“Mashenka, how’s your family?” Kristina asked.
Masha looked up. The skin under her eyes was drawn tight by the temperature. “Fine,” she said. “Normal.”
Lada’s leg was hotter in the spots where Yegor’s touched. “How’s Vanya?” she asked Masha.
“Is that your boyfriend?” asked the cousin.
“My brother,” said Masha. “He’s good.” She smiled, her teeth precise white in the room’s mist. “He’s graduating from high school this year.”
“No!” Lada said.
“He’s applying to university in Vladivostok. He wants to be a businessman.” That little boy who used to follow them outside and watch them play. Once, when Masha’s parents were out for the night, the girls told him ghost stories until he wet his pants. Now he was going to learn how to run a company.
“Good for him,” said Kristina. She pushed her bangs back from her forehead. Her bare face was all cheekbones and lips. “Good for both of you world travelers.”
“You’re cosmopolitan, then, aren’t you?” asked the cousin.
“I don’t know,” said Masha. “No. Not really.”
“You don’t miss Kamchatka life?” he asked. She shook her head. “You don’t miss Kamchatka men?”
“No.”
“You haven’t met the right one.”
Kristina’s fingers trailed on Lada’s leg. The steam lifted all the blood to Lada’s head. Masha’s discomfort was apparent in the line of her back—that beautiful back—her muscles, stripped and tensed and sleek—and Lada wanted to say, Masha, it’s New Year’s, relax, let him touch you, because Lada would let Yegor take her to bed tonight. Masha, she wanted to say, just do it. Be with us again.
The walls were hissing. Kristina slid down off the bench. Her shoulders shone with sweat. “I’m going outside.”
Masha stood up fast. Lada, too, got to her feet, and the edges of her vision blotted black. The boys would follow. Kristina led them out of the sauna up the noisy hall.
Opening the house’s front door, Kristina shrieked at the cold. It wasn’t yet midnight, but the sky was black, black. Millions of stars blinked down. Kristina’s boyfriend pushed her out onto the iced-over cement step, and they all squeezed after. People in the kitchen were shouting. The detective’s voice rose above the rest. When the door shut, the racket from the house was muted.
Though Lada had braced herself, the outside air came like nothing. She couldn’t yet feel it through the sauna’s leftover warmth. From the clarity of the air, the crystals on the ground, she knew the night was far below zero. Her nerves must have sizzled out. On the base of her spine, a hand touched, steady. She looked down at her arms and saw them steam.
Yegor, behind her, leaned forward so his lips touched her ear. “You’re so tiny.”
She supposed that was a compliment. “I’m all grown up,” she said and eased her weight back to press against his palm.
“Really. How tall are you?”
“One meter fifty-five.” One meter fifty-four.
His hand rested on her back. “Have you ever been to Esso?” he asked. “I could take you.”
Someone shoved against them. On the other side of the step, Masha said, “Stop it.”
“Come on,” Kristina’s cousin said. “What’s your problem?” Masha had moved away from the rest of them. The cousin was holding up his hands.
“I’m not interested,” Masha said, in that flat tone. My dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
The cousin lowered his arms. He was tall like Kristina, with her same pout. On his face that mouth looked soppy. “Fucking lesbian.”
He spoke like he was serious. People died for less. Lada felt the cold then. She was frozen.
“Don’t say things like that to her,” Kristina said.
“So what if I am?” said Masha. “At least I’m not a fucking pervert.” She stepped down into the snow and gravel and pulled herself up into a different part of the group. Everyone was silent. Kristina’s long neck bent forward.
The cousin said they made him sick. He was going back inside.
The other two men went, too. Yegor last, but he went. It was only them then—Lada, Masha. Kristina. Like it used to be.
Masha sat down on the edge of the step. Her bikini bottom wrinkled in back. “It’s too cold to sit,” said Kristina. “You’ll go barren.”
Masha did not answer.
A car flashed by the opening of the driveway. Its headlights lit up the trees. Someone was going late to another celebration. “Forget it,” Kristina said and turned around.
