The vendor rolled her eyes. “You said eighty-six? A soda and a tea are eighty-five.” Olya slid her money across the counter and took back a coin, a handful of sugar packets, a can of Coca-Cola. After a minute, she got her soft plastic cup of tea. Drinks in her fists, one hot, one cold, she picked her way across the stone-covered shore to a bench.
Cars passed behind her. Tiny waves lapped the rocks. Olya drank the soda first, while she listened to the current and the engines and the back-and-forth shouts of teenagers by the statue. Then she shook three sugar packets in her tea and drank that, too, tipping her head back until the sludge at its bottom slid to her tongue. Sweet grit in her throat.
People thinned out on the sidewalk. Birds swooped toward the hill. Ahead of Olya, the water twinkled with sunlight. The rows of cranes farther down the coast were motionless. Their operators were long home, with family, with friends.
The phone lay heavy in Olya’s jacket pocket. She did not want to check her news feed. She might discover more pictures of the four of them, temples pressed together, hands cupping each other’s faces, and the captions underneath: best friends! More of a threat than any stranger.
Though there might be no new posts at all. After today’s conversation, maybe Valentina Nikolaevna had taken Diana’s cell away. Maybe she kicked the other girls out. Maybe Diana, hearing what her mother had said, was going to cry all night.
And tomorrow before their first class, Olya would ask, “Why did you let her talk to me that way?”
Diana would say, “I couldn’t stop her. She grabbed my phone and pushed me away while she called.”
“You never stop her. She’s sick in the head.” Olya would have permission to speak plainly because she’d been treated so wrong, and Diana, after years of pretending she had the ideal family, would finally have to agree.
Together they would come up with a plan. Diana could say she joined a club so they would have two afternoons a week to go to Olya’s apartment. No one else would have to know. Olya’s mother would not tell. Olya ripped open another sugar packet, poured the crystals into her mouth, and chewed. The sugar dissolved on her teeth. The club could be called the Everybody Hates Valentina Nikolaevna Group or Escape from Mother Monster.
Swallowing, Olya brushed her trash onto the ground and lay across the bench.
The bay made such soft noises. Its ripples appeared a meter or two from shore. Far across the water was the dark opposite coast, the lights that marked where nuclear submarines docked, the layers of mountains that grew paler all the way to the sky.
The club could be called the Olya-All-Alone Brigade because Olya knew Diana wouldn’t do it. She knew that. No club was happening. When it came to love and lying, Diana put Olya last every time.
The yellow in the sky was leaching into the ground. Lights across the bay flickered. Behind Olya, traffic passed without a break.
Her temples grew wet and cold from tears. Olya wiped her eyes. Someone’s big hand closed around her right ankle and she sat up, terrified.
The detective from the news stood at the foot of her bench. He was tall, wearing sunglasses, imposing in his uniform. He let go of Olya’s ankle and said, “Alyona Golosovskaya?”
Olya drew her legs back. Her breath was quick. “Do I look like that girl to you?”
“Surname, name, and patronymic.”
“Petrova, Olga Igorevna.” Was this how the police conducted their search? Bench by bench where the girls were last seen? No wonder the Golosovskayas were still missing. “I’m older than they are. I’m in year eight. And I don’t look anything like her.” Olya wiped her face with both hands before staring up at the detective’s sunglasses to show him. The Golosovskaya girls had been tiny things, small-boned and fragile. Not teenage rats. Not Olya.
The detective evaluated her, then waved in dismissal toward the street. A police car, engine humming, sat at the curb. “How long have you been here?”
“Maybe an hour.”
“Have you seen anyone suspicious?”
“I haven’t seen anyone. I’ve seen you, that’s all.”
“No one else approached you? No man in a dark car?” Olya shook her head. “Don’t roll your eyes while I ask you questions,” the detective said.
“I didn’t.” It felt surprisingly good to lie to a stranger.
“I hope you understand the risk of being out here by yourself.”
