Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The cheerleaders were stacked in a pyramid on the basketball court. The smallest one perched on top of the stack, gripping her stocky leg by the ankle, toes pointed in an ecstasy of school spirit.

“Leffie Gators!” she screamed, and the pyramid deconstructed in a flash of fluorescent orange bloomers. The girls rearranged into two lines that spanned the gym, and the football players ran through a gauntlet of shaking pompoms, while a male of murky sexuality yelled their names and numbers through a bullhorn.

It had surprised Ilya that Leffie High was not so different from School #17—as though institutional style had been an addendum to some international accord—but the gym was the exception. The gym at School #17 was a remnant of a concrete factory, with one wall of windows so old that each pane thickened at the bottom. The glass was barred against errant balls, so that the light coming through plaided the plank floors. Leffie High’s gym was windowless, trapped in the center of the school, with a smell that reminded Ilya of the opening gasp of a time capsule, of air held captive for centuries.

He was sitting at the top row of the bleachers. Directly beneath him a couple seemed to be having sex or something close to it. He and Sadie had done nothing but kiss. It had been a week of him and Sadie as a thing now, as something joined by an “and,” and his body wanted what came next as badly as his mind feared it. Vladimir had told him plenty of lewd stories and shown him a few pornos at the Kebab, but still Ilya felt completely unprepared to navigate anything beyond kissing, so he was taking breaks from the overwhelming pep of the pep rally to peer between the bleachers’ slats at the progress below. The boy had the girl pressed up against a wall, and his hand was down the front of her jeans. His mouth was on her neck, which was arched, her eyes closed in an expression that shifted continually from boredom to ecstasy to annoyance, and the mercurialness of her experience terrified Ilya.

On the basketball court, the last football player was announced. Ilya couldn’t find Sadie in the crowd. The entire student body was in Leffie High colors: fluorescent orange and lime green. The combination made the gym look like the confluence of two terrible chemical spills, and Principal Gibbons strode into the center of it with a microphone and began to wax poetic about the football team. Below the bleachers the girl’s pants were halfway off now, obscured by an overpour of upper thigh flesh. The boy’s head was bent, his hands at his own crotch. Ilya wasn’t sure what he was doing—whether he was working on his zipper or putting on a condom—and as he tried to puzzle it out, the girl looked up, and her eyes met Ilya’s.

“What the fuck,” she said, as though she had been copulating somewhere private and Ilya had intruded.

The boy followed her eyes and glared. “Fuck off,” he said, and Ilya slid down a row and over, toward a clot of kids playing some sort of fantasy card game. Below them, the marching band stood, their feathered caps shaking, a conductor waved an arm, and cymbals crashed. Ilya’s heart was racing from the girl’s yell and the boy’s glare, and so it took him a long moment to notice Sadie, who had just come in through a side door. Her ponytail whipped over one shoulder as she turned, scanning the crowd. He could tell that she was looking for him, and the knowledge of it calmed him, made him feel warm and full. Bread belly, he and Vladimir had called that feeling when they were little and happiness was as simple as eating too much.

She saw him and lifted a hand and ran across the basketball court. As a rule, Sadie was composed. Soft-spoken. Almost every conversation between Mama Jamie and her began with her saying, “I’m right here. You don’t have to yell.” He had never heard her say anything in public that might be overheard—Babushka would love this about her, her natural discretion—but as she took the stairs two at a time, she began to call his name. The kids playing the card game froze and looked at her. Her cheeks were splotched. On the court, the cheerleaders cartwheeled. Principal Gibbons began to sing the school song just as Sadie reached Ilya’s row and sidestepped past the gamers.

“Look,” she said. She was holding a piece of paper that was shaking in her hand.

“He wrote me back,” she said. “Gabe Thompson.”

“Back?” Ilya said.

Sadie nodded. “I wrote them all—all the outdated profiles. I figured it couldn’t hurt.”

She handed him a printout of a series of Facebook messages, and Ilya read them from the bottom up, from the first message Sadie had sent:

A phone number appeared under his name. “It’s him, right?” Sadie said. “It has to be. ‘God threw a lot of problems my way there.’”

Ilya thought of Lana and Olga and Yulia dying in the snow.

“‘Forgetting is not the path to forgiveness,’” Sadie said.

