Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER NINE

Breakfast that first day of school was a chaotic affair. The kitchen reeked of bacon. The radio by the sink bellowed Christian rock, and Papa Cam sang along, cracking eggs with gusto. The microwave beeped and beeped, and the dryer churned, desperately fluffing things that had wrinkled overnight. Mama Jamie ripped tags off Ilya’s and the girls’ new book bags and cut crusts off their sandwiches and threw them in the trash. Babushka had always wiped the crumbs from her cutting board into the palm of her hand and eaten them. “The best bits,” she called them, and when Vladimir and Ilya were little they used to fight over who would get them. He imagined telling the Masons this story. Fighting for crumbs, they would think, though that wasn’t the point; his family was not that poor.

Sadie was sitting at the table, eating a slice of toast and staring out the sliding glass doors. Her lips were buttery. Her knees were tucked into another huge black T-shirt, and again Ilya had the sense that she was separate from them all. He wasn’t deluded enough to think that they were together in their separateness, but at least they were similar for it. She was looking toward the refinery, and he sat next to her and said, “My home is so close to the refinery that it lights up our whole apartment.”

She looked at him, but it took a second for her to focus on him, as though her mind were returning from some distance.

“There are houses like that here too,” she said. “How’d you sleep?”

“You get accustomed to it,” he said. “But at first people were awake all the time, and they complained. And Gazneft manufactured a study saying the lights would be healthy for us, make us less sad, since it’s dark so much of the time.”

“That’s a new one,” Papa Cam said.

“I meant how’d you sleep last night,” Sadie said, and Ilya wondered if she could tell from his face that he’d barely slept at all.

“I don’t like the dark,” Molly said. She squeezed between Ilya and Sadie with a plate of waffles and began to systematically pour syrup into each of the waffle’s tiny trenches. “That’s why I have ten nightlights.”

“Let me guess,” Marilee said, from across the table, “your longitude is very far north.”

Papa Cam emerged from a closet with what looked like a tripod. “Latitude,” he said, and Ilya got the sense that even patient Papa Cam found satisfaction in correcting Marilee.

“In the middle of winter there are only a couple of hours of light each day,” Ilya said.

Sadie smiled. “That sounds kind of nice,” she said.

“In what way?” Mama Jamie said.

“If you don’t know I can’t tell you,” Sadie said, and Mama Jamie wiped her hands on a dishcloth and said, “Photo time. Everybody to the fireplace.”

Marilee, Molly, and Sadie groaned in unison.

“This is something we do every year on the first day of school, Ilya,” Mama Jamie said, “and if the girls don’t appreciate it now, they will later.”

The girls slumped over to the fireplace, and Mama Jamie scooped up the dog, which they were now routinely calling Durashka, and climbed onto the brick fire skirt so that her head jutted above her daughters’ shoulders. Molly’s shirt was tucked into an inch of exposed underwear. A citrusy stain traversed the entirety of Papa Cam’s tie, a rash had sprouted on Marilee’s cheek, and the vacancy had not quite left Sadie’s face. Ilya watched them arrange themselves, and they were not much to look at, but still he thought of his mother and Babushka alone in their apartment, and he felt a bit of bile rise in his throat because on top of everything else the Masons had each other.

“Why’s he staring at us like that?” Marilee said.

“Nobody’s looking any which way,” Mama Jamie said.

“Yes he is,” Marilee said, and Ilya looked at his feet because he knew that in this case she was right.

Papa Cam lifted an arm like some sort of lamed bird. “Front and center,” he said.

“No, please,” Ilya said. “I’ll take the picture.”

“No you don’t!” Mama Jamie cried. “Get in here.”

Ilya wedged himself under Papa Cam’s arm, and Papa Cam clicked a button on a tiny remote, and a red light on the camera began to flash. “Timer’s on,” he said.

Next to him Marilee began to itch the rash on her cheek.

“Stop it,” Mama Jamie hissed.

“I can’t help it,” Marilee said.

“Are you sure you set it?” Sadie said as the camera clicked, whirred, and went silent.

Papa Cam stared at the camera screen. “Well, we sure captured the real deal,” he said.

“I didn’t want to capture the real deal.” Mama Jamie sighed. “Ilya, do you want one of just you? To send to your mom? First day of school in a new country—can you imagine, girls? Ilya is brave, right?”

A picture of him here, safe, would soothe his mother.

“Yes,” he said. “She’d like that.”

