Disappearing Earth

MARCH

Three wordless days after the kitchen flooded, Nadia and Mila took off from Esso’s provincial airport toward Palana’s. They had their own row to themselves. Mila, five years old, spent the plane ride eating cucumber slices and drawing figures with ever-larger breasts. She drew two big circles in her notebook and laughed, then drew two bigger circles around those and laughed again, then set her mouth in concentration to draw two even bigger circles. Peering over her daughter’s head, Nadia asked, “No men?”

Quickly Mila drew another, wider person. She added two tiny nipple dots to the chest.

“I wasn’t telling you to add one,” Nadia said.

Mila put her pen back to the page and circled those dots with breasts. “Wonderful,” Nadia said and looked out the window at the white ground.

They were already past the central mountain range that penned in Esso. Nadia had spent the last few days bartering with their pilot so this twin-engine turboprop, halted by a blizzard after leaving Petropavlovsk, would take her and Mila along for the last leg of its trip north. In the village they left behind was Chegga. His garbage palace of a rental house where they had spent the last three years. The newly broken radiator pipe, the tile floor yellow under ankle-deep water. The last sentence Nadia spoke to him—“Call the landlord,” she had said on Tuesday—and the note she slid under the frozen honey jar on the kitchen table today.

She and Mila were starting over. Nadia put one arm around Mila’s back. “My sweet,” Nadia said, “let’s not tell Grandpa and Baba about what happened this week, all right?”

Mila drew another loop. “All right.”

“Pretend I’m Grandpa. Hi, Mila, what’s new with you?”

“Nothing!” Mila said. “The other day a pipe broke and it made an ice rink in the house.”

Nadia paused. “That’s what we’re not telling.”

“I thought we weren’t telling about you and Daddy being mad at each other.”

“That, too,” Nadia said. “All of it.” She squeezed Mila’s shoulder, took her arm back, sank in her seat. Pushed her knees against the seat pocket ahead.

It didn’t matter what Mila said. In a month or two, their life would be good enough that Nadia would no longer have to misrepresent it to her parents. So instead of wasting words on what they were leaving, that iced-over shithole, Nadia unlocked her phone, scrolled to a Rihanna album, and put one earbud in. “Here, kitten,” she said to Mila, who tilted the side of her face up. Nadia tucked the other bud into her daughter’s soft ear and let pop music play them in.

They came at Palana from the east. The town was the administrative center of its district, but looked shabby from above: streets smudged gray, apartment blocks crumbling, rows of wooden houses trailing into the sea. Nadia hadn’t been back since she and Mila moved south to Esso. She could not see any new structures from the air.

Her parents met them at the airport. Neither of them questioned Mila on what was new. Nadia’s mother said, “I will not ask why Chegga didn’t come.”

“He’s busy with work,” Nadia said. “Not only the newspaper anymore—weddings, events.” That wasn’t the reason, but it was a flattering fact.

“He needed a break, I imagine. You’re not easy to live with.”

“And who raised me that way?” Nadia muttered. Her mother, too deaf to hear, was squinting at the other disembarking passengers in search of anyone she recognized. Her father was bent over and squeezing Mila’s cheeks.

Mila had on a new coat, shining purple, that Nadia had bought her for New Year’s. Thank God for Sberbank: it was Nadia’s job that had landed them here. Seven weeks of paid vacation. She and Chegga had talked about using that time to go to Sochi for the summer, before one burst pipe, one final argument, and one firm conversation with her boss about what Nadia had called a “family matter” changed those plans permanently.

They had seven weeks now, which would take them into May. Long enough to find a quality place to live. Not in Palana, certainly, or in Petropavlovsk, where Chegga’s sister was in university, but on the mainland—perhaps Kazan?—or even Europe. Istanbul? London? Without Chegga to hold them back, Nadia and Mila might become world travelers. Sberbank had branches everywhere.

In the car, Nadia took the passenger seat, while her father and Mila climbed into the back. Sitting close to the steering wheel, Nadia’s mother continued to squint, though there was nothing but iced-over parked cars in front of them.

“Mama, can you see?” Nadia asked. No answer. Nadia twisted in her seat. “Can she see?”

“Of course she can,” her father said. “She drove us here.”

Nadia studied him, his knit cap, his own clouding eyes, and leaned over into the back to buckle Mila in. Her mother pulled into the line of cars leaving the airport lot. “Papa, I got a raise in January,” Nadia said. “I’m a manager now. Sixty more an hour.”

“With the way the ruble’s falling, that’s nothing,” her father said. “Your mother’s pension hardly buys our bread.”

“Do you need help?” Nadia asked. Her father frowned. She had been away too long; she’d forgotten his habits, the complaints about money segueing into the same concerns about politics, bureaucrats, criminals clogging parliament. His lack of a wish to change. She took a breath. “Sorry. How’s the catch these days?”

“What’s there to say? Winter waters. How’s—”

“How’s our Chegga?” her mother asked.

“He’s fine.” Her mother didn’t react. “HE’S FINE,” Nadia said. “SAME AS EVER.” At this, her mother shook her head, her bun drifting from side to side across her scalp while her shoulders stayed fixed over the wheel.

The last season Nadia lived here was the first she spent with Chegga. He had finished his military service and decided to work a month in Palana’s fishing camps, then extended his stay once they met. Nadia’s parents fell all over him: a good boy, native like them, and from a place that was not theirs but seemed enough like theirs, meaning not too white, not foreign. Chegga was responsible, Chegga was talented. After Mila fell asleep with her mouth open each night, he and Nadia made silent love on the freshly laundered sheets. Next to them, Mila never stirred.

