Lights All Night Long Page 7

  Ilya had never had faith in anything except that knowledge could be gained. Numbers in a column added up to something. If you stared at a word, if you sounded out the letters and visualized its meaning, it could be learned. And there was Vladimir. Vladimir, who could not be counted on for anything, who was untrustworthy in a million little ways, but who had still managed to inspire Ilya’s faith.

  As Pastor Kyle danced, Ilya turned these things over in his mind. He stood when the Masons stood. He held a hymnal and let Marilee flip to the right pages. The music grew softer, and then Pastor Kyle announced that it was time for testimonials. A woman took the microphone. She was plump with pinkish hair, and in a soft voice she admitted that in times of trial she turned to food rather than God. Then a kid Ilya’s age mumbled that he had played a video game that was somewhat Satanic. A bookish man told the congregation that he had not gotten a much hoped for promotion. His coworker had gotten it instead, and the man had been angry. He was crying as he spoke, his glasses slipping on the damp planes of his cheeks. The hardest thing, he said, was that his anger and his jealousy—a jealousy so intense that it seemed almost sexual—had clouded his relationship with God. When he prayed, he felt like he was yelling under water, his words muffled and choked and inaudible to anyone above the surface.

  Pastor Kyle nodded through transgressions large and small, a beatific smile on his lips, a muscle spasming gently in his jaw. When the last testimonial had been aired, he began to preach. He spoke of a direct line to God. No call waiting. No being put on hold. Then, through a transition that Ilya could not follow, he was describing the gates of Heaven, saying how quickly they would open for the righteous. He began dancing again—a sort of slow gyration, his eager hips leading him down the aisle.

  “There are two kinds of people in this world,” he said. His lips grazed the microphone. He was only a few meters from the Masons’ pew, and then he stopped, and he looked at Ilya. “There are the Cains and the Abels. There are the believers and those that don’t.” He paused and smiled at Ilya as though he and Ilya were in on some joke. “We have someone new with us today, folks. All the way from Mother Russia, will you give it up for Ilya Morozov!”

  The congregation began to clap around him. The man with the video camera hovered behind Pastor Kyle, and Ilya could see that the lens was trained on him.

  “You’re supposed to stand,” Sadie whispered, and he looked at her, and she read the fear on his face and said, “Just for a second.”

  Ilya stood.

  “Ilya,” Pastor Kyle said, “is a top student in his town, which, as I understand it, is in the Siberian wilderness. Can you say ‘hello,’ Ilya?”

  Pastor Kyle held the microphone out, and Ilya leaned toward it and said, “Hello,” and his voice sounded sullen and small. He cleared his throat, was about to add that Berlozhniki was not in Siberia, when Pastor Kyle whipped the microphone back and said, “Ilya is here today in the good old U-S-of-A thanks to the generosity of EnerCo and the Mason family.” There was another round of clapping. Papa Cam and Mama Jamie nodded, their cheeks pink, and Pastor Kyle waited for the applause to die down before saying, “But Ilya’s family has suffered a tragedy.”

  Ilya stiffened. Beside him Papa Cam and Mama Jamie were flushed with attention. Ilya dug his fingers into his palms, tried to stem an anger that he knew was not entirely justified. He had lied, after all, had used their pity to gain their forgiveness, but still he couldn’t believe how quickly they had told Pastor Kyle. Pastor Kyle, who was looking at Ilya like he was one of Jesus’s lost lambs. Pastor Kyle, who, as he opened his mouth to speak, revealed a wad of something pink and bright between his molars. Bubble gum.

  “Ilya’s brother died not long ago, folks,” he said. “And I was thinking there might be something we could do to help his family.”

  Around him, people were nodding. Someone a few rows behind him said, “Yes!” There was a basket weaving its way along the rows, and the ladies were reaching into their purses, and the men were leaning on one haunch to get to their wallets. Ilya let his hands loosen. He unclenched his gut. Maybe they could help, he thought. They would collect money, and he would send it home to pay for a decent lawyer or to bribe someone to tell them where Vladimir was being held or to cover travel expenses so that his mother could visit him. Ilya could feel the anger leaving him, could feel his face softening as though it were clay, losing its shape in the heat, and then Pastor Kyle said, “What do we do, when a family is in need? What is the thing we can always do to help one another no matter our circumstances?”

