Disappearing Earth

by Julia Phillips

  She breathed normally by the time Eva’s and Petya’s footsteps crunched outside. The tent door unzipped. They crawled in clumsily, shushing each other, and the heavy scent of liquor followed. Eva giggled a little. Marina listened to them slide over their sleeping bags, fuss with zippers and Velcro. Petya whispered something. “She’s sleeping,” Eva said. He was quiet. There came the wet noises of one, then two, kisses, before they lay down.

  In the morning Marina left the tent before them. The sun, up for barely an hour, blurred yellow in the mist above the tree line. Yesterday’s rain was rising from the ground. The wet settled cold on Marina’s skin. Down at the river, she spat toothpaste foam into the water and watched it churn away. She remembered the body the police had recovered from the city’s bay in April—their many mistakes and misidentifications—they had called her to the coroner, although they knew it wasn’t right. They knew. They only wanted her to release them from their duties. Spiderwebs at her feet were decorated with water droplets. Farther into the forest, birds sang.

  On her way from the outhouse, she again passed the tables, now set up with stacks of paper napkins for breakfast. Alla Innokentevna, standing with two other women by the cooking fire, waved and called, “Join us.”

  Marina wrapped her plastic sandwich bag more tightly around her toothbrush. “It’s all right. We brought food. I don’t want to intrude.”

  “You’re not intruding. I’m inviting you.”

  After a moment, Marina stepped off the path. Alla Innokentevna nodded and turned back to her cooks.

  Marina let her fingers trail along the plank tabletops as she approached their little group. Flakes of ash, caught by the wet air, floated toward her. One of the cooks held out a plastic mug. “Take it,” the cook said, and Marina hurried to do so. A tea bag was already inside. The cook said, “Here,” and poured water from the blackened kettle. “How’d you sleep?”

  Both this cook and Alla Innokentevna had that bouncing, northern way of speaking. “Fine,” Marina said. The cook turned her attention back to the meal—rice floating in milk—but Alla Innokentevna faced Marina. Soon, the organizer would start to ask questions.

  “It’s lovely here,” Marina said, to stop her.

  “You don’t come up this way too often?”

  “No. I can’t. I have work.”

  “We all have work,” Alla Innokentevna said. She waved one hand, and ash fluttered in her wake. “In any case, you’re here now.”

  Marina slid her palms around her mug, which was hot enough to light up the tender skin. The rest of Marina’s body was cool, wary. Rice swam through the milk as one cook stirred the pot.

  “My son and one of my daughters will be here today,” Alla Innokentevna said. A mention of children. Finally the organizer was coming to her point.

  “Good morning,” Eva called from the path behind them. Marina turned to see her friend wave. Eva’s face was fresh from being washed.

  “Did you sleep well?” Alla Innokentevna called back.

  Eva came over. Drops of river water were suspended on her jaw. “My husband’s just getting up. He’s not a morning person,” she told the group. “Unlike some of us.” She nudged Marina. The cooks ignored the conversation now. Eva drove talk toward the day’s events, then the recent construction on the campground—Alla Innokentevna had installed a sauna with a wood-burning stove—and then incidents from around the peninsula. Global complaints: the country’s downgraded bond credit rating, the interventions in Ukraine. There was always some new catastrophe to discuss.

  Marina sipped her tea. The taste was bitter. The bag had steeped too long.

  Once Petya joined them, Marina left the couple to eat together, with their spoons resting in half-full bowls of porridge and their knees touching under the table. She took her time around the camp. A pen and notepad were in her jacket pockets in case the need for any award-winning journalism arose. In the woods, away from the first clearing, surprises were hidden: the sauna, a shack stocked full of canned food, a small yurt. Traces of conversation came from the eating area. Music played in the distance. Farther into the trees, Marina found a little house on stilts—a granary. Notched logs made a ladder from the ground to its door. She climbed up.

