Disappearing Earth

JANUARY

Roswell, 1947. The Tunguska event years before. The Travis Walton abduction, the Sassowo explosions, and the Petrozavodsk phenomenon. Height 611, along the Pacific, where witnesses reported the crash of an enormous red ball. The Voronezh incident, 1989.

Natasha started hearing these tales from her younger brother while they were still in school. Since then, aided by the arrival of satellite Internet in the Esso library, Denis had expanded his repertoire: Japan Airlines Flight 1628, Chile’s El Bosque Air Force Base, Turkey’s Yenikent Compound, and the opening ceremonies of London’s Olympic Games. Outside the window of the International Space Station. The skies over Jerusalem, 2011 and 2012. The 2013 fireball that burned through Chelyabinsk. The purple lights, hovering, lowering, above the least populated parts of Kamchatka.

If aliens really did land on Earth, Natasha would ask them to start their world domination by erasing her brother’s memory. Through fifteen years of study, Denis had absorbed an encyclopedia set’s worth of information on UFO sightings, with mental volumes updated constantly. Four days into this new year, he’d already referenced every one of his false facts and started again at the top. Natasha had made her family pancakes with raspberry preserves for breakfast. Their mother was peeling an orange.

“The El Bosque Air Force Base,” Denis said.

Natasha switched her knife and fork between her hands. She did not look up at him. Her brother and mother had arrived at Natasha’s Petropavlovsk apartment the afternoon of New Year’s Eve and were due to stay another week—Natasha would have to ration out her frustration to last the whole time. Difficult, though. Now that the celebrations were over, nothing distracted her from the desire to shake Denis until his eyes rolled. Concentrating on pancakes wasn’t quite the balm she needed.

“The sighting was captured on film from seven angles.”

“We know, honey,” Natasha said, in the direction of her plate.

“The Minister of Defense saw it in broad daylight. An object—”

“An object was stalking their jets,” she recited. “I said we know.”

Their mother put her cool hand on top of Natasha’s. The smell of citrus rose between them. “Don’t,” she said, then addressed Natasha’s children: “You never do that, do you? Interrupt each other while one is trying to talk.”

Natasha flushed. “Mama.”

Their mother took back her hand. To Natasha’s daughter, she said, “Yulka, you would never be so rude, would you?” The little girl straightened in her seat at the table. “So let’s not pay any attention to the adults’ bad example. Tell me, how’s your reading going? What’s the best book you read last year?”

“Yulka reads too much. She probably can’t even remember them all,” Natasha’s son said. Natasha stabbed at a sliver of pancake. At thirty-one, a doctoral candidate, she was still getting reprimanded by her mother. Her family’s every visit turned her into a teenager again. She had snuck enough holiday chocolate over the last few days to get a line of pimples across her forehead, and this morning, she had to style her hair differently to hide them. Her whole head felt sloppy.

“The Call of the Wild,” Yulka said. “Babulya, have you read it?”

Natasha’s mother propped her chin in one palm and managed to look terribly interested. “Jack London. Of course I have.”

“Lev hasn’t.”

“Shut up,” said the boy, and Natasha slammed down her utensils, and Natasha’s mother called for order, and the morning was back to normal, just like that.

At least her kids seemed unfazed by Denis’s strangeness. Lev and Yulka, after so many school vacations spent in their uncle’s company, were used to following their grandmother’s lead: keep it light, change the subject, don’t engage. Even after the holiday’s sparklers were extinguished, movies watched, gifts opened, they had not become bored enough to turn on Denis, who was picking at his food at the other end of the table. Waiting for a prime moment to mention the Chelyabinsk meteor, no doubt.

Did Natasha insist on nattering on about her interests? Her research on saffron cod populations? No. So why was her brother encouraged to talk endlessly? She burned to ask.

She would have liked to introduce her children to Denis as he was as a boy. Still shy then, still obsessive, but more engaged with matters on the ground than in the sky. Growing up, they had spent happy summers together, the three of them—Natasha and Denis dunking each other under the warm green water of their village’s community pool, while their little sister sat on the side and screamed with pleasure.

Now Denis was single-minded, Lilia was gone, and Natasha could hardly make it through a shared breakfast.

Natasha cleared her throat. “I’m sorry I interrupted you.”

“The footage is online,” Denis said. “We can watch it, if you like.”

Natasha took up her tea so she could widen her eyes at her mother over the rim of the cup. Her mother said, “We’re not going to spend our holiday on the computer. Lev, your turn. What have you been reading?”

The alien stuff had started when Denis was in year nine. He spent his high school evenings watching space-invader movies. If she didn’t have homework to finish, Natasha would sit on their couch beside him, take Lilia in her lap, and giggle at the cardboard ships suspended from wires. Denis, too, used to laugh when a scene got ridiculous. At the beginning of his shift toward outer space, he had been willing to participate in ordinary life.

Not anymore. Lev and Yulka knew a different Denis, a different family, a different world than the green-dream one in which Natasha grew up. Still, Natasha could make these days more comfortable for her children. They deserved better than a mad uncle and a self-conscious mother on her third straight morning of a champagne headache. “What do you two want to do today?” she asked.

“Ride horses,” Yulka said.

Lev sighed. “You can’t ride horses in the winter,” he said, and Yulka said, “Yes, you can,” and he said, “No, you can’t,” and Natasha interrupted them both to say, “Shhh.” They continued the argument whispering. Natasha looked over at her mother, who looked back in expectation. Natasha always forgot her own household authority when her family came to town.