The door shut again. Finally just the two of them. Lada lowered herself to the step, and the cement scraped the backs of her thighs.
“He didn’t mean anything by it,” she told Masha. “Are you okay?”
Masha looked straight ahead. Her arms were crossed on her knees. Everyone’s cars were lined up on the driveway in front of them. “This is my last time coming here,” she said.
“Kristina’s cousin is an idiot. Stay the night.”
Masha nodded at the iced-over yard. “Here, I mean. Home. Kamchatka.”
The night was filling Lada’s lungs with ice. “You just got back,” she said.
“Yeah, well,” Masha said. Her shoulders were raised. The way she sat was as it ever was. “My parents wanted me to come this winter. Now they say they don’t want me to anymore.”
“That’s not true.”
“That’s what they told me tonight.”
The sauna warmth was long gone. Masha’s skin was raised in white goose bumps. Lada wanted to touch that skin—the impulse crested inside her. It had once been so easy to reach Masha. She was the girl that Lada knew, and she wasn’t, all at once.
“But you’re happy in St. Petersburg,” Lada said. “Right? Kristina says you are—you have been.”
“I guess,” Masha said. She rested her head on her crossed hands to watch Lada. “I have to find a new apartment when I get back. I just broke up with my girlfriend.”
“Oh,” Lada said. The roommate. Kristina had said Masha had a roommate.
A girlfriend. Masha was so stupid. A girlfriend, Masha said outside the door, while all those big familiar men sat just on the other side of the wall. A detective. A police detective was in there. Underneath the frost, the steam, and the liquor, Lada’s anger bubbled up, and she wanted to touch Masha now, but not gently, not with fingertips where Masha’s fine arm hairs rose. She wanted to grab her by the wrist and shake. Brilliant Masha, with her scholarship spot, her tech degree. Perfect Masha, who got a job at a global firm. Gorgeous Masha, who paid twenty-eight thousand rubles a month to live with another woman. Masha had been treated her whole life like she was exceptional. If she, from that, now believed she could act this way…
Some people don’t care if you’re special. They will punish you anyway. Neighbors, for example, will report a girl, even a smart girl, with a girlfriend. The police will hurt you, if they get the chance. One person up the Okhotsk coast had been burned to death for this only a couple years earlier. Masha moved away from home at seventeen; when she thought back on life in Kamchatka, she probably pictured volcanoes, tasted caviar, remembered hikes on stone paths to the clouds. She didn’t understand what happened these days to girls as innocent as she and Lada had been. They were destroyed for it. Any girl would be. The Golosovskaya sisters, who, walking alone, made themselves vulnerable—that one mistake cost them their lives.
If you aren’t doing what you’re supposed to, if you let your guard down, they will come for you. If you give them the opportunity. Lada could not believe Masha would be naïve enough to choose to have a girlfriend. They will hurt you, Lada had to say. You could die for this.
In the stillness, a pop song leaked through the kitchen windows. How could one person have studied so hard yet stayed so foolish?
Lada said, “You can’t say that here.”
Masha was silent.
“You could get killed. Why did you come back if you’re going to be this way?”
“What way?” Masha said. “I’m the same. You know better than anyone the way that I am.”
Lada folded her arms across her own knees, laid her cheek on them, and looked at Masha. She was trying not to be angry. “Mashenka,” she said. “Listen to me. Can’t you not?”
“No,” Masha said and smiled.
Those teeth. Her tipped and lovely face. It made Lada’s stolen heart hurt to see.
The stars scattered above them. Cold had sunk so deeply into Lada’s bones that she felt her marrow must have frozen blue. After a while, Lada said, “Will you at least promise to be careful?”
“For you?” Masha said. “I’d do anything.”
The mixed noise of people’s voices came from the house. Bottles and laughter. Though sitting out so long was risky, because Kristina’s cousin, in the kitchen, could be saying all sorts of things about what Lada and Masha were doing together in the dark, Lada could not bear to go. She’d waited years. So many parts of their friendship were lost forever, but Masha had spoken to Lada again, once, honestly, as if they were still the most precious people in each other’s lives.
