Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Marilee and Molly made a new sign with Vladimir’s name etched in deliberate letters, only this time Ilya helped them write it in Cyrillic, because, he explained, Vladimir really, truly didn’t speak any English at all. Sadie sat next to him on the ride to the airport, and though she was careful not to touch him, he could feel that she wanted to, and that was enough.

Vladimir had called two days earlier. Ilya and the Masons were just home from Star Pilgrim, where Pastor Kyle had told a whitewashed version of Vladimir’s story after which the collection basket had bobbed down the rows, filling with money to fund his stay. Marilee had been the one to answer the phone, and after a moment she had looked at the receiver with exasperation and said, “I think it’s a wrong number.” She punched the speakerphone button, and Vladimir’s terrible English had flooded the kitchen.

“Hello,” he’d said, over and over, only coming from him the word sounded like “Yellow.”

Ilya grabbed the receiver from Marilee and turned the speaker off just as Mama Jamie realized who it was and ushered the girls out to the deck, hissing something about privacy to Marilee.

“Vlad,” he said.

“You better stop emailing me about this girl and seal the deal. Just once, Ilyusha, think with your dick instead of your brain.”

“You got my emails,” Ilya said.

“Of course I got them. One day in the life of fucking Ilya Denisovich.” His voice was rushed, euphoric. There was no regard in it for the risks he’d taken. It was exactly as Ilya had expected it to be, as Ilya had wanted it to be, but still Ilya had to fight the urge to ask him if he was high. He wanted, so badly, not to ruin the moment.

“Are you home?” he said instead.

“At the Kebab, and Kirill the tight-ass motherfucker is the only one in this whole town not cutting me a deal so I have—I don’t know—a minute left, but I’ll see you soon, bratishka.”

“Wait,” Ilya said, wishing there were a way to keep Vladimir on the phone for the next two days until he saw him in person. “Tell me how you did it. How’d you get him on tape?”

Ilya had wondered this; he’d marveled at the planning it must have entailed for Vladimir to know that Dmitri was coming to the clinic and to record him.

“He came and threatened me,” Vladimir said. “He said he wouldn’t let you go if I didn’t confess to the murders. And the boards—he said you’d have it on your record for life that you’d cheated, that you wouldn’t be able to go to university, get a job. He said he was going to fuck you over so completely, and the whole time he’s talking, I’m thinking, I’m going to fuck you over, you fucker. I’m going to rip you apart. That’s the thing about everyone assuming you’re an idiot—every once in a while it gives you the upper hand.

“So I told Dmitri I needed a couple days to think about it, and then I convinced that nurse to give me a little warning, and two days later, when he comes back, I stuck the tape player under the sheets. Right where my knee should be.”

“But how’d you get the tapes?” Ilya said.

“Aksinya brought them. I’d been listening to them for a while. Like you,” he said, sounding almost bashful at this confession. “I figured if I could just learn a little English then you’d find a way to get me there.”

Someone called Vladimir’s name in the background.

“I’m talking to my brother, asshole!” Vladimir shouted. And then he lowered his voice, so that it was just like it had been when they were little and would whisper in bed even though their mother was at work and Babushka was sleeping and no one was trying to overhear them. “You and me, Hollywood Boulevard, right?” he said, and the call ended.

Ilya and the Masons waited by the arrivals door for fifteen minutes, more even, until the people coming from the gates slowed to a trickle. The security guard stationed by the NO RE-ENTRY sign took out a pen, gave it a cruel click, and began to do a crossword puzzle. An airport employee pushed past him with an old woman in a wheelchair. Something was stuck in one of the wheels, making a ticking sound with each revolution. Surely the old woman was the last passenger, Ilya thought, which meant that Vladimir had missed the flight. He’d found some party in Moscow and had ended up using his tickets as roll papers. Or he’d never left Berlozhniki at all.

Sadie pulled her hair back, twisted it into a bun, and then let it drop again, which was something that she did when she was nervous. She saw him looking at her, saw him see her nervousness, and perhaps to make up for it, she took his hand and squeezed it. Mama Jamie noticed without understanding, and she gave Ilya this small, close-lipped smile. It was a smile meant to temper expectations, and it made Ilya’s chest hurt.

“Maybe he missed it,” he said, just as a figure appeared at the end of the corridor. He was silhouetted by a bank of windows, and far enough away that Ilya couldn’t be sure. His first day in America he had conjured Vladimir in the back of the Masons’ car, and he thought he might be doing it again. The loose-jointed walk. The laces of his boots dragging on the carpet. How slowly he moved! Had always moved, as though he had nowhere in the world to be. And often he didn’t. He was meters from them now, but Ilya was afraid to look at his face, afraid it might disappear under scrutiny.

Papa Cam said, “Is that him?”

Marilee and Molly raised their arms over their heads, locked their elbows, and held the sign high.

The figure seemed to hesitate there, by the NO RE-ENTRY sign, by the chubby guard and his crossword puzzle. His face was bland and friendly. His eyes bovine in their lack of guile. He looked at Ilya with a mild disinterest that felt like a kick in the gut. And, of course, he had two legs, and Vladimir had only one.

“No,” Ilya said.

Papa Cam and Mama Jamie left Ilya and the girls, and went to have Vladimir paged. That same terrible Russian blared through the bathroom’s empty stalls, each of which Ilya checked and rechecked, hoping that somehow he had missed Vladimir, that he might be lost, hiding, as scared or hesitant as Ilya had been two months earlier. They got pretzels from the vending machine, took over a bank of chairs, and waited until the next flight from Atlanta had arrived and departed, until the security guard had finished his puzzle, and then his shift, and finally Papa Cam said, “Let’s go, troops. We can always come back tomorrow.”

There was a message waiting on the Masons’ machine, and as soon as Ilya saw the flashing light, he knew what it would say. Or maybe he’d known sooner, when that other boy, that American boy, with his two perfect legs, had walked past them, and then out the door to the curb, where he’d stood and blinked in the light.

Ilya’s mother’s voice was detached, formal, as though the Masons might be able to understand her. Vladimir had gone to Aksinya’s on his last night to say good-bye, only he hadn’t come home in the morning. He’d taken krokodil again. They both had, and Aksinya had woken up with his arm around her, and his mother said that she had lain that way for minutes, because she hadn’t been so completely happy in a long time, and then Vladimir’s arm began to take on a strange weight, and he wouldn’t answer when she said his name.

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 backs, 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.