Disappearing Earth

by Julia Phillips

  “You know, you can be a real bitch,” Katya said. Her eyes were shadowed. Oksana scoffed. “Truly,” Katya said. “We came out tonight to help you. I know you’re upset, but if you would just look outside yourself, you would see that we’re here trying.”

  “What fine help,” Oksana said. “Should I be grateful that your boyfriend murdered my dog?”

  Katya shifted her car into gear. The engine got louder. “Malysh is probably upstairs. But you want to be alone, we’ll leave you alone. I can’t imagine how I hung around this long anyway.”

  “I’ll be alone,” Oksana said. “You’ve both made sure of that. You’re right. Thank you.”

  The apartment building’s stairwell was dark. The landing was empty. Oksana’s security door jutted forward.

  She slipped inside her double doors and called, “Malysh?” He did not come.

  Oksana pressed her hands to her chest, the phone hard against her ribs as punishment. One of her doors bent onto the landing and the other hung into her home. Outside them, the building slept. In her living room, fists pressed to skin, Oksana blamed herself. Sloppy. As deliberate as she had tried to be all these years, she was sloppy, and this was the consequence. She had closed her eyes to the world around her. Walked happily past a murderer of children. Put all of herself into an animal that ran…

  If only Malysh had jumped that day on the mountain. Oksana should have thrown the stick for the dog herself. In August, in the very first few hours of police questioning, the missing girls’ mother had come to the station to talk to Oksana. Only now, months after that desperate conversation with her, did Oksana appreciate why. It hurts too much to break your own heart out of stupidity, to leave a door unlocked or a child untended and return to discover that whatever you value most has disappeared. No. You want to be intentional about the destruction. Be a witness. You want to watch how your life will shatter.

  JUNE

  A forest takes seventy years to recover after a fire. Out the car window, black streaked across the hills that guided Marina away from home. Limbless trunks rose from charred earth. In the front seats, Eva and Petya argued over the ending of an Australian horror movie. Eva was winning, speaking with more conviction; Petya kept falling silent as he navigated around potholes in the road. The next time he downshifted, Eva turned in her seat to make her case to Marina. “The end of it is a fantasy, like a dream sequence, don’t you agree?”

  “I didn’t see the movie,” Marina said.

  Eva pursed her lips. “From what you heard us describe, though. Doesn’t it seem most likely that it’s a fantasy?”

  Marina shook her head. “I don’t know.” That familiar pressure began to come down on her chest.

  Petya, bringing the car back up to speed, glanced at his wife. “She hasn’t seen it. Leave her alone.” Eva blew out her breath and muttered a word. “She’s fine,” Petya said. His eyes flicked up in the rearview mirror. Marina looked again toward the window. Above them, the sky was enormous, bloated with clouds. The long tracks of dead forest looked like thousands of bones pushed up from their graves.

  The weight dropped hard on her chest. Marina could not breathe. She put her head back, folded her hands in her lap, and focused on shutting off the part of her mind that insisted on leading her toward panic. The path was simple: horror movies, petrified wood, bones. Graves. Murderers.

  One hand came up to press on her sternum. Her heart hurt. If Marina could peel off her left breast, crack back her ribs, and grip that muscular organ to settle it, she would. She started having these attacks last August, after her daughters disappeared. A doctor gave her tablets to relieve the anxiety. Those did not help. No prescription brought her children home.

  Marina was drowning in the backseat of her friends’ car. Pulling air in through her nose, she concentrated on benign knowledge instead. Seventy years for full regrowth. Where did she learn that? In childhood…her grandfather taught her, probably. Her family spent weekends at her grandparents’ dacha when she was a girl. He showed her the difference between common and creeping juniper, how to apply a lime wash to an orchard, and the best time to tap a birch for its juice.

