Lights All Night Long

CHAPTER TWENTY

On Friday morning, they parked Sadie’s car at the Walmart near Leffie High and piled into J.T.’s truck, which was not as inconspicuous as Ilya would have liked, with the matte black paint job, the enormous tires, and the flame decal that sprouted from the grille and licked at the windshield. As they sped north, sugarcane fields filled the windows, electric green in the sun, and they went over the details: Ilya would be the one to knock on Gabe’s door. He’d have the tape recorder running inside his duffel, and he’d have Sadie’s cell on him so that he could call J.T. or the police if worse came to worst.

They all went quiet at this last statement. The asphalt unspooled ahead of them, gray and smooth. Roads like this were rare in Russia, and its very perfectness seemed to convey a sort of expectancy, as though it had been waiting here, in the middle of nowhere, to carry him from past to future. It was a ridiculous thought, Ilya knew, sprung from a hope that he’d let grow too large, and as a way to reduce his hope, to turn it into something useful, he reminded himself of all the ways this might go wrong: Gabe’s parents might not let Ilya see him. Gabe might admit nothing, might show nothing. He might slam the door in Ilya’s face.

Up ahead one of the fields was burning. Smoke ribboned up from the rows of cane, giving the air the taste of burnt sugar. Ilya had succeeded in making his hope smaller; it was a tight knot between his lungs, something he could almost ignore. They passed a sign, and Ilya read the letters, which would have seemed an incomprehensible combination except that he’d teased out the tangle of their syllables the day before when they’d planned their route.

MISSISSIPPI, it said, WELCOMES YOU!

They drove all day and into the night. J.T. and Sadie took turns behind the wheel and napping in the truck’s tiny backseat. At five a.m., on a highway skirting Pittsburgh, under a blur of fluorescent signs, Sadie took a hand off the wheel and reached for Ilya’s.

“Are you scared?” she said.

He nodded. J.T. was snoring lightly in the backseat, and Ilya lay down with his head on Sadie’s thigh. He could see the point of her chin and that delicate triangle of skin that bridged her jawbones and that quivered each time she breathed. She put a hand on his cheek, then on his forehead the way Babushka did to check for fever, and he felt safe just as he had with Babushka, as though his existence was simple, was reduced to the spot where their skin was touching.

The sun, bright on his face, woke him. They were at yet another Walmart, identical in every way to the one in Leffie. J.T. was standing in the parking lot smoking. Sadie sipped at an enormous coffee.

“We already drove by. It’s just a couple blocks away,” she said. “And they’re home.”

Gabe’s parents’ house looked like a poor man’s dacha: dark-stained wood with blue trim, a tiny screened porch, and a vegetable garden surrounded by more wire than a camp. There was a loved, labored-over feel to the place—in the potted herbs that lined the steps, in the rocking chair on the porch, which had been painted to match the trim. There was a truck in the driveway and from somewhere inside Ilya could hear the churn of a washing machine.

As Ilya climbed the steps to the front door, he turned and looked at J.T. and Sadie, who were parked on the other side of the street. The duffel was on Ilya’s back, the tape player inside, already recording. Sadie lifted a hand and J.T. nodded, and Ilya pressed the doorbell.

For a second the sounds inside did not change, and then he heard Frank’s voice, just as it had sounded on the phone, say “If it’s that lady again, I’m going to—”

“Just let me get it,” Ida said. She was whispering, but they were somewhere close to the door, or the walls of the little house were thin enough that Ilya could hear every word. “I don’t know why you get so worked up about it. She just wants to see how he is.”

“She wants to gawk is what she wants,” Frank said, and scared as he was, Ilya was comforted by the ordinariness of their bickering. There was the clatter of one plate against another, and then brisk footsteps, and then the door was open.

Ida had a resolute smile in place for whatever lady she’d been expecting. It stayed there, evolutionary baggage, for the second it took her to examine him, then it was replaced by an expression of gentle skepticism, as though she knew he was here for no good reason, but she hoped that he might prove her wrong.

“May I help you?” she said.

This was a line straight out of Michael & Stephanie, one that Ilya had never heard an actual American say. He knew that she didn’t mean “help” literally, but he needed help so badly that for a moment he was stunned by it.

