Marina’s pulse was too loud. She saw it, then, the sign from last fall that she had reached a peak of terror: the edges of her vision pulled in black. The world darkened. She tried to think of something, anything—the combination lock she used at university. Her and Eva’s old locker numbers. The best time of year to pick wild garlic. Anything before her girls were born. Anything to keep them out of her mind in this moment.
The dark receded. Lowering her head, she saw the people dancing. The reporter’s hand hovered a centimeter beyond Marina’s jacket sleeve.
Marina turned away. She wove across the clearing until she reached the woods.
The music followed her. People shouted back and forth—the crowd was getting drunker. Marina opened her mouth to swallow air. Again her vision narrowed. Light among the trees was even dimmer than out on the grass.
A fact: the statistical likelihood that her daughters would be found at this point was infinitesimal. Wherever they went, they were there now permanently, no matter the number of search parties organized or pleas printed on a front page. Marina was not ignorant. A missing child is most likely to come home in the first hour after disappearance. Every hour after that, the chance of a happy reunion decreases; by the time twenty-four go by, a missing child is almost certainly dead. Three days into the girls’ absence, the city police began to speak of recovering bodies, not rescuing children. And many hours, and many days, had passed since then.
Marina had lost them forever. She was never going to get her daughters back.
At the tent, she bent over to unzip the door and tossed her cell phone inside. The phone bounced across their sleeping bags. When she tried to stand back up, she found she could not. She could not.
They were dead. They had been dead for months. Nothing she did could save them.
The drums were thudding. Her chest was collapsing. “Marina,” Petya said from behind her. His hand on her back. “Marina. Breathe. Breathe.” He pulled her up to standing, as straight as she would go. Now both his hands were on her shoulders. “Calm down.” His familiar face. Strong when she could not be. “Marina, breathe. Look at me,” he said, and she did. He made a little circle of his lips, then pulled in air, slowly. Relaxed his mouth. Let the air out. “Do it with me.” Her lungs burned, her throat was torn. She, too, made an O of her lips, sucked in oxygen, let it out. “Slower,” he said. “Like me.” He must have followed her from the clearing. He had lost the dance marathon because of her. She focused on the pattern of his mouth.
“There you go,” he said when she got her breath back. He hugged her. Her nose pressed against his chest, and she turned her face to rest there more easily. Her hands were caught between them. She moved her lips in the way he showed.
After a long moment, he asked her, “How are you?” Marina nodded. “Can you sit down?” Nodding again, she bent her knees, and he helped her sit half in the tent with her legs propped out its doorway. He crouched beside her. She felt the phantom crush of his body, its welcome weight. She remembered Sophia’s head against her shoulder. Holding her girls in her arms when each was a newborn. That warmth. She had been so alone for the last eleven months that she believed she was going insane.
He stood up. She stared ahead at the woods, and he touched her shoulder. The soft skin behind her ear. “Hey,” he said. She looked up. Again he formed an O with his lips. Again she mimicked him. “Keep doing that,” he said. “Eva is going to be worried. I’ll be right back.”
With cool air hissing past her teeth, she watched him go. Petya, whom she saw in a blue suit at his wedding. Now he was heavier and going gray. Through the years, he had remained decent, honorable. Attuned to the dangers around him. If only Marina could say the same for herself. She turned back toward the trees. Her lips moved. The river, somewhere to her right, rushed away.
She twisted at the sound of someone approaching the tent. It was the photographer, camera on a sling around his neck.
“Please go away,” she said. She made an O of her lips and put her head down.
He crouched beside her in the wet leaves. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t want to bother you. But you said a guy in a new-looking car, right? Could it have been a black Toyota Surf?”
* * *
·
There is a man who lives near Esso, the photographer said, who might look like the person she had described. “This man is strange,” the photographer said. His words were low, quick. He had that northern intonation to his voice. “His name is Yegor Gusakov. He lives alone. I know he sometimes goes to the city overnight, and I know he keeps his car looking nice.”
“A man who cares for his car and sometimes goes to the city,” Marina said.
“It’s a black Toyota Surf. An SUV.”
She sat with that for a moment. “What do you mean, he’s strange?”
The photographer shifted his feet in his crouch. “We were in the same year in school, and he was always by himself, people felt sorry for him. He took advantage of that.”
Marina kept her eyes down. The photographer’s boots were dark with rainwater above the soles.
He kept talking. Yegor had been interested in the daughter of Alla Innokentevna years before that girl disappeared, he was saying. “It was more than a crush. He was almost obsessed with her. Lilia talked about it back when we were kids.”
Marina glanced up at him. He was staring at her, anticipating her response.
“Lilia ran away from home,” she said. “Isn’t that so?”
“Some people say that. Some people don’t.”
“You don’t,” she said.
The photographer paused to choose his next words. “Listen, did Alla Innokentevna tell you what Lilia looked like?” Marina shook her head. “She was older than your daughters,” the photographer said, “but short. Small. She was eighteen but she looked younger. I…wonder if someone might have hurt her. She could’ve run away herself, but she wouldn’t have stayed away like this, I think, so long.”