  Her lungs inflated again. As the car bumped along, Marina counted facts. What else did she know about trees? About the formation of hills? Though now a propagandist by necessity, she was a journalist by training, and she had always had a head for information. They were on kilometer 250 of 310 along the pitted road toward Esso. Another hour and a half would pass before they reached the campground. The holiday they headed toward might draw only a few hundred people; its organizers had already transmitted a press release to the party newspaper and there was no need for on-the-ground reporting, but Marina’s editor, who was soft, sensitive, encouraged her toward any opportunity to leave the city. As soon as Marina mentioned Eva and Petya’s invitation, he insisted she attend to cover the event. When, toward the end of last week, she said she was rethinking the trip, he called her into his office and shut the door. “You have to go,” he told her. Again, more firmly, with his shoulders hunched forward so he could catch her eye: “You have to.” Not for the story, she knew, but for the comfort of the rest of the office. He wanted her to leave in grief but come back different.

  The road north followed the path of a blaze so old Marina’s grandparents might have heard news break about it. That was another fact. The trees still looked like death to her.

  “Are you all right back there?” Eva called over the seat. “Are you hungry? Are you bored?”

  Marina leaned forward. The seat belt tugged against her strained ribs. “I’m fine.”

  “Well, I have to get out,” Eva said. She spoke sideways—maybe Marina was not meant to hear. Petya checked his watch and guided the car to the side of the road, so Eva, slamming the door behind her, could climb down off the gravel shoulder. Eva’s ponytail bobbed as she unbuttoned her pants and crouched. Marina looked out the other window. The trees on that side were thick, deep, damp-looking. Old growth.

  She remembered taking her girls for an early hike. In a younger forest, on a warmer day, in a neighborhood at the southern end of Petropavlovsk. Sophia so small, then, that Marina carried her most of the way in a backpack. That sweet load on Marina’s spine. Sophia’s fingers brushed Marina’s bare arms, and Alyona pulled leaves off the shrubs they passed. Alyona was five years old, at the height of her obsession with carrots—she ate nothing but—and Marina brought a plastic bag full of them, washed and peeled and prepared, for her daughter to picnic on. The three of them climbed along a stream bank, with the sun coming through the trees in strips and ribbons. The sound of Alyona’s crunching, the trickle of fresh water, the steady rush of Sophia’s breath behind Marina’s ear.

  Marina pressed her palm to her chest. Her inhalations got shallower. Petya was doing her the kindness of pretending he did not hear.

  The passenger door opened and the car chimed in greeting. “Thanks, my joy,” Eva said. She opened the glove compartment, pulled out a sanitizing wipe, and leaned over to kiss her husband on the cheek. The car bloomed with the smell of rubbing alcohol.

  When they were another fifteen kilometers along, rain started, falling in little patters at first, then faster, harder. Up front, Eva was talking again about a woman at the campsite she wanted Marina to meet. Marina checked her phone. No service. The police had her parents’ numbers on file, so in case anything developed in the city, they would be able to contact her family, but…Marina hated leaving cell service. These interruptions happened so often—at the ocean, at the dacha, on one stretch of the road between the city and the airport. During the first months the girls were gone, Marina went nowhere that risked disconnection. She drove from home to work, work to home, with her cell phone clutched in one hand on top of the steering wheel.

  When she called the police major general to say she was considering traveling to this campground for the weekend, he, too, pushed her
toward the trip. “Take a vacation,” he told her.

  “It’s for work,” she said.

  “Well, take some extra time for yourself.” His voice dropped. “Marina Alexandrovna, our investigation is no longer active.”

  Listening, Marina rolled her chair away from her desk and bent over her knees. “I understand that. But if—”

  “We will get in touch right away if any new information comes in. Of course we hope for a lead.” Marina could not breathe then, either. “But take your trip. Live your life. Now is the time to move forward.”

  He dared to mention hoping for a lead, after she had dedicated months to combing through city news coverage, calling scattered village police stations to ask after unsolved kidnappings, tracking down the prison records of men convicted of sex crimes against minors, begging superiors in the party to bring this case to the attention of Moscow. The major general said such things to make her doubt they had ever spent a minute looking for her daughters. With him in charge, no wonder the girls had not come back, Marina thought and wanted to suffocate.