The absurdity of it: that Natasha, barely able to meet her obligations as a sister or daughter, was now in charge of school and work and two children of her own. “What do you think,” her mother asked the table, “of ice skating?”

Denis tried next as Natasha parked them in front of the sports complex. “In 2008 at Yenikent—”

“Just a minute,” she called over her shoulder. “I’m trying to concentrate.” They were in her husband’s car. Yuri was at sea again; he had sent her a picture, a full day late, of him celebrating the New Year in some Pacific port past the International Date Line. Beer in hand and a wink toward the phone’s front camera. Natasha sent him back a selfie with her middle finger raised. Then she followed that almost instantly with a picture of herself lit by the lamp on their bedside table, her top lowered, her lips and cheeks spun by the low wattage into dark gold. The story of their marriage: a little love, a little rage, a lot of ocean water.

Shifting the gears with an ear for the same rising engine noises Yuri would attend to, Natasha eased the car into place. Her mother peered at the bumper ahead. From the back of the car, Denis said, “Yenikent.”

“One minute,” Natasha said, unbuckling her seatbelt and fully intending never to ask him to go on.

Once they were out of the car, though, she was not as convinced of silence as she had been. The children ran a few paces ahead. Her brother was subdued. He walked beside her and their mother with his back rounded. Natasha ought to ask him about the Turkish compound—she could ease him into the telling with his own words—the most significant extraterrestrial image ever caught on tape, she knew he would say—except she did not want to.

The tree branches stretching above the sidewalk were frosted white. Snow capped the iron fence that lined the skating rink. The ice today was busy with families, and young couples held hands while they glided in laps. “So crowded. I don’t know how you stand living in the city,” her mother said. She spoke in Even so the kids wouldn’t understand.

Natasha made herself busy looking for her wallet. In Even, too, she said, “I don’t know when you’ll get tired of telling me that.” Her mother snorted.

The prices above the cashier’s head were taped onto a printed sign. Natasha would like to see what was under the tape—the entrance fees were probably twice as much as they had been before last month’s devaluation. She paid for her mother’s rental skates and laced Yulka’s blades on. In his own bulky black skates, Lev stepped up to his uncle and asked, “Aren’t you going to do it?” Denis shook his head. “Why’d you come, then?”

“Don’t be rude,” Natasha said. “Denis, are you sure you don’t want to skate?” Another head shake. Her kids were already making their way onto the ice. She considered asking her brother if he wanted a hot chocolate, but he was a grown man. He could find his own refreshments. She knotted her laces and pushed off.

Flight 1628. Height 611. It went on and on and on.

The skates were snug around her ankles. She passed on one foot through a cluster of strangers, and once she had room, she surveyed the rink. There was Lev, with a couple classmates he had bumped into, and Yulka holding hands with Natasha’s mother. Denis, at the rink’s edge, caught Natasha’s eye, and she waved. Then she looked across the ice for Lilia, like always. Just in case. Imagine finding Lilia’s face in the pale city crowds, only a few kilometers from Natasha’s apartment, after more than three years. But Lilia wasn’t there.

Natasha’s limbs felt loose, liquid. She leaned to the left and glided past another group.

It was down to the two of them, then. Natasha and Denis. She knew that but somehow she forgot, searching for their sister every time she entered a crowd. It was down to them…

Making another turn, Natasha looked again for Denis’s slouched body. He had propped his elbows on the rink wall.

The afternoon air was crisp on her skin. The sun was a cold, clear circle, a hole in a white sky. On what seemed like her hundredth loop, Natasha’s husband called. His voice came through a second delayed. She waited for the connection to clear.

“Nice picture,” Yuri said.

She grinned into the phone. “Thanks.”

“I showed all the guys.”

“The first picture or the second one?”

“The second one. I’m joking,” he said before she could start. “How are the kids?”

She found them immediately. Yulka’s knit hat and Lev’s red-and-gray jacket. “Fine. Bickering, but fine.”

“Is your mom helping?”

“Sure. She’s perfect.”

“You’re perfect,” he said. She touched light fingers to her blemished forehead. He went on: “I’ve been missing you.”

“Turn the sub around, then. We’re at Spartak. I want to be skating in circles with you.”

“I want to be stuck in one warm place with you,” he said, and she laughed. After twelve years of deployments, they were good at these phone calls. Better, in fact, than they were at living in the same cramped apartment. At home, Yuri got bored, bothersome; when he was on sea duty, he was only his best, with no time to show anything more.

Everyone looked better at a distance. Everyone sounded sweetest when you did not have to hear them talk too long. After her husband hung up, Natasha skated past her brother at the wall, their mother cleaning her glasses beside him. Loving someone close-up—that was difficult.

Lilia had understood. She left for just that reason, Natasha knew. After all, Natasha and Yuri had moved away from the village after high school to get some distance from their relatives—Yuri’s drunken parents, Natasha’s mother’s strictures, Denis’s rambling. Lilia must have done the same, only farther, beyond Kamchatka. And with no warning.

Natasha and Yuri were already living in the city by the time it happened. Natasha would get texts from her sister filled with small-town rumors, romantic troubles, the choicest Denis quotes. Their mothership surveilled Earth from the outer atmosphere. Or Radar was tracking the pin-shaped crafts. Natasha texted back invitations for her sister to see the kids, and Lilia said later, later, that she missed them, that she would come soon.