Everyone around them was standing now, in response to some cue from Principal Gibbons that Ilya had missed. The marching band had removed their hats and were tucking their clarinets and trumpets and bassoons into velvet-lined cases.

“Let’s go to the library and look at your list. The area code here is for western Pennsylvania, so if we check all of those, the Pennsylvania ones…” She trailed off, seeing something on Ilya’s face.

Feels like fate to me, he was thinking, and it did feel like fate, in the best and the worst way. They had found Gabe, and somehow this solidified the connection between Gabe and the girls, between Gabe and Vladimir. It felt certain now, real and concrete, something only dreamt made manifest, and the certainty was terrifying, like seeing a monster slip out from under the bed, each scale just as he’d imagined it. They had found him. It was a good thing, but what Ilya kept picturing was Gabe in western Pennsylvania—wherever that was—staring at Sadie’s face on a computer screen. His hands were just barely touching the keys. He took her in, every bit of her, her jagged pupil, her white-blond hair, and then slowly, deliberately, he began to type.

“You’re mad,” she said. “I should have told you.”

The bleachers were almost empty now. Beneath them the couple was gone, and one of the boys from the fantasy game was searching for a dropped card.

“If we found him, he could find you too.”

Sadie smiled. It was this terrible, invincible, American smile. She didn’t think it could happen to her—the clothes ripped, the knife against her cheek, the blood in the snow. But he could see it all happening to her just as it had happened to Lana, and he would be responsible for it because he had opened a portal between her world and his.

“I didn’t use my profile,” she said. “I made a fake one.”

“With a different picture?” he asked.

She nodded. “A different picture and a different last name,” she said, and the anger drained out of him and left just the fear, because finding Gabe Thompson meant seeing Gabe Thompson.

There was only one Gabe Thompson in western Pennsylvania, in a town called Warren. The home phone number was on the list, and the area code was the same as the number Gabe had included in his message to Sadie.

“I bet one’s the landline and one’s his cell,” Sadie said, “which means he might not actually be in Warren.” She pulled her phone out of the front pouch of her backpack, and Ilya shook his head.

“You’re not calling,” he said.

“OK,” she said. She tapped the phone against the palm of her hand for a second, and then she said, “What about J.T.?”

J.T. seemed like a gossip and a flake, the sort of person who would use Ilya’s life for conversational gain without thinking twice, but when Ilya told Sadie this, she said, “He’s known about my mom all this time and he’s never told anyone. Not a single soul.”

They found J.T. at his mom’s apartment on Leffie’s old main street, which, Sadie said, had been the center of town way back in the day before Route 21 enticed Leffians east with a Super Walmart and a Cracker Barrel. J.T. sat on his stoop, wearing a gray sweatshirt and smoking a cigarette.

“Sick day,” he said, when Sadie asked why he hadn’t been at school.

He finished that cigarette and then another as they told him about Vladimir and Gabe and the girls.

“Fuck,” he said, “that is some fucked-up shit,” and for a second Ilya thought that this was his way of saying that he didn’t want to be involved, but he pulled his cell out of the front pouch of his sweatshirt. Ilya had written Gabe’s home phone number on his palm, and he held it out to J.T., and J.T. dialed and put the phone on speaker mode.

“So you think this guy murdered people,” J.T. said, as the ring tone sounded.

Ilya nodded and Sadie put her finger to her lips and J.T. rolled his eyes.

It rang three times before a woman answered.

“Hey,” J.T. said, “I’m calling for a Mr. Gabe Thompson.”

There was a thick pause. The woman’s voice, when it came again, was weary. “He can’t come to the phone right now.”

J.T. looked at Ilya, and Ilya nodded, and J.T. continued with the script: “I’m calling because Mr. Gabe Thompson left a personal item on his flight.”

“Oh,” she said. “OK. You need our address then?”

“Well is Mr. Gabe Thompson there?” J.T. said.

“He is—” she said.

“Who is it, Ida?” another voice said in the background. It was a man, older, and audibly aggrieved.

There was the stethoscopic thwump of a hand covering the receiver, but they could still hear Ida, her voice like the buzz of an insect in the heat. “The airline,” she said. “Gabe left something on the plane, and they want to send it to us.”