Marina worked on the muscles in her mouth. The tent’s plastic rustled under her weight.
“You think he did something to her?” she asked.
“He could have. He might have.”
“Have you reported this to the police?”
“The police didn’t pay any attention to Lilia. Anyway, there was never anything to report. Only suspicion. He’s creepy. But then—”
“I mean about my daughters,” she said. “The car.”
“I just— No.” His forehead wrinkled. “I didn’t know about any car.”
She slit her eyes at him. His anxious face, his bent knees. “You just said—”
“Those pictures you showed us, I’ve seen those before. There were posters up here with their faces. But I never put them together with her. There was no…I’ve never heard about any kidnapper.”
She closed her lips. Then she said, “What do you mean, never heard?”
“The posters said two Russian girls in the city were missing. Nothing else.”
Did no call for a kidnapper ever go out through the peninsula? What had the police been doing all this time? By winter, Marina knew, authorities were already turning their attention toward custody battles, or swimming accidents, or trafficking off Kamchatka. But before that? When had the major general first discounted their witness? Was it in the first weeks of the investigation? The first days?
“I never heard about some man who took the girls away in a black car,” the photographer said.
“Black or blue,” Marina said. Her head was back down.
Music filtered through the trees. The sound of the river. “I can take you to see him,” the photographer said. “Yegor’s house is twenty minutes away. We can drive there.”
“You want me to go driving alone with you.”
The photographer flushed and sat back on his heels. “No, I’m not— I unders
tand. You’re thinking of your daughters? So am I. I’m not trying to get you in a car alone.” He was short-haired, solid, very young. “You can bring your friends. We can do whatever you like.”
Around them, the cheers from the marathon. Marina evaluated the photographer. Eager as he was, he seemed genuine, someone sincere. Certain.
The major general, telling her the girls drowned, hadn’t looked so sure of himself. “All right,” Marina said. The photographer stood and held out a hand to help her up. She reached backward for her phone, tucked it into her pocket, and followed.
* * *
·
At the edge of the clearing, Eva and Petya met them. Petya had his arm around Eva’s shoulders. “What’s going on?” Eva said. “Petya told me the Esso reporter upset you. Do I owe you an apology?”
The drizzle was starting up again. Where the evening sun should have been, at the base of the sky, was only a bleary white spot. Marina introduced them to the photographer, who said, “I’m Sergei Adukanov. Call me Chegga. I was telling your friend—”
“Chegga lives here,” Marina said. “He knows a man with a big black car.”
Eva’s face sharpened in the low light. Her muscles tightened enough to pull on her bones and make her eyes large. Sometimes Marina forgot, from Eva’s chatter about horror movies watched and festivals attended, that Eva, too, had loved Marina’s daughters. Marina almost wanted to give her own apology for offering this false hope now.
The photographer told the group about Yegor Gusakov. When he mentioned Alla Innokentevna’s daughter, Petya squinted. “One minute. Please. You think this has something to do with Alyona and Sophia?”
“Lilia looked younger than she was,” Chegga explained, “and this guy might be—”
“Did you just find out about this case?” Petya asked. “Because it’s very easy, when you first hear about it, to jump to conclusions. But when you actually know the people involved, and when you see the steps of the investigation, you understand this is not so simple to solve.”
The photographer chewed on his cheeks. “I understand that. I’m not naïve.”
Petya turned to Marina. “You need to protect yourself. This sounds like village gossip.”
“Maybe,” Marina said. “So I want to ask Alla Innokentevna for the truth.”
Couples still danced on the stage. Their arms waved in the air to the beat. As her group crossed the grass clearing, Marina counted the kilometers between Esso and Petropavlovsk, the number of seats in a Toyota SUV. Could someone have driven from the city to here without notice? The roads did empty outside city limits. She saw that yesterday. And after he took the girls in the late afternoon, he would have driven into the night, unseen…and if he had carried extra fuel cans in his trunk, instead of stopping at a gas station, he could’ve gone the whole way without talking to anyone…
But the police must have searched the villages. They told Marina they looked everywhere.
But Chegga said he hadn’t talked with any officers. He had never heard a description of the kidnapper before. To recover the girls, the city authorities only sent out posters with Alyona’s and Sophia’s photos and birth dates. Alla Innokentevna had warned Marina to expect this: To stop us, the police say many things…
But it should not have mattered if the details coming out of Petropavlovsk’s headquarters were false. Marina herself had called the Esso police station in August. She had called every regional branch on the peninsula. They told her then they had no record of any kidnappings or lost children.
But Marina did not ask them about any eighteen-year-old they presumed had left home.
Behind the stage, in damp shadow, they found the organizer talking to a younger woman. “Alla Innokentevna,” Chegga called. “Forgive us for interrupting.”
The organizer frowned from him to Eva to Marina. “Go ahead.”
Hours earlier, Alla Innokentevna had said she would take any questions. She had dipped close to Marina to offer her assistance and request help. And it had taken Marina all day, all this terrible year, to understand what to ask for. Marina said, “Would you tell me what really happened with your daughter? With Lilia?”