A month younger than Nadia, Chegga dreamed as big as she did. He already wanted to be a father. He loved that Nadia had Mila, who at that time was starting to speak, looking for someone to call Daddy. He talked up their future together. In his descriptions, Esso was the most beautiful village on Kamchatka, with carved log cabins and mountain air as fresh as an apple. After he went back, he called her every night: I found us a place, he said then, a temporary place, two rooms to stay warm in while we look for somewhere down the street to keep building our family. And while they saved for her and Mila’s tickets south, Nadia walked around Palana flush with the knowledge that a better life was coming. Here were all the half-collapsed buildings, the flaking Soviet murals, the stained smokestacks, the mended nets, the tethered rowboats, the exes who no longer acknowledged her, the classmates who tittered when they passed Mila having a tantrum—and there, a flight away, was Chegga.

But in Esso, Nadia and Mila only found a half-collapsed shack of their own. It’s temporary, he had shouted again on Tuesday morning as they stood in the flood. For three years he had been saying the same thing while pieces of the rental house fell off. Last fall, Nadia had approached her office about a home loan. She and Chegga argued about the bank for a month. No mortgages, he said, no debt. “We’re not Americans. I won’t live on credit.” Goddamn it, she said to him, if we won’t live on credit then we’ll be stuck here—and still he insisted. So Nadia tried other methods. His parents had piled up savings from years of work in the reindeer herds; with Chegga’s sister in university on a scholarship, their money just sat there. When the radiator began to leak this winter, Nadia went in confidence to Chegga’s mother to suggest how they might see those savings spent. “Your generation always wants more,” his mother said then. “Your avarice. Will that really seem good enough for you, to own someplace you borrowed and begged for? Will that satisfy?”

Nadia had not been begging. But now she saw his mother might be right: nothing in Esso would satisfy.

The village Chegga had flown them to was like the town they’d left. Over the January holidays, he had made Nadia and Mila spend their days with his sister and her boyfriend at Esso’s public thermal pool. Whatever compromises Nadia suggested—Can we pay for admission to a private pool, a cleaner one? Can we take Ksyusha, Mila adores her, but not invite Ruslan? Can we go out as a family, just the three of us?—he turned down. Instead, they paddled in community waters, sweating, smelling sulfur, feeling the slip and give of algae on the cement under their feet.

In the pool, Chegga and Ruslan, his sister’s sleazy boyfriend, had dissected the other villagers who came to swim—this one’s mental deficiency, that one’s weight problem, this one’s unfaithful spouse. Chegga’s sister, Ksyusha, only laid her head on the edge of the pool and shut her eyes. Once a man on the other side of the water waved in their direction. Mila dipped under, and Nadia clicked her tongue: “Mouse, don’t get your hair wet. You’ll catch cold.” She stretched to grab a towel for her girl. Over her shoulder, she said to Chegga, “Someone’s trying to say hello.” Chegga glanced the man’s way without acknowledgment. Ruslan, looking after, laughed.

“You’re not going to greet him?” Nadia said.

“That’s Yegor Gusakov,” Ruslan said. “He graduated in Chegga’s year.”

“He’s not normal,” Chegga said. “A freak.”

Nadia wanted to dip herself underwater, then, too. The man across the pool was no hero—soft-bodied, sitting alone—but he was not monstrous. Chegga, meanwhile, was ignoring the misbehavior of his chosen child, who had undone her towel turban and let cords of hair freeze over her forehead. And Ruslan was about as agreeable as a feral white dog.

“You should feel sorry for him,” Ksyusha said. Sweat glistened on her cheeks.

“I don’t,” Chegga said. “When we were kids he used to torture cats.”

“That was a frog,” Ksyusha said. “One time.” Careful as always, this university girl. Ksyusha was restrained while her brother gave himself every liberty.

“A frog when we were watching. The cats, he did on his own. Lilia Solodikova told me Yegor left them in front of her house every week of sixth year. Her mother complained to all their neighbors because she thought someone was putting out too much rat poison.”

“Oh, Lilia told you,” Ruslan said. He nuzzled Ksyusha. When she turned away, he revolved to face Chegga. “Should we go ask Lilia what she thinks of him now?”

“You know she was probably murdered?” Chegga said. “You’re an asshole.”

Ruslan puffed his narrow chest up. “You’re the asshole.”

“Everyone’s an asshole,” Ksyusha said. “Let’s talk about anything else.”

Nadia was done with it all. If she wanted to hear family arguments, false superiority, and snide mentions of girls who fled the area years before, she could do that in her parents’ town, where at least the heat worked and wallpaper stayed adhered to the walls. Nadia’s mother drove them along a row of five-story apartment buildings. Blocks like that, half a century old, might not look as appealing from the outside as Esso’s cottages, but their inhabitants could eat together without having to wade through chunks of ice.

Chegga used to swear that apartment blocks had no place in beautiful Esso. Kamchatka’s Switzerland, he said. What did he know? None of them had ever been past Moscow.

At the house, Nadia’s mother served fish soup. She insisted on giving them all a second helping as soon as the level of their broth dipped. Mila pushed her bowl away, and Nadia’s mother pushed it back. “I don’t want any more,” Mila said.

“What?” Nadia’s mother said.

