“Would she and her mother like to be taken to Palana’s finest café?”
Palana’s only café. “Unfortunately, she can’t make it. She has plans with her grandparents.”
“And her mother?”
She still hadn’t gotten a text back from Chegga. “Her mother,” said Nadia, “is free.”
* * *
·
The next morning, after she and Mila woke to the slam of the front door from Nadia’s father leaving, after their bed linens were folded, the couch cushions rearranged, and the breakfast dishes washed, Nadia called the Far Eastern headquarters of Sberbank about an international transfer. A manager provided the number of the main office in Moscow, which, because of the time difference, would not open for another nine hours. Mila was sitting in Nadia’s lap drawing. Nadia tapped her daughter’s fist, pulled the pen out of her hand, and wrote on the top of one notebook page the phone number that would change their future.
After she hung up, she gave Mila the pen. Mila scribbled in the bottom circle of an 8 Nadia had written. “Don’t,” Nadia said and flipped to a blank page. To her mother, Nadia said, “Can I take the car today?”
Her mother hesitated, and Nadia leaned into Mila’s back. “CAN I TAKE THE CAR, I SAID?”
“Where?” her mother asked.
“OUT.”
Nadia’s mother twisted her mouth up. “Okay,” Nadia said to that knot of disapproval. She got up and plucked the keys off their wall hook beside the portrait of Stalin.
“Mama, I’m going with you,” Mila said. She held on to Nadia’s thighs as Nadia put her coat on.
“Your grandmother misses you too much to let you go, Milusha. I’ll be back soon,” Nadia said. “Be good.” And Nadia was gone.
The cold grabbed her lungs in two fists. Wind off the Sea of Okhotsk polished the streets here with dark ice. In only a few years, she had gotten used to Esso—its clean puffs of snowflakes, its mounds of spotless snow, its seeming calm. Wooden fences lined garden plots in people’s backyards. Horses had brushed their noses against Mila’s palms when Nadia took her out walking. Palana, facing open water, looked vicious in comparison.
Nadia might like that viciousness now. Before moving again, she would need to research her options, collect a few paychecks, call landlords across Europe. While she waited for the car’s engine to warm up, she experimented with the idea of pausing for a bit in Palana. Why not? Let the town see what she had made of herself. Spend some time at the edge of the sea.
Slava was waiting at a table when she got to the café. Five years on, he looked okay. Just okay, she told herself, glad for it. Time had carved lines around his mouth and on his forehead. His skin was darkened in a stripe over his eyes—he must be out on the snowmobile these days. And his hair was too long in the back. Compare that to Chegga, whose hair Nadia buzzed in their bathroom monthly.
Stop with Chegga, already. Nadia was moving on. She had evaluated herself in the bathroom mirror this morning, and felt herself attractive, or no more unattractive than she had been. She stood a little differently since having Mila—her pelvis pushed at a new angle—but the change was nothing stark. And her clothes had improved.
She took the empty seat. Slava stood up too late to pull it out for her and settled for kissing her cheek instead. “How many summers, how many winters. Hello, beautiful,” he said.
“Hi. Tea?” He signaled to the waiter. “You don’t work today?” she asked.
“I work nights. This is late for me to even be up. Two black teas,” he told the boy.
“Mine with lemon,” she said, and the boy nodded.
“How have you been?” Slava asked.
She opened her hands under the table. Since they last saw each other, Nadia had turned eighteen, had a baby, fallen for Chegga, moved to Esso, started at the bank, taken charge of a household. Gotten engaged—or at least talked a lot about marriage. “You first,” she said.
He laughed. “You heard it all. I work nights. Not much else. I was married for a bit—did your mother tell you?—but we’re separating. You don’t know her. She came after you left.”
After Slava broke up with her, Nadia had, for the first and only time in her life, cried so hard she vomited. There was a particular period of teenagehood when she behaved more childishly than Mila did now. Pregnancy certainly had not helped. Her heart had been fragile, its chambers shifting as easily and dangerously as volcanic earth. Slava got in there before the ground hardened.