His eyes were gritty with tiredness, but as Papa Cam crouched behind the camera, he tried, for his mother’s sake, to look happy. “Cheese,” he murmured. The flash blinked, then burst. Papa Cam showed him the photo, and he had expected to look as grim as the convicts online, but the flash had collected in his pupils and made his eyes look like the lights of a train pushing through a dark tunnel. It was a look of purpose. He told himself to temper his hopes. All the picture of Lana in Gabe’s hat proved was that they had been involved. It wasn’t enough, but still it was more than he’d had the day before.

Leffie High was a concrete slab hunched under a big sky. Behind it, playing fields stretched into the distance, and kids ran back and forth between the goals with a sort of grace, like birds rearranging in the sky. Sadie had her own car and, much to Ilya’s delight, was in charge of driving him to and from school. She pulled into a parking spot between two pickups with huge, rutted tires. A melancholy rock song blasted from the radio—“Smashing Pumpkins,” Sadie said, when he asked who it was—and she mouthed the words while dabbing something that smelled like coconut on her lips.

“It’s familiar,” Ilya said, though it was not.

“Oh yeah? They’re big in Russia?”

“Very,” Ilya said.

Kids surged around the car, headed for the front doors. They yelled hellos, shrieking over new haircuts and new outfits. The song ended, and Sadie said, “Ready?” softly, as though she were talking to herself more than to him.

Inside, the press of bodies, the thin clanging of lockers, the sheer energy of teenagers colliding were all familiar to him, but that made it all no less terrifying. Ilya watched Sadie’s white hair slip through the crowd, and as she got farther from him, he began to sweat. Someone stepped on his foot. Someone else yelled, “The Russian!” He didn’t realize that he’d stopped walking until he saw Sadie’s slim shoulders sliding back through the crowd for him.

“You’re famous,” Sadie said, and when she saw his face, she said, “I’m just kidding. Everyone will get over it by tomorrow.”

Sadie brought him to the principal’s office first. “This is Miss Janet,” she said, nodding at a woman behind a desk. The woman couldn’t have been much older than his mother, but her skin had been sunned so that it crinkled like the brown paper lunch bag that Mama Jamie had given him that morning.

“And is this Ilya?” Miss Janet said, pronouncing the “I” like the letter.

“It’s Ilya. He’s supposed to see Principal Gibbons,” Sadie said, and her pronunciation wasn’t perfect, but still this heat seeped into Ilya’s chest at hearing her say his name, at the fact that she’d bothered to correct Miss Janet.

“He’s on a call, sweet pea,” the woman said, “but you head on, and I’ll take care of Ilya here.”

Sadie paused at the door. “We have history together,” she said. “So I’ll see you then,” and then she was gone, and Ilya was left alone with Miss Janet, who was baring too-white teeth at him.

“Russia, huh?” she said. “Now that is a far way to come.”

The phone on Janet’s desk rang, and she rolled her eyes in a conspiratorial way and ignored it. “I went to Alaska once. On a cruise. A long time ago. And at one point—I’ll never forget this—the captain came on the loudspeaker and said that we were close enough to swim to Russia.” The phone rang again, and this time she was moved to put a hand on the receiver. “Of course the water was too cold to actually do it but I just thought it was so exciting. Swim to Russia. Can you imagine?”

“Yes,” Ilya said, and if she noticed the sarcasm in his voice, she didn’t show it.

The phone rang once more, a door opened behind Janet’s desk, and a small, powerful man said, “The phone. Please.”

Janet looked back over her shoulder, unperturbed. “Principal Gibbons,” she said, “this is Ilya from Russia.”

“Ah ha,” Gibbons said. “Come on back.”

Principal Gibbons held out a hand to indicate a chair for Ilya, twisted a rod to shut the window blinds, and leaned against his desk. He had the body of a spetsnaz, like he’d know his way around a Kalashnikov. His skin looked buffed. It shone like the fruit had at the Walmart the day before.

“This is quite an opportunity for you,” he said. He did not smile. “I hope you’re ready to take advantage of it.”

“Yes,” Ilya said.

“The Masons are a fantastic family. And as I said, we’re glad to have you—” A bell rang, and Gibbons tilted his head and waited for it to finish. “But there are rules and ramifications here. You will be held to the same standard as every other student. No diplomatic immunity, you understand?”

“I understand,” Ilya said, wondering whether the man was always this aggressive. Gibbons picked up a folder from his desk. He opened it, though it seemed to be empty, then closed it again.

“I imagine that where you’re from is pretty rough—”

Ilya tried to speak—not to disagree, because Berlozhniki was rough by any standard, but to say that that didn’t mean he was—but Gibbons held up a hand. His fingers were incredibly thick and straight. “Whoa. Whoa. Let me finish. I admire the fact that you’ve gotten yourself here by hook or crook.”