“SHE DOESN’T WANT ANY MORE,” said Nadia.

Clicking her tongue, her mother took the bowl to scrape back into the pot. Boiled potatoes fell splat, splat. Onions sprouted out of old mayonnaise jars on the counter. “It’s because you’re not eating. You don’t set a good example for her.”

Nadia flushed. “It’s because she ate on the way.”

“What?”

“IT’S BECAUSE SHE ATE ON THE WAY.”

“That’s not why,” her mother said.

Nadia ducked her head so her hair made a dark wall between them. “Papa, doesn’t she wear her hearing aid anymore?”

“Your mother’s an excellent woman,” her father said. He was lifting his spoon.

Nadia’s nose prickled and she raised her face in surprise. She wasn’t going to cry! Silly. But the way her father said that reminded her of the best of Chegga. The compliments Chegga delivered to Nadia through Mila—Isn’t your mama funny? Aren’t we lucky? The way he did show he loved her when he remembered to try.

She was simply getting sentimental because she was worn out after days of mutual silent treatment. Exhausted from the coordinating it took to get Mila out of preschool and herself away from the currency-counting machines.

Tired, too, from covering for the insufficiencies in their household. She could only imagine how people in Esso talked about their situation. That Chegga Adukanov, who lived in a dump, couldn’t afford to fix his rented pipes. Maybe they did not even say “couldn’t afford”—people could assume instead didn’t care. They might think, There’s a certain type of man, indigenous, probably drinks too much, seems polite when he’s on the job but then see how he acts at home. Lives with a woman but doesn’t follow through with marriage. Acts sweet enough to take on another man’s baby but lets that child freeze. Except for the drinking, all those potential whispers were true. And Nadia could not stand being subject to more gossip.

This month and a half would give her the time to sort out what propelled her toward him in the first place. If she had been willing after high school to spend a few more days here, instead of getting pregnant by the first man who approached her, would she have ended up a couple lovers later in an even tinier village than where she started, with someone who took her and her baby on double dates to a communal swamp?

Once the lunch dishes were cleared, Nadia opened their suitcase in the living room. Mila’s things were microscopic, rhinestone-dotted. “You’re a very brave girl,” Nadia told her daughter. Mila wrapped her arms around Nadia’s neck and leaned into her lap. The girl smelled soupy: dill, black pepper, lemon juice. Nadia hugged her tighter.

Nadia shouldn’t, but she could not resist. “We don’t miss Daddy, do we?” she asked against Mila’s cheek.

At first Mila was quiet. Then she turned her face in to Nadia’s shoulder. Sniffed. Sniffed again—Nadia had made her daughter cry.

“Oh, my duckling,” Nadia said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She held her daughter hard, trying to squeeze the tears back in before Mila really started to go off.

“He’s not coming?” Mila asked. Her voice was all choked. Nadia released some of the pressure around her daughter’s ribs.

“He’s back at home. Remember? We’re staying with Grandpa and Baba for a while.” Mila got louder, saying no—no-o-o—Nadia tried to talk over her. “Don’t you remember how he broke the kitchen? He has to stay to fix it.” Nadia had put Mila in this position, she’d asked her daughter about Chegga, and still she was getting angry at the girl. Nadia wanted to ask her, Remember Tuesday? Leaving the house cold and sobbing? The frost up the walls—the school attendant’s pity—the way Chegga afterward had acted so defensive and put-upon? For once, couldn’t Mila remember whose side she was on?

Nadia pushed her nose into her daughter’s round cheek. “Do you want to watch TV?” There. Snot sucked back up into little sinuses. Cheburashka cartoons could undo any tragedy.

A swollen-faced Mila curled into Nadia on the couch. When Nadia was growing up, this was the spot where she slept, did her homework, fantasized about freedom; now she came back to this place as a mother and a professional. Together, she and Mila watched animals dance on her laptop. The light faded overhead.

When her phone buzzed, Nadia slipped out. In the hush of the hallway she looked at Chegga’s picture on the screen. Then she silenced the call. The vibration stopped, but his face remained, backlit by last summer’s southern sun. His smile.

She felt that old tug he put in her. A finger hooked under her ribs.

The phone screen went black for a second, then lit up again. Another call. She knew exactly the conversation that was going to come—why didn’t you, when are you, why not, and so on. She silenced the call again and pulled up their text message chain. In Palana, she sent. Will call when I’m ready.

The phone stayed silent. She watched the screen until she had to close her eyes against it. From the living room leaked the tinny sound of a song about trains.

Picture that hovel in Esso. Her daughter’s breath fogging as she dressed. His barrel of a body looking ridiculous in gym shorts as he stood with his feet in ice water. Imagine anything but his voice rough at night, the toast and jam he prepared for Mila each morning, his breath over Nadia’s shoulder as he showed her his latest work on his computer, the way his mouth must have fallen when he came home today and found his family was not there.

Again the phone vibrated. The tug was a yank, and she rocked with the urge to answer. The number coming up was unknown. Maybe he’d bought a new SIM card…Impressive, Chegga. She exhaled, picked up. “What is it?”

There was silence on the other end. A guy she didn’t recognize: “Nadia?”

She pressed her hand to her forehead. “Yes? Sorry. Hello?”

“It’s Slava Bychkov.”

“Ooooh,” she said.

“You don’t still have my number, huh.”

“I’m surprised you still have mine.”

