Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

He knew from some long-forgotten textbook or nature program that crocodiles killed by drowning. That they grabbed you by a limb and pulled you down and held you there for the burning moments it took your lungs to empty.

The crocodile reached the steps and paused, its nose perched just out of the water. It was an invitation, Ilya thought, and he could see himself walking down to the pool and stepping carefully into the water. Even as he knocked on the glass doors and called out to the Masons, he could feel the slice, the tear, the pressure. Mama Jamie was running toward him, and even once she’d opened the doors and was holding him in her arms he could feel the heat in his lungs, the crush of them giving up, and the cold rush of water filling him.

“There’s a crocodile,” he said.

Sadie was at the door now too, and as Mama Jamie bent over the rail and peered into the pool, she hugged him.

“Breathe, breathe,” she said, as though she understood that he was drowning.

Mama Jamie shook her head. “Ilya, honey,” she said, “an alligator can’t climb over that wall.”

He spent that day sitting by the pool, in the same chair where he’d listened to Vladimir’s confession. He wanted to keep an eye on the water, to keep an eye on the wall.

The Masons were gone—Sadie had track practice, which she’d wanted to skip, but he’d insisted that she go—and Mama Jamie and Papa Cam and the girls were shopping for Thanksgiving, which was only a few days away. Durashka was curled in a patch of sunlight by the grill, her paws twitching in some dream. The deck doors were open, and when the phone rang, the sound was as clear as a bell pealing. The dog cocked her head. Ilya ignored it. It stopped, and then started again. It went on like that for ten minutes, and then this thought formed in his head and sank like a stone to his gut: Babushka had died. Or his mother. Because what else could that terrible insistence mean? The phone had rung like that when they’d been at the airport, waiting for Vladimir. They hadn’t heard it, of course, but Ilya had seen the ten missed calls. He had still not allowed Mama Jamie to delete the message.

The phone stopped. Ilya exhaled, careful not to break the silence, as though the caller might hear him and start up again. A plane passed so far overhead that he could not hear it, then somewhere on Route 21 a tanker bellowed at some lesser car, and the silence was pierced. Durashka licked her chops with wet vigor and rattled her tags scratching at a patch on her belly. Inside, the phone rang again, and Ilya stood and walked along the edge of the pool and up the deck steps, and when he picked it up, the voice on the other end was clotted with tears, which he had expected, but it was speaking English, which he had not expected.

“It’s me,” she said. “You said to call.”

It sounded like an accusation.

“Who?” he said, though her tone congealed into her identity as he said it.

“I had a close call,” she said. “Too fucking close. And I don’t have anybody. It was either you or the fucking bitch at the Bojangles’, and she would probably like to see me dead.”

He couldn’t tell if she was high or scared or both, but a story tumbled out of her, of waking up in a ditch by an old racetrack on Leffie’s outskirts. She’d been half dressed, and that was all as bad as you’d expect, she said, but the really fucked-up thing was that when she’d pulled herself together, sat up, stood up, and started walking down the shoulder, something made her turn around. She’d looked back—for her purse, maybe, she thought—but she’d seen herself lying there, still in the ditch, her cheek on this weedy mound of gravel, her eyes open and drying out in the sun. She kept walking, she said. Running almost, but every time she looked back, she could still see her body. It was like that for half a mile, and she thought that was it, she’d killed herself and was a ghost now, and this was Hell or purgatory or whatever. When she’d gotten to the 7-Eleven in Latraux, a man had stared at her from inside his car, then locked his doors, and she’d been sure she was a ghost. Then the cashier had stopped her at the door.

“It wasn’t ’til that fucker said, ‘Uh-uhn. No way. You can’t come in here after the way you was last night,’ that I realized I was at least mostly alive.”

“Where are you now?” Ilya said.

“At home,” she said.

“I’ll come there, OK?” he said.

“OK,” she said.

“Turn on the TV. For company,” he said. “And don’t take anything.”

“I got nothing to take,” she said.

“OK,” he said.

“OK,” she said again.

He called Mama Jamie on her cell and told her what had happened, and she left the store and met him at Sadie’s mom’s house.

“Sadie’s not coming?” Sadie’s mom said, as soon as Mama Jamie walked in the door.

“No,” Mama Jamie said. “Did you want her to?”

Sadie’s mom shrugged, and Mama Jamie helped her pack a bag while on the TV a reporter in Hollywood interviewed an actress about her morning beauty routine. Ilya sat on the couch and looked out the window to the sidewalk and the street. It was so close. He imagined Sadie’s face framed in it. How could her mom never have seen her? Maybe she had, he thought. Maybe she’d wanted to open the door and invite her in, but she’d known better. She’d given her up once, and maybe she didn’t have the strength to do it again. A van drove past the window to the end of the cul-de-sac, turned around, and parked in front of the trailer. TOMORROW’S SUNRISE was printed in rainbow letters on the side.

“It’s supposed to be good,” Mama Jamie said. “Pastor Kyle recommended it.”

Sadie’s mom nodded. She had barely spoken since Mama Jamie had arrived. She had not cursed once. Something about Mama Jamie had turned her docile, and as she grabbed her bag and walked out the door, it occurred to Ilya that her docility was the closest she could come to saying thank you.

Once she’d left in the van, he and Mama Jamie drove home. “I’ll tell Sadie tonight,” she said. “Maybe it’ll be a good thing for her.”

“Maybe,” Ilya said.

“At least she’ll get some sleep for a while.” Ilya looked at Mama Jamie. Her cheeks were so round and high that she looked innocent regardless of her expression. “She thinks I’d be mad. Be jealous, maybe. And I don’t like the lying, the sneaking. But I’m proud of her. Proud of her heart,” she said. “So don’t break it.”

“I won’t,” Ilya said.

They passed the fireworks stand, the old plantation, the hot sauce plant. They turned up Dumaine Drive to the house that still did not feel like home. He saw Vladimir waiting on the stoop, stubbing a cigarette into one of Mama Jamie’s potted plants, running a hand through hair that had only just grown past the prison buzz. He thought of Sadie’s mom seeing herself in the ditch, and he wondered if it had been that way for Vladimir. Whether he’d seen himself lying there, with his arm around Aksinya. Their spine-studded backs, her beautiful face, the drugs on the table, his clothes on the floor. Why, Ilya wondered, had he not seen anything there worth saving?

He and Sadie walked to her mom’s place the next night. The landlord had emptied it already. The couch sat in the yard, soaked from an afternoon storm. Her mattress slumped against the window, blocking their view inside, but the door gave when they tried it. The carpet was damp—it had been cleaned with some sort of cleaner that smelled of rancid oranges—and because the furniture was gone, or because the landlord had replaced the bulbs with fluorescent ones, there was an anonymity to the space that was alarming. It felt as though Sadie’s mom were more than gone. It was like she had never existed at all. Ilya remembered Sadie telling him about burning down her mom’s house, about wanting to walk through the ashes, and he’d brought a lighter for her, just in case.