Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

“No,” Ilya said. “He did drugs. He stole. He was bad. He confessed even, but no, I still don’t think—”

If he did , his mother had said, and Ilya forced himself to follow the thought to that curve in the road where the snowplow had turned up Yulia Podtochina’s body, to the alley where Olga Nadiova had been dumped, to the clump of trees where Lana had died, and again he could not see Vladimir there. He shook his head. “He didn’t do it,” he said.

“He’s an addict?”

Ilya nodded, and she was quiet for a long time. Her curiosity was strange, but he liked it better than pity. Outside a string of headlights made their way down the levee road and the Pound was washed in light and for an instant it looked just as sad as a face under fluorescence. Car doors slammed. Someone—it sounded like J.T.—yelled, “Can we change the fucking song?”

“The thing is,” Ilya said, “when we were little, we used to talk about coming here together. It was stupid. I mean Vladimir thought he was going to play hockey for Severstal too. Be a big star. Or an oligarch like Fyodor Fetisov. Just stupid things kids think of, but it turned real for me.” Just saying it made his gut burn with the need to vomit again. He swallowed. “And it’s one thing to have him home and me here, but to have him be in prison and me here...”

“It’s too much,” Sadie said.

Ilya nodded. “It’s too much.”

“Can you help him?” she said. “I mean, if he didn’t do it, there’s someone out there who did, right?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “When I first got here, I thought I found a clue.” He told her about the picture of Lana wearing Gabe’s hat. He told her about the list he’d made from the White Pages, about cross-referencing it with Mormon churches, and checking VKontakte and the newspaper.

“Will you show me the picture?” she said.

He nodded. He thought he’d fallen in love with her that night in the kitchen when she’d told him to stop being an asshole, but the feeling was suddenly different. It was bigger and painfully urgent and held within it was the knowledge of the loneliness she might erase. He scooted over, and she sat beside him.

The door to the bus squeaked open, and a boy boarded with a semiconscious girl riding on his back.

“That’ll be twenty-five cents,” the kid with the tongue piercing said.

“Shut the fuck up, Tyrese,” the boy said, and as he walked down the aisle, the girl roused herself and began nibbling his ear.

“I wondered what you were doing in the basement every night,” Sadie said. “My parents think you have a girlfriend that you’re always emailing.”

“No,” he said. “No girlfriend.”

The boy walked past them, his hands gripping the girl’s thighs so tight that she squealed. He flopped her into a seat behind them and then lowered himself down on top of her, and Ilya looked away.

“I thought you’d be angry that I lied,” he said.

“Promise not to do it again,” she said in a voice that was mock stern.

“I promise,” he said.

Then Sadie said, “You know the Masons aren’t my real parents.”

“They aren’t your parents.” He said it slowly, hating the way English sometimes made him sound like a dim parrot, repeating what she’d said.

“Nope. Do I look like them? Don’t say yes.” She smiled.

“No,” he said. “Not at all. Are your parents dead?” His inflection must have been off because there was a twitch of hurt on her face.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know anything about my dad. My mom’s alive. She gave me up for adoption. She got pregnant in high school, and Mama Jamie worked at the school then—as a guidance counselor or spiritual adviser or something—and she convinced my mom not to have an abortion. And my mom didn’t, and Jamie thought that was it. She’d saved one soul and one life. I’m sure she felt pretty smug about it. Only I guess my mom must have sucked at being a mom, because when I was four she found Jamie and basically blamed her for my existence and begged her to take me. I got this from her—” Sadie pointed at her eye. “She wasn’t aiming at me or anything. She wasn’t that bad. She just threw a bottle and missed the trash can.” She spoke fast, smoothly, with this hint of metal in her voice. And something in the story—the laziness, maybe, of that missed throw—made it clear to him that the woman in the trailer was Sadie’s mother.

“So you’re like Durashka. You’re a rescue,” he said, which was a word the Masons had taught him.

She laughed. “That’s not really a word you use with people. But yeah, I guess I am. And you are too.” She was quiet for a second. “We should go soon. Just in case they check the movie times.”

She didn’t move and neither did he, and then she turned, and he thought she was going to say something else, but instead she leaned in and kissed him. Her teeth hit his—there was this tiny click—and the back of his head bounced against the seat. He felt the warm melt of her mouth. For a second there was just the sensation of it. For a second his mind was blank, and then he became terribly aware of his hands. They felt feverish, bloated, and he had no idea where to put them. And his tongue. Hers had touched his, and he did not know whether to reciprocate or whether to let it lie in his mouth like a slug. His lips, thank God, seemed to move of their own accord. The drunk girl moaned audibly behind them. Sadie smiled—he could feel it, not see it—and as quickly as it had begun, the kiss ended. She pulled away. Ilya closed his mouth. Blood had rushed to his lips and his dick and the rest of him was limp and possibly paralyzed. She was still smiling, a lasting sort of smile that he hadn’t known she had.

“I’ve been wanting to do that,” she said, and she grabbed his hand and led him back to the car.

She drove home a different way, on a road that followed the pipeline. There was a fence now, the pipeline unfurling behind it, and Ilya thought of his arm and how it had quivered. He imagined the pipeline curling toward him, a long silver finger, and he felt another jolt of fear, but then it curved away from him across a flat stretch of water.

“That’s Weeks Bay,” she said. “Cam took me fishing out there when I was little. You can’t go now ’cause of the pipeline.”

The refinery was on the other side, its lights long on the water, and Ilya imagined the fish, swimming all night long in the brightness. He wondered how they’d adapt to it, whether their eyes would shrink from the light until they’d turned into a different species entirely.

It wasn’t until they’d pulled back into the Masons’ driveway that Ilya thought to ask, “What about J.T.?” and as he asked the question, he imagined J.T. watching them kiss through the bus windows. He imagined J.T. at school on Monday, marching down the hallway toward him.

“What about J.T.?” she said.

“I thought he was—”

“He’s my cousin. My actual cousin. He’s the only one that knows about my mom besides the Masons. And you.”

“That’s good news,” Ilya said, and Sadie laughed and this time he leaned in and kissed her.

That night his email to Vladimir was a long one. Ilya told him about the party, about kissing Sadie, about her adoption and her mother and that J.T., that miracle of high school muscle, was her cousin and nothing more. He asked Vladimir what it would be like tomorrow, whether he could assume that she would kiss him again, or whether it might be a discrete occurrence. Any suggestions, he asked, for where to put my hands when we kiss? And he smiled because he could hear what Vladimir’s answer would be: Down her pants, durashka . He told Vladimir about the pipeline, about how he’d actually touched it and that the oil had sounded like blood does in your temples. His whole body was throbbing with the night, with the excitement of it, and then there it was again: the blinking cursor, Vladimir’s life. I heard about the arraignment , he wrote. Please , he wrote, please don’t say you did something you didn’t.