Disappearing Earth

APRIL

The men were already at work. Zoya watched them from her kitchen balcony as she smoked. They appeared and disappeared in the window holes of the unfinished concrete building across the street. Four floors below, they looked as small as the fingers on her hand. She still recognized them. Their muddy boots; their black hair shining over the collars of their coveralls; the way they walked, muscular, strange.

Her husband knocked at the glass of the balcony door and she jumped. “What are you doing out there?” he asked.

Zoya stabbed out her cigarette. “Nothing.”

Kolya was knotting his tie. In his police uniform, he always seemed so serious. Different from the person she’d just watched finish a plate of fried eggs. She slid the door shut behind her and came over to touch his clean clothes. Smoothing her palms across his epaulettes, she said, “Handsome man.”

“All right,” he said, pleased.

The smell of his toothpaste glittered between them. Zoya raised herself on her toes to kiss him, and Kolya turned his face. “You stink,” he said. She stepped away. Ever since the baby was born, he did not like Zoya smoking. She became less bothered by this criticism when she kept a pack nearby.

The sky over Petropavlovsk was gray-pink. Kolya had half an hour before his shift started at six. Though Zoya was months into maternity leave, she maintained the habit of waking with him, making his breakfast, and seeing him off. It was as if they were both getting ready for work—as if she, too, would soon walk out into the city.

Kolya was dressed and leaving. “Good luck today,” she said. After their apartment doors shut behind him, her head cleared, her heart emptied. Sasha, freshly fed, would not wake again for two more hours. This was Zoya’s time now.

This was theirs.

Zoya was not headed for the balcony just yet—she could credit herself with that much patience. Instead she washed her husband’s breakfast dishes. Then she set the electric kettle, filled her teacup, and sat down with her phone, scrolling through pictures of other people’s pets and weddings and vacations. One of her coworkers had posted about a route for ecotourists through icy central Kamchatka.

Zoya put the phone down. She had not left her neighborhood since Sasha’s birth. Across the table, the kitchen wallpaper showed overlapping palm leaves.

She shook out another cigarette and slid open the door.

The men below were finished with their site walk-through. They had come from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, to gather in the doorframe across her street. Their building was a concrete husk built level by level by their gloved hands. They had ripped up the sidewalk around the structure and erected scaffolding. At the edge of the lot, they had made a shack from scrap wood with a roof of corrugated metal. Zoya wanted to see inside. Their five-man crew ducked in there every few hours: when they all arrived, to break for tea, for lunch, to rest, and when the day was done. On the evenings her husband worked late, Zoya could catch them holding the shack’s door open and filing out in street clothes. The last man would close the door behind him. The shack, the building, and she would all be left waiting for them to come back tomorrow.

She took another drag on her cigarette. The men broke away from each other. Their generator coughed, whirred.

The air on her arms was fresh and cold. The streets below were zebra-striped with melting snow. Four kilometers downhill, the city center spread out, its buildings dark, parking lots empty, ship repair yard motionless. Early last fall, before Zoya’s leave started, she stood here watching the flashing blue lights of emergency vehicles. She’d imagined Kolya finding the Golosovskaya sisters on those far cliffs. He would be celebrated on television and get promoted to senior lieutenant, maybe captain. At work, her colleagues would gather around her for all the details. Then the blue lights turned off, the snow fell, the searches stopped, and Sasha was born.

These days, Zoya turned her thoughts to nearer fantasies. The men below lugged buckets of mixed concrete. They used a crane last month to stack slabs for floors, walls, and ceilings. Now they were tending to details—pouring staircases, ripping out support frames. They bent their necks in concentration as they moved. Looking down at them, Zoya bent her neck the same way.

The sun shone white above the distant water. Tossing the butt over the balcony railing, Zoya went back inside, where she washed her hands and smelled them. The smoke hung on her skin—so what? It flavored her. She brushed her teeth, applied perfume, and stroked on makeup as carefully as she used to on those mornings before she left for class or work. Foundation, concealer, bronzer, brow pencil. She ran texturizer through her hair and braided it into a yellow fishtail. Above the collar of her robe, she rose beautiful as a newlywed.

Until November, Zoya would have gotten dressed, driven to the park office, greeted her colleagues in ecological education, and started the day. An inspector might stop by, bragging of poachers apprehended. A movie producer might call from Germany for a permit to film in protected territory. The park director might announce a team visit to a far base, so all of them, research and protection and education and tourism, would have to shut off their computers and hurry to their cars and drive to the airfield, where they’d board a helicopter bound for the Valley of the Geysers or Kronotskoye Lake.

