Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Ilya called Maria Mikhailovna from the phone in the kitchen. The house was empty except for Durashka, who was staring out the sliding glass door at a bird perched on the deck railing. Somehow Maria Mikhailovna must have known that it was him, because when she picked up, she said his name instead of “Hello.”

“Zdravstvuyte,” he said.

“Why are you talking to me in Russian? I want to hear your English! All those Americanisms! They haven’t corrupted your grammar, have they?” The excitement in her voice was almost enough to make him hang up, but the tape was in his hand. He had the sense that if he let it out of his grasp it might disappear, and it was sickening to him how light and small it felt, given how much it contained: the ridiculous confession, the months Vladimir had spent in prison and all the miseries that must have entailed.

She said his name again, cautiously this time, as though she could sense his anger fortifying. Then she switched to Russian and said, “Are you all right? What is it? Are they mean to you, the family? Tell me.” Ilya thought of Mama Jamie and the way her face relaxed when she prayed, of the way she held Molly sometimes and stroked the hair back from her forehead, of the notes she left in his lunch bag, each one signed with a string of Xs and Os.

“Nyet,” he managed.

She said, “Is it Vladimir? Is he OK?”

“Are you alone?” he asked.

“I’m alone,” she said, her voice lifting at the end like it was a question.

“I know Vladimir came to see you before the boards—I know he wanted to come here—but did he ever come after the boards?”

“Yes,” she said quickly, as though she were relieved at the ease of the question. “Once.”

“He wanted to help me, right?”

“Yes,” she said again. “Why?”

“What did you tell him? Did you tell him that you’d taken the boards?”

“No. I just said that he needed to keep his mouth shut. I wasn’t about to tell him, not after he’d taken you to the Tower—”

“And did you tell Dmitri that he’d come to see you?”

Ilya had never interrupted her before, and he could hear the sting of it in her voice when she said, “Of course I did. Dmitri was worried that someone would find out. Fetisov or the mayor or who knows who. Has someone found out?” she said. “Is that what’s wrong? Someone there?”

He was quiet for a moment. He could understand, now, how Dmitri had threatened Vladimir, what he had used. It had been Ilya, here, in America.

“Ilya,” she said, “please tell me.”

But Vladimir had not known how much Dmitri loved Maria Mikhailovna; Dmitri never would have kept Ilya from coming to America because that was what she wanted. That December night in their apartment, Ilya remembered thinking that the Malikovs’ love had been palpable, strong enough to change the quality of the light, the air. And then, after Dmitri had chased Vladimir with his car, he had asked Ilya not to tell her. He had said that she was too good for this world. He was right, and Ilya knew that if there was anyone who could hold Dmitri accountable, it was her.

He told her. About the tape that Vladimir had made and about how Gabe had found Lana and about how Dmitri had driven Gabe to the airport and told him never to come back.

“Are you saying he killed them? The girls? I was with him the night Lana died. I’m sure of it—if it was the night before the boards. There has to be another explanation.” Her voice was incredulous, defensive, but not scared, not yet. She didn’t know what came next, and he hated her for that in the same way that he hated Lana in that picture in the Tower, the assumption in Lana’s pursed lips, her angry eyes, that life would continue as it always had.

“I have the tape,” he said. “I could send it to the TV stations.”

“To the—” She made this small, choking sound. She understood now. Now she was scared.

Once, when Ilya was eleven or twelve, Babushka had called Maria Mikhailovna a saint. His mother usually resisted Babushka’s effusions, especially those of a religious nature, but in this case, she’d agreed, and agreement between them was like a warm, cloudless day in Berlozhniki—rare—and Ilya had soaked it up, thinking, She isn’t just a saint, she’s mine. My saint.

He said, “If anything happens to Vladimir, it’ll be on every news channel, in every paper in America. Tell him that.”

She was quiet for a long moment, and Ilya felt, suddenly, the distance between them: the thousands of miles of line slicing the sky and sea. Then she said, softly, “But you haven’t done that yet?”

“No,” he said. “I wanted to give you a chance—to give him a chance—to get Vladimir out.”

“Then I guess I should thank you for that,” she said, and she hung up, and he felt like he might vomit.

It was nighttime in Berlozhniki, and he could see her standing at that enormous window. She was tiny against the inky darkness pressing at that one, perfect pane. He could see her, banging a fist against the glass. It didn’t break. It wouldn’t break no matter how hard she hit it. The night Ilya had come for dinner, Dmitri had told him that the window was reinforced, bulletproof, that nothing could shatter it, not ever.

Ilya found Sadie up at the track. Practice was over, or at least she was the only one still there, crouched in the blocks on the far straightaway. She didn’t see him at first. Her eyes were on the spot where the track started to curve. She hit a button on her watch. Raz, dva, tri, he counted, and she started to run.

He’d only ever known Sadie to move with a nonchalance that was almost lazy—even when they were together in the back of her car—but as he watched her now, the laziness fell away and the nonchalance too, and there was a naked urgency there. Pure want, he thought, or maybe pure fear, and he wondered if Lana had had a chance to run the night she’d been killed and whether her eyes had looked like Sadie’s did, like they wanted to leave her body behind.

She slowed when she saw him and lifted a hand.

