At eleven o’clock Zoya called her husband. He did not pick up. With the permission that gave her, Zoya called Tatyana Yurievna on the second floor to ask if she could watch Sasha—“I’ll be quick,” Zoya told her. “No more than an hour.” Groceries, Zoya explained, but it did not matter. Tatyana Yurievna loved the baby. The neighbor made up games with spoons and songs and measuring cups, and when she came over to babysit, which was often, three or four times a week, she never minded if Zoya took too long to wend her way back home.
The day cracked open. Zoya rushed to dress—satin button-down, smooth belt, dark jeans, and tall heeled boots—and stood by the door to wait. Her lungs expanded to breathe the air outside. The baby began to cry. Zoya tugged off her boots, unbuttoned her blouse, and lifted Sasha to feed. Sasha’s head rested against Zoya’s satin sleeve. Sasha had Zoya’s same eyes: pale, glacial. The blank eyes of a drowned girl. Zoya kissed her daughter on the forehead to undo those thoughts.
The knock. “There’s my darling,” Tatyana Yurievna cooed when Zoya opened the doors.
“An hour,” Zoya promised. She pulled her boots back on and stepped out the door.
She could do anything now—anything. She emerged from her apartment building into the cool light. Her boots were snug around her calves. Her skin was tight, too, with expectation. Across the street, the building hid the workers. Zoya walked forward to line up with the hole of its doorway. Then she stopped to take out a cigarette. Only a minute outside, and her fingers were already cold, stiff. She flicked her lighter, but the flame did not catch.
The building hummed with machines inside. Zoya was too early. Prickling with wasted anticipation, she put the cigarette back in its pack. The men were not yet on break.
So it was the grocery store. Zoya went there flat and frustrated. After she paid, she checked the time—still a few minutes before noon. Instead, then, of turning left out of the store and returning to her apartment, she headed for the end of the block. A set of marble stairs brought her into the courtyard of the city church, which shone, gold-domed, like new money. She chose a bench, took out her phone, and navigated to the profile of the girl she met at New Year’s who lived in St. Petersburg.
At that holiday rental house, Zoya’s husband actually felt sorry for the girl, who had seemed serious, even standoffish, refused the men, and left in the morning without saying goodbye. “There’s the old maid you could’ve been if you never met me,” Kolya whispered into Zoya’s ear. Nine days later, Zoya went into labor.
The world-traveling old maid. Her stomach flat, her orange bikini. Locking the phone, Zoya shut her eyes.
She could live another life. It wasn’t too late. If she boarded the bus to the park office, she would make it there in time to surprise them all in the middle of their lunches. The building would smell like it always had, that mix of paper, rags, and bleach. The eco-education girls would kiss her cheeks and the park director would come over to squeeze her hands. They might say, Zoyka! What perfect timing. We’ve got an extra spot for you on today’s trip. A flight over the Klyuchevskaya stratovolcano—a helicopter to South Kamchatka Sanctuary. Her coworkers would treat Zoya just as they did when she was newly graduated, a tour leader through the park’s visitor center. When she was young and unburdened.
But there wasn’t really time to get to the office and back this afternoon, or any. They would ask her for stories, for pictures of the baby. And what did Zoya have to show, beyond her infant’s blank expression? Almost half a year spent indoors. What could she say to them?
So instead she could choose something solitary. Go down to the city center, buy a sausage from one of the stands by the bay, and sit to eat her food on the shore. The water steady, the mountains beyond layered in dark blue, light blue, white. Looking like cut paper. Rocks pressing under her heels. She used to loiter there when she was a schoolgirl. She and her friends stayed late, drank on the beach, watched the horizon flatten, saw the night ships pass…But what if her husband drove by and saw her?
She could…why didn’t she tell Tatyana Yurievna that she’d be gone three hours? An hour was not enough. Neither was a day or a week. Zoya could move to St. Petersburg, too. She could get away from this. She could leave.
But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t, really. Her chest tingled with milk letting down. She couldn’t.
