Disappearing Earth

JUNE

A forest takes seventy years to recover after a fire. Out the car window, black streaked across the hills that guided Marina away from home. Limbless trunks rose from charred earth. In the front seats, Eva and Petya argued over the ending of an Australian horror movie. Eva was winning, speaking with more conviction; Petya kept falling silent as he navigated around potholes in the road. The next time he downshifted, Eva turned in her seat to make her case to Marina. “The end of it is a fantasy, like a dream sequence, don’t you agree?”

“I didn’t see the movie,” Marina said.

Eva pursed her lips. “From what you heard us describe, though. Doesn’t it seem most likely that it’s a fantasy?”

Marina shook her head. “I don’t know.” That familiar pressure began to come down on her chest.

Petya, bringing the car back up to speed, glanced at his wife. “She hasn’t seen it. Leave her alone.” Eva blew out her breath and muttered a word. “She’s fine,” Petya said. His eyes flicked up in the rearview mirror. Marina looked again toward the window. Above them, the sky was enormous, bloated with clouds. The long tracks of dead forest looked like thousands of bones pushed up from their graves.

The weight dropped hard on her chest. Marina could not breathe. She put her head back, folded her hands in her lap, and focused on shutting off the part of her mind that insisted on leading her toward panic. The path was simple: horror movies, petrified wood, bones. Graves. Murderers.

One hand came up to press on her sternum. Her heart hurt. If Marina could peel off her left breast, crack back her ribs, and grip that muscular organ to settle it, she would. She started having these attacks last August, after her daughters disappeared. A doctor gave her tablets to relieve the anxiety. Those did not help. No prescription brought her children home.

Marina was drowning in the backseat of her friends’ car. Pulling air in through her nose, she concentrated on benign knowledge instead. Seventy years for full regrowth. Where did she learn that? In childhood…her grandfather taught her, probably. Her family spent weekends at her grandparents’ dacha when she was a girl. He showed her the difference between common and creeping juniper, how to apply a lime wash to an orchard, and the best time to tap a birch for its juice.

Her lungs inflated again. As the car bumped along, Marina counted facts. What else did she know about trees? About the formation of hills? Though now a propagandist by necessity, she was a journalist by training, and she had always had a head for information. They were on kilometer 250 of 310 along the pitted road toward Esso. Another hour and a half would pass before they reached the campground. The holiday they headed toward might draw only a few hundred people; its organizers had already transmitted a press release to the party newspaper and there was no need for on-the-ground reporting, but Marina’s editor, who was soft, sensitive, encouraged her toward any opportunity to leave the city. As soon as Marina mentioned Eva and Petya’s invitation, he insisted she attend to cover the event. When, toward the end of last week, she said she was rethinking the trip, he called her into his office and shut the door. “You have to go,” he told her. Again, more firmly, with his shoulders hunched forward so he could catch her eye: “You have to.” Not for the story, she knew, but for the comfort of the rest of the office. He wanted her to leave in grief but come back different.

The road north followed the path of a blaze so old Marina’s grandparents might have heard news break about it. That was another fact. The trees still looked like death to her.

“Are you all right back there?” Eva called over the seat. “Are you hungry? Are you bored?”

Marina leaned forward. The seat belt tugged against her strained ribs. “I’m fine.”

“Well, I have to get out,” Eva said. She spoke sideways—maybe Marina was not meant to hear. Petya checked his watch and guided the car to the side of the road, so Eva, slamming the door behind her, could climb down off the gravel shoulder. Eva’s ponytail bobbed as she unbuttoned her pants and crouched. Marina looked out the other window. The trees on that side were thick, deep, damp-looking. Old growth.

She remembered taking her girls for an early hike. In a younger forest, on a warmer day, in a neighborhood at the southern end of Petropavlovsk. Sophia so small, then, that Marina carried her most of the way in a backpack. That sweet load on Marina’s spine. Sophia’s fingers brushed Marina’s bare arms, and Alyona pulled leaves off the shrubs they passed. Alyona was five years old, at the height of her obsession with carrots—she ate nothing but—and Marina brought a plastic bag full of them, washed and peeled and prepared, for her daughter to picnic on. The three of them climbed along a stream bank, with the sun coming through the trees in strips and ribbons. The sound of Alyona’s crunching, the trickle of fresh water, the steady rush of Sophia’s breath behind Marina’s ear.

Marina pressed her palm to her chest. Her inhalations got shallower. Petya was doing her the kindness of pretending he did not hear.

