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.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
He didn’t do it,” Ilya said, as J.T. turned the truck around in the gravel cul-de-sac at the end of Gabe’s street. He told them the st
ory that Gabe had told him—how he’d found Lana’s body and prayed over her in the snow, the car passing him on the lumber road, the flashlight lancing the trees.
“It could be anyone,” he said.
“Not anyone,” Sadie said. “Vladimir doesn’t have a car, right?”
“No,” Ilya said, “but he has a flashlight.” Vladimir had gripped it as he’d led Ilya through the Tower. The light had snagged on glass, swept over graffiti, and, at the end of that long hallway, it had found Lana’s face.
Anger grew, hot, in Ilya’s stomach. He was angry at Gabe, of course, for not being the one. He was angry at whoever had killed the girls. He was angry at the girls, even, for their vulnerability. But most of all he was angry at Vladimir, for becoming the sort of person who got addicted, convicted, who confessed to things he hadn’t done, because no one would believe the truth from him. He was angry at the millions of mistakes Vladimir had made—large and small. He was angry for Vladimir’s sake, and for his own. What had Dmitri Malikov told him? That you can’t change people who don’t want to change themselves? The solution was easy: let Vladimir confess, let him plead guilty, let him go to jail if that was what he wanted.
They were passing the last of Gabe’s town: a grocery store with one cart stranded in its lot; a balloon man bending and snapping in the sky over an auto dealership; then the high school, its marquee announcing the score from the previous night’s football game. Above it was the bear from Gabe’s hat: orange, with rabid eyes, its fangs bared. The last piece of the puzzle—but the picture it formed didn’t help Vladimir, didn’t really include him at all.
* * *
—
That afternoon, exhausted, they stopped at a campground for the night. It was an old-growth forest, the shade of shadows like home to Ilya. A copper creek rushed through its center, the water whitening with the current. J.T. went on a food run, and Ilya and Sadie wandered down a trail that followed the creek. The light was brindled and beautiful, and it was hard for Ilya to believe that the day could contain this moment and Gabe’s house. He wondered what Gabe was doing now, whether he had fallen back to sleep or whether he was working on the refinery, gluing together the tiny panels of its fence, painting its lengths of silver pipes. What would he do with himself when the town was complete? And, as if in answer, Ilya could picture him painting the trees of the endless forests that surrounded it.
Sadie held his hand as they walked. They passed a few tents close to the trailhead, bright flags between the trees, but after a while, the sounds of the highway faded, and the woods got quiet. The air was laced with this fungal tang, and Ilya thought of the terrible painting at home over the couch, of the mother and daughter mushroom hunting in the forest. Babushka had told them that she hated that painting, hated the smug smile on the little girl’s face, hated the suggestion that all was right with the world. And Vladimir had said, “But that’s why I like it,” and then, because there wasn’t any place for earnestness in their world, or maybe just because Vladimir was perpetually horny, he’d added, “That and the mama’s titties.”
“You know what I fantasize about sometimes?” Sadie said. The sun was behind her; her profile carved the light.
Ilya shook his head.
“Burning my mom’s place down. Not when she’s home or anything. I just want it to be totally destroyed. All her shit charred. I want to see her face when she finds it, and I want her to know it was me. Then I want her to leave, to go somewhere where I don’t know where she is.” She walked faster as she talked, as though she knew what was at the end of the trail and she wanted to get to it. “I tried it once. When I was eleven. I had a newspaper and some matches and was so fucking pissed.”
“What happened?”
Sadie laughed, this harsh, little sound. “I was crouched in the bushes beside her house, trying to light a match forever. But I almost threw up thinking that she’d be gone, that I wouldn’t know if she was alive or dead or high or what. Then a neighbor found me and called Mama Jamie. And of course Mama Jamie was in hysterics. Crying for days, asking me what she was doing wrong, why I was turning into a delinquent. Like I was turning into my mom. I could see how scared she was on her face. Never mind that I hadn’t actually done anything. I couldn’t even get the match lit.”
