Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

“What was in it?” Ilya said, though he knew. He could picture the pink plastic bag sitting in the center of the room like an offering.

“Tapes,” Gabe said. “These tapes for learning English. But I didn’t think you’d need them. You were coming here, after all.”

He didn’t do it,” Ilya said, as J.T. turned the truck around in the gravel cul-de-sac at the end of Gabe’s street. He told them the story that Gabe had told him—how he’d found Lana’s body and prayed over her in the snow, the car passing him on the lumber road, the flashlight lancing the trees.

“It could be anyone,” he said.

“Not anyone,” Sadie said. “Vladimir doesn’t have a car, right?”

“No,” Ilya said, “but he has a flashlight.” Vladimir had gripped it as he’d led Ilya through the Tower. The light had snagged on glass, swept over graffiti, and, at the end of that long hallway, it had found Lana’s face.

Anger grew, hot, in Ilya’s stomach. He was angry at Gabe, of course, for not being the one. He was angry at whoever had killed the girls. He was angry at the girls, even, for their vulnerability. But most of all he was angry at Vladimir, for becoming the sort of person who got addicted, convicted, who confessed to things he hadn’t done, because no one would believe the truth from him. He was angry at the millions of mistakes Vladimir had made—large and small. He was angry for Vladimir’s sake, and for his own. What had Dmitri Malikov told him? That you can’t change people who don’t want to change themselves? The solution was easy: let Vladimir confess, let him plead guilty, let him go to jail if that was what he wanted.

They were passing the last of Gabe’s town: a grocery store with one cart stranded in its lot; a balloon man bending and snapping in the sky over an auto dealership; then the high school, its marquee announcing the score from the previous night’s football game. Above it was the bear from Gabe’s hat: orange, with rabid eyes, its fangs bared. The last piece of the puzzle—but the picture it formed didn’t help Vladimir, didn’t really include him at all.

That afternoon, exhausted, they stopped at a campground for the night. It was an old-growth forest, the shade of shadows like home to Ilya. A copper creek rushed through its center, the water whitening with the current. J.T. went on a food run, and Ilya and Sadie wandered down a trail that followed the creek. The light was brindled and beautiful, and it was hard for Ilya to believe that the day could contain this moment and Gabe’s house. He wondered what Gabe was doing now, whether he had fallen back to sleep or whether he was working on the refinery, gluing together the tiny panels of its fence, painting its lengths of silver pipes. What would he do with himself when the town was complete? And, as if in answer, Ilya could picture him painting the trees of the endless forests that surrounded it.

Sadie held his hand as they walked. They passed a few tents close to the trailhead, bright flags between the trees, but after a while, the sounds of the highway faded, and the woods got quiet. The air was laced with this fungal tang, and Ilya thought of the terrible painting at home over the couch, of the mother and daughter mushroom hunting in the forest. Babushka had told them that she hated that painting, hated the smug smile on the little girl’s face, hated the suggestion that all was right with the world. And Vladimir had said, “But that’s why I like it,” and then, because there wasn’t any place for earnestness in their world, or maybe just because Vladimir was perpetually horny, he’d added, “That and the mama’s titties.”

“You know what I fantasize about sometimes?” Sadie said. The sun was behind her; her profile carved the light.

Ilya shook his head.

“Burning my mom’s place down. Not when she’s home or anything. I just want it to be totally destroyed. All her shit charred. I want to see her face when she finds it, and I want her to know it was me. Then I want her to leave, to go somewhere where I don’t know where she is.” She walked faster as she talked, as though she knew what was at the end of the trail and she wanted to get to it. “I tried it once. When I was eleven. I had a newspaper and some matches and was so fucking pissed.”

“What happened?”

Sadie laughed, this harsh, little sound. “I was crouched in the bushes beside her house, trying to light a match forever. But I almost threw up thinking that she’d be gone, that I wouldn’t know if she was alive or dead or high or what. Then a neighbor found me and called Mama Jamie. And of course Mama Jamie was in hysterics. Crying for days, asking me what she was doing wrong, why I was turning into a delinquent. Like I was turning into my mom. I could see how scared she was on her face. Never mind that I hadn’t actually done anything. I couldn’t even get the match lit.”

They reached the end of the trail, which was nothing but a cluster of logs that bordered the creek. He reached into the water, felt the cold more in his bones than in his skin, and his hand closed on a rock. A perfect slingshot rock, he thought, and he slipped it into his pocket.

“But that doesn’t mean I don’t wish I had. Every day,” she said. “Until you came.” He looked at her. Half of her face was in the light, the other half in the shaking shadow of some leaves. She smiled. “Now I just think about it every other day.”

He laughed, and they kissed, and he could still feel it—that happiness for him was like a dog chained to a stake, that whenever he let it run, he’d be yanked back, but still he let it run for a second and tried not to brace himself for the pull of the chain.

When she unbuttoned his jeans, he said, “I’ve never done this before,” and it didn’t occur to him until afterward that that was something Vladimir would never say, that inexperience was something Vladimir never admitted to, and it didn’t matter anyway, because she said, “We’re not doing that. I’ve got something else in mind.”

Ilya was home in time for Sunday dinner and opened the door to the usual chaos. Molly and Marilee were tussling over what to watch on TV. Papa Cam was whipping open a new trash bag, the plastic ballooning as Mama Jamie sang along to Sting and pounded a chicken cutlet to the beat. Sadie had come home in her own car an hour earlier, and when she saw him in the doorway, she said, “Hey! How was the fishing?”

At the sight of her, the woods came back to him, made his dick swell with the memory of her hand on it, of her mouth hot on his stomach.

“That good, huh?” Papa Cam said. “You look like you’re a convert.”

Ilya nodded. “We caught gar,” he said, which was what J.T. had told him to say.

“Well, where are they?” Papa Cam said. “We were counting on you for a fish fry.”

“J.T. kept them all, didn’t he?” Sadie said. “He’s literally the most selfish person on the planet.”

“Did you miss me?” Molly asked, which was something she had started asking him every day when he got back from school, and Ilya felt this sudden ache for these people, for their patterns, for how willing they had been to take him in, and for how little he’d given them in return.

“Of course,” he said.

“After dinner let’s watch the sermon,” Mama Jamie said. “So you all can see what you missed.”

Ilya’s eyes met Sadie’s over the table. She had predicted this punishment, and she was grinning at him now, as she said, “Can’t wait. Were the testimonials especially juicy?”

The testimonials were wedged between the hymns and the sermons at every Star Pilgrim service. They were awkward allegros of shame or expansive expressions of guilt, depending less on the severity of the transgression than on the character of the transgressor.