every greeting from Michael & Stephanie, every expression from their unit on small talk, and Sharice had only ever responded with an unwelcoming “Welcome to Bojangles’. What’s your order?”

  But maybe he’d worn her down after all, because that Friday, Sharice said, “The usual?”

  Ilya was almost unable to respond both from shock and noncomprehension, and by the time he’d parsed her meaning, her eyebrows had clenched together in the same old scowl, and when he said, “Yes,” and then added, “It has rained all week,” she gave him nothing but a grunt.

  As he took his receipt and turned to wait for his order in the sticky eddy by the fountain sodas, he bumped into a slight woman with a mass of blond hair that smelled like the front pocket of Vladimir’s jacket, where he’d kept old cigarette butts for when he got desperate.

  “Excuse me,” Ilya said.

  The woman ducked her head and walked up to the register. Ilya wouldn’t have paid her another second’s attention, except that Sharice said, “You bring your wallet this time?,” which was another break from her script. The woman produced a five-dollar bill from her pocket and passed it across the counter. It wasn’t until she’d ordered and turned to wait next to Ilya that he recognized her.

  She was high, he could see that, and as they waited she seemed to become more so. Her neck slumped a bit, and she took a few steps backward, searching for support from the wall, but her elbow hit the soda machine, and Dr Pepper sprayed down her arm and onto the floor.

  “Fuck,” she said.

  At the register, Sharice rolled her eyes.

  The woman looked at Ilya, and the shape of her eyes, the way they canted upward, toward her temples, was the only thing of Sadie that he could see in her. “You gonna get me some napkins, or you just wanna stare?” she said.

  Ilya pulled a wad of napkins out of the dispenser and handed them to her, and she snatched them and said, “They treat me like shit here.”

  She dabbed at her elbow, ignored the puddle of soda on the floor, and then stuffed the dirty napkins into a metal bucket of creamers.

  “Me too,” Ilya said. “But I thought that was because I’m Russian.”

  She laughed, a little too hard, then said, “Russia? What the fuck?” to herself, as though Ilya were an especially juicy hallucination.

  Sharice slid Ilya’s chicken box across the counter, and when Ilya reached for it, she said softly, “I’d ignore her if I was you.”

  Ilya nodded just as, behind them, Sadie’s mom stepped into the puddle of soda and slipped. She caught herself, but not before her spine hit the edge of the counter. Ilya saw the pain pierce her high. For a second, she stayed still, her knees bent, hand gripping the counter, and then she straightened.

  “OK,” she said softly, and again Ilya had the sense that she was talking to herself. She stood up, hitched the strap of her tank top back onto her shoulder, raised her voice, and said, “This place is a dump. Clean the fucking floors once in a while, before I sue your asses.”

  The Bojangles’ went silent. A group of boys whom Ilya recognized as some of J.T.’s basketball buddies froze, their chicken fingers poised above various dips. A man—Sharice’s boss, Ilya guessed—appeared, as though expelled from the bowels of the Bojangles’ at any threat of legal action.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?” he said, and Sadie’s mom turned and walked out the door. “Get the mop,” he said to Sharice, and he disappeared back past the deep fryers and into the bowels once more.

  Behind Ilya, the basketball players erupted in laughter.

  “Did you see her face? It’s not like she’s going to say no,” one of them said to some suggestion that Ilya had not heard.

  Sharice slid another box across the counter toward Ilya. “You want her chicken?” she said.

  Ilya nodded, stacked it on top of his own, and followed Sadie’s mom out into the parking lot.

  She was sitting on a crumbling concrete bumper at the head of a parking spot, with her arms draped over her knees and her hands dangling. It wasn’t just her eyes that were like Sadie’s—Ilya had been wrong about that—her hands were like Sadie’s too. Piano hands, his mother called them, with this note of regret because she had had them too but had never played a piano. Ilya set the Bojangles’ box by her feet.

  “Did King send you?” she said. “It’s not like I’ve got anything.” She lifted her head and spread her arms as though Ilya might pat her down.

  Ilya shook his head. He didn’t know whether she meant drugs or money, or who King was. “I just thought you mig
ht want this,” he said, holding out her meal.

