* * *
—
A month later, early in the morning, Ilya woke to the sound of splashing. The sun wasn’t up yet. The sky was the color of slush. He pulled open the doors under the deck and climbed up to the pool expecting to find Papa Cam there, dredging leaves, or Mama Jamie swimming as part of her new exercise regime. There was something in the pool. It was moving, dark and fluid under the leaves that had fallen overnight. It swam more slowly than a person, though, and as Ilya stood there and watched, it did not surface for air. Could it be one of the girls, Ilya wondered, unconscious and drifting on some current? Only he must have known that this was not the case because he made no move to jump in. He was, in fact, backing up the stairs onto the deck. His fingers found the light switch, and he flicked it, and the pool shone, a turquoise brick cut out of the earth. Swimming in its depths was a crocodile. Its body was the color of mud, its shape impossibly prehistoric, yet it drifted with a slow grace that held Ilya there on the deck.
He knew from some long-forgotten textbook or nature program that crocodiles killed by drowning. That they grabbed you by a limb and pulled you down and held you there for the burning moments it took your lungs to empty.
The crocodile reached the steps and paused, its nose perched just out of the water. It was an invitation, Ilya thought, and he could see himself walking down to the pool and stepping carefully into the water. Even as he knocked on the glass doors and called out to the Masons, he could feel the slice, the tear, the pressure. Mama Jamie was running toward him, and even once she’d opened the doors and was holding him in her arms he could feel the heat in his lungs, the crush of them giving up, and the cold rush of water filling him.
“There’s a crocodile,” he said.
Sadie was at the door now too, and as Mama Jamie bent over the rail and peered into the pool, she hugged him.
“Breathe, breathe,” she said, as though she understood that he was drowning.
Mama Jamie shook her head. “Ilya, honey,” she said, “an alligator can’t climb over that wall.”
* * *
—
He spent that day sitting by the pool, in the same chair where he’d listened to Vladimir’s confession. He wanted to keep an eye on the water, to keep an eye on the wall.
The Masons were gone—Sadie had track practice, which she’d wanted to skip, but he’d insisted that she go—and Mama Jamie and Papa Cam and the girls were shopping for Thanksgiving, which was only a few days away. Durashka was curled in a patch of sunlight by the grill, her paws twitching in some dream. The deck doors were open, and when the phone rang, the sound was as clear as a bell pealing. The dog cocked her head. Ilya ignored it. It stopped, and then started again. It went on like that for ten minutes, and then this thought formed in his head and sank like a stone to his gut: Babushka had died. Or his mother. Because what else could that terrible insistence mean? The phone had rung like that when they’d been at the airport, waiting for Vladimir. They hadn’t heard it, of course, but Ilya had seen the ten missed calls. He had still not allowed Mama Jamie to delete the message.
The phone stopped. Ilya exhaled, careful not to break the silence, as though the caller might hear him and start up again. A plane passed so far overhead that he could not hear it, then somewhere on Route 21 a tanker bellowed at some lesser car, and the silence was pierced. Durashka licked her chops with wet vigor and rattled her tags scratching at a patch on her belly. Inside, the phone rang again, and Ilya stood and walked along the edge of the pool and up the deck steps, and when he picked it up, the voice on the other end was clotted with tears, which he had expected, but it was speaking English, which he had not expected.
“It’s me,” she said. “You said to call.”
It sounded like an accusation.
“Who?” he said, though her tone congealed into her identity as he said it.
“I had a close call,” she said. “Too fucking close. And I don’t have anybody. It was either you or the fucking bitch at the Bojangles’, and she would probably like to see me dead.”
