“No.”
“He’s performing well? Doing his work?” his mother said.
“Da. Very well.”
“Good,” his mother said. “He works hard.”
“He gets that from you,” Maria Mikhailovna said.
Ilya’s mother smiled and shook her head. Maria Mikhailovna took another swallow of tea. “What brings me here tonight is an opportunity—a possible opportunity—and it could have waited, of course, until the storm is over, but I couldn’t wait.” She slid her lip between her teeth and then went on: “Gazneft has decided to sponsor an exchange program along with an American petrol company. One student from Berlozhniki is to be sent to a city in America. It’s only for a year. A year of upper school. He’d have to take the boards early, of course, and he’d have to get above the ninetieth percentile, but I believe he’s in that range, and it seemed—”
She hesitated, struck maybe by the silence of the room or by the force of the hope she was giving them. Babushka’s hands shook on the table, and his mother reached for them and covered them with her own.
“It seemed,” Maria Mikhailovna finished, “perfect for him.”
“Could he be chosen?” his mother said.
“Who, me?” Vladimir said, with a tight smile, and they all turned and looked at him because they had forgotten—or at least Ilya had—that he was in the room.
“He has a chance?” his mother said. “Won’t the spot be saved for someone?” She meant someone important. The mayor’s son or the daughter of some refinery bureaucrat.
Maria Mikhailovna straightened in her chair. “In this, I have some influence. It’s just a bit of luck really. Dmitri drives Fyodor Fetisov and mentioned to him that I teach at the school, and he’s asked me to choose the Berlozhniki student.”
Ilya’s mother’s eyes went huge and wet, and when she turned them on Ilya, the happiness in them was terrifying.
Vladimir got up from the couch, walked to the table, and shoved a Malvina in his mouth. “What city?” he said. “New York? Orlando? Florida?” He was chewing aggressively, all the power of his body collected in his jaw. “I’ll do it. What are my chances?”
“Vladimir, go in the bedroom,” their mother said.
Maria Mikhailovna looked at Vladimir. There was still a crust of dried blood under his nostril from his fall, and Ilya expected a look of disgust from her, but she smiled. “Third period is much more lively with you back, Vladimir Alexandrovich.”
Vladimir let out a sudden laugh. “It’s an exchange?” he said. “So you’re saying that an American is coming here?”
“Not next year,” she said, “but in the future, maybe.”
“Of course,” Vladimir said, “in the future, maybe.”
“What would it cost?” Babushka said.
“It’s funded, Mamulya. She already said that.” His mother glanced at Maria Mikhailovna as though she and Babushka were failing some oral exam.
“Gazneft and EnerCo pay for everything. The flight and visas and everything.”
“Everything.” Babushka said it like it was a word she’d never heard.
“Ilya can stow me in his suitcase,” Vladimir said. “I promise to behave.”
“I need your approval before I can submit his name and register him for the boards,” Maria Mikhailovna said.
His mother and Babushka nodded. Maria Mikhailovna nodded.
“Ilya?” Maria Mikhailovna said.
Ilya imagined himself in the big belly of a plane. His mother, his brother, the kommunalkas, the refinery, even, shrunk to a pinprick of light. A lesser star. Ilya didn’t hear her say his name again. He didn’t notice the candle sputtering out under the plastic icon or the way his brother’s face was buckling. He had left. In his mind, he was up high and far away.
Maria Mikhailovna put a hand on his arm. “Would you like to go?”
Ilya looked at her. “Yes. I want to go,” he said, just as Vladimir slipped out the door and into the storm.
CHAPTER NINE
Breakfast that first day of school was a chaotic affair. The kitchen reeked of bacon. The radio by the sink bellowed Christian rock, and Papa Cam sang along, cracking eggs with gusto. The microwave beeped and beeped, and the dryer churned, desperately fluffing things that had wrinkled overnight. Mama Jamie ripped tags off Ilya’s and the girls’ new book bags and cut crusts off their sandwiches and threw them in the trash. Babushka had always wiped the crumbs from her cutting board into the palm of her hand and eaten them. “The best bits,” she called them, and when Vladimir and Ilya were little they used to fight over who would get them. He imagined telling the Masons this story. Fighting for crumbs, they would think, though that wasn’t the point; his family was not that poor.
Sadie was sitting at the table, eating a slice of toast and staring out the sliding glass doors. Her lips were buttery. Her knees were tucked into another huge black T-shirt, and again Ilya had the sense that she was separate from them all. He wasn’t deluded enough to think that they were together in their separateness, but at least they were similar for it. She was looking toward the refinery, and he sat next to her and said, “My home is so close to the refinery that it lights up our whole apartment.”
She looked at him, but it took a second for her to focus on him, as though her mind were returning from some distance.
“There are houses like that here too,” she said. “How’d you sleep?”
“You get accustomed to it,” he said. “But at first people were awake all the time, and they complained. And Gazneft manufactured a study saying the lights would be healthy for us, make us less sad, since it’s dark so much of the time.”
“That’s a new one,” Papa Cam said.
“I meant how’d you sleep last night,” Sadie said, and Ilya wondered if she could tell from his face that he’d barely slept at all.
“I don’t like the dark,” Molly said. She squeezed between Ilya and Sadie with a plate of waffles and began to systematically pour syrup into each of the waffle’s tiny trenches. “That’s why I have ten nightlights.”
“Let me guess,” Marilee said, from across the table, “your longitude is very far north.”
Papa Cam emerged from a closet with what looked like a tripod. “Latitude,” he said, and Ilya got the sense that even patient Papa Cam found satisfaction in correcting Marilee.
“In the middle of winter there are only a couple of hours of light each day,” Ilya said.
Sadie smiled. “That sounds kind of nice,” she said.
“In what way?” Mama Jamie said.
“If you don’t know I can’t tell you,” Sadie said, and Mama Jamie wiped her hands on a dishcloth and said, “Photo time. Everybody to the fireplace.”
Marilee, Molly, and Sadie groaned in unison.
“This is something we do every year on the first day of school, Ilya,” Mama Jamie said, “and if the girls don’t appreciate it now, they will later.”
The girls slumped over to the fireplace, and Mama Jamie scooped up the dog, which they were now routinely calling Durashka, and climbed onto the brick fire skirt so that her head jutted above her daughters’ shoulders. Molly’s shirt was tucked into an inch of exposed underwear. A citrusy stain traversed the entirety of Papa Cam’s tie, a rash had sprouted on Marilee’s cheek, and the vacancy had not quite left Sadie’s face. Ilya watched them arrange themselves, and they were not much to look at, but still he thought of his mother and Babushka alone in their apartment, and he felt a bit of bile rise in his throat because on top of everything else the Masons had each other.
“Why’s he staring at us like that?” Marilee said.