Hearing about his marriage did hurt a little. Despite the length of his hair. Once in her life, one time, she would like someone to love her completely, with no room left for anything else.
“In Esso I live with my man,” she said. “We’re very happy. He’s a photographer.” The waiter came with their glasses and she busied herself for a few seconds by stirring.
She glanced up to see Slava appraising her. “So happy you came here to meet me?”
“Well,” she said, then ran out of words.
He sipped his tea, steam rising. “How’s your mother?”
Nadia squinted and leaned toward him. “What?”
“How’s your— Oh,” he said and laughed. Just that, the deep noise, unlocked something in her again. She looked away.
“She’s the same as she was,” Nadia said, “only more.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“Not me,” she said. “I’ve transformed.”
He smiled at her over the lip of his glass.
This was an adorable affectation—the café. When they last knew each other, Slava was all cheap beer and cheaper spirits. He might have knocked someone to the ground for suggesting he had ever been in the proximity of a moka pot. And Nadia used to like his posturing; like Chegga with the infamous Lilia Solodikova, Nadia had her own youthful fixations, her embarrassing things to adore.
But Nadia had matured. Girls younger than she were already graduating from university, for God’s sake. They were grown women. Nadia herself was adult enough to have a half-grown child.
“How’s your daughter?” Slava said, and Nadia started in her seat. If he could read her mind, she would have to stop thinking about his hair.
“Precious. Five already. Do you have any of your own?”
“I don’t know,” Slava said. Grinned. “I’d like to meet her.”
“Hmm,” Nadia said. She changed the subject to his parents, his brothers. The animals he was trapping these days. When he smiled, he showed those familiar teeth, the top two angled in toward each other to make a crooked gate. She let that old sweet sight wash over her until their teas were drunk and done.
In the car, though, Nadia was glad to be alone again. Sitting beside Slava had made her recall herself at her clingiest. In Esso, surrounded by family and old friends, Chegga had relished going over his school years, but Nadia did not want to soak in the memory of who she used to be.
A local embarrassment. A girl who sought her joy in other people—in men. She began to learn her error only after Mila’s father left, when from him, reeling, she stumbled into Slava’s bed. She had never wanted to get out. After that ended, she sincerely thought of dying.
She had been seventeen, four months pregnant, in love twice over with nothing to show for it. Sobbing into her pillowcase while her parents watched TV in their bedroom. She used to ask, How can I go on?
Then she figured it out. She could go on. She had loved Chegga, his big heart, his bigger promises, but what brought true joy in this life was a climbing salary, a full belly, a firmly connected radiator pipe.
* * *
·
Neighbors’ dogs lifted their heads to watch her drive down their street. The animals sat in sockets of ice under fence posts. Nadia pulled up to her parents’ house, turned the engine off, and heard a child crying. Taking her purse under the puffed arm of her coat, she got out�
�yes. Mila. “Where’s my girl?” Nadia called, letting herself inside.
“Mamochka!” A wet-faced Mila pitched around the corner toward her.
“Hi, kitten,” Nadia said. “Hi, turtledove. Have you been torturing your grandparents?” Her daughter shook her head. Mila must have taken her hair out and retied it herself; before breakfast, Nadia had arranged it in a clean braid, but now Mila wore two lopsided pigtails. Great lumps of black hair rose across her skull. Nadia took her hand. “I think you were.”
“In here,” Nadia’s father called.
Mila led Nadia down the hall to the bedroom. The sound of the television drew them along. They found Nadia’s parents sitting up on the bed, her mother darning a pile of already mended socks. A news program played at top volume: results of a Euro qualifying match, cease-fires called for the day in eastern Ukraine, rail service restored between the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. “Happiness, it’s happiness,” a Ukrainian commuter told the reporter. Light from the screen flashed across the fleece blanket under Nadia’s parents’ feet.