They reached the end of the trail, which was nothing but a cluster of logs that bordered the creek. He reached into the water, felt the cold more in his bones than in his skin, and his hand closed on a rock. A perfect slingshot rock, he thought, and he slipped it into his pocket.
“But that doesn’t mean I don’t wish I had. Every day,” she said. “Until you came.” He looked at her. Half of her face was in the light, the other half in the shaking shadow of some leaves. She smiled. “Now I just think about it every other day.”
He laughed, and they kissed, and he could still feel it—that happiness for him was like a dog chained to a stake, that whenever he let it run, he’d be yanked back, but still he let it run for a second and tried not to brace himself for the pull of the chain.
When she unbuttoned his jeans, he said, “I’ve never done this before,” and it didn’t occur to him until afterward that that was something Vladimir would never say, that inexperience was something Vladimir never admitted to, and it didn’t matter anyway, because she said, “We’re not doing that. I’ve got something else in mind.”
* * *
—
Ilya was home in time for Sunday dinner and opened the door to the usual chaos. Molly and Marilee were tussling over what to watch on TV. Papa Cam was whipping open a new trash bag, the plastic ballooning as Mama Jamie sang along to Sting and pounded a chicken cutlet to the beat. Sadie had come home in her own car an hour earlier, and when she saw him in the doorway, she said, “Hey! How was the fishing?”
At the sight of her, the woods came back to him, made his dick swell with the memory of her hand on it, of her mouth hot on his stomach.
“That good, huh?” Papa Cam said. “You look like you’re a convert.”
Ilya nodded. “We caught gar,” he said, which was what J.T. had told him to say.
“Well, where are they?” Papa Cam said. “We were counting on you for a fish fry.”
“J.T. kept them all, didn’t he?” Sadie said. “He’s literally the most selfish person on the planet.”
“Did you miss me?” Molly asked, which was something she had started asking him every day when he got back from school, and Ilya felt this sudden ache for these people, for their patterns, for how willing they had been to take him in, and for how little he’d given them in return.
“Of course,” he said.
“After dinner let’s watch the sermon,” Mama Jamie said. “So you all can see what you missed.”
Ilya’s eyes met Sadie’s over the table. She had predicted this punishment, and she was grinning at him now, as she said, “Can’t wait. Were the testimonials especially juicy?”
The testimonials were wedged between the hymns and the sermons at every Star Pilgrim service. They were awkward allegros of shame or expansive expressions of guilt, depending less on the severity of the transgression than on the character of the transgressor.
“Don’t mock it ’til you’ve tried it,” Mama Jamie said. She was always begging the girls to give testimonials, but Molly was too shy, Marilee too self-righteous, and Sadie too private. “But since you asked, no, they were not especially juicy. It was Margaret Joy again.”
Sadie groaned and, as they set the table, she told Ilya the story of Margaret Joy, whose favorite cat had been accidentally poisoned by a neighbor whom Margaret Joy now tortured in tiny, mostly inconsequential ways. “She’ll turn her neighbor’s hose on so it’s just barely running all night long, or cut the roses off her bushes before they bloom.”
Ilya laughed, and Sadie said, “Bet you can’t wait to hear what she’s done this time.”
Later, after dinner, aft
er they had watched the service and Margaret Joy had confessed to allowing another cat of hers to urinate on her neighbor’s lawn furniture, once he was alone in the basement, Ilya played the tape he’d made at Gabe’s house. He listened to Gabe’s story over and over, with his eyes closed so that he could see it all. Lana and that halo of bloody snow. The redheaded nurse shoving the bag of Ilya’s tapes into Gabe’s arms. Austin with his perfect faith and his wide smile and the plaid tie. There was Gabe roaming the Tower, looking for Vladimir and Sergey and krokodil. What did you people do to him? Frank asked, over and over, and Dmitri Malikov was kissing Gabe’s forehead, and the train was pushing through the snow to Berlozhniki, the end of the line, and Gabe stepped off it, looking small under the faded banner that proclaimed, BERLOZHNIKI MINES RUSSIA’S FUTURE!
Lights All Night Long Page 24