  On her back on the planks, she watched dust drift from the bunches of dried grass that insulated the granary’s roof. She was close enough to the river to hear water rushing. What kind of place was this? Meant to store food, obviously, but during what time, and for whom? If a grounds tour was offered later, Marina should take it. She knew too little about Kamchatka’s north. Native culture was not taught in school when she grew up. There was a little more of that local history in today’s lessons…Alyona would probably know.

  The girls had now missed an entire school year. If they came back, they would have to join new classes.

  Why did she do this? Couldn’t she recall the past without imagining what had happened to her daughters since?

  They could come back. They could not.

  The last Marina knew, Alyona and Sophia were in the city center. A woman taking her dog out had seen them walking there. After that, the police lost them; investigators said at first a man snatched them, but the search teams turned up no men to hold accountable. Marina had walked the city shouting her daughters’ names. She pounded on her neighbors’ doors. She enlisted librarians to help scour the archives for any mention of children gone missing. For four fruitless months, she called the headquarters of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow, gasped on the phone to junior staff members, scribbled names and phone numbers that led her nowhere.

  Then the Petropavlovsk police interrogated Marina and her ex-husband, as though Alyona and Sophia would turn out to have been hiding in one of their apartments the whole time. Then the police said the girls drowned. In the spring, they dragged the bay for bodies. The major general had used that excuse to scale back the investigation last month, so there would be no more organized search parties or announcements to local media. When she heard about that decision, Marina went to the station with the girls’ bathing suits.

  “These were still in our apartment,” she said, pressing the printed nylon to his desk. “Are you thinking Alyona and Sophia went swimming in their clothes? During a cold summer? That they drowned in the center, in still water, at the height of tourist season, without anyone noticing?”

  He asked her to sit. She took the bathing suits back to hold in her lap. “Do you want to know what I’m thinking?” he said. “We have not found any evidence of a kidnapper. We have not found your daughters on land. We know they were next to the water when they disappeared. It’s a reasonable conclusion.”

  “And the witness?” Marina asked.

  The major general shook his head. “At this point, we don’t believe she was a witness to anything at all.”

  Marina started to hyperventilate there in the station. An assistant came over to help her out of her chair. The police did not believe the witness—but Marina did. She had interviewed enough liars over the years to see when someone was telling the truth. The dog-walking woman did not have much information to offer, but she was frank, when Marina met with her that first day, about what she saw: a man in a dark car with two girls.

  No. Alyona and Sophia did not drown that day. They were taken.

  This was the knowledge that depressed Marina’s lungs. She understood how such cases took shape. Though her work now, for the party paper, was generally cheery (electricity grids humming, roads repaved, citizens turning out to the polls in record numbers), she was familiar, from her early work and her latest research, with the other side of the news. Kidnappings around the world. Police corruption. Sexual assaults. Abuse. Children murdered. Alyona’s and Sophia’s school pictures appeared on her own front page—their faces alike as two drops of water, their finely combed hair—and when she saw them, Marina pictured terrible things: where were those c
hildish heads now? Where were their bodies? Which girl was victim first? Had they screamed?

  “Are they dead?” she asked her ex-husband, when the drowning theory came out. He had moved to Moscow for a job when the girls were little, and the time difference meant Marina was always interrupting in some way. Still, she kept calling. Her ex was a comfort to speak to because they could share the blame: she should have never left them alone that day; he should have never left them in Kamchatka to begin with; she should have taught their daughters to stay away from dangerous men; he should have shown them what a trustworthy one looks like. He was the only person, besides the girls’ kidnapper, who might deserve more guilt than Marina.

  He was quiet. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Exactly. Because I think we would know. I think we would feel it—something different. A more permanent absence.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You don’t think so?” She had wanted him to agree, or to disagree, or something. To tell her how to proceed.

  “I don’t know,” he said again. “I would…like to believe that was true.” He spoke carefully. This was how he talked in moments of great stress; during arguments, he became deliberate. He tried to manage her. He was hurting, she knew, but not as much as she was. She suffered more. She was the guilty one, after all. The blame did belong to her.

  He said, “Maybe they really are gone,” and she wished him dead in their place.