  “It better clear up,” Eva said. Her narrow face tipped toward the windshield. “Otherwise setting up the tent will be a nightmare.”

  “It’ll pass,” Petya said. Marina tucked her phone back in her bag. Drops tracked across her window. She thought about surface tension, chemical composition, school science experiments. Nothing else. No recent memories.

  By the time they pulled up to the fence bordering the campground, the rain had stopped. The stretch of wet, shining grass in front of their car was lined by empty booths. A stage in the middle of the clearing bore a banner: WE WELCOME VISITORS TO THIS TRADITIONAL FESTIVAL IN CELEBRATION OF THE REGION’S CULTURAL MINORITIES. HAPPY NEW YEAR—NURGENEK.

  “Happy New Year,” Marina said. It sounded odd in June.

  “The party’s not until tomorrow,” said Eva. Petya slammed his door on his way to grab their things from the trunk.

  Arms full of supplies, they crossed the clearing on a dirt path that took them into the forest. They heard people talking, smelled cooked meat. An ATV was parked on the path ahead of them; when they squeezed past the vehicle, they found thirty people sharing dinner around tables in the open air.

  “That’s her,” Eva whispered to Marina, and stepped forward. “Alla Innokentevna.” A gray-haired woman in the center of the group glanced up. “It’s so good to see you again.”

  The woman put down her fork and beckoned them. Her lips pursed as Eva approached. “Don’t you usually come earlier?”

  “We do. This year we brought a friend”—Eva looked behind for Marina—“a journalist. She had to work yesterday so we couldn’t leave until this morning.”

  Marina nodded at the group. Alla Innokentevna was smiling now. “A journalist. In the city? What newspaper?”

  “United Russia’s,” Marina said.

  “We sent you a press release,” Alla Innokentevna said.

  Marina said, “I know.” Eva broke in: “When we described the holiday to her, she said she had to experience it for herself. She hasn’t been up north for years. And before she worked for the party, she covered all sorts of subjects. In 2003 she won the Kamchatka Regional Prize for her reporting.”

  Petya glanced at Marina. “In 2002,” Marina mouthed. He winked.

  “Have you eaten dinner?” Alla Innokentevna asked. “No? You can set up by the big yurt.” She gestured toward the trees. “Come back afterward and we’ll have plates for you.” The other event organizers and the young members of visiting dance troupes fell back into their own conversations.

  Eva turned around, grinning. Her face shone in the blue evening. She looked ready to celebrate someone else’s new year.

  They put up the tent on soaked ground. Water seeped through the knees of Marina’s pants while she held the tent ties in her fists and waited for Eva and Petya to finish arguing over where to put the stakes. When they got back to the tables, three dishes of boiled meat and buttered rice waited. Some of the dancers had left, but Alla Innokentevna still sat. The organizer waited until Marina took her first bite to start talking. “You’re going to cover the holiday for your paper?”

  Marina nodded. The meat was soft against her teeth. A few meters away, two teenagers washed dishes in a basin of soapy water.

  “I run the cultural center here. You arrived late,” Alla Innokentevna said. “We had a concert this afternoon.”

  Marina swallowed her mouthful. “I’m sorry we missed it.”

  “Most people come tomorrow, anyway. It’s all right,” Alla Innokentevna said. Her glasses turned opaque as they caught the little light left in the sky. “What did you win your reporting award for?”

  “A series on poaching. Salmon poaching in the southern lakes.”

  Alla Innokentevna lifted her chin. The reflections slid away, turning her glasses back to transparency. “Dangerous work.”

  “Yes,” Marina said. It had been. In those years, poaching was organized crime; poachers stripped rivers of their entire salmon runs, tanks of caviar surfaced for illegal sale, bears and eagles starved to death throughout the peninsula, international environmental groups dumped billions of rubles into Kamchatka’s economy to fight the black market. Marina had been there on the water. Rowing boats out at night, no flashlights, no talking. The rangers holding rifles in the seats beside her. An emergency radio resting heavy at their feet, and her lips dry, her blood racing. Ripples off the oars. Frogs called back and forth. As they steered closer to the poaching teams, belly-up fish floated past, each one slit from gills to anus, each body gleaming from the moon.

