Disappearing Earth

by Julia Phillips

  “Please, these experts,” Anfisa said. “They say that now. Don’t listen.”

  “But they’re right. Aren’t they? It shouldn’t have come as a surprise.” Natasha wrapped her fingers around her mug. “My mother doesn’t believe that, though. She thinks Lilia’s like the Golosovskaya sisters—killed.”

  “Whatever happened with those girls is so different.”

  “My mother and brother don’t grasp that,” Natasha said. “No one needed to take Lilia. She left on her own. Because who could stand living with him? Talking incessantly about what does not exist. Hearing that, and only that, who wouldn’t keep her own secrets? Who wouldn’t go?”

  After a minute, Anfisa said, “Take a sip.” She took the kettle from the counter to top off Natasha’s drink.

  Natasha looked up at her friend. “You understand,” she said. She was so grateful.

  Reaching out, Anfisa wrapped her fingers around Natasha’s wrist. That warm, soft skin. The kettle shone silver between them. Anfisa’s hand eased back any anger.

  “It must be so hard to have an invalid in the family,” Anfisa said. “Which category is Denis in? The second?”

  Natasha opened her mouth. Shook her head. “No, Denis isn’t—None.” She was startled out of her own words. Anfisa seemed sure that Denis fit into a government invalid group, that he received disability pay. That he was sick. “He’s not.”

  “Oh,” Anfisa said. “I thought…You were just saying he can’t work.”

  “He can work. He has a job right now.”

  “But isn’t that what you’ve been telling me? There’s something wrong.”

  “Don’t say that,” Natasha said. “There’s nothing wrong. Denis is strange. That’s all.”

  “More than strange.” Anfisa’s fingers were still on Natasha’s wrist. “It’s like you said, isn’t it? Hard to live with that. Who in your sister’s place wouldn’t go?”

  Anfisa’s hand still, still, still there. Still there. Natasha had said those things, yet repeated by Anfisa they were foul. They made her siblings into caricatures. Anfisa did not know. The memory came up inside Natasha like vomit: not Lilia herself, her wit and freshness, but the village women who came over after Lilia left to gossip about a teenage girl gone missing. How they hugged Natasha and her children, how they wiped their wet faces on her cheeks. Their appraisal of her household. The blow of judgment.

  Natasha took her arm back. She was done with the taste of the tea. “It’s time for me to leave.”

  “Come on.”

  “I’ve already been here too long. They’re at home waiting.”

  Anfisa looked skeptical. “Uh-huh,” she said. Though Natasha knew this situation was her own fault—she had given every reason, by sneaking away from her apartment to complain, for her neighbor to judge her family—she could not stand the look on Anfisa’s face. Anfisa did not really look like Lilia. She was too old. Her jaw and cheeks and brow bones were highlighted in shimmering powder. She dangled herself like a lure; for the sake of a drinking partner, she had baited Natasha into intimacy.

  Anfisa followed Natasha to the door. “I’m sorry if I offended you.”

  Natasha pulled her boots back on. “No. But they’re leaving in three days. I should spend more time with them while I have the chance.” Dressed for the cold, Natasha faced her neighbor. “Unlike you, I actually like being with my family,” she said. Anfisa’s expression kept that sly cat look, and Natasha wished she had come up with something more cutting. Or no—already she wished she had said nothing at all; already she regretted speaking. Always regretting. As if a comment made in anger was like another slap.

  The building’s stairwell was dark. The sun was already behind the mountains.

  She had not told Anfisa details of Denis as a boy—the community pool, the way he spoon-fed baby Lilia cereal, how all three of them gathered grass together to feed the horses fenced in neighbors’ yards—or Denis as a younger man. The herders that summer said that they wouldn’t need his help in the future, but he had done well for himself in the field. Crossing the parking lot, Natasha swayed with guilt. Her coat was open. She dialed Yuri’s number again. The recording piped into her ear, cannot be accessed, always cannot be accessed, like the thousands of times she had called Lilia with no luck, and she flung her phone down at a snow pile. It slotted sideways into the white. Quick, she crouched, scooped the phone back out, and pressed the home button—the screen still worked. Natasha wiped the phone over and over across one bare palm. For days, for years, she had been making the stupidest choices.

