Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

“Never hurts to stick with the basics,” he said.

“Stick with the basics,” Ilya repeated, just the way he used to with Michael and Stephanie when he wanted to commit something they’d said to memory.

“Quick study,” Papa Cam said. “Do you know that one?”

Ilya shook his head. “Quick study,” he said.

“Exactly.” Papa Cam smiled.

On the way home they stopped at a place called Red’s that served sandwiches as long as Ilya’s forearm. They ate at picnic tables overlooking a stagnant stream with shit-colored water. The sandwiches, Ilya learned, were called “po’ boys” and the stream was called a “bayou,” and the gray-green vines cloaking the trees were “Spanish moss.” Ilya’s English was not as perfect as Maria Mikhailovna had believed or as he had hoped. There were constant hiccups in the conversation—moments when the Masons’ eyes flicked up slightly, as though they were searching their brains for his meaning—and he was so much slower than he wanted to be. English, as the Masons spoke it, was a rapid-fire slurry of slang and abbreviations and interruptions. If he gave it his full attention, he could catch enough of what they said to cobble together an understanding, but he kept thinking about Vladimir’s eyes in that picture and he’d lose the thread of the conversation, and then, by the time he uttered a word aloud, whatever he said seemed clunky and irrelevant. He would flush, embarrassed, and his eyes would find Sadie. Sadie, poking at her sandwich with a fork; Sadie, pulling apart the strands from a stray clump of moss and braiding them back together; Sadie, with her face half hidden behind a curtain of hair. She seemed separate from her family. Self-contained. He thought of her room—the empty walls, the spartan bed—and was not sure what to make of her. He thought of her standing in the dark by the pool. Sometimes she looked at him too, and if there wasn’t necessarily affection there, there was at least a measure of curiosity. And she had touched his arm at Star Pilgrim. She had sat next to him in the car. Small things, sure, but taken together they began to add up.

By the time they got home that night, Ilya’s head throbbed with the effort of understanding. His tongue was so exhausted that it had become a presence in his mouth. But still, when the Masons said “Good night,” he was able to answer. “Sleep tight.” It was an expression that had long confused him, but from their smiles he could see that that, at least, he had gotten right.

In the months between Vladimir’s arrest and his own departure, Ilya had tried to ask himself the sorts of questions that the police would have been asking had Vladimir not confessed. The questions that they should have been asking even though he had confessed. Three women were dead: Olga Nadiova, Yulia Podtochina, and Lana. In the movies, there was always one thing that connected the victims and that inevitably led to the killer, but Lana and Yulia and Olga were connected in a million messy ways. They were all women, all lower class, all somewhat attractive. They all liked to party. Olga and Lana had lived in the kommunalkas. Yulia and Olga had been seen together at Dolls, a club named after some infamous Moscow hot spot that no one had ever seen. Yulia had worked at the refinery, and so had Lana’s dad, a welder whose cheeks were flecked with scars from flying sparks.

Of the three, Lana was the only one Ilya had actually known, and so he’d asked himself over and over whether there was anyone who had wanted her dead. He tried to imagine Lana at school, before she’d dropped out like Vladimir and Sergey and Aksinya. He tried to picture her in the hallway, tried to remember where her locker had been, which table she’d eaten at in the cafeteria, and who had sat next to her, but she’d been in a different grade, and Ilya had always been studying. Studying so much that he might as well have existed in a different world. He barely knew who her friends were, let alone her enemies.

One afternoon, desperate for information, he’d gone to see Aksinya at her sister’s apartment. She’d answered the door in her coat, just home from somewhere, her eyes shiny with exhaustion or tears or drugs or all three.

“Ilyusha,” she’d said, “Lana was like sugar. Simple, sweet. People made fun of her, but you couldn’t not like her.”

“But was there anyone who liked her too much?”

Aksinya shook her head. “Too much? She slept around. She wanted a boyfriend, but nobody was knocking down her door.”

“Slept around?”

“Is that a big shock? She hooked up with you, right? So, yeah, she was scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

“What about Sergey?” Ilya asked.

“For sure when we were younger. But not for a while I don’t think.”

Aksinya was beautiful enough to leave Berlozhniki—that was what people said about her—and Ilya had always wondered whether Vladimir loved her beauty more or her potential for flight, but since Vladimir’s arrest there was this weariness to her. As though she weren’t still young, as though she hadn’t been young for a long, long time. She wouldn’t ever leave. Ilya could see it: she’d marry some midlevel apparatchik, move into an apartment a little better than this one. She’d have kids and love them, but at night, she’d dream of Vladimir and the way that when he held her his laughter had shaken her body, had felt like it was coming out of her own mouth. Then she would wake up.

“And what about Vladimir?” Ilya asked, his brother’s name like a lump in his throat.

“Don’t say his name like that,” she’d said.

“Like what?” he said.

“Like you-know-what,” she said. “He didn’t kill anybody. And he didn’t sleep with my best fucking friend.”

She’d shut the door then. It was the same thin plywood as his own door. He could have knocked again—she would have opened it—but he hadn’t had any other questions to ask.

Now, in the Masons’ basement, he logged back in to VKontakte. It had been ten hours since the church service at Star Pilgrim, and he was sure that he had imagined Vladimir’s sidelong look in the picture, just as he’d imagined the heat of Lana’s skin against his palm. As he typed in Vladimir’s name, there was this leadenness to his lungs, the anticipation of a dead end. This was real life, he reminded himself, not a movie, not a telenovela where the murders were committed and solved within an episode. The image loaded, and there was Vladimir’s mouth. It was open. He had been saying something—Ilya had been right about that—but his eyes were looking straight at the camera.

Ilya sighed and clicked Aksinya’s tag in the picture. The photo was hers. It was the only one that she’d tagged from that night at the Tower, but now, as her profile loaded, he saw that it wasn’t the only one that she’d posted. There were a dozen of the same shot, more or less, and Ilya clicked through them. In the first, Sergey’s finger was on the lens, obscuring Vladimir entirely, but Aksinya looked gaunt and gorgeous, which must have been why she’d posted it. In the second shot, Lana’s eyes were closed and so was Vladimir’s mouth. The third photo was the one they’d all been tagged in, and then, as Ilya clicked to the next and the next, Vladimir’s mouth opened wider. The pictures blurred until they were like a movie—the girls dipping inward to kiss Ilya and Vladimir’s cheeks, their arms extending to flick Sergey off. Vladimir’s lips split. His tongue hit his teeth. Ilya could hear him again, just as clearly as he had at the Masons’ church. “You have competition, Ilyusha,” and as Vladimir said it, his eyes shifted bit by bit by bit until, in the last photo, they were looking to the far left.