  The people who surrounded Marina at home tried to do better than that. They invited her out and were gentle. This trip was not the first time she had left the city—for New Year’s, she went with her parents to the dacha, coated then by ice. The stakes in the garden were black with withered vines. Marina had a panic attack at midnight, and her mother fetched her a pill and fixed her warm vodka with honey. On Alyona’s birthday in March, they came together again, nervously. Marina’s mother was the wreck then, weeping for the girls. Marina cut the cake to the sound of sobs. Sophia’s birthday was coming soon.

  For her part, Marina survived. She went to her office, filed her scripted articles, responded to small talk. She showed up at friends’ apartments when they asked her to. She called the police station in search of updates. But that was all she could manage, and sometimes even that seemed like too much. Everything that once propelled her was now gone. She used to be a storyteller, she used to have a sense of humor, she used to be a mother, but now she was—nothing. Alla Innokentevna was equipped, after her loss, to organize celebrations, but Marina was a person left purposeless.

  Someone called her name in the woods. Marina’s hand stayed on her chest. The planks under the curve of her head were hard and scratchy and unforgiving. She remembered Sophia’s breakfast that last morning. Oats mixed with milk and freeze-dried bits of berries. A peeled orange. The girl’s shoulders over the table looking as easily shattered as porcelain cups.

  “Marina,” Petya shouted. Closer now. She exhaled, waited, and then realized—maybe he was looking for her for a reason—maybe they had contact from the police. No. It wouldn’t be. And yet she sat up.

  “I’m here,” she shouted back.

  The log ladder rocked in place. Petya’s head came into view, framed by the granary’s entryway. “There you are,” he said. His eyebrows rose in tenderness.

  His expression made it clear he had nothing urgent to say, but still she asked, “What is it? Did anything happen?”

  “No,” he said. “Sorry.” Brows now creased. He climbed the rest of the way up and joined her inside. “Nice little nest you found here.”

  “Caw, caw,” she said.

  He turned himself around to face the river. He had to hunch to fit under the roof. In front of her was the broad sweep of his back. She lay down again.

  “Eva sent me to find you. They’re about to start.”

  “Okay. I’ll come in a minute.”

  “She wants you to talk to people.” Marina did not respond. Eventually, he said, “It’ll be a good time today.”

  “I know it will,” she said. “I’m sure.” She doubted.

  The world around them was a constant buzz. The rushing water sounded louder than their breath did. Petya shifted his weight. The wood creaked.

  “I’m too heavy for this,” he said. “I’ll see you down there.” She kept her eyes fixed on the roof as he climbed out.

  * * *

  ·

  The clearing was filled with people. Yesterday’s empty stalls were packed tight with trinkets and posters. Shouting over each other were narrow-eyed villagers, teenagers in neon hooded sweatshirts, pale Russians with swollen red noses, city tour guides wearing name-brand outdoors gear. Alla Innokentevna, who this morning was dressed in slacks and a turtleneck, wore a beaded deerskin tunic, and spoke into a microphone on the stage.

  “We thank the Ministry of Culture for its support.” The crowd, that portion facing the stage, clapped. Alla Innokentevna’s teeth flashed white behind the black foam of the microphone’s head. “And we thank you, dear guests, for coming to our Even New Year, Nurgenek.” The words blasted from speakers on either side of the stage. “We welcome you all, indigenous, Russian, and foreign, on this final day of June, to celebrate the solstice sun.”

  Eva and Petya were close to the stage. Eva’s yellow ponytail stood out among the dark-haired locals. Marina squeezed over to her side and gripped Eva’s arm, thin in its windbreaker sleeve.

  “Couldn’t we use some new sun?” Alla Innokentevna asked the crowd. The ground was packed with wetness under their feet. A woman on Marina’s other side tittered. “We’re joined today,” Alla Innokentevna continued, “by native artists from all over the country. Let’s meet them.” Music bumped out of the speakers. It was the same song Marina had heard in the woods after breakfast—a woman’s voice trilling over a synthesizer. One by one, dancers stepped onto the stage from behind the banner, shook and stomped across the boards.

