by J. A. Rock
“Okay.” Ilia didn’t move.
“Listen, you want burgers for lunch? I’ll go get burgers.”
“Okay.” Stared at the ceiling still.
Louis sighed. “Eli...” Then he cleared his throat, forced a lightness into his tone. “They still playing this song? You know, they take a good song but then they play it too much, and in the end you’re so damn sick of it you change the station when it comes on.”
Little red painted soldier,
I’m gonna make you mine.
Take you back to my back porch;
We’ll share the stars; we’ll share the wine.
The world is old and colder,
But my little house is fine.
Oh red painted soldier,
The wounds you feel are mine.
The wounds you feel, the wounds you heal,
The words you steal from a quiet mind;
Yeah little red painted soldier,
Don’t let the blind mislead the blind.
Ilia closed his eyes.
IV
“There,” said his mom, wiping the side of the cupcake with the back of the spoon. “Nice clean edges.”
Ilia took the spoon and sucked the frosting off it.
Maybe that’s what he wanted too. Nice clean edges. He’d wanted Patrick to stay with him. He’d wanted them to be together. He’d wanted his father to apologize for Mikhail, to look him in the eye and tell him that he understood how much he had hurt him.
But Patrick wasn’t here, and his dad wasn’t sorry.
“He went for a gun,” Louis had said last Saturday, when he and the guys had a little too much to drink and their voices rose from the barbeque in the backyard all the way to Ilia’s open window. “Perp goes for a gun, you take the fucking shot, rookie.”
At first Ilia had thought he was talking about Nick.
“You don’t stop to think. You stop to think, and you’re dead. And fucked if I’ll lose any sleep over that asshole or his piece of shit brother.”
Ilia didn’t know. Maybe it was Mikhail he’d been talking about. It didn’t matter.
There wouldn’t be any clean edges.
“Mom.” He laid the spoon on the counter.
“Mmmm?” she asked over her shoulder, packing the cupcakes into a Tupperware container. Cupcakes for his dad to take to work. Someone’s birthday or something.
“It doesn’t matter.”
She turned. Her voice was sharp. “No. Talk to me!” Her hand fluttered to her throat as though she was surprised at the vehemence of her tone. “Please.”
Ilia spun the spoon on the counter, watching the light bounce off it.
“Eli.”
He looked up. “He loved me. Mikhail did.”
She pursed her lips. Didn’t contradict him outright, but Ilia saw it in her face. How could a man like that—a monster—love anyone?
Ilia felt the same creeping sense of desolation as always. If he couldn’t make them understand that, then how could they ever grasp the enormity of his loss? Here he was sinking, always sinking, and they couldn’t even see it.
“Eli,” she said again, and then pressed her lips together tightly as though she were afraid to let the words spill out.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
It was just his universe.
V
He knew his mother cried a lot.
“It must have hurt so much,” he overheard her saying to his dad one night, her voice hushed, broken. Ilia listened on the stairs, like he had sometimes as a child. “That’s all I can think about. How much he must have hurt. And we didn’t even know.”
Ilia’s dad mumbled something too low for Ilia to hear.
“What kind of parents don’t know, Louis?” his mother asked. “Don’t even realize their son’s been kidnapped?”
“He made his choice,” Ilia’s father said. “He washed his hands of us a long time ago.”
“That—” His mother’s voice was ugly now, angry, “—is a choice a child can make about his parents. But that is not a choice parents get to make about their children.”
“And how long are you going to hate me for this?” Louis asked. “Because I didn’t see you knocking on Mikhail Kadyrov’s door asking for your son back.”
“Maybe if I’d known sooner where he’d gone—”
“Oh, please. I can’t believe we’re still talking about this. I warned him. I told him Kadyrov was dangerous. I told him to come home. He didn’t.”
“So you just left it at that. And didn’t tell me for weeks.”
“What difference did it make when I told you? You wrote him off, same as I did.”
“I never wrote him off. How can you say that?”
“He was an adult. I was done trying to make decisions for him.”
His mother’s voice got soft again. Ilia had to come down a few more steps to hear. “—had a chance. When you brought him in. It haunts me every day that we could have stopped it from happening.”
“You mean I could have?”
No answer.
“Well I’ve got news for you,” Louis went on. “He wanted nothing to do with me when I brought him to the station. If I’d forced him to come back here, he would have run away again. A twenty-one year old man. If I’d dragged him back home, he could have had me on kidnapping charges.”
“Oh, shut up,” Ilia’s mother said, but with no real rancor in her voice. “Just shut up.”
Neither said anything for a while, and Ilia went back upstairs. He felt oddly calm. If he should have hated his parents, he didn’t. If they hated him, he could see why.
He remembered Nick had seemed almost nervous, pressing the gun to Ilia’s back. “I’m taking everything.”
And in that lightless place where grief kept him, it had seemed better to Ilia to be snatched up like a lost and valuable possession than to go home, where he would be nothing.
I made my choice.
VI
If he closed his eyes, he could see Mikhail. Could feel his touch.
“Ilie. My light.”
Ilia slid his hand into his track pants and gripped his cock. Teased it into stiffness.
