Lights All Night Long - Lydia Fitzpatrick Page 0,63

stared and eventually the silvery patch resolved and gained dimension: it was the pipeline, bending and twisting, catching the faint light of the moon wherever it emerged from the overgrowth.

Ilya stepped closer, the mud releasing his feet with a slurp that sounded like Timofey sucking down the last of his soup. The pipeline was higher than he’d thought it would be. He had to reach up to touch its belly. He put a hand against it and felt cool metal. This was a surprise too. He had thought it would be warm, like a vein, he guessed, with a hot gush of oil inside. Behind him, there was a honk, a scream, laughing. He tried to block it out. He cocked his head and listened, and at first there was nothing but the static inside his head, and then he heard it: a sound like a wave as it crashes over you, a sound that seemed to gain strength as he listened until it was a roar. He pulled his hand away, took a quick step back, and slipped in the mud. He landed on his back. A root jabbed him in the ribs, and his side pulsed with pain, and his arm—the one he’d held up over his head—quivered. He wasn’t sure whether the pipeline had shocked him or just scared him, but as he trekked through the mud back to the party, he had the ridiculous but distinct impression that touching it had been bad luck.

J.T. wasn’t at the keg any longer, and someone else was sitting in Ilya’s beach chair. Ilya looked up at the bus. A black guy was behind the wheel, and when he saw Ilya, he pulled the handle, and the door creaked open.

“Russia,” he said. “Welcome. Have a seat.” He smiled and stuck his tongue out, and there was a diamond nestled in the wet center of it, like an enormous pill he was about to swallow.

Ilya found a seat in the back, where it smelled less strongly of piss. The brown pleather seat had been slashed. Stuffing fluffed out of the cuts. The same stuff they used at the House of Culture to make fake snow for the New Year’s performance. Ilya pulled at it, let it fall and pile on the floor.

When he looked up again, Sadie was coming down the aisle toward him. She held out a cup of beer.

“Want this?” she said. “I don’t really drink.”

Ilya shook his head. “Papa Cam doesn’t allow it?”

“More like Mama Jamie,” she said. “But that’s not why.”

“I don’t drink much either. I was just sick in a bush.” He waved a hand toward the brush behind the bus.

“Is that why you’re all muddy? ‘Vodka is like water,’ huh?” She laughed and set her beer down on the seat next to him. She ran a finger down the cut he’d emptied of stuffing and plucked at its edge, and he had this feeling, like his future was close, like it was idiotic that he had not already scooted over to make room for her, and that if he did, there would be this tiny, celestial click and things would unlock between them, but instead he stayed where he was and said, “My brother isn’t dead. He’s in prison. For murder.”

Her hand stopped moving. That was the only sign that she’d heard. Her face was shadowed enough that her eyes looked identical, that tiny imperfection erased. “Shit,” she said softly, and then, “Did he do it?”

Ilya shook his head. He was so grateful for the question that tears clotted his throat and welled, hot and hard, behind his eyes. He looked up at the bus’s ceiling. Someone had graffitied it with swooping letters that looked more Cyrillic than Roman. He bit the inside of his cheek until he could feel the lump of tears loosen and dissolve.

“No,” Ilya said. “He did drugs. He stole. He was bad. He confessed even, but no, I still don’t think—”

If he did, his mother had said, and Ilya forced himself to follow the thought to that curve in the road where the snowplow had turned up Yulia Podtochina’s body, to the alley where Olga Nadiova had been dumped, to the clump of trees where Lana had died, and again he could not see Vladimir there. He shook his head. “He didn’t do it,” he said.

“He’s an addict?”

Ilya nodded, and she was quiet for a long time. Her curiosity was strange, but he liked it better than pity. Outside a