The passenger door opened and the car chimed in greeting. “Thanks, my joy,” Eva said. She opened the glove compartment, pulled out a sanitizing wipe, and leaned over to kiss her husband on the cheek. The car bloomed with the smell of rubbing alcohol.

When they were another fifteen kilometers along, rain started, falling in little patters at first, then faster, harder. Up front, Eva was talking again about a woman at the campsite she wanted Marina to meet. Marina checked her phone. No service. The police had her parents’ numbers on file, so in case anything developed in the city, they would be able to contact her family, but…Marina hated leaving cell service. These interruptions happened so often—at the ocean, at the dacha, on one stretch of the road between the city and the airport. During the first months the girls were gone, Marina went nowhere that risked disconnection. She drove from home to work, work to home, with her cell phone clutched in one hand on top of the steering wheel.

When she called the police major general to say she was considering traveling to this campground for the weekend, he, too, pushed her toward the trip. “Take a vacation,” he told her.

“It’s for work,” she said.

“Well, take some extra time for yourself.” His voice dropped. “Marina Alexandrovna, our investigation is no longer active.”

Listening, Marina rolled her chair away from her desk and bent over her knees. “I understand that. But if—”

“We will get in touch right away if any new information comes in. Of course we hope for a lead.” Marina could not breathe then, either. “But take your trip. Live your life. Now is the time to move forward.”

He dared to mention hoping for a lead, after she had dedicated months to combing through city news coverage, calling scattered village police stations to ask after unsolved kidnappings, tracking down the prison records of men convicted of sex crimes against minors, begging superiors in the party to bring this case to the attention of Moscow. The major general said such things to make her doubt they had ever spent a minute looking for her daughters. With him in charge, no wonder the girls had not come back, Marina thought and wanted to suffocate.

“It better clear up,” Eva said. Her narrow face tipped toward the windshield. “Otherwise setting up the tent will be a nightmare.”

“It’ll pass,” Petya said. Marina tucked her phone back in her bag. Drops tracked across her window. She thought about surface tension, chemical composition, school science experiments. Nothing else. No recent memories.

By the time they pulled up to the fence bordering the campground, the rain had stopped. The stretch of wet, shining grass in front of their car was lined by empty booths. A stage in the middle of the clearing bore a banner: WE WELCOME VISITORS TO THIS TRADITIONAL FESTIVAL IN CELEBRATION OF THE REGION’S CULTURAL MINORITIES. HAPPY NEW YEAR—NURGENEK.

“Happy New Year,” Marina said. It sounded odd in June.

“The party’s not until tomorrow,” said Eva. Petya slammed his door on his way to grab their things from the trunk.

Arms full of supplies, they crossed the clearing on a dirt path that took them into the forest. They heard people talking, smelled cooked meat. An ATV was parked on the path ahead of them; when they squeezed past the vehicle, they found thirty people sharing dinner around tables in the open air.

“That’s her,” Eva whispered to Marina, and stepped forward. “Alla Innokentevna.” A gray-haired woman in the center of the group glanced up. “It’s so good to see you again.”

The woman put down her fork and beckoned them. Her lips pursed as Eva approached. “Don’t you usually come earlier?”

“We do. This year we brought a friend”—Eva looked behind for Marina—“a journalist. She had to work yesterday so we couldn’t leave until this morning.”

Marina nodded at the group. Alla Innokentevna was smiling now. “A journalist. In the city? What newspaper?”

“United Russia’s,” Marina said.

“We sent you a press release,” Alla Innokentevna said.

Marina said, “I know.” Eva broke in: “When we described the holiday to her, she said she had to experience it for herself. She hasn’t been up north for years. And before she worked for the party, she covered all sorts of subjects. In 2003 she won the Kamchatka Regional Prize for her reporting.”

Petya glanced at Marina. “In 2002,” Marina mouthed. He winked.

“Have you eaten dinner?” Alla Innokentevna asked. “No? You can set up by the big yurt.” She gestured toward the trees. “Come back afterward and we’ll have plates for you.” The other event organizers and the young members of visiting dance troupes fell back into their own conversations.

Eva turned around, grinning. Her face shone in the blue evening. She looked ready to celebrate someone else’s new year.

They put up the tent on soaked ground. Water seeped through the knees of Marina’s pants while she held the tent ties in her fists and waited for Eva and Petya to finish arguing over where to put the stakes. When they got back to the tables, three dishes of boiled meat and buttered rice waited. Some of the dancers had left, but Alla Innokentevna still sat. The organizer waited until Marina took her first bite to start talking. “You’re going to cover the holiday for your paper?”

