“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.
“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.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
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.”