The sun went down, and Durashka barked as though in response. She began to chase her tail, her feet springing, the white fur on her haunches flashing. She looked like one of the chechotka girls, twirling on the stage.
“What an idiot,” Sadie said, and together they walked back up the hill to the house.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ilya woke in one of the folding chairs with Vladimir’s jacket draped over his chest. Lana was gone, and Aksinya and Vladimir were intertwined in the lump of blankets. All Ilya could see of them was the point of an elbow, the coil of Aksinya’s ponytail, and a stray foot, the sock a holed disgrace. The room was hazy. It was dark enough that it could have been early morning, that there could still have been time for him to flag down a bus headed for town, to sprint from the square to the school, to slide into his desk so quickly that its legs shrieked against the linoleum. Maria Mikhailovna would be angry, furious, but she’d forgive him when his scores came back. She’d still drive him to the airport in Leshukonskoye as they had planned. He’d still get to go to America. For a minute he let himself lie there and believe that that was what would happen. Then he got up and lifted a corner of the rug that had been hung over the window.
The sun was ridiculously high. It was almost noon. Ten, at least. The snow was electric with light, and the sight of it made blood surge at his temples. A car flashed by on its way north to the refinery. Dmitri Malikov, he thought, no doubt looking at the Tower with the same scorn that had surfaced when he talked about it. He could hear the grind of a lumber saw in the woods somewhere, and the noise drilled into his head until he could feel it in his teeth.
Behind him, someone sighed. Ilya froze, terrified that Lana had reappeared. He had no idea what to say to her. They had only kissed, but it occurred to him that he might be the sort of boy a girl regrets kissing in the morning. When he turned, Vladimir was up, pulling on his jeans with a hand against the wall. He had always been skinny, wolfish, the sort that babushkas live to feed, but there was something wrong with him now. He looked like the photos of the camp prisoners that Daniil Chernyshev showed anyone who was unlucky enough to end up in his apartment. For a dumb moment, Ilya thought, He’s sick, then Vladimir turned, put a finger to his lips, and tipped his head toward the door. Ilya stepped over Aksinya. Sleep had drained the drugs from her face, and she looked peaceful again.
Outside, the daylight was torture. Ilya could feel his brain constricting from its brightness. “Where’d Lana go?” he asked, as they trudged across the prison yard.
“You want to get back on that horse, huh? I don’t blame you. She’s got that X factor. Je ne sais quoi. Every time she opens her mouth, I’m like, please don’t talk, but still there’s something about her. I couldn’t send you to America a virgin, could I?”
“America,” Ilya said. “Right.”
Vladimir stopped, and Ilya was afraid that something in his voice had given him away, but Vladimir knelt in the snow and yanked at the laces of his boot, which were snarled in an icy knot. When he stood, he pointed toward a telephone pole, one of dozens strung along the road.
“They found that woman over there,” he said.
“Yulia Podtochina?”
“I don’t know her name,” Vladimir said, with a world of impatience in his voice. “The dead one.”
“Oh,” Ilya said, and the day before he would have been fascinated, he would have corrected Vladimir, asked him which dead woman, but he was thinking of the boards. Of Maria Mikhailovna. He wanted to know the time with a sudden urgency, needed to know exactly how long it had been since she’d sat at her desk with the pale green booklet in front of her, how long since she’d ripped it in two, put on her coat, locked her classroom, and walked home. He knew that he’d made his decision the night before, when Vladimir passed him the bottle of Imperia, or when Lana wrapped his arms around her, or when he’d danced with all of them, but in those moments he’d convinced himself there was still this chance that he could make it. The chance had grown dimmer and dimmer as he slept, like a dying star, and for some reason it was crucial to him that he know how far he was from that moment when it had disappeared entirely.
“What time is it?” he said. They were almost to the telephone pole, to the mound of plowed snow that shouldered the road. It was January, and the mound was at its tallest, shoulder-high and streaked with dirt and oil.
“You got somewhere to be?”
“Nah,” Ilya said.
“Good. Let’s go to the Internet Kebab. We’ll let the girls sleep it off. Maybe hit up Dolls. You can get back to studying tomorrow.”
Once they’d made it to the snow heap, Vladimir fished his watch out from within his jacket. “It’s almost twelve,” he said.
It was completely over then. He was three hours late. He had never been three hours late for anything. He had missed fewer than three days of school in his entire life. Next to him, Vladimir was breathing hard, and Ilya could smell the tang of his breath. Then Vladimir put his hands on his knees and vomited into the snow. Nothing much came out, and Ilya winced at the thought of his ribs—the cage of them—heaving. They stood with their backs to the heap, waiting for a bus, Ilya thought, but when one came, and he began to scramble up, Vladimir stopped him.
“Don’t you want to go?” Ilya said.
“Use your head,” Vladimir said. “Mama’s out.”
Their mother’s shift ended at twelve. She’d most likely gotten the 11:47 bus, which usually ran late enough for her to catch it, but sometimes, if the 11:47 was on time, she had to wait for the 12:17. They sat down, and the bus passed them in a wet whoosh that made Ilya’s ears pop. They waited until their asses were numb and the bus was long, long gone, and Ilya wondered how many times Vladimir had done this and whether it was for their mother’s sake or for his own and whether he’d ever climbed the snowbank at just the wrong time and looked up to see her looking down at him. It was fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, before they heard the hiss of another bus. Ilya stood, too fast, and his head spun a bit, and he thought he might vomit like Vladimir had. This time it was not a bus, though. It was a black SUV, cutting down the road so fast that it seemed almost to fly.
“Did you see that?” Ilya said. It had been going fast enough to miss.
“Fyodor Fetisov. Here to count his billions,” Vladimir said, and Ilya couldn’t tell if he was bitter or just tired.
They chanced the 12:47 bus, and it was empty except for a few neftyaniki in their coveralls, who were electric with Fetisov’s visit. The bus driver was not. He took their rubles, then said, “If either of you vomits on this bus, you’re not getting off until it’s clean.”
“Fair enough,” Vladimir said, and they sank into their seats. Vladimir seemed to fall instantly asleep. His shoulder bobbed against Ilya’s once they hit the potholed roads in town. Ilya’s hangover grew with the motion of the bus until his headache seemed to eclipse all rational thought, to give him the attention span of a gnat. He couldn’t focus on the boards, on the possibility that Maria Mikhailovna had gone straight to his apartment and that his mother and Babushka were sitting at the kitchen table waiting for him in a fury usually reserved for Vladimir. He couldn’t really think of anything without a sharp, frontal lobe pain that forced him to shift his attention, and with this realization came an understanding of Vladimir and how he lived his life, sloughing through the hangovers so he could get to the highs. Dolls tonight, and what tomorrow?
Ilya shut his eyes, not really expecting to sleep, and when he opened them again, they were stopped on the square, right by the traffic light where Ilya had seen Vladimir and Sergey the night Dmitri drove him home. The bus was empty, the driver standing on the curb smoking a cigarette and drinking something out of a paper bag.