She never came. The fall before she turned nineteen, Lilia vanished. Their mother, not grasping why a teenager might want to flee Esso, went to the police, who agreed to spend a day or two chasing Lilia’s shadow. Village officers showed her picture to the bus drivers in the area and knocked on a couple neighbors’ doors. Esso’s tiny police station was no more than an outpost of a regional branch of the force in Petropavlovsk, which in its turn responded to occasional directions from Moscow; they were not equipped for a missing-person case. Natasha’s own search efforts—canvassing Esso, questioning airport security in Petropavlovsk, messaging her sister for months, where are you, please answer—seemed more promising. Though they, too, yielded no result.

“Lilia’s eighteen, she graduated. She’s restless like a lot of girls can be,” Esso’s police captain told Natasha’s mother at the time. “She decided to go off to see the world.”

Now, of course, Natasha knew the captain was right, but back then his words enraged her. To see the world, Lilia would have needed to leave the peninsula through Petropavlovsk. Would she really have come to the city without saying goodbye? Something must have happened at home to make Lilia turn her back on Natasha. Someone—and was it Denis?—had driven Lilia away.

Three years had gone by since then. In three more, or five, or ten, or seventy, Natasha would still remember every second of those first disappearance days. On the drive from Petropavlovsk toward Esso with husband and children in tow, the morning after her mother called with the news, Natasha had pulled over to dry-heave in the dirt. Lilia gone. Natasha was sickened by fury. When she arrived, she found that their mother had sobbed so much that her face had swelled, lizard-like. Denis told them Lilia did not leave but was taken. When he pointed up, toward the roof, toward the stars, Natasha slapped him.

It had been a waking nightmare. Lilia’s things, her books, her rumpled clothes, were still scattered at that moment around the house. Natasha’s children, then only five and seven, were asleep in the living room. In the kitchen, Natasha was watching her mother struggle to blink: behind her glasses, her lashes stuck out from sore eyelids. Yuri’s hand weighed on the base of Natasha’s back—he had not stopped touching her since they got the call that Lilia was gone. When Denis said that, Natasha crouched up out of her seat and hit her brother as hard as she could. The sound of the slap was a shock. His cheek was harder than she had expected. She made contact with his jawbone and two rows of clenched teeth.

To this day, Natasha felt awful about it. Denis could not have acted differently. He honestly believed their sister had been pulled away into the stars. Yes, there were times Natasha wished he had been more attentive, in the crucial months after Lilia graduated, to what Lilia was doing and who she spent time with. But Natasha had the same old regrets for herself. If she had returned to see their family more often—or insisted on Lilia’s visiting her in the city—but it was impossible now to do those things, to go back or to say what would have saved them.

Anyway, Natasha was not angry anymore.

She skated up to her mother and brother to prove that to herself. “I was just telling Denis to wrap himself up,” her mother said. “That wind off the water. Lev and Yulka must get sick all through the winter.”

“No, they’re used to it,” Natasha said. She faced half away from the conversation so she could watch her children pass. The bay beyond the rink was a silver dish. “Today’s pretty calm, anyway.”

Her mother lifted one hand to the scarf around her coat collar. “I feel the cold here, like a knife to the throat. It’s barely below freezing but the wind makes you believe you’ll die of exposure.” For years after Natasha and Yuri moved, Natasha’s mother had complained about city crime rates, but after their family’s brush with the village police, she shifted to other subjects. The weather.

What Natasha’s mother did not talk about was worse than what Natasha’s brother did. Her mother harbored her own bitter theories. After the Golosovskaya girls were taken, Natasha brought them up on a phone call to Esso, and her mother said, “So now you’re interested?”

“What does that mean?” Natasha asked. Though she knew. On the other end of the line, her mother stayed silent. After a long minute, Natasha said, “You’ve heard the news, then. It’s frightening. Isn’t it?”

“Now you’re frightened,” her mother said. “Yes. It’s terrible. Their pictures are in our post office. But you are aware by now that these things happen.”

“What things, Mama?” Her mother would rather despise the police, suspect their neighbors, picture her youngest child grabbed and murdered than admit Lilia had run away from them. “These are children. The older girl is only a year above Lev in school. They were abducted,” Natasha said. “They aren’t Lilia.”

Her mother sighed. The sound crackled through the phone. “Tell me what Yulka and Lev need to prepare before school starts,” she said. Then: “They were killed, I’m sure. Their posters here don’t mention any abduction. But, Tasha, it’s better not to speak of such things. What can we do about it all? Nothing.”

After that, Natasha left the headlines out of their conversations. She did not ask how the village captain spoke to her mother, even now, years later, or what the neighbors whispered about their family while standing in line at the grocery store. Lev and Yulka swooped past her and bent on their blades for another turn. Her mother started to say, “Those gloves—”

Natasha raised her hand in greeting to someone coming over. “Sorry, Mama,” she said in quick Even, and then in Russian introduction: “Happy New Year! It’s so good to see you. My mother, Alla Innokentevna, and brother, Denis. They’re visiting—”

“From the north, from Esso,” Natasha’s mother said.

“And this is Anfisa. Her son and Lev are in the same class.” Natasha only knew the neighbor, a feline blonde, from chatting at the bus stop or the odd school concert. Denis, thank God, did not embarrass them. He made eye contact, said hello, stopped there.

“I’m thrilled you’re here,” said Anfisa. Under her winter cap, her eyebrows were arched and penciled to perfection. “We’ve spent the last few days stuck in the apartment. Look, they found each other.” She lifted her chin toward the ice.

Natasha turned to see their boys skating in a cluster of year-six classmates. Yulka, cheeks red with effort, trailed behind. Natasha called her daughter’s name, but Yulka didn’t hear, or pretended not to.