My dear, my dear. My darling.
“You promise,” Lada said.
“I promise.” Though God knew Masha had broken her promises before.
Lada shifted her seat to rest her head on Masha’s shoulder. Under Lada’s temple, Masha’s cool, smooth grace. “I’d do anything for you, too,” Lada said. “Anything I was able to do.”
“I know,” Masha said. “You would if you could. I knew that.”
In front of their faces, their breath puffed white, curled up. Vanished.
“We should go in,” Lada said.
Masha said, “Will you stay with me for midnight?” Lada nodded against her. “Just like this. It’s silly to ask.”
“No, it’s not.”
“It’s my last night here.”
Boys like Yegor had come before and would come again. “We can sit,” Lada said. “That’s easy. Really.”
The night was an immense windowless room. The stars were impossibly far away. In the crisp dark, Lada pushed back against the alcohol in her blood. She willed herself to make new memories. This moment mattered in a way the trip she wouldn’t take to Esso never could. She should not forget a second of this.
Masha may have carried Lada’s love with her wherever she went, but that didn’t keep anyone safe. Besides the hiking, and the reading, the games played in their courtyard and the movies watched in bed, Lada would hold on to this: her friend bare-shouldered, stubborn. Stupid enough to speak honestly. Sitting near midnight in weather that turned their toes white against the gravel. Smiling. Beautiful Masha, all grown up yet still childish. Unafraid of what harm was sure to come to her.
JANUARY
Roswell, 1947. The Tunguska event years before. The Travis Walton abduction, the Sassowo explosions, and the Petrozavodsk phenomenon. Height 611, along the Pacific, where witnesses reported the crash of an enormous red ball. The Voronezh incident, 1989.
Natasha started hearing these tales from her younger brother while they were still in school. Since then, aided by the arrival of satellite Internet in the Esso library, Denis had expanded his repertoire: Japan Airlines Flight 1628, Chile’s El Bosque Air Force Base, Turkey’s Yenikent Compound, and the opening ceremonies of London’s Olympic Games. Outside the window of the International Space Station. The skies over Jerusalem, 2011 and 2012. The 2013 fireball that burned through Chelyabinsk. The purple lights, hovering, lowering, above the least populated parts of Kamchatka.
If aliens really did land on Earth, Natasha would ask them to start their world domination by erasing her brother’s memory. Through fifteen years of study, Denis had absorbed an encyclopedia set’s worth of information on UFO sightings, with mental volumes updated constantly. Four days into this new year, he’d already referenced every one of his false facts and started again at the top. Natasha had made her family pancakes with raspberry preserves for breakfast. Their mother was peeling an orange.
“The El Bosque Air Force Base,” Denis said.
Natasha switched her knife and fork between her hands. She did not look up at him. Her brother and mother had arrived at Natasha’s Petropavlovsk apartment the afternoon of New Year’s Eve and were due to stay another week—Natasha would have to ration out her frustration to last the whole time. Difficult, though. Now that the celebrations were over, nothing distracted her from the desire to shake Denis until his eyes rolled. Concentrating on pancakes wasn’t quite the balm she needed.
“The sighting was captured on film from seven angles.”
“We know, honey,” Natasha said, in the direction of her plate.
“The Minister of Defense saw it in broad daylight. An object—”
“An object was stalking their jets,” she recited. “I said we know.”
Their mother put her cool hand on top of Natasha’s. The smell of citrus rose between them. “Don’t,” she said, then addressed Natasha’s children: “You never do that, do you? Interrupt each other while one is trying to talk.”
Natasha flushed. “Mama.”
Their mother took back her hand. To Natasha’s daughter, she said, “Yulka, you would never be so rude, would you?” The little girl straightened in her seat at the table. “So let’s not pay any attention to the adults’ bad example. Tell me, how’s your reading going? What’s the best book you read last year?”