  Anfisa was not Lilia. Lilia was kind and clever and had the wisdom to keep her views private. She was living in Moscow, or St. Petersburg, or Luxembourg. Natasha liked to picture her in Europe. Lilia was an elegant young woman now. Maybe she had finally enrolled in university. Maybe she had gotten married. Maybe she even had a child or two of her own.

  Lilia, Natasha promised herself, fingers freezing, was traveling the world. And one day she might come back to them. For now, Natasha would have to deal with her brother without a sibling who could carry stories between them.

  Denis was fine. He was just on the more idiosyncratic end of normal. He was all Natasha had at the moment, and so she needed to be kinder, not dismiss him, value having him nearby.

  On her landing, with her keys out, Natasha could hear conversation. She let herself back in. Peeking around the corner, she found Denis and Lev still on the couch. Yulka had joined them there. The three of them in a row, holding her accountable.

  Natasha turned away to hang her wet coat. Her fingers hurt from cold. “Where’s Babulya?” she called to the children.

  “She went out to meet her cousin again,” Yulka said.

  “How nice,” Natasha said. Trying hard to sound loving.

  “But we wanted to stay here.”

  Natasha went to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water. She came out and took the armchair. Her face was flushed. “What have you all been talking about?”

  Yulka glanced at her uncle. Lev said, “Nothing.”

  Natasha sipped her water. She put the glass down at her feet, leaned forward, and squeezed Denis’s shoulder. He glanced at her with surprise and, she hoped, pleasure. “You only have a couple more days in the city,” she said. “What would you like to do?”

  “It’s not safe to be out too much,” Denis said. “Remember London. Petrozavodsk.”

  “I do,” she said.

  Yulka said, “Mama, Uncle Denis told us that he met aliens.”

  Natasha took her hand back and touched her forehead. “All right.”

  “Are they actually real?”

  She only hesitated for an instant. “No, bunny,” she said, then addressed her brother: “You know that, Denis.”

  His expression flattened. His eyes half-shut. Natasha felt it then, the familiar grief of looking for someone who would not be recovered.

  “See, I told you,” Lev said to his sister. Natasha watched her brother. She was listening.

  Roswell. Tunguska. Chelyabinsk. Jerusalem. Natasha was waiting for Denis to change. And she, too, would be different—she was going to be an excellent sister. She would let go of this anger. She was not angry. She just wanted to hear what else Denis had to say.

  FEBRUARY

  Revmira woke up knowing it was February 27. The date bore down on her. She dressed slowly, sadly, under its weight, and came out to the kitchen to find her husband boiling their coffee. “Good morning,” she said.

  “Morning,” Artyom said, and she knew from the line of his shoulders over the stove that he knew what day it was, too.

  She got out cheese and ham for breakfast. While she prepared two plates at the counter, he poured their cups. The teaspoon clinked as he mixed sugar into hers. They had been together twenty-six years, nearly half Revmira’s life, and still she was surprise
d by Artyom’s kindness. He was the easiest man she had ever known. But then she had only known two.

  “How’d you sleep?” he asked.

  She shrugged, put their breakfast sandwiches down, and took her seat. “Are you on call today?”

  “Twelve to twelve.” Soon he would meet with the rest of his rescue team, stack their gear, get ready for any urgent flight to the mountains or the ice caves or the open water, but for now he was rumpled in his T-shirt. He had not yet shaved. Behind him, their kitchen window showed a clear sky.

  She had slept heavy and dark the night before. She had not dreamed of Gleb. For years after the accident, she did—that Gleb visited her in her childhood home; treated her on her birthday; drove her down the bumpy road beyond the city limits to the ocean’s black sandy shore. “This is impossible,” she said in that one. “I know,” he said and shifted gears. She wanted in the dream to touch his hand but was afraid to distract him at the wheel.