Now, instead, Zoya took her flawless face into the kitchen to wipe the counters clean. She reorganized the row of shoes in the foyer. When Sasha woke up crying, surprised all over again at the world in front of her eyes, Zoya nursed her. “How’d you sleep?” Zoya asked. “Any nightmares?” Sasha’s tiny mouth worked against Zoya to tug milk forward. The leaves printed on the kitchen walls were frozen tropical.

At eleven o’clock Zoya called her husband. He did not pick up. With the permission that gave her, Zoya called Tatyana Yurievna on the second floor to ask if she could watch Sasha—“I’ll be quick,” Zoya told her. “No more than an hour.” Groceries, Zoya explained, but it did not matter. Tatyana Yurievna loved the baby. The neighbor made up games with spoons and songs and measuring cups, and when she came over to babysit, which was often, three or four times a week, she never minded if Zoya took too long to wend her way back home.

The day cracked open. Zoya rushed to dress—satin button-down, smooth belt, dark jeans, and tall heeled boots—and stood by the door to wait. Her lungs expanded to breathe the air outside. The baby began to cry. Zoya tugged off her boots, unbuttoned her blouse, and lifted Sasha to feed. Sasha’s head rested against Zoya’s satin sleeve. Sasha had Zoya’s same eyes: pale, glacial. The blank eyes of a drowned girl. Zoya kissed her daughter on the forehead to undo those thoughts.

The knock. “There’s my darling,” Tatyana Yurievna cooed when Zoya opened the doors.

“An hour,” Zoya promised. She pulled her boots back on and stepped out the door.

She could do anything now—anything. She emerged from her apartment building into the cool light. Her boots were snug around her calves. Her skin was tight, too, with expectation. Across the street, the building hid the workers. Zoya walked forward to line up with the hole of its doorway. Then she stopped to take out a cigarette. Only a minute outside, and her fingers were already cold, stiff. She flicked her lighter, but the flame did not catch.

The building hummed with machines inside. Zoya was too early. Prickling with wasted anticipation, she put the cigarette back in its pack. The men were not yet on break.

So it was the grocery store. Zoya went there flat and frustrated. After she paid, she checked the time—still a few minutes before noon. Instead, then, of turning left out of the store and returning to her apartment, she headed for the end of the block. A set of marble stairs brought her into the courtyard of the city church, which shone, gold-domed, like new money. She chose a bench, took out her phone, and navigated to the profile of the girl she met at New Year’s who lived in St. Petersburg.

At that holiday rental house, Zoya’s husband actually felt sorry for the girl, who had seemed serious, even standoffish, refused the men, and left in the morning without saying goodbye. “There’s the old maid you could’ve been if you never met me,” Kolya whispered into Zoya’s ear. Nine days later, Zoya went into labor.

The world-traveling old maid. Her stomach flat, her orange bikini. Locking the phone, Zoya shut her eyes.

She could live another life. It wasn’t too late. If she boarded the bus to the park office, she would make it there in time to surprise them all in the middle of their lunches. The building would smell like it always had, that mix of paper, rags, and bleach. The eco-education girls would kiss her cheeks and the park director would come over to squeeze her hands. They might say, Zoyka! What perfect timing. We’ve got an extra spot for you on today’s trip. A flight over the Klyuchevskaya stratovolcano—a helicopter to South Kamchatka Sanctuary. Her coworkers would treat Zoya just as they did when she was newly graduated, a tour leader through the park’s visitor center. When she was young and unburdened.

But there wasn’t really time to get to the office and back this afternoon, or any. They would ask her for stories, for pictures of the baby. And what did Zoya have to show, beyond her infant’s blank expression? Almost half a year spent indoors. What could she say to them?

So instead she could choose something solitary. Go down to the city center, buy a sausage from one of the stands by the bay, and sit to eat her food on the shore. The water steady, the mountains beyond layered in dark blue, light blue, white. Looking like cut paper. Rocks pressing under her heels. She used to loiter there when she was a schoolgirl. She and her friends stayed late, drank on the beach, watched the horizon flatten, saw the night ships pass…But what if her husband drove by and saw her?