“Is Yuri home?” Anfisa asked.

“Not until March.”

“Excellent to have your family visit, then.” Anfisa smiled at Natasha’s mother. “Although Natasha’s very strong—she handles everything—I’m sure she appreciates the company. Do you come down often?”

“Only for the winter holidays. They visit us in the summer,” Natasha’s mother said. “But once a year here is enough. Work keeps me busy—I run our cultural center at home. And Petropavlovsk overwhelms.”

“I understand, I do,” Anfisa said. “I was raised in the north myself.”

Natasha looked in surprise at her neighbor. Anfisa’s white skin and toneless accent. “I didn’t know that.”

“I was. In Palana. I only moved here after I had Misha.”

“It’s actually better to be away from the city,” Denis said. “It’s safest in a small town. At the London Olympics, the ships surveilled everyone. There’s photographic evidence. Three lights in a row in the sky.”

Natasha shut her eyes. She concentrated on the laced tightness around her ankles, the thermal leggings constricting her thighs. Low-level frustration sat trapped in her chest. But not anger.

When she opened her eyes again, she saw Anfisa. The neighbor reached out and gripped Natasha’s elbow. “Come over this week,” Anfisa said. “The boys can distract each other while we take an hour or two to ourselves.” In her cat’s smile, there was something small, recognizable, and secret, speaking to Natasha, saying: You are not alone.

Anfisa’s apartment was in the same row of buildings as theirs, only a few entrances away. Two days after the skating trip, Lev tramped across their parking lot toward that door. “Slow down,” Natasha called after him. She had Yulka by the hand to guide the girl over hills of unplowed snow. Under her arm, Natasha carried a box of chocolates, swirled dark and milk and white, each in the shape of a different seashell.

Her son overshot the entrance and had to double back when Natasha shouted. Since exchanging numbers on Sunday, she and Anfisa had been texting: first little things, hellos and how are you holding ups, and then jokes, memes, a picture Anfisa took of herself frowning next to a bottle of Soviet champagne. You and Lev should come over, Anfisa had written this afternoon. Misha needs someone to play with and so do I. When, fifteen minutes later, Natasha sent an apology—we’re trying to get out the door but my daughter—Anfisa said to bring Yulka, too, just come already.

A buzz, and the building’s door unlocked for them. Lev ran up the stairs. Natasha, climbing after, heard voices echo. By the time Natasha and Yulka reached the right landing, Anfisa stood alone, wearing a cream-colored sweater and leggings patterned with swirling galaxies. “They’re in Misha’s bedroom,” Anfisa said to Yulka. “Down the hall, second door.” The girl pulled off her boots, dropped her jacket, and dashed inside. Once Anfisa and Natasha were alone, Anfisa said, “Finally.”

While the kettle heated, they sat at the kitchen table. The gift box lay between them. Anfisa held a white-chocolate nautilus; with one leg propped up on the chair, she looked like a teenager. Her eyes were outlined in gunmetal powder. “Tell me how long they’re visiting,” she said.

“Until the eleventh. Not that long.”

“Long enough.”

“It feels like forever,” Natasha said. “When I got your invitation, I threw Lev’s jacket on him so quickly I probably ripped a sleeve.”

Water chugged in the kettle. Down the hall, the boys shouted what sounded like military commands. Anfisa popped the chocolate in her mouth and unfolded herself to get two mugs. “I get it, believe me. Last New Year’s was the first we didn’t spend at my parents’ place.”

“What excuse did you use?”

“Misha’s music school. I can give you its name.” Anfisa stirred their tea at the counter. The spoon chimed against the side of a mug. Below the hem of her sweater, her legs emerged narrow and dark. “It won’t help you, though. Your family’s already in the habit of coming down.”

Natasha buried her head in her arms on the place mat. She only lifted her face when Anfisa put the teas down. “I slipped some whiskey in there,” Anfisa said.

A lemon slice floated alongside the needles of tea leaves in each drink. “Thanks. Listen, I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of ungrateful monster,” Natasha said. “I’m just having an off week.” She thought. “An off past few years.”

“Don’t worry about what I think. I’m a monster born and bred.” Anfisa inhaled the steam off her mug. “Have you had lunch? Do you want something?”

While Anfisa microwaved two plates of rice and fish cutlets, while she spooned out salad from a bowl kept in the fridge, Natasha told family anecdotes. They came surprisingly easily. That morning, for example, Lev had interrupted one of his uncle’s recitations to ask, “Why do you act like that?” And when Denis fell silent, mournful, Lev said, “See? There. Like that.”

Anfisa shut the refrigerator door. “What was your brother trying to talk about?”

“You heard him.”

“Only for a minute.”

Natasha rounded her shoulders and widened her eyes. “Photographic evidence from London shows three unidentified ships. Three lights in a row in the sky.” Thin guilt rippled through her. But she was having too good a time to stop.

“Oh, you’re excellent,” her neighbor said. “Keep going. What’d Denis say back?”

“He pretended it wasn’t happening, I think.”

Anfisa put their plates down. She fetched paper napkins and utensils. “Too bad, because it’s a good question.”

“It’s rude. I made Lev apologize,” Natasha said. The room smelled like dill, butter, warm salmon. “But yes, obviously, yes. It’s not like I haven’t wanted to say that to him myself.”

“Invite me over before the eleventh. I’ll ask him.” Anfisa scooted her chair in, turned her chin up, and did a little playacting of her own. “Why are you the way you are? And can’t you stop?” Natasha laughed, surprised, at the face across the table. Anfisa looked very young and very lovely. Very, for one instant, like Lilia.