The younger woman next to the organizer flinched. She wore no glasses, and her skin was unlined, but she looked like Alla Innokentevna—the same full lips and rounded jawline. Alla Innokentevna took her by the arm and said, “Don’t get into it, Tasha.”
“The police told you she ran away, correct?” Marina said. “They told me my daughters must have been lost while swimming. But someone else saw them climb into a car with a man that day—a big, dark, shiny car.”
“You’re the Golosovskaya girls’ mother,” the younger woman said.
“Alla Innokentevna, did you know Yegor Gusakov bought himself a nice car a few winters ago? A large black one?” Chegga asked.
The younger woman said, “Who? Which Yegor?”
Alla Innokentevna’s eyebrows were high. She kept her hand tight on the younger woman’s elbow. “You wouldn’t know him. He finished school between Denis and Lilia. He lives toward Anavgai…You’re joking,” Alla Innokentevna said to Marina. “This is the favor you want from me? To chase down this boy?”
“I’m coming to you to ask for information.”
“Information.”
“About this man. What this man might have done.”
Alla Innokentevna turned to the photographer. “Is your mother in the village or out with the herd now? What would she think, to see you mislead someone in this way?”
Chegga shifted from side to side on the wet ground. Rain droplets hung on his buzzed hair. Marina said, “I was told this Yegor spends some nights in Petropavlovsk. Is that true?” The organizer sighed. “So it could be him. It’s possible.”
Alla Innokentevna shook her head.
“In Esso!” the younger woman said. “No. It’s not to be believed…”
Alla Innokentevna spoke in another language to her. That was Even, Marina guessed. To Marina, Alla Innokentevna said, “Has someone explained to you yet what Yegor Gusakov is like?”
Next to her, Chegga made a disapproving noise. Marina spoke over him. “I hear he’s strange.”
“I’m sure you do hear that. It’s what people say about anyone who acts different,” said Alla Innokentevna. “They talk the same way about my son—they say he’s strange and they worry about danger.” The younger woman said something in Even, but Alla Innokentevna continued. “They’re wrong. Yegor is harmless. Not very clever. He is not a criminal mastermind, do you understand what I mean? He is just a sad boy who always wanted friends.”
Chegga said, “Respectfully, I don’t agree.” The organizer held up both palms. “He was always watching Lilia when we were children. Maybe he wanted her for himself.”
Marina had never been able to watch herself pleading on television or hear her own voice crack on regional radio. After experiencing those moments, she did not want to relive them. But here, behind a stage crowded for a dance contest, near the end of a day at a rural holiday, she saw for the first time what she must have looked like. Alla Innokentevna’s expression broke open, a split fruit, exposing four years of rotten loss. Her lips parted. Devastation. Her nostrils flared. Her eyes, for a second, did not see the festival, and then they focused, and she clenched her teeth, and she shut herself up again.
“I see,” Marina said.
Alla Innokentevna looked straight at her. “You want to know if Lilia ran away.” Marina nodded. “No. Clearly not. She got into trouble here—she’d been getting into trouble for years—and someone hurt her.”
“Mama,” the younger woman said.
“And no one cared,” Alla Innokentevna said. “I told the authorities. No one listened.”
“I’m listening,” said Marina. Seeking inside Alla Innokentevna the parent she recognized.
Alla Innok
entevna said, “No. You are trying to convince me, like our police captain did, of a fairy tale. Lilia was not taken from us over a schoolboy’s interest. She got into something worse.”
The speakers boomed as someone on the stage made an announcement. “Chegga is bringing us now to look at this man,” Marina said.
“Go look, then.”
“You can come with us. If we see anything that seems—if you see anything connected—to Lilia—I’ll give his name, his description, his license plate number to the city police. We can go together—”
Alla Innokentevna spat the name out. “Yegor Gusakov, of all people, is not the one who killed her.”
“No one killed her!” her daughter cried. “Mama, all they’re saying is that this Yegor happens to match their kidnapper’s description—that maybe he frightened Lilia before she left.”
“Someone killed her,” Alla Innokentevna said. To Marina, she said, “Like someone killed your daughters. You fool yourself by believing otherwise. You want a different answer so badly, but it will not come.”
Someone touched the base of Marina’s back very gently. Eva. The crowd, beyond the banner, was cheering. Alla Innokentevna had to be right. For years, the organizer had occupied the place Marina was pushed into last summer. She had been surrounded by people who stared, whispered, asked questions, but never changed her prospects of recovering what was lost. Two or three summers from now, Marina might speak the same way; she might come to accept that they were gone, that their bodies would never be found, and that the only recourse left would be bribing the police to make up a theory with a better chance of placating her.
But not yet. “So you won’t go,” Marina said.
Alla Innokentevna said something in Even to her daughter. The daughter shook her head. “She won’t,” her daughter said. Tasha. Natasha. “But if you really think this could have something to do with my sister, I will. I’ll come along.”
* * *
·
Petya in the driver’s seat, Eva in the passenger’s, Marina and Chegga and Natasha, Alla Innokentevna’s daughter, in the back. The photographer leaned forward to give directions. When he broke off, Natasha said, “So what did he do to scare Lilia? She never mentioned him, I don’t think. I don’t remember that name.”
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