He was halfway asleep, giving in, too tired to dream, he hoped, but when he slept, he did dream. Of Vladimir in their kitchen. Naked, water dripping from his chin, his penis like a slug against his thigh, dried blood turning red as Babushka washed him. In the dream Vladimir’s leg was just as it had been—the skin the color of onions cooked in grease, a long, thin chasm where his flesh parted to show bone. His lips were the turquoise of the Masons’ pool. He was smiling, saying something sly, something about love that Ilya couldn’t quite understand.
Ilya woke with a scream balled in his throat. His pulse jerked in his neck. He washed his face in the sink and went upstairs. The house was filled with the mechanical noises that at home would have been familiar and would have amounted to silence. The clock on the microwave read 2:07. He opened the fridge and stared at the jugs of juice, the tubs of lettuce and sticks of butter. Everything was in a weird container. The butter was too yellow, the lettuce too white. Ilya poured a glass of water from the tap, and it stank of iron and tasted of salt.
His mother had bought him a phone card at the Internet Kebab—sixty minutes, Kirill had said—and he used it to call her, thinking that her voice, at least, would be like home. Her phone was off, though, and her outgoing message was stiff and cheerful, was not really her at all. Still, he left a message saying that he’d arrived, and that the family seemed nice enough, but before he could say anything more, before he could ask after Vladimir or say that he loved her, the connection ended, and a computerized voice announced that his phone card was empty. Kirill had ripped them off, and the normalcy of this, after all they’d gone through, was like a little gift.
Ilya sat at the table, looking out onto the den and foyer and up to the hallway, which was high and dark and silent. He listened for the Masons’ breathing. He wanted to hear a sigh or snore, something to know that he wasn’t alone. Then behind him, on the deck, there was a noise. A faint scratch, a scuffle. He turned in his chair, but the deck was empty, the window black and blank.
“Think of white paper,” his mother used to tell him when he had nightmares, “paper, just white and empty,” and he tried to, but still his pulse jumped like something trying to escape him. Sweat gathered on his lip. He kept seeing Vladimir half dead in the dream, and then it came to him what Vladimir had said: “Love is like a devil in the corner.” One of Babushka’s sayings. The sort that didn’t actually make any sense when you tried to analyze it, but when you let your mind stay outside of it you understood.
There was the noise again. A louder scratch this time. A wet exhale. Ilya pushed his chair back, and it screeched against the tiles. On the deck, there was this white flash of movement back and forth, back and forth, like a hand waving. A puff of condensation bloomed on the glass. Ilya fought the urge to yell. Then the creature let out a high-pitched yip, the condensation faded, and he saw that it was a dog. It was up on its hind legs with its front paws on the glass. Its tail wagged steadily behind its head. He tried to remember whether the Masons had said anything about owning a dog and could not. At home strays ranged, loping across snowy streets and marking certain alleys as their territory. They could be vicious—many were part wolf—and they were routinely rounded up and shot in the square, but this creature seemed docile. Ilya opened the door a crack, and the dog cocked its head at him. It had white fur that curled in coy tendrils at the base of its ears and an air of indulged expectation that was not unlike Marilee’s and Molly’s.
“Otvali,” Ilya said. And then, thinking the dog might be more apt to obey English, he whispered, “Go away, dog! Go!”
The dog stopped panting for a second, as though it were listening. It let its paws fall from the glass with a thud and wandered down the steps into the yard. It skirted the pool and picked its way across the grass slowly, as though it did not care for getting its paws dirty, and then it stopped by the alligator wall where a figure was standing. Ilya’s insides went heavy and hard, like they were turning to cement. It’s him, he thought, whoever killed those girls, and then the figure stepped out of the gloom, and Ilya saw that it was Sadie. She crossed the yard with the dog at her heels, and climbed up the deck steps toward him. She was barefoot, in the same black T-shirt, but with sweatpants underneath. Her silver sneakers dangled from one hand.
“‘Go away, dog’?’’ she said. She let the dog in, slid past him, glanced up the stairs toward her parents’ bedroom, and clicked the door shut behind her. “Don’t look so shocked,” she said. “I knew before.”
“Will you tell?” he asked.
“I won’t if you won’t. But you should—for all our sakes—or else they’re going to keep talking to you like you’re deaf.”
“You don’t think they know?” For a moment, Ilya’s stomach burned at the idea that they might. He imagined them explaining to their friends, It turned out he does speak English—he was just pretending not to. He imagined them thinking this strangeness the result of a disturbing Russian childhood or, worse, simply the result of being Russian, and then he remembered another of Babushka’s sayings: embarrassment is a luxury. He remembered his mother on that wooden bench at the police station, the secretaries nakedly staring, looking for something in her that might explain Vladimir.
“They don’t know,” Sadie said. “They’re innocents. Tell them and they’ll forgive you. They love forgiving people.” She said this softly, but with a scorn that made it clear that she did not love forgiving people and that she did not consider herself an innocent.
She walked past him into the kitchen and opened a cabinet that was stuffed with boxes of crisps and crackers and biscuits. “I get hungry at night. All the time. I’m growing. I can feel it happening sometimes—it’s like cramps in my legs.”
“You look completely grown to me,” he said.
“Is that a compliment?” she said, and she gave a quick smile that slid across her face like a snake across a path. Like she was afraid to let it last. “Are you hungry?”
Ilya nodded. “I didn’t eat dinner,” he said.
“Mama Jamie might not forgive that.” She pulled a box out of the cabinet with a picture of little girls in what appeared to be construction hats. “Girl Scout cookies,” she said.
His heart was still thumping away, but his fear was no longer entirely unpleasant. It was exhilarating to talk to her. He’d never actually used his English with a native speaker, and it seemed as though she could understand him, that his words were not as clumsy as they felt on his tongue. And she was beautiful. Her hair was in a big knot on top of her head, and it made her face seem wider, younger. She looked like Snegurochka in the book of fairy tales that Babushka had read to them as kids, in the picture when she first comes out of the forest, when she’s newly, magically made. Even the one shattered pupil seemed more like magic than a mistake.
“What happened to your eye?” he said.
She lifted a hand to it as though she’d forgotten. “Birth defect,” she said. “Sometimes I forget it’s there and I wonder why people are staring at me.”