Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

“Which words?” Ilya said.

“Mr. Landry,” Mr. Shilling said, to J.T., “maybe you can tell Ilya after class, once you’ve finished whispering with Ms. Mason.”

“Happy to,” J.T. said with a smirk. Beside him, Sadie went back to her drawing.

J.T. did corner Ilya after class, to tell him that he was a badass. “You’re a fucking oligarch,” J.T. said, raising a fist, and, when Ilya did not raise a fist in return, he bumped it against Ilya’s arm. Ilya wanted to hate him, but the force of J.T.’s enthusiasm was hard to deny. “Catch you later,” J.T. said, and he spun off into the crowd, and when Ilya finally had a chance to look for Sadie, her desk was empty.

By the end of eighth period, Ilya was exhausted. His eyelids were a force to be reckoned with. It had been two nights now of little sleep. Five if he counted the nights he’d spent traveling. He hadn’t taken a decent shit since arriving. He could only manage to expel these angry, fossilized pellets, and with so little output, eating had become uncomfortable. Plus, Sadie had a boyfriend, a boyfriend charming enough to charm even Ilya, though J.T.’s charm dissipated with time as Ilya roamed the halls trying to find his way back to his locker. In the end, he found the library and slumped in front of a computer monitor. It was the middle of the night at home, but he checked his email anyway, thinking that his mother might have stopped off at the Internet Kebab on her way to work. He had only one email, from Aksinya:

Have you heard anything from V? I still don’t know where he’s being held or whether he’s coming home for the trial. Your mom keeps fucking avoiding me and your grandma looks at me like I’m a ghost.

I don’t know about Lana and Gabe Thompson. He’s been gone for a few months at least. Pavel said the police sent him home, but Pavel wouldn’t know his dick from a toothpick.

Study hard, smarty. He needs you even more now.

Ilya had no idea who Pavel was or whether the email was good or bad news. Surely it was more than a coincidence that Gabe had left Berlozhniki not long after Lana’s murder. Ilya tried to remember the last time he’d seen Gabe and could not. Gabe had been part of life’s backdrop, like the nasty-tempered babki who ran the flower kiosk in the summer and the ancient, one-armed dedok who bore the flag in the Defender of the Fatherland parade each year. The dedok who, Ilya had to admit, had been dead for several years before Ilya noticed. And the fact that the police had been involved seemed especially hard to parse. Had they suspected Gabe too and decided that getting him out of Berlozhniki was easier than reopening the investigation? Or had they just gotten tired of dragging Gabe back up to the Hotel Berlozhniki every time the temperature got below minus ten?

Why the police? Ilya wrote. He clicked send, hoisted his book bag onto his shoulder, and went back into the halls in search of his locker. Half an hour later, Miss Janet found him slumped against it, waiting for Sadie to finish track practice.

“You’ll get scoliosis if you keep sitting like that,” she said, and she ushered him to the front office and set him up at an empty desk that had belonged to another secretary. “Principal Gibbons no longer needed her,” Miss Janet said, with this swell of pride in her voice.

Ilya was afraid that Miss Janet was the sort who would chatter nonstop, who sought out quiet types because they offered the least resistance to verbal barrages, but once Ilya opened his chemistry textbook and began a problem set, she unwrapped a sandwich swaddled in tinfoil, and they settled into a companionable silence that she broke only once, to say, “It must be so strange waking up here. Half a world away from home.”

Home , Ilya thought. The police sent him home , which, of course, meant here.

“It is. It’s very strange,” Ilya said. He looked at Miss Janet, who was considering the last bite of her sandwich. “How would you find someone in America?” he said. He tried to keep his voice nonchalant, like finding this person was not at all crucial, like the prospect of it was not burning through his veins with the power of a drug.

“Find someone? Like in Leffie?”

Ilya nodded.

“You’d look online. In the White Pages,” Miss Janet said.

“The White Pages?”

“Yeah, the White Pages, the Yellow Pages. They were actual books—I’m aging myself—but now they’re databases.” Miss Janet sucked the tip of a finger and dabbed, absently, at stray sandwich crumbs.

“But what if you don’t know where he is?” Ilya said.

“Well, who is he?” Miss Janet said.

“He’s this American who came to my town on a mission, only I can’t remember where he’s from.”

“I guess you could search state by state,” she said. “What kind of mission was it?”

“He wanted to convert us,” Ilya said. He thought of Gabe, pleading with them for a minute of their time, for a chance to be saved, and the way that his pleas had gone from earnest to angry and had seemed, eventually, like rants.

“I figured that,” Miss Janet said. “But convert you to what? Was he Baptist?”

Ilya shook his head, thinking of Papa Cam, who hadn’t been allowed to dance or date or drink soda. “The Church of Later Day Saints,” Ilya said.

Miss Janet smiled. “It’s not ‘later,’ she said. “It’s ‘latter,’ like a ladder that you climb.”

“Ladder. Latter,” Ilya said, and out of habit his hand drifted to his back pocket, where he used to keep his notebook of unknown words, but he’d memorized all the words in it and left the notebook in Berlozhniki.

“So he’s Mormon. I don’t know much about Mormons, but I’m pretty sure there aren’t any in Leffie,” she said. She crushed the tinfoil into a tight ball and tossed it into the trash can under her desk. At home, they did not throw away tinfoil. Babushka rinsed it and hung it to dry on the laundry line, as did everyone else in the kommunalkas. And sometimes, when Ilya was walking home from school and the sun hit the balconies just right, the whole building seemed to sparkle.

Ilya woke the morning after the windstorm with the last bits of a dream melting in his mind the way sugar melts on your tongue. Had all of it—Maria Mikhailovna’s visit, the exchange program, America—been a dream? The heat was back on. All of the candles had burned down to nubs overnight. Frozen wax puddled on the countertops and windowsills. Babushka was chipping away at it with a spoon and collecting the shavings in a pot. Ilya watched her for a moment, then he sat up.

“Is it true?” he said.

Babushka nodded. She put the pot on the stove, walked over to the couch, and sat on its edge. “When I woke up this morning, for the first time in my life, I was thankful that your grandfather is with God instead of with me. Do you know why?”

Ilya shook his head. She leaned over him, the way she used to when he and Vladimir were little and still got good night kisses. She was beautiful as grandmothers go. Her spine was straight, her eyes clear and blue. She did not have any of the terrible and obvious signs of age—the knobs and growths, the shaking—but still it scared him to really examine her. Her veins were too apparent. Loose skin fringed her jaw like melting wax and every once in a while her voice slowed as she spoke, as though her brain were limping toward the end of the sentence.

“Why?” he said.

“Because he wouldn’t have let you go. America. Not in a million years. You suffer for a country, and either you find a way to love it or you go crazy. He found a way to love it. Even here.” Ilya’s grandfather had been in the camp for seven years. The day after he’d gotten out, he’d taken the son he’d never met fishing. The day after that he’d gone to party headquarters and begged for his membership to be reinstated. “But it’s different now,” she said. “It’s allowed.”