Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

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.

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.

“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.”