Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER THREE

The sun was still high as Papa Cam pulled onto a smaller street and sped up a rise into a cul-de-sac where a lone house bit a chunk out of the sky. It was as graceless as a kommunalka. Over one of its shoulders, Ilya could make out the refinery, so small that its lights had merged into one light. Its smoke melted into the clouds. The Masons’ lawn was cut military short, but the lots on either side were full-grown with sawgrass.

“It was supposed to be a neighborhood, then the market crashed,” Papa Cam said. He slung Ilya’s duffel over his shoulder with a grunt and made his way up a brick walk to the door.

“We have it all to ourselves,” Molly said in a rote, uninflected way, as though that were the party line.

Inside, everything—the walls, the furniture, the pillows, the countertops—was the color of tea made for a child, with lots of milk. The ceilings went up and up and up, and there seemed a determination not to divide space into rooms. The kitchen bled into the dining room, which bled into the den and the foyer, where the stairs curled into an open-air hallway. Mama Jamie gave Ilya a tour, using game-show host gestures, and the house did seem like something on TV. It was all polish; it lacked dimension, lacked the smells and sounds and smudges that were life in the kommunalkas. Ilya’s duffel, in all of its dirtiness, suddenly seemed like the only real thing, and he wanted to grab it from the chair where Papa Cam had left it and run. He would head toward the refinery and figure things out from there, he thought, just as Mama Jamie reached out and took his arm. Ilya flinched, and there was this flash of fear in her eyes, as though he’d been the one to touch her. She looked at him and he looked at her, and his heart was beating so hard that he was sure that she could see it shaking his body. Then she smiled. And he was wondering how many times she would do that—let her goodwill trump her instincts—when footsteps sounded in the hallway and a girl appeared at the top of the stairs. The third daughter. The first daughter, he thought, because she was the eldest. She was his age. Maybe a year younger. Her hair was dyed a shade close to white, which was more unsettling than attractive, but still there was something beautiful about her. Like the girls in Berlozhniki, she was all long, pale lengths: her shins, her wrists, her neck, which she was stretching now, with an arm crooked over her head and an elbow pointing to the ceiling. Her voice was long and pale too.

“Took you a while,” she said, and it did not in any way mean that she cared. She let her arm drop and rolled her head gently and her eyes closed with the motion. She was wearing an enormous black T-shirt with cut-off jean shorts, and as she walked down the stairs toward him, the T-shirt consumed all of her shorts except the little white threads that hung down her thighs like icicles. Her sneakers were high-tops, spray-painted silver so that even the laces were crusty with paint.

“Ilya,” Mama Jamie said, “this is Sadie.”

Sadie looked at him for a long moment. “Welcome to Leffie,” she said. “Home of the largest boudin ball ever cooked.” She smiled. A darting, furtive expression. Ilya tried to think what “boudin” meant and could not.

“It’s not as bad as all that,” Papa Cam said.

“True,” Sadie said. “There’s the corn festival.”

“Ilya doesn’t speak quite as much English as we were thinking,” Mama Jamie said, “but he’s going to learn fast. Immersion, right?”

“He doesn’t speak any,” Marilee said.

Sadie rolled her eyes—whether at Marilee or her mom or his lack of English, Ilya wasn’t sure—and walked past them all into the kitchen. She opened the fridge door and disappeared behind it. Ilya thought that they would all migrate to the kitchen, that naturally they would follow her, but Mama Jamie just called, “Don’t spoil your supper,” and led Ilya upstairs, where the girls’ bedrooms marched down the hall, one after another. Marilee and Molly opened their doors to reveal studies of pink and green—plaid, polka dots, stripes, flowers. There was not an inch that had been left unmolested. But when Ilya looked through the cracked doorway into Sadie’s bedroom, it was spartan: a white quilt on a slim bed; a single pillow over which a slight, black cross hung; a wooden desk with a chair lumped in clothes. It looked temporarily inhabited, like there might be a suitcase somewhere out of sight. He wanted to linger, to open the door just a little wider, but Mama Jamie had moved on.

“This is our room,” she said, presenting a carpeted kingdom into which Ilya could easily have tucked his entire apartment. “The door is always open.”

“Well, not literally,” Papa Cam said, “but you can always knock.”

Ilya stared. He couldn’t help it. The TV at the foot of their bed was as big as a door and as thin as a dinner plate. There was a sleek bureau with a dozen drawers, and on top was a silver tray bearing bottles of perfume and shimmery boxes. Through another door he glimpsed a bathroom with marble counters and two sinks in case Mama Jamie and Papa Cam ever wanted to wash their faces in concert. He tried to lock on to just one detail that he could give to his mother, something that she might use like currency with the other mothers in the kommunalkas, something about which she might say, “This is what it’s really like there,” but no one in the kommunalkas would talk to his mother now, with Vladimir in prison, and besides there wasn’t any detail that wouldn’t sting.

When they’d gone back downstairs, Papa Cam said, “I’m going to call Terry and see if we can’t figure out this whole language situation. Maybe there’s someone in Leffie who speaks Russian.”

“Doubtful,” Sadie said. She had a series of plastic containers open on the counter. She dabbed a finger into a beige puree, tasted it, and wrinkled her nose. “Is this old?” she said.