“Is it good or bad?” she said. She put her hands on her hips and hung her head for a second to catch her breath.

“Both,” Ilya said. And as they walked around the track, he told her about the confession, and that he’d called Maria Mikhailovna.

“And what will she do?” Sadie said when he’d finished.

“She’ll get him out,” he said.

Sadie shook her head. “What if you’d never listened to them?”

“I know,” Ilya said. He’d imagined the tapes still sitting in their plastic bag in the Tower; he’d imagined them stolen in transit, just as the batteries had been; he’d imagined the redheaded nurse dropping them into a trash can; or Gabe searching the bag for drugs and, finding none, leaving it in the snow by his bench; and with each way Vladimir’s plan could have gone wrong, his stomach seized.

Sadie squeezed his hand. “What’s the bad? You said it was both.”

He told her about the boards.

“You never took them at all?” she said.

He shook his head. Vladimir, in his bravado, had thought that if he could just get Ilya to America, the how would not matter. A technicality, Vladimir would say, because he did not understand the rigidity of American morals. In Russia, you paid the nurse for the chance to see your brother; in Russia, a bribe was how you got your foot in the door, the starting point of negotiations. But not here. What had Principal Gibbons said to Ilya on that first day of school? Hook or crook, with a nasty emphasis on the crook.

“Will they send me back? If they find out?” he said. He’d asked her the same question that first night, and he felt, suddenly, the weight of all the lies he’d told the Masons, and he wanted to be rid of them.

Sadie was quiet for a second, and then she said, “Do you want to stay? I mean, if Vladimir gets out, would you still want to stay?”

He could sense, under the question, her fear of being left. He could feel how hard it had been for her to ask it lightly, to keep her own want out of it.

He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I want to stay.”

She smiled at him. “OK,” she said, “then we find a way for you to stay.”

The next day, Ilya heard nothing from Maria Mikhailovna or Dmitri. He checked his email between classes and then, when that became unbearable, he skipped his classes altogether and sat at the computer in the library refreshing his email over and over.

“Time’s up, Ilya,” the librarian said, and Ilya swiveled in his chair to find the room empty, the lights dimmed. The last bus was pulling out of the parking lot, and the librarian was giving him a look of concern.

He nodded, hit refresh one more time, and watched his inbox blink, then reload, still empty. He walked to the Bojangles’ more out of habit than hunger. At the register, Sharice failed to greet him.

“Has that woman been back?” he said. “The one who fell.” He gestured toward the soda machine.

“You think that was bad,” Sharice said. “She slept in that booth half the day yesterday. I swear she comes here just to haunt me.”

“She seems worse?”

Sharice nodded, then gave Ilya a long look and said, “What are you creeping on her for? You are the last thing she needs.”

“I’m not creeping,” Ilya said.

“Sure,” Sharice said. “You want more chicken or not?”

That night Ilya could not sleep. Midnight came, then one a.m., then two. He was hoping that Sadie might go to see her mother, that he could walk with her, get his mind off everything, but by three a.m. it was late enough that he knew she wouldn’t go.

He pulled on his sneakers and slid open the door and hiked down the hill to Route 21. He broke into a run. At first to warm himself—it was finally cold at night here—and then because the motion felt good, made him optimistic. With each step he took, the refinery bobbed on the horizon. He could feel his lungs, the wet curves of them drying with each inhale. He wondered how long it had been since Vladimir had been outside. He wondered if there was a window in Vladimir’s cell. He tried to send patience through the air to Vladimir like it was a wish. Sweat stung his eyes. He was close now. The air was cut with chemicals, so burnt and acrid that he couldn’t breathe deeply. Vladimir and Sergey used to say that you’d get superpowers if you breathed the refinery air, like Superman did from living on Krypton. Lap it up, they’d tell him. Stop holding your nose. That had been when they were young enough and the refinery was new enough that they noticed the smell.

The lights were on in the trailer, and from the sidewalk Ilya could see Sadie’s mom sleeping on the couch. She looked peaceful enough, but still he wanted to know that she was breathing. He couldn’t get what Sharice had said about her haunting the Bojangles’ out of his head. There was a bush in front of the window, dry with neglect, and even when he pressed himself into its bristles, he couldn’t see the rise and fall of her chest.

Over her head, one corner of the poster of the woman in the white dress had come unstuck. Trash covered the coffee table—an empty tissue box, a jug of juice, a couple of cans, a wadded T-shirt. The pink pipe was nestled among them, and next to it was a syringe.

Ilya’s sweat turned cold, and his skin tightened. She was completely still on the couch. Too still, he thought. He reached down, grasped one of the bush’s branches, and broke it off. He rapped it against the window. Once, twice, three times. Nothing.

No, he thought, imagining Vladimir’s bone, all that blood. No.

He crouched and groped on the ground until he found a rock, half embedded in the hard-packed dirt of her yard. Before he could think better of it, he took a step back and threw the rock. It hit the trailer’s plastic siding, and the noise of it was enormous. Across the street a motion light flashed on. A dog barked. And on the couch, Sadie’s mom sat up and yelled, “What the fucking fuck?”

By the time she got to the window, he was running again, back down Route 21, wondering why he hadn’t just knocked on her door.