She exhaled fog. When she first moved to this apartment, the church was shut up in scaffolding. This courtyard was a stretch of gravel, no trees. Zoya was nineteen, and her mother’s new man bought this place for Zoya so he and her mother could have their privacy. That was before Zoya met Kolya, before they fixed up the apartment; the wallpaper was stained, one stove burner did not work, the washing machine shook so hard that it jostled its plug from the outlet halfway through a cycle. And Zoya loved it. Some mornings before she left for class, she walked circles around the bedrooms, just looking. Anything seemed possible.
Things were different now. Zoya checked the time on her phone and picked up the groceries.
As soon as she got to the bottom of the courtyard stairs, she saw the workers. They stood together on boards over wet earth and sipped steaming cups of tea. Oh—her stomach twisted. These were the few minutes of their lunch break. She came toward them slowly, measuring out her steps to make the walk last, and as she approached, they broke off their conversation. To watch.
One said, “Hello, miss,” in that half-swallowed way he always did. His accent made the greeting dirty.
A cord of tension extended from Zoya’s eyes, her sinuses, the back of her throat, through her body, out her ribs, to the men. So close. The line was taut. She swallowed. “Hello,” she said to the street ahead of her. She was almost past them now. The men said nothing in return. She kept her head up, tightened her fingers around the grocery bag, and let herself in the door of her apartment building.
The hall was cold and dark and left her alone again. If some neighbor brushed past her right now, she would thrum. Only two words—and still the migrants did this to her.
The locked joints of her knees. Her neck tense, her jaw hard. A thousand things to say behind her teeth. She pressed her back to the wall and listened to her heart pound them out: I want you, it said in the dark. There was no one around to hear.
Climbing the stairs, Zoya pressed herself down, holding fingers on her fantasies so they settled. Be still. Tatyana Yurievna met her at the apartment door with the baby in her arms. “We knew you were coming home, didn’t we, Sashenka? We saw you from the window.”
Zoya kept her face down as she pulled off her boots. “Is that right?” She took the bag into the kitchen. They followed her.
“Did those men say something to you?” Tatyana Yurievna asked.
Zoya was already putting the food away. Hidden behind the refrigerator door, she said, “Who? No.”
“The migrants. It’s dangerous. Nobody keeps an eye on them,” Tatyana Yurievna said. “I heard on the news this morning that the police found a body in the bay.”
Zoya shut the door to look at her neighbor. “One of the Golosovskaya sisters?” The lights, the boats, a child’s slack limbs bumping along stones.
“They said it was probably an adult. But who knows? I get my information from other sources.” Tatyana Yurievna winked. Zoya returned to her groceries. “What did Kolya tell you? Do they have any suspects?”
“I didn’t know the searches were back on,” Zoya said. “He didn’t tell me anything.”
“Because you’re busy with this little angel.” Tatyana Yurievna’s voice rose and fell as she bounced Sasha. “I’ll ask him myself. Those men outside, I wonder…any one of them could have taken those sisters. You’re too young to remember what it was like before the collapse. It’s only after Kamchatka opened to outsiders that we started to see any crime.”
“They’re just construction workers,” Zoya said. “Not child molesters.”
&nbs
p; “We don’t know who or what they are. Why would someone come to a different country if he didn’t have something to get away from in the last? You be careful, Zoyka. Who knows what they might do to a girl like you?”
Her back to her neighbor, Zoya rinsed the vegetables. She, too, believed in the migrants’ power—not the power to steal children, but the power to take a woman, to transform her, to turn her life that was growing smaller all the time into an existence that was dark and mighty.
That they came here from somewhere else only made Zoya hungrier. The workers’ dirtiness, their ignorance. That they hardly spoke. The way, when she was in school, they stood over her on the bus and looked down. Her neighbor was right: this was not their country. They had nothing to lose. Zoya wanted to enter that little cabin, which must smell like sweat, mud, gasoline. A white woman’s picture would be stapled to its wall, and she would be the white woman in its center. She needed to find out what these men might do to a girl like her. She craved that knowledge; her hands, her mouth, wanted it like they wanted cigarettes.