She could…why didn’t she tell Tatyana Yurievna that she’d be gone three hours? An hour was not enough. Neither was a day or a week. Zoya could move to St. Petersburg, too. She could get away from this. She could leave.

But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t, really. Her chest tingled with milk letting down. She couldn’t.

She exhaled fog. When she first moved to this apartment, the church was shut up in scaffolding. This courtyard was a stretch of gravel, no trees. Zoya was nineteen, and her mother’s new man bought this place for Zoya so he and her mother could have their privacy. That was before Zoya met Kolya, before they fixed up the apartment; the wallpaper was stained, one stove burner did not work, the washing machine shook so hard that it jostled its plug from the outlet halfway through a cycle. And Zoya loved it. Some mornings before she left for class, she walked circles around the bedrooms, just looking. Anything seemed possible.

Things were different now. Zoya checked the time on her phone and picked up the groceries.

As soon as she got to the bottom of the courtyard stairs, she saw the workers. They stood together on boards over wet earth and sipped steaming cups of tea. Oh—her stomach twisted. These were the few minutes of their lunch break. She came toward them slowly, measuring out her steps to make the walk last, and as she approached, they broke off their conversation. To watch.

One said, “Hello, miss,” in that half-swallowed way he always did. His accent made the greeting dirty.

A cord of tension extended from Zoya’s eyes, her sinuses, the back of her throat, through her body, out her ribs, to the men. So close. The line was taut. She swallowed. “Hello,” she said to the street ahead of her. She was almost past them now. The men said nothing in return. She kept her head up, tightened her fingers around the grocery bag, and let herself in the door of her apartment building.

The hall was cold and dark and left her alone again. If some neighbor brushed past her right now, she would thrum. Only two words—and still the migrants did this to her.

The locked joints of her knees. Her neck tense, her jaw hard. A thousand things to say behind her teeth. She pressed her back to the wall and listened to her heart pound them out: I want you, it said in the dark. There was no one around to hear.

Climbing the stairs, Zoya pressed herself down, holding fingers on her fantasies so they settled. Be still. Tatyana Yurievna met her at the apartment door with the baby in her arms. “We knew you were coming home, didn’t we, Sashenka? We saw you from the window.”

Zoya kept her face down as she pulled off her boots. “Is that right?” She took the bag into the kitchen. They followed her.

“Did those men say something to you?” Tatyana Yurievna asked.

Zoya was already putting the food away. Hidden behind the refrigerator door, she said, “Who? No.”

“The migrants. It’s dangerous. Nobody keeps an eye on them,” Tatyana Yurievna said. “I heard on the news this morning that the police found a body in the bay.”

Zoya shut the door to look at her neighbor. “One of the Golosovskaya sisters?” The lights, the boats, a child’s slack limbs bumping along stones.

“They said it was probably an adult. But who knows? I get my information from other sources.” Tatyana Yurievna winked. Zoya returned to her groceries. “What did Kolya tell you? Do they have any suspects?”

“I didn’t know the searches were back on,” Zoya said. “He didn’t tell me anything.”

“Because you’re busy with this little angel.” Tatyana Yurievna’s voice rose and fell as she bounced Sasha. “I’ll ask him myself. Those men outside, I wonder…any one of them could have taken those sisters. You’re too young to remember what it was like before the collapse. It’s only after Kamchatka opened to outsiders that we started to see any crime.”

“They’re just construction workers,” Zoya said. “Not child molesters.”

“We don’t know who or what they are. Why would someone come to a different country if he didn’t have something to get away from in the last? You be careful, Zoyka. Who knows what they might do to a girl like you?”

Her back to her neighbor, Zoya rinsed the vegetables. She, too, believed in the migrants’ power—not the power to steal children, but the power to take a woman, to transform her, to turn her life that was growing smaller all the time into an existence that was dark and mighty.

That they came here from somewhere else only made Zoya hungrier. The workers’ dirtiness, their ignorance. That they hardly spoke. The way, when she was in school, they stood over her on the bus and looked down. Her neighbor was right: this was not their country. They had nothing to lose. Zoya wanted to enter that little cabin, which must smell like sweat, mud, gasoline. A white woman’s picture would be stapled to its wall, and she would be the white woman in its center. She needed to find out what these men might do to a girl like her. She craved that knowledge; her hands, her mouth, wanted it like they wanted cigarettes.