  Into Eva’s ear, Marina asked, “Is there information posted somewhere about what’s happening?”

  Without turning from the dancers, Eva pointed to the left. “Try the food stall.”

  Marina forced her way out of one clot of people, crossed the trampled grass, and pushed into another crowd. When she got to the front, she found the morning’s cooks ladling out bowls of soup in exchange for cash. Marina waved to catch one’s eye. The cook showed no recognition. “Is there a schedule for today?” Marina called over other people’s orders. Seeking numbers, names, the small and neutral details that could always return her to herself. The cook nodded at the end of the counter, beyond stacks of plastic bowls and loose spoons, where scattered pamphlets carried the title “Nurgenek.” Marina grabbed a pamphlet and pushed her way out.

  She read as she walked past the stalls. The campground was a reconstruction of a traditional Even settlement—the granary was Even, then. Long paragraphs praised the grounds’ historical accuracy. A full page of the pamphlet was dedicated to pictures of dance troupes to draw tourists. The sky in those photographs was brilliant blue, while the one above Marina looked like rain.

  “Genuine sealskin caps,” said one vendor she passed, turning a hat inside out to show hidden speckles. The back of the pamphlet listed the holiday’s events. After this came a concert on traditional instruments, then an hour-long leatherworking demonstration by native craftsmen…“Pardon me, miss?” said a man from behind her.

  She turned to the flat black eye of a camera. A middle-aged man in a polo shirt stood beside it, recorder in his hand. “Yes?” she said. Airless.

  “Is this your first time at the festival?” Marina nodded, waiting for his next question to cut. He must have recognized her. “What are your impressions so far?” She stared at him. “We’d love a comment. Where are you visiting from?”

  Beside the reporter, the photographer’s camera shutter clicked. “No pictures,” she said. People pressed behin
d her, against her, but she was trying to keep a little distance between herself and the recorder. How was it possible? This peninsula was so small that she collided with random journalists wherever she went, but so big she could lose both her girls?

  The reporter pushed on. “Are you enjoying yourself?”

  Instead of answering, she pointed in the direction of the stage, waved to no one over there, and mouthed, “My friends.” Her throat was closing. Even not knowing about the kidnapping, he forced her to return to it. She had to get away.

  These attacks always felt like dying. They came on at the thought of her girls’ death, and brought her to a dead place, where her lungs shut down, her mouth dried up, her vision eventually blotted out. But she had felt like this before and lived. Many times. Every time. She plunged deeper into the crowd because she felt the reporter watching.

  When she finally got to Eva, Marina’s chest throbbed. Eva glanced down and looked horrified. “What’s the matter?”

  Marina shook her head. Petya turned to them, and Marina gave him a thumbs-up. The couple watched Marina until she could talk again. “Everything’s normal,” Marina said.

  The leatherworkers were already filing out onstage. Old men in tool belts and baggy yellow boots. “Something happened to you,” said Eva.

  “A reporter stopped me.” Eva spun in place, searching. “It was nothing. He wanted to know what I thought of the holiday,” Marina said. She held up her pamphlet. “Look what I found.”

  * * *

  ·

  The disappearance day. The search-party weeks. The cameras that crowded and the requests for quotes. While her friends flipped through the pamphlet pages, Marina remembered the sour smell of microphones held under her nose. She drank that stench and described her daughters as volunteer searchers walked by her in waders. Police boats pulled nets through the bay. Flyers with her girls’ faces, their heights, their weights, their birth dates, were stuck to the plywood walls surrounding construction sites. For months, until the snow fell and the police reorganized their investigation, her former colleagues’ hunger for information was bottomless, and Marina was desperate, she would give them anything. She pled and sobbed on the evening news in an attempt to bring a breakthrough in the case. She was a fish ripped open for the reporting. Her wet guts spilled out. After a while, medicated, she could hardly speak. Her parents took over. She could not open her mouth, could not comprehend, could not move, and could not breathe.