Lights All Night Long

by Lydia Fitzpatrick

  Ilya laughed.

  “He was a wonderful drunk, though,” Vladimir said, “which is where I get it.”

  “Clearly,” Ilya said.

  “You were being a bitch, of course. Complaining about being hungry all the time and carsick, and Papa just turned the music up loud, so we couldn’t hear you or the car thumping, and I remember wondering why he wasn’t worried about how we were going to make it to Leshukonskoye, let alone back home, but he wasn’t. So I didn’t worry about it either,” Vladimir said. “I can count the number of days I spent with him. On one hand.”

  Ilya nodded, and Vladimir leaned back so that his head was nestled against Aksinya’s.

  “Then the petrol gauge was low again, and we rolled into this station with these bright yellow pumps and a wind chime dangling above the door. Papa went inside to pay. He told us not to move a muscle, and so we didn’t. For ten minutes. Twenty. And then you had to pee, so I took you out and let you pee on the shoulder. It was hot in the car, so we sat outside instead, and wrote our names in the dust on the pumps. And there was this old cat with a goiter on its stomach that dragged in the dirt, and we found sticks and were playing this game where you got a point if you poked its goiter with a stick. Of course the cat got pissed and then it got desperate, and it was running for the road, and you were following it. Fucking toddling along after it, not a care in the world except that you wanted points, you wanted to win, and I can see this truck coming. Flat out. Fast as it can go. You were screaming at the cat, and then you tripped over your stick and fell into the road. And you were just lying there, whining about a scrape on your knee, in the middle of the road, and the truck is basically on you, is honking so loud, and I was so fucking scared, but I ran out there and pulled you to the shoulder and the truck swerved and the cat—splat.”

  Vladimir clapped his hands softly.

  “No way,” Ilya said.

  “Swear to God,” Vladimir said. “Swear on Papa.”

  Ilya lifted an eyebrow. Vladimir had lied in their father’s name before and, when called on it, said, “What does he care? He’s dead.”

  Vladimir shrugged. “It’s the truth,” he said. “I practically shat my pants. I thought you were toast. I was so scared I made you hide under a blanket in the backseat with me for a full hour, sweating our balls off. And when Papa finally came out, he was even more wonderfully drunk, and he’d bought us slingshots and candy.”

  Ilya remembered the slingshots, the smooth birch handles, the cradles made of strips of tire rubber that smelled singed. They were strong enough to shoot a rock from their balcony all the way across the courtyard. “I kept waiting for you to say something about the truck. I wanted to know if he’d be proud of me for saving you or if I’d get in trouble for letting you in the road in the first place, but you didn’t say a word, and he slept it off. We ate the candy, and the next time you had to piss I made you do it in a bottle. Then he woke up and drove us home. Like he’d forgotten all about Leshukonskoye. Like he’d never meant to get there in the first place.”

  “That’s what you remember?” Ilya said, because aside from the slingshots the memory didn’t seem to hold much that was good.

  “It’s the farthest from home I’ve ever been,” Vladimir said. “Halfway to fucking Leshukonskoye.” His eyes were drooping, and next to him, the girls’ faces had gone pale, like faces under ice.

  “But you could remember it anyway,” Ilya said, and he could feel himself getting shrill.

  “I know, but it’s more than remembering. It’s like it’s all happening at once. Like I’m there and like I’m holding it at the same time. And then there are the times that aren’t so good.”

  “What happens those times?”

  Vladimir smiled at Ilya, a melting sort of smile. “This time’s going to be good. Look—” He held his hand out to Ilya and opened his fist as though there were something in it that might explain, but his palm was empty.

  They were just taking naps. That’s what Ilya told himself over and over. When he couldn’t convince himself of that, he told himself that they were all having the good high, the remembering kind. And it seemed as though they were. Aksinya laughed twice, said her sister’s name, and then called for someone named Yuri. Once Vladimir started to hum, but Ilya did not know the tune. He watched them for a while, and then he began to look for his tapes. They were in the pink plastic bag in the corner, stuffed underneath a camouflage sweatshirt of Vladimir’s. Ilya counted them. All ten were there. He read each of their titles and ran his finger down their spines. The tape player was in the bag too, and this was a mystery to Ilya. Vladimir could have sold the player in an instant—the pawnshop was filled with more worthless items, with the flotsam of the Soviet years—but he hadn’t. There was a glimmer of decency in this, a tiny promise of restraint, and so Ilya put the tapes and the player back into the bag.

