Lights All Night Long - Lydia Fitzpatrick Page 0,3

now, in the back row of the car, with his duffel under his head and his boots propped against the window.

“Tell them to stop. We need some refreshments. I’m starving,” he’d say, pointing at one of the convenience stores whose windows were plastered with advertisements for lottery tickets and sausage sandwiches. “I bet these places put the Minutka to shame. I bet they have Doritos we’ve never even heard of. Did you see that sign? ALL YOU CAN EAT! They’ve got no idea how much this Russian can eat.”

Molly had fallen asleep with her mouth agape and her temple bouncing against Ilya’s shoulder, and Vladimir said, “The girls are a bit of a disappointment, no? One’s a bitch. And they’re both a little young. But just be patient, Ilyusha. Think of the long con. Trust me—the age gap will be a good thing down the road.”

Ilya turned around, suddenly sure that he would see his brother’s face, but the back row was empty. The leather was smooth and shining in the sun, and Ilya bit his lip to stop the burn in his eyes. The seams in the road ticked by, taking him farther and farther from Vladimir, and he could feel it in his gut, this growing absence, and, worse, he was sure that Vladimir, wherever he was now, could feel it too.

In the front seat, Mama Jamie was still talking about the family rules. She was saying something about praying every night. She put her hands together and bowed her head in supplication. “Pray,” she said, dragging the word out so that each letter was a syllable.

Behind him, Vladimir belched. “We’ll pray for your daughters to get hot,” he said, and Ilya looked Mama Jamie in the eye and made his face as blank as a field of snow.

CHAPTER TWO

At the train station in Berlozhniki, a billboard stretched across the tracks. BERLOZHNIKI MINES RUSSIA’S FUTURE! it said, though the mine had closed decades earlier and in the winter, when the trains stopped running, there was no one to see the banner. On the town square, birds roosted on a concrete pedestal where a statue of Stalin had once stood, facing the labor camp, his overcoat unbuttoned as though he were expecting milder weather.

Two kilometers from town was a crescent-shaped complex of six huge kommunalkas, which had been built for the coal miners and their families. When the mine collapsed, the families stayed, without their miners. This was before perestroika, when living in a place was the closest you could come to owning it, and Ilya’s family had lived there for half a century without ever believing it their own.

On the west side, the kommunalkas overlooked the remains of the mine, and, on the east, the remains of the camp, where the cells and the guard towers crumbled slowly, where crosses had been staked in the ground. In winter, snow fell, and people measured its depth by how much of the cross it swallowed. If it only reached the footrest, the winter would be mild. If it reached the higher crossbeam, the winter would be long. To the north, across the river, the refinery jutted into the sky, smoke heaving from its towers. Ilya’s mother worked in the cafeteria at the refinery, and she moaned sometimes about the poison it was spewing and the cancers that were sure to result, but Ilya was mesmerized by it. Electricity in the kommunalkas could not be counted on, but the refinery’s lights shone all night long. Like a city, like places Ilya had seen on TV. Moscow or Times Square or a space station. A patch of some other world stitched into Berlozhniki’s horizon by mistake.

Ilya’s family lived in Building 2, which was considered the best by practical people because it was closest to the road into town and the worst by spiritual people because in the ’70s two brothers had jumped off the roof. Their apartment was one of a dozen on the eighth floor. All the floors were identical except for the color of paint used in the long, low hallways, so they came to be known by colors instead of numbers. Ilya’s floor was zhelty, a bright yellow that had dirtied over time to mustard. At the head of each hallway was a shared kitchen—though most of the residents had acquired tiny electric stoves—and at the end of each hallway was a shared bathroom. Before he died, Ilya’s father would wake in the middle of the night and trudge