Marina nodded. The meat was soft against her teeth. A few meters away, two teenagers washed dishes in a basin of soapy water.

“I run the cultural center here. You arrived late,” Alla Innokentevna said. “We had a concert this afternoon.”

Marina swallowed her mouthful. “I’m sorry we missed it.”

“Most people come tomorrow, anyway. It’s all right,” Alla Innokentevna said. Her glasses turned opaque as they caught the little light left in the sky. “What did you win your reporting award for?”

“A series on poaching. Salmon poaching in the southern lakes.”

Alla Innokentevna lifted her chin. The reflections slid away, turning her glasses back to transparency. “Dangerous work.”

“Yes,” Marina said. It had been. In those years, poaching was organized crime; poachers stripped rivers of their entire salmon runs, tanks of caviar surfaced for illegal sale, bears and eagles starved to death throughout the peninsula, international environmental groups dumped billions of rubles into Kamchatka’s economy to fight the black market. Marina had been there on the water. Rowing boats out at night, no flashlights, no talking. The rangers holding rifles in the seats beside her. An emergency radio resting heavy at their feet, and her lips dry, her blood racing. Ripples off the oars. Frogs called back and forth. As they steered closer to the poaching teams, belly-up fish floated past, each one slit from gills to anus, each body gleaming from the moon.

She left investigative work to go on maternity leave. By the time Alyona took her first steps, Marina no longer missed the risk; she wanted to stay far away from night raids, gutted creatures, men who carried weapons. After Sophia was born and the girls’ father left, Marina found a different way to support a family. She wrote lies for the party, which paid the bills. For a while, she kept their household safe and happy and whole.

Marina got up. She gave her plate to the dishwashing teenagers, took a rinsed mug from the stack, and fixed herself tea. The hot water came from a kettle sitting on coals. The leftover meat, fat congealing, was in a stockpot on the ground. Back at the table, Eva was telling Alla Innokentevna about their last year in the city. Marina checked her phone again. The conversation at the table quieted. When she looked up, Alla Innokentevna was staring at her, and Marina knew Eva had told the woman that her daughters were gone.

Eva kept trying to help. Last week making travel plans, and again this afternoon in the car, she had told Marina that this head organizer had a missing child, too. Eva talked about that fact as if Marina and Alla Innokentevna had something in common, but Alla Innokentevna’s daughter was already a high school graduate when she vanished from Esso. Her name never appeared in public records. The girl ran away from home, Eva said. There was no comparison.

Marina poured out the rest of her tea and balanced the mug on the pile of dirty dishes. “Thank you,” she told the teenagers, both of whom had women’s hips already. Marina returned to the table to tell Eva and Petya that she was exhausted. She was headed to bed.

“Outhouses are down the path. The river is straight back. You can wash yourself there,” Alla Innokentevna said. The organizer’s voice had not changed—usually people’s voices changed after they found out—but the quality of her focus had. She turned a pure beam of attention on Marina. For nearly eleven months already, people had been watching Marina, expecting details, begging for more. They wanted to know what went wrong with her family. They enjoyed feeling sorry for her once they heard.

The tent rustled as Marina crawled in and unrolled her sleeping bag against one wall. The trees above her made restless noises. Their branches threw black lines across the tent’s gray dome.

A school dance troupe must be staying in the yurt beside her. Young voices floated through the air. Someone thudded on a drum, and someone else laughed, too loudly. Of Marina’s two girls, Sophia had been the dancer. Her skinny limbs…even as a baby, she was long-legged. Whenever the culture channel was on the TV at home, Sophia imitated the ballerinas. Raised her arms, sharp elbows, and bent one knee. Lifted her face, with its high eyebrows and thin, innocent lips.

Marina curled her fingers over her sternum. She turned her face toward the plastic wall. She could not help thinking of them, she could not, except as soon as she did, she slipped too far into fantasy—pictured them coming back, both of them intact, frightened but alive. Their hair a little longer than when she saw them last. She imagined them returning in the same clothes. The three of them would huddle together, and Marina would run her hands over their backs, their worn shirts. She would press her mouth to their foreheads. Her girls would stay safe with her forever.

Or her imagination slid the other way. Finding their bodies instead.

Move forward, the major general had told her. Live. Marina would not survive another year if she pictured these things. Her pulse was deafening. The images choked her. Her hand was a claw under her neck, and she did not think about their little necks, their bodies, the stranger’s hands that touched them, her daughters, she would not. She shut her eyes and screamed in silence at herself to calm down.