Tatyana Yurievna talked on. Zoya took cheese, cucumber, and tomatoes from the fridge, sliced them up, and set out a platter. She poured them both cups of tea while Tatyana Yurievna, holding Sasha on her lap with one arm, picked up a bite. “At least we have Kolya here to protect us. Zoyka, you don’t know this, but our building used to be full of humble people like us. Real Russians. The whole nation was. No one was a stranger. We were united by our common ideals, we believed in greatness. That was a different era, wasn’t it? A better time.” The older woman looked down at the food as she spoke. Her eyebrows were thin, her mouth loose, her bottom teeth lined with stains like the shore when the tide goes out. The baby chewed on her fingers. Tatyana Yurievna would talk about the way things were until her stomach was full, then she would ask Zoya about Kolya, compliment his service, squeeze the baby one last time, and return to her own floor. Three times a week and sometimes four. This was Zoya’s life.
Zoya took a slice of cucumber. When she bit, freshness burst across her tongue.
The afternoon grew late before Zoya was alone again. Sasha lay in her crib. In the palm-leaf kitchen, Zoya scrubbed two beef tongues clean and slid them into boiling water. Garlic, onions, sugar, celery. She covered the pot. While the meat simmered, she chopped columns of carrots. The windows steamed over. She was a universe away from the park territory, its rainbow rivers, its puffing fumaroles. They used to go out there in the summer when the lakes churned with salmon. Bears gutted fish and scattered shining red roe across the ground. She wouldn’t see such dangerous beauty again for years.
She let her mind wander. It wandered downstairs.
The baby at rest. The food on the stove. The air in the apartment sticky with starch and the walls beading. Hurrying out of her building, she’ll find empty landings on every floor. The railing under her fingers will be rough from layers of chipped paint, blue and gray and yellow. She will press the button, release her building’s front door, and go out into the sun.
An afternoon washed in greenish light, the whole city like a bud about to open. A hundred meters away, beyond the church, traffic will rush by, but no cars will turn down their street. As she comes closer to the building, the workers will lift their chins. They will bring her into the shack. They will take her out of her old body. They will make her new.
Zoya peeled the tongues, salted the vegetables, dressed the salad, sliced the bread. When Sasha woke up, Zoya fed the baby in the kitchen while skimming through the photo feed on her phone. Kolya was supposed to be back at half past five. Fifteen minutes past that, with no Kolya in sight, their daughter began crying. Baby on her shoulder, Zoya walked a loop through the apartment: from Sasha’s room, wallpapered with ducks, to the master bedroom with its shining television screen, into the bathroom, out again, a hundred thousand times.
Her husband unlocked the doors at ten to seven. Kolya had people with him—two other officers and one of the female assistants. Thudding feet, happy talk. “Look how big she is,” the assistant cried as soon as she saw the baby in Zoya’s arms. Zoya said hello. She was flayed. How pathetic she must look, with the table set, the meat on the stove, her baby fussy, and her whole day displayed for ridicule. Kolya had brought three guests home to see how Zoya waited for him like she had nothing else to live for. Zoya could have run away today. They didn’t know. She could have flown over a volcano. She could have moved to St. Petersburg.
Kolya shook off his jacket. When the assistant held out her hands, Zoya, shiny-eyed with shame, put the baby in them. Then Zoya slid back into the kitchen and whisked the dinner plates away.
Before they finished lining up their boots in the hall, Zoya took out a bottle, five shot glasses, and the platter of food from this afternoon’s tea. “What a hostess!” her husband said when he saw. She held up her face to be kissed. This time she could smell him, a sharp, sweet booziness. “Pour us a round, my queen,” he said, and she did.
“Queen,” one of the men said, “do you know what your king accomplished today?” The other man snickered. “He earned himself a letter of reprimand.”
“Ah, Fedya, you ruin a woman’s mood that way,” the assistant said. “Don’t tell her such things.” In her uniformed arms, the baby squirmed.
Zoya faced her husband. “What happened?”
He smiled at her. His collar was less crisp than it had been when he left. “They pulled a body from the bay this morning. Yevgeny Pavlovich congratulated us for finding one of the Golosovskaya girls. I told him, Sir, if finding a corpse that size makes you hopeful, just wait, we’ll drag in a sea lion.”
The assistant sat up straighter to imitate the major general’s voice. “Bodies swell in water. Didn’t you know?” Fedya and the other man laughed.