Five years from now, or fifty, Nadia expected she would enter this room to find her parents this same way. She bent down to her daughter. “Your notebook is in the front pocket of my suitcase. Want to bring it?” Mila left and Nadia checked her phone. No missed calls. Chegga might not try again until the evening.
Mila came back with the breast-filled notebook. “Go get a pen out of the drawer in the kitchen table,” Nadia said. Her mother looked up, questioning, but Nadia did not repeat herself. Instead Nadia sat on the rug to wait for her daughter to return.
One day soon Nadia would have her own television. A bedroom with tall windows for Mila. Fine new socks, machine-made in Europe, that she could ship by the carton back here. While Mila drew smiling faces, their eyes and cheeks and mouths decorated by ink flowers, Nadia finger-combed the girl’s hair and put it in place. Nadia’s father snored above their heads. A tiny, soothing noise.
The afternoon drifted away, at once quiet and too loud. A few minutes before five, Nadia plugged in her phone to charge and went to the kitchen to help with dinner. They were having buttered macaroni and fish. Nadia’s father played with Mila while the room steamed up. Once the time to eat came, Nadia’s mother portioned out servings, as she had when Nadia was little. Mila kept eating noodles with her fingers until Nadia smacked her hand.
Nadia did not miss Chegga. She and Mila were doing fine. So when she got back to her phone and saw he had called twice, she decided she should let him know.
He picked up on the first ring. “What were you thinking?”
She tucked one arm under the other. “Hello to you, too.” Almost a week had passed since they heard each other’s voices. He did not sound like he was savoring hers.
“You’re really at your parents’ place?”
“Where else would I be?”
“How much did those tickets cost us?”
“Christ, Chegga,” she said. “Twenty-five thousand.” Nearly all her cash. He let out a goose’s hiss at that, kkkh, air forced from the back of his throat. “Mila flew half-price. And I took all my time from work, because we weren’t going to use it together, anyway. Right? We weren’t?”
“Unbelievably selfish,” he said. “We were. Why weren’t we?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. Full of baked fish, half a meter from her framed graduation portrait on her parents’ dresser, she knew again the cold clarity of that early-morning flood. She had followed him, his feet bare, hers in rubber boots, through the dirty water. He carried Mila, who clung to his shoulders like he was some sort of savior. Meanwhile Nadia, behind them, stared at his neck. The neat bottom of the haircut she had given him. The white rectangle of the open door ahead. The silhouette of some passerby already loitering to ask what their trouble was. “I don’t think a cross-country trip was going to work out for us. You couldn’t even put a roof over our heads.”
“There was never an issue with the roof,” he said. Now she was the one making exasperated noises. “Don’t you act like that,” he said. “I have done everything for you.”
“Everything for me!”
“Without me, you would’ve still been living at home, fighting with your mother, working some ridiculous job to support Mila. Shoveling coal at Palana’s hot-water plant.”
“Fuck you,” she said, just to hear him sputter. Nobody liked it when a woman cursed. “I’m supposed to be glad that you brought me to Esso? So I could fight with your mother instead?”
“Don’t talk about my mother.”
“Don’t talk about mine.”
“Don’t…” He fell quiet. When he started again, he spoke more slowly, deliberately. “Do you know what I thought? Before I found your little note. That something happened to you two. That you had been hurt.”
“You’re out of your mind,” she said.
“That I would have to show Mila’s picture around the village. There’s the gift you spent twenty-five thousand to give me. You don’t remember Lilia?”
* * *
·
All of his worst qualities were coming back to her: his cheapness, his stubbornness, his eagerness to insert himself into other people’s lives. Even his little sister had warned Nadia about this; in the wooden changing stall after swimming that January day, while pulling down Mila’s bathing suit straps, Nadia had asked, “Was he in love with this Lilia or something?” Ksyusha shook her head. “Then why bring her up?”
