Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

“I know,” she said. “I just keep thinking about him as a baby. He always wanted to be held. Cuddle, cuddle, cuddle. All the time. If I put him down, he stretched his arms up to me, and of course I was always having to tell him no. No, Mama has to work. No, not now, Mama has to cook. I think of that and then this, and I just don’t know… . How am I supposed to know? What could I have done—” She was choking on the words. Each one like something sharp dragged up her throat.

At the table, Sadie mouthed, “You OK?” and he realized that he’d been staring at her without seeing her.

“Listen,” he said. “I need you to do something. I need you to send me one of those pamphlets from the American missionary. Babushka cut the pictures from them for the windows.”

“Why?” his mother said, and her voice was clear again, and hard. “Don’t you dare get involved. You hear me, Ilyusha? You are there, you are safe. You leave this behind, OK? That is the most important thing.”

“He might have—”

“Keep your head down. Do you understand me? Do you know how easy it would be for someone to say you were both involved?”

“OK,” Ilya said, and he did understand her. He knew that her fear was ingrained. He and Vladimir magnified it, of course, but it had existed before them; her parents had given it to her like an inheritance, something to help her survive the world. But what he wanted to say was: you’re doing it again. Putting me before him. “It’s just a year, Mama,” he said. “Less than that now.”

“Listen to me. I want you to study, work hard. I don’t want you coming back here ever,” she said. “Ilyusha, I have to go. I’m at work.”

The dial tone flooded the receiver. His mother was crying now. She’d hung up so he wouldn’t have to hear her, but he could hear her anyway. And he could picture her: in the cafeteria’s dank break room, where the lockers had all been painted primary colors to boost morale. She was sobbing, dabbing at her face with her apron, eyes on the door, because her boss had caught her like this too many times already.

Sadie was still looking at him over the counter, her eyes a question. He made some approximation of a smile and held the phone to his ear until the dial tone broke into a pulse loud enough that he was afraid Mama Jamie would hear.

“Tell me you’re hungry!” Mama Jamie said, when he hung up.

“I’m hungry,” he said. If he did do these things , he thought.

Mama Jamie fixed him a plate, and he ate it while Papa Cam talked about a new hire, an engineer whose wife he thought Mama Jamie would like, but whose son was a little off.

“Please pass the rice,” Molly said. Ilya passed the rice. He thought, If he did .

“How’s school, Ilya?” Papa Cam said. He must have asked it more than once, because when Ilya said, “It’s fine,” they were all looking at him, the grown-ups and Sadie with concern, Molly and Marilee with amused curiosity, like he was a toy that had short-circuited.

If he did , he thought. His mother was back in the cafeteria by now, spraying cleaner on the long metal tray tracks that Vladimir and Ilya had loved to run their toy cars down the few times she’d brought them to work. She sprayed and wiped. Her cheeks were splotchy, but she’d washed her face, and it was not so obvious that she’d been crying. Spray and wipe. She had not been caught this time. That was a good thing. Spray, spray, wipe. She wished she’d asked him more about America—what the mother fed him, what school was like, whether he was the smartest there too. She wondered if that other mother thought of her, thought that maybe she was smart like Ilya. Spray and wipe. She did not think of Vladimir. She had given up.

Later, Sadie found him in the basement trying to read an espionage thriller from one of the dusty boxes that lived under the Ping-Pong table. It was the time he usually spent on the Gabe Thompson list, but the phone call with his mother had demoralized him. If he couldn’t convince his mother of Vladimir’s innocence, what were the chances that, even armed with evidence, he could convince the police? Maybe it was hopeless, maybe it was even cowardly, he thought, a way of hiding from life. He thought of all the years he’d spent with the Delta headphones clamped over his ears, of all the times his mother or Babushka or Vladimir had said something to him, and he’d pretended not to see their lips moving. He had liked to think that he was being transported, but maybe he’d just been hiding then too.

“Hey,” Sadie said.

He dog-eared his page when she sat beside him, though he’d only read three pages.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

Ilya shrugged. He’d told her that his brother was dead, and it had proved an easy lie to defend. With the exception of that horrible moment at Star Pilgrim, the Masons had tiptoed around his grief, and he’d become sickly comfortable with the duplicity. But now he couldn’t think of any way to explain his mood without revealing that lie.

“J.T.’s party is tonight,” she said. “I was going to go in a little.”

Ilya ran his hand over the cover of the book. A man was holding a pistol. It was aimed at the reader, and the letters of the book’s title exploded from its barrel. He thought of his mother’s tiny voice on the telephone and wondered if he’d sounded the same to her.

“It’s no big deal,” she said. “I’ll tell him you can’t go.”

“No,” Ilya said, fast, because suddenly the idea of being left down here, of watching the light fade between the deck supports, seemed unbearable. “Let’s go.”

Sadie told her parents that she was taking Ilya to the movies in Alexandria, and the Masons seemed thrilled, especially when Ilya told them that there wasn’t a movie theater in his town, and that he’d never actually seen a movie on a big screen.

“Well, this will be a cultural experience for you,” Mama Jamie said. “Take some moolah from my purse, Sadie. Make sure Ilya tries the popcorn.”

“Do the IMAX,” Papa Cam said, which sounded like complete gibberish.

As they backed out of the driveway, Ilya said, “What if they ask about the movie?”

“Say we saw The Fast and the Furious . I saw it with J.T. It’s like one long car chase. And then the good guy wins at the end.” It sounded like something Vladimir would love. “And tell them the acoustics were amazing. My dad’s obsessed with the acoustics at the IMAX.”

Star Pilgrim and Leffie High were in opposite directions on the same road—Route 21—and they marked the dimensions of Leffie in Ilya’s mind. Now Sadie sped past the high school and into the unknown. Ilya rolled down his window. The air was hot, but Sadie was going fast enough for it to have a cooling effect. She scanned the radio, then settled on something with a cowboy twang. A woman sang about scratching her ex’s car with a key.

“Is it far?” he asked.

“The Pound? Not too far. It’s an old impound yard.” She told him that it was a place where cars used to get crushed for scrap metal, but that it had been shut down for a decade, ever since the owner ran away with the football coach’s daughter. Kids from all different schools partied there, and she said there’d even been a guy who lived there for a winter, in the back of an old semi. That would be Vladimir, he thought.

She turned off of Route 21 onto a smaller road cupped by trees. Every once in a while, back in the woods, windows glowed high up, like they were in treehouses. This wisp of a memory drifted through his mind. A childhood story of fairies living in trees. “What are those lights?” he asked. “Why are they so high?”

“It’s trailers up on stilts.” Sadie said. “We’re close to the bayou—it floods a lot.”