“So I heard. Swell to a meter taller than where they started,” Kolya said. “Swell enough to turn from a twelve-year-old girl to a middle-aged fisherman.”
“You can’t talk that way to your supervisor,” Zoya said. “Even if he’s wrong, you should work with him, respect him…”
The guests were already picking up their drinks. “A toast to our major general,” the assistant said, one hand supporting the baby and the other around a glass. “And to you, Kolya. Your many accomplishments in this career.”
Kolya passed Zoya a shot. “To my success,” he said to her. His voice was rough. Everyone drank; Zoya, too, vodka singing in her throat.
“One day, Kol,” Fedya said, “I’ll write you a letter of commendation.” He collected their glasses on the kitchen table and poured a second round. “You’re right. Dragging the bay is pointless. The bodies of those girls are floating off Fiji by now.”
“Cheers to that,” the other officer said.
Zoya shook her head. “That’s no good toast.”
Kolya took his glass anyway, clinked it, tossed the alcohol back. He wiped his mouth. “Pointless, yes, but only because the sisters didn’t drown. They were taken.”
“This again,” the assistant said. “Don’t interrupt,” said the other officer, and the assistant said, “Dima!”
“They were absolutely taken,” Zoya said. Her husband nodded. The baby whimpered. “There was a witness.”
Fedya’s face was soft and scornful. “You call her a witness?”
“She saw something,” Zoya said. Her husband used to come home energized about this case, excited. Zoya remembered: two kids, a big guy, and a shiny dark car, he reported the witness saying. That, and I want his car-wash tips.
“They were taken by someone off the peninsula,” Kolya continued. “That’s why we haven’t uncovered any trace of them, dead or alive. They’re not hidden in a garage or buried in the woods or floating in the bay. They’re gone. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell the major general for months now.”
Fedya took up the bottle again to refill their glasses. The vodka glugged. “If tha
t’s so, if they were killed somewhere on the mainland, then what does it matter? Let this drowned body be called one of the girls. Listen to your wife. Stop arguing with your superiors. Otherwise you’ll wind up where you did in the fall—”
“Enough,” Kolya said. The assistant giggled at the end of the table.
“Looking at Moscow got you nothing but embarrassment,” Fedya said. “In the future, you’ll be wiser to keep any ideas to yourself.”
“Hear that?” Dima said, leaning over to pinch the assistant’s slim waist. His hand bumped Sasha’s head and the baby howled.
Kolya’s mood was darkening. Zoya waved away her glass. “Is that what you’re going to write in my letter of commendation?” Kolya asked. “How good I’ll be at shutting up?”
“What else would I write about?” Fedya said. “Your failure to find an imaginary kidnapper? Your years of monitoring the speeds on city boulevards?”
Sasha was really worked up now. Kolya was raising his voice. Zoya took the baby from the assistant, who smiled as if they knew each other well, and excused herself into the bedroom.
The baby didn’t want to eat, so Zoya walked her until the girl’s unhappy mouth relaxed again. With talk like this, Kolya’s side of the bed was sure to stay empty past midnight. Zoya set down Sasha on the orange duvet and lay beside her. On her stomach, the baby lifted her head, arms, and legs, paddling through the air but going nowhere.
“That’s not how you crawl,” Zoya said. Sasha went on. Zoya watched her fat limbs work. After a minute, the baby looked wide-eyed at her. Zoya put her hand on her daughter’s back, where her palm fit warm in that arch. “Sasha,” she said. “Sashenka. I wish you could talk to me.”
The sisters were taken. Their bodies could be somewhere near. Before the baby, Kolya would talk to her about his work, but since Sasha’s birth, Zoya seemed to have lost her curiosity, lost nearly all her appetites. She used to have theories about the girls for her husband: the man that abducted them drove them west, to the villages on the coast of the Okhotsk, and kept them alive in his root cellar. He lived too far from his neighbors for anyone to notice. His car wasn’t on the footage from gas station surveillance cameras because he’d carried fuel in his trunk. Those theories had disintegrated from disuse, and now all Zoya kept were images: a shining car, a round face, a floating child. Picturing those things gave her no relief.
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