Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

Ilya’s tape player was in Vladimir’s lap, the Delta headphones around his neck, and when Vladimir saw him he lifted the player up and said, “OK if I borrow it for a bit?”

Ilya nodded. “Learn some English,” he said. “I brought you a bedpan. And polka-dotted gowns.”

Vladimir grinned. “Did you see the hot nurse?”

“The one with the red hair?”

“Yes. That braid is made for tugging. She comes in here to help me pee. She said if I ever lose my arms, she’ll hold my dick for me.”

“In your dreams.” A male voice came from the other side of the curtain, high and wheezy.

Vladimir rolled his eyes and pretended to take a swig from a bottle. “It’s none of your business what happens on this side of the curtain, Tolya.”

“That’s not what you were saying last week. Screaming for me to put you out of your misery.”

Tolya began to laugh, and Ilya looked away from Vladimir’s face.

“Does it hurt?” Ilya asked.

“It’s numb. I don’t feel anything there—no real leg, no ghost leg. People are going to think I’m a vet. Tolya and I are going to make a killing panhandling.”

Ilya put the duffel in a chair in the corner and handed Vladimir the magazine he’d gotten him at the Minutka. On the cover, a girl in an ushanka, lace underwear, and fishing waders posed in a river. Vladimir nodded without much enthusiasm, and Ilya wondered if he’d already seen this one, or if it was too tame, if Ilya could not even pick the right kind of nudie magazine.

“How is Mamulya?”

“She’s fine. She’ll be fine.”

“And you’re going?”

Ilya nodded.

“When?”

“August.”

“That’s good,” Vladimir said. “Don’t fuck it up again, OK?”

“I won’t.”

Behind the curtain, Tolya’s cough grew rough, like he was dredging up something awful from his sternum.

“Tolya?” Vladimir said.

Tolya was silent.

“Is he OK?” Ilya said.

“Are you OK?” Vladimir said.

“I’m dying,” Tolya said.

“Don’t be dramatic,” Vladimir said.

Tolya coughed again, and Ilya could feel the pain of it in his own chest. The lights flickered overhead, and for a moment he and Vladimir just listened to Tolya coughing. A phone was ringing somewhere down the hall. Then there were footsteps and the nurse appeared pushing an empty wheelchair, her braid tick-tocking behind her. She looked at Vladimir like he was an especially tough tea stain on her counter and said, “You’re about to get a life lesson. Have you ever seen a baby born?”

“You’re shitting me,” Vladimir said.

“I am not. And this woman does not seem like the friendly type—not that any woman is when she’s being ripped stem to sternum—but you might want to shut your trap for once.”

“What about me?” Tolya said.

“You’re out of here,” she said, pulling back the curtain.

Tolya had the body of a ten- or eleven-year-old and the face of someone much older. His cheeks were speckled with scars the size of kopeks and there was something strange and sucked-in about his lips. He did not have any teeth, Ilya realized, and as the nurse lifted him out of the bed Ilya saw that he did not have any legs either.

“Jealous?” he said to Vladimir as the nurse hugged him to her and carried him to the wheelchair.

The nurse made a noise between a snort and a laugh. “You have two minutes,” she said to Ilya.

As she wheeled Tolya from the room, he looked back over his shoulder at Ilya and said, “You’re the one going to America?”

They were gone before Ilya had a chance to answer, but he heard Tolya’s voice, fading down the corridor, saying, “In America, they eat this shit up. Thirteen and a double amputee. They’d have me on ten reality shows at once. Jerry Springer would be interviewing me every fucking day.”

They both stared at the door. “He took it too?” Ilya said.

“Yeah.”

“Did you know what it would do?”

“I’m not a complete idiot,” Vladimir said. Then why , Ilya thought, and his face must have shown the question, because Vladimir said, “I can’t explain it.”

“You said it makes you remember. That’s what you said that night”—he was going to say the night Lana died, because that was how he thought of it now, but instead he said, “in the Tower.”

“Yeah. It makes you remember…” He trailed off and plucked at the edge of the gauze on his leg.

“Is it worth it?” Ilya said.

Vladimir looked down at the magazine on his lap.

“If you’d brought some, I’d take it again,” he said. His voice was quiet and frank, and then it took on a harder cast: “I’d kill you to take it.”

“No you wouldn’t,” Ilya said.

“You don’t have any, do you?” Vladimir said, and he was joking now, but Ilya still thought he might cry, and so he concentrated on Tolya’s bed. The rumpled sheets with the yellowish shadow where his body had been. His sneakers were still under the chair, and Ilya wondered how long they’d sit there before someone noticed. Down the hall, he could hear the pregnant woman coming. “Don’t touch me!” she bellowed, at her husband no doubt, and Ilya stood up.

“Thanks for this,” Vladimir said. He picked up the magazine. “I have a feeling it’s going to be a dry spell for me for a while. Aksinya is pissed at this gimp situation.”

“Will you come home? When they let you out?” Ilya said, and he wondered why he hadn’t ever asked this before, why it had seemed like something he couldn’t say. “They’re going to be lonely once I’m gone.”

“You kidding me? Those two are going to live it up. Put up a disco ball. Get themselves a boom box.”

“Yeah,” Ilya said.

Vladimir was smiling, but there was this toska in his eyes—a sadness that Maria Mikhailovna had once told him didn’t have an English equivalent, like it belonged only to them. Ilya thought of telling Vladimir this, but instead he smiled back.

“Later, Vlad,” he said, and Vladimir said, “Yeah, come again, will you?”

And as Ilya walked down the hall, past the pregnant woman who had propped herself against a wall, Vladimir yelled, “And bring Fanta next time and a kebab. Tell Babushka no more nasty broth!”

Their mother had to go back to work, but Ilya and Babushka spent every day of the next week in the clinic waiting room, begging to see Vladimir. Every day they gave the nurses more money, and every day they were told that the rooms were too full for visitors.

After a week of waiting, the nurse with the red braid took pity on them. She came and squatted by Babushka’s chair so that their eyes were level. “They took him in yesterday,” she said.

“Took him where?” Babushka said.

“He’s lucky he had time to heal here first,” the nurse said.

“He got off the stuff. He was clean. Ilya said he was clean. He didn’t need to—” Babushka said.

“Not detox. Jail,” the nurse said. “And not for the drugs, either.”

Babushka kept her face completely still and in her ice voice said, “You’re mistaken.”

The nurse must have been the sort of woman who was sick of tears and sobs and moans and could only be softened by toughness, because she said, “He was not smart, that’s for sure, but I agree. He didn’t seem like the type to kill anyone. More a Don Juan. But he confessed.”

“Confessed?” Babushka said.

“To the murders. Of those women.”

Babushka nodded stiffly, and gripped Ilya’s hand, and they sat like that, on the bench, for a long time. Then Babushka patted his arm, rose on her own, and together they walked across the square to the bus stop.

Papa Cam had heated the pool so that it was as hot as Babushka’s tea, and a layer of steam formed between the water and the October air that made it look like an enormous cauldron. Since he’d come to America, Ilya’s swimming had improved, and he and Molly and Marilee took turns diving, and Mama Jamie and Papa Cam ranked their scores as though they were in the Olympics. Sadie floated on the water’s surface, and every once in a while, Ilya used his dives as an excuse to swim underneath her, to twist like a seal and look at the way the water fanned her hair and blued her skin.