“I’m looking for Gabe,” he said. “I’m from Russia.”

“Russia?” she said.

Ilya nodded. In the shadows behind Ida there was a shift in the light. Frank was standing behind her.

“He lived in my town,” Ilya said. He tried his best to minimize his accent, which he knew surfaced most with the letter o. He tried to smile, because Americans smiled constantly, and to make his voice open and warm, like Mama Jamie’s. He tried to hunch so that he seemed shorter than Ida, who was remarkably short, tried in every possible way to broadcast that he was not a threat. Though of course he was, and Frank sensed it immediately, or else saw threats in everything, because he stepped between Ida and Ilya and said, “What do you want with Gabe?”

“He told me to come visit him. Once I’d arrived,” Ilya said. “I don’t know anyone else in America, and he—”

Ida put a hand on Frank’s arm.

“Come in,” she said, and she ushered Ilya into the kitchen. The table was covered in newsprint, which was speckled with bits of balsa wood, tiny trees, and cars. There were tiny pots of paint and jars of a shimmering white powder and brushes with bristles thin as eyelashes. “Excuse the mess,” Ida said.

Ilya nodded. “Where is Gabe?” he said.

“Sleeping,” Frank said. “He sleeps half the day now.”

Ida cleared a patch of table, and Ilya sat, and as she poured them glasses of iced tea she said, “We’d love to know about Russia, about his time there.”

Ilya tried to think of his first memory of Gabe, but he kept picturing Gabe on the sidewalk, staring into the Minutka, and the way that Anatoly had gripped the shovel. “It was two years, I think. I can’t remember exactly when he came.”

Ida nodded.

Frank was standing at the sink, holding a glass of water under the tap, and as Ilya watched the water began to overflow the glass.

“He was there on a mission, right?” Ilya said. “Your church sent him?”

Frank turned the water off, set the glass down on the counter, turned, and said, “What did you people do to him?”

“Frank,” Ida said. “Please.”

“He left here at eighteen. So happy. So excited to spread God’s word, and when he comes back, he’s like a different person. And the doctors say that he has—” Frank made an ugly noise in his throat, and tears flooded his eyes.

Ilya looked at the table. There was a row of tree trunks drying on the newspaper. They’d been painted the exact silvery gray of birch trees.

“—the doctors say that he has gangrene on his foot. Gangrene. It’s a miracle that he could even get on the plane. That he could get back to us. So you tell my wife whatever she wants to know, and then I want you to get out of my house.”

Frank walked outside, and the screen door slapped behind him. He’d forgotten the glass of water on the counter. Ilya’s hands had begun to shake. He pressed them between his knees. He saw Vladimir on the floor in the kitchen, saw the way his leg had rotted. He had known that Vladimir would die if he didn’t get the drug, that he would die if he kept getting it.

Ida sat at the table next to him, and her feet barely touched the floor. She put a hand on Ilya’s arm, just as she had with Frank a few minutes before. “Gabe won’t talk to us about it, about Russia,” she said.

I’d been trying to forget that part of my life, his message had said.

“There has to be something you remember—you knew him there,” she said. There was this ache in her voice again, the same ache it had had when she’d asked what Gabe had left on the plane, the same ache his mother’s had had whenever she asked Ilya if he’d seen Vladimir at school, in town, anywhere. Gabe had been lost to them, and here Ilya was, a gift.

“If you let me see him,” Ilya said, quietly.

Ida nodded. “OK,” she said.

“Americans don’t come to our town,” he began. “It’s far from everywhere. And cold. So he was special, exciting. Everyone paid attention to him. He got an apartment on the square. The pizza place put his picture up in the window.”

Ida smiled.

“And then he started giving out the pamphlets. He handed them to anyone who walked past.” Ilya thought of all the stoves stoked by those pamphlets, all those angels and prophets burning. He thought of the windows in Babushka’s bedroom, papered with Gabe’s saints. “He’d preach all day about angels and a mine where they dug up dreams, and everyone was patient with him, but no one paid any attention. No one wanted to be converted, and maybe that was why he started to drink. He would sit on this one bench and drink vodka, and then samogon, which is cheaper—it’s homemade, sort of—and can be stronger. And he got angry, and he said the same things he’d always said—‘It’s not too late to find God,’ or ‘Give me a minute to show you the way’—but it started to feel like he was cursing us. He was sober less and less and more and more crazy, and then last winter this new drug came.”

