Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

“She seems worse?”

Sharice nodded, then gave Ilya a long look and said, “What are you creeping on her for? You are the last thing she needs.”

“I’m not creeping,” Ilya said.

“Sure,” Sharice said. “You want more chicken or not?”

That night Ilya could not sleep. Midnight came, then one a.m., then two. He was hoping that Sadie might go to see her mother, that he could walk with her, get his mind off everything, but by three a.m. it was late enough that he knew she wouldn’t go.

He pulled on his sneakers and slid open the door and hiked down the hill to Route 21. He broke into a run. At first to warm himself—it was finally cold at night here—and then because the motion felt good, made him optimistic. With each step he took, the refinery bobbed on the horizon. He could feel his lungs, the wet curves of them drying with each inhale. He wondered how long it had been since Vladimir had been outside. He wondered if there was a window in Vladimir’s cell. He tried to send patience through the air to Vladimir like it was a wish. Sweat stung his eyes. He was close now. The air was cut with chemicals, so burnt and acrid that he couldn’t breathe deeply. Vladimir and Sergey used to say that you’d get superpowers if you breathed the refinery air, like Superman did from living on Krypton. Lap it up, they’d tell him. Stop holding your nose. That had been when they were young enough and the refinery was new enough that they noticed the smell.

The lights were on in the trailer, and from the sidewalk Ilya could see Sadie’s mom sleeping on the couch. She looked peaceful enough, but still he wanted to know that she was breathing. He couldn’t get what Sharice had said about her haunting the Bojangles’ out of his head. There was a bush in front of the window, dry with neglect, and even when he pressed himself into its bristles, he couldn’t see the rise and fall of her chest.

Over her head, one corner of the poster of the woman in the white dress had come unstuck. Trash covered the coffee table—an empty tissue box, a jug of juice, a couple of cans, a wadded T-shirt. The pink pipe was nestled among them, and next to it was a syringe.

Ilya’s sweat turned cold, and his skin tightened. She was completely still on the couch. Too still, he thought. He reached down, grasped one of the bush’s branches, and broke it off. He rapped it against the window. Once, twice, three times. Nothing.

No, he thought, imagining Vladimir’s bone, all that blood. No.

He crouched and groped on the ground until he found a rock, half embedded in the hard-packed dirt of her yard. Before he could think better of it, he took a step back and threw the rock. It hit the trailer’s plastic siding, and the noise of it was enormous. Across the street a motion light flashed on. A dog barked. And on the couch, Sadie’s mom sat up and yelled, “What the fucking fuck?”

By the time she got to the window, he was running again, back down Route 21, wondering why he hadn’t just knocked on her door.

Ilya sat on the steps of the Berlozhniki police station, watching the square wake up. Kirill yanked up the metal grate to the Internet Kebab, grunting each time the grate snagged in its rusted tracks. Anatoly opened the Minutka, and a man selling pirozhki from a cart steered it through the slush, calling out the day’s choices: “Cabbage! Egg! Beef! Cabbage! Egg! Beef!” Every once in a while, he added “Jam!” to the list, but with less conviction, like it was his least favorite filling. At eight, a few secretaries in high-heeled boots picked their way from the bus stop to the station. They teetered up the stairs, toting purses and thermoses, and did not look at him.

“That’s it,” one said. “That was the whole date. And then he expected a fuck.” The others laughed, and the sound was suctioned off by the door shutting behind them. Eventually the policemen trickled in, but not Dmitri.

As the sun inched up to the tops of the birch trees, a babushka poked her head out the station door and said, “You should wait inside. You’ll freeze. Come, come.”

She held an arm out and bent it as though Ilya’s shoulders were already wrapped in it, but he shook his head. He wanted to talk to Dmitri alone, knew that Dmitri would be more apt to listen without an audience, and, besides, the idea of going into the station and announcing that he was Vladimir Alexandrovich Morozov’s brother was too terrifying, too shaming, even though he knew that his mother came to the station every day to plead Vladimir’s innocence and that she did it without shame.

The babushka sensed his degradation and did not like it. Her arm dropped and her face tightened. “Wait on the bench then.” She pointed across the street to Gabe’s bench, which was flanked by overflowing trash cans. “You’re in the way.”

So Ilya waited on the bench, and after another hour the babushka came out with a bucket of salt and began to scatter it on the station steps. The policemen left for lunch at the Kebab or Tepek, and each time they came down the steps the babushka skittered away from them. One policeman coughed, then spat, and his spit landed on the babushka’s shoe, and she made no move to wipe it off until he was out of sight. Occasionally she looked up at Ilya and glared, as though his presence in her periphery were a burden even heavier than the bucket of salt.

It was well past noon, and still Dmitri had not arrived. Ilya began to wonder if Dmitri even came to the station at all. He patrolled the refinery, Ilya knew, and he knew that the refinery paid him on the side to keep the private road clear, to make sure that the miles and miles of fence were secure, that the pipeline was safely buried under its coat of snow. And Ilya was about to stand, to stretch his legs and begin to walk north past the Malikovs’ apartment and then out of town, toward the Tower and the refinery, when he saw Dmitri round the corner of Ulitsa Lenina. He was in his valenki and pogony like all the other policemen, and they made him look anonymous and sharp. Ilya stood, and forced himself to think of the night when he’d eaten at the Malikovs’, when Dmitri had said that Maria Mikhailovna loved him like family and that that meant that he, Dmitri, loved Ilya like family. He thought of this, and not of what had happened next—of Vladimir and Sergey running in his headlights—as he ran across the street.

“Dmitri Ivanovich,” he said, when he was near enough that no one but Dmitri would hear him.

Ilya was not expecting Dmitri to be happy to see him—there was a chance that someone might recognize Ilya, might know that he was Vladimir’s brother, and Dmitri could be tainted by association—but Dmitri smiled and made room for Ilya to walk beside him. “Berlozhniki’s pride!” he said. “How long have you got left here?”

Ilya’s chest cinched. “Berlozhniki’s Pride” was what the papers had called Olga Nadiova in her heyday, when she had braids and could do a perfect double axel with her eyes closed. “A few months,” he said.

“Good, good,” Dmitri said, and then he stopped walking, and Ilya stopped too. “Listen,” he said, “I’m sorry about your brother. Sorry that I had to be involved at all. And I don’t believe what they’re saying—that he was evil—all this shit. He was on drugs, and the drugs made him crazy. In a way, prison might save him. But I’m sorry—I know it’s hard for you.”

This was kind. Kinder, at least, than what any other policeman would say to him. Kinder than the things that had been spat at him and his mother in the kommunalkas. The mean things always made his mind turn to metal, made his spine straighten, but at this kindness tears banked up behind his eyes, and before he could cry, he said, “That’s why I wanted to talk to you, Dmitri Ivanovich. I was with Vladimir the night Lana died. I went to the Tower with him, and I was there, with him, the whole time.” This wasn’t exactly true, but he figured it was a lie worth telling. “He was with me and Aksinya. Aksinya Stepanova. We were together the whole time. She will tell you—”