I know you didn’t do it, he’d write. The same thing every night, and when that started to feel rote, he began to add things about his day: that he’d played American football in gym, that they ate their fries with ketchup here, that American girls never wore high heels to school, that Mama Jamie had a crush on Sting, that Papa Cam drank beer that had purposely had the alcohol removed. Vladimir would not be allowed to check email, Ilya knew, and so before long these emails took on the tone of a diary. He told Vladimir about Sadie, about how in moments it seemed that she liked him but in other moments it seemed that she was completely indifferent to his presence—to everyone’s presence. He told Vladimir about J.T., about how he was preternaturally developed and looked exactly like Sergey Fedorov in his prime, and how the fuck, he wrote, am I supposed to compete with that? He told Vladimir about the sexting ring, about Pastor Kyle and the way he sometimes made the pulpit seem like a strip pole. He attached the picture of himself that Papa Cam had taken on that first morning of school, looking terrible. It’s hard to sleep here, he wrote, and what he meant was, it’s hard to sleep without you.
Listening to Michael and Stephanie would have helped, but Ilya kept thinking of all the nights when he’d lain in bed and listened to them instead of Vladimir, when Vladimir and his stories had seemed unimportant, an interruption. So Ilya didn’t ask the Masons for new batteries, and the tapes gathered dust on the dresser. When he did finally fall asleep, his dreams were horrible. There was Babushka washing the blood off Vladimir. There was the doctor touching Ilya’s leg just where he’d cut Vladimir’s. He dreamt of the Tower too. Of Lana’s hair—those pink streaks—and the way they’d snaked around his face when she kissed him. He saw the grove where she’d been killed, with the crosses nailed into the molting birch bark and the flowers that someone had planted inside an old tire. There was Vladimir, opening up his pencil case and pulling out their mother’s silver sugar spoon and holding a lighter under it. There was the stove in the Tower, the flames burning a strange blue, and next to it, Vladimir and Aksinya were fucking, both so high that they’d forgotten shame, and Ilya would wake up sure that he was still there, that he’d never left. Sometimes, in the heights of his nostrils, there was this acid burn as though somehow he’d actually breathed the Tower’s air. But bad as the dreams were, he craved them, craved sleep, because they gave him Vladimir. Vladimir’s face bent over the spoon. Vladimir’s face bent over Aksinya’s. Vladimir’s face bent over his, saying, “This is not for you, bratishka.”
Sometimes he managed to sleep through the dreams, to wake up with his pillow reeking of sweat and the light slanting through the deck supports onto that pile of abandoned bicycles. But most nights the dreams would wake him, and he would get out of bed and let his forehead cool against the sliding glass doors until he felt tired enough to try for sleep again.
He was standing like that one night, his forehead slick against the glass, when he saw the shadow of someone climbing down the deck stairs. The silhouette of calves and bare feet. Then Sadie walked past the pool, sat on the alligator wall, and lifted a knee to tie one shoe and then the other.
Ilya opened the basement door. He meant to say her name, but when she didn’t turn at the sound of the door, he stayed quiet. She slid off the wall and into the neighboring lot, and it wasn’t until he was at the wall, his hand on the bricks where she’d sat, that he realized he was going to follow her. She was a hundred meters away now, small enough to fit in his palm. He jogged after her, the sawgrass stinging his ankles, giving him the shallow, cross-woven cuts that Sadie’s ankles had had that first night in America. He tried to be quiet and keep a safe distance. He thought of Jackie Chan, who always stepped toe to heel, and Jean-Claude Van Damme and the way that, despite his bulk, he moved with such stealth.
At the end of Dumaine Drive, a house had been abandoned half built. Tarps were draped in place of walls, the slick plastic shuddering in the dark like an organ, like something that shouldn’t be exposed to air. Sadie stopped in the shadow of the house and pulled something out of her pocket. Ilya had assumed that she was going to meet J.T., but as she gripped whatever it was, it occurred to him that it could be drugs. A syringe or a pipe. He waited to see her creep into the half-built house. He thought of Lana high in the Tower. The way her lips had parted, the pink bud of her tongue between them, and how his dick had pulsed at the sight of it. He’d felt a weird sort of power looking at her, an awareness that he could touch her, that he could reach out and hook the hair back behind her ear, that he could go further, even, open her mouth a little wider and push his tongue deep inside it, and he’d wondered if all boys—all men—came upon these sudden pricks of violence in their fantasies. Maybe he was only different from the man who’d killed Yulia and Olga and Lana by a degree, and by the fact that he’d felt powerless, not powerful, knowing that the white puffs of her breath might simply stop. He could already see Sadie’s face the same way, and he could feel the same mix of lust and fear and helplessness gathering in him, and he began to walk down the slope of the lot. He didn’t know what he’d do, even as the distance between them collapsed, and then whatever she’d pulled from her pocket began to glow. Ilya stopped. It was a phone or an iPod. Her thumb twitched over the screen, and she pulled loose a tangle of headphones, stuck one in each ear, and kept walking.
Ilya gulped the hot, wet air, and let her gain some distance. She took Dumaine Drive to its end, cutting the corner it made with Route 21, and he followed her: past the old fireworks stand where a giant red rocket leaned on one haunch; past a plantation house that floated, gray-blue, down a dirt road; past the hot sauce plant that even at this hour made the air burn, made Ilya’s nostrils sting and his eyes water.
She walked the white line religiously, like a child might. Tankers rushed by at steady intervals—the time between them the time it took to fill them—and as each approached, she stepped onto the shoulder and froze and the hair twisted up off her head like pale snakes rising up out of a basket. None of the truckers honked. She and he were too small; it was too dark for them to be anything but an aftersight, something to make the truckers rub their eyes and wonder.
They were headed south. It was the only direction Ilya knew in Leffie because the refinery was at the town’s southern edge, and its light grew brighter and brighter as they walked, and even though he knew the light’s source, even though it was the one thing here that was completely familiar, his brain kept tripping on the fact, telling him that it was morning already and that they should turn around before Papa Cam and Mama Jamie woke up and found them gone.
Soon it was so bright that if she turned, she’d see him. Plain as day, he thought, which was an expression Mama Jamie used that he was still trying to figure out. Sadie did stop every once in a while to change the song on her iPod, but she didn’t turn. Then the refinery was right before them. The moonscape of it looked just the same as it had in Berlozhniki, and a memory caught Ilya: his mother holding him at their apartment window, telling him what each constellation of lights was—the high, flashing signal lights; the cluster of the cooling tower; the bright pool of the parking lot; the dim scatter of the administrative buildings; and the fires of the stacks, which from afar looked like crowns.