“Oh, I’m not,” Olya said. She smiled up at him. “My mother just got out of work. She’s coming to get me—she should be here any minute.” On her lap, under her folded hands, her phone vibrated. Olya started. “That’s actually her calling right now.”
The detective shifted his feet. Though his glasses and clothes made him look authoritative, his face behind them was smooth, young. He pulled a business card from his back pocket and handed it to her: LT. NIKOLAI DANILOVICH RYAKHOVSKY. A number below and a shield embossed in the corner. “Call if there’s anything you want to tell me,” he said. “And let your mother know when she arrives that this is no place to leave a little girl.”
Nodding, Olya lifted the phone to her ear. “Hi, Mama. Yeah? Soon? Great.” She watched the detective leave, rocks shifting under his weight. The phone kept vibrating against her cheekbone.
After the detective climbed into his car, Olya lay back down. She looked at the glowing screen. One missed call from Diana. Unlocking her phone, Olya cleared the notification, opened their text message thread, and waited for Diana’s explanation to arrive. She pictured its letters, its sloppy dashes. Nothing appeared. She locked her screen again.
To tell the truth, Olya did not want to call back.
Olya all alone out here. She liked it more than she knew she would.
In the sunset, the pebbles on the shore shifted their color from black and gray to honey. Amber. They were brightening. Soon the stones would glow, and the water in the bay was going to turn pink and orange. Spectacular in the city center, where people feared to have their pretty daughters go.
When Olya turned her head on the bench slats, electric white and yellow lines appeared in her peripheral vision. Her hair had caught the light. Her jacket, too, was sun-soaked. Saturated.
Golden Olya. She concentrated on that light in the air. Even if Diana came to the apartment to explain things or arrived at school with a written apology from Valentina Nikolaevna, or if Olya’s mother, home next week, announced she found a new job, well salaried, teaching grammar in the university, so she would never have to leave for long again, or if the kidnapped girls returned, or if the police stopped patrolling, or if Petropavlovsk went back to normal…even if all of that happened, Olya wouldn’t tell them how the colors changed here. She would share nothing. They would never find out they missed the most beautiful day of autumn, while Olya, alone, had been in its very center.
How good Olya would feel to keep this secret. How safe it was inside herself.
OCTOBER
“We forgot the tent,” Max said, turning to Katya. The beam of her flashlight flattened his features. His face was a white mask of distress. The forest around them was black, because they’d left Petropavlovsk so late—his last-minute packing, his bad directions. His fault.
In the harsh light, he was nearly not beautiful anymore. Cheekbones erased, chin cleft illuminated, lips parted, he looked wide-eyed into the glare. Katya and Max had been together since August and as of September were officially in love. Yet the tent. Disgust rippled through her. “You’re not serious,” she said. She caught the tail of her repulsion before it passed; she had to hold on to it, a snake in the hand, otherwise she would forgive him too soon.
“It’s not here.”
Katya handed him the flashlight and started to dig through the trunk. Shadows lengthened and contracted against their things: sacks of food, sleeping bags, two foam mats. A folded tarp to line the tent floor. Loose towels for the hot springs,
a couple folding chairs, rolled trash bags that unraveled as she shoved them. Katya should have packed the car herself, instead of watching his body flex in the rearview mirror this evening. Pots clanked somewhere deep in the mess.
“Max!” she said. “How!”
“We can sleep outside,” he said. “It’s not that cold.” She stared back at his outline above the circle of light. “We can sleep in the car,” he said.
“Magnificent.” We forgot, he said, we, as if they together kept one tent in one closet of one shared home. As if they jointly made these mishaps. As if she had not needed to leave the port early this afternoon, drive twenty minutes south through the city to shower and change at her own place, drive thirty-five minutes north to get to his apartment complex on time, then wait eighteen long minutes in his parking lot for him to come out.