  “It’s not even real chicken,” she said. “Did you know that? It’s like some mashed-up cartilage and shit.”

  He nodded.

  “Where you from again?” she said.

  “Russia,” he said.

  She smiled and shook her head. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “It’s an exchange program,” he said. “You remind me of someone from home.” That wasn’t true. She didn’t remind him of Vladimir at all. Her personality seemed to hinge on self-pity, and Ilya had never known Vladimir to feel sorry for himself. Vladimir was an optimist, even when optimism seemed an impossible attitude to sustain.

  She looked up at him. “I heard Russian women are good-looking,” she said.

  “Sometimes,” he said, thinking that sometimes Russian women looked like her, like they were hanging on to life by a dirty, painted fingernail.

  “Listen, if you ever need help, if you ever want anything—to stop—or anything, call me.”

  It was easier to say than he’d expected, and the ease of it stung because it was the sort of thing he’d thought of saying to Vladimir a million times but had never managed to.

  “Oh please,” she said, with a snort, and she opened up the box and began to pick at the manufactured chicken. “Now I know King didn’t send you. You religious or something?”

  Ilya shook his head. He was groping inside his backpack for his history book, and when he found it, he pulled out the drawing that Sadie had done. In person, the likeness was even more profound. The coarseness of her hair, the way her nose ended in a shiny little knob, the grooves that cupped her lips like her pout was an offering. Ilya wrote the Masons’ number on the back and held it out to her.

  “Sadie drew this,” he said.

  He dropped the picture onto her lap. She didn’t say anything until she’d stared at it for a few seconds. “My Sadie?” she said.

  He nodded.

  “It’s not bad,” she said. She looked up at Ilya. “You know as a kid she was like that. Artistic. I could give her a couple crayons and she’d be so good—just coloring for hours. You could forget that she was there.” She had a memory in her eyes, he could see that, could see her watching Sadie color, a crayon clutched tight in her hand, before the commercial break ended, her show resumed, and she forgot Sadie all over again.

  “My number’s on the back,” he said.

  She flipped it over and the grease from her fingers turned the paper translucent.

  “Did Sadie send you?”

  “No,” he said.

  “And not King either? For real?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then fuck off,” she said softly, and he walked back into the woods. Before long he was out in the open of the soccer field. Up a rise, the track ringed the football field. Sadie was up there somewhere, running, her white ponytail whipping back and forth between her shoulder blades. He thought of the soda dribbling down her mother’s arm, of the silence she’d inspired when she yelled, and he decided not to tell Sadie about it. If he did, she’d start a pilgrimage to the Bojangles’ too, and eventually she’d see a scene like the one Ilya had today.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Raz, dva, tri,” the gym teacher, Ekaterina Borisovna, counted.

  It was the end of class, and Ilya was the last in the row, stretching, reaching his fingertips toward his toes, toward the floorboards, which had been scrubbed with lye so often that the smell of them made Ilya nauseous.

  “Lana Vishnyeva was killed,” a girl said loudly, as though she needed everyone to hear it.

  Her friend nodded. “I know,” she said.

  Ilya stood up, and his vision went black and then cleared.

  “What?” he said.

  The girls turned, their hands still dangling at their toes, their rumps high in the air. Their ponytails dusted the floor. He had never spoken to either of them before.

  “They found her yesterday,” one girl said. “But she’d been dead three weeks at least.”

  Ekaterina Borisovna pointed a finger at Ilya and then at the ground, and Ilya bent back into the stretch. He could feel Lana kissing him. Their teeth hitting, her tongue darting into his mouth. “Don’t worry,” she’d said. “You were fine.”

  “She was killed?” he said, thinking of her overdosing, of how thin she’d been.

  “Her throat was cut,” the girl’s friend said.

  “And stand,” Ekaterina Borisovna said.

  They all stood and crossed their right arms over their torsos and began to count. They had been doing the same series of stretches for ten years.

  “So not exactly like the other two. But she had the slashes on her cheeks. And apparently the knife was the same.”

  “They were stabbed thirteen times,” her friend offered.

  “No,” she said. “Twelve.”

