Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

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.