“Took you a while,” she said, and it did not in any way mean that she cared. She let her arm drop and rolled her head gently and her eyes closed with the motion. She was wearing an enormous black T-shirt with cut-off jean shorts, and as she walked down the stairs toward him, the T-shirt consumed all of her shorts except the little white threads that hung down her thighs like icicles. Her sneakers were high-tops, spray-painted silver so that even the laces were crusty with paint.
“Ilya,” Mama Jamie said, “this is Sadie.”
Sadie looked at him for a long moment. “Welcome to Leffie,” she said. “Home of the largest boudin ball ever cooked.” She smiled. A darting, furtive expression. Ilya tried to think what “boudin” meant and could not.
“It’s not as bad as all that,” Papa Cam said.
“True,” Sadie said. “There’s the corn festival.”
“Ilya doesn’t speak quite as much English as we were thinking,” Mama Jamie said, “but he’s going to learn fast. Immersion, right?”
“He doesn’t speak any,” Marilee said.
Sadie rolled her eyes—whether at Marilee or her mom or his lack of English, Ilya wasn’t sure—and walked past them all into the kitchen. She opened the fridge door and disappeared behind it. Ilya thought that they would all migrate to the kitchen, that naturally they would follow her, but Mama Jamie just called, “Don’t spoil your supper,” and led Ilya upstairs, where the girls’ bedrooms marched down the hall, one after another. Marilee and Molly opened their doors to reveal studies of pink and green—plaid, polka dots, stripes, flowers. There was not an inch that had been left unmolested. But when Ilya looked through the cracked doorway into Sadie’s bedroom, it was spartan: a white quilt on a slim bed; a single pillow over which a slight, black cross hung; a wooden desk with a chair lumped in clothes. It looked temporarily inhabited, like there might be a suitcase somewhere out of sight. He wanted to linger, to open the door just a little wider, but Mama Jamie had moved on.
“This is our room,” she said, presenting a carpeted kingdom into which Ilya could easily have tucked his entire apartment. “The door is always open.”
“Well, not literally,” Papa Cam said, “but you can always knock.”
Ilya stared. He couldn’t help it. The TV at the foot of their bed was as big as a door and as thin as a dinner plate. There was a sleek bureau with a dozen drawers, and on top was a silver tray bearing bottles of perfume and shimmery boxes. Through another door he glimpsed a bathroom with marble counters and two sinks in case Mama Jamie and Papa Cam ever wanted to wash their faces in concert. He tried to lock on to just one detail that he could give to his mother, something that she might use like currency with the other mothers in the kommunalkas, something about which she might say, “This is what it’s really like there,” but no one in the kommunalkas would talk to his mother now, with Vladimir in prison, and besides there wasn’t any detail that wouldn’t sting.
When they’d gone back downstairs, Papa Cam said, “I’m going to call Terry and see if we can’t figure out this whole language situation. Maybe there’s someone in Leffie who speaks Russian.”
“Doubtful,” Sadie said. She had a series of plastic containers open on the counter. She dabbed a finger into a beige puree, tasted it, and wrinkled her nose. “Is this old?” she said.
Mama Jamie ignored her and went on telling Ilya about the house. She pointed here and there. Bathroom, she said. Towels. Trash. Chores. Yard. Phone. Garage. Her lips did wild exaggerations of each word, and twice beads of spit flew off her tongue, propelled by the force of her enunciations.
“We have a pool,” she said, “and if you don’t know how to swim, Papa Cam can teach you. He taught all the girls. He had Molly doing freestyle—”
“I’m sure he knows how to swim,” Sadie said.
Ilya knew little more than how to keep his head above water—summers in Berlozhniki were short, and between the mine and the refinery, the river wasn’t so clean—but his throat caved in at the thought of Sadie in a bathing suit. A bikini. Topless, even, with sunglasses and a stomach piercing and a sweating Coke can in hand. It was a ridiculous fantasy, he knew, ripped in part from some advertisement he’d internalized, and it came barbed with the memory of nights, lying in bed, listening to Vladimir talk about girls. He couldn’t think of any fantasy of his that hadn’t been Vladimir’s first.
“Terry’s looking into it,” Papa Cam said, coming back in from the deck. “He was stumped. He said Ilya’s the best student in the whole town there, like some sort of language savant, at least according to his teacher there. He’s going to get in touch with her.”
Maria Mikhailovna. Ilya could see her pushing her glasses up her nose, nodding to the beat of his conjugations. He could see the tiny red notations she made in the margins of his homework, and the way she gripped her pen with one too many fingers. What would she say if she saw him now, after all her work, after all she’d risked, pretending not to understand a word of English?
Mama Jamie’s smile was failing her. Worry puckered her mouth. He knew that this was the moment to speak up, to blurt out something in English, to say he’d been exhausted, scared. Any excuse would do, but he couldn’t shake the idea that uttering a word in English would be letting go of something.
“Ilya, can you understand us?” Mama Jamie said. “Can you—”
“I’m out of here,” Sadie said. She grabbed a backpack from a closet off the kitchen, and Mama Jamie and Papa Cam pulled their eyes off Ilya and looked at her.
“Where are you going?” Papa Cam said.
“Kayla’s,” she said. “The summer reading report’s due Tuesday.”
“And you’ve had how long to work on it—all summer?” Mama Jamie said. “It’s Ilya’s first night. We’re going to eat soon.”
There was a long silence that Ilya recognized. Even the little girls stared at Sadie with big eyes, and Ilya could see that she was like Vladimir had been. She was the one they worried about.
Sadie zipped up her backpack, which was encrusted with the same silver spray paint as her sneakers. As she pulled it onto her shoulders, her hair got trapped under the straps. She gathered it at the nape of her neck and freed it, and her eyes met his. She had not been particularly nice to him, but still he had the distinct impression that she’d saved him somehow, that she’d interrupted Mama Jamie on purpose and bought him a little more time.
“Home by ten,” Papa Cam said.
“Nine,” Mama Jamie said.
“Later,” Sadie said to no one in particular.
As Mama Jamie slipped a casserole into the oven, Papa Cam led Ilya out onto 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.