Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

“Don’t mock it ’til you’ve tried it,” Mama Jamie said. She was always begging the girls to give testimonials, but Molly was too shy, Marilee too self-righteous, and Sadie too private. “But since you asked, no, they were not especially juicy. It was Margaret Joy again.”

Sadie groaned and, as they set the table, she told Ilya the story of Margaret Joy, whose favorite cat had been accidentally poisoned by a neighbor whom Margaret Joy now tortured in tiny, mostly inconsequential ways. “She’ll turn her neighbor’s hose on so it’s just barely running all night long, or cut the roses off her bushes before they bloom.”

Ilya laughed, and Sadie said, “Bet you can’t wait to hear what she’s done this time.”

Later, after dinner, after they had watched the service and Margaret Joy had confessed to allowing another cat of hers to urinate on her neighbor’s lawn furniture, once he was alone in the basement, Ilya played the tape he’d made at Gabe’s house. He listened to Gabe’s story over and over, with his eyes closed so that he could see it all. Lana and that halo of bloody snow. The redheaded nurse shoving the bag of Ilya’s tapes into Gabe’s arms. Austin with his perfect faith and his wide smile and the plaid tie. There was Gabe roaming the Tower, looking for Vladimir and Sergey and krokodil. What did you people do to him? Frank asked, over and over, and Dmitri Malikov was kissing Gabe’s forehead, and the train was pushing through the snow to Berlozhniki, the end of the line, and Gabe stepped off it, looking small under the faded banner that proclaimed, BERLOZHNIKI MINES RUSSIA’S FUTURE!

Ilya listened until the parts of the story seemed dissociated from the story itself, until they were rendered nonsensical, then he clicked open his email and wrote another message to Vladimir. He wanted to tell him everything that had happened with Gabe. He thought that Vladimir might see something in it that Ilya could not, but the police would be reading Vladimir’s email. He didn’t tell Vladimir about Sadie in the forest either, because he was afraid that Vladimir would somehow divine the feeling that had come upon Ilya afterward. It was not quite contentment, but something akin to it. Like he’d compartmentalized his fear, his worry, like he’d somehow compartmentalized Vladimir himself. He had known that it was a temporary containment, a pill he’d swallowed, the membrane thinning, the drug soon to hit him again, hitting him now, as he wrote the same, tired message. I know you didn’t do it, and then, because he wanted Vladimir to feel his desperation, he wrote, but I don’t know how to help you .

That night, for the first time, he dreamt of Sadie instead of Vladimir. He was sliding his hand into the waistband of her jeans. They were in the forest again, and he was too terrified to actually put his fingers inside her, so he rubbed at the cotton of her underwear until it dampened. That was right, he knew, and so he pulled her underwear down and touched the hot, damp pulse of her until she arched her neck and her body tightened. Her nails dug into his arm and he kept going, afraid to stop, until she pulled his hand away. She smiled at him, an embarrassed smile, and then they plucked leaves and pine needles off each other’s clothes and hiked back up the trail to the campsite, where J.T. waited with burgers and beers and a knowing look.

He woke up throbbing, and as soon as Sadie had turned off Dumaine Drive toward school, he started to kiss her, and they found a lot behind the discount grocery store, and then it was all happening again, as it had in the dream, and in the forest, and it wasn’t until Ilya got to school—and saw that every locker and door, every millimeter of wall space, had been papered with posters for the Homecoming Dance, which was on the same day as the arraignment—that Ilya thought of Vladimir.

The next week was like that. Ilya managed not to think of Vladimir for longer and longer stretches. A half hour here. An hour there. It was easiest when he was with Sadie, but he started to throw himself into his studies too. Into the thick of quadratic equations, the joy of isolating and solving for x . Into the components of a cell: the mitochondria and villi and endoplasmic reticulum, each with its own tiny, vital function.

It rained that week, and there was a comfort in sitting next to Miss Janet in the front office, in listening to the clack of her keyboard or the quiet rasp of her nail file. To avoid the rain, he skipped his usual Bojangles’ chicken box in favor of cookie packets from the vending machine, but that Friday the weather cleared a bit, and he trekked through the soggy woods. The woman at the register—Sharice, her nametag read—treated him with the same disdain she doled out to all the Leffie High students, who made out in the booths and left ketchup smeared on the tables, pee on the toilet seats, and more work in general for Sharice. At first Ilya had appreciated being included in her curled-lip nonresponsiveness, but over the weeks it had worn on him. He’d thought of his mother, endlessly plating pirozhki for the neftyaniki, wiping trays and spraying floors, and he’d wondered if she gave them the same face that Sharice gave him. He’d tried to treat her with extra politeness. He’d used every greeting from Michael & Stephanie , every expression from their unit on small talk, and Sharice had only ever responded with an unwelcoming “Welcome to Bojangles’. What’s your order?”

But maybe he’d worn her down after all, because that Friday, Sharice said, “The usual?”

Ilya was almost unable to respond both from shock and noncomprehension, and by the time he’d parsed her meaning, her eyebrows had clenched together in the same old scowl, and when he said, “Yes,” and then added, “It has rained all week,” she gave him nothing but a grunt.

As he took his receipt and turned to wait for his order in the sticky eddy by the fountain sodas, he bumped into a slight woman with a mass of blond hair that smelled like the front pocket of Vladimir’s jacket, where he’d kept old cigarette butts for when he got desperate.

“Excuse me,” Ilya said.

The woman ducked her head and walked up to the register. Ilya wouldn’t have paid her another second’s attention, except that Sharice said, “You bring your wallet this time?,” which was another break from her script. The woman produced a five-dollar bill from her pocket and passed it across the counter. It wasn’t until she’d ordered and turned to wait next to Ilya that he recognized her.

She was high, he could see that, and as they waited she seemed to become more so. Her neck slumped a bit, and she took a few steps backward, searching for support from the wall, but her elbow hit the soda machine, and Dr Pepper sprayed down her arm and onto the floor.

“Fuck,” she said.

At the register, Sharice rolled her eyes.

The woman looked at Ilya, and the shape of her eyes, the way they canted upward, toward her temples, was the only thing of Sadie that he could see in her. “You gonna get me some napkins, or you just wanna stare?” she said.

Ilya pulled a wad of napkins out of the dispenser and handed them to her, and she snatched them and said, “They treat me like shit here.”

She dabbed at her elbow, ignored the puddle of soda on the floor, and then stuffed the dirty napkins into a metal bucket of creamers.

“Me too,” Ilya said. “But I thought that was because I’m Russian.”

She laughed, a little too hard, then said, “Russia? What the fuck?” to herself, as though Ilya were an especially juicy hallucination.

Sharice slid Ilya’s chicken box across the counter, and when Ilya reached for it, she said softly, “I’d ignore her if I was you.”