Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

He didn’t do it,” Ilya said, as J.T. turned the truck around in the gravel cul-de-sac at the end of Gabe’s street. He told them the story that Gabe had told him—how he’d found Lana’s body and prayed over her in the snow, the car passing him on the lumber road, the flashlight lancing the trees.

“It could be anyone,” he said.

“Not anyone,” Sadie said. “Vladimir doesn’t have a car, right?”

“No,” Ilya said, “but he has a flashlight.” Vladimir had gripped it as he’d led Ilya through the Tower. The light had snagged on glass, swept over graffiti, and, at the end of that long hallway, it had found Lana’s face.

Anger grew, hot, in Ilya’s stomach. He was angry at Gabe, of course, for not being the one. He was angry at whoever had killed the girls. He was angry at the girls, even, for their vulnerability. But most of all he was angry at Vladimir, for becoming the sort of person who got addicted, convicted, who confessed to things he hadn’t done, because no one would believe the truth from him. He was angry at the millions of mistakes Vladimir had made—large and small. He was angry for Vladimir’s sake, and for his own. What had Dmitri Malikov told him? That you can’t change people who don’t want to change themselves? The solution was easy: let Vladimir confess, let him plead guilty, let him go to jail if that was what he wanted.

They were passing the last of Gabe’s town: a grocery store with one cart stranded in its lot; a balloon man bending and snapping in the sky over an auto dealership; then the high school, its marquee announcing the score from the previous night’s football game. Above it was the bear from Gabe’s hat: orange, with rabid eyes, its fangs bared. The last piece of the puzzle—but the picture it formed didn’t help Vladimir, didn’t really include him at all.

That afternoon, exhausted, they stopped at a campground for the night. It was an old-growth forest, the shade of shadows like home to Ilya. A copper creek rushed through its center, the water whitening with the current. J.T. went on a food run, and Ilya and Sadie wandered down a trail that followed the creek. The light was brindled and beautiful, and it was hard for Ilya to believe that the day could contain this moment and Gabe’s house. He wondered what Gabe was doing now, whether he had fallen back to sleep or whether he was working on the refinery, gluing together the tiny panels of its fence, painting its lengths of silver pipes. What would he do with himself when the town was complete? And, as if in answer, Ilya could picture him painting the trees of the endless forests that surrounded it.

Sadie held his hand as they walked. They passed a few tents close to the trailhead, bright flags between the trees, but after a while, the sounds of the highway faded, and the woods got quiet. The air was laced with this fungal tang, and Ilya thought of the terrible painting at home over the couch, of the mother and daughter mushroom hunting in the forest. Babushka had told them that she hated that painting, hated the smug smile on the little girl’s face, hated the suggestion that all was right with the world. And Vladimir had said, “But that’s why I like it,” and then, because there wasn’t any place for earnestness in their world, or maybe just because Vladimir was perpetually horny, he’d added, “That and the mama’s titties.”

“You know what I fantasize about sometimes?” Sadie said. The sun was behind her; her profile carved the light.

Ilya shook his head.

“Burning my mom’s place down. Not when she’s home or anything. I just want it to be totally destroyed. All her shit charred. I want to see her face when she finds it, and I want her to know it was me. Then I want her to leave, to go somewhere where I don’t know where she is.” She walked faster as she talked, as though she knew what was at the end of the trail and she wanted to get to it. “I tried it once. When I was eleven. I had a newspaper and some matches and was so fucking pissed.”

“What happened?”

Sadie laughed, this harsh, little sound. “I was crouched in the bushes beside her house, trying to light a match forever. But I almost threw up thinking that she’d be gone, that I wouldn’t know if she was alive or dead or high or what. Then a neighbor found me and called Mama Jamie. And of course Mama Jamie was in hysterics. Crying for days, asking me what she was doing wrong, why I was turning into a delinquent. Like I was turning into my mom. I could see how scared she was on her face. Never mind that I hadn’t actually done anything. I couldn’t even get the match lit.”

