Lights All Night Long - Lydia Fitzpatrick Page 0,9
the deck to see the backyard. A grill was tucked into one corner. Mow lines checked the grass, which was encircled by a low brick wall.
“It’s to keep out alligators,” Papa Cam said, pointing at the wall. “Vicious, but they can’t even climb a foot.”
The pool was square and still, the water taking on a dark shine, like oil, in the dusk. Papa Cam seemed to have taken the idea of immersion less literally than Mama Jamie, or maybe he was more comfortable with silence. He leaned against the deck rail and let Ilya look for himself. Eventually he said, “It took us two years to get the pool built. For a while there I thought it just wasn’t in God’s plan.”
Part of Ilya wanted to express his awe, but what he wanted to say more—the thing burning his tongue like acid—was that if God did exist then he was a motherfucker if the Masons’ pool was part of his plan, was even a blip on his radar.
Ilya thought of his mother and Babushka, wondered what they were doing at that moment. He did not even know what time it was at home, whether they were sitting on the wooden bench in the hall of the police station, waiting for someone to talk to them, or whether his mom was halfway through her night shift, eating the boiled eggs on rye that Babushka packed her every evening. He couldn’t imagine where Vladimir was. The only prisons he’d seen were on TV—American prisons—and he knew that wherever they were holding Vladimir would be worse. But then, suddenly, he could picture Vladimir: his back against a rough concrete wall, the kind that crumbled slightly under your fingertips. His lips were moving like he was praying, but of course he wasn’t. He was reciting the lines from Kickboxer, the movie unspooling behind his eyelids, his fists clenching with the muscle memory of the fight scenes.
Behind him, Papa Cam flipped a light switch on the wall of the house, and the pool jumped into being. Turquoise and glowing, with a rim of blue tiles and a lone leaf resting on the bottom.
“There,” Papa Cam said. His voice was exalted, and Ilya thought he might vomit.
For almost a year, since the night Maria Mikhailovna had knocked on their door, he had thought about America constantly. On some level he had imagined the wide, smooth streets, the car-size refrigerators, the tank-size cars, the carpets that went all the way from one wall to another. He had even anticipated the faith with which the Masons clicked their seat belts; the way Papa Cam had paid for the airport parking with a lazy swipe of his credit card; the fact that, in the one grocery store they’d driven past, there had been no lines. But he hadn’t ever thought of this: in America, they light their pools. This was the detail for his mother. He imagined telling her. He could almost hear her silence, the quick suck of air through her teeth.
“Sometimes,” Papa Cam said, “the girls like to swim at night.”
CHAPTER FOUR
By the time Ilya turned eleven, he’d skipped a level at School #17, and there was constant talk of his promise. “He’s sharp,” one teacher said. “A prodigy,” said another. They said that he might get a scholarship to Syktyvkar State or even to the Language Institute in Moscow. Convinced by his teachers of Ilya’s aptitude, his mother and grandmother started to hope. For a little more money, for a table that didn’t wobble, for a bigger apartment, for a car, but most of all their hope conjured his future: a degree and a good job in Moscow or St. Petersburg, neither of which they’d ever seen. They treated Ilya as tenderly as the brass samovar that came out from under the bed, from under its layers of felt, only for polishing. His grandmother mixed extra sour cream into his shchi. She scooped it onto his pelmeni.
“More smetana, Ilyusha?” she’d say. He’d watch the cream quiver on the end of her spoon and knew she’d give him all they had.
Vladimir noticed this favoritism—it was impossible not to. He teased Ilya about it. “Your big brain is oozing out of your ears,” he’d say, or, “Study, smart-ass, study!” But sometimes when Ilya pulled out his pencil case and his textbooks, Vladimir would go quiet. He’d shut off the TV and slink down to the stairwell where boys bounced tennis balls off the walls and smoked cigarettes.