Tatyana Yurievna talked on. Zoya took cheese, cucumber, and tomatoes from the fridge, sliced them up, and set out a platter. She poured them both cups of tea while Tatyana Yurievna, holding Sasha on her lap with one arm, picked up a bite. “At least we have Kolya here to protect us. Zoyka, you don’t know this, but our building used to be full of humble people like us. Real Russians. The whole nation was. No one was a stranger. We were united by our common ideals, we believed in greatness. That was a different era, wasn’t it? A better time.” The older woman looked down at the food as she spoke. Her eyebrows were thin, her mouth loose, her bottom teeth lined with stains like the shore when the tide goes out. The baby chewed on her fingers. Tatyana Yurievna would talk about the way things were until her stomach was full, then she would ask Zoya about Kolya, compliment his service, squeeze the baby one last time, and return to her own floor. Three times a week and sometimes four. This was Zoya’s life.

Zoya took a slice of cucumber. When she bit, freshness burst across her tongue.

The afternoon grew late before Zoya was alone again. Sasha lay in her crib. In the palm-leaf kitchen, Zoya scrubbed two beef tongues clean and slid them into boiling water. Garlic, onions, sugar, celery. She covered the pot. While the meat simmered, she chopped columns of carrots. The windows steamed over. She was a universe away from the park territory, its rainbow rivers, its puffing fumaroles. They used to go out there in the summer when the lakes churned with salmon. Bears gutted fish and scattered shining red roe across the ground. She wouldn’t see such dangerous beauty again for years.

She let her mind wander. It wandered downstairs.

The baby at rest. The food on the stove. The air in the apartment sticky with starch and the walls beading. Hurrying out of her building, she’ll find empty landings on every floor. The railing under her fingers will be rough from layers of chipped paint, blue and gray and yellow. She will press the button, release her building’s front door, and go out into the sun.

An afternoon washed in greenish light, the whole city like a bud about to open. A hundred meters away, beyond the church, traffic will rush by, but no cars will turn down their street. As she comes closer to the building, the workers will lift their chins. They will bring her into the shack. They will take her out of her old body. They will make her new.

Zoya peeled the tongues, salted the vegetables, dressed the salad, sliced the bread. When Sasha woke up, Zoya fed the baby in the kitchen while skimming through the photo feed on her phone. Kolya was supposed to be back at half past five. Fifteen minutes past that, with no Kolya in sight, their daughter began crying. Baby on her shoulder, Zoya walked a loop through the apartment: from Sasha’s room, wallpapered with ducks, to the master bedroom with its shining television screen, into the bathroom, out again, a hundred thousand times.

Her husband unlocked the doors at ten to seven. Kolya had people with him—two other officers and one of the female assistants. Thudding feet, happy talk. “Look how big she is,” the assistant cried as soon as she saw the baby in Zoya’s arms. Zoya said hello. She was flayed. How pathetic she must look, with the table set, the meat on the stove, her baby fussy, and her whole day displayed for ridicule. Kolya had brought three guests home to see how Zoya waited for him like she had nothing else to live for. Zoya could have run away today. They didn’t know. She could have flown over a volcano. She could have moved to St. Petersburg.

Kolya shook off his jacket. When the assistant held out her hands, Zoya, shiny-eyed with shame, put the baby in them. Then Zoya slid back into the kitchen and whisked the dinner plates away.

Before they finished lining up their boots in the hall, Zoya took out a bottle, five shot glasses, and the platter of food from this afternoon’s tea. “What a hostess!” her husband said when he saw. She held up her face to be kissed. This time she could smell him, a sharp, sweet booziness. “Pour us a round, my queen,” he said, and she did.

“Queen,” one of the men said, “do you know what your king accomplished today?” The other man snickered. “He earned himself a letter of reprimand.”

“Ah, Fedya, you ruin a woman’s mood that way,” the assistant said. “Don’t tell her such things.” In her uniformed arms, the baby squirmed.

Zoya faced her husband. “What happened?”

He smiled at her. His collar was less crisp than it had been when he left. “They pulled a body from the bay this morning. Yevgeny Pavlovich congratulated us for finding one of the Golosovskaya girls. I told him, Sir, if finding a corpse that size makes you hopeful, just wait, we’ll drag in a sea lion.”

The assistant sat up straighter to imitate the major general’s voice. “Bodies swell in water. Didn’t you know?” Fedya and the other man laughed.

“So I heard. Swell to a meter taller than where they started,” Kolya said. “Swell enough to turn from a twelve-year-old girl to a middle-aged fisherman.”

