going to get yourself arrested.” She collapsed the fan of cards in her hand into a neat stack and said, “Who are you?” to the girls.
One of them was almost too beautiful to look at, with long, dark hair like the Nenets and blue eyes that were all Russian. “Aksinya,” she said, and then, to Vladimir, “I don’t know why you wanted to touch his car. He’s terrible. That’s what my sister says.”
“It’s no business of ours,” Babushka said.
“I’m Lana,” the other girl said. She was blond, softer, with a gap between her teeth that suggested a gentle stupidity.
“Lana Vishnyeva. I know your father,” Babushka said, and Lana nodded.
Ilya asked if they’d seen the oligarch’s face, and Vladimir shook his head. He said that the windows were as black as oil. “I saw Maria Mikhailovna’s husband through the windshield though,” Vladimir said. “He was driving.”
“Why’s Fetisov here? He hasn’t been here since—” Ilya paused. As far as he could remember, Fyodor Fetisov had never been to Berlozhniki.
“Some new pipeline project,” Vladimir said.
“Because the billions he has aren’t enough,” Babushka said, her tone sharp, and then it softened, and she said, “Are you hungry, girls?”
Once Vladimir had asked her if she ever got tired of asking people if they were hungry, of feeding them. “There’s nothing that makes me happier in the world than being able to feed a child,” she’d said in that tone that old people used when they talked about the Great War, and Vladimir had rolled his eyes.
“I’m starving,” Lana said, without any shame.
Aksinya nodded, and Babushka brought out more plates. Ilya cleared his books, and the prostoy durak game was put on hold. They crowded around the table, and the apartment got that feeling that it could sometimes have, like it was holding something golden and sweet, like it was filled to the brim with honey.
CHAPTER FIVE
From down in the basement, Ilya could hear the Masons eating dinner. The clink of dishes. Chairs scraping, water running, the occasional shriek of Marilee or Molly. He had yawned enough times during Mama Jamie’s tour of the basement—the “rec room,” she called it—that she had relented and allowed him to skip dinner and whatever other orientation activities she had planned.
The basement had a set of glass doors that framed a dark patch of earth under the deck where a few bikes were slumped in a pile. A ping-pong table stretched across half the room. The net had given up in the middle, the paddles peeled at the edges, and Ilya was comforted by these tiny signs of neglect. Over the bed, there was an enormous poster of a beach with footprints near the surf. The sky had been enhanced till it looked radioactive. The water was the color of Freon. It had something to do with Jesus, but Ilya wasn’t sure what exactly. He had his own bathroom. “Feel free to flush the t.p.,” Mama Jamie had said, and she’d ripped a few squares off the roll and flushed them herself to prove the power of American plumbing. Then she’d opened a shallow cabinet over the sink to reveal a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, and shampoo, each in its own bright packaging. Ilya wished that he didn’t need them—if he had left under different circumstances, his mom would have packed them—but he did.
In a little nook by the glass doors was a desk with a computer. The monitor was off, the screen the gray of a dead tooth, but still Ilya’s stomach lifted and flipped when he saw it. He wanted news of Vladimir. He wanted, so badly, just to see Vladimir’s face. As soon as Mama Jamie had retreated up the basement stairs, he pressed the button on the hard drive. For a long second there was nothing, and he thought it must be broken, aged out by the sleeker model in the den, but then the computer exhaled softly. Something inside began to spin. A weak green light flicked on, and the screen came to life. The background loaded: Papa Cam, Mama Jamie, and the girls on a beach. They were all in turquoise shirts and white shorts. Sadie’s hair was a darker blond—her natural color, Ilya guessed—and now that he could stare at her unabashedly, he saw that there was something strange about one of her eyes. One pupil was slightly jagged, as though it had suffered a tiny explosion. Then the applications popped up. One covered Sadie’s face, and Ilya pulled the mouse over to the