“What’s it made of?” Ida said. “Is it heroin? Crack?”

Ilya shook his head. “It’s like heroin,” he said. “But it’s not the real thing. It’s made of cheap stuff. Stuff they could get when the trains stopped running.”

Ida closed her eyes at this.

“He’ll be OK here,” Ilya said. He didn’t know if that was true. He thought of Vladimir in the bed at the hospital saying that he would kill for a hit. His eyes had been fervent with the belief, and Ilya wondered how long it took the want to leave you, or whether it ever did.

“I hope so,” Ida said. She slid forward on the chair so that her feet were flat on the ground and hesitated there for a moment. “I’ll wake him,” she said, and she disappeared down a dim, narrow hall.

On the wall above Ilya was a picture of Gabe as a little boy, kneeling on a grassy field, a soccer ball propped on his knee. He had a cowlick at his hairline and the wide-set eyes and freckles of a cartoon character. There was a picture of Frank and Ida in front of a lake, looking impossibly young and happy. Below it was another picture of Gabe, in a white collared shirt and a plaid tie that Ilya remembered him wearing daily. His arm was around another boy in a matching tie, this one dark-haired with an enormous, squinty-eyed smile. They were seventeen or eighteen, necks chafed from shaving and from their stiff collars, and behind them was the Hermitage, robin’s egg blue, the Russian flag flapping above its golden cupolas. There were footsteps again, and Ilya looked up, expecting Gabe, but Ida had come back alone.

“He says no,” she said. “He says he didn’t tell anyone to visit him.”

There was a silence. More than a silence, it was a feeling of listening, like Gabe was listening in his room down the hall, and Frank, somewhere out in the yard, was listening, and inside the duffel the tape player was listening, the silence spooling across the ribbon, writing over Michael and Stephanie, erasing all of their beautiful, English words.

“Please,” he said. It had been the first word that Maria Mikhailovna taught him. He opened his duffel. The tape player cast a weak red light on the canvas, and he dug beneath it for the pamphlets. “Show him these,” he said, thrusting them at Ida.

Ida fingered a sharp edge where Babushka had cut. She looked at the pamphlets in the way you look at something you love that has betrayed you, and he could see that she had lost her faith over this, over her lost son. “Fine,” she said.

This time Ilya followed her down the hallway, and when they reached a door at its end, she put a hand up to stop him and disappeared behind it.

“He brought these,” Ilya heard her say, without emotion, and Ilya could hear nothing from Gabe. He put his hand on the knob. Ida had not locked it. He could twist it, push it open, have a moment to see Gabe’s face—but then the door opened of its own accord.

Gabe was sitting on a couch. His hair had been shaved, and he’d gained weight. Fat wreathed his face, his features gathered in the middle like a herd huddling for protection. He was in sweatpants and a stained T-shirt and his foot was swaddled in an enormous bandage. The room was hazy, the blinds pulled, the light like a video with poor resolution. A TV was on, but muted, its colors dancing on the shiny skin at Gabe’s temples. The pamphlets were in his hands. He’d grasped the top one between his thumb and forefinger as though he were still by his bench in Berlozhniki, ready to hand it to the next passerby.

“Here he is,” Ida said, and Ilya did not know which of them she was talking to.

“I’m from Berlozhniki,” Ilya said. “Ilya.”

Gabe nodded.

“You’re OK?” Ida said, and Gabe nodded again, and she turned and disappeared back down the hallway.

Ilya wanted to make her stay. He wanted to know exactly where J.T.’s truck was and how long it would take him to run to it. Sunlight pulsed at the edges of the blinds. He’d gotten disoriented inside the house and wasn’t sure whether the truck was outside one of Gabe’s windows or in a different direction entirely. He catalogued his talismans: Sadie’s phone was in his back pocket, Timofey’s knife was in the front pouch of his sweatshirt, and he’d worn both of the saint medals that Babushka had given him although he believed in neither of them and neither was specific to this occasion, to confronting a murderer.

“You kept them,” Gabe said. The Path to Salvation was on top. That was the one he was holding. “Did you read them?”