Mama Jamie ignored her and went on telling Ilya about the house. She pointed here and there. Bathroom, she said. Towels. Trash. Chores. Yard. Phone. Garage. Her lips did wild exaggerations of each word, and twice beads of spit flew off her tongue, propelled by the force of her enunciations.

“We have a pool,” she said, “and if you don’t know how to swim, Papa Cam can teach you. He taught all the girls. He had Molly doing freestyle—”

“I’m sure he knows how to swim,” Sadie said.

Ilya knew little more than how to keep his head above water—summers in Berlozhniki were short, and between the mine and the refinery, the river wasn’t so clean—but his throat caved in at the thought of Sadie in a bathing suit. A bikini. Topless, even, with sunglasses and a stomach piercing and a sweating Coke can in hand. It was a ridiculous fantasy, he knew, ripped in part from some advertisement he’d internalized, and it came barbed with the memory of nights, lying in bed, listening to Vladimir talk about girls. He couldn’t think of any fantasy of his that hadn’t been Vladimir’s first.

“Terry’s looking into it,” Papa Cam said, coming back in from the deck. “He was stumped. He said Ilya’s the best student in the whole town there, like some sort of language savant, at least according to his teacher there. He’s going to get in touch with her.”

Maria Mikhailovna. Ilya could see her pushing her glasses up her nose, nodding to the beat of his conjugations. He could see the tiny red notations she made in the margins of his homework, and the way she gripped her pen with one too many fingers. What would she say if she saw him now, after all her work, after all she’d risked, pretending not to understand a word of English?

Mama Jamie’s smile was failing her. Worry puckered her mouth. He knew that this was the moment to speak up, to blurt out something in English, to say he’d been exhausted, scared. Any excuse would do, but he couldn’t shake the idea that uttering a word in English would be letting go of something.

“Ilya, can you understand us?” Mama Jamie said. “Can you—”

“I’m out of here,” Sadie said. She grabbed a backpack from a closet off the kitchen, and Mama Jamie and Papa Cam pulled their eyes off Ilya and looked at her.

“Where are you going?” Papa Cam said.

“Kayla’s,” she said. “The summer reading report’s due Tuesday.”

“And you’ve had how long to work on it—all summer?” Mama Jamie said. “It’s Ilya’s first night. We’re going to eat soon.”

There was a long silence that Ilya recognized. Even the little girls stared at Sadie with big eyes, and Ilya could see that she was like Vladimir had been. She was the one they worried about.

Sadie zipped up her backpack, which was encrusted with the same silver spray paint as her sneakers. As she pulled it onto her shoulders, her hair got trapped under the straps. She gathered it at the nape of her neck and freed it, and her eyes met his. She had not been particularly nice to him, but still he had the distinct impression that she’d saved him somehow, that she’d interrupted Mama Jamie on purpose and bought him a little more time.

“Home by ten,” Papa Cam said.

“Nine,” Mama Jamie said.

“Later,” Sadie said to no one in particular.

As Mama Jamie slipped a casserole into the oven, Papa Cam led Ilya out onto the deck to see the backyard. A grill was tucked into one corner. Mow lines checked the grass, which was encircled by a low brick wall.

“It’s to keep out alligators,” Papa Cam said, pointing at the wall. “Vicious, but they can’t even climb a foot.”

The pool was square and still, the water taking on a dark shine, like oil, in the dusk. Papa Cam seemed to have taken the idea of immersion less literally than Mama Jamie, or maybe he was more comfortable with silence. He leaned against the deck rail and let Ilya look for himself. Eventually he said, “It took us two years to get the pool built. For a while there I thought it just wasn’t in God’s plan.”

Part of Ilya wanted to express his awe, but what he wanted to say more—the thing burning his tongue like acid—was that if God did exist then he was a motherfucker if the Masons’ pool was part of his plan, was even a blip on his radar.

Ilya thought of his mother and Babushka, wondered what they were doing at that moment. He did not even know what time it was at home, whether they were sitting on the wooden bench in the hall of the police station, waiting for someone to talk to them, or whether his mom was halfway through her night shift, eating the boiled eggs on rye that Babushka packed her every evening. He couldn’t imagine where Vladimir was. The only prisons he’d seen were on TV—American prisons—and he knew that wherever they were holding Vladimir would be worse. But then, suddenly, he could picture Vladimir: his back against a rough concrete wall, the kind that crumbled slightly under your fingertips. His lips were moving like he was praying, but of course he wasn’t. He was reciting the lines from Kickboxer, the movie unspooling behind his eyelids, his fists clenching with the muscle memory of the fight scenes.

Behind him, Papa Cam flipped a light switch on the wall of the house, and the pool jumped into being. Turquoise and glowing, with a rim of blue tiles and a lone leaf resting on the bottom.

“There,” Papa Cam said. His voice was exalted, and Ilya thought he might vomit.

For almost a year, since the night Maria Mikhailovna had knocked on their door, he had thought about America constantly. On some level he had imagined the wide, smooth streets, the car-size refrigerators, the tank-size cars, the carpets that went all the way from one wall to another. He had even anticipated the faith with which the Masons clicked their seat belts; the way Papa Cam had paid for the airport parking with a lazy swipe of his credit card; the fact that, in the one grocery store they’d driven past, there had been no lines. But he hadn’t ever thought of this: in America, they light their pools. This was the detail for his mother. He imagined telling her. He could almost hear her silence, the quick suck of air through her teeth.

“Sometimes,” Papa Cam said, “the girls like to swim at night.”