He’d told her earlier in the week he would bring his tent. His car, a dinky Nissan, didn’t have four-wheel drive, so they were taking hers, and he had loaded such a stack of stuff into the trunk—enough to merit a second run up to his apartment, a return trip with his arms full—that Katya told herself he had it handled. Instead of checking she tuned her car radio to local news of a shop robbery, an approaching cyclone, another call for those two little girls. She gripped her steering wheel. Once Max finally climbed into the passenger seat, she said, “That’s everything?”
Nodding, he leaned to kiss her. “Let’s get going. Take me away,” he said then. She checked the time (forty-one minutes late) and shifted into reverse.
Now they were going to spend the night in her mini SUV. Dependable as the Suzuki was, bringing them these four hours north of the city over roads that turned from asphalt to gravel to dirt, it made terrible sleeping quarters. Two doors, two narrow rows of seats, no legroom. The gearshift would separate them from each other. Neither of them would have space to lie down.
Katya sighed and Max’s shoulders bowed in response. She wanted to touch those shoulders. “It’s okay,” she said. Her disgust slithered off to wait for his next error. “It’s all right, bear cub, it happens. Would you gather us some wood?”
Once the flashlight was off bobbing between trees, Katya moved her car over the flattened patch of weeds where a tent was meant to be staked. The mistake had been hers in not asking earlier…next time they’d do better. Max was simply the sort of person, like so many others, whom she had to supervise.
Soil shifted under her tires. She didn’t turn the headlights back on. Slowly, her eyes were adjusting to the dark. She had visited these woods as a child, and though she must be seeing two decades of growth, the birch trees in the starlight looked to her exactly as they had when she was a girl: aged and grand and magical. The world outside had steadily warped, become less predictable and more dangerous, while spots like this were protected. Here, there was no radio news, no city stresses, no schedule to disrupt. The tent had served as the last opportunity for disappointment. There was no reason left to get worked up. Katya had to remember that.
When she opened the door, her keys chimed in the ignition. She pulled them out and the nighttime rushed in. Bats chirping, insects whirring. Dry leaves brushing against each other at the tops of the trees. Max, far in the woods, cracking branches for their fire. The steady waterfall noise of the hot springs.
Katya cleared her head with the sounds. Max’s company left her overstimulated; back in the city, at his apartment, she sometimes excused herself to the bathroom just to sit on the closed toilet lid and cool down. Even having him give directions from the passenger seat overwhelmed. His clumsiness, his sincerity, the shocking symmetry of his flawless face lit her up.
“It’s the honeymoon phase,” her girlfriends told her. Oksana, who worked with Max at the volcanological institute, said, “He’s an idiot. It’ll pass.” But Katya had been with other men, even lived with one for a while in her twenties, and never gone on this kind of honeymoon. Max activated a new sense in her. Just as the ability to hear lived in her ears, taste in her tongue, touch in her fingertips, a particular sensitivity to Max was now concentrated below her belly button. He reached for her and her guts twinged. Her sixth sense: craving.
He might be an idiot, but it wasn’t passing.
Craving him distracted Katya from other things. Like the tent, she reminded herself, as she took her headlamp from the glove compartment. Strapping it on, she got to work—organizing the bags, unpacking their groceries, reclining the front seats as far as they would go.
She stood back to scan them in the thin light of her lamp. Not very far at all.
Max returned to a set-up camp. Peeled potatoes bumped in a pot filled with stream water. Katya had laid half a smoked salmon belly, alongside slices of radish, tomato, and white cheese, on a plastic bag on the hood of her car, so they could snack before dinner. Together, in the brisk air, they built the fire. “I fell out there,” he confessed once they had the flames going. He turned to show her a smear of dirt down his back.
She pressed her fingers to his shirt, the heat of his skin underneath. Ripples of muscle. “You’re not hurt, are you?”
“Mortally wounded.”
She had to laugh at the length of the stain. “You’re not much of an outdoorsman, cub.”
“I am,” he said. “Give me a break, Katyush, it’s dark.”
“I know,” Katya said. Still. Over the fire, the potatoes were boiling. She took her hands away from him to stir the pot.