  It took Aksinya and Lana an hour to come to, longer for Vladimir, and Ilya gathered that, chivalry aside, Vladimir had given himself a little extra. They were quiet when they woke, with sour faces. They drank more of the vodka, and ate Maria Mikhailovna’s pelmeni, which had congealed into a cold lump.

  The boards were the next day, in twelve hours. Ilya hadn’t forgotten, but still he took the bottle whenever they handed it to him, and when Lana said, “Let’s go dance,” he agreed. As they walked down the corridor, he nudged Vladimir with his elbow.

  “Was it the good high?” he asked.

  Vladimir smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “I saw you there.”

  People had flooded the mess hall while Vladimir and the girls were high. It was so full that as Ilya moved through it he felt his feet leave the ground, like he was suspended in that crush of bodies. It smelled of yeast and smoke, and more than once, Ilya was jabbed with the burning tip of someone’s cigarette. Lana was a good dancer, better than Aksinya, who could never quite lose her stiffness, and Ilya just copied Vladimir. He shuffled his feet, tried to roll his shoulders to the beat. He bummed a cigarette, and then another. He smoked his way through a Michael Jackson song and then some skinhead music from St. Petersburg and U2 and a Eurodance song that Vladimir rolled his eyes at and that Sergei flat out refused to move to.

  “If you’re not going to dance, take a fucking photo,” Aksinya said. She jammed her phone in his hand, and Sergey pressed back against the crowd to get an angle on them.

  Ilya put his arm around Lana, and tried to think why he had not let her unbutton his pants. The phone was flashing at them, over and over.

  “Not your best angle, Aksinya,” Sergey said.

  The girls held out their fists and flicked Sergey off. Lana kissed his cheek, just as Gabe Thompson shouldered through the crowd. His face was shadowed by a black baseball cap. He bumped into Sergey, and Sergey said, “Watch yourself,” and for a second Gabe’s eyes seemed to take in Ilya with Lana’s lips against his cheek.

  “You’ve got competition, Ilyusha,” Vladimir said, as Gabe disappeared into the crowd.

  Sergey flipped the phone shut, and the song ended.

  “Thank you Jesus,” he said, and the bass started up again, these deep plunging notes. A rap song, Ilya thought, and Vladimir must have recognized it because he started to cheer, and then they were all dancing.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It was strange watching Sadie look at the picture from the Tower: at his brother, Lana, and Aksinya. At him.

  “You look different,” Sadie said. “Happier.”

  He did look carefree, but he hadn’t been. He had been worried about Vladimir for months by then.

  “And that’s Vladimir?” She pointed at him, and Ilya nodded. He expected her to examine him, to lean in and see if the truth was written on the planes of his face, and Ilya wouldn’t have blamed her—that was what he wanted to do with Gabe Thompson—but she just said, “You have the same eyes.”

  She pointed again, at Gabe this time.<
br />
  “That’s him,” Ilya said.

  She hunched close to the screen and zoomed in on the picture just as Ilya had a few weeks earlier. Gabe’s cheeks bloated and his eyes fattened, the hat and that bear looming over them.

  Outside, there was a splash, then a shriek. Marilee and Molly were swimming with Papa Cam, and Mama Jamie was sitting on a beach chair, her laptop propped on her thighs, organizing a Halloween costume drive for needy children. Sadie had told them that she and Ilya were working on a joint history report on the Founding Fathers.

  Ilya clicked over to the photo of Lana on the bed in Gabe’s hat.

  “It’s the same, right?” he said, and she nodded.

  “Maybe the bear’s a mascot,” she said. She traced its outline on the screen. It was jagged with pixels.

  “What’s a mascot?” Ilya said.

