Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

“May I help you?” she said.

This was a line straight out of Michael & Stephanie , one that Ilya had never heard an actual American say. He knew that she didn’t mean “help” literally, but he needed help so badly that for a moment he was stunned by it.

“I’m looking for Gabe,” he said. “I’m from Russia.”

“Russia?” she said.

Ilya nodded. In the shadows behind Ida there was a shift in the light. Frank was standing behind her.

“He lived in my town,” Ilya said. He tried his best to minimize his accent, which he knew surfaced most with the letter o . He tried to smile, because Americans smiled constantly, and to make his voice open and warm, like Mama Jamie’s. He tried to hunch so that he seemed shorter than Ida, who was remarkably short, tried in every possible way to broadcast that he was not a threat. Though of course he was, and Frank sensed it immediately, or else saw threats in everything, because he stepped between Ida and Ilya and said, “What do you want with Gabe?”

“He told me to come visit him. Once I’d arrived,” Ilya said. “I don’t know anyone else in America, and he—”

Ida put a hand on Frank’s arm.

“Come in,” she said, and she ushered Ilya into the kitchen. The table was covered in newsprint, which was speckled with bits of balsa wood, tiny trees, and cars. There were tiny pots of paint and jars of a shimmering white powder and brushes with bristles thin as eyelashes. “Excuse the mess,” Ida said.

Ilya nodded. “Where is Gabe?” he said.

“Sleeping,” Frank said. “He sleeps half the day now.”

Ida cleared a patch of table, and Ilya sat, and as she poured them glasses of iced tea she said, “We’d love to know about Russia, about his time there.”

Ilya tried to think of his first memory of Gabe, but he kept picturing Gabe on the sidewalk, staring into the Minutka, and the way that Anatoly had gripped the shovel. “It was two years, I think. I can’t remember exactly when he came.”

Ida nodded.

Frank was standing at the sink, holding a glass of water under the tap, and as Ilya watched the water began to overflow the glass.

“He was there on a mission, right?” Ilya said. “Your church sent him?”

Frank turned the water off, set the glass down on the counter, turned, and said, “What did you people do to him?”

“Frank,” Ida said. “Please.”

“He left here at eighteen. So happy. So excited to spread God’s word, and when he comes back, he’s like a different person. And the doctors say that he has—” Frank made an ugly noise in his throat, and tears flooded his eyes.

Ilya looked at the table. There was a row of tree trunks drying on the newspaper. They’d been painted the exact silvery gray of birch trees.

“—the doctors say that he has gangrene on his foot. Gangrene . It’s a miracle that he could even get on the plane. That he could get back to us. So you tell my wife whatever she wants to know, and then I want you to get out of my house.”

Frank walked outside, and the screen door slapped behind him. He’d forgotten the glass of water on the counter. Ilya’s hands had begun to shake. He pressed them between his knees. He saw Vladimir on the floor in the kitchen, saw the way his leg had rotted. He had known that Vladimir would die if he didn’t get the drug, that he would die if he kept getting it.

Ida sat at the table next to him, and her feet barely touched the floor. She put a hand on Ilya’s arm, just as she had with Frank a few minutes before. “Gabe won’t talk to us about it, about Russia,” she said.

I’d been trying to forget that part of my life , his message had said.

“There has to be something you remember—you knew him there,” she said. There was this ache in her voice again, the same ache it had had when she’d asked what Gabe had left on the plane, the same ache his mother’s had had whenever she asked Ilya if he’d seen Vladimir at school, in town, anywhere. Gabe had been lost to them, and here Ilya was, a gift.

“If you let me see him,” Ilya said, quietly.

Ida nodded. “OK,” she said.

“Americans don’t come to our town,” he began. “It’s far from everywhere. And cold. So he was special, exciting. Everyone paid attention to him. He got an apartment on the square. The pizza place put his picture up in the window.”

Ida smiled.

“And then he started giving out the pamphlets. He handed them to anyone who walked past.” Ilya thought of all the stoves stoked by those pamphlets, all those angels and prophets burning. He thought of the windows in Babushka’s bedroom, papered with Gabe’s saints. “He’d preach all day about angels and a mine where they dug up dreams, and everyone was patient with him, but no one paid any attention. No one wanted to be converted, and maybe that was why he started to drink. He would sit on this one bench and drink vodka, and then samogon, which is cheaper—it’s homemade, sort of—and can be stronger. And he got angry, and he said the same things he’d always said—‘It’s not too late to find God,’ or ‘Give me a minute to show you the way’—but it started to feel like he was cursing us. He was sober less and less and more and more crazy, and then last winter this new drug came.”

“What’s it made of?” Ida said. “Is it heroin? Crack?”

Ilya shook his head. “It’s like heroin,” he said. “But it’s not the real thing. It’s made of cheap stuff. Stuff they could get when the trains stopped running.”

Ida closed her eyes at this.

“He’ll be OK here,” Ilya said. He didn’t know if that was true. He thought of Vladimir in the bed at the hospital saying that he would kill for a hit. His eyes had been fervent with the belief, and Ilya wondered how long it took the want to leave you, or whether it ever did.

“I hope so,” Ida said. She slid forward on the chair so that her feet were flat on the ground and hesitated there for a moment. “I’ll wake him,” she said, and she disappeared down a dim, narrow hall.

On the wall above Ilya was a picture of Gabe as a little boy, kneeling on a grassy field, a soccer ball propped on his knee. He had a cowlick at his hairline and the wide-set eyes and freckles of a cartoon character. There was a picture of Frank and Ida in front of a lake, looking impossibly young and happy. Below it was another picture of Gabe, in a white collared shirt and a plaid tie that Ilya remembered him wearing daily. His arm was around another boy in a matching tie, this one dark-haired with an enormous, squinty-eyed smile. They were seventeen or eighteen, necks chafed from shaving and from their stiff collars, and behind them was the Hermitage, robin’s egg blue, the Russian flag flapping above its golden cupolas. There were footsteps again, and Ilya looked up, expecting Gabe, but Ida had come back alone.

“He says no,” she said. “He says he didn’t tell anyone to visit him.”

There was a silence. More than a silence, it was a feeling of listening, like Gabe was listening in his room down the hall, and Frank, somewhere out in the yard, was listening, and inside the duffel the tape player was listening, the silence spooling across the ribbon, writing over Michael and Stephanie, erasing all of their beautiful, English words.

“Please,” he said. It had been the first word that Maria Mikhailovna taught him. He opened his duffel. The tape player cast a weak red light on the canvas, and he dug beneath it for the pamphlets. “Show him these,” he said, thrusting them at Ida.

Ida fingered a sharp edge where Babushka had cut. She looked at the pamphlets in the way you look at something you love that has betrayed you, and he could see that she had lost her faith over this, over her lost son. “Fine,” she said.