Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

J.T. hesitated. “A hat,” he said, fingering the brim of his own hat, which featured the fluorescent outline of a naked, supine woman.

“A hat?” the woman said. “What kind of hat?”

“It’ll be in the mail tomorrow, ma’am,” J.T. said, and ended the call.

“Those were his parents,” Ilya said. He had not expected Gabe to be living with his parents, but it was a stroke of luck. This meant that Ilya did not necessarily have to be alone with Gabe.

Sadie nodded. “Frank and Ida,” she said.

“Can I borrow your car?” Ilya said, and in his mind he was already in the car, was pulling up at the house. He could see Gabe at the door, standing between his parents, and when Gabe saw him there would be a look of recognition, of anger, hatred, a look like the one he’d given Ilya through the glass at the Minutka.

“Do you even know where Pennsylvania is?” J.T. said.

Ilya did not, but soon they were crouched around J.T.’s laptop, tallying the time it would take to drive through the five states between Leffie and Warren. It was nineteen hours away.

“So basically a day with stops,” J.T. said. “What are you going to tell Cam and Jamie?”

Ilya had not thought of this—the enormity of finding Gabe had eclipsed whatever punishment the Masons might dole out for Sadie and him going missing—but apparently Sadie had.

“I’m going to Kayla’s for the weekend, and Ilya’s going fishing with you at your dad’s camp. A real bayou experience.”

“A bayou experience,” J.T. said. “Shut the fuck up. Like you’re not bayou to the bone.”

“I’m telling you, they’ll eat that up,” Sadie said. She was laughing, but Ilya’s body felt suddenly clammy, as though fear were a virus he was coming down with.

“Will you come too?” Ilya asked J.T., because he could imagine Sadie following him into Gabe’s house, refusing to stay on the sidelines. J.T. wouldn’t let her—he hadn’t ever told a soul about Sadie’s mom; he would protect her.

Sadie looked at J.T., and J.T. shrugged. “I’ll drive you fools, but I’m not going in a fucking murderer’s house. Haven’t you all ever seen a horror movie?”

“I guess we should talk about the plan,” Sadie said.

Ilya had had plenty of time to think about what exactly he’d do if he ever found Gabe Thompson: he’d imagined peering in a dingy window to a room papered with pictures of Lana and Yulia and Olga; he’d imagined digging through Gabe’s drawers and finding the knife, the knife that he and his mother had asked the police about over and over, the knife that they knew had not been in Vladimir’s possession at the clinic; he’d imagined finding Gabe doing something so completely sane—mending a gutter or washing his car—that it would be instantly clear that he was insane, for how else could one person contain such disparate selves? But none of these imaginings were realistic. They were the sorts of things that happened in movies, so that people could feel the satisfaction of a story stitched shut. And life was not like that. Life was a constant unraveling. “Neither of you is going into his house,” he said. “I’ll go alone, and I’m going to ask him what he knows about Lana and see what he says.”

That night, after dinner, Ilya dug his tape player and his Michael & Stephanie tapes out of the dresser drawer where he’d stashed them when he first arrived. He wanted to record Gabe, hoping to get something concrete enough that he could use it in court. The tapes were coated in a fine layer of dust. He picked up the player, his hand curling around its familiar heft. It was still missing its batteries, courtesy of the Leshukonskoye baggage department. He popped the battery slot open and pressed a finger against one of the springs, felt the tiny insistence of the spring pushing back. The batteries had been Russian 286s. It seemed unlikely that the United States and Russia might have reached some agreement on battery size when they could agree on so little else, but perhaps, Ilya thought, there was an exact translation.

Upstairs the den was abandoned. As Ilya searched between the couch cushions for the TV remote, he heard the murmur of voices in Papa Cam and Mama Jamie’s bedroom. Light from beneath Sadie’s door fanned the hallway. She’d told him that she drew before bed. She said it emptied her out, made it easier for her to sleep, and he could almost hear the scratch of her pencil, could see the way her tongue sometimes traced her bottom lip. Ilya reached under the couch, and his hand closed on the remote. He popped open the back. Four batteries slid out. They clacked, cool as stones in his palm, and he could feel that they were right.

Back downstairs, he opened up the player and took out the tape, which was the first one, Level I, Volume 1. He hadn’t listened to the tapes since Vladimir had stolen them from his crate under the couch, since he’d found them in Vladimir’s room at the Tower. He’d have to record over one of them, but he didn’t want it to be this one. Vladimir might have listened to this one, and so he wanted to save it, wanted the chance to listen to it and hear the same words that Vladimir had, as though this might allow him to be there with Vladimir in that moment. Ilya closed his eyes and plucked a tape off the pile on the dresser. It was Level II, Volume 4, in which Michael and Stephanie tackled prepositions and their usage. As Ilya clicked the player shut, there was a light knock on the basement door.

Mama Jamie had not come down into the basement since she’d given Ilya the tour of the house. Or at least she had not ventured into the basement while Ilya was home. When he returned from school each day, there was evidence of her presence: laundry folded and stacked on his bed, plump rolls of toilet paper pyramided on the back of the toilet, and, occasionally, the water inside the toilet bowl glowed a fluorescent blue. But now she was padding down the stairs in her slippers and her jeans and a magenta shirt that brought out the piggish undertones in her skin, but that he knew was her favorite because she wore it every other day. She was holding a white paper package in one hand. It was the shape of a small pillow and had torn in a few places to reveal its pulp.

“This came today,” she said, handing it to him.

His name was inked on the outside above the Masons’ address. It was his mother’s handwriting, and he could imagine her double-checking the Roman F s in “Leffie,” the half-moon D s in “Dumaine Drive,” and the simple slash of the I . The package felt like a book, and he didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but his heart sank a bit because a book was most likely from Maria Mikhailovna, some new text or translation that she’d wanted him to have.

“Are you excited for your trip?”

For a moment, Ilya stared at her, and then he remembered that he was supposed to be fishing with J.T. this weekend. He nodded.

“I’ll pack you guys a cooler,” she said. “Sandwiches and some chips.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“J.T. gets into trouble sometimes,” Mama Jamie said. “But I trust you to stay out of it.”

Ilya nodded.

“He has a phone—you can call me whenever. You know that?”

He nodded again, and she did too. “Get some sleep,” she said, “’cause I know you won’t be getting any tomorrow.”

Once she’d shut the door behind her, Ilya tore the top off the package. It was not a book at all, but a stack of papers, and he was still thinking that they were from Maria Mikhailovna, some stiff, formal English-with-a-capital-E exercises that would be entirely useless now that he was here and immersed in the disaster of the language itself, but as he pulled out the stack, he saw a picture of Jesus. His robe the color of butter, a halo flaring over his head. It was one of Gabe Thompson’s pamphlets. There were a half dozen in the package, with titles like The Plan of Salvation and The Restoration and Chastity. Some of the pages were hollow in the center, like empty frames, the pictures still pasted to the windows at home. Ilya didn’t need the pamphlets any longer—he knew where to find Gabe, and it was a good thing because they gave no trace of him: no address, no church name, but still Ilya’s heart thrummed as he flipped the pages. It wasn’t just that Gabe had touched them; it was the fact that his mother had sent them. He could imagine how terrified she’d been to bring them to the post office, to write that American address. She’d been too terrified to include a note, or a return address. She’d taken a risk, and there was desperation in it, and permission too. Permission to find Gabe, to help Vladimir. For the first time that Ilya could remember, she was putting Vladimir first.