They reached the end of the trail, which was nothing but a cluster of logs that bordered the creek. He reached into the water, felt the cold more in his bones than in his skin, and his hand closed on a rock. A perfect slingshot rock, he thought, and he slipped it into his pocket.

“But that doesn’t mean I don’t wish I had. Every day,” she said. “Until you came.” He looked at her. Half of her face was in the light, the other half in the shaking shadow of some leaves. She smiled. “Now I just think about it every other day.”

He laughed, and they kissed, and he could still feel it—that happiness for him was like a dog chained to a stake, that whenever he let it run, he’d be yanked back, but still he let it run for a second and tried not to brace himself for the pull of the chain.

When she unbuttoned his jeans, he said, “I’ve never done this before,” and it didn’t occur to him until afterward that that was something Vladimir would never say, that inexperience was something Vladimir never admitted to, and it didn’t matter anyway, because she said, “We’re not doing that. I’ve got something else in mind.”

Ilya was home in time for Sunday dinner and opened the door to the usual chaos. Molly and Marilee were tussling over what to watch on TV. Papa Cam was whipping open a new trash bag, the plastic ballooning as Mama Jamie sang along to Sting and pounded a chicken cutlet to the beat. Sadie had come home in her own car an hour earlier, and when she saw him in the doorway, she said, “Hey! How was the fishing?”

At the sight of her, the woods came back to him, made his dick swell with the memory of her hand on it, of her mouth hot on his stomach.

“That good, huh?” Papa Cam said. “You look like you’re a convert.”

Ilya nodded. “We caught gar,” he said, which was what J.T. had told him to say.

“Well, where are they?” Papa Cam said. “We were counting on you for a fish fry.”

“J.T. kept them all, didn’t he?” Sadie said. “He’s literally the most selfish person on the planet.”

“Did you miss me?” Molly asked, which was something she had started asking him every day when he got back from school, and Ilya felt this sudden ache for these people, for their patterns, for how willing they had been to take him in, and for how little he’d given them in return.

“Of course,” he said.

“After dinner let’s watch the sermon,” Mama Jamie said. “So you all can see what you missed.”

Ilya’s eyes met Sadie’s over the table. She had predicted this punishment, and she was grinning at him now, as she said, “Can’t wait. Were the testimonials especially juicy?”

The testimonials were wedged between the hymns and the sermons at every Star Pilgrim service. They were awkward allegros of shame or expansive expressions of guilt, depending less on the severity of the transgression than on the character of the transgressor.

“Don’t mock it ’til you’ve tried it,” Mama Jamie said. She was always begging the girls to give testimonials, but Molly was too shy, Marilee too self-righteous, and Sadie too private. “But since you asked, no, they were not especially juicy. It was Margaret Joy again.”

Sadie groaned and, as they set the table, she told Ilya the story of Margaret Joy, whose favorite cat had been accidentally poisoned by a neighbor whom Margaret Joy now tortured in tiny, mostly inconsequential ways. “She’ll turn her neighbor’s hose on so it’s just barely running all night long, or cut the roses off her bushes before they bloom.”

Ilya laughed, and Sadie said, “Bet you can’t wait to hear what she’s done this time.”

Later, after dinner, after they had watched the service and Margaret Joy had confessed to allowing another cat of hers to urinate on her neighbor’s lawn furniture, once he was alone in the basement, Ilya played the tape he’d made at Gabe’s house. He listened to Gabe’s story over and over, with his eyes closed so that he could see it all. Lana and that halo of bloody snow. The redheaded nurse shoving the bag of Ilya’s tapes into Gabe’s arms. Austin with his perfect faith and his wide smile and the plaid tie. There was Gabe roaming the Tower, looking for Vladimir and Sergey and krokodil. What did you people do to him? Frank asked, over and over, and Dmitri Malikov was kissing Gabe’s forehead, and the train was pushing through the snow to Berlozhniki, the end of the line, and Gabe stepped off it, looking small under the faded banner that proclaimed, BERLOZHNIKI MINES RUSSIA’S FUTURE!

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 might 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.