He should have, if only to know Gabe better, but he shook his head, and Gabe laughed, this short, shallow sound.

“No,” Ilya said. “They were my grandmother’s. She cut out the pictures.” His English felt thick and slow, was suddenly something he was conscious of again, like his fear had tripped some crucial neural circuit.

“At least she didn’t burn them like everyone else,” Gabe said. He set the pamphlets next to him on the couch and said, “Why are you here?”

Ilya had meant to ease into the subject of Lana’s murder, to try to catch Gabe off guard, but the directness of Gabe’s question had caught him off guard, and so he said, “I’m a friend of Lana’s.”

When he said Lana’s name, Gabe stiffened. He hunched forward, his back coming off the cushions, and there, in that one movement, Ilya saw what he’d come for. Gabe knew Lana, and he knew something about her death. His eyes settled on Ilya’s face, reading it, wondering at Ilya’s intent. Ilya had not noticed his eyes at first, but they were blue and bright even in the dimness of the room, bright enough that it seemed to Ilya that they could read his intent, that Gabe understood that Ilya was working up the nerve to ask if he had killed Lana, was trying to force himself to say that word “kill,” was wondering why Maria Mikhailovna had taught him it, how she had divined that it would be necessary and made him conjugate it just as she had thousands of other, more innocent words.

“Lana,” Gabe said. He slumped back against the couch, and there, in the defeat of that one movement, Ilya saw that he hadn’t killed her, that Gabe had never killed a soul.

“You knew her?” Ilya said. He had the pictures in his duffel. He could prove that Gabe had known her, but he didn’t need them, because Gabe was nodding.

“Yeah,” he said. “We went out together a couple times. To the Tower. To Dolls once. Sometimes we hooked up.”

“What happened?” Ilya said, and Gabe didn’t seem surprised at the question. He seemed relieved by it, in just the way that Ilya felt relieved to hear Gabe talk about the Tower, like by saying the things that came to them in nightmares they might rob them of their power.

“We would meet in the polyana. To hook up,” he said. It was the word they’d used for the grove of trees where Lana’s body had been found. A local word, one that Lana must have taught him. “Or to get drunk. Or high, if we had anything. It wasn’t a regular thing. Not like she was my girlfriend.” Gabe laughed suddenly, and then just as suddenly he stopped. “We could understand like ten words the other one was saying. I wouldn’t even know how to say ‘girlfriend,’ but I liked her. At least I think I did.” He rubbed a hand across the top of his head, then let it drop in his lap. “I was supposed to meet her there the night she got killed, but I didn’t want to go ’til I scored. She wouldn’t have wanted me there ’til I scored.” He said this like there was a clear logic to it, and there was, Ilya guessed. The same addict logic that Vladimir had used when he’d stolen their stuff and sold it at the pawnshop, when he’d asked Lana to sleep with Ilya in exchange for the krokodil. “And there was this guy at the Tower who usually hooked me up. Either him or your brother.”

“My brother,” Ilya said, trying to keep the surprise out of his voice. He had not planned to tell Gabe that he was Vladimir’s brother. Vladimir had been accused of the murders, and whether Gabe was guilty or innocent, Ilya’s relationship to him was bound to put Gabe on edge.

“Vladimir, right? He talked about you all the time, about how you were coming here,” Gabe said. “You look a little like him.”

Ilya nodded, ignoring the vision of Vladimir flooding his mind: Vladimir, in the thick of a drug deal, bragging to an American about how his brother was moving to America, about how he’d come home and run the whole machine. “Sergey’s the other one that would sell to you?” he said.

“Yeah,” Gabe said. “He seemed to be the boss, or at least a little more sober. Sometimes he’d give me some. To be nice, I guess. Or maybe to keep me hooked.”

“Did you find them that night? At the Tower? Did you find Vladimir?”