  “Like a symbol for a team or a club or whatever, and if we knew what team, it might tell us where he’s from. Leffie High’s mascot is the Gators. Louisiana State’s the tiger,” she said, “so somebody from New York’s probably not going to be wearing a hat with the LSU tiger on it.”

  “Of course,” he said, thinking of Vladimir’s Severstal jersey with the eagle diving across one arm. He felt this tiny lift in his chest, a loosening of his lungs. If they could narrow down his list to a state or even a region, then there was a chance of finding Gabe before the arraignment. And even if Vladimir did plead guilty, maybe it wouldn’t matter if Ilya could prove that Gabe had actually committed the murders.

  Sadie opened a new browser window and searched for “mascot” and “bear,” her fingers flying across the keys. That turned up hundreds of people prancing around in bear suits, so they narrowed the search to “NFL mascot” and “bear,” and then “MLB mascot” and “bear.” They searched hockey teams, basketball teams, college teams, high school teams, debate teams, and they found lots of bear mascots, but none were like the one on Gabe’s hat: fangs bared, tongue splayed, and a rabid roll to the eyes.

  “I guess it could be anything—an emblem, a character, a logo for some company,” she said. “Have you tried Facebook or Myspace?”

  Ilya shook his head. “I don’t have an account. I checked VKontakte, but he wasn’t on there.”

  Sadie logged in to her Facebook account and typed in Gabe’s name. The results loaded endlessly. There were seventy Gabe Thompsons, and again Ilya felt this lightness in his chest. It wasn’t just the possibility of all of these faces—it was Sadie’s hope too, the way it amplified his own.

  They combed through the profiles one by one, eliminating anyone over forty and under eighteen, anyone who wasn’t white, anyone with brown or black hair, anyone who had been anywhere but Berlozhniki the previous year. After an hour they reached the Facebook dregs: the profiles that hadn’t been updated for years, the ones with a John Doe silhouette where a picture should be or else an anonymous, grainy shot. Of a blue sports car, in one case, and a droopy-eared dog with bloodshot eyes in the other.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She turned and faced him, leaning against the desk. They hadn’t touched since the night before at the Pound, and he had the feeling that the longer he waited, the harder it would get.

  “Don’t be,” he said. This was a phrase that he’d heard her say to someone, and though he loved the quick rhythm of it, the meaning had mystified him at first. Don’t be. A command against existence.

  He reached out and touched her hand, and she looked out the glass doors. They could see only one corner of the pool, and Marilee’s head rose out of it, a dark splotch, like a seal’s, above the water.

  “My parents would freak out,” Sadie said.

  “Because I’m Russian?”

  “No,” Sadie said, “’cause of my mom. They live in fear that I’m going to have a baby any second.”

  Ilya went quiet at the implication of all that pregnancy entailed, and Sadie leaned over and kissed him again. Her lips were chapped and a little rough, like winter skin.

  “So we just have to be careful,” she said, “and they’ll keep assuming you have a girlfriend in Russia.” She clicked out of her account and closed the browser, and the picture of Lana was waiting there behind it, her freckles scattered across her nose like birdseed.

  “Was she your girlfriend?” Sadie asked.

  “No,” he said. He thought of Lana kissing him. Maybe a little part of her had wanted to, but mostly she’d been fulfilling her end of the deal with Vladimir. He’d understood that when Vladimir gave her the krokodil. “I guess I had a crush on her. She was the only one of Vladimir’s friends who was nice to me, really.”

  Sadie nodded. She moved one of her legs so that it rested against his knee.

  There was a knock at the glass doors, and Sadie and Ilya both whipped around. Molly was standing under the deck in her swimsuit, a pair of goggles pulled torturously tight across her eyes.

  “Come swim!” she yelled. “Mom says you’re going to get vitamin deficient if you don’t get outside!”

  Sadie looked at him.

  “OK,” he said. He clicked the X in the top corner of the picture, but it took a second for the image to disappear, and in that second Lana’s expression seemed clouded with disappointment.