  “It’s going to be warm,” Artyom said.

  She looked up from her plate. “Is that right?”

  “Almost zero.”

  “I’m not surprised,” she said. “You only give yourself the best shifts. You’ll probably spend all day picnicking.”

  “Having ice cream in the snow. Sure. More like we’ll be called at noon on the dot for some novice getting sunburned off-piste.”

  “Just be careful,” she said. He kept watching her.

  “With weather like this, it could be a short winter,” he said. “Lieutenant Ryakhovsky texted this morning. They want our boats to search for the sisters in the bay once it thaws.”

  The bread was dry in Revmira’s mouth. “He never got back to me.”

  “I asked again about that. He didn’t respond.”

  “He’s a jackass,” she said.

  Artyom smiled at her from across the table. That look deepened the lines on his face.

  “You told him about Alla’s daughter?”

  “I told him everything,” Artyom said. “He’s all business: the major general wants approval from the ministry for another round of water searches.”

  Revmira put her bread down. For months, Petropavlovsk’s rescue team had been helping the police organize search efforts for the Golosovskaya sisters. Artyom’s rescue work usually came in bursts—hikers unable to descend from volcanoes, snowmobilers cracking through thin lake ice, fishermen getting turned around at sea—but this case would not end. In the fall, Artyom had led civilians through the city to search for the missing girls; once the weather turned, he brought home occasional updates from officers.

  How tidy of the police to throw all their efforts into looking for two small white bodies. That served as a good excuse to ignore the city’s other corruptions, its injustice, its drunk drivers or petty arsonists. Why should Ryakhovsky answer Artyom’s text messages about some northern teen? Preparing boats to drag a bay that was frozen must occupy all the lieutenant’s valuable time.

  Over the winter holidays, Revmira’s second cousin, Alla, visiting from Esso, had said that her younger daughter was still missing. Alla had brought the subject up at the cross-country ski base’s café after what was supposed to be a pleasant morning together spent gliding over snow. Listening, Revmira cut a cottage-cheese pastry into three portions, while Alla rubbed her temple and talked, and Alla’s grown son watched those entering the base stomp their boots clean.

  Revmira had never met this missing daughter. Alla came to the city only once a year, to see her grandchildren, and contacted Revmira with the same sadness each time. Their meetings came out of mutual obligation. After Revmira’s parents passed, Revmira had stopped visiting the village. There was nothing for her there. Her cousin’s gloomy annual updates were enough to confirm that choice.

  “The authorities still have nothing to say about your girl?” Revmira had asked. Her cousin only shook her head. “Here the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Emergency Situations have been looking for these Russian sisters tirelessly.”

  “It wasn’t that way with us.”

  “I imagine not.”

  “Natasha told me in the fall that the sisters were taken by someone,” Alla said. “When Lilia disappeared, I begged authorities to look for the person responsible. All Esso’s officers did then was spread rumors about Lilia’s boyfriends. She wasn’t…she had admirers, but that was exactly why…” Behind her glasses, Alla’s eyelids lowered. Her nostrils flared.

  Revmira sat in quiet with her for a few moments. Meanwhile Alla’s son picked up his portion of their divided pastry. “Artyom could speak to the city police for you,” Revmira said eventually. “He knows people. They might open a case for her, at least. Keep a description on file.” Her cousin did not look hopeful.

  Still, Revmira had collected a few details to pass forward. Lilia was small, too, and young, though not as young as the Golosovskaya sisters. Artyom had given Revmira the lieutenant’s number, then himself messaged the lieutenant with a graduation photo of the teen, but they heard nothing back. No great surprise. Lilia was three years missing, Even, the child of a nobody.

  Revmira should never have suggested a city investigation to Alla. This was how it went: no end to grief. Her cousin’s cheeks had been hollowed out by absence. Revmira knew that expression too well.

  “No shock Ryakhovsky didn’t respond,” Revmira said at the breakfast table. “Given the chance to assist an old native woman, our police would rather—” She stopped, turned her face from Artyom.

