Lights All Night Long - Lydia Fitzpatrick Page 0,2

to a news station, and the low voices lulled the girls into silence.

On either side of the road was swamp. Kilometer after kilometer of swamp, and Ilya had learned the word, though he’d never known the thing itself. It was beautiful. Shimmering and still, you thought, until you looked closer and saw long-legged birds sunning with their wings spread and fish leaving ringlets on the surface. Buzzards picked at carcasses on the roadside and their feathers ruffled as the car sped by them. The sun was hidden behind a low shield of clouds, but still everything was bleached by it.

Way out across the water, in a tangle of swamp trees, Ilya caught the flash of metal. He narrowed his eyes and tried to follow it, and then the pipeline pierced the thicket, shot across open water, and curved along the road. Before long it led to a refinery and its crown of smoke. There were the stacks and the cooling towers and the lengths of chainlink fence. It was just like the one in Berlozhniki, and Ilya imagined the pipeline snaking through land and water, connecting this place and the place he’d come from. Oil pumping through it like blood. He knew, though, that it didn’t work that way.

“That’s my office,” Papa Cam said. He worked in human resources at the refinery. Maria Mikhailovna had told Ilya that, and that the Masons were getting paid to host him. “If they don’t feed you, if they’re treating you poorly, just call me,” she’d said, in a burst of worry. “You can use a code word if you need to. How about ‘Raskolnikov’? Just mention him like he’s someone you know.” At the time they’d been a third of the way through Crime and Punishment—an English version, poorly translated—and now it occurred to Ilya that they’d never finished it. Maria Mikhailovna had spared him the punishment part.

Papa Cam eased the car off the highway and onto a smaller one with traffic lights. There were shops now, fringing the swamp. Groceries and video stores and pizza places and a store with a sign saying, EVERYTHING’S A DOLLAR!, and through the windows Ilya could see that the shelves were completely full. There were gas stations, their crimson signs slashed by the white E of EnerCo. Each series of shops was larger than the town square in Berlozhniki, and they seemed to go on forever.

Ilya swallowed. He was exhausted. It had been two days since he’d left Berlozhniki. Thirty-six hours since he’d flown out of Leshukonskoye, but his stomach was still sour with the liquor he’d drunk there. Samogon, the man hawking it had told him, but it had tasted more like rubbing alcohol. He wanted to close his eyes, but when he slept he dreamt of Vladimir. For months—since the night of the Winter Festival—he’d been dreaming of Vladimir. On the flight to Moscow, he’d awoken to a stewardess’s hand on his arm, her face bent over his.

“You were screaming,” she’d said, her mouth tight, and then she’d moved off down the aisle.

Now Mama Jamie was pointing at something. “That’s our church,” she said. Up ahead, an ugly building rose out of a field. It was shaped like a pyramid, with two walls of concrete and two of glass. As they got closer, Ilya saw letters carved over the door. STAR PILGRIM CHURCH, they said, and otherwise he never would have known that it was a church. There was no cupola, no cross—Orthodox or not. Papa Cam slowed as they passed it and through the glass Ilya could make out rows of seats, a shadowed aisle that must lead to a pulpit.

“We go every Sunday,” Mama Jamie said. “I think that’s the same—in Russia, I mean?”

Ilya stifled a snort. He imagined Babushka hearing her say that, as though Americans had been the first to worship on Sundays.

“Is he Christian?” Marilee said loudly, like she was suddenly terrified to be sitting thigh-to-thigh with a heathen.

“I’m not sure, honey,” Mama Jamie said. “But whatever he believes is OK. Remember? We talked about that.” Then she aimed another invasive smile at Ilya. “We also have family dinner every night—all five of us. Six now, with you.”

Ilya knew this meant that there was another daughter, who would, no doubt, be waiting at home with questions about communism and American Idol, but he let himself imagine that Vladimir would be the sixth at the table, that somehow Vladimir had been able to come too, that he was with them