“What happened?”
Sadie laughed, this harsh, little sound. “I was crouched in the bushes beside her house, trying to light a match forever. But I almost threw up thinking that she’d be gone, that I wouldn’t know if she was alive or dead or high or what. Then a neighbor found me and called Mama Jamie. And of course Mama Jamie was in hysterics. Crying for days, asking me what she was doing wrong, why I was turning into a delinquent. Like I was turning into my mom. I could see how scared she was on her face. Never mind that I hadn’t actually done anything. I couldn’t even get the match lit.”
They reached the end of the trail, which was nothing but a cluster of logs that bordered the creek. He reached into the water, felt the cold more in his bones than in his skin, and his hand closed on a rock. A perfect slingshot rock, he thought, and he slipped it into his pocket.
“But that doesn’t mean I don’t wish I had. Every day,” she said. “Until you came.” He looked at her. Half of her face was in the light, the other half in the shaking shadow of some leaves. She smiled. “Now I just think about it every other day.”
He laughed, and they kissed, and he could still feel it—that happiness for him was like a dog chained to a stake, that whenever he let it run, he’d be yanked back, but still he let it run for a second and tried not to brace himself for the pull of the chain.
When she unbuttoned his jeans, he said, “I’ve never done this before,” and it didn’t occur to him until afterward that that was something Vladimir would never say, that inexperience was something Vladimir never admitted to, and it didn’t matter anyway, because she said, “We’re not doing that. I’ve got something else in mind.”
Ilya was home in time for Sunday dinner and opened the door to the usual chaos. Molly and Marilee were tussling over what to watch on TV. Papa Cam was whipping open a new trash bag, the plastic ballooning as Mama Jamie sang along to Sting and pounded a chicken cutlet to the beat. Sadie had come home in her own car an hour earlier, and when she saw him in the doorway, she said, “Hey! How was the fishing?”
At the sight of her, the woods came back to him, made his dick swell with the memory of her hand on it, of her mouth hot on his stomach.
“That good, huh?” Papa Cam said. “You look like you’re a convert.”
Ilya nodded. “We caught gar,” he said, which was what J.T. had told him to say.
“Well, where are they?” Papa Cam said. “We were counting on you for a fish fry.”
“J.T. kept them all, didn’t he?” Sadie said. “He’s literally the most selfish person on the planet.”
“Did you miss me?” Molly asked, which was something she had started asking him every day when he got back from school, and Ilya felt this sudden ache for these people, for their patterns, for how willing they had been to take him in, and for how little he’d given them in return.
“Of course,” he said.
“After dinner let’s watch the sermon,” Mama Jamie said. “So you all can see what you missed.”
Ilya’s eyes met Sadie’s over the table. She had predicted this punishment, and she was grinning at him now, as she said, “Can’t wait. Were the testimonials especially juicy?”
The testimonials were wedged between the hymns and the sermons at every Star Pilgrim service. They were awkward allegros of shame or expansive expressions of guilt, depending less on the severity of the transgression than on the character of the transgressor.
“Don’t mock it ’til you’ve tried it,” Mama Jamie said. She was always begging the girls to give testimonials, but Molly was too shy, Marilee too self-righteous, and Sadie too private. “But since you asked, no, they were not especially juicy. It was Margaret Joy again.”
Sadie groaned and, as they set the table, she told Ilya the story of Margaret Joy, whose favorite cat had been accidentally poisoned by a neighbor whom Margaret Joy now tortured in tiny, mostly inconsequential ways. “She’ll turn her neighbor’s hose on so it’s just barely running all night long, or cut the roses off her bushes before they bloom.”
Ilya laughed, and Sadie said, “Bet you can’t wait to hear what she’s done this time.”
Later, after dinner, after they had watched the service and Margaret Joy had confessed to allowing another cat of hers to urinate on her neighbor’s lawn furniture, once he was alone in the basement, Ilya played the tape he’d made at Gabe’s house. He listened to Gabe’s story over and over, with his eyes closed so that he could see it all. Lana and that halo of bloody snow. The redheaded nurse shoving the bag of Ilya’s tapes into Gabe’s arms. Austin with his perfect faith and his wide smile and the plaid tie. There was Gabe roaming the Tower, looking for Vladimir and Sergey and krokodil. What did you people do to him? Frank asked, over and over, and Dmitri Malikov was kissing Gabe’s forehead, and the train was pushing through the snow to Berlozhniki, the end of the line, and Gabe stepped off it, looking small under the faded banner that proclaimed, BERLOZHNIKI MINES RUSSIA’S FUTURE!
Ilya listened until the parts of the story seemed dissociated from the story itself, until they were rendered nonsensical, then he clicked open his email and wrote another message to Vladimir. He wanted to tell him everything that had happened with Gabe. He thought that Vladimir might see something in it that Ilya could not, but the police would be reading Vladimir’s email. He didn’t tell Vladimir about Sadie in the forest either, because he was afraid that Vladimir would somehow divine the feeling that had come upon Ilya afterward. It was not quite contentment, but something akin to it. Like he’d compartmentalized his fear, his worry, like he’d somehow compartmentalized Vladimir himself. He had known that it was a temporary containment, a pill he’d swallowed, the membrane thinning, the drug soon to hit him again, hitting him now, as he wrote the same, tired message. I know you didn’t do it, and then, because he wanted Vladimir to feel his desperation, he wrote, but I don’t know how to help you.
That night, for the first time, he dreamt of Sadie instead of Vladimir. He was sliding his hand into the waistband of her jeans. They were in the forest again, and he was too terrified to actually put his fingers inside her, so he rubbed at the cotton of her underwear until it dampened. That was right, he knew, and so he pulled her underwear down and touched the hot, damp pulse of her until she arched her neck and her body tightened. Her nails dug into his arm and he kept going, afraid to stop, until she pulled his hand away. She smiled at him, an embarrassed smile, and then they plucked leaves and pine needles off each other’s clothes and hiked back up the trail to the campsite, where J.T. waited with burgers and beers and a knowing look.
He woke up throbbing, and as soon as Sadie had turned off Dumaine Drive toward school, he started to kiss her, and they found a lot behind the discount grocery store, and then it was all happening again, as it had in the dream, and in the forest, and it wasn’t until Ilya got to school—and saw that every locker and door, every millimeter of wall space, had been papered with posters for the Homecoming Dance, which was on the same day as the arraignment—that Ilya thought of Vladimir.
The next week was like that. Ilya managed not to think of Vladimir for longer and longer stretches. A half hour here. An hour there. It was easiest when he was with Sadie, but he started to throw himself into his studies too. Into the thick of quadratic equations, the joy of isolating and solving for x. Into the components of a celclass="underline" the mitochondria and villi and endoplasmic reticulum, each with its own tiny, vital function.