  * * *

  —

  After church the next day, he and Sadie worked on the list of Gabe Thompsons, starting with Colorado and Utah, where, Sadie said, there were the most Mormons. They found two matches, and Sadie must have seen the excitement on his face because she said, “I think everyone is Mormon there. Not that one of these isn’t him, but just so you know.”

  Ilya stared at the two numbers, which he’d circled in red ink. “I don’t think I can call,” he said. “My accent—I don’t want him to know I’m looking for him. Or at least not until I’m there to see his face.”

  “I’ll call. What should I say?” Sadie said.

  Ilya had thought of this. All those nights when he’d compiled the list, then begun crossing Gabes off it. “Say you’re calling for Mr. Gabe Thompson because he left a personal item on his flight.” Ilya was especially proud of that quintessentially American phrase, “personal item,” which had been used dozens of times on his own flight to the States.

  They told the Masons that they were taking Durashka for a walk and sat on the stoop of the half-built house at the bottom of Dumaine Drive. Durashka curled at their feet resignedly, as though she’d known all along that the walk was a ruse. Sadie punched the first number into her cell and cupped the phone to her ear. Ilya was expecting to have to wait, because nothing about finding Gabe Thompson had been easy thus far, but a voice answered before the first ring had even finished.

  “Howdy,” the voice said.

  “Hi,” Sadie said, “I’m calling for Mr. Gabe Thompson.”

  “You got him.” It wasn’t him. Ilya was almost positive. The man sounded like a cowboy, like John Wayne in the few westerns that Vladimir had allowed in his VHS collection.

  “I’m calling because you left a personal item on your flight.”

  “My flight?”

  “Yes, sir,” Sadie looked at Ilya, eyes wide. This was as far as the script went.

  “Darling,” he said, “I wish I’d been on a flight recently, but I think you’ve got the wrong guy.”

  Ilya shook his head, and Sadie apologized and hung up.

  “OK,” she said, “take two,” and she dialed the second number they’d found.

  This time the call rang and rang, the sound just like that blinking cursor. Sadie was in another of her enormous T-shirts. Her collarbone jutted through the fabric like a shelf, and he thought of his own snapping at birth, and he was suddenly terrified to let her have anything at all to do with Gabe Thompson.

  “Hang up,” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “Please,” he said. He reached for the phone, just as the la
st ring was cut short by the static of a message machine: “You’ve reached Gabe Thompson. Leave a message if you’d like. Have a blessed day!”

  The voice was wrong. Ancient and rickety and nothing at all like Gabe Thompson’s, which had been confident on his better days, but more often sullen and curt, as though he meant for his blessings to sting. Ilya ended the call, and Sadie looked at him.

  “No?” she said.

  “No,” he said.

  She rubbed Durashka’s belly with the toe of her sneaker, and the dog rolled onto her back and lifted her feet up to the sky. The refinery was small on the horizon, looking, from this distance, like a castle sending out an endless smoke signal. Above them, the tarp covering the second floor ballooned with wind, then flattened again with a sigh. Somewhere inside the house, water was dripping.

  “I followed you once,” Ilya said. “When you went to see your mom.”

  He had been wanting to tell her this since the night at the Pound. She didn’t know everything about him—she didn’t know about the boards, didn’t know that he’d kissed Lana—but he wanted her to at least know everything he knew about her.

  Sadie tucked her hair behind her ear. “So you saw her,” she said. “She’s a wreck, huh?”

  “I’ve seen worse,” Ilya said. He turned and looked at her. It was almost dinnertime, and the last of the light pinked her skin. She squinted into the grass like she was looking for something in the blades. “Why do you go?” he asked. “Why do you watch her?”

  She shrugged, and he thought that was it. He stood up, and Durashka did too, her collar jangling. Then Sadie said, “For the same reason you’re doing this.” She lifted the phone in her hand, but kept looking at the ground, and he realized why her room looked the way it did. Uninhabited. Like there was a suitcase just out of sight. Like she was ready for flight. She’d been the Masons’ daughter for over a decade, but she was still waiting for the moment when her mom might call, might toss a bottle at her window, might want her or, at least, need her.