  She left investigative work to go on maternity leave. By the time Alyona took her first steps, Marina no longer missed the risk; she wanted to stay far away from night raids, gutted creatures, men who carried weapons. After Sophia was born and the girls’ father left, Marina found a different way to support a family. She wrote lies for the party, which paid the bills. For a while, she kept their household safe and happy and whole.

  Marina got up. She gave her plate to the dishwashing teenagers, took a rinsed mug from the stack, and fixed herself tea. The hot water came from a kettle sitting on coals. The leftover meat, fat congealing, was in a stockpot on the ground. Back at the table, Eva was telling Alla Innokentevna about their last year in the city. Marina checked her phone again. The conversation at the table quieted. When she looked up, Alla Innokentevna was staring at her, and Marina knew Eva had told the woman that her daughters were gone.

  Eva kept trying to help. Last week making travel plans, and again this afternoon in the car, she had told Marina that this head organizer had a missing child, too. Eva talked about that fact as if Marina and Alla Innokentevna had something in common, but Alla Innokentevna’s daughter was already a high school graduate when she vanished from Esso. Her name never appeared in public records. The girl ran away from home, Eva said. There was no comparison.

  Marina poured out the rest of her tea and balanced the mug on the pile of dirty dishes. “Thank you,” she told the teenagers, both of whom had women’s hips already. Marina returned to the table to tell Eva and Petya that she was exhausted. She was headed to bed.

  “Outhouses are down the path. The river is straight back. You can wash yourself there,” Alla Innokentevna said. The organizer’s voice had not changed—usually people’s voices changed after they found out—but the quality of her focus had. She turned a pure beam of attention on Marina. For nearly eleven months already, people had been watching Marina, expecting details, begging for more. They wanted to know what went wrong with her family. They enjoyed feeling sorry for her once they heard.

  The tent rustled as Marina crawled in and unrolled her sleeping bag against one wall. The trees above her made restless noises. Their branches threw black lines across the tent’s gray dome.

  A school dance troupe must be staying in the yurt beside her
. Young voices floated through the air. Someone thudded on a drum, and someone else laughed, too loudly. Of Marina’s two girls, Sophia had been the dancer. Her skinny limbs…even as a baby, she was long-legged. Whenever the culture channel was on the TV at home, Sophia imitated the ballerinas. Raised her arms, sharp elbows, and bent one knee. Lifted her face, with its high eyebrows and thin, innocent lips.

  Marina curled her fingers over her sternum. She turned her face toward the plastic wall. She could not help thinking of them, she could not, except as soon as she did, she slipped too far into fantasy—pictured them coming back, both of them intact, frightened but alive. Their hair a little longer than when she saw them last. She imagined them returning in the same clothes. The three of them would huddle together, and Marina would run her hands over their backs, their worn shirts. She would press her mouth to their foreheads. Her girls would stay safe with her forever.

  Or her imagination slid the other way. Finding their bodies instead.

  Move forward, the major general had told her. Live. Marina would not survive another year if she pictured these things. Her pulse was deafening. The images choked her. Her hand was a claw under her neck, and she did not think about their little necks, their bodies, the stranger’s hands that touched them, her daughters, she would not. She shut her eyes and screamed in silence at herself to calm down.

  Calm down. Count something and calm down.

  The sleeping bag she lay in was rated to zero degrees. The tent belonged to Petya and Eva, and had space to sleep four. In childhood, Marina camped in humbler conditions: her father’s army tent, made of canvas and rope. Her father set their tent up in a section of the garden behind her grandparents’ house. Marina cataloged the smells of those summer nights. Early grass. Fresh dirt. The bitter leaves of tomato plants.

  The drum sounded again over her heartbeat. Leaves rustled. In the darkness behind her eyelids, Marina sorted through a lifetime of trivia.