Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

That night Ilya waited for Vladimir for a long time, pacing the stretch of carpet between the TV and the couch. He knew that Dmitri was right, that Vladimir had been too high, too stupid to just run off the road, to run up into the square, into the trees where the car couldn’t follow him. And though he knew that that was beside the point, though he could hear the thump of Vladimir under the car so clearly that he had to remind himself that it hadn’t happened, he was angry too. Vladimir was always in these sorts of situations. Vladimir was always the one out until two a.m., the one sneaking out of school, sneaking in the back door of Dolls; the one never, ever doing what he was supposed to, and it was infuriating to always worry that his latest mistake might be the one that was too big, too deep and stupid for him to escape. Ilya burned the beer off pacing. Eventually he burned his anger off too, and there was just this acidic film of fear on his tongue, lining his stomach. He lay on the couch. He was tired. He felt young. He wanted to tell Vladimir that he’d been in the elevator, that he’d seen one of the apartments. He wanted to tell him that no one even lived in the penthouse. He waited and waited, but of course Vladimir didn’t come home.

Sadie didn’t go to the trailer by the refinery the next few nights, and Ilya began to wonder if he’d inflated the importance of the woman. Maybe there was some simple explanation. Maybe it was J.T.’s house, and they’d arranged to meet, but his mom had been home and foiled their plans. Then in history one day, Sadie began a new portrait, and as it took shape, he realized it was the woman. Sadie spent five minutes shading under her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, somehow capturing her exact lassitude.

“Who’s that?” Ilya whispered, as Mr. Shilling handed out a quiz on the key battles of the Revolution.

She shrugged. “This woman from church.”

J.T., who sat on the other side of Sadie, leaned across the aisle, draped one arm behind Sadie’s back and his other over the drawing, and said, “Next weekend at the Pound, y’all. It’s my birthday.” He was grinning like a child, and Ilya felt a pang of jealousy at how easily he touched Sadie.

“You’re obsessed with your birthday,” she said.

“Of course I am,” he said. “Ilya? You coming?”

Ilya looked at Sadie, and Sadie nodded. “We’ll come.”

At the front of the room, Shilling said, “There’s a Peppermint Pattie in my drawer for anyone who gets all ten battles in chronological order.”

“What battles?” J.T. yelled.

A girl in the front row said, “What if more than one of us does?”

“Then I would be shocked,” Shilling said, “and you’d split the patty.”

J.T. shielded his mouth with a hand and whispered, “Who the fuck wants a Peppermint Pattie? Do they even make those anymore?”

Peppermint Patties had been one of the most coveted candies at the Minutka. Vladimir used to steal them with regularity. “I want it,” Ilya said, and J.T. and Sadie laughed.

After class, Ilya stayed to receive the patty.

“Well done,” Shilling said. “Although you’re lucky that, as a rule, I ignore spelling.”

The patty looked as though it had been in Mr. Shilling’s desk drawer for a decade at least, but it tasted delicious, the filling minty enough to make the inside of Ilya’s mouth snap, to remind him of the way the air tasted in Berlozhniki, on the days when the wind was blowing the refinery’s smoke away from town. He ate the whole thing in a few ferocious bites, and as he dropped the wrapper into the trash can, he saw Sadie’s drawing crumpled at the bottom. He pulled it out. The creases gave the woman a mild harelip and a scar that sliced one eyebrow. Ilya smoothed it as best he could and pressed it between the pages of his history text.

At church that weekend, Ilya scanned the crowd for the woman, but she wasn’t there. He hadn’t really expected her to be; she hadn’t seemed like a churchgoer. As Pastor Kyle preached—a sermon about forgiveness that somehow tied in to an extended golf metaphor—Ilya closed his eyes, hoping for another clue or, at the least, to be transported back to the Tower like he had been during that first Star Pilgrim service, when he’d heard Vladimir’s voice, the exact gravel of it, as though Vladimir were there next to him. He’d been in America for two weeks, and he’d crossed seventy Gabe Thompsons off his list—almost all of the Gabe Thompsons in the state of California—but there were still hundreds left.

On one side of him, Sadie picked the paint off her sneakers, scattering silver flakes on the floor. She was singing softly, practicing whatever the choir was performing later. On the other side of him, Papa Cam’s eyebrows knitted in fervent prayer. His meaty hands were clasped between his knees, and Ilya wondered what he could possibly want or need. Babushka would say that that was not what praying was about, that God didn’t listen if you talked to him only when you needed something.

In the middle of each of the church’s glass walls were fragments of stained glass. They were clustered in abstract patterns like the inside of a kaleidoscope, but still they reminded Ilya of lying on the bed his mother and Babushka shared, looking at the light streaming through the pictures that Babushka had taped over the glass. The pictures from Gabe’s pamphlets. They were still there, he thought, and Babushka had probably kept the pamphlets too, and maybe inside was the name of Gabe’s church.

That afternoon, he called his mother from the Masons’ kitchen. Her voice, when she answered, sounded very faint, as though she’d been swallowed by some larger creature and was calling out from within its belly.

“You heard,” she said, and he could tell from her voice that it was nothing good.

“Heard what?” Ilya said. He tried to keep his own voice steady. Around him the Masons’ predinner preparations raged. Mama Jamie chopped celery with vigor, Marilee whined about setting the table, and Molly did somersaults across the den carpet. Only Sadie seemed to have sensed the import of the call. She was watching him from a stool at the counter, her pencil poised above an algebra equation, her head propped in her palm.

“The arraignment is set. Four weeks from now. In Syktyvkar.”

In four weeks Vladimir would have to enter his plea, and given his confession he would likely plead guilty.

“Can you go?” Ilya said. “Have you gotten to see him?”

“No,” his mother said. “They still won’t tell me where he’s being held. No one will talk to me, except for Dmitri Malikov.”

“What does he say?”

She was quiet for a second, and he got the sense that she was gathering herself. Her voice, when it came, had gone up an octave. “He says that I should focus on you. That you’re our hope. Although sometimes I think I’ve done that for too long already.” She meant this as a reproach to herself, but Ilya couldn’t help but feel the sting of it, as though her hope was a limited commodity that he’d intentionally cornered. “And sometimes I wonder why he confessed at all—”

“Mama,” Ilya said.

“He was on drugs, Ilyusha. If he did do these things, it wasn’t him . Not really. Do you remember? How he looked?”

Ilya did remember. He remembered the ammoniac stench of Vladimir’s crotch. He remembered his mother trying to find a vein in the minefield of Vladimir’s body. He had been pitiful, disgusting. If he did do these things , he thought, and he said, “Mama, he was practically dead.”

Next to him, Mama Jamie speared a hunk of pork and dropped it into a hot skillet. Droplets of grease splashed Ilya’s arm and left pinpricks of pain.