  Rather die, she’d almost said. She had almost let herself forget what day it was.

  “Well, he ought to try,” Artyom said. She shook her head. He went on: “He’s touchy these days about taking tips from civilians. He was reprimanded for it by the major general in the fall. But that’s their job. These officers are too young to understand what duty is.”

  Revmira sipped the coffee. It tasted good. Sweet. She did not deserve it. Distracting herself, talking casually…even after all this time, it made no sense that she got to wake up and chatter and drink fresh coffee while Gleb could not.

  She stood from the table. “Late, isn’t it?” she said. Artyom glanced at the clock on the stove.

  She went to brush her teeth. In the mirror, she saw herself dressed for work.

  Had she ever been as young as she was when she met Gleb? All her days back then felt bright. When, at seventeen, she moved to Petropavlovsk, the city was filled with scaffolding, soldiers, polished monuments. She came to her first day of university and saw Gleb. She was thinner then, tanner, an emissary from Esso’s Young Communist League, and he was as fair and glorious as a figure on a propaganda poster. His eyebrows furrowed under the classroom lights as he looked back.

  What a lucky, stupid girl she had been in those years. Even the most difficult times she remembered from that age were nothing now. A month into her first semester, she received a package at her dormitory. The box was so light she thought at first it must be empty. She opened it to find dozens of dried pinecones; her father had gathered them to mail three hundred kilometers south to her. The box smelled like home. The forest, dirt, her parents’ scratchy clothes. She shook out the seeds, chewed them, and cried. At seventeen years old, that was her most desolate moment: missing the people who sent her packages.

  And that same afternoon she was able to bring a pinecone to class and pass it across the aisle into Gleb’s hand. They were married before graduation. She had the whole world then, but she was only a child.

  She applied her eyeliner. Revmira always took this date to repeat to herself Gleb’s qualities: his patience, his charm. He waited by her desk after class and she prolonged collecting her books to keep him there above her. Once, in the park with friends, he knelt down to tie her shoes. He was that indulgent. That surprising. His fingers a little longer and thinner than hers. The weekend she, finally his wife, moved in with him
and his mother, he brought home a two-liter tub of red caviar to celebrate. They ate out of the tub with spoons. The saline pop of those eggs on their teeth. She would never forget.

  In the other room, Artyom was clearing the dishes. They rang against the sink. Each year, Revmira’s recollections stayed the same—the tied shoe, the tub of caviar—while everything else, against her will, deepened, strengthened, grew. Gleb’s letters and records were in a suitcase on the floor of her closet. She wore a white uniform, and kept a tidy house he would not see, and had been married again for so long that people said to her, “Your husband,” without bothering to specify who.

  She came back into the kitchen to give Artyom a kiss. “I’m off.”

  Wiping his hands, he followed her to the hall. He stood in slippered feet while she pulled on her heels. When she was ready, he held out her coat, wool and thickly lined. “Lunch this afternoon?”

  “If you’re not too busy,” she said. “You’ll let me know if you get called in?”

  “Of course,” he said. He always did. She kissed him again. His mouth under hers was soft and warm and living. It was not fair that he should be so good to her today, when she attended least to him. None of this was fair.

  As she drew away, she saw his eyes had stayed open. He saw, somewhere in there, the woman she was when they first met—that destroyed version of her.

  Revmira pulled her purse up on her shoulder. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she said. She had to be.

  All the same, she walked as though lost the four short blocks to the bus stop. The sky was washed blue. Melting ice broke under her shoes. Banks of snow propped up the buildings around her. The morning of the accident, Gleb’s mother, still in her nightgown, came into their room. Sunlight was filtering through the curtains. Gleb had left for work almost an hour before. Revmira sat up, then, so the futon swayed underneath her. The frame was hard as bones below the mattress. “What is it, Mama?” Revmira said. She always thought of that question afterward—another recollection played and replayed. She should not have asked. Vera Vasilievna’s expression already told her.