The firelight painted them both orange and black. Max’s chin, his fine bones, the tip of his nose, the knob that ended his jaw. Too handsome. With one boot, Katya nudged a burning log into better position.
The only other weekend Katya and Max had spent away together was the one in August when they first met. Oksana had invited Katya as a plus-one on a work retreat to Nalychevo Park. Katya did not dare refuse; Oksana’s terrible summer, spent going through her husband’s phone as their marriage crumbled, had hit its low only days before when she managed to walk her dog past the abduction of those little girls. Oksana had spent hours with the police as she tried to describe a kidnapper she hardly remembered. “The only reason I noticed him at all,” she told Katya on the drive up to the park that weekend, “was because his car looked so good. I thought, Where does he get that cleaned? My van looks like trash after one turn around the city, while his shone.” Oksana checked her mirrors and shifted into the left lane to pass a truck. “I told the officers that when they find this guy, before they cuff him and beat him unconscious, they have to ask him for his best car-wash tips.”
“My God,” Katya had said. “Are you sure you want to do this right now?” Their route from the city to the Nalychevo cabin forced them to ford six shallow rivers; after they parked, they needed to walk the last half hour of their journey through marsh. Katya found Oksana’s commitment to the trip disturbing. If Katya were in the driver’s seat, she would have turned the van around.
In the first days after the kidnapping, Katya was nervous, touchy, about everything. She looked at her friends like they were aliens. She could not fit the missing sisters in with the crimes she knew. Bribery, for example, Katya understood—she encountered corruption all the time at her job. Just today, inspecting the cargo of a new Canadian importer, she and the other customs officers discovered thousands of live turtles, their yellow arms waving in the light. (“What’d you do with them all?” Max had asked her this evening as they left city limits. “Threw them in the bay,” Katya said. “No. Come on. Seized them for destruction.” He’d pouted and she’d laughed.)
So smugglers, sure. Or poachers, trespassers, arsonists, drunk drivers, mauled hunters, men throttling each other in the course of an argument, migrant workers falling off the scaffolding at construction sites, people freezing to death over the winter months…these were regular items in Kamchatka’s news. Two stolen little girls were a different matter. Oksana had passed only ten meters from the crime as it happened
but managed to joke about it; meanwhile Katya studied the missing-person posters and frightened herself by thinking of what abductors she might run into one day.
“I’m obligated to do this,” Oksana had told Katya during their drive. “I’m not going to stop going to work because I happened to walk Malysh at a shitty time.” She passed another slow car. “Besides, what else am I going to do? Spend all weekend relaxing in my happy home?”
Katya had known Oksana more than a decade. Even when they met, as graduate students, Oksana had been cold, guarded, but intriguing. A fine distraction on a long trip. She spent the rest of the car ride briefing Katya on her colleagues. Boring, sloppy, and pregnant, Oksana said of the three other institute researchers in the group. “Don’t bother with any of them. At least we’ll have each other.” Then Katya followed Oksana into a park cabin to discover a man who looked like a film star.
“Who, Max?” Oksana said. “Ugh.”
From the first night, he put that tug in Katya’s stomach. Petropavlovsk wasn’t that big and the number of thirty-six-year-old singles in town even smaller, but she had somehow missed him for all these years, until Nalychevo. The two of them kept slipping off to fumble under each other’s clothes behind the woodpile. They could hear the group’s voices through the cabin windows. When Max whispered caution into Katya’s mouth, she only wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him closer. She wanted his beauty to blot out all fear.
And now Max and Katya were well on their way to domesticity. Max’s coworkers had moved on from their initial burst of gossip; even Oksana was too preoccupied with her home life to do much more than shrug when Katya brought him up. Katya’s male colleagues had backed off on asking her to drinks, and her female colleagues treated her marginally less like an old maid. On weekends, Max and Katya cycled through the city together. They kayaked the bay and barbecued by the ocean shore. He took her a few times to his climbing gym. This autumn trip to the hot springs was Katya’s initiative.
Disappearing Earth Page 4