Hook or crook, Ilya thought. That was in his book of idioms. He understood the insult in “crook” but could not remember what “hook” meant in this context.

“That takes determination, and we like to reward determination here. In this country. So keep that in mind.” Gibbons’s hand was still in the air. It had not moved a millimeter. “How old are you?” he said.

“Fifteen.”

“We’ve got you in sophomore classes for now. See if you sink or swim. Except English. And history. You’ll be with the freshmen for those two. I’m assuming that American history was not part of your curriculum.” A smile flitted across Gibbons’s eyes. That word, “curriculum,” was a test. He wanted to know how good Ilya’s English actually was, and, as luck would have it, Ilya had understood that word perfectly.

“In Russia, Russian history is the standard curriculum,” he said.

The smile leaked out of Gibbons’s eyes. “OK, then. Let’s get you integrated. First period began”—he looked at his watch—“two minutes ago.”

Miss Janet printed out a schedule for Ilya and led him through the empty halls to his first class.

“Don’t worry,” she said when they got to the door. “Nobody’s gonna bite.”

In each class, Ilya was introduced as the EnerCo Exchange Student. The teachers were so careful to say “EnerCo” that Ilya knew the school must be getting some sort of payment for taking him on, just as the Masons were. In first-period math, Mr. Cammer trotted out some elementary Russian. In second-period biology, Mrs. Lareaux asked him to write his name on the board. He did so, using the Cyrillic alphabet, and when he stepped back and brushed the chalk dust off his palms, she had the look of someone lost in a maze.

“Oh, that’s right,” she said. “There’s a different alphabet. Would you mind writing it in English too, so that we can read it?”

So Ilya carefully chalked the roman letters under each Cyrillic one and listened as, behind him, a dozen voices sounded out his name.

His new backpack was soon full of syllabi and textbooks. There were course calendars, course expectations. That was all as overwhelming as he’d expected, but he hadn’t anticipated the force of attention: the questions, the smiles, the silences he was expected to fill. For fifteen years Ilya had lived with Vladimir, who lived for attention of any sort, and Ilya’s personality had been shaped by Vladimir’s need. Ilya was used to observing from the edges; he was used to going whole days without saying much of anything—except, of course, to Maria Mikhailovna or Michael and Stephanie—and now, when he entered a room, every face turned to look at him, and he wished that he’d brought his tape player, that he could listen to Michael and Stephanie and slip from this America into that other one.

It didn’t help that he had worn the wrong things: his jeans were too skinny, his sneakers not nearly large enough nor bright enough. Boys in America did not, it seemed, wear their T-shirts tight, and no one had a fringed haircut like his that tapered into spikes above his eyebrows.

By fourth-period history, he was desperate to see Sadie. He wanted to hear her say again that tomorrow they would have forgotten all about him. Luckily, the history classroom was next to his third-period class, so he was saved the embarrassment of asking some other straggler in the hallway for directions. When he walked in the door, he saw her almost immediately, in the far back corner, framed by an enormous poster of a nobleman in a wig that was the same color as her hair.

“Sadie,” he said, and he was halfway to her, nearly across the room, before he realized that the seat next to her was taken by a boy who looked more like a man. The sort of man in cologne commercials. The sort of man whose abs had bristled on the packet of boxers that Ilya had opened just that morning. He was looking at Ilya now, and so was Sadie. They had been talking, Ilya realized, and had stopped when he said her name.

“Hi,” Sadie said.

Ilya could feel himself flushing. Sadie was smiling, as was the man-boy next to her. All around Ilya the desks were filling up—and he could tell that he would be left standing, the odd man out, the perfect target—and he tried to remember where the closest bathroom was so that he could propel himself there and hide in a stall until the last bell had rung. And then he heard a voice say, “Before you take a seat, would you mind coming up here and telling us a little bit about Russia? About your city or town?”

Ilya turned to find a small, thin man with a beard to rival Father Frost’s and the sleepy smile of a lizard on a rock.

“Mr. Shilling,” the man said, “American history buff and, by necessity, teacher, at your service.” He led Ilya to the front of the room. “So, Russia, tell us about it,” he said, and a silence fell over the class, so thick that Ilya could almost feel it on his skin. They were all looking at him. He knew they wanted the dramatic things, the things that reaffirmed America: that his grandfather had died in the mine, that his father had died coughing it up, that his grandmother had spent a third of her life in lines; that after the currency collapse your life savings could buy you a pack of Optimas; that his brother was in prison for murder. Or maybe they wanted to know about the cultural tidbits: about Victory Day, and the ice sculptures, and the fact that they gave presents for New Year’s, not Christmas.