Natasha had not ever noticed the similarity before. They had completely different coloring, and Anfisa was much taller, but there was some angle of the eyes, some bend of the neck, in common. Lilia, too, had been skinny, high-cheeked, funny. “How old are you?” Natasha asked.

“Talk about rude. Twenty-six,” Anfisa said. She drew her head back and the overlap melted away. When Anfisa lifted her mug, Natasha raised her own, remembering. “May we get the answers to all our good questions,” Anfisa said.

Natasha toasted to that.

The spiked tea spread through her. It tasted like pine and honey. Walking back across the lot in the black evening, snow crystals crunching under her feet and traffic passing in a hush on the other side of their building, Natasha felt loose and beloved. Yulka and Lev chattered alongside. Out in the Pacific, Yuri was going off watch, going on maintenance, and Natasha did not envy him his lonely holiday. A person needed company. She carried a sense, wrapped in whiskey, that someone once more understood where she was coming from.

Over dinner, the kids told their grandmother about Misha’s gaming system. Lev raised his arms to mimic the hold of a weapon in Call of Duty. Still warm inside, Natasha scooped mashed potatoes onto everyone’s plates. She looked up to find Denis staring at her. Nothing in her was against him. Thanks to Anfisa, that necessary outlet. Natasha met his eyes and smiled.

The next morning, Natasha drove her mother and brother to the city ski track, where a cousin who moved to Petropavlovsk decades earlier had agreed to tour them around the cross-country trails. When they parked, Natasha’s mother swiveled in the passenger seat to look at the kids. She was covered in nylon and fleece so she rustled. “Are you sure you don’t want to come along?”

“They’re going to their friend’s house,” Natasha said.

“To play that game again? It’s not right to stare at a television set all day. You need some fresh air.”

“Don’t you keep saying this air isn’t good for them?” Natasha leaned over her mother’s lap to open the car door. “Bye, Mama.”

“The harbor air isn’t good for them. This is mountain air,” her mother said. But she was already getting out of her seat. Denis, in the back row, climbed out in his snow boots.

“I’ll pick you up at four,” Natasha called.

Back in Anfisa’s kitchen, the whiskey out, they talked about men. Like Yuri, Misha’s father had been a military man, Anfisa said. She brought a photo album from her bedroom: he was a teenager, really, with buzzed hair that revealed big ears and a neck rising too skinny out of a student uniform. Anfisa turned the album’s pages tenderly. All the photos had that yellow fuzziness that came from film. “Is that you?” Natasha asked, pointing to a pigtailed girl in a knee-length skirt. Anfisa said, “Fifteen when I got pregnant,” and spun the album in place so Natasha could take a better look.

They talked about raising their kids on their own. Anfisa’s parents still lived together, but Natasha’s mother had done it herself, too. “I shouldn’t even try to compare my situation to…I’m not really alone. Yuri’s here for half the year,” Natasha said.

Anfisa shook her head. “Tasha, are you joking? You do it all yourself. Yuri is a good man, but if he’s not here all the time, he doesn’t take care of the children the way you do.” Natasha liked that—both the words and the way Anfisa said them, which was cozy, self-assured. Sisterly. Anfisa insisted, “I’m serious.”

They talked, too, about their jobs. Natasha was one of a few doctoral students at the oceanographic institute. She and the other researchers spent their days in the laboratory, projecting the coming season’s catch limits and complaining about their dissertations.

“You’re so smart,” Anfisa said. She wore less makeup today, and her cheeks were already pink from the alcohol.

Anfisa worked as an administrative assistant for the Petropavlovsk police. “So you know all about the Golosovskaya girls’ kidnapping,” Natasha said.

Anfisa shrugged. “As much as anybody does. Which isn’t much.”

“Well, what’s happening?” At Anfisa’s rolled eyes, Natasha said, “You must be able to say something at this point.”

“Let’s see.” Anfisa sipped from her mug. “We took surveillance tapes from every gas station in the city. We tried to trace the older girl’s phone—nothing. We searched all the abandoned cars at the dump. Did you hear that? We took dogs through to sniff for bodies.”

“Oh, God.”

“We only found a few old drunks who had to be escorted back to their wives. What else…Did you know our detectives were after the girls’ father for a while? The man lives in Moscow, and we actually had officers there take him in for questioning. They acted like the whole thing was some kind of joke.”

“It wasn’t the father?”

“It was humiliating. He hadn’t seen his girls in years. He never paid alimony, let alone the bribes it would take to arrange a kidnapping by private plane. Anyway, it would’ve been impossible to leave Petropavlovsk without anyone seeing.”

“I don’t know…” The empty, dusty roads around the city. The endless tundra. Natasha’s sister had traveled that territory without a witness.

“Think about it. The alert for the sisters went up within four hours. Where could someone drive in that time? You can’t show up in a village with two strange children in tow. And any other way you might want to take those girls—a dock, an airport—people would notice.”

Lilia had told their mother she was sleeping at her friend’s house the night she left, so she got a head start of two days. She went quietly, with only her purse. Later they discovered there never had been a friend she stayed with. Lilia had been leaving the house at night for her own reasons for years. “See, you’re the smart one,” Natasha said. “You’re right.”

Anfisa smiled at her. “The only answer that makes sense is that the girls must have died here that same day. Before their mother even notified us. The major general thinks they may have gone swimming in the bay and drowned.”

Natasha edged closer to the table. “But didn’t the police think someone took them? What about your witness?”