“You can’t talk that way to your supervisor,” Zoya said. “Even if he’s wrong, you should work with him, respect him…”

The guests were already picking up their drinks. “A toast to our major general,” the assistant said, one hand supporting the baby and the other around a glass. “And to you, Kolya. Your many accomplishments in this career.”

Kolya passed Zoya a shot. “To my success,” he said to her. His voice was rough. Everyone drank; Zoya, too, vodka singing in her throat.

“One day, Kol,” Fedya said, “I’ll write you a letter of commendation.” He collected their glasses on the kitchen table and poured a second round. “You’re right. Dragging the bay is pointless. The bodies of those girls are floating off Fiji by now.”

“Cheers to that,” the other officer said.

Zoya shook her head. “That’s no good toast.”

Kolya took his glass anyway, clinked it, tossed the alcohol back. He wiped his mouth. “Pointless, yes, but only because the sisters didn’t drown. They were taken.”

“This again,” the assistant said. “Don’t interrupt,” said the other officer, and the assistant said, “Dima!”

“They were absolutely taken,” Zoya said. Her husband nodded. The baby whimpered. “There was a witness.”

Fedya’s face was soft and scornful. “You call her a witness?”

“She saw something,” Zoya said. Her husband used to come home energized about this case, excited. Zoya remembered: two kids, a big guy, and a shiny dark car, he reported the witness saying. That, and I want his car-wash tips.

“They were taken by someone off the peninsula,” Kolya continued. “That’s why we haven’t uncovered any trace of them, dead or alive. They’re not hidden in a garage or buried in the woods or floating in the bay. They’re gone. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell the major general for months now.”

Fedya took up the bottle again to refill their glasses. The vodka glugged. “If that’s so, if they were killed somewhere on the mainland, then what does it matter? Let this drowned body be called one of the girls. Listen to your wife. Stop arguing with your superiors. Otherwise you’ll wind up where you did in the fall—”

“Enough,” Kolya said. The assistant giggled at the end of the table.

“Looking at Moscow got you nothing but embarrassment,” Fedya said. “In the future, you’ll be wiser to keep any ideas to yourself.”

“Hear that?” Dima said, leaning over to pinch the assistant’s slim waist. His hand bumped Sasha’s head and the baby howled.

Kolya’s mood was darkening. Zoya waved away her glass. “Is that what you’re going to write in my letter of commendation?” Kolya asked. “How good I’ll be at shutting up?”

“What else would I write about?” Fedya said. “Your failure to find an imaginary kidnapper? Your years of monitoring the speeds on city boulevards?”

Sasha was really worked up now. Kolya was raising his voice. Zoya took the baby from the assistant, who smiled as if they knew each other well, and excused herself into the bedroom.

The baby didn’t want to eat, so Zoya walked her until the girl’s unhappy mouth relaxed again. With talk like this, Kolya’s side of the bed was sure to stay empty past midnight. Zoya set down Sasha on the orange duvet and lay beside her. On her stomach, the baby lifted her head, arms, and legs, paddling through the air but going nowhere.

“That’s not how you crawl,” Zoya said. Sasha went on. Zoya watched her fat limbs work. After a minute, the baby looked wide-eyed at her. Zoya put her hand on her daughter’s back, where her palm fit warm in that arch. “Sasha,” she said. “Sashenka. I wish you could talk to me.”

The sisters were taken. Their bodies could be somewhere near. Before the baby, Kolya would talk to her about his work, but since Sasha’s birth, Zoya seemed to have lost her curiosity, lost nearly all her appetites. She used to have theories about the girls for her husband: the man that abducted them drove them west, to the villages on the coast of the Okhotsk, and kept them alive in his root cellar. He lived too far from his neighbors for anyone to notice. His car wasn’t on the footage from gas station surveillance cameras because he’d carried fuel in his trunk. Those theories had disintegrated from disuse, and now all Zoya kept were images: a shining car, a round face, a floating child. Picturing those things gave her no relief.

What did was picturing pleasure. If only these guests would drink faster so the end of the night could come. She did not especially like talking to the detective version of Kolya anymore, but after people came over, he was always sweet with her. A tipsy Kolya reminded Zoya of the months before she graduated: going to parties, flirting with friends, winding up with him in these same sheets. She turned the baby stomach-up and cupped Sasha’s small face in one hand.

