Disappearing Earth

by Julia Phillips

  It was understood that Nadia had done a bad thing but that thing itself was never discussed. Her mother had not even looked directly at Nadia’s enormous stomach when Nadia was admitted to the town hospital’s maternity ward. And after the birth she certainly never suggested that Nadia would be a fit parent. That one generation might pass on any skill or knowledge to the next. Instead, her mother fussed about the nurses, the neighbors, Nadia’s diet and vanity and laziness.

  Nothing had changed. When Nadia came back out to the living room, her mother was there scowling. “Where have you been? I’ve had to set you up all by myself.” Her mother bent, back stiff, to smooth the last corner of a sheet over the couch cushion. Nadia scooped up Mila and felt her waist warmed by her daughter’s legs.

  “Mama, I’ll do that,” Nadia called. Mila in her arms, she crowded close to the cushion until her mother was forced to step away. “You could’ve waited ten minutes for me,” Nadia said, though she knew she spoke only to herself.

  Her mother hung over them for a few more minutes. Nadia concentrated on kissing Mila’s neck to make the girl giggle. Her darling girl. Everyone had something to say, doubts and whispers, but look at her daughter—Mila’s long legs, her belly-out posture, her little fingernails, the wisps at her hairline. Her cheeks so round they swelled her profile and hid the corners of her smile. Look at what Nadia had done for Mila and what she was going to do.

  * * *

  ·

  Nadia phoned the main Sberbank office in the morning. It was closed, but even hearing its prerecorded menu of options, its vowels stressed with a Moscow accent, felt promising. After that she called the Far Eastern branch for an email address, too, so she was able to write to headquarters from her laptop. To pass the day, Nadia’s parents took her and Mila to a fairy-tale puppet show at the Palace of Culture. The four of them sat in a row on a wooden bench. The lights in the auditorium went down. A curtain rose, and there appeared papier-mâché heads, ruffled costumes, hands lifting to make frogs and foxes and roosters fly through the air.

  “Let’s see a movie,” Nadia said to her daughter afterward. To her parents, she explained, “There’s no cinema in Esso.”

  Nadia’s mother frowned. “There are films to watch at home.”

  “Don’t wait for us,” Nadia said. “We’ll walk back when we’re finished.”

  The cinema sat a floor above the puppet theater. When she and Mila got up there, they found the place dark. Mila started getting weepy. “Cinemas don’t work in the morning,” Nadia told her. “I’m so sorry. I forgot.” They wandered back downstairs, where they found a booth selling berry hand pies, and Nadia peeled off a bill for two of those instead.

  Sticky with berry juice, Nadia and Mila moved through the halls to study the murals. Nadia’s cell vibrated, showing Slava’s number. She silenced the call and took Mila’s hand.

  The paintings on the walls showed a swirl of men in wolf skins. Nadia’s parents had brought her here as a child. “Milusha, do you want to go fishing tomorrow with Grandpa?” Nadia asked. “I used to go when I was your age.”

  Mila squeezed her fingers. “What’s it like?”

  The rich rotten smell of low tide—the endless flatness of the sea. And her father, hooking the bait, blood running thin down his forearms. “It’s nice,” Nadia said.

  “I’ll catch a dolphin. But we won’t eat it.” Mila shook her head at the thought. “It’ll live with us.”

  “Great idea.” Nadia squeezed back. “You know what? I’m going to get us our own house soon.”

  “For us and Daddy?”

  “For us and the dolphin,” Nadia said. “We’ll buy a place on the beach so it can visit all its friends when it likes. And we’ll have a fancy bathroom. We’ll put in a tub big enough for it to live.”

  In the building’s lobby, Nadia zipped Mila’s coat, then belted her own. They pushed out into the cold together. Snow crystals in the wind brushed like fine-grit sandpaper across their exposed skin.

  A familiar white hatchback was parked at the curb. Nadia moved toward the car cautiously. Her father was napping in the passenger seat. Her mother, as Nadia got closer, tipped her head in their direction, lifted one hand from the steering wheel, and waved.