  “Pray!” Marilee yelled from down the pew.

  Pastor Kyle pointed a finger at her and clicked his tongue. “Bingo,” he said.

  He turned on his heel and headed back to the pulpit, and when he got there, he bent his head and closed his eyes and made his voice as low and lush as velvet. “Lord,” he said. “We have a brother in need among us. We have a brother who is in pain, who is grieving, who has lost someone he loves, and we ask you to comfort him.”

  Pastor Kyle kept saying “brother,” over and over. All around Ilya, heads were bowed. Rows and rows of people, their hair shining in the sun. Ilya could smell sweat distinctly. He could almost feel the force of their prayers, like they were leaving a wake as they sped up to an industrious American heaven where they would be answered with ease. Except the prayers were wrong. Misdirected. And Ilya was sure that they would come plummeting back to Earth in some new and twisted form, and so he closed his eyes and tried to redirect them.

  Just give me a clue, he thought. Just something to prove he didn’t do it.

  He tried to picture Vladimir the last time he’d seen him—in the clinic with white sheets all around him. But instead he saw Vladimir in the picture from VKontakte. It was as though, in staring at that picture the night before, Ilya had burned it into his retinas, and now his imagination could project it onto his lids at will. Pastor Kyle’s voice began to rise and crest, and then it was as though Ilya were in the picture. He was there again, at the Tower with Vladimir and Aksinya and Lana and Sergey. He could feel the bass coming up through the concrete floor, making his jaw chatter. A smile lifted his cheeks. All around him the pulse of bodies, dancing. The golden whip of a girl’s hair. That chemical prick to the air. The soft hump of someone’s ass hitting his. The slosh of vodka in the bottle as Aksinya took a swig. The crunch of glass under his sneakers. Lana was next to him, his fingers clammy on her waist. Her skin burning hot. Sergey was holding up Aksinya’s phone.

  “Not your best angle, Aksinya,” Sergey said, and Aksinya held out her middle finger and flicked him off. Lana flicked him off too, and just as the flash clicked Vladimir said, “You have competition, Ilyusha.” That was why Vladimir’s mouth had been open in the picture, that was what he’d been saying. In the moment, Ilya had thought that he meant Sergey, that Sergey liked Lana, though Sergey had his own girlfriend. In the moment, he’d thought it was a joke because Lana was not his to compete for, but now he could see Vladimir’s eyes, made even more narrow by his sidelong glance. He had not meant Sergey. He had been looking to the side, past Aksinya and Ilya and Lana. He had been looking at someone.

  Ilya felt a hand on his wrist. Lana, he thought, but when he opened his eyes it was Sadie. Her nails ragged, the skin around them chewed pink and raw. She kept her hand on his skin for a second, and then she said, “I have to get up there.”

  Ilya looked to the aisle. Marilee and Molly and a troop of preteen boys were marching up toward the pulpit, and now Sadie squeezed past him. For a second her foot was between his. Her thigh brushed his. The opening chords of a song were twanging in the heat. At some point, while Ilya’s eyes were closed, Pastor Kyle had moved from the pulpit to an electric keyboard. The kids gathered behind him, and Sadie joined them. Someone handed her a microphone. She looked at Ilya. That one eye was so beautifully broken, like something at the end of a kaleidoscope.

  You’ll know it
when it happens, Vladimir had told him one night, when he and Aksinya were still a new thing. Vladimir had never been shy about talking about women—he was the sort to sing his love from the rooftops, too cool to be embarrassed. But Ilya had been embarrassed to listen. He had always been more squeamish than Vladimir, and, besides, it hadn’t seemed to him like something he needed to know about, not yet anyway, not like participles and gerunds and contractions. But now he wished that he had listened, had asked, “So you know it when it happens, and then what?”

  Up by the pulpit Pastor Kyle’s hands were dancing over the keyboard. Sadie put the microphone to her mouth. He could hear her lips part, and then she began to sing.