“Nadechka, it’s not a question. So. How does it feel to be home after this long?” Nadia narrowed her eyes. Had her mother told the neighbors she was coming? But then he said, “My aunt saw you at the airport. You can’t hide anything from anyone in this town.”

“I guess I forgot.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll remind you.”

“Uh-huh,” Nadia said. “We’re having a great time here—my daughter and I.” She lay on daughter a little harder than she needed to, probably, but she would like to hear him lose that ease in his voice. She and Slava had been seeing each other when she was pregnant. He left once she really started to show.

“Do you ever tell her about me?”

Nadia laughed. “No, Slav.”

“Maybe she’s too young to understand fairy tales.” Nadia chose not to respond. “Does she like hot chocolate?”

“Yes, Prince Charming, she does.”

“Would she and her mother like to be taken to Palana’s finest café?”

Palana’s only café. “Unfortunately, she can’t make it. She has plans with her grandparents.”

“And her mother?”

She still hadn’t gotten a text back from Chegga. “Her mother,” said Nadia, “is free.”

The next morning, after she and Mila woke to the slam of the front door from Nadia’s father leaving, after their bed linens were folded, the couch cushions rearranged, and the breakfast dishes washed, Nadia called the Far Eastern headquarters of Sberbank about an international transfer. A manager provided the number of the main office in Moscow, which, because of the time difference, would not open for another nine hours. Mila was sitting in Nadia’s lap drawing. Nadia tapped her daughter’s fist, pulled the pen out of her hand, and wrote on the top of one notebook page the phone number that would change their future.

After she hung up, she gave Mila the pen. Mila scribbled in the bottom circle of an 8 Nadia had written. “Don’t,” Nadia said and flipped to a blank page. To her mother, Nadia said, “Can I take the car today?”

Her mother hesitated, and Nadia leaned into Mila’s back. “CAN I TAKE THE CAR, I SAID?”

“Where?” her mother asked.

“OUT.”

Nadia’s mother twisted her mouth up. “Okay,” Nadia said to that knot of disapproval. She got up and plucked the keys off their wall hook beside the portrait of Stalin.

“Mama, I’m going with you,” Mila said. She held on to Nadia’s thighs as Nadia put her coat on.

“Your grandmother misses you too much to let you go, Milusha. I’ll be back soon,” Nadia said. “Be good.” And Nadia was gone.

The cold grabbed her lungs in two fists. Wind off the Sea of Okhotsk polished the streets here with dark ice. In only a few years, she had gotten used to Esso—its clean puffs of snowflakes, its mounds of spotless snow, its seeming calm. Wooden fences lined garden plots in people’s backyards. Horses had brushed their noses against Mila’s palms when Nadia took her out walking. Palana, facing open water, looked vicious in comparison.

Nadia might like that viciousness now. Before moving again, she would need to research her options, collect a few paychecks, call landlords across Europe. While she waited for the car’s engine to warm up, she experimented with the idea of pausing for a bit in Palana. Why not? Let the town see what she had made of herself. Spend some time at the edge of the sea.

Slava was waiting at a table when she got to the café. Five years on, he looked okay. Just okay, she told herself, glad for it. Time had carved lines around his mouth and on his forehead. His skin was darkened in a stripe over his eyes—he must be out on the snowmobile these days. And his hair was too long in the back. Compare that to Chegga, whose hair Nadia buzzed in their bathroom monthly.

Stop with Chegga, already. Nadia was moving on. She had evaluated herself in the bathroom mirror this morning, and felt herself attractive, or no more unattractive than she had been. She stood a little differently since having Mila—her pelvis pushed at a new angle—but the change was nothing stark. And her clothes had improved.

She took the empty seat. Slava stood up too late to pull it out for her and settled for kissing her cheek instead. “How many summers, how many winters. Hello, beautiful,” he said.

“Hi. Tea?” He signaled to the waiter. “You don’t work today?” she asked.

“I work nights. This is late for me to even be up. Two black teas,” he told the boy.

“Mine with lemon,” she said, and the boy nodded.

“How have you been?” Slava asked.

She opened her hands under the table. Since they last saw each other, Nadia had turned eighteen, had a baby, fallen for Chegga, moved to Esso, started at the bank, taken charge of a household. Gotten engaged—or at least talked a lot about marriage. “You first,” she said.

He laughed. “You heard it all. I work nights. Not much else. I was married for a bit—did your mother tell you?—but we’re separating. You don’t know her. She came after you left.”

After Slava broke up with her, Nadia had, for the first and only time in her life, cried so hard she vomited. There was a particular period of teenagehood when she behaved more childishly than Mila did now. Pregnancy certainly had not helped. Her heart had been fragile, its chambers shifting as easily and dangerously as volcanic earth. Slava got in there before the ground hardened.

Hearing about his marriage did hurt a little. Despite the length of his hair. Once in her life, one time, she would like someone to love her completely, with no room left for anything else.

“In Esso I live with my man,” she said. “We’re very happy. He’s a photographer.” The waiter came with their glasses and she busied herself for a few seconds by stirring.

She glanced up to see Slava appraising her. “So happy you came here to meet me?”

“Well,” she said, then ran out of words.

He sipped his tea, steam rising. “How’s your mother?”

Nadia squinted and leaned toward him. “What?”

“How’s your— Oh,” he said and laughed. Just that, the deep noise, unlocked something in her again. She looked away.

“She’s the same as she was,” Nadia said, “only more.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“Not me,” she said. “I’ve transformed.”