  Nadia boosted Mila into the backseat and climbed in after. “I told you WE WOULD WALK,” she said. The car smelled like salted fish inside. Her father blinked awake.

  “Mila will get sick in this cold,” her mother said. “You should know that.”

  “She’s fine. She’s all wrapped up.”

  Her father turned in his seat and reached out to stroke Mila’s purple sleeve. “These new coats,” he said. “Manufactured in China. Terrible.”

  The prickling in Nadia’s nose was back. “No, this one’s quality, Papa. It’s well made.” He shook his head.

  Nadia put her own fingers on Mila’s sleeve. The refined slip of it. She ran her hand down to reach Mila’s damp palm. Pushed back against the headrest and widened her eyes against tears.

  More and more and more, Chegga’s mother had condemned her for wanting. As though everyone in their generation was not already enjoying all they had taken for themselves—pensions, marriages, friendships, history, the values they were sure were wasted on their children, the sweeping moral high ground.

  “What movie did you see?” her mother called backward.

  “Communist Killers from Outer Space,” Nadia said. They were not listening anyway.

  Nadia did not pick up either Chegga’s or Slava’s calls that night. She had no energy for conversation. On the couch, Nadia read Mila a story about a bear cub, watched her drowse off, and folded herself around the girl to wait for sleep. Tomorrow they would go to the library. They would keep themselves busy until Nadia figured out where to go next. And they would have fun doing it—because they had each other, which was what mattered—Nadia and Mila, forever.

  * * *

  ·

  She woke with her pulse thudding. Someone was pounding on the front door. The room was silvery, divided into strips of light and dark, and Mila lay on her stomach in the crack between the cushion and the couch back. The sound of a man’s voice outside. Nadia’s father’s feet coming down the hall.

  Opening the living room door, Nadia found the shock of her parents and Slava. Her parents in their pajamas. Slava, by the smell of the hallway, drunk. The overhead light was on. Slava’s face was red. That color in his skin, the slur in his speech, brought her right back to high school.

  She shut the door behind her. “What are you doing here?” she hissed. “Go home!”

  “Nadia, this—” said her father.

  “I’m sorry, Papa,” she told him.

  “I’ve got to ask you something,” Slava said.

  Nadia threw her hands up. It had to be two in the morning. “You haven’t heard of a text message?”

  Her mother, soft in a worn nightgown, squeezed against her to get a better look at the scene. “Is that Vyacheslav Bychkov? What is he doing here so late?”

  “I’m very sorry to wake you,” Slava said. He was overenunciating. “I needed to talk—”

  “I know your brother,” Nadia’s mother called toward him.

  Slava blinked at her. Nadia waved in the air. “Enough! Leave!”

  “Nadechka, you’re not listening, you’re not hearing me,” he said. “I wanted— Okay, I was thinking. You could come home with me. My wife— No, it’s my house, you know, it’s only me now. You and your daughter could stay there with me. As long as you like. You look just the same as you did,” he said. Speaking much too loudly. “You could come there. And our daughter.”

  “Who, Mila?” Nadia’s mother asked, and Nadia turned.

  “Mila is—” Nadia halted. “Get out,” she said, “get out, get out.” She pushed forward, past her parents, to Slava’s stinking chest. Citrus and vodka. She
hoped he’d choke. Pressed too close to Slava’s jacket, that smell, the chill carried in from outside, she said, “Mila isn’t yours.” Still he did not leave.

  Nadia kept talking. Let everyone go deaf together. “I told you I was already pregnant when we met. Can’t you remember? Or have you drunk yourself too stupid to recall?” The other day’s smile was loose on Slava now. “You were a fling,” she said. “Not a very good one. If I were you, I’d be ashamed to show my face in this house.”

  Slava sneered. She used to want to hurt him, then to make him jealous, to cause him regret, but seeing this look gave no satisfaction now. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d be ashamed to show my face in this town.”

  * * *

  ·

  Her father pressed on the front door before locking it. Slush on the floor. Alcohol in the air. Slava was gone.

  “I’m really sorry,” Nadia said again. Her father wouldn’t look at her. He was dressed in his pajamas, dark sweatpants. His mouth made a slit. Disapproval.