  * * *

  —

  “He’s quite something, isn’t he?” Mama Jamie said. They were backing out of their parking spot at Star Pilgrim. Pastor Kyle was standing by the doors to the church waving vigorously. Now that the service had concluded, he chomped openly on his gum.

  “Mom has a crush on him,” Marilee said.

  Molly giggled.

  “I think every mom in there has a crush on him,” Sadie said. She was sitting next to Ilya. Her thigh was an inch from his. It looked like a loaf of toasted bread. Little blond hairs traversed it, catching the sun.

  “I’m inspired by him, if that’s what you mean,” Mama Jamie said. “Did you like it, Ilya?”

  The service, with its crackling acoustics and spastic light show, had seemed to him like a glossier version of the “karaoke club” that Pasha Kamenev ran in the boiler room of Building 6, the testimonials like the sad stories that Berlozhniki’s half-dozen reformed alcoholics told over and over at their Tuesday meetings in the communal kitchen. Now, with Papa Cam scanning the radio stations and the car’s AC blasting, even that moment when his memory of the Tower had crystallized seemed a bit ridiculous. More heatstroke than divine intervention. Ilya was sure that when he looked at the picture on VKontakte, Vladimir would be looking straight ahead, at no one but him.

  “Church in Russia is more serious,” he said, and then, realizing that that sounded like an insult, he said, “It’s more fun here.”

  Papa Cam laughed. “Not always,” he said. “I grew up Baptist, and let me tell you that is some serious worshipping.”

  “No dancing,” Mama Jamie said. “No drinking. No coffee. No soda.”

  “You didn’t have soda?” Molly said, incredulous. “Never, once, not any?!”

  Papa Cam shook his head. “I was deprived,” he said.

  Postchurch, the Masons had planned an entire day of back-to-school shopping at a mall in Alexandria. The girls each got new outfits, new sneakers, new notebooks. Pencil cases and key chains and a calculator for Marilee that cost over a hundred dollars. Papa Cam hefted the growing collection of bags from store to store like a pack mule. In the Walmart, Mama Jamie sent Ilya and Papa Cam on a mission to get undershirts and underwear and socks, and Ilya wondered if she’d seen his drying on the shower rod down in the basement.

  The options were paralyzing: sleeveless, V-neck, ribbed, briefs, boxers, each in their own plastic satchel. Mountains of them, drifts of them, the fabric as gleaming white as snow. So many that Ilya found himself staring at them blankly. Papa Cam threw a pack of boxers and short-sleeved shirts into their cart.

  “Never hurts to stick with the basics,” he said.

  “Stick with the basics,” Ilya repeated, just the way he used to with Michael and Stephanie when he wanted to commit something they’d said to memory.

  “Quick study,” Papa Cam said. “Do you know that one?”

  Ilya shook his head. “Quick study,” he said.

  “Exactly.” Papa Cam smiled.

  On the way home they stopped at a place called Red’s that served sandwiches as long as Ilya’s forearm. They ate at picnic tables overlooking a stagnant stream with shit-colored water. The sandwiches, Ilya learned, were called “po’ boys” and the stream was called a “bayou,” and the gray-green vines cloaking the trees were “Spanish moss.” Ilya’s English was not as perfect as Maria Mikhailovna had believed or as he had hoped. There were constant hiccups in the conversation—moments when the Masons’ eyes flicked up slightly, as though they were searching their brains for his meaning—and he was so much slower than he wanted to be. English, as the Masons spoke it, was a rapid-fire slurry of slang and abbreviations and interruptions. If he gave it his full attention, he could catch enough of what they said to cobble together an understanding, but he kept thinking about Vladimir’s eyes in that picture and he’d lose the thread of the conversation, and then, by the time he uttered a word aloud, whatever he said seemed clunky and irrelevant. He would flush, embarrassed, and his eyes would find Sadie. Sadie, poking at her sandwich with a fork; Sadie, pulling apart the strands from a stray clump of moss and braiding them back together; Sadie, with her face half hidden behind a curtain of hair. She seemed separate from her family. Self-contained. He thought of her room—the empty walls, the spartan bed—and was not sure what to make of her. He thought of her standing in the dark by the pool. Sometimes she looked at him too, and if there wasn’t necessarily affection there, there was at least a measure of curiosity. And she had touched his arm at Star Pilgrim. She had sat next to him in the car. Small things, sure, but taken together they began to add up.