He smiled at her over the lip of his glass.

This was an adorable affectation—the café. When they last knew each other, Slava was all cheap beer and cheaper spirits. He might have knocked someone to the ground for suggesting he had ever been in the proximity of a moka pot. And Nadia used to like his posturing; like Chegga with the infamous Lilia Solodikova, Nadia had her own youthful fixations, her embarrassing things to adore.

But Nadia had matured. Girls younger than she were already graduating from university, for God’s sake. They were grown women. Nadia herself was adult enough to have a half-grown child.

“How’s your daughter?” Slava said, and Nadia started in her seat. If he could read her mind, she would have to stop thinking about his hair.

“Precious. Five already. Do you have any of your own?”

“I don’t know,” Slava said. Grinned. “I’d like to meet her.”

“Hmm,” Nadia said. She changed the subject to his parents, his brothers. The animals he was trapping these days. When he smiled, he showed those familiar teeth, the top two angled in toward each other to make a crooked gate. She let that old sweet sight wash over her until their teas were drunk and done.

In the car, though, Nadia was glad to be alone again. Sitting beside Slava had made her recall herself at her clingiest. In Esso, surrounded by family and old friends, Chegga had relished going over his school years, but Nadia did not want to soak in the memory of who she used to be.

A local embarrassment. A girl who sought her joy in other people—in men. She began to learn her error only after Mila’s father left, when from him, reeling, she stumbled into Slava’s bed. She had never wanted to get out. After that ended, she sincerely thought of dying.

She had been seventeen, four months pregnant, in love twice over with nothing to show for it. Sobbing into her pillowcase while her parents watched TV in their bedroom. She used to ask, How can I go on?

Then she figured it out. She could go on. She had loved Chegga, his big heart, his bigger promises, but what brought true joy in this life was a climbing salary, a full belly, a firmly connected radiator pipe.

Neighbors’ dogs lifted their heads to watch her drive down their street. The animals sat in sockets of ice under fence posts. Nadia pulled up to her parents’ house, turned the engine off, and heard a child crying. Taking her purse under the puffed arm of her coat, she got out—yes. Mila. “Where’s my girl?” Nadia called, letting herself inside.

“Mamochka!” A wet-faced Mila pitched around the corner toward her.

“Hi, kitten,” Nadia said. “Hi, turtledove. Have you been torturing your grandparents?” Her daughter shook her head. Mila must have taken her hair out and retied it herself; before breakfast, Nadia had arranged it in a clean braid, but now Mila wore two lopsided pigtails. Great lumps of black hair rose across her skull. Nadia took her hand. “I think you were.”

“In here,” Nadia’s father called.

Mila led Nadia down the hall to the bedroom. The sound of the television drew them along. They found Nadia’s parents sitting up on the bed, her mother darning a pile of already mended socks. A news program played at top volume: results of a Euro qualifying match, cease-fires called for the day in eastern Ukraine, rail service restored between the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. “Happiness, it’s happiness,” a Ukrainian commuter told the reporter. Light from the screen flashed across the fleece blanket under Nadia’s parents’ feet.

Five years from now, or fifty, Nadia expected she would enter this room to find her parents this same way. She bent down to her daughter. “Your notebook is in the front pocket of my suitcase. Want to bring it?” Mila left and Nadia checked her phone. No missed calls. Chegga might not try again until the evening.

Mila came back with the breast-filled notebook. “Go get a pen out of the drawer in the kitchen table,” Nadia said. Her mother looked up, questioning, but Nadia did not repeat herself. Instead Nadia sat on the rug to wait for her daughter to return.

One day soon Nadia would have her own television. A bedroom with tall windows for Mila. Fine new socks, machine-made in Europe, that she could ship by the carton back here. While Mila drew smiling faces, their eyes and cheeks and mouths decorated by ink flowers, Nadia finger-combed the girl’s hair and put it in place. Nadia’s father snored above their heads. A tiny, soothing noise.

The afternoon drifted away, at once quiet and too loud. A few minutes before five, Nadia plugged in her phone to charge and went to the kitchen to help with dinner. They were having buttered macaroni and fish. Nadia’s father played with Mila while the room steamed up. Once the time to eat came, Nadia’s mother portioned out servings, as she had when Nadia was little. Mila kept eating noodles with her fingers until Nadia smacked her hand.

Nadia did not miss Chegga. She and Mila were doing fine. So when she got back to her phone and saw he had called twice, she decided she should let him know.

He picked up on the first ring. “What were you thinking?”

She tucked one arm under the other. “Hello to you, too.” Almost a week had passed since they heard each other’s voices. He did not sound like he was savoring hers.

“You’re really at your parents’ place?”

“Where else would I be?”

“How much did those tickets cost us?”

“Christ, Chegga,” she said. “Twenty-five thousand.” Nearly all her cash. He let out a goose’s hiss at that, kkkh, air forced from the back of his throat. “Mila flew half-price. And I took all my time from work, because we weren’t going to use it together, anyway. Right? We weren’t?”

“Unbelievably selfish,” he said. “We were. Why weren’t we?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. Full of baked fish, half a meter from her framed graduation portrait on her parents’ dresser, she knew again the cold clarity of that early-morning flood. She had followed him, his feet bare, hers in rubber boots, through the dirty water. He carried Mila, who clung to his shoulders like he was some sort of savior. Meanwhile Nadia, behind them, stared at his neck. The neat bottom of the haircut she had given him. The white rectangle of the open door ahead. The silhouette of some passerby already loitering to ask what their trouble was. “I don’t think a cross-country trip was going to work out for us. You couldn’t even put a roof over our heads.”

