Up ahead one of the fields was burning. Smoke ribboned up from the rows of cane, giving the air the taste of burnt sugar. Ilya had succeeded in making his hope smaller; it was a tight knot between his lungs, something he could almost ignore. They passed a sign, and Ilya read the letters, which would have seemed an incomprehensible combination except that he’d teased out the tangle of their syllables the day before when they’d planned their route.
MISSISSIPPI, it said, WELCOMES YOU!
They drove all day and into the night. J.T. and Sadie took turns behind the wheel and napping in the truck’s tiny backseat. At five a.m., on a highway skirting Pittsburgh, under a blur of fluorescent signs, Sadie took a hand off the wheel and reached for Ilya’s.
“Are you scared?” she said.
He nodded. J.T. was snoring lightly in the backseat, and Ilya lay down with his head on Sadie’s thigh. He could see the point of her chin and that delicate triangle of skin that bridged her jawbones and that quivered each time she breathed. She put a hand on his cheek, then on his forehead the way Babushka did to check for fever, and he felt safe just as he had with Babushka, as though his existence was simple, was reduced to the spot where their skin was touching.
The sun, bright on his face, woke him. They were at yet another Walmart, identical in every way to the one in Leffie. J.T. was standing in the parking lot smoking. Sadie sipped at an enormous coffee.
“We already drove by. It’s just a couple blocks away,” she said. “And they’re home.”
Gabe’s parents’ house looked like a poor man’s dacha: dark-stained wood with blue trim, a tiny screened porch, and a vegetable garden surrounded by more wire than a camp. There was a loved, labored-over feel to the place—in the potted herbs that lined the steps, in the rocking chair on the porch, which had been painted to match the trim. There was a truck in the driveway and from somewhere inside Ilya could hear the churn of a washing machine.
As Ilya climbed the steps to the front door, he turned and looked at J.T. and Sadie, who were parked on the other side of the street. The duffel was on Ilya’s back, the tape player inside, already recording. Sadie lifted a hand and J.T. nodded, and Ilya pressed the doorbell.
For a second the sounds inside did not change, and then he heard Frank’s voice, just as it had sounded on the phone, say “If it’s that lady again, I’m going to—”
“Just let me get it,” Ida said. She was whispering, but they were somewhere close to the door, or the walls of the little house were thin enough that Ilya could hear every word. “I don’t know why you get so worked up about it. She just wants to see how he is.”
“She wants to gawk is what she wants,” Frank said, and scared as he was, Ilya was comforted by the ordinariness of their bickering. There was the clatter of one plate against another, and then brisk footsteps, and then the door was open.
Ida had a resolute smile in place for whatever lady she’d been expecting. It stayed there, evolutionary baggage, for the second it took her to examine him, then it was replaced by an expression of gentle skepticism, as though she knew he was here for no good reason, but she hoped that he might prove her wrong.
“May I help you?” she said.
This was a line straight out of Michael & Stephanie, one that Ilya had never heard an actual American say. He knew that she didn’t mean “help” literally, but he needed help so badly that for a moment he was stunned by it.
“I’m looking for Gabe,” he said. “I’m from Russia.”
“Russia?” she said.
Ilya nodded. In the shadows behind Ida there was a shift in the light. Frank was standing behind her.
“He lived in my town,” Ilya said. He tried his best to minimize his accent, which he knew surfaced most with the letter o. He tried to smile, because Americans smiled constantly, and to make his voice open and warm, like Mama Jamie’s. He tried to hunch so that he seemed shorter than Ida, who was remarkably short, tried in every possible way to broadcast that he was not a threat. Though of course he was, and Frank sensed it immediately, or else saw threats in everything, because he stepped between Ida and Ilya and said, “What do you want with Gabe?”
“He told me to come visit him. Once I’d arrived,” Ilya said. “I don’t know anyone else in America, and he—”
Ida put a hand on Frank’s arm.
“Come in,” she said, and she ushered Ilya into the kitchen. The table was covered in newsprint, which was speckled with bits of balsa wood, tiny trees, and cars. There were tiny pots of paint and jars of a shimmering white powder and brushes with bristles thin as eyelashes. “Excuse the mess,” Ida said.
Ilya nodded. “Where is Gabe?” he said.
“Sleeping,” Frank said. “He sleeps half the day now.”
Ida cleared a patch of table, and Ilya sat, and as she poured them glasses of iced tea she said, “We’d love to know about Russia, about his time there.”
Ilya tried to think of his first memory of Gabe, but he kept picturing Gabe on the sidewalk, staring into the Minutka, and the way that Anatoly had gripped the shovel. “It was two years, I think. I can’t remember exactly when he came.”
Ida nodded.
Frank was standing at the sink, holding a glass of water under the tap, and as Ilya watched the water began to overflow the glass.
“He was there on a mission, right?” Ilya said. “Your church sent him?”
Frank turned the water off, set the glass down on the counter, turned, and said, “What did you people do to him?”
“Frank,” Ida said. “Please.”
“He left here at eighteen. So happy. So excited to spread God’s word, and when he comes back, he’s like a different person. And the doctors say that he has—” Frank made an ugly noise in his throat, and tears flooded his eyes.
Ilya looked at the table. There was a row of tree trunks drying on the newspaper. They’d been painted the exact silvery gray of birch trees.
“—the doctors say that he has gangrene on his foot. Gangrene. It’s a miracle that he could even get on the plane. That he could get back to us. So you tell my wife whatever she wants to know, and then I want you to get out of my house.”
Frank walked outside, and the screen door slapped behind him. He’d forgotten the glass of water on the counter. Ilya’s hands had begun to shake. He pressed them between his knees. He saw Vladimir on the floor in the kitchen, saw the way his leg had rotted. He had known that Vladimir would die if he didn’t get the drug, that he would die if he kept getting it.
Ida sat at the table next to him, and her feet barely touched the floor. She put a hand on Ilya’s arm, just as she had with Frank a few minutes before. “Gabe won’t talk to us about it, about Russia,” she said.
I’d been trying to forget that part of my life, his message had said.
“There has to be something you remember—you knew him there,” she said. There was this ache in her voice again, the same ache it had had when she’d asked what Gabe had left on the plane, the same ache his mother’s had had whenever she asked Ilya if he’d seen Vladimir at school, in town, anywhere. Gabe had been lost to them, and here Ilya was, a gift.
“If you let me see him,” Ilya said, quietly.
Ida nodded. “OK,” she said.
“Americans don’t come to our town,” he began. “It’s far from everywhere. And cold. So he was special, exciting. Everyone paid attention to him. He got an apartment on the square. The pizza place put his picture up in the window.”