CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Then
There was shouting going on, muffled behind his mother’s bedroom door. Galina and Barry had been going at it, on and off, every day since the funeral. Ilya didn’t care what was going on with them; he didn’t care if they were breaking down or angry or grieving or in the depths of despair or anything else.
His whole world went dark, and nothing else mattered.
Still, the constant rise and fall of their angry voices drifting through the wall between their two bedrooms made it hard to sleep, and that was all he wanted. To sink into oblivion. He would get drunk again, if the thought of taking even a single sip of booze didn’t make his throat convulse and sour spittle fill his mouth. He wouldn’t be able to drink a sip without puking at the reminder of how hungover he’d been. Not enough to get a buzz, much less hammered the way he wanted.
That left sleep, and he couldn’t find it. He put the pillow over his head, crushing it against his ears, but that didn’t help. Tossing and turning, sweating as though he had a fever, Ilya clutched at his head and considered gouging his thumbs into his ears. He pressed them against his closed eyes instead, seeing the bursts and pinwheels of color.
Another rolling rumble of furious noise drifted toward him, and he swung his legs out of bed to get up. In the kitchen, he got a glass and opened the fridge, but nothing inside appealed to him, so he settled for a glass of tepid water from the faucet. It turned his stomach. At the sound of footfalls behind him, he put the glass on the counter and rested both his hands on it. Shoulders hunching. If it was Barry, Ilya would fucking punch him right in the throat. If it was his mother . . .
“Hey.” It was Theresa.
Ilya turned. “What.”
“I can’t sleep, either.”
“They should shut the hell up.”
Theresa moved toward him hesitantly. “They’ve been fighting for days. They’re not going to stop just because we can’t sleep.”
“We have school in the morning,” he hissed after a second, the horror of this truth twisting his mouth and making him spit the words. His fists clenched. How could he go to school tomorrow or any day after that? How could he do anything for the rest of his life?
Jenni was dead.
She was going to be dead forever. He could do nothing about it. It would never change. How could school matter? How could anything?
“I just want to sleep,” he said. “I want to sleep and not wake up. Okay? That’s all I want right now. I just want to sleep.”
His voice broke, and he turned away to hide the fact that he was about to break down in tears like a baby. Behind him, he heard Theresa leaving the kitchen. He considered gripping his glass hard enough to break, or tossing it into the sink to watch it shatter. Instead, he left it carefully on the counter, knowing it would make his mother lose her mind to find it there instead of the dishwasher.
Upstairs, the sound of the argument had faded, at least until he got back into bed. Then it started again, a rolling rise and fall of shouting and weeping. So far there’d been no sounds of anything breaking, no crack of flesh on flesh. If Barry hit Galina, Ilya would have to consider defending her. He wouldn’t put it past her to take a crack at Barry, though, and then what?
“Ugh,” he muttered. “Just shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut the hell up—”
“Ilya?” Theresa rapped on his door frame. “Can I come in?”
He gestured. She moved forward, holding out her hand, her fingers clenched around something. She turned her palm up and showed him the small oblong pill. She offered it to him.
“What’s that?” Ilya asked suspiciously.
Theresa lifted her chin. “It will help you sleep.”
“Yeah, but what is it?” He didn’t take it.
“I don’t know,” Theresa said. “I got it from my dad’s . . . drawer. But I know it’ll help you sleep.”
He sat. “Did you take any?”
“No. I’ll be okay. You should have it. At least you’ll be able to sleep.” She offered it again, though she hadn’t moved any closer.
Ilya had done his share of drinking and smoking a little weed now and then, but he’d never gotten into pills. You could get seriously messed up with pills, like long-term shit. “Nah. I’m good.”
“Are you sure?” Theresa closed her fingers around the pill in her hand.
“You shouldn’t be stealing your dad’s meds,” he said, aware that he sounded snotty about it. It wasn’t like he even really cared.
She laughed. “He won’t notice. Trust me.”
“Thanks,” Ilya said. “But no thanks. I don’t want to get messed up in any of that. You shouldn’t, either.”
He wasn’t sure why this made her look so stricken, why her eyes glistened with tears and she swallowed hard against an obvious lump in her throat. Her voice was cracked and shaky when she answered. “No. I’m not. I don’t want to be. I didn’t mean that you should be. I just wanted to help.”
Ilya settled onto his pillow with his hands folded on his chest, staring at the ceiling. The noise from his mother’s room had gone silent, finally. “Thanks.”
“It’ll be okay,” Theresa whispered.
He didn’t look at her. “No, I don’t think so. Just leave me alone.”
And, after a few seconds of silence, she did.