“Yulka reads too much. She probably can’t even remember them all,” Natasha’s son said. Natasha stabbed at a sliver of pancake. At thirty-one, a doctoral candidate, she was still getting reprimanded by her mother. Her family’s every visit turned her into a teenager again. She had snuck enough holiday chocolate over the last few days to get a line of pimples across her forehead, and this morning, she had to style her hair differently to hide them. Her whole head felt sloppy.
“The Call of the Wild,” Yulka said. “Babulya, have you read it?”
Natasha’s mother propped her chin in one palm and managed to look terribly interested. “Jack London. Of course I have.”
“Lev hasn’t.”
“Shut up,” said the boy, and Natasha slammed down her utensils, and Natasha’s mother called for order, and the morning was back to normal, just like that.
At least her kids seemed unfazed by Denis’s strangeness. Lev and Yulka, after so many school vacations spent in their uncle’s company, were used to following their grandmother’s lead: keep it light, change the subject, don’t engage. Even after the holiday’s sparklers were extinguished, movies watched, gifts opened, they had not become bored enough to turn on Denis, who was picking at his food at the other end of the table. Waiting for a prime moment to mention the Chelyabinsk meteor, no doubt.
Did Natasha insist on nattering on about her interests? Her research on saffron cod populations? No. So why was her brother encouraged to talk endlessly? She burned to ask.
She would have liked to introduce her children to Denis as he was as a boy. Still shy then, still obsessive, but more engaged with matters on the ground than in the sky. Growing up, they had spent happy summers together, the three of them—Natasha and Denis dunking each other under the warm green water of their village’s community pool, while their little sister sat on the side and screamed with pleasure.
Now Denis was single-minded, Lilia was gone, and Natasha could hardly make it through a shared breakfast.
Natasha cleared her throat. “I’m sorry I interrupted you.”
“The footage is online,” Denis said. “We can watch it, if you like.”
Natasha took up her tea so she could widen her eyes at her mother over the rim of the cup. Her mother said, “
We’re not going to spend our holiday on the computer. Lev, your turn. What have you been reading?”
The alien stuff had started when Denis was in year nine. He spent his high school evenings watching space-invader movies. If she didn’t have homework to finish, Natasha would sit on their couch beside him, take Lilia in her lap, and giggle at the cardboard ships suspended from wires. Denis, too, used to laugh when a scene got ridiculous. At the beginning of his shift toward outer space, he had been willing to participate in ordinary life.
Not anymore. Lev and Yulka knew a different Denis, a different family, a different world than the green-dream one in which Natasha grew up. Still, Natasha could make these days more comfortable for her children. They deserved better than a mad uncle and a self-conscious mother on her third straight morning of a champagne headache. “What do you two want to do today?” she asked.
“Ride horses,” Yulka said.
Lev sighed. “You can’t ride horses in the winter,” he said, and Yulka said, “Yes, you can,” and he said, “No, you can’t,” and Natasha interrupted them both to say, “Shhh.” They continued the argument whispering. Natasha looked over at her mother, who looked back in expectation. Natasha always forgot her own household authority when her family came to town.
The absurdity of it: that Natasha, barely able to meet her obligations as a sister or daughter, was now in charge of school and work and two children of her own. “What do you think,” her mother asked the table, “of ice skating?”
* * *
·
Denis tried next as Natasha parked them in front of the sports complex. “In 2008 at Yenikent—”
“Just a minute,” she called over her shoulder. “I’m trying to concentrate.” They were in her husband’s car. Yuri was at sea again; he had sent her a picture, a full day late, of him celebrating the New Year in some Pacific port past the International Date Line. Beer in hand and a wink toward the phone’s front camera. Natasha sent him back a selfie with her middle finger raised. Then she followed that almost instantly with a picture of herself lit by the lamp on their bedside table, her top lowered, her lips and cheeks spun by the low wattage into dark gold. The story of their marriage: a little love, a little rage, a lot of ocean water.
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