Lights All Night Long Page 5

  He was halfway asleep, giving in, too tired to dream, he hoped, but when he slept, he did dream. Of Vladimir in their kitchen. Naked, water dripping from his chin, his penis like a slug against his thigh, dried blood turning red as Babushka washed him. In the dream Vladimir’s leg was just as it had been—the skin the color of onions cooked in grease, a long, thin chasm where his flesh parted to show bone. His lips were the turquoise of the Masons’ pool. He was smiling, saying something sly, something about love that Ilya couldn’t quite understand.

  * * *

  —

  Ilya woke with a scream balled in his throat. His pulse jerked in his neck. He washed his face in the sink and went upstairs. The house was filled with the mechanical noises that at home would have been familiar and would have amounted to silence. The clock on the microwave read 2:07. He opened the fridge and stared at the jugs of juice, the tubs of lettuce and sticks of butter. Everything was in a weird container. The butter was too yellow, the lettuce too white. Ilya poured a glass of water from the tap, and it stank of iron and tasted of salt.

  His mother had bought him a phone card at the Internet Kebab—sixty minutes, Kirill had said—and he used it to call her, thinking that her voice, at least, would be like home. Her phone was off, though, and her outgoing message was stiff and cheerful, was not really her at all. Still, he left a message saying that he’d arrived, and that the family seemed nice enough, but before he could say anything more, before he could ask after Vladimir or say that he loved her, the connection ended, and a computerized voice announced that his phone card was empty. Kirill had ripped them off, and the normalcy of this, after all they’d gone through, was like a little gift.

  Ilya sat at the table, looking out onto the den and foyer and up to the hallway, which was high and dark and silent. He listened for the Masons’ breathing. He wanted to hear a sigh or snore, something to know that he wasn’t alone. Then behind him, on the deck, there was a noise. A faint scratch, a scuffle. He turned in his chair, but the deck was empty, the window black and blank.

  “Think of white paper,” his mother used to tell him when he had nightmares, “paper, just white and empty,” and he tried to, but still his pulse jumped like something trying to escape him. Sweat gathered on his lip. He kept seeing Vladimir half dead in the dream, and then it came to him what Vladimir had said: “Love is like a devil in the corner.” One of Babushka’s sayings. The sort that didn’t actually make any sense when you tried to analyze it, but when you let your mind stay outside of it you understood.

  There was the noise again. A louder scratch this time. A wet exhale. Ilya pushed his chair back, and it screeched against the tiles. On the deck, there was this white flash of movement back and forth, back and forth, like a hand waving. A puff of condensation bloomed on the glass. Ilya fought the urge to yell. Then the creature let out a high-pitched yip, the condensation faded, and he saw that it was a dog. It was up on its hind legs with its front paws on the glass. Its tail wagged steadily behind its head. He tried to remember whether the Masons had said anything about owning a dog and could not. At home strays ranged, loping across snowy streets and marking certain alleys as their territory. They could be vicious—many were part wolf—and they were routinely rounded up and shot in the square, but this creature seemed docile. Ilya opened the door a crack, and the dog cocked its head at him. It had white fur that curled in coy tendrils at the base of its ears and an air of indulged expectation that was not unlike Marilee’s and Molly’s.

  “Otvali,” Ilya said. And then, thinking the dog might be more apt to obey English, he whispered, “Go away, dog! Go!”

  The dog stopped panting for a second, as though it were listening. It let its paws fall from the glass with a thud and wandered down the steps into the yard. It skirted the pool and picked its way across the grass slowly, as though it did not care for getting its paws dirty, and then it stopped by the alligator wall where a figure was standing. Ilya’s insides went heavy and hard, like they were turning to cement. It’s him, he thought, whoever killed those girls, and then the figure stepped out of the gloom, and Ilya saw that it was Sadie. She crossed the yard with the dog at her heels, and climbed up the deck steps toward him. She was barefoot, in the same black T-shirt, but with sweatpants underneath. Her silver sneakers dangled from one hand.