“Mikhail. God, Mikhail.”
A door slammed toward the front of the house, and Ilia’s eyes flashed open. He heard his mother call out, and his father say something in response. He sounded pissed.
Bad day at the office, Dad?
Ilia expected to hear footsteps. Expected to have his door pushed open. Expected it to be his fault somehow. But then he heard the television, turned on and turned up. Sounded like the news channel.
Ilia sat up.
Tugged at the end of the Redskins scarf under his bed, pulling it free. He looped it around his bedpost.
Felt a thrill of anticipation.
How easy it would be to kneel on the floor with the scarf around his throat, and just lean forward into sleep.
Ilia’s hands shook.
No.
No?
God, but he wanted it to be over.
Didn’t he?
The blood pounded in his skull. He struggled to breathe.
It could be.
It could be.
And it was so simple.
Ilia ran his trembling fingers along the scarf.
Simple.
His fear bled away. He slid onto his knees. God.
“Eli?” his mom called. She opened his door. “What are you doing down there?”
His throat was dry. “Dropped, um, dropped my pen.”
“Your dad wants to know if you want pizza for dinner.”
“O-okay.”
“We’re ordering soon. Come out and tell him what you want, or he’ll make an executive decision. And you know what that means.”
“Pepperoni,” Ilia said, wondering where he summoned his ghost of a smile.
His mom returned the smile gratefully.
Ilia followed her down to the living room.
If she wondered
why he unhooked his scarf from his bedpost first, she didn’t ask.
VII
It didn’t occur to Ilia right away to worry about Nick’s men. At least, not in any specific way. Most of the “family” had disliked Nick; thought he was reckless, a fuckup. They’d be glad to have him gone.
Except Kysna. Kysna had always been loyal to Nick.
What if he came to finish the job?
Ilia knew his father was being cautious. Knew patrol cars drove by the house several times a day. The media was keeping Ilia’s story quiet. Ilia wanted to stop worrying and move on, whatever the fuck that meant.
But it was foolish not to worry. Nick hadn’t loved Mikhail, but he had wanted Ilia’s father dead on principle. Just because Nick was dead didn’t mean the principle was.
Though maybe Nick hadn’t wanted Louis dead as much as he’d wanted to see Ilia kill.
Ilia wished he could talk to his dad about it.
But he was so fucking humiliated to have brought this danger on his family, on himself, that days went by, and Ilia didn’t mention Kysna to Louis. He tried to create a thick swell of fog that would swallow any memory of Nick’s followers, of Nick.
VIII
Ilia was allowed to use Georgetown University’s free counseling service, even though he wasn’t a student. His mother volunteered to drive him to his consultation, but he said no.
He brought home all the pamphlets. List of symptoms for trauma survivors: Re-experiencing, nightmares, intrusive memories…
How Do I Know if My Experience is Considered Traumatic?
If you feel:
Overwhelmed.
Unable to Cope.
Helpless.
The counseling was at the Women’s Resource Center. Ilia wondered how his dad felt about that.
IX
Most days, he didn’t want to go to Georgetown. So he didn’t.
Wandered in DuPont instead, or went to the museums.
He got a notice saying that if he missed one more appointment, his counseling would be terminated.
Good, and fuck you.
X
Two things Ilia and his father never talked about: rape, and the night Ilia had entered his parents’ bedroom with a gun. Ilia didn’t know how to bring either of those things up.
He wondered if his father was unable to cope with the idea of a man being raped. Overwhelmed that it had happened to his son.
His helpless son.
Wondered if his father thought he’d deserved it.
It wasn’t ever the memory of physical pain that bothered Ilia the most. It was the memory of moaning Nick’s name. Betraying Mikhail. Losing himself.
If he had nightmares, they weren’t about being on his knees. They were about sitting at the dinner table with Nick. Sitting on the couch with the TV on. They were about all the minutes and hours he hadn’t spent fighting.
He didn’t see how his father could forgive him for that sort of weakness.
And he didn’t see how his father could ever forgive him for that night.
Made him sick that he even wanted his father’s forgiveness. His father was the one who owed Ilia an apology. For Mikhail. For his whole life.
XI
For his dad’s birthday, they went to dinner at the small Italian restaurant he liked, two blocks away from the station. It was supposed to be just family, just the three of them, but all the cops liked that restaurant, and pretty soon there were so many extra people at the table that the owner moved them to the private room in the back.
Ilia felt as though there was a glass screen around him. He was there, but he was untouched. He was kept apart.
The only time he felt any sense of connection was when he accidentally caught the gazes of the men on his dad’s team: speculative, pitying, or disgusted. Those short, sharp jabs of guilt kept Ilia anchored in the moment.
He got up and walked out the door.
In front of the restaurant was a little stone trough with flowers planted in it. Ilia hunched his shoulders and wished he’d grabbed his coat.
There were too many people out front. He walked along the side of the restaurant into a gravel lot and stood between two cars. He realized he could see his parents’ table through the window. The cops were all laughing. Ilia’s mother bent close to his father, speaking in his ear. Louis hesitated, then nodded.