“Let’s start with where you live,” Shilling said. “Russia is a big place, right?”

“Yes,” Ilya said.

“What’s your town called?”

“Berlozhniki,” Ilya said.

“Where is that?”

“The northwest.”

“OK,” Mr. Shilling said, and when Ilya didn’t offer anything further, he said, “Maybe it’d be easier if we let the class ask some questions, things they’re curious about.”

Ilya nodded.

“Please remember,” Shilling said, turning to the class, “that your grades are partially based on participation.”

A few hands went up, but not Sadie’s. She was writing something in a tiny notebook. Actually, from the way her pen was moving it looked like she was drawing.

“What’s the population?” asked a boy with glasses and a splash of acne on each cheek. When Ilya told him, he wrote the answer down in a notebook, which prompted a girl in the front row to ask if they’d be tested on this information. Mr. Shilling shook his head, and said that he hoped they’d pay attention anyhow.

“Was it part of the gulag archipelago?” a girl in the front row asked. She said the phrase—gulag archipelago—like it was the Latin name for some rare, carnivorous plant, like she should be congratulated on her recall.

“Yes,” Ilya said.

“You ever meet a mail-order bride?” This came from the man-boy, who was leaning so far back in his chair that its feet lifted off the ground.

Sadie rolled her eyes, but a few other girls giggled.

“Ignore J.T., please,” Mr. Shilling said. “Let’s try not to sink to the lowest common denominator.”

Shilling pointed at a chubby girl with dark lipstick. “Chelsea,” he said.

“Is the refinery privately owned? Or does the state own it?” she said.

It was an easy question, easier than the gulag one in theory, but it felt somehow accusatory, as though it were Ilya’s fault that Yeltsin had dealt out the country’s resources to his friends like a hand of seka, but as she asked it, the sun came out from behind a cloud and half soaked the classroom, and the light was like melted butter, was like nothing he’d seen before, as if they orbited a different star here, and home suddenly felt so far.

As his silence grew, the class’s did too. They stopped moving in their desks, stopped cracking knuckles and chewing gum. Even J.T. had stopped fidgeting and was looking at him the way you look at a three-legged dog, with lots of pity and a little amazement. He thought of Aksinya saying, “Maybe over there you’ll grow a pair.” Of Vladimir saying that Ilya would be a boss, that he’d run shit. Of Vladimir asking Maria Mikhailovna to send him instead. He thought of Lana sleeping with Gabe Thompson, and he knew why she’d done it: she’d wanted to be here too, and Gabe had been as close as she could get.

“This oligarch owns most of it,” Ilya managed. His words were clipped, his voice terse. He sounded like some sort of demented robot. Vladimir, he knew, would be expansive. Vladimir would embellish, impress. He would not worry about the truth. “Fyodor Fetisov. An oligarch is someone who’s rich. Dirty rich.”

“Filthy rich,” Mr. Shilling said.

“Filthy rich,” Ilya said. “And this oligarch, once he filled a bathtub with caviar and two prostitutes.”

Sadie looked up from her drawing.

“Hell yes!” J.T. shouted.

“And these prostitutes, they’ve got diamonds for nipples and thongs made out of gold. These are women so fucking beautiful that they cost millions of rubles a day, and he has them for as long as he wants, forever. All thanks to oil. We have a joke at home, that the oligarch’s balls are filled with oil, instead of—I don’t know the word—and when he’s finished he takes a lighter—”

“OK, OK,” Mr. Shilling said, and J.T. started to laugh. Next to him, Sadie was smiling. He looked at her, and for one triumphant second it was clear to him that she liked him. It was right there in her eyes. And then J.T. leaned across the aisle, cupped his hand over his mouth and whispered something in her ear, and it was just as clear to Ilya that J.T. was her boyfriend. Of course she had a boyfriend, he thought; why else did girls sneak out in the middle of the night?

“I’m not sure how those words translate,” Mr. Shilling was saying, “but they’re not really appropriate for school.”

“Which words?” Ilya said.

“Mr. Landry,” Mr. Shilling said, to J.T., “maybe you can tell Ilya after class, once you’ve finished whispering with Ms. Mason.”

“Happy to,” J.T. said with a smirk. Beside him, Sadie went back to her drawing.

J.T. did corner Ilya after class, to tell him that he was a badass. “You’re a fucking oligarch,” J.T. said, raising a fist, and, when Ilya did not raise a fist in return, he bumped it against Ilya’s arm. Ilya wanted to hate him, but the force of J.T.’s enthusiasm was hard to deny. “Catch you later,” J.T. said, and he spun off into the crowd, and when Ilya finally had a chance to look for Sadie, her desk was empty.