  “‘Go away, dog’?’’ she said. She let the dog in, slid past him, glanced up the stairs toward her parents’ bedroom, and clicked the door shut behind her. “Don’t look so shocked,” she said. “I knew before.”

  “Will you tell?” he asked.

  “I won’t if you won’t. But you should—for all our sakes—or else they’re going to keep talking to you like you’re deaf.”

  “You don’t think they know?” For a moment, Ilya’s stomach burned at the idea that they might. He imagined them explaining to their friends, It turned out he does speak English—he was just pretending not to. He imagined them thinking this strangeness the result of a disturbing Russian childhood or, worse, simply the result of being Russian, and then he remembered another of Babushka’s sayings: embarrassment is a luxury. He remembered his mother on that wooden bench at the police station, the secretaries nakedly staring, looking for something in her that might explain Vladimir.

  “They don’t know,” Sadie said. “They’re innocents. Tell them and they’ll forgive you. They love forgiving people.” She said this softly, but with a scorn that made it clear that she did not love forgiving people and that she did not consider herself an innocent.

  She walked past him into the kitchen and opened a cabinet that was stuffed with boxes of crisps and crackers and biscuits. “I get hungry at night. All the time. I’m growing. I can feel it happening sometimes—it’s like cramps in my legs.”

  “You look completely grown to me,” he said.

  “Is that a compliment?” she said, and she gave a quick smile that slid across her face like a snake across a path. Like she was afraid to let it last. “Are you hungry?”

  Ilya nodded. “I didn’t eat dinner,” he said.

  “Mama Jamie might not forgive that.” She pulled a box out of the cabinet with a picture of little girls in what appeared to be construction hats. “Girl Scout cookies,” she said.

  His heart was still thumping away, but his fear was no longer entirely unpleasant. It was exhilarating to talk to her. He’d never actually used his English with a native speaker, and it seemed as though she could understand him, that his words were not as clumsy as they felt on his tongue. And she was beautiful. Her hair was in a big knot on top of her head, and it made her face seem wider, younger. She looked like Snegurochka in the book of fairy tales that Babushka had read to them as kids, in the picture when she first comes out of the forest, when she’s newly, magically made. Even the one shattered pupil seemed more like magic than a mistake.

  “What happened to your eye?” he said.

  She lifted a hand to it as though she’d forgotten. “Birth defect,” she said. “Sometimes I forget it’s there and I wonder why people are staring at me.”

  That was not what people were staring at, Ilya knew, but he liked her modesty.

  She took a cookie out and snapped it in two with her front teeth. They were shiny with spit, and Ilya remembered Vladimir’s leg. That wet bit of bone. The skin failing to cover it.

  “Do you miss home?” she said. The question was a nice one, but her voice had a strange distance to it, like the idea of missing home was a curiosity. For her, it probably was.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “The whole no-English thing—did you just feel like messing with us?”

  “I wasn’t in the mood,” he said. He could hear how cold his voice sounded, and of course that wasn’t the truth. But how could he explain to her that speaking English felt like cutting the last thread of a fraying rope? It was stupid, he saw now. An empty protest. As useless as the emails he sent Vladimir. What did it
matter what he spoke? Russian, English, gibberish. He was still here, and his brother was still there.

  She was looking at him with narrowed eyes. She had said something, and he had not heard her.

  “What?” he said.

  “I said, ‘Don’t you want to be here?’”

  A few hours ago, the thought had almost made him cry, and he was afraid that he might, but instead he had the strange sense that he was solidifying, as though he were rejoining his old self, the one for whom this moment—a conversation alone in the middle of the night with an American girl—would have been an insane distillation of desire.

  “I did,” he said, “but then my brother—” If he told her the truth—that his brother had been arrested for murder, that his brother had confessed to murder—she would look at him the way everyone in Berlozhniki had started to, as though he were guilty by association, and, of course, she wouldn’t think to ask whether Vladimir had actually done it.

  “Your brother?”

