Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

Sadie had slowed down, and Ilya matched her pace. When she stopped completely it was at one of the few trailers with a light on. This trailer had become part of the landscape against its will. A meaty vine enveloped one wall. The cinderblocks that held up each corner had sunk unevenly into the dirt yard, so the trailer listed slightly toward the refinery, as though taking a knee. J.T. would be inside, he thought. Or else it was a neftyanik—a roughneck, they called them here—with muscles and stubble and hands big enough to encircle Sadie’s waist.

There was a path through the dirt yard, shiny as a scar, that led to the door, but Sadie stayed on the sidewalk, her hands in the pockets of her sweatshirt, her eyes on the window. Whoever was inside stayed inside. Ilya wasn’t close enough to see into the window, and so he crept past Sadie on the opposite side of the street, trying to keep to the shadows of spindly trees and parked trucks. He hunched next to a car under a portico. Sadie was completely still, standing there in the shadow of the trailer. He wanted to see her expression, to know what this was. A vigil, he found himself thinking, and he could smell the wax on Babushka’s fingers, could hear the crack of her knees that meant she’d spent the day at the church, lighting candles for Dedushka and Papa and Vladimir.

Ilya kept waiting for the door to open or for a car to pull up, but after thirty minutes—or maybe it was longer, maybe it was an hour; the light made it hard to measure time—Sadie left. She walked back the way she’d come, and Ilya crossed the street and stood in the spot where she’d stood and looked in the window just as she had.

A woman was sitting inside on a couch. She looked a little like Yulia Podtochina, with her blond hair and her wide-set eyes. Or maybe it was just her air of hopelessness that reminded him of Yulia. She was braless, her breasts tiny, nipples aggressive and pressing at the thin cotton of a tank top. Her feet were tucked up under her, and she was watching something on TV that made her smile in a wry sort of way, like she’d been in the characters’ shoes, knew just what sorts of problems they were facing, and knew too that they didn’t stand a chance.

Hanging askew behind her head was a poster of a woman standing over a vent, her white dress blowing up to her crotch. A pack of cigarettes rested on the arm of the couch. The woman smoked one, letting the ash get long. She hunched forward, out of Ilya’s view, and for a minute all he could see was the top of her head, and then she reclined again with a pink glass pipe in her hand. She put her lips to it, lit it, took a hit, then another, all the while keeping her attention on the show. Her face relaxed. It lost the wryness and the hopelessness, and, as Ilya watched, the drug animated her. It brought a beauty to her wide mouth, a flush to her cheeks, and glitter to her eyes.

He was about to go when he heard the woman’s voice.

“Come on,” she said, in a croak that gained strength. “Come the fuck on.”

She stood and stepped toward the window, and for a second Ilya thought that she’d seen him and was about to confront him. He stumbled back into the street, just as she reached out and gave the TV a thwack.

“That’s what I thought,” she said, with a tone like she’d wrangled an especially difficult child into submission.

Ilya was back at the Masons’ an hour later. The house was quiet and dark, and he wondered if Sadie was sleeping or awake and thinking of the woman. Who was the woman to her? He thought of the drug and the way it had seemed to bring her to life; he thought of Sadie’s empty room, the black cross over her bed, her nails bitten to nubs, the pages and pages of portraits. He knew that it should not have come as a surprise to him that Sadie had secrets, but his own secrets had made him myopic, made him forget that the world, even America, was a tangle of lives, all twisted and bent.

Maria Mikhailovna’s building was on the square, one of the new ones that had gone up along with the refinery, when it seemed as though Berlozhniki’s time had finally come. It was tall and slim in defiance of the squat practicality of the kommunalkas, and it was the only building in Berlozhniki with an elevator. When Vladimir and Ilya were young, before Ilya knew a word of English, they would lurk outside the building. If the custodian left the service door propped open after his afternoon smoke, they’d sneak in and ride the elevator. What a thrill it was, to press a button and see it light up, to hear a whoosh and feel the ground move under your feet. Usually they’d have five minutes, maybe ten, before the custodian kicked them out, calling them little thugs or golovorezy, which did not have the sting he intended because Vladimir and all of his friends wanted, badly, to be gangsters.

One afternoon, when the custodian seemed to have disappeared altogether, they snuck in and pressed a button with PH on it. The elevator climbed and climbed and then it dinged and the doors parted to reveal another door made of thick, brushed metal.

“Where’s the hall?” Ilya had asked.

“It’s the penthouse. Some badass has the whole floor,” Vladimir said. He reached out and touched the door. “Bet you anything it’s bulletproof.”

The elevator hesitated there, shaking slightly, and then it dinged and the doors slid shut, and it descended again. In awe over the revelation that one individual might own an entire floor, they didn’t immediately realize that the L button was glowing and that the elevator was not descending of its own accord. It had been summoned. The floors whizzed by, and this was usually Ilya’s favorite part of the ride, when it seemed like the elevator could not possibly stop in time, and a delicious terror would fly up his spine. But the terror was not delicious this time. Vladimir began madly pressing buttons, trying to pick a floor that they hadn’t already passed, but the elevator was quicker than him. Then it slowed, its cables smooth and silent, and stopped. The L above the door lit up. The elevator dinged once more, this beautiful impassive note, and the doors opened.

Ilya saw the man’s shoes first—slick and pointy and dark green, like they had been made with the skin of some fantastic jungle snake. On each there was a thin metal buckle shaped like a bone. He was in a suit, an anomaly in Berlozhniki, and an overcoat. Ilya did not see his face—there wasn’t time, because as the man stepped into the elevator, Ilya darted past him and ran for the door. Vladimir was behind him for a second, but the man must have caught him, because by the time Ilya yanked open the service door, he was alone.

“Vlad!” Ilya yelled, just as Vladimir staggered out of the elevator.

Ilya heard the man say “Scum,” softly, and then the doors slid shut.

Under Vladimir’s eye, blood pearled from a long cut, and as they pushed through the door and out into the snow, the blood began to roll down his cheek in fat droplets.

“He hit you?” Ilya said.

Vladimir winced and wiped at his cheek with the cuff of his sweatshirt. “He had this fucking ring on. With this fat diamond.”

Ilya had never seen Vladimir hurt before, not really, and his anger was sharp and sudden, a pain in his belly as though the man had cut him there. “Let’s get him back,” Ilya said. “Put shit in the elevator, or—”

“Nah,” Vladimir said, “let’s go.”

Once they’d rounded the corner and the building was out of sight, Vladimir squatted down so that his eyes were level with Ilya’s. He turned and showed Ilya his cheek. Up close the cut was messy, the flesh snagged, the skin around it fattening. “Clean me up,” Vladimir said. “I don’t want Babushka freaking out.”