  By the time they got home that night, Ilya’s head throbbed with the effort of understanding. His tongue was so exhausted that it had become a presence in his mouth. But still, when the Masons said “Good night,” he was able to answer. “Sleep tight.” It was an expression that had long confused him, but from their smiles he could see that that, at least, he had gotten right.

  * * *

  —

  In the months between Vladimir’s arrest and his own departure, Ilya had tried to ask himself the sorts of questions that the police would have been asking had Vladimir not confessed. The questions that they should have been asking even though he had confessed. Three women were dead: Olga Nadiova, Yulia Podtochina, and Lana. In the movies, there was always one thing that connected the victims and that inevitably led to the killer, but Lana and Yulia and Olga were connected in a million messy ways. They were all women, all lower class, all somewhat attractive. They all liked to party. Olga and Lana had lived in the kommunalkas. Yulia and Olga had been seen together at Dolls, a club named after some infamous Moscow hot spot that no one had ever seen. Yulia had worked at the refinery, and so had Lana’s dad, a welder whose cheeks were flecked with scars from flying sparks.

  Of the three, Lana was the only one Ilya had actually known, and so he’d asked himself over and over whether there was anyone who had wanted her dead. He tried to imagine Lana at school, before she’d dropped out like Vladimir and Sergey and Aksinya. He tried to picture her in the hallway, tried to remember where her locker had been, which table she’d eaten at in the cafeteria, and who had sat next to her, but she’d been in a different grade, and Ilya had always been studying. Studying so much that he might as well have existed in a different world. He barely knew who her friends were, let alone her enemies.

  One afternoon, desperate for information, he’d gone to see Aksinya at her sister’s apartment. She’d answered the door in her coat, just home from somewhere, her eyes shiny with exhaustion or tears or drugs or all three.

  “Ilyusha,” she’d said, “Lana was like sugar. Simple, sweet. People made fun of her, but you couldn’t not like her.”

  “But was there anyone who liked her too much?”

  Aksinya shook her head. “Too much? She slept around. She wanted a boyfriend, but nobody was knocking down her door.”

  “Slept around?”

  “Is that a big shock? She hooked up with you, right? So, yeah, she was scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

  “What about Sergey?” Ilya asked.

  “For sure when we were younger. But not for a while I don’t think.”

 
Aksinya was beautiful enough to leave Berlozhniki—that was what people said about her—and Ilya had always wondered whether Vladimir loved her beauty more or her potential for flight, but since Vladimir’s arrest there was this weariness to her. As though she weren’t still young, as though she hadn’t been young for a long, long time. She wouldn’t ever leave. Ilya could see it: she’d marry some midlevel apparatchik, move into an apartment a little better than this one. She’d have kids and love them, but at night, she’d dream of Vladimir and the way that when he held her his laughter had shaken her body, had felt like it was coming out of her own mouth. Then she would wake up.

  “And what about Vladimir?” Ilya asked, his brother’s name like a lump in his throat.

  “Don’t say his name like that,” she’d said.

  “Like what?” he said.

  “Like you-know-what,” she said. “He didn’t kill anybody. And he didn’t sleep with my best fucking friend.”

  She’d shut the door then. It was the same thin plywood as his own door. He could have knocked again—she would have opened it—but he hadn’t had any other questions to ask.

  Now, in the Masons’ basement, he logged back in to VKontakte. It had been ten hours since the church service at Star Pilgrim, and he was sure that he had imagined Vladimir’s sidelong look in the picture, just as he’d imagined the heat of Lana’s skin against his palm. As he typed in Vladimir’s name, there was this leadenness to his lungs, the anticipation of a dead end. This was real life, he reminded himself, not a movie, not a telenovela where the murders were committed and solved within an episode. The image loaded, and there was Vladimir’s mouth. It was open. He had been saying something—Ilya had been right about that—but his eyes were looking straight at the camera.