“There was never an issue with the roof,” he said. Now she was the one making exasperated noises. “Don’t you act like that,” he said. “I have done everything for you.”

“Everything for me!”

“Without me, you would’ve still been living at home, fighting with your mother, working some ridiculous job to support Mila. Shoveling coal at Palana’s hot-water plant.”

“Fuck you,” she said, just to hear him sputter. Nobody liked it when a woman cursed. “I’m supposed to be glad that you brought me to Esso? So I could fight with your mother instead?”

“Don’t talk about my mother.”

“Don’t talk about mine.”

“Don’t…” He fell quiet. When he started again, he spoke more slowly, deliberately. “Do you know what I thought? Before I found your little note. That something happened to you two. That you had been hurt.”

“You’re out of your mind,” she said.

“That I would have to show Mila’s picture around the village. There’s the gift you spent twenty-five thousand to give me. You don’t remember Lilia?”

All of his worst qualities were coming back to her: his cheapness, his stubbornness, his eagerness to insert himself into other people’s lives. Even his little sister had warned Nadia about this; in the wooden changing stall after swimming that January day, while pulling down Mila’s bathing suit straps, Nadia had asked, “Was he in love with this Lilia or something?” Ksyusha shook her head. “Then why bring her up?”

Tugging on her jeans, Ksyusha kept her eyes down. She had come back from university for the holidays with muscled legs from dance classes and a tense jaw, Nadia thought, from too much schoolwork. How exhausting it must be to be as smart as Ksyusha. All that possibility held tight under Ruslan’s arm. Ksyusha said, “Chegga likes the drama. The disappearance. He has fun making up theories instead of admitting she ran away.” She stuffed her swimsuit into her purse. “Can I tell you the truth?”

Nadia nodded.

Ksyusha reached out to cup her hands over Mila’s ears. “Lilia was a whore,” Ksyusha said. Her expression was harder than Nadia ever remembered seeing before. “She was sweet, but she slept with everyone. Chegga didn’t love her. He just loves talking about people, and she’s the easiest to talk about, because she’s not here anymore.”

A whore, Ksyusha said. And Nadia had thought herself sufficiently humiliated when she saw herself in the cat-killing classmate swimming near them. Chegga had devoted himself to Nadia so quickly, so fully—was that because he loved her drama? When they met, she was barely out of school, raising a child on her own. And he had coaxed her and Mila into moving. Sworn he cared. Promised happiness. All that because he saw her as what she used to be? Had he only swapped her into Esso to fill that place?

“I remember,” Nadia said. The words were raw. The phone beeped and she drew it away to look at the screen. “You’re right, Chegga. Mila and I are exactly like your Lilia. We would rather get ourselves killed than live near you anymore.” Again the beep. He was going to shout. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’m getting another call.”

“Slava?” she said when she switched over. Her voice was too loud.

“Hey. What are you doing?”

She waited to collect her breath. Then: “Nothing.”

“I thought I could come over,” he said.

Five years ago this offer would have been a firework. It did not burst and burn the same way now. “No,” she said. “It’s late. Mila’s bedtime’s soon.”

“That’s fine. I told you, I’d like to meet her.”

Alone in the room, Nadia shook her head.

He said, “I’ve been thinking— You know, we were so young.” Nadia didn’t respond. Her high school picture on the dresser smirked back at her. “…I wondered if I might be her father.”

“No,” Nadia said.

“No?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you weren’t. And you aren’t. My period was three weeks late when we first slept together.” Mila’s father was older, married. He was someone who was glad to make love to Nadia in his car by the coastline but stopped picking up her calls after she told him the blood had not come. She went for Slava then in the hope he could undo what had already happened.

Slava was silent. “All right,” he said. “That doesn’t change, though—I was there. And I still…I could have been there all this time.”

“Well, you weren’t,” she said.

“Listen, I was a kid,” he said. “I acted like an idiot. But I’ve grown up. I want a family. Please don’t punish this little girl now for the mistake I made back then.”

She could tell he had rehearsed that line. “My God,” she said. “Tonight’s not a good night for us, okay? Forget about it.” He was not finished, she knew, but she was hanging up.

The whole thing made her want to laugh. Or scream. She’d felt the same way when she saw her positive pregnancy test: this must be a joke, this must be a joke, the feeling bubbling in her throat. Slava called again and she silenced the buzzing phone. His voice, his words, the suggestion (we were young) churned inside her.

Too bad she had nowhere for this hysteria to go. She could not call Chegga back, she would never tell Mila, and she had made no real friends from school to now. Some girls shared such things with their mothers, but not Nadia…just imagine screaming this phone conversation into her mother’s crumpled ear.

Nadia did laugh then, loud and bitter. It was impossible to tell how much her mother perceived (the affair with Ivan Borisovich, the liquid few months with Slava, the late-night anguish, the growing belly) and how much was lost in background noise. They never even had a real conversation about the baby coming; in Nadia’s second trimester, her parents simply started to make little comments—how soulless it was to raise a child into capitalism, how much better communal living had been for families, how important it was never to lift one’s hands over one’s head during pregnancy.