They first met when Kolya pulled her over. Not yet lieutenant, he was Sergeant Ryakhovsky then, watching for traffic violations. She had been going too fast down Komsomolskaya. She was twenty, in the summer before her last year of university, leaving work to stop at the apartment before heading back out to a birthday dinner. And he was twenty-four and seemed so much older. On the gravel-rough side of the road, he watched her from behind his sunglasses. Her cheeks burned under her foundation. He was tall, broad-shouldered, unimpressed. He held on to the sill of her car door with one hand and looked down the length of his arm. She tried to tell him she was in a rush, going to an engagement. The cars behind his back whooshed by. Finally, he said, “Go on, then.” No ticket.

The next week, on her drive home, lights flared again in her rearview mirror. She pulled over with her heart quick and hands sweating. She had not been speeding, or she did not think she was. After five agonizing minutes, her passenger door opened, and he slid into the seat. His sunglasses were off. He smiled.

Six months later he moved into the apartment. They got married a few weeks after her final exams. By then, she was full-time at the park, and on her first day back after the wedding her coworkers kept bringing her champagne in a mug to celebrate, while their director pretended the drink was only milky tea. Zoya and her husband stayed happy for a while; when she found out she was pregnant, he held her and kissed her cheeks. She was crying. He did not ask her why. Now he took her car to and from the police station, while she stayed home and would for ages more. Two years, at least, Kolya said. That was what the baby needed. Enough time had passed that Zoya no longer wrapped herself up in romance over their second meeting, when he slipped into her passenger seat. His unfamiliar body strapped into its uniform, looking so adult, so sure, and hiding the man she would marry.

She had been away from the guests too long. Zoya carried Sasha back through the dim hall toward their voices—still arguing. Then someone in the kitchen said, “Illegals.”

Zoya clutched the baby to her. The workday was over. The migrants were gone—but maybe one of her husband’s guests had stepped out on the balcony in time, looked down on them leaving, seen Zoya’s ashes, and found her out—

She came to the kitchen doorway. “Waste of our time,” her husband said. “They call us then say nothing when we arrive.”

“They’re not the ones who call,” Fedya said.

“Then who? Who else gives a shit? Over nothing. Paint and five thousand rubles’ worth of fuel. They stood and looked at me like they had nothing to do with it,” Kolya said. “Scuttling off afterward like a pack of rats.”

Compact and dangerous, lifting mixed concrete. Black hair shining. And their accents. Zoya could go for hours on a single word. All day…if she had to be alone all day, why couldn’t it be with them, in the cold, by the unfinished building, on the other side of the street…

Sasha wiggled. Zoya waved her hand in front of the baby’s eyes to keep her quiet. She forced herself to ask: “What are you talking about?”

“Nothing,” her husband said.

“Vandalism,” said the assistant.

Fedya corrected her. “Just kids being kids. Graffiti at a construction site. Broken bottles, stolen tools.”

“Where was that?” Zoya asked.

“Nowhere,” her husband said, filling up their glasses. Then he relented. “On the eighth kilometer.” By the library and the volcanological institute. Far from here.

She pictured those workers on the eighth kilometer—like hers but not. The kind of men not strong enough to protect themselves from petty crimes. “So what—” she asked, and as she did, Dima started in saying, “To our—” He stopped, lowering his glass. Zoya waved him on. “To our long days of work,” Dima said, “and our longer nights of pleasure.”

“Good to hear it’s going well,” said Fedya after they all swallowed.

“So fucking rude,” said the assistant.

“Watch your mouth,” said Dima. He put a hand over the assistant’s lips. To the rest of the table, he explained, “Anfisa’s insulted because it’s not just nights with us anymore. She’s good for mornings, too.”

“What a gentleman,” said Anfisa from behind his fingers. Fedya refilled their glasses. “What honor. What chivalry.”

“What did you do,” Zoya asked her husband, “about the vandals?”

“There was nothing to do,” he said.

“My gallant prince,” Anfisa said to Dima. “See what happens if you keep speaking so sweetly to me. Our nights can get much shorter.”

“Long lunch breaks, too,” said Dima. Fedya snorted. “Our Anfisa is a twenty-four-hour kind of girl.”

Zoya said, “But if things were taken. If tools are gone. Don’t you have to catch whoever took them?”