“The plane?” the man said. “His flight was six months ago.”

Ilya could feel the skin tighten at his temples. Lana’s body had been found in March.

“What does it matter, Frank.” The woman sighed. “They just want to mail it to us.”

“Fine,” Frank said. “Has he had lunch yet? He’s saying he’s—”

“They’re still on the phone, Frank. I’ll give him lunch in a second.”

The hand was removed from the receiver, and the woman’s voice was clear again as she gave J.T. the address that Ilya had read in the library a half hour earlier.

J.T. thanked her, and just as he was about to hang up, she said, “Wait a second.” She lowered her voice to a whisper, but still Ilya could feel the hunger of the question: “What was it that he left?”

J.T. hesitated. “A hat,” he said, fingering the brim of his own hat, which featured the fluorescent outline of a naked, supine woman.

“A hat?” the woman said. “What kind of hat?”

“It’ll be in the mail tomorrow, ma’am,” J.T. said, and ended the call.

“Those were his parents,” Ilya said. He had not expected Gabe to be living with his parents, but it was a stroke of luck. This meant that Ilya did not necessarily have to be alone with Gabe.

Sadie nodded. “Frank and Ida,” she said.

“Can I borrow your car?” Ilya said, and in his mind he was already in the car, was pulling up at the house. He could see Gabe at the door, standing between his parents, and when Gabe saw him there would be a look of recognition, of anger, hatred, a look like the one he’d given Ilya through the glass at the Minutka.

“Do you even know where Pennsylvania is?” J.T. said.

Ilya did not, but soon they were crouched around J.T.’s laptop, tallying the time it would take to drive through the five states between Leffie and Warren. It was nineteen hours away.

“So basically a day with stops,” J.T. said. “What are you going to tell Cam and Jamie?”

Ilya had not thought of this—the enormity of finding Gabe had eclipsed whatever punishment the Masons might dole out for Sadie and him going missing—but apparently Sadie had.

“I’m going to Kayla’s for the weekend, and Ilya’s going fishing with you at your dad’s camp. A real bayou experience.”

“A bayou experience,” J.T. said. “Shut the fuck up. Like you’re not bayou to the bone.”

“I’m telling you, they’ll eat that up,” Sadie said. She was laughing, but Ilya’s body felt suddenly clammy, as though fear were a virus he was coming down with.

“Will you come too?” Ilya asked J.T., because he could imagine Sadie following him into Gabe’s house, refusing to stay on the sidelines. J.T. wouldn’t let her—he hadn’t ever told a soul about Sadie’s mom; he would protect her.

Sadie looked at J.T., and J.T. shrugged. “I’ll drive you fools, but I’m not going in a fucking murderer’s house. Haven’t you all ever seen a horror movie?”

“I guess we should talk about the plan,” Sadie said.

Ilya had had plenty of time to think about what exactly he’d do if he ever found Gabe Thompson: he’d imagined peering in a dingy window to a room papered with pictures of Lana and Yulia and Olga; he’d imagined digging through Gabe’s drawers and finding the knife, the knife that he and his mother had asked the police about over and over, the knife that they knew had not been in Vladimir’s possession at the clinic; he’d imagined finding Gabe doing something so completely sane—mending a gutter or washing his car—that it would be instantly clear that he was insane, for how else could one person contain such disparate selves? But none of these imaginings were realistic. They were the sorts of things that happened in movies, so that people could feel the satisfaction of a story stitched shut. And life was not like that. Life was a constant unraveling. “Neither of you is going into his house,” he said. “I’ll go alone, and I’m going to ask him what he knows about Lana and see what he says.”

That night, after dinner, Ilya dug his tape player and his Michael & Stephanie tapes out of the dresser drawer where he’d stashed them when he first arrived. He wanted to record Gabe, hoping to get something concrete enough that he could use it in court. The tapes were coated in a fine layer of dust. He picked up the player, his hand curling around its familiar heft. It was still missing its batteries, courtesy of the Leshukonskoye baggage department. He popped the battery slot open and pressed a finger against one of the springs, felt the tiny insistence of the spring pushing back. The batteries had been Russian 286s. It seemed unlikely that the United States and Russia might have reached some agreement on battery size when they could agree on so little else, but perhaps, Ilya thought, there was an exact translation.