Gabe nodded. “Yeah, around midnight, I think. So I got high. Got drunk. I hadn’t forgotten about Lana, but it wasn’t serious like that. She’d stood me up a few times. So it was almost morning when I made it over there. Four or five a.m. It was so dark that it was hard to tell.” He paused. His story had seemed smooth up until now, like something he’d gone over in his mind enough times that it didn’t hurt him to say it aloud, even the parts he was ashamed of, but as he went on, his voice tightened, gained this quality that made Ilya think of the way ice shrieked before it shattered. “I knew right away that she was dead, even before I saw her neck. It wasn’t that she wasn’t moving—” He paused, grappling with something ineffable, some quality in the dead that was instantly recognizable to the living, and Ilya thought of the snowplow driver and how he’d known that Yulia was dead the moment he’d seen her leg. Ilya nodded, not because he understood, but because he needed Gabe to go on. “I could tell she was dead, and I didn’t know what to do but pray. I’d never talked to her about God or whether she believed. I knew better than to bring it up, with her or anyone else at the Tower. By then it was like there were two of me: the one who had faith and the one who’d lost it, or I guess that’s what I liked to think, but of course it was just the one me. Drunk off my ass and praying for her because I didn’t know what else to do. There was blood all around her. The snow was so bloody, and I remember that I was careful to stay in the white snow. I didn’t want her blood on me. And then at a certain point I got so cold that I started to feel warm, hot, even, like I could stay there forever, and I thought it might be a message, like God was telling me that I was doing the right thing, but another part of me knew that I’d die if I stayed. So I left her there. And as I was walking away, it hit me: she’d chosen the grove, she’d convinced whoever killed her to go there, because she’d thought there was a chance that I might come in time. That I might save her. And when I realized that, I couldn’t leave her. I turned around, and just as I did, a car passed me on the lumber road, and a minute later, somebody got out of it and walked into the grove.”

He must have seen the excitement on Ilya’s face because he shook his head. “All I could see was a flashlight. Moving around in the trees. For a couple of minutes. Maybe five. And at first I was relieved, not scared, because she wasn’t alone anymore, and because I wanted her to be found. So the whole next day I’m waiting to hear something, and there’s nothing. And the next day and the next. Whoever it was had seen her—she wasn’t hidden, there was no way to miss her, not with a flashlight—but still he wasn’t saying a word, and so I knew that I couldn’t either. I was scared then, for those weeks. Things got bad then.”

“You don’t have any idea who it was? What about the car? What did it look like?”

Gabe shrugged. “It was dark, and I was out of my mind.”

That was it, Ilya thought. A flashlight bobbing through the trees, an impossible lead, and maybe Gabe could feel the force of Ilya’s disappointment, because he said, “Believe me, I wish I knew who it was too.”

“But you don’t think it’s my brother?”

“No,” Gabe said. “I don’t think it’s your brother.”

And it didn’t matter for Vladimir what Gabe thought, but still it was a relief to Ilya that this would be on the tape, that he would be able to listen to Gabe saying it again and again.

“How’d you get back here?” Ilya asked. “I heard it was the police?”

Gabe nodded. “I went on a bender one night. The last thing I remember is walking home from the Tower—like I had a million times before—and then I wake up in the back of this SUV. At first I thought I was gonna get killed. I kept thinking of the car passing me and the flashlight in the woods, and I’m sure that whoever it was had seen me and thought that I’d seen him. But the guy tells me that he’s a cop and that he’s taking me to the airport. He’d packed my bag, gave me withdrawal meds and everything. When we got to the airport, he kissed me on the forehead and told me, ‘Don’t ever come back,’ and he handed me over to some thug who looked like a bodyguard, and he told the bodyguard to get me home ’cause the last thing he needed was a dead American on his hands.”

“The policeman was a short guy? With glasses?” Ilya asked, though he knew the answer. He could see Dmitri in all of it, especially that kiss on the forehead.

Gabe nodded. “He saved me.”

“Lucky you,” Ilya said, his voice catching on the hypocrisy of it. Here they were, the saved ones, and the air in the room seemed suddenly unbearable—sharp and sour, and he had the sense that there was some message gathering in the shadowed corners, in the dark slit of the closet door, the way clouds mass into a storm. He didn’t want to look at Gabe anymore, didn’t want to see him sitting there on the couch, hollow-eyed but saved, looking like a teenager home sick from school. Ilya turned. There was a desk behind him, and it was covered in the same tiny detritus as the kitchen table. Miniature buses. Miniature telephone poles. Tiny slabs of wood. A red car the size of a button. It was a Lada. The license plate precisely inked with the Russian flag.

“What is all this?” Ilya said.