It was understood that Nadia had done a bad thing but that thing itself was never discussed. Her mother had not even looked directly at Nadia’s enormous stomach when Nadia was admitted to the town hospital’s maternity ward. And after the birth she certainly never suggested that Nadia would be a fit parent. That one generation might pass on any skill or knowledge to the next. Instead, her mother fussed about the nurses, the neighbors, Nadia’s diet and vanity and laziness.

Nothing had changed. When Nadia came back out to the living room, her mother was there scowling. “Where have you been? I’ve had to set you up all by myself.” Her mother bent, back stiff, to smooth the last corner of a sheet over the couch cushion. Nadia scooped up Mila and felt her waist warmed by her daughter’s legs.

“Mama, I’ll do that,” Nadia called. Mila in her arms, she crowded close to the cushion until her mother was forced to step away. “You could’ve waited ten minutes for me,” Nadia said, though she knew she spoke only to herself.

Her mother hung over them for a few more minutes. Nadia concentrated on kissing Mila’s neck to make the girl giggle. Her darling girl. Everyone had something to say, doubts and whispers, but look at her daughter—Mila’s long legs, her belly-out posture, her little fingernails, the wisps at her hairline. Her cheeks so round they swelled her profile and hid the corners of her smile. Look at what Nadia had done for Mila and what she was going to do.

Nadia phoned the main Sberbank office in the morning. It was closed, but even hearing its prerecorded menu of options, its vowels stressed with a Moscow accent, felt promising. After that she called the Far Eastern branch for an email address, too, so she was able to write to headquarters from her laptop. To pass the day, Nadia’s parents took her and Mila to a fairy-tale puppet show at the Palace of Culture. The four of them sat in a row on a wooden bench. The lights in the auditorium went down. A curtain rose, and there appeared papier-mâché heads, ruffled costumes, hands lifting to make frogs and foxes and roosters fly through the air.

“Let’s see a movie,” Nadia said to her daughter afterward. To her parents, she explained, “There’s no cinema in Esso.”

Nadia’s mother frowned. “There are films to watch at home.”

“Don’t wait for us,” Nadia said. “We’ll walk back when we’re finished.”

The cinema sat a floor above the puppet theater. When she and Mila got up there, they found the place dark. Mila started getting weepy. “Cinemas don’t work in the morning,” Nadia told her. “I’m so sorry. I forgot.” They wandered back downstairs, where they found a booth selling berry hand pies, and Nadia peeled off a bill for two of those instead.

Sticky with berry juice, Nadia and Mila moved through the halls to study the murals. Nadia’s cell vibrated, showing Slava’s number. She silenced the call and took Mila’s hand.

The paintings on the walls showed a swirl of men in wolf skins. Nadia’s parents had brought her here as a child. “Milusha, do you want to go fishing tomorrow with Grandpa?” Nadia asked. “I used to go when I was your age.”

Mila squeezed her fingers. “What’s it like?”

The rich rotten smell of low tide—the endless flatness of the sea. And her father, hooking the bait, blood running thin down his forearms. “It’s nice,” Nadia said.

“I’ll catch a dolphin. But we won’t eat it.” Mila shook her head at the thought. “It’ll live with us.”

“Great idea.” Nadia squeezed back. “You know what? I’m going to get us our own house soon.”

“For us and Daddy?”

“For us and the dolphin,” Nadia said. “We’ll buy a place on the beach so it can visit all its friends when it likes. And we’ll have a fancy bathroom. We’ll put in a tub big enough for it to live.”

In the building’s lobby, Nadia zipped Mila’s coat, then belted her own. They pushed out into the cold together. Snow crystals in the wind brushed like fine-grit sandpaper across their exposed skin.

A familiar white hatchback was parked at the curb. Nadia moved toward the car cautiously. Her father was napping in the passenger seat. Her mother, as Nadia got closer, tipped her head in their direction, lifted one hand from the steering wheel, and waved.

Nadia boosted Mila into the backseat and climbed in after. “I told you WE WOULD WALK,” she said. The car smelled like salted fish inside. Her father blinked awake.

“Mila will get sick in this cold,” her mother said. “You should know that.”

“She’s fine. She’s all wrapped up.”

Her father turned in his seat and reached out to stroke Mila’s purple sleeve. “These new coats,” he said. “Manufactured in China. Terrible.”

The prickling in Nadia’s nose was back. “No, this one’s quality, Papa. It’s well made.” He shook his head.

Nadia put her own fingers on Mila’s sleeve. The refined slip of it. She ran her hand down to reach Mila’s damp palm. Pushed back against the headrest and widened her eyes against tears.

More and more and more, Chegga’s mother had condemned her for wanting. As though everyone in their generation was not already enjoying all they had taken for themselves—pensions, marriages, friendships, history, the values they were sure were wasted on their children, the sweeping moral high ground.

“What movie did you see?” her mother called backward.

“Communist Killers from Outer Space,” Nadia said. They were not listening anyway.

Nadia did not pick up either Chegga’s or Slava’s calls that night. She had no energy for conversation. On the couch, Nadia read Mila a story about a bear cub, watched her drowse off, and folded herself around the girl to wait for sleep. Tomorrow they would go to the library. They would keep themselves busy until Nadia figured out where to go next. And they would have fun doing it—because they had each other, which was what mattered—Nadia and Mila, forever.

She woke with her pulse thudding. Someone was pounding on the front door. The room was silvery, divided into strips of light and dark, and Mila lay on her stomach in the crack between the cushion and the couch back. The sound of a man’s voice outside. Nadia’s father’s feet coming down the hall.