“That’s what happens when you get your information from city rumors,” Anfisa said. “The so-called witness…she saw a man, she thinks, with some kids, she thinks, in a nice car, she knows, for three seconds. The dog she was walking would’ve made a better witness than she did.”

“She didn’t actually see anything?”

“She admits as much herself. But the girls’ mother is involved with United Russia, she works for the party, and our senior staff was terrified in the beginning about intervention from the governor. There was so much pressure to find some person responsible. They needed a big, scary kidnapper, so they made one up.”

Natasha clicked her tongue. A made-up kidnapper—if only her mother could hear. “We can’t trust a thing they report. I’ll have to get my news from you from now on.”

“Don’t I sound authoritative?” Anfisa said. “When actually most of my time at the station is spent pretending I know nothing so the officers won’t bother me.” She sat up straight, laced her hands on the table, and arranged her features into placidity. Above blushing cheeks, her forehead was smooth. Incorruptible.

“Looking good while avoiding work? Really, you ought to be our major general,” Natasha said. Anfisa unfolded her hands to pour them both another drink.

“Mama,” Yulka said, making Natasha jump. Anfisa laughed. The girl stood, fidgeting, at the border where the living room carpet met the kitchen tile.

“What is it, bunny?”

“Can we go home?”

“What’s wrong?” Yulka had her brave face on. Her eyes were wet but her chin was firm. Even this far into motherhood, Natasha found it extraordinary that she and Yuri had made two creatures who were so odd, so particular. During her practice run as a parent, tending to nine-years-younger Lilia, Natasha had been dazzled by the same thing: the raw dough of an infant shaping into a determined child.

These days Natasha pushed herself to see that quality fondly. A person’s early sharpness. That insistence on being themselves. When their father died, Lilia was only five, and during the few days his body lay for viewing in their home, Lilia sat on Natasha’s lap and asked questions. Is he uncomfortable? Can he hear us? If we opened his eyes, what would we see? “He’s dead,” Natasha told her, which was an answer that did not satisfy. For hours, Natasha rested her head on Lilia’s back, in the space between her spine and the fragile wing of her shoulder blade. Natasha’s arms circled Lilia’s waist. Heat rose from her little sister’s skin. There had been so much life inside her.

“The boys are arguing,” Yulka told them.

“Boys argue,” Anfisa said. “It’s all right, sweetheart.”

Yulka waited for her mother. Natasha sighed, stood, and hugged her daughter to her side. “Go tell Lev to get ready.” Yulka hopped away with the news, and Anfisa sipped her tea. Inspired, Natasha leaned down to kiss her friend’s cheek. Pink and smooth and comforting. Anfisa grasped her hand, smiled up, and let her go.

At home, Lev announced, “I hate Misha.”

Natasha was filling a glass from the sink tap. She had an hour to sober up before she was due to retrieve her mother and brother from the ski base. “Don’t say that.”

“I do. He turned off our game because he was losing, and then he told me it was an accident.”

“Maybe it was an accident,” Natasha said.

“It wasn’t,” Lev said. “He did it. It was obvious.”

On Thursday, her son refused to go back. “But they’re expecting us,” Natasha said.

“I don’t care,” Lev said. “I don’t like Misha. He doesn’t play fair.”

They were sitting on their couch in front of the television. Yulka was the only one paying attention to the screen. In the armchair, Natasha’s mother held a book but was clearly eavesdropping. “You’ll hurt Misha’s feelings,” Natasha murmured to her son. He was too grown-up now to carry places. She could not make him go anywhere he did not want to go.

“Lev, honey, do you want to spend this afternoon together?” Natasha’s mother asked. Natasha frowned.

Looking like Yuri in miniature, with the same round lower lip and black eyebrows, Lev pushed his body back against the cushions. “No.”

“Tasha, don’t make that face,” her mother said. “Shouldn’t we be together? We aren’t down so often, are we?” Speaking in Russian so the children would hear.

“You’re right,” Natasha said. “You’re right, you’re right.” Deprived of the release of Anfisa, she was tipping into nastiness. Natasha’s daughter, lying on a pillow at their feet, turned up the volume on the television set. The screen showed a redheaded soap-opera star.

“What should we do, then?” Natasha’s mother asked the room. “Our holiday’s already half over. How about downhill skiing instead of cross-country?”

Denis said, “Where would we go?”

“Have you looked out the window?” Natasha asked. “Do you notice any hills in Petropavlovsk?”

His chin pushed forward. To their mother, he said, “You can take the kids out on your own.”

Their mother pinched the pages of her book open. Her forehead was creased. “Denis, try not to be so sensitive. You know your sister doesn’t mean to hurt you.”

Natasha was trapped in this apartment with these family members. That truth was stunning. All the people she wanted to see were far from her. Even one day when their mother died, Natasha would remain stuck. No confidantes. Barely half a husband. She would have to look after Denis and hear his looped stories and nag her own children until they scattered.

Lev leaned forward. “Uncle Denis,” he said, “if you’re home today, I’ll stay with you.”

Denis turned in his direction. “Did I ever tell you about Travis Walton?” Lev shrugged. “An American. When Travis Walton was abducted, in 1975, his friends were witnesses. They were in the forest and saw a golden disk. The disk took Travis Walton and he was missing for five days. Finally he was returned to a gas station. When he came back, he described the Greys, who are short, with enormous heads.” Denis touched his lower eyelid. “Big brown eyes with no white in them. Five times as big as normal. Travis Walton told investigators they look right through you.”

Natasha stared ahead at the screen.

