Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sadie didn’t go to the trailer by the refinery the next few nights, and Ilya began to wonder if he’d inflated the importance of the woman. Maybe there was some simple explanation. Maybe it was J.T.’s house, and they’d arranged to meet, but his mom had been home and foiled their plans. Then in history one day, Sadie began a new portrait, and as it took shape, he realized it was the woman. Sadie spent five minutes shading under her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, somehow capturing her exact lassitude.

“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 their 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.

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 did 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.