“Jealous?” he said to Vladimir as the nurse hugged him to her and carried him to the wheelchair.
The nurse made a noise between a snort and a laugh. “You have two minutes,” she said to Ilya.
As she wheeled Tolya from the room, he looked back over his shoulder at Ilya and said, “You’re the one going to America?”
They were gone before Ilya had a chance to answer, but he heard Tolya’s voice, fading down the corridor, saying, “In America, they eat this shit up. Thirteen and a double amputee. They’d have me on ten reality shows at once. Jerry Springer would be interviewing me every fucking day.”
They both stared at the door. “He took it too?” Ilya said.
“Yeah.”
“Did you know what it would do?”
“I’m not a complete idiot,” Vladimir said. Then why, Ilya thought, and his face must have shown the question, because Vladimir said, “I can’t explain it.”
“You said it makes you remember. That’s what you said that night”—he was going to say the night Lana died, because that was how he thought of it now, but instead he said, “in the Tower.”
“Yeah. It makes you remember…” He trailed off and plucked at the edge of the gauze on his leg.
“Is it worth it?” Ilya said.
Vladimir looked down at the magazine on his lap.
“If you’d brought some, I’d take it again,” he said. His voice was quiet and frank, and then it took on a harder cast: “I’d kill you to take it.”
“No you wouldn’t,” Ilya said.
“You don’t have any, do you?” Vladimir said, and he was joking now, but Ilya still thought he might cry, and so he concentrated on Tolya’s bed. The rumpled sheets with the yellowish shadow where his body had been. His sneakers were still under the chair, and Ilya wondered how long they’d sit there before someone noticed. Down the hall, he could hear the pregnant woman coming. “Don’t touch me!” she bellowed, at her husband no doubt, and Ilya stood up.
“Thanks for this,” Vladimir said. He picked up the magazine. “I have a feeling it’s going to be a dry spell for me for a while. Aksinya is pissed at this gimp situation.”
“Will you come home? When they let you out?” Ilya said, and he wondered why he hadn’t ever asked this before, why it had seemed like something he couldn’t say. “They’re going to be lonely once I’m gone.”
“You kidding me? Those two are going to live it up. Put up a disco ball. Get themselves a boom box.”
“Yeah,” Ilya said.
Vladimir was smiling, but there was this toska in his eyes—a sadness that Maria Mikhailovna had once told him didn’t have an English equivalent, like it belonged only to them. Ilya thought of telling Vladimir this, but instead he smiled back.
“Later, Vlad,” he said, and Vladimir said, “Yeah, come again, will you?”
And as Ilya walked down the hall, past the pregnant woman who had propped herself against a wall, Vladimir yelled, “And bring Fanta next time and a kebab. Tell Babushka no more nasty broth!”
Their mother had to go back to work, but Ilya and Babushka spent every day of the next week in the clinic waiting room, begging to see Vladimir. Every day they gave the nurses more money, and every day they were told that the rooms were too full for visitors.
After a week of waiting, the nurse with the red braid took pity on them. She came and squatted by Babushka’s chair so that their eyes were level. “They took him in yesterday,” she said.
“Took him where?” Babushka said.
“He’s lucky he had time to heal here first,” the nurse said.
“He got off the stuff. He was clean. Ilya said he was clean. He didn’t need to—” Babushka said.
“Not detox. Jail,” the nurse said. “And not for the drugs, either.”
Babushka kept her face completely still and in her ice voice said, “You’re mistaken.”
The nurse must have been the sort of woman who was sick of tears and sobs and moans and could only be softened by toughness, because she said, “He was not smart, that’s for sure, but I agree. He didn’t seem like the type to kill anyone. More a Don Juan. But he confessed.”
“Confessed?” Babushka said.
“To the murders. Of those women.”
Babushka nodded stiffly, and gripped Ilya’s hand, and they sat like that, on the bench, for a long time. Then Babushka patted his arm, rose on her own, and together they walked across the square to the bus stop.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Papa Cam had heated the pool so that it was as hot as Babushka’s tea, and a layer of steam formed between the water and the October air that made it look like an enormous cauldron. Since he’d come to America, Ilya’s swimming had improved, and he and Molly and Marilee took turns diving, and Mama Jamie and Papa Cam ranked their scores as though they were in the Olympics. Sadie floated on the water’s surface, and every once in a while, Ilya used his dives as an excuse to swim underneath her, to twist like a seal and look at the way the water fanned her hair and blued her skin.
He had a biology quiz the next day, and so it wasn’t until he’d memorized the steps of photosynthesis that he got into bed and listened to the tape from Gabe’s house. He’d listened to it so many times that it was hard to actually pay attention, and his mind drifted to Sadie, as his mind did more and more recently. That afternoon she’d asked him if he’d want to stay for longer than a year. Her shirt was off—they were in the back of her car in the parking lot behind the defunct fireworks stand—and his hands ran down her ribs, her skin so smooth it made it hard to think, but even if he hadn’t been touching her, he would have nodded, would have said yes.
On the tape, Gabe was saying stained glass and personal effects, and Ilya was saying yes, and kissing her neck and then her chest, and he was slipping down one strap of her bra and then the other, and then Gabe said, Tapes. These tapes for learning English.
Ilya sat up. Only I didn’t think you’d need them, Gabe said, and he was right, of course. Ilya didn’t need them. Why would he need them here, in America? But Ilya had brought them anyway, had brought them though he knew them by heart, because when he’d found them in the Tower it had seemed like a message. When Gabe told Ilya that the nurse had asked him to give them to Ilya, Ilya thought that he’d understood the message: the tapes were Vladimir’s way of apologizing for stealing them in the first place, for everything, or else they were his way of saying good-bye. Vladimir had known that Ilya would want the tapes even in America—Vladimir, who had spent years of his life plucking the headphones off Ilya’s ears so that he could call him a loser or a brainiac or tell him that dinner was ready or ask him if he wanted to go find some cardboard and sled down the concrete ramps under the bridge.
Ilya rewound. Tapes, Gabe said. I didn’t want to be involved. Ilya could imagine the redheaded nurse thrusting them at Gabe, telling him to get them to Vladimir’s brother. Clearly she’d been doing Vladimir a favor—she’d taken the tapes from him instead of giving them straight to the police—but she hadn’t wanted to wait to give them to Ilya and Babushka, who came to the clinic almost daily. The only explanation that Ilya could think of was that she’d gotten scared, as though they were contraband, a pack of Marlboros or three stolen pounds of rye, something that, back in the day, would earn you ten years without the right of correspondence.