He couldn’t tell if she was high or scared or both, but a story tumbled out of her, of waking up in a ditch by an old racetrack on Leffie’s outskirts. She’d been half dressed, and that was all as bad as you’d expect, she said, but the really fucked-up thing was that when she’d pulled herself together, sat up, stood up, and started walking down the shoulder, something made her turn around. She’d looked back—for her purse, maybe, she thought—but she’d seen herself lying there, still in the ditch, her cheek on this weedy mound of gravel, her eyes open and drying out in the sun. She kept walking, she said. Running almost, but every time she looked back, she could still see her body. It was like that for half a mile, and she thought that was it, she’d killed herself and was a ghost now, and this was Hell or purgatory or whatever. When she’d gotten to the 7-Eleven in Latraux, a man had stared at her from inside his car, then locked his doors, and she’d been sure she was a ghost. Then the cashier had stopped her at the door.
“It wasn’t ’til that fucker said, ‘Uh-uhn. No way. You can’t come in here after the way you was last night,’ that I realized I was at least mostly alive.”
“Where are you now?” Ilya said.
“At home,” she said.
“I’ll come there, OK?” he said.
“OK,” she said.
“Turn on the TV. For company,” he said. “And don’t take anything.”
“I got nothing to take,” she said.
“OK,” he said.
“OK,” she said again.
He called Mama Jamie on her cell and told her what had happened, and she left the store and met him at Sadie’s mom’s house.
“Sadie’s not coming?” Sadie’s mom said, as soon as Mama Jamie walked in the door.
“No,” Mama Jamie said. “Did you want her to?”
Sadie’s mom shrugged, and Mama Jamie helped her pack a bag while on the TV a reporter in Hollywood interviewed an actress about her morning beauty routine. Ilya sat on the couch and looked out the window to the sidewalk and the street. It was so close. He imagined Sadie’s face framed in it. How could her mom never have seen her? Maybe she had, he thought. Maybe she’d wanted to open the door and invite her in, but she’d known better. She’d given her up once, and maybe she didn’t have the strength to do it again. A van drove past the window to the end of the cul-de-sac, turned around, and parked in front of the trailer. TOMORROW’S SUNRISE was printed in rainbow letters on the side.
“It’s supposed to be good,” Mama Jamie said. “Pastor Kyle recommended it.”
Sadie’s mom nodded. She had barely spoken since Mama Jamie had arrived. She had not cursed once. Something about Mama Jamie had turned her docile, and as she grabbed her bag and walked out the door, it occurred to Ilya that her docility was the closest she could come to saying thank you.
Once she’d left in the van, he and Mama Jamie drove home. “I’ll tell Sadie tonight,” she said. “Maybe it’ll be a good thing for her.”
“Maybe,” Ilya said.
“At least she’ll get some sleep for a while.” Ilya looked at Mama Jamie. Her cheeks were so round and high that she looked innocent regardless of her expression. “She thinks I’d be mad. Be jealous, maybe. And I don’t like the lying, the sneaking. But I’m proud of her. Proud of her heart,” she said. “So don’t break it.”
“I won’t,” Ilya said.
They passed the fireworks stand, the old plantation, the hot sauce plant. They turned up Dumaine Drive to the house that still did not feel like home. He saw Vladimir waiting on the stoop, stubbing a cigarette into one of Mama Jamie’s potted plants, running a hand through hair that had only just grown past the prison buzz. He thought of Sadie’s mom seeing herself in the ditch, and he wondered if it had been that way for Vladimir. Whether he’d seen himself lying there, with his arm around Aksinya. Their spine-studded ba
cks, her beautiful face, the drugs on the table, his clothes on the floor. Why, Ilya wondered, had he not seen anything there worth saving?
* * *
—
He and Sadie walked to her mom’s place the next night. The landlord had emptied it already. The couch sat in the yard, soaked from an afternoon storm. Her mattress slumped against the window, blocking their view inside, but the door gave when they tried it. The carpet was damp—it had been cleaned with some sort of cleaner that smelled of rancid oranges—and because the furniture was gone, or because the landlord had replaced the bulbs with fluorescent ones, there was an anonymity to the space that was alarming. It felt as though Sadie’s mom were more than gone. It was like she had never existed at all. Ilya remembered Sadie telling him about burning down her mom’s house, about wanting to walk through the ashes, and he’d brought a lighter for her, just in case.