  Nadia was vibrating in the silence. If they would just look at her—she was no longer a disobedient child; she had a job at a bank; she walked her daughter daily to preschool in a scenic village. She was not a whore. Not Slava’s, not anyone else’s. She had tried to make of herself someone beyond scandal, beyond shame.

  “Go to sleep,” her father said. Her mother, one hand on the wall, walked back toward their bedroom.

  It had been a mistake to come back. A mistake. Nadia in Palana had been her worst—her most vulnerable—people saw that and took advantage. Chegga had spotted the same thing five years earlier. And yet she had spent her savings on the plane tickets back here.

  All Nadia could do was return to the living room. She loathed herself so much her teeth hurt. She took extra care in closing the room’s door. A strip of light touched Mila, who could not have slept through that, but whose eyes were shut. Awake or not, the little girl did not want to be any further disturbed.

  Nadia put her hand on Mila’s back, which rose and fell in the half-light of the moon. “I’m sorry,” Nadia whispered. Her head ached. She lifted her hand, crawled in beside her daughter, and took out her phone to call Moscow.

  “I want to go home,” Mila said.

  “That’s what I want, too, dove,” Nadia said. “I’m trying to find a home for us.”

  “No,” Mila said. “Home. To Daddy.”

  He’s not your fucking daddy, Nadia almost said. But she was looking at her daughter’s perfect, stubborn face.

  Nadia had gone to bed on this same couch as a child. Her own mother, coming in late some nights to load laundered clothes into the wardrobe, would stand there with her arms full of folded cotton. Always almost speaking, but never opening her mouth. And Nadia, not knowing what else her mother could want to say after days of nagging, would pretend to be asleep. Nadia must have had the same set look then as Mila did now. Cheeks fat with youth, eyebrows tense, and chin set. Pure unwillingness.

  When Nadia got pregnant, years ago, she promised herself she would become better. She had not been and did not know how to start. Now she’d brought Mila to this house, this town, these old grudges, and it was clear they had to leave but she did not actually know where else to go. A city abroad? Where? How would they pay for the move? Another paycheck or two wouldn’t cover the fact that Nadia had no real support. She knew no one off the peninsula. She was still the lonely child, the desperate teenager, who slept in this room with illusions.

  Wherever she moved, she would be the same person. But Mila could grow up to be anyone. Mila could be encouraged by two parents, attend university, become a scientist, find a husband, buy a home, maybe even live in London. Or in the real Switzerland. She could be raised in Kamchatka’s version and move to the other. And wherever Mila ended up in the world, she would know that someone—her mother—loved her most.

  Mila’s eyes were pinched so tight her lashes looked shortened. Nadia navigated to her phone’s contact list. When Nadia spoke again, her words came higher, fainter. “Then let’s go home,” she said.

  Back to Esso. Because all the joy in Nadia’s life came from her daughter. The woman this child would one day be. Between the hard places in Nadia, some part, for Mila, was always open. A pipe thinned from pressure until the flood burst through. A chunk of dark stone worn down, broken off, washed free.

  APRIL

  The men were already at work. Zoya watched them from her kitchen balcony as she smoked. They appeared and disappeared in the window holes of the unfinished concrete building across the street. Four floors below, they looked as small as the fingers on her hand. She still recognized them. Their muddy boots; their black hair shining over the collars of their coveralls; the way they walked, muscular, strange.

  Her husband knocked at the glass of the balcony door and she jumped. “What are you doing out there?” he asked.

  Zoya stabbed out her cigarette. “Nothing.”

  Kolya was knotting his tie. In his police uniform, he always seemed so serious. Different from the person she’d just watched finish a plate of fried eggs. She slid the door shut behind her and came over to touch his clean clothes. Smoothing her palms across his epaulettes, she said, “Handsome man.”

  “All right,” he said, pleased.

  The smell of his toothpaste glittered between them. Zoya raised herself on her toes to kiss him, and Kolya turned his face. “You stink,” he said. She stepped away. Ever since the baby was born, he did not like Zoya smoking. She became less bothered by this criticism when she kept a pack nearby.