Opening the living room door, Nadia found the shock of her parents and Slava. Her parents in their pajamas. Slava, by the smell of the hallway, drunk. The overhead light was on. Slava’s face was red. That color in his skin, the slur in his speech, brought her right back to high school.

She shut the door behind her. “What are you doing here?” she hissed. “Go home!”

“Nadia, this—” said her father.

“I’m sorry, Papa,” she told him.

“I’ve got to ask you something,” Slava said.

Nadia threw her hands up. It had to be two in the morning. “You haven’t heard of a text message?”

Her mother, soft in a worn nightgown, squeezed against her to get a better look at the scene. “Is that Vyacheslav Bychkov? What is he doing here so late?”

“I’m very sorry to wake you,” Slava said. He was overenunciating. “I needed to talk—”

“I know your brother,” Nadia’s mother called toward him.

Slava blinked at her. Nadia waved in the air. “Enough! Leave!”

“Nadechka, you’re not listening, you’re not hearing me,” he said. “I wanted— Okay, I was thinking. You could come home with me. My wife— No, it’s my house, you know, it’s only me now. You and your daughter could stay there with me. As long as you like. You look just the same as you did,” he said. Speaking much too loudly. “You could come there. And our daughter.”

“Who, Mila?” Nadia’s mother asked, and Nadia turned.

“Mila is—” Nadia halted. “Get out,” she said, “get out, get out.” She pushed forward, past her parents, to Slava’s stinking chest. Citrus and vodka. She hoped he’d choke. Pressed too close to Slava’s jacket, that smell, the chill carried in from outside, she said, “Mila isn’t yours.” Still he did not leave.

Nadia kept talking. Let everyone go deaf together. “I told you I was already pregnant when we met. Can’t you remember? Or have you drunk yourself too stupid to recall?” The other day’s smile was loose on Slava now. “You were a fling,” she said. “Not a very good one. If I were you, I’d be ashamed to show my face in this house.”

Slava sneered. She used to want to hurt him, then to make him jealous, to cause him regret, but seeing this look gave no satisfaction now. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d be ashamed to show my face in this town.”

Her father pressed on the front door before locking it. Slush on the floor. Alcohol in the air. Slava was gone.

“I’m really sorry,” Nadia said again. Her father wouldn’t look at her. He was dressed in his pajamas, dark sweatpants. His mouth made a slit. Disapproval.

Nadia was vibrating in the silence. If they would just look at her—she was no longer a disobedient child; she had a job at a bank; she walked her daughter daily to preschool in a scenic village. She was not a whore. Not Slava’s, not anyone else’s. She had tried to make of herself someone beyond scandal, beyond shame.

“Go to sleep,” her father said. Her mother, one hand on the wall, walked back toward their bedroom.

It had been a mistake to come back. A mistake. Nadia in Palana had been her worst—her most vulnerable—people saw that and took advantage. Chegga had spotted the same thing five years earlier. And yet she had spent her savings on the plane tickets back here.

All Nadia could do was return to the living room. She loathed herself so much her teeth hurt. She took extra care in closing the room’s door. A strip of light touched Mila, who could not have slept through that, but whose eyes were shut. Awake or not, the little girl did not want to be any further disturbed.

Nadia put her hand on Mila’s back, which rose and fell in the half-light of the moon. “I’m sorry,” Nadia whispered. Her head ached. She lifted her hand, crawled in beside her daughter, and took out her phone to call Moscow.

“I want to go home,” Mila said.

“That’s what I want, too, dove,” Nadia said. “I’m trying to find a home for us.”

“No,” Mila said. “Home. To Daddy.”

He’s not your fucking daddy, Nadia almost said. But she was looking at her daughter’s perfect, stubborn face.

Nadia had gone to bed on this same couch as a child. Her own mother, coming in late some nights to load laundered clothes into the wardrobe, would stand there with her arms full of folded cotton. Always almost speaking, but never opening her mouth. And Nadia, not knowing what else her mother could want to say after days of nagging, would pretend to be asleep. Nadia must have had the same set look then as Mila did now. Cheeks fat with youth, eyebrows tense, and chin set. Pure unwillingness.

When Nadia got pregnant, years ago, she promised herself she would become better. She had not been and did not know how to start. Now she’d brought Mila to this house, this town, these old grudges, and it was clear they had to leave but she did not actually know where else to go. A city abroad? Where? How would they pay for the move? Another paycheck or two wouldn’t cover the fact that Nadia had no real support. She knew no one off the peninsula. She was still the lonely child, the desperate teenager, who slept in this room with illusions.

Wherever she moved, she would be the same person. But Mila could grow up to be anyone. Mila could be encouraged by two parents, attend university, become a scientist, find a husband, buy a home, maybe even live in London. Or in the real Switzerland. She could be raised in Kamchatka’s version and move to the other. And wherever Mila ended up in the world, she would know that someone—her mother—loved her most.

Mila’s eyes were pinched so tight her lashes looked shortened. Nadia navigated to her phone’s contact list. When Nadia spoke again, her words came higher, fainter. “Then let’s go home,” she said.

Back to Esso. Because all the joy in Nadia’s life came from her daughter. The woman this child would one day be. Between the hard places in Nadia, some part, for Mila, was always open. A pipe thinned from pressure until the flood burst through. A chunk of dark stone worn down, broken off, washed free.