Sadie paused for a moment in the doorway, and then began to walk carefully around the room’s edges. She was counting footsteps, he realized. Some holdover from childhood, when these walls had been the limits of her world. When she’d finished with the living room, he followed her through an accordion door into the bedroom.
“This was our room,” she said. “I slept there.” She pointed to a corner as blank as the other three. And then she saw her drawing, which her mom had tacked in the center of the wall. Her mom’s penciled eyes looked out at them with a sad reproach that reminded him of saints’ eyes in icons, as though she’d pasted it there to watch over her. Sadie looked at it for a second, saw the Masons’ number written on the back, and her mom’s greasy fingerprints on the edges.
He handed her the lighter, but she shook her head, folded the picture into a square, and put it in her pocket.
“Let’s go,” she said, and she took his hand.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
When summer came in Berlozhniki, the snow thawed and things surfaced. Trash, mostly. Old issues of the Vecherniye Berlozhniki, their ink bled to a uniform gray, their stories erased. Scarves and mittens, dolls and books, dead squirrels and birds, perfectly preserved, their eyes like crystals. Sets of keys glinted patiently in the newfound sun, waiting for discovery. Rubles appeared on sidewalks, in gutters, on stoops. Cars emerged on corners where snowbanks had loomed the highest. Their windows were cracked from the pressure, their seats soggy, but sometimes their engines sputtered and caught, and their owners cheered and bought a bottle of Imperia and gathered friends to witness the miracle and before long they’d forgotten, all over again, where the fuck they’d left their cars.
Children stepped out of the kommunalkas, blinking, their eyes adjusting from the TV to the world as it was. They yelled. They ran. They remembered, suddenly, how full their lungs could get.
There was talk that the snow would melt and reveal another body. Multiple bodies. There was talk that Vladimir had killed others that winter and buried them in deep drifts. Sometimes Ilya was tempted to believe these rumors. As the snow grew patchy, he eyed the piles that were still big enough to hide a body, and he wondered if there might be someone in there. A victim with a clue that would absolve Vladimir: a chunk of the killer’s hair gripped in a fist; the knife with fingerprints frozen on its handle; or a note, written in the throes of death, naming the killer.
By July the snow was gone entirely. The ground was swampy, and they’d all traded their felt boots for rubber ones. No more bodies appeared, and the Vecherniye Berlozhniki began to cover other news besides the murders and Vladimir’s arrest. A twelve-year-old girl collected enough change in the melting town’s nooks and crannies to pay her family’s rent for a month. She smirked in the picture in the Vecherniye Berlozhniki, each hand hoisting a tube sock filled with rubles.
“What a ferret,” Babushka said, slapping the paper down on the table. “She steals people’s change, and they call her a hero.”
“You’re jealous you didn’t beat her to it,” Ilya’s mother said. It was her day off, and she’d spent it watching Simply Maria and smoking cigarettes out the open window. Ilya was not used to her smoking—she’d quit when she was pregnant with Vladimir and begun again after his arrest—but he liked to watch her slim fingers pinch the tobacco into a neat row. She rolled a cigarette just like Vladimir did.
A week before Ilya left for America, he walked out to the Tower. It was empty. Daylight streamed through glassless windows. Puddles had collected in the dips in the concrete. It didn’t seem to Ilya like a place he’d ever been before, and it took him a while to find Vladimir’s room. The posters had been torn down and left in long strips on the ground. The blankets were gone, and so were Vladimir’s clothes, but sitting there in the middle of the room was the pink plastic bag. Vladimir’s camouflage sweatshirt was inside, and as Ilya pulled it out, he heard the familiar, plastic clatter of his Michael & Stephanie tapes beneath it.
Ilya spent much of that last week in the kommunalkas, on their tiny balcony. If he leaned over the rail a bit and looked to the right, he could see the polyana, where they’d found Lana. The police tape was long gone, but there were still these snatches of color from the photos people had left. Someone had painted a tire in rainbow colors and planted flowers inside it. Sometimes Ilya thought that if he stared hard enough he’d be able to see what had happened. He’d see Lana walk to the trees. He’d see who was with her. He’d see it all, and he’d know that it hadn’t been his brother.