Upstairs the den was abandoned. As Ilya searched between the couch cushions for the TV remote, he heard the murmur of voices in Papa Cam and Mama Jamie’s bedroom. Light from beneath Sadie’s door fanned the hallway. She’d told him that she drew before bed. She said it emptied her out, made it easier for her to sleep, and he could almost hear the scratch of her pencil, could see the way her tongue sometimes traced her bottom lip. Ilya reached under the couch, and his hand closed on the remote. He popped open the back. Four batteries slid out. They clacked, cool as stones in his palm, and he could feel that they were right.

Back downstairs, he opened up the player and took out the tape, which was the first one, Level I, Volume 1. He hadn’t listened to the tapes since Vladimir had stolen them from his crate under the couch, since he’d found them in Vladimir’s room at the Tower. He’d have to record over one of them, but he didn’t want it to be this one. Vladimir might have listened to this one, and so he wanted to save it, wanted the chance to listen to it and hear the same words that Vladimir had, as though this might allow him to be there with Vladimir in that moment. Ilya closed his eyes and plucked a tape off the pile on the dresser. It was Level II, Volume 4, in which Michael and Stephanie tackled prepositions and their usage. As Ilya clicked the player shut, there was a light knock on the basement door.

Mama Jamie had not come down into the basement since she’d given Ilya the tour of the house. Or at least she had not ventured into the basement while Ilya was home. When he returned from school each day, there was evidence of her presence: laundry folded and stacked on his bed, plump rolls of toilet paper pyramided on the back of the toilet, and, occasionally, the water inside the toilet bowl glowed a fluorescent blue. But now she was padding down the stairs in her slippers and her jeans and a magenta shirt that brought out the piggish undertones in her skin, but that he knew was her favorite because she wore it every other day. She was holding a white paper package in one hand. It was the shape of a small pillow and had torn in a few places to reveal its pulp.

“This came today,” she said, handing it to him.

His name was inked on the outside above the Masons’ address. It was his mother’s handwriting, and he could imagine her double-checking the Roman Fs in “Leffie,” the half-moon Ds in “Dumaine Drive,” and the simple slash of the I. The package felt like a book, and he didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but his heart sank a bit because a book was most likely from Maria Mikhailovna, some new text or translation that she’d wanted him to have.

“Are you excited for your trip?”

For a moment, Ilya stared at her, and then he remembered that he was supposed to be fishing with J.T. this weekend. He nodded.

“I’ll pack you guys a cooler,” she said. “Sandwiches and some chips.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“J.T. gets into trouble sometimes,” Mama Jamie said. “But I trust you to stay out of it.”

Ilya nodded.

“He has a phone—you can call me whenever. You know that?”

He nodded again, and she did too. “Get some sleep,” she said, “’cause I know you won’t be getting any tomorrow.”

Once she’d shut the door behind her, Ilya tore the top off the package. It was not a book at all, but a stack of papers, and he was still thinking that they were from Maria Mikhailovna, some stiff, formal English-with-a-capital-E exercises that would be entirely useless now that he was here and immersed in the disaster of the language itself, but as he pulled out the stack, he saw a picture of Jesus. His robe the color of butter, a halo flaring over his head. It was one of Gabe Thompson’s pamphlets. There were a half dozen in the package, with titles like The Plan of Salvation and The Restoration and Chastity. Some of the pages were hollow in the center, like empty frames, the pictures still pasted to the windows at home. Ilya didn’t need the pamphlets any longer—he knew where to find Gabe, and it was a good thing because they gave no trace of him: no address, no church name, but still Ilya’s heart thrummed as he flipped the pages. It wasn’t just that Gabe had touched them; it was the fact that his mother had sent them. He could imagine how terrified she’d been to bring them to the post office, to write that American address. She’d been too terrified to include a note, or a return address. She’d taken a risk, and there was desperation in it, and permission too. Permission to find Gabe, to help Vladimir. For the first time that Ilya could remember, she was putting Vladimir first.

Ilya collected the pamphlets in a neat stack and put them in his duffel along with the tape player, printouts of the photos from VKontakte, a change of clothes, and a pocketknife that Timofey had given him. The hinge was rusty, and the blade was not much larger than Ilya’s pinkie, but still it was better than nothing.