  The sky over Petropavlovsk was gray-pink. Kolya had half an hour before his shift started at six. Though Zoya was months into maternity leave, she maintained the habit of waking with him, making his breakfast, and seeing him off. It was as if they were both getting ready for work—as if she, too, would soon walk out into the city.

  Kolya was dressed and leaving. “Good luck today,” she said. After their apartment doors shut behind him, her head cleared, her heart emptied. Sasha, freshly fed, would not wake again for two more hours. This was Zoya’s time now.

  This was theirs.

  Zoya was not headed for the balcony just yet—she could credit herself with that much patience. Instead she washed her husband’s breakfast dishes. Then she set the electric kettle, filled her teacup, and sat down with her phone, scrolling through pictures of other people’s pets and weddings and vacations. One of her coworkers had posted about a route for ecotourists through icy central Kamchatka.

  Zoya put the phone down. She had not left her neighborhood since Sasha’s birth. Across the table, the kitchen wallpaper showed overlapping palm leaves.

  She shook out another cigarette and slid open the door.

  The men below were finished with their site walk-through. They had come from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, to gather in the doorframe across her street. Their building was a concrete husk built level by level by their gloved hands. They had ripped up the sidewalk around the structure and erected scaffolding. At the edge of the lot, they had made a shack from scrap wood with a roof of corrugated metal. Zoya wanted to see inside. Their five-man crew ducked in there every few hours: when they all arrived, to break for tea, for lunch, to rest, and when the day was done. On the evenings her husband worked late, Zoya could catch them holding the shack’s door open and filing out in street clothes. The last man would close the door behind him. The shack, the building, and she would all be left waiting for them to come back tomorrow.

  She took another drag on her cigarette. The men broke away from each other. Their generator coughed, whirred.

  The air on her arms was fresh and cold. The streets below were zebra-striped with melting snow. Four kilometers downhill, the city center spread out, its buildings dark, parking lots empty, ship repair yard motionless. Early last fall, before Zoya’s leave started, she stood here watching the flashing blue lights of em
ergency vehicles. She’d imagined Kolya finding the Golosovskaya sisters on those far cliffs. He would be celebrated on television and get promoted to senior lieutenant, maybe captain. At work, her colleagues would gather around her for all the details. Then the blue lights turned off, the snow fell, the searches stopped, and Sasha was born.

  These days, Zoya turned her thoughts to nearer fantasies. The men below lugged buckets of mixed concrete. They used a crane last month to stack slabs for floors, walls, and ceilings. Now they were tending to details—pouring staircases, ripping out support frames. They bent their necks in concentration as they moved. Looking down at them, Zoya bent her neck the same way.

  The sun shone white above the distant water. Tossing the butt over the balcony railing, Zoya went back inside, where she washed her hands and smelled them. The smoke hung on her skin—so what? It flavored her. She brushed her teeth, applied perfume, and stroked on makeup as carefully as she used to on those mornings before she left for class or work. Foundation, concealer, bronzer, brow pencil. She ran texturizer through her hair and braided it into a yellow fishtail. Above the collar of her robe, she rose beautiful as a newlywed.

  Until November, Zoya would have gotten dressed, driven to the park office, greeted her colleagues in ecological education, and started the day. An inspector might stop by, bragging of poachers apprehended. A movie producer might call from Germany for a permit to film in protected territory. The park director might announce a team visit to a far base, so all of them, research and protection and education and tourism, would have to shut off their computers and hurry to their cars and drive to the airfield, where they’d board a helicopter bound for the Valley of the Geysers or Kronotskoye Lake.

  Now, instead, Zoya took her flawless face into the kitchen to wipe the counters clean. She reorganized the row of shoes in the foyer. When Sasha woke up crying, surprised all over again at the world in front of her eyes, Zoya nursed her. “How’d you sleep?” Zoya asked. “Any nightmares?” Sasha’s tiny mouth worked against Zoya to tug milk forward. The leaves printed on the kitchen walls were frozen tropical.