Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

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 “I wrote them all—all the outdated profiles.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:

Hi,

I’m a high school sophomore doing a report on Russia, and I got your name through the LDS community. I just have a few questions about what it’s like there after communism and was wondering if you might be able to answer them. Thanks for your time and God bless!

Sadie,

I’m willing to talk to you about Russia, although I’ve got to say that God threw a lot of problems my way there. Honestly, before I saw your message I’d been trying to forget that part of my life, and I was this close to deleting it without responding, but I wonder if this isn’t God’s way of saying that forgetting is not the path to forgiveness, that I need to look the past in the eye in order to move forward. Honestly, your message feels like fate to me. I’ll help however I can. Who gave you my name again? Not sure where you’re located, but we could meet up or you could give me a call whenever.

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?”