Stood.
Ilia stepped back into the shadows where no one could see him. His father wouldn’t come looking for him. Unless it was to tell Ilia to get the hell back in there.
A minute later, the restaurant door opened, and the noise from within swelled then died as the door fell shut. Ilia heard the crunch of shoes on gravel.
“Eli?”
Louis stood at the entrance to the lot, also jacketless.
“I’m not trying to ruin your birthday.” Ilia wiped his nose. “I just needed some air.”
Louis stuck his hands in his pockets. “I know.”
No you don’t.
“You can go back in.” Ilia glanced at him. “I’ll be in in a minute.”
“We can leave if you need to,” Louis said awkwardly.
“I don’t need to. Just want a break from people looking.”
Silence.
“I’ve got an idea.” His father took his keys from his jeans pocket. “If you want. Get in the car.”
“Why?”
“We’ll go for a drive.”
A bizarre suggestion, but Ilia was cold enough that he walked across the lot to their car and got in when Louis clicked it open.
They drove for nearly ten minutes. Louis didn’t say anything, and Ilia was content to look out the window at the buildings that were closed up for the night. Eventually they got into darker country. Ilia tensed when they approached the shooting range, suddenly scared as all fuck.
But his dad drove past the range and on to the old roadside ice cream stand where Ilia’s soccer team had gone after games when Ilia was a kid. Ilia had hated soccer. But Louis had believed there was a chance his skinny, delicate son would grow to like sports, to win at them. Ilia had played reluctantly for a few weeks, then had hurt his ankle in a game. Not badly—the pain was gone an hour later. But Ilia had pretended it was worse than it was. Had insisted he couldn’t play anymore.
“You’ve got to stop whining and get back out there, Eli. Don’t be a goddamn princess.”
Little bitch.
The stand was boarded up for the winter. Ilia’s dad shut off the engine.
“They, uh…they don’t mean anything. The way they look at you,” Louis said. “Just, they’re concerned.”
Yeah fucking right.
“I should have fought him.” Ilia dug his nails into his palms. “I didn’t. Most of the time.”
His father let out a soft breath, like maybe he’d meant to say something and the words had simply dissolved.
Ilia looked at his father. “I’m sorry.” Wasn’t what he’d planned to say at all. His jaw trembled. “I’m sorry.”
Louis shook his head. “You don’t have to be.”
“I did bad things. Ought to go to jail. Worse than jail.”
“No. Jesus, no.” Louis tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. His voice was strained. “You were under duress.”
Ilia stared out the windshield. So was Patrick, but Patrick had never bent like Ilia had. Never rushed to try to be a monster because he was too fucking scared of the alternative. Patrick had remembered what was right.
“I’m sorry,” he offered again, even though that was the wrong thing to say.
This was their moment. The moment when Ilia would summon all the courage to say all the things he wanted to say—
Dad, I loved Mikhail.
I need you to look me in the eye and tell me you understand that.
I don’t know if I can forgive you.
But I need you to love me too.
—and just like that the dam walls would break, and Louis would turn to him and say—
I’m s
orry, Eli.
I wish that my job hadn’t come between us.
I wish I hadn’t had to take the shot.
I love you. I have always loved you and nothing will ever change that.
—but neither of them spoke.
Ilia watched the refracted headlights of a passing truck slide up the windshield and vanish. He wanted to tell his dad about Kysna too. Wanted to tell him he was still afraid the men who’d been loyal to Nick might come back.
At last Louis sighed and reached forward to start the ignition again. “Your mom will be wondering what happened to us.”
The moment was gone.
XII
Ilia woke with a start.
His dad was sitting on the end of his bed, his face illuminated by the glow of a phone screen. He was wearing his jeans and his worn SWAT T-shirt with the three-quarter tear on the shoulder seam.
Ilia twisted his head to look at his clock. 3:47.
“Dad?” He rubbed his eyes and sat up. “Have you been at work?”
“Mmmm. Three hours standing in the street in Burleith waiting for the negotiator to admit he had jack shit. Got inside and the kids were already dead.” His voice was flat. Tired.
“What are you doing in my room?”
Louis turned the screen toward him, and Ilia realized with a jolt that it was his phone. While Ilia was in the hospital, someone had gone to the apartment to get that phone. Had found it God knows where. Had brought Ilia’s wallet back too—empty.
Mikhail smiled out at him. Louis swiped his thumb over the screen and this time it was full of Ilia’s grinning face.
“Dad.” Ilia reached for the phone. “Don’t. It’s...it’s private.”
His stomach clenched. There were dick pics on that phone. Ilia’s mostly. And at least one video he’d made when he was fucking himself on Mikhail’s cock, moaning and writhing while Mikhail lay under him with his arms folded behind his head.
“Work for it, Ilie. Come on.”
Louis held the phone away. He turned his face to Ilia. “Look at you.” A somber shot this time. Ilia had been practicing his serious face for some reason. Probably to send something sexy to Mikhail. He’d tried to catch his jawline, his dark lashes, and his full lips. “You look like your mother. Beautiful, like her.”