  “My brother died,” he said, and he was surprised at how easy it was to say, and for a second he found himself thinking how much easier it would be. He fought the urge to cross himself, to knock on wood.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She looked him in the eye. “But that doesn’t mean you can be an asshole.”

  Heat rushed to his face. She took a handful of cookies and pushed the box across the counter toward him. “Church is early tomorrow. You should sleep. And tell them about your brother—they’ll understand.”

  She walked past him again, closer this time, and she smelled like cut grass and something acrid too, like oil. The dog followed her, its nails clicking gently against the floorboards. As they started to climb the stairs, he saw that the bottoms of her feet were dirty. The cuffs of her sweats were speckled with bits of grass and her ankles were crisscrossed by thin pink scratches.

  “Sadie,” he said.

  She stopped halfway up the stairs and looked at him, and the dog did the same. He hadn’t asked her what she’d been doing in the yard. I won’t tell if you won’t, she’d said, and he hadn’t even wondered what she meant.

  “What were you doing?” He gestured toward the door.

  “The dog had to pee,” she said.

  He nodded. It may have been true, but from the look of her pants, she’d been walking outside for a while, and there were her sneakers, dangling from her hand.

  “How did you know? That I spoke English?” he said.

  She hesitated. “You just have a look. Like you’re listening. Most people don’t have that, even when you’re speaking their language.” She smiled at him, a lasting smile this time, and then she climbed the rest of the stairs, and he watched the flash of her dirty heels as they disappeared into her bedroom.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Immersed as he was in his studies, Ilya did not notice exactly when Vladimir first started cutting school. Babushka shooed them out the door at the same time each morning, and they still walked together across the Pechora, up Ulitsa Snezhnaya, past the bookstore where the window had been replaced, past the little wooden church where their father and Dedushka were buried and where Babushka lit her candles, past the abandoned Komsomol headquarters to School #17. They parted ways at the front doors, and Ilya assumed that Vladimir went inside to his classroom just as Ilya did, but apparently he did not.

  “Is Vladimir sick?” Maria Mikhailovna asked him one day. For the second year in a row, Vladimir was in her Introductory English class, a class that Ilya had skipped altogether. Not knowing what else to do, Ilya said that yes, Vladimir was sick. Then Aksinya and Lana started sneaking to Ilya’s classroom. They’d stare in through the windows in the door, making Vs of their fingers and flicking their tongues between them. Ilya would ask to go to the bathroom, his face burning, and when he emerged, they’d giggle uncontrollably. Their hair was gauzy around their faces, the purple under their eyes somehow beautiful. They were always out of breath.

  “Have you seen Vladimir?” they’d ask.

  Every time Ilya hoped for a different question—something to do with him, not Vladimir. “We need help with our English paper,” or “Let’s go to the Internet Kebab,” or “There’s a party later, at the Tower.” But it was always “Where’s Vladimir? Where is that mudak, that asshole brother of yours?” and when Ilya didn’t know, they’d leave him in the hall, clutching his bathroom pass.

  Another teacher gave Ilya a folder labeled HOMEWORK FOR SEPTEMBER to bring home to Vladimir. Ilya slipped it into his backpack and that night, once their mother had left for work, once Babushka had made up the couch for them and was snoring softly in the bedroom, he handed it to Vladimir.

  “It’s from Nikolay Grigorievich,” Ilya said. “The math you’ve missed.”

  Vladimir opened the folder and flipped through the pages. He looked at them closely, not casually, as though they were written in a code he might be able to unlock if only he knew the key. Ilya thought of him at the bookshop, sounding out the titles from Maria Mikhailovna’s list, and in that moment he wanted so desperately for school to be as easy for his brother as it was for him. Then Vladimir dropped the folder onto the carpet and began to undress for bed.

  Ilya stared at it. “What should I tell him?”

  Vladimir shrugged. “Tell him you gave it to me.” He fell backward onto his pillow, pulled his socks off by their soggy toes, and said, “Let me tell you, Ilya, a vagina is an alarming thing to look at.” Vladimir went on, detailing his latest exploits with Aksinya, and Ilya picked the folder up and slipped it back into his backpack.