“That’s not true,” her son said.

“Lev,” Natasha’s mother warned.

“It is true. Travis Walton passed a polygraph test,” said Denis. “They don’t land in cities. But when you’re not a threat to them, and there aren’t many other people—I saw them the same way. In the wilderness. When I worked in the herds, the year before Lilia.”

“Enough,” Natasha said. Too loud. “Lev, I told you, they’re waiting for us over there. If you don’t want to come, don’t, but understand how cruel you’re being to your friend.” Her son made a face, and she knew Misha wasn’t his friend, not really. She got up anyway. “Yulka?”

Her daughter propped herself up on her elbows. “I’ll stay here, too, Mama.”

“Fine,” Natasha said. “Fine.” She went to the foyer for her coat. On the other side of the wall, the television squawked.

“Don’t go,” her mother called in Even. Natasha was sick of hearing her childhood language.

If aliens really had landed, they would have taken Denis, not Lilia, away. And didn’t Natasha wish for that? An interplanetary exchange? “I’ll be back soon,” she shouted in Russian toward the living room. They were no longer children, happy to swim together in warm water—Natasha and Denis had no bond to each other anymore.

He wanted to talk about his spaceships. Tell them, then, and see.

“Denis claims he’s hosted visitors from outer space,” Natasha told Anfisa. The neighbor raised her eyebrows. Anfisa had not shown even that much surprise when Natasha turned up without Lev, although Natasha had not said she was coming, had instead wasted the short walk over on calling Yuri’s out-of-service cell phone. He was somewhere off the coast of Canada. He would call on Sunday, if the sub stayed on schedule. For now, Natasha had to accept the rise and fall of their cell provider’s recorded messages: The number cannot be accessed. Hang up and try again…

Anfisa rested her head on one fist. Their mugs were topped off with so much liquor that the tea in them was already cool enough to drink. Natasha said, “He worked one season in the reindeer herds.” She explained it: the period in Denis’s twenties when he kept losing jobs. He was briefly employed as a daycare attendant, a cook, a shop cashier. All that was before he found the position he held now, as a night watchman for the village school. Their mother had arranged a herding apprenticeship with another Even family that lived near them. Denis accepted it without fuss. He left that year in June, when the herders swung close to Esso, and returned in September sun-darkened.

Lev entered kindergarten that fall, and Lilia started her final year of high school. The week he came home, Lilia called Natasha to report Denis’s experience of extraterrestrials. Her voice came through the phone amused. One night, out in the tundra with the herd, Denis saw a purple light overhead, she said. Simply spotting that light froze him in place. Meanwhile the deer kept grazing. The glow got bigger, filling his vision, and then creatures from outer space were on the ground beside him. They stroked his arms. They sent messages telepathically. When he thought how worried he was about losing the herd, that the deer might wander off into the tundra during this visitation, they told him not to worry, his paralysis was temporary, they had already put all the animals and the other herders back at camp to sleep.

The grasses rustling in the night breeze. The deer, barely a meter tall at the shoulder, hunkered down together to make a low, dark field of fur. The world so quiet that Denis could hear his own breath in his ears. The sweep of stars and satellites above.

“How considerate of them,” Natasha said.

Lilia laughed. Natasha should have asked more questions, probed for Lilia’s coming escape plans, but back then it seemed there was no other family sorrow to discuss. They turned the subject instead to Lilia’s classes. Which kids planned to leave Esso after high school graduation to study. Lilia said she’d do that, too, but not right away. She talked about coming down to visit Petropavlovsk. Eleven months later, she was gone.

Returning home after her sister’s disappearance was the only time Natasha ever heard that story direct from Denis. The same details: purple light, resting deer, alien mouths fixed shut while alien words in his head were echoing. He told her and their mother in the kitchen that first night. He was nervous. His breath came short. And he tacked on a new ending. “They told me they’d come back for me, but they came for Lilia instead,” he said. “She’s taken.” Pointed up. “Lilia’s safe,” he said, in a promise that stemmed from a vivid dream, a promise neither he nor anyone else on this peninsula was capable of proving.

“Phoo,” said Anfisa and shuddered. “So what really happened to her?”

“She ran away,” Natasha said. Anfisa waited. “It was hard to figure out at first because she didn’t take the bus out, she didn’t have a car, and she never mentioned leaving permanently. But afterward we put it together.”

They sat in quiet. The air around them was sticky with that pine smell, wet from steam. “My sister had secrets,” Natasha said. “She dated people I didn’t know about. She had a reputation our neighbors only mentioned after she left. Everyone at home says they saw this coming.” Even Yuri, with his hands pressed to Natasha’s back as reassurance.

“Please, these experts,” Anfisa said. “They say that now. Don’t listen.”

“But they’re right. Aren’t they? It shouldn’t have come as a surprise.” Natasha wrapped her fingers around her mug. “My mother doesn’t believe that, though. She thinks Lilia’s like the Golosovskaya sisters—killed.”

“Whatever happened with those girls is so different.”

“My mother and brother don’t grasp that,” Natasha said. “No one needed to take Lilia. She left on her own. Because who could stand living with him? Talking incessantly about what does not exist. Hearing that, and only that, who wouldn’t keep her own secrets? Who wouldn’t go?”

After a minute, Anfisa said, “Take a sip.” She took the kettle from the counter to top off Natasha’s drink.

Natasha looked up at her friend. “You understand,” she said. She was so grateful.

Reaching out, Anfisa wrapped her fingers around Natasha’s wrist. That warm, soft skin. The kettle shone silver between them. Anfisa’s hand eased back any anger.