By the end of eighth period, Ilya was exhausted. His eyelids were a force to be reckoned with. It had been two nights now of little sleep. Five if he counted the nights he’d spent traveling. He hadn’t taken a decent shit since arriving. He could only manage to expel these angry, fossilized pellets, and with so little output, eating had become uncomfortable. Plus, Sadie had a boyfriend, a boyfriend charming enough to charm even Ilya, though J.T.’s charm dissipated with time as Ilya roamed the halls trying to find his way back to his locker. In the end, he found the library and slumped in front of a computer monitor. It was the middle of the night at home, but he checked his email anyway, thinking that his mother might have stopped off at the Internet Kebab on her way to work. He had only one email, from Aksinya:

Ilya had no idea who Pavel was or whether the email was good or bad news. Surely it was more than a coincidence that Gabe had left Berlozhniki not long after Lana’s murder. Ilya tried to remember the last time he’d seen Gabe and could not. Gabe had been part of life’s backdrop, like the nasty-tempered babki who ran the flower kiosk in the summer and the ancient, one-armed dedok who bore the flag in the Defender of the Fatherland parade each year. The dedok who, Ilya had to admit, had been dead for several years before Ilya noticed. And the fact that the police had been involved seemed especially hard to parse. Had they suspected Gabe too and decided that getting him out of Berlozhniki was easier than reopening the investigation? Or had they just gotten tired of dragging Gabe back up to the Hotel Berlozhniki every time the temperature got below minus ten?

Why the police? Ilya wrote. He clicked send, hoisted his book bag onto his shoulder, and went back into the halls in search of his locker. Half an hour later, Miss Janet found him slumped against it, waiting for Sadie to finish track practice.

“You’ll get scoliosis if you keep sitting like that,” she said, and she ushered him to the front office and set him up at an empty desk that had belonged to another secretary. “Principal Gibbons no longer needed her,” Miss Janet said, with this swell of pride in her voice.

Ilya was afraid that Miss Janet was the sort who would chatter nonstop, who sought out quiet types because they offered the least resistance to verbal barrages, but once Ilya opened his chemistry textbook and began a problem set, she unwrapped a sandwich swaddled in tinfoil, and they settled into a companionable silence that she broke only once, to say, “It must be so strange waking up here. Half a world away from home.”

Home, Ilya thought. The police sent him home, which, of course, meant here.

“It is. It’s very strange,” Ilya said. He looked at Miss Janet, who was considering the last bite of her sandwich. “How would you find someone in America?” he said. He tried to keep his voice nonchalant, like finding this person was not at all crucial, like the prospect of it was not burning through his veins with the power of a drug.

“Find someone? Like in Leffie?”

Ilya nodded.

“You’d look online. In the White Pages,” Miss Janet said.

“The White Pages?”

“Yeah, the White Pages, the Yellow Pages. They were actual books—I’m aging myself—but now they’re databases.” Miss Janet sucked the tip of a finger and dabbed, absently, at stray sandwich crumbs.

“But what if you don’t know where he is?” Ilya said.

“Well, who is he?” Miss Janet said.

“He’s this American who came to my town on a mission, only I can’t remember where he’s from.”

“I guess you could search state by state,” she said. “What kind of mission was it?”

“He wanted to convert us,” Ilya said. He thought of Gabe, pleading with them for a minute of their time, for a chance to be saved, and the way that his pleas had gone from earnest to angry and had seemed, eventually, like rants.

“I figured that,” Miss Janet said. “But convert you to what? Was he Baptist?”

Ilya shook his head, thinking of Papa Cam, who hadn’t been allowed to dance or date or drink soda. “The Church of Later Day Saints,” Ilya said.

Miss Janet smiled. “It’s not ‘later,’ she said. “It’s ‘latter,’ like a ladder that you climb.”

“Ladder. Latter,” Ilya said, and out of habit his hand drifted to his back pocket, where he used to keep his notebook of unknown words, but he’d memorized all the words in it and left the notebook in Berlozhniki.

“So he’s Mormon. I don’t know much about Mormons, but I’m pretty sure there aren’t any in Leffie,” she said. She crushed the tinfoil into a tight ball and tossed it into the trash can under her desk. At home, they did not throw away tinfoil. Babushka rinsed it and hung it to dry on the laundry line, as did everyone else in the kommunalkas. And sometimes, when Ilya was walking home from school and the sun hit the balconies just right, the whole building seemed to sparkle.