  Ilya skipped math for the first time in his life and went to the Internet Kebab to read the article in the Vecherniye Berlozhniki. It was short and formal. This time there was no picture. The girls were right: Lana’s throat had been cut, and she had been dead for three weeks before her body was found by a group of kids playing in the grove of trees behind the kommunalkas, only two kilometers from Berlozhniki proper. A two-minute walk from Ilya’s apartment. One minute in the summer. When Ilya was little, kids had used those trees as hiding spots in tag, crouching among the trunks until they were flushed out.

  Most of the article was devoted to a self-satisfied explanation of how the police had calculated Lana’s date of death. Snow, the article explained, could serve as a chronological record in the same way that sediment layers did, and Lana’s body had been preserved under a layer of ice that rested beneath a half meter of snow. The ice was formed during a deep thaw and flash freeze that had occurred four weeks before. Her family had not reported her missing.

  “She was living with a friend,” her mother was quoted as saying, “because we had argued about her lifestyle.”

  It was impossible to read the tone in this—whether it was said with regret or reproach. The article said that Lana did not appear to have been robbed and that the motive may have been sexual. It closed with a list of what she had been wearing when she was killed—jeans, a parka, and a pink T-shirt—and a plea for any information that might aid the police in their investigation. Ilya read this last line over again, sure that he’d misread or imagined. She’d been wearing a pink shirt that night in the Tower. Four weeks and a day earlier. He remembered the pink of it with the pink of her hair; he remembered wanting to ask her if she liked to do that, to match her clothes with her hair, but he’d been too afraid.

  He looked up the weather in Berlozhniki from the past month, which was a flat line punctuated by one deep dip, like a heart giving one last twitch. The thaw had been the night after the boards, the night after Ilya had kissed Lana. He tried to think when he had last seen her at the Tower, whether she’d left the mess hall with all of them or whether she’d stayed and kept dancing, but all he could remember was that she’d been gone when he woke up.

  Ilya walked home so fast that his lungs were burning when he got to the grove. It was just a thin cluster of birch trees that had grown around some long-departed spring and that, for some unknown reason, the loggers had spared. The police had marked off the entire area. The slim gray trunks were banded together with police tape like a bouquet. The police were not there, though, and Ilya could not tell the exact spot where Lana had been found, whether she’d been leaning against a tree or lying in the snow between them. There were crisp packets and plastic bags and cigarette butts everywhere. All the usual garbage. High up in the branches of one tree, a bra dangled. It had been there for years, fading from red to pink, and a tiny icicle had managed to find purchase on one of its straps.

  * * *

  —

  Yulia Podto
china’s and Olga Nadiova’s deaths had been met with shock, but Lana’s was met with resignation. Look at where we live, people said, gesturing, vaguely, toward the camp and its crosses. Should we expect anything different? And yet defensive preparations were made. Lana was blond like Yulia and Olga, and so women started darkening their hair. Dye rimmed the sinks in the bathrooms and the communal kitchen, and the women—who went everywhere in pairs now—took on the look of actresses poorly cast as sisters.

  When the police tape was taken down, the grove became a shrine. People left teddy bears and plastic bouquets and laminated postcards of Jesus and Axl Rose, who had been Lana’s idol. Ilya hadn’t known this. He hadn’t really known her at all, he reminded himself, and when he thought of her death, it was with wonder rather than grief. Someone he had touched had died. Someone he had kissed. Someone young. He had the feeling too that her death was a portent of worse things to come—whether for him specifically or Berlozhniki in general, he couldn’t say—and he found himself desperate to get to America, to leave before whatever happened next.

  He drew a grid on an enormous sheet of newsprint, numbered the days until he left, and crossed off each one with a red X. One hundred and fifty-two. One hundred and fifty-one. If Babushka and his mother resented his eagerness, they didn’t show it. Babushka bought him supplies: a new sweatshirt and jeans, a watch that was also a calculator, a pair of Adidas knockoffs with four stripes instead of three, a St. Nicholas medal to wear when he flew, and a St. Sergius medal for after he landed. She washed the clothes and folded them, and Ilya stacked them carefully in the crate under the couch, and tried not to think of Vladimir and all of his tapes in that pink bag in the Tower.