“It must be so hard to have an invalid in the family,” Anfisa said. “Which category is Denis in? The second?”

Natasha opened her mouth. Shook her head. “No, Denis isn’t—None.” She was startled out of her own words. Anfisa seemed sure that Denis fit into a government invalid group, that he received disability pay. That he was sick. “He’s not.”

“Oh,” Anfisa said. “I thought…You were just saying he can’t work.”

“He can work. He has a job right now.”

“But isn’t that what you’ve been telling me? There’s something wrong.”

“Don’t say that,” Natasha said. “There’s nothing wrong. Denis is strange. That’s all.”

“More than strange.” Anfisa’s fingers were still on Natasha’s wrist. “It’s like you said, isn’t it? Hard to live with that. Who in your sister’s place wouldn’t go?”

Anfisa’s hand still, still, still there. Still there. Natasha had said those things, yet repeated by Anfisa they were foul. They made her siblings into caricatures. Anfisa did not know. The memory came up inside Natasha like vomit: not Lilia herself, her wit and freshness, but the village women who came over after Lilia left to gossip about a teenage girl gone missing. How they hugged Natasha and her children, how they wiped their wet faces on her cheeks. Their appraisal of her household. The blow of judgment.

Natasha took her arm back. She was done with the taste of the tea. “It’s time for me to leave.”

“Come on.”

“I’ve already been here too long. They’re at home waiting.”

Anfisa looked skeptical. “Uh-huh,” she said. Though Natasha knew this situation was her own fault—she had given every reason, by sneaking away from her apartment to complain, for her neighbor to judge her family—she could not stand the look on Anfisa’s face. Anfisa did not really look like Lilia. She was too old. Her jaw and cheeks and brow bones were highlighted in shimmering powder. She dangled herself like a lure; for the sake of a drinking partner, she had baited Natasha into intimacy.

Anfisa followed Natasha to the door. “I’m sorry if I offended you.”

Natasha pulled her boots back on. “No. But they’re leaving in three days. I should spend more time with them while I have the chance.” Dressed for the cold, Natasha faced her neighbor. “Unlike you, I actually like being with my family,” she said. Anfisa’s expression kept that sly cat look, and Natasha wished she had come up with something more cutting. Or no—already she wished she had said nothing at all; already she regretted speaking. Always regretting. As if a comment made in anger was like another slap.

The building’s stairwell was dark. The sun was already behind the mountains.

She had not told Anfisa details of Denis as a boy—the community pool, the way he spoon-fed baby Lilia cereal, how all three of them gathered grass together to feed the horses fenced in neighbors’ yards—or Denis as a younger man. The herders that summer said that they wouldn’t need his help in the future, but he had done well for himself in the field. Crossing the parking lot, Natasha swayed with guilt. Her coat was open. She dialed Yuri’s number again. The recording piped into her ear, cannot be accessed, always cannot be accessed, like the thousands of times she had called Lilia with no luck, and she flung her phone down at a snow pile. It slotted sideways into the white. Quick, she crouched, scooped the phone back out, and pressed the home button—the screen still worked. Natasha wiped the phone over and over across one bare palm. For days, for years, she had been making the stupidest choices.

Anfisa was not Lilia. Lilia was kind and clever and had the wisdom to keep her views private. She was living in Moscow, or St. Petersburg, or Luxembourg. Natasha liked to picture her in Europe. Lilia was an elegant young woman now. Maybe she had finally enrolled in university. Maybe she had gotten married. Maybe she even had a child or two of her own.

Lilia, Natasha promised herself, fingers freezing, was traveling the world. And one day she might come back to them. For now, Natasha would have to deal with her brother without a sibling who could carry stories between them.

Denis was fine. He was just on the more idiosyncratic end of normal. He was all Natasha had at the moment, and so she needed to be kinder, not dismiss him, value having him nearby.

On her landing, with her keys out, Natasha could hear conversation. She let herself back in. Peeking around the corner, she found Denis and Lev still on the couch. Yulka had joined them there. The three of them in a row, holding her accountable.

Natasha turned away to hang her wet coat. Her fingers hurt from cold. “Where’s Babulya?” she called to the children.

“She went out to meet her cousin again,” Yulka said.

“How nice,” Natasha said. Trying hard to sound loving.

“But we wanted to stay here.”

Natasha went to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water. She came out and took the armchair. Her face was flushed. “What have you all been talking about?”

Yulka glanced at her uncle. Lev said, “Nothing.”

Natasha sipped her water. She put the glass down at her feet, leaned forward, and squeezed Denis’s shoulder. He glanced at her with surprise and, she hoped, pleasure. “You only have a couple more days in the city,” she said. “What would you like to do?”

“It’s not safe to be out too much,” Denis said. “Remember London. Petrozavodsk.”

“I do,” she said.

Yulka said, “Mama, Uncle Denis told us that he met aliens.”

Natasha took her hand back and touched her forehead. “All right.”

“Are they actually real?”

She only hesitated for an instant. “No, bunny,” she said, then addressed her brother: “You know that, Denis.”

His expression flattened. His eyes half-shut. Natasha felt it then, the familiar grief of looking for someone who would not be recovered.

“See, I told you,” Lev said to his sister. Natasha watched her brother. She was listening.

Roswell. Tunguska. Chelyabinsk. Jerusalem. Natasha was waiting for Denis to change. And she, too, would be different—she was going to be an excellent sister. She would let go of this anger. She was not angry. She just wanted to hear what else Denis had to say.