That was where Maria Mikhailovna found him. It was early morning, but already light. He hadn’t slept, and he tried not to think of the only other time she’d been in their apartment.
“It’s time to go,” she’d said, in English, as always.
His mother and Babushka hugged him good-bye, and Timofey pressed a thousand-ruble note and a tiny knife with the hammer and sickle on it into his hands.
“It’s a lucky one,” he said.
Two hours south of Berlozhniki, halfway to Leshukonskoye, they stopped at a petrol station with faded yellow pumps.
“Two hours to go,” Maria Mikhailovna said, and Ilya filled the car while she went inside to pay. It wasn’t until the tank was full that he noticed a wind chime above the door. There was something familiar about it, about the hollow clatter it made when the door opened. And the yellow pumps. Ilya touched one, picked at a flake of paint with a fingernail. He walked toward the road. A truck was coming. A pale splotch on the horizon, far enough away that he could barely hear it. He could feel a memory growing like a bubble within him. He remembered running, laughing. Vladimir was chasing him, reaching out for him. Behind him, the wind chime made its rattle. The truck was close now, its horn blasting. In a second, Vladimir’s arms would be around him. He waited, and he waited.
“Ilya!” someone called, and then a hand yanked him backward, and the truck passed, close enough that the pressure of it made his body shake. Maria Mikhailovna gripped his hand in hers. The sun was hitting her glasses, turning them into mirrors.
“Ilya,” she said again, in this way that meant he was forgiven, and he forgot what it was that he’d been trying so hard to remember.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Emily Cunningham and Samantha Shea for their passion for this project, their brilliant edits, and their calm guidance, without which both this novel and I would be lost. And thank you to Kate Griggs and Michael Burke for turning these pages into a book, and to Gail Brussel, Matt Boyd, and Grace Fisher for bringing that book out into the world.
Thank you to the Wallace Stegner Fellowship, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the University of Michigan M.F.A. program, and the Elizabeth George Foundation for their generous support. And to Elizabeth Tallent, Tobias Wolff, Adam Johnson, Judith Mitchell, Michael Byers, Peter Ho Davies, Eileen Pollack, and Malena Watrous for their patience and insight.
To Austin, Brad, David, Helen, Juliana, Monique, Nicole, NoViolet, Tony, Shannon, and Lydia C. for helping me see what this novel might be.
/> To Karolina, for reading this not once, but twice, and for her expertise in editing and in all things Russian; and to Alex Raben for the late night spent in the labyrinth of transliterations.
To Hannah Tinti at One Story and to Linda Swanson-Davies and Susan Burmeister-Brown at Glimmer Train for taking a chance on my writing.
To Svetlana Alexievich for her brilliant and heartbreaking Secondhand Time; to Ian Frazier for Travels in Siberia; to Johann Hari for Chasing the Scream; and to Donald Weber for the photographs in Interrogations, especially Vorkuta and April 26, 2008, Vorkuta, Russia, both of which I turned to time and time again for inspiration.
To Patricia, for being a “Bacca” to my girls every time I disappeared to reckon with this story.
Thank you to my families, the Fitzpatricks and the Davids, for your encouragement and enthusiasm. To Jan, for your endless faith in me. To my brother, whom I look up to even more than Ilya does Vladimir. And to my mother, for inspiring me every day, in every way. Thank you for all the books on tape we listened to, sitting in the car, in the driveway; and thank you for all of the adventures—especially the Russian ones.
To my grandfather, the first writer I knew, and to my father, who wanted to be a writer. I wish you could hold this book in your hands.
Thank you, with every bit of my love, to Margot and Win, who, in acknowledgment of themselves, have typed their names here. And to Grainger for all the moves, all those midwestern winters, for all the drafts you’ve read, and all the love you’ve given. How lucky I am to have you.
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