Gabe pointed to a coffee table on the other side of the room, and even in the dimness Ilya recognized what Gabe had built. There were the kommunalkas, the curve of them like teeth scattered along a jaw. There was Ilya’s building, the closest to the road, with a dozen paper-thin balconies and dental-floss laundry lines. There was School #17, and the wooden church, with a sloppy little cupola, and the Minutka, and the square, with its empty pedestal. Maria Mikhailovna’s building was all shining glass, the police station a slab of concrete, the clinic crowned with its tiny red cross. Gabe had covered the town with snow—that sparkly white powder on the kitchen table—so that cars were half buried and the benches on the square lost their legs and looked like driftwood in a sea of white. The Tower was a tiny gray box, innocent at this size, edging a field of snow ridged like the roof of a mouth. Tiny toothpick crosses speckled the snow. Ilya’s breath caught in his throat when he recognized the polyana, a scattering of birch trees, but the snow was clean and white there too, no trace of Lana’s blood. On the model’s edge Gabe had begun to build the refinery with a few centimeters of screening for the chainlink fence and silver-painted straws for the pipes.

“It’s exactly right,” Ilya said.

“You think so?” Gabe said, and Ilya nodded.

He leaned close, counted the floors in Building 2, and then the windows, until he found his apartment. He peered in, half expecting to see his life there as it had been—Babushka cooking, Vladimir splayed on the couch, his mother dressing for work, and him at the kitchen table practicing his English—but the windows were opaque, made, Ilya could see now, with squares of wax paper the size of his fingernail.

It was a wonder, all of it, every tiny component speaking of a larger love. “How did you end up in Berlozhniki?” Ilya said. “Were you assigned there, for your mission?”

Gabe shook his head. “We were assigned to St. Petersburg. My best friend, Austin, and me. The church assigns you in pairs.” Ilya thought of the squinty-eyed boy in the picture. Their matching ties. “We were there for a month—not even—three weeks, and then he died in his sleep. I guess he had a heart defect, had always had it, and his heart just stopped.”

“I’m sorry,” Ilya said, and Gabe smiled weakly.

“He’s with God,” he said. “The coordinator there wanted to send me home, give me some time to grieve, but Austin had wanted to go to Russia so badly, so much more than me. He was always saying stuff like, ‘We leave our family for two years to bring other families together for eternity.’ He didn’t care if people ignored us, when they cussed at us or flicked us off or tossed their cigarette butts at our feet. I’d get angry, so angry, but he was invincible because he believed completely.

“And after he died, going home felt like giving up, so I got on a train instead. I had a couple hundred bucks, enough to keep paying the conductor every time we stopped, but I had no idea where I was going. I was on the train for two nights, almost three days, and then I’m in Berlozhniki. The last stop. End of the line. It was September, and it was snowing, and the sky was huge and gray with these clouds that looked completely ominous, and it seemed right, like a place that needed the Gospel.” Gabe smiled this rueful smile. “I thought you all needed me. Ridiculous, right?”

It was ridiculous, of course, but there was something in Gabe that wasn’t. A humility, maybe, that made Ilya point at the pamphlets and say, “My grandmother put the pictures up in our windows. She thought they looked like stained glass.”

“Stained glass,” he said. “I like that.”

Down the hallway a door slammed, and Ilya could hear Frank’s voice, its rising notes, and Ida’s lower, like an undertow. They listened for a moment, and Gabe said, “You should go. He’s fucking desperate to blame someone besides me.”

Ilya nodded, and then Gabe said, “You know, I went to see your brother at the clinic. Or I tried to, but they’d just arrested him. To be honest I was looking to score—I thought he might have a stash somewhere, and I could help him sell it and split the money or something. But the nurse told me to get out of there unless I wanted to get arrested too. And then she gives me this plastic bag that I’m supposed to give to you—his personal effects, she says—and I took it, thinking there might be drugs in it, but there weren’t. And then I didn’t want anything to do with it, not with Lana dead and Vladimir arrested, so I just left it in his room at the Tower. I should have found you,” he said.

“What was in it?” Ilya said, though he knew. He could picture the pink plastic bag sitting in the center of the room like an offering.

“Tapes,” Gabe said. “These tapes for learning English. But I didn’t think you’d need them. You were coming here, after all.”