“Why do you suddenly care?” asked her husband. He looked like the tired version of the officer she first met. At her car window, in her passenger seat—unpredictable. “Why should you tell me how to do my job? Do I tell you how to do yours? ‘Sit at home, get fat, and tend to the baby’?”

“Kolya,” Dima said.

“Ridiculous,” her husband muttered to the table.

This wasn’t her job. Or it shouldn’t be. The dinner Zoya had cooked for them sat on the stove. Her husband did not know what she was capable of. Outside, the construction site was empty. The ground there was a mix of mud and snow, and four floors above, Zoya held her child, kept quiet among strangers, waited for tomorrow.

In bed later, Kolya was tender. His cropped hair brushed against her jaw. “Forgive me?” he asked. She hummed, a neutral noise. “They treat me like a child…they make me lieutenant, put me on this case, then treat me like I’m inferior.” His breath on her neck. “I wish I’d never heard of these sisters. I could simply stay home with you.”

She stared up into the dark. “Don’t be angry,” he murmured.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. He held her tighter and she kissed his forehead.

Hello, miss, the migrant will say.

The sound of his voice will wet her mouth. She will say back, Hello. She will check that no one’s watching. She will point to the shack. Take me in there, she will say.

Inside, she will back up until she hits a table. Then she will reach, grip the surface, scoot herself up to sit. His eyelids will be heavy as he watches her body. His pupils will dilate. Shining black. Forearms thick with muscle, jaw clenched, he will be ready for her. Beyond the thin wall, she will hear the others. She will open her hands.

Zoya had always wanted them. Always wanted, and never touched. Before she found these workers, there were others, the men pushing carts through the market, the ones sweeping the block where she was raised. Long before she met her first blond boyfriend, she watched the migrants. And even lying next to her husband, she wanted them still. This was not some fetish, she believed. This was something more. She was not a woman made for sitting home and nursing. She craved things darker, stranger, out of bounds.

Tomorrow. She will give herself three hours. If she can find a sufficient excuse—a doctor’s appointment, maybe. No one will know. One afternoon, and then Zoya will return home, tell Tatyana Yurievna she’s sick, go to the shower and soap away the marks left by the workers’ fingers. She’ll wash slowly, wishing they could stay. And after that she will make it as Kolya’s wife and Sasha’s mother. No more visions of dead children. No desires to undo herself. After tomorrow, she will have enough to make it through.

Zoya fell asleep into that fantasy. She dreamed of geysers and woke to the sound of running water. Her husband was already in the shower. In the kitchen, she brought out eggs to boil, bread to slice, white cheese from the refrigerator’s bottom drawer. The room smelled like a charred pan. Beyond her balcony, the morning was getting so bright.

The kettle was almost bubbling. The bathroom door opened, the bedroom door shut. Watching the sky, gray shot through with yellow, Zoya took her pack and lighter off the top of the refrigerator, slid open the balcony door, and stepped outside.

The morning was cool. The men were there. The rippled sheets of the roof of their shack were on the ground where that little structure was supposed to be. The workers stood in a circle around the spot. One had his coat in his hand.

They were standing over ash-black wreckage. A couple of charred planks, and what looked like the metal base of a table. Zoya understood. Their shack had been burned down.

She tapped out a cigarette, put it paper-dry between her lips, and flicked at the lighter. No spark. She wound her trembling fingers around the lighter, tried again. The flame flared. The sun was not yet up. That yellow in the air was the leftover glow from them, their ruined shack, the blackened ground, metallic ash in the smoke catching whatever brightness reflected off the bay.

Do something, she was begging them in silence. Shout or smash something or start to rebuild. Zoya would make up their day together, change the setting, put them all in the dark half-constructed building, if they did something—but they just stood in a circle and stared.

Vandals, the officers said last night. Stolen tools, petty crimes, and arson. The shack had been an easy target. And the men across the street, these foreign workers, the migrants who were supposed to transform her life, were powerless.

Zoya lifted her fingers to take the cigarette from her mouth. She nearly could not get a hold on it. One of the men—she could not tell which—put his hands in his hip pockets. He looked down the street where no police car was coming. Then he turned around toward her.

She drew back against the glass so she couldn’t see them anymore.

The water was probably boiling. Zoya had to finish breakfast or Kolya was going to be late. Carefully, keeping her arm close to the wall, she tossed her cigarette off the balcony. Then she gripped one hand tight with the other. It only took a few minutes to settle down within herself. When she was ready, she slid the door open and went back inside.