  The next afternoon, after he’d finished listening to Michael & Stephanie, after he’d done his translation for Maria Mikhailovna and all of the homework for his other classes, he began to chip away at Vladimir’s math. He didn’t do it out of loyalty, but out of this new anxiety that hit him sometimes like a fever. He was worried for Vladimir, worried when Vladimir was not home in the afternoons, worried even when Vladimir was home, was right next to him on the couch, watching one of Babushka’s telenovelas with one hand stuffed in a bag of crisps and the other stuffed down his pants.

  It took Ilya a week to do all the makeup work. All those lines and figures. All those neat totals. He’d had to teach himself the basics of trigonometry, and when he finally presented it to Nikolay Grigorievich, the teacher said, “I’m afraid that ship has sailed.”

  Vladimir began skipping dinner too, and Babushka would groan and say, “The boy never eats,” or, “He’s with that girl. The one whose parents are dead, and the sister who’s a you-know-what.”

  “Aksinya,” Ilya would say, because he loved saying her name, and because the fact that such a beautiful girl liked Vladimir seemed to him something to be proud of.

  Ilya’s mother would bite a radish in half and make a bitter face and say, “What am I supposed to do? Put him in a straitjacket?” And it was true that there was little she could do. She worked the night shift, slept during the day. She was with Vladimir and Ilya for only two exhausted hours in the evening and one exhausted hour in the morning.

  “He’ll be fine,” Timofey would say, his nostril hairs twitching. “Just give him some time. He’s running around. It’s what boys do.”

  Then they’d all look at Ilya with this awkward sort of appreciation, because of course he would never do the things that boys do.

  Every once in a while, after Ilya was already in bed, half asleep, listening to Michael and Stephanie, Vladimir would poke his head through the door and say, “Ilyusha, I’m sleeping at Sergey’s tonight,” or “Night, night, bratik. I won’t be home until late.” His breath would be a beery fog, and behind him, in the light of the hall, Ilya would see Sergey and Aksinya and Lana, their hands clamped over their mouths to keep from laughing, to keep from waking him, as though he were a baby. Vladimir would click the door shut, and he would hear their voices echo up the stairway. And there were times—and this is
what Ilya would remember—when he would simply not let the worry in, when he would not wonder where Vladimir was going or what Vladimir was doing, when he would stretch his legs out and revel in the expansiveness of the couch. It felt decadent and very adult to be sleeping alone, to have two pillows. The refinery lights sparked on the ceiling, and he would imagine that they were city lights, and that he was in his own apartment, in Moscow or St. Petersburg, and that in the morning he would be heading to work, not school. Those nights, Ilya slept like the dead, but he’d wake and, in just the way your tongue finds the tender spot where you’ve bitten your cheek, his mind would find Vladimir.

  * * *

  —

  One morning in October, as Ilya, his mother, and Babushka were eating syrniki with cream and apples, Vladimir walked in the door of their apartment wearing a tracksuit and smelling dank. He pulled a term card out of his pocket and slid it onto the table, right between Ilya’s plate and his mother’s. The card was filthy. It had been crumpled, stepped on, and partially incinerated—as though Vladimir had used it to roll a cigarette, lit it, and then thought better of it—but Ilya could still make out Vladimir’s grades: a neat column of ones. Ilya gasped. No one got ones. Ones were like zeros, just a place for the scale to start, the end of a ruler.

  Their mother was in her work clothes: a hairnet, blue smock, and rubber clogs. At first she did not notice the card. She had a magazine next to her plate and was flipping the pages impossibly fast. She was angry—either because Vladimir had been out all night, or because she hated her job, or because Babushka had recently announced that she and Timofey from down the hall were romantically involved, and Ilya’s mother had not been romantically involved with anyone for a decade. But after a minute she saw the card there on the table and snatched it up. Her eyes went shallow.