Tugging on her jeans, Ksyusha kept her eyes down. She had come back from university for the holidays with muscled legs from dance classes and a tense jaw, Nadia thought, from too much schoolwork. How exhausting it must be to be as smart as Ksyusha. All that possibility held tight under Ruslan’s arm. Ksyusha said, “Chegga likes the drama. The disappearance. He has fun making up theories instead of admitting she ran away.” She stuffed her swimsuit into her purse. “Can I tell you the truth?”
Nadia nodded.
Ksyusha reached out to cup her hands over Mila’s ears. “Lilia was a whore,” Ksyusha said. Her expression was harder than Nadia ever remembered seeing before. “She was sweet, but she slept with everyone. Chegga didn’t love her. He just loves talking about people, and she’s the easiest to talk about, because she’s not here anymore.”
A whore, Ksyusha said. And Nadia had thought herself sufficiently humiliated when she saw herself in the cat-killing classmate swimming near them. Chegga had devoted himself to Nadia so quickly, so fully—was that because he loved her drama? When they met, she was barely out of school, raising a child on her own. And he had coaxed her and Mila into moving. Sworn he cared. Promised happiness. All that because he saw her as what she used to be? Had he only swapped her into Esso to fill that place?
* * *
·
“I remember,” Nadia said. The words were raw. The phone beeped and she drew it away to look at the screen. “You’re right, Chegga. Mila and I are exactly like your Lilia. We would rather get ourselves killed than live near you anymore.” Again the beep. He was going to shout. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’m getting another call.”
“Slava?” she said when she switched over. Her voice was too loud.
“Hey. What are you doing?”
She waited to collect her breath. Then: “Nothing.”
“I thought I could come over,” he said.
Five years ago this offer would have been a firework. It did not burst and burn the same way now. “No,” she said. “It’s late. Mila’s bedtime’s soon.”
“That’s fine. I told you, I’d like to meet her.”
Alone in the room, Nadia shook her head.
He said, “I’ve been thinking— You know, we were so young.” Nadia didn’t respond. Her high school picture on the dresser smirked back at her. “…I wondered if I might be her father.”
“No,” Nad
ia said.
“No?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you weren’t. And you aren’t. My period was three weeks late when we first slept together.” Mila’s father was older, married. He was someone who was glad to make love to Nadia in his car by the coastline but stopped picking up her calls after she told him the blood had not come. She went for Slava then in the hope he could undo what had already happened.
Slava was silent. “All right,” he said. “That doesn’t change, though—I was there. And I still…I could have been there all this time.”
“Well, you weren’t,” she said.
“Listen, I was a kid,” he said. “I acted like an idiot. But I’ve grown up. I want a family. Please don’t punish this little girl now for the mistake I made back then.”
She could tell he had rehearsed that line. “My God,” she said. “Tonight’s not a good night for us, okay? Forget about it.” He was not finished, she knew, but she was hanging up.
The whole thing made her want to laugh. Or scream. She’d felt the same way when she saw her positive pregnancy test: this must be a joke, this must be a joke, the feeling bubbling in her throat. Slava called again and she silenced the buzzing phone. His voice, his words, the suggestion (we were young) churned inside her.
Too bad she had nowhere for this hysteria to go. She could not call Chegga back, she would never tell Mila, and she had made no real friends from school to now. Some girls shared such things with their mothers, but not Nadia…just imagine screaming this phone conversation into her mother’s crumpled ear.
Nadia did laugh then, loud and bitter. It was impossible to tell how much her mother perceived (the affair with Ivan Borisovich, the liquid few months with Slava, the late-night anguish, the growing belly) and how much was lost in background noise. They never even had a real conversation about the baby coming; in Nadia’s second trimester, her parents simply started to make little comments—how soulless it was to raise a child into capitalism, how much better communal living had been for families, how important it was never to lift one’s hands over one’s head during pregnancy.
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