Vladimir. She had given up.
* * *
—
Later, Sadie found him in the basement trying to read an espionage thriller from one of the dusty boxes that lived under the Ping-Pong table. It was the time he usually spent on the Gabe Thompson list, but the phone call with his mother had demoralized him. If he couldn’t convince his mother of Vladimir’s innocence, what were the chances that, even armed with evidence, he could convince the police? Maybe it was hopeless, maybe it was even cowardly, he thought, a way of hiding from life. He thought of all the years he’d spent with the Delta headphones clamped over his ears, of all the times his mother or Babushka or Vladimir had said something to him, and he’d pretended not to see their lips moving. He had liked to think that he was being transported, but maybe he’d just been hiding then too.
“Hey,” Sadie said.
He dog-eared his page when she sat beside him, though he’d only read three pages.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
Ilya shrugged. He’d told her that his brother was dead, and it had proved an easy lie to defend. With the exception of that horrible moment at Star Pilgrim, the Masons had tiptoed around his grief, and he’d become sickly comfortable with the duplicity. But now he couldn’t think of any way to explain his mood without revealing that lie.
“J.T.’s party is tonight,” she said. “I was going to go in a little.”
Ilya ran his hand over the cover of the book. A man was holding a pistol. It was aimed at the reader, and the letters of the book’s title exploded from its barrel. He thought of his mother’s tiny voice on the telephone and wondered if he’d sounded the same to her.
“It’s no big deal,” she said. “I’ll tell him you can’t go.”
“No,” Ilya said, fast, because suddenly the idea of being left down here, of watching the light fade between the deck supports, seemed unbearable. “Let’s go.”
Sadie told her parents that she was taking Ilya to the movies in Alexandria, and the Masons seemed thrilled, especially when Ilya told them that there wasn’t a movie theater in his town, and that he’d never actually seen a movie on a big screen.
“Well, this will be a cultural experience for you,” Mama Jamie said. “Take some moolah from my purse, Sadie. Make sure Ilya tries the popcorn.”
“Do the IMAX,” Papa Cam said, which sounded like complete gibberish.
As they backed out of the driveway, Ilya said, “What if they ask about the movie?”
“Say we saw The Fast and the Furious. I saw it with J.T. It’s like one long car chase. And then the good guy wins at the end.” It sounded like something Vladimir would love. “And tell them the acoustics were amazing. My dad’s obsessed with the acoustics at the IMAX.”
Star Pilgrim and Leffie High were in opposite directions on the same road—Route 21—and they marked the dimensions of Leffie in Ilya’s mind. Now Sadie sped past the high school and into the unknown. Ilya rolled down his window. The air was hot, but Sadie was going fast enough for it to have a cooling effect. She scanned the radio, then settled on something with a cowboy twang. A woman sang about scratching her ex’s car with a key.
“Is it far?” he asked.
“The Pound? Not too far. It’s an old impound yard.” She told him that it was a place where cars used to get crushed for scrap metal, but that it had been shut down for a decade, ever since the owner ran away with the football coach’s daughter. Kids from all different schools partied there, and she said there’d even been a guy who lived there for a winter, in the back of an old semi. That would be Vladimir, he thought.
She turned off of Route 21 onto a smaller road cupped by trees. Every once in a while, back in the woods, windows glowed high up, like they were in treehouses. This wisp of a memory drifted through his mind. A childhood story of fairies living in trees. “What are those lights?” he asked. “Why are they so high?”
“It’s trailers up on stilts.” Sadie said. “We’re close to the bayou—it floods a lot.”
They passed a clearing, and Ilya saw one of the trailers now, a box of light over a box of shadow. A handful of cars were parked under it. A spindly ramp climbed to the door, which was open. Ilya stared inside. It was