“You’re supposed to stand,” Sadie whispered, and he looked at her, and she read the fear on his face and said, “Just for a second.”
Ilya stood.
“Ilya,” Pastor Kyle said, “is a top student in his town, which, as I understand it, is in the Siberian wilderness. Can you say ‘hello,’ Ilya?”
Pastor Kyle held the microphone out, and Ilya leaned toward it and said, “Hello,” and his voice sounded sullen and small. He cleared his throat, was about to add that Berlozhniki was not in Siberia, when Pastor Kyle whipped the microphone back and said, “Ilya is here today in the good old U-S-of-A thanks to the generosity of EnerCo and the Mason family.” There was another round of clapping. Papa Cam and Mama Jamie nodded, their cheeks pink, and Pastor Kyle waited for the applause to die down before saying, “But Ilya’s family has suffered a tragedy.”
Ilya stiffened. Beside him Papa Cam and Mama Jamie were flushed with attention. Ilya dug his fingers into his palms, tried to stem an anger that he knew was not entirely justified. He had lied, after all, had used their pity to gain their forgiveness, but still he couldn’t believe how quickly they had told Pastor Kyle. Pastor Kyle, who was looking at Ilya like he was one of Jesus’s lost lambs. Pastor Kyle, who, as he opened his mouth to speak, revealed a wad of something pink and bright between his molars. Bubble gum.
“Ilya’s brother died not long ago, folks,” he said. “And I was thinking there might be something we could do to help his family.”
Around him, people were nodding. Someone a few rows behind him said, “Yes!” There was a basket weaving its way along the rows, and the ladies were reaching into their purses, and the men were leaning on one haunch to get to their wallets. Ilya let his hands loosen. He unclenched his gut. Maybe they could help, he thought. They would collect money, and he would send it home to pay for a decent lawyer or to bribe someone to tell them where Vladimir was being held or to cover travel expenses so that his mother could visit him. Ilya could feel the anger leaving him, could feel his face softening as though it were clay, losing its shape in the heat, and then Pastor Kyle said, “What do we do, when a family is in need? What is the thing we can always do to help one another no matter our circumstances?”
“Pray!” Marilee yelled from down the pew.
Pastor Kyle pointed a finger at her and clicked his tongue. “Bingo,” he said.
He turned on his heel and headed back to the pulpit, and when he got there, he bent his head and closed his eyes and made his voice as low and lush as velvet. “Lord,” he said. “We have a brother in need among us. We have a brother who is in pain, who is grieving, who has lost someone he loves, and we ask you to comfort him.”
Pastor Kyle kept saying “brother,” over and over. All around Ilya, heads were bowed. Rows and rows of people, their hair shining in the sun. Ilya could smell sweat distinctly. He could almost feel the force of their prayers, like they were leaving a wake as they sped up to an industrious American heaven where they would be answered with ease. Except the prayers were wrong. Misdirected. And Ilya was sure that they would come plummeting back to Earth in some new and twisted form, and so he closed his eyes and tried to redirect them.
Just give me a clue, he thought. Just something to prove he didn’t do it.
He tried to picture Vladimir the last time he’d seen him—in the clinic with white sheets all around him. But instead he saw Vladimir in the picture from VKontakte. It was as though, in staring at that picture the night before, Ilya had burned it into his retinas, and now his imagination could project it onto his lids at will. Pastor Kyle’s voice began to rise and crest, and then it was as though Ilya were in the picture. He was there again, at the Tower with Vladimir and Aksinya and Lana and Sergey. He could feel the bass coming up through the concrete floor, making his jaw chatter. A smile lifted his cheeks. All around him the pulse of bodies, dancing. The golden whip of a girl’s hair. That chemical prick to the air. The soft hump of someone’s ass hitting his. The slosh of vodka in the bottle as Aksinya took a swig. The crunch of glass under his sneakers. Lana was next to him, his fingers clammy on her waist. Her skin burning hot. Sergey was holding up Aksinya’s phone.
“Not your best angle, Aksinya,” Sergey said, and Aksinya held out her middle finger and flicked him off. Lana flicked him off too, and just as the flash clicked Vladimir said, “You have competition, Ilyusha.” That was why Vladimir’s mouth had been open in the picture, that was what he’d been saying. In the moment, Ilya had thought that he meant Sergey, that Sergey liked Lana, though Sergey had his own girlfriend. In the moment, he’d thought it was a joke because Lana was not his to compete for, but now he could see Vladimir’s eyes, made even more narrow by his sidelong glance. He had not meant Sergey. He had been looking to the side, past Aksinya and Ilya and Lana. He had been looking at someone.
Ilya felt a hand on his wrist. Lana, he thought, but when he opened his eyes it was Sadie. Her nails ragged, the skin around them chewed pink and raw. She kept her hand on his skin for a second, and then she said, “I have to get up there.”
Ilya looked to the aisle. Marilee and Molly and a troop of preteen boys were marching up toward the pulpit, and now Sadie squeezed past him. For a second her foot was between his. Her thigh brushed his. The opening chords of a song were twanging in the heat. At some point, while Ilya’s eyes were closed, Pastor Kyle had moved from the pulpit to an electric keyboard. The kids gathered behind him, and Sadie joined them. Someone handed her a microphone. She looked at Ilya. That one eye was so beautifully broken, like something at the end of a kaleidoscope.
You’ll know it when it happens, Vladimir had told him one night, when he and Aksinya were still a new thing. Vladimir had never been shy about talking about women—he was the sort to sing his love from the rooftops, too cool to be embarrassed. But Ilya had been embarrassed to listen. He had always been more squeamish than Vladimir, and, besides, it hadn’t seemed to him like something he needed to know about, not yet anyway, not like participles and gerunds and contractions. But now he wished that he had listened, had asked, “So you know it when it happens, and then what?”
Up by the pulpit Pastor Kyle’s hands were dancing over the keyboard. Sadie put the microphone to her mouth. He could hear her lips part, and then she began to sing.
“He’s quite something, isn’t he?” Mama Jamie said. They were backing out of their parking spot at Star Pilgrim. Pastor Kyle was standing by the doors to the church waving vigorously. Now that the service had concluded, he chomped openly on his gum.
“Mom has a crush on him,” Marilee said.
Molly giggled.
“I think every mom in there has a crush on him,” Sadie said. She was sitting next to Ilya. Her thigh was an inch from his. It looked like a loaf of toasted bread. Little blond hairs traversed it, catching the sun.
“I’m inspired by him, if that’s what you mean,” Mama Jamie said. “Did you like it, Ilya?”
The service, with its crackling acoustics and spastic light show, had seemed to him like a glossier version of the “karaoke club” that Pasha Kamenev ran in the boiler room of Building 6, the testimonials like the sad stories that Berlozhniki’s half-dozen reformed alcoholics told over and over at their Tuesday meetings in the communal kitchen. Now, with Papa Cam scanning the radio stations and the car’s AC blasting, even that moment when his memory of the Tower had crystallized seemed a bit ridiculous. More heatstroke than divine intervention. Ilya was sure that when he looked at the picture on VKontakte, Vladimir would be looking straight ahead, at no one but him.