Calm down. Count something and calm down.

The sleeping bag she lay in was rated to zero degrees. The tent belonged to Petya and Eva, and had space to sleep four. In childhood, Marina camped in humbler conditions: her father’s army tent, made of canvas and rope. Her father set their tent up in a section of the garden behind her grandparents’ house. Marina cataloged the smells of those summer nights. Early grass. Fresh dirt. The bitter leaves of tomato plants.

The drum sounded again over her heartbeat. Leaves rustled. In the darkness behind her eyelids, Marina sorted through a lifetime of trivia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No. I can’t. I have work.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They could come back. They could not.

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

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

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

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

“And the witness?” Marina asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Maybe.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m here,” she shouted back.

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

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

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

“Caw, caw,” she said.

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

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

“Okay. I’ll come in a minute.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the festival crowd, the craftsmen invited a boy onto the stage to participate. They draped a hide over his knees and showed him, and the crowd, a stone set into a wooden bow. When the boy scraped the bow across the leather once, the stone fell out of its wooden socket to the boards. In the audience, those paying attention laughed.

An artisan replaced the boy in his seat and guided the tool in long strokes. Marina’s heart was more or less steady. She did not see the reporter, but he was somewhere out there. Who else would she bump into here? She saw the black humps of cameras all around her—more journalists? Strangers who might recognize her from a months-old city broadcast? This was precisely why she ought to avoid busy places. When she got back to Petropavlovsk, she had to tell her editor: no more public events. No matter where she went now, people, consciously or not, were drawn toward her tragedy. They responded to some call she was still emanating; they felt compelled to approach.

The sun was lost behind clouds. The air around them was heavy. Eva squeezed Marina’s shoulder and pointed out a log bench on the right side of the stage. The three of them shuffled over to take those seats.

Alla Innokentevna called for a volunteer from the crowd for a game. She handed a lasso to a Russian woman who came forward to play, while a dancer onstage leaned on a pole with a deer skull tethered to it. At a sign, the dancer rocked that pole to make the smooth bone spin. The skull swung around him like a moon around a planet. The goal of the game was to snare the skull in motion. The white woman took aim, clumsy with the rope, and Marina stared away at the forest.

The music thumped through her brain. Marina could tell from the hoots in the crowd that the woman was missing her mark over and over again. “Are you three enjoying yourselves?” someone said.

Marina looked up. Alla Innokentevna, in her holiday tunic, looked down. The other organizers had taken charge of the stage and were calling for a second volunteer. Up close, Alla Innokentevna’s outfit showed the tracks of traditional craft. A stone rubbed over leather. “Yes,” Marina said.

“So many people came out this year, despite the weather,” said Eva.

“The weather doesn’t matter. We’re not here to sunbathe, but to celebrate our history.”

Marina straightened her back. “You’re all doing an excellent job. It seems like everyone’s having fun.”

“Are you?” said Alla Innokentevna.

“I’m a little tired,” said Marina. The crowd mocked someone’s latest failure to lasso the skull.

“We haven’t had lunch yet,” said Eva. Petya stood.

“Going for food?” Alla Innokentevna asked him. “Walk around the back of the stage. Fewer people there.” The organizer sat in the spot Petya vacated.

The bench was low to the ground, forcing their knees up. Marina wrapped her arms around her shins. The three women watched in silence as the dancer slowed the momentum of the swinging skull then reversed its direction, prompting cheers.

Marina sat back a little to get a good look at Alla Innokentevna in her old-fashioned clothes. A serious face, framed by shaggy gray hair. Earrings shone silver underneath. This campground was built to emulate an Even settlement, and Alla Innokentevna, who managed it, must be Even, too, Marina decided. Though Marina couldn’t tell northern people apart. Even or Chukchi or Koryak or Aleut. Her grandparents used to speak fondly about how the peninsula’s natives had been pushed together, Sovietized, with their lands turned public, the adults redistributed into working collectives and the children taught Marxist-Leninist ideology in state boarding schools.

Alla Innokentevna turned from the stage to face Marina. Marina looked away.

“I heard about your girls,” Alla Innokentevna said. “Eva told me. My oldest daughter told me, too, months ago. She lives in the city. She followed your news at first.”

The organizer’s voice was low. Marina concentrated on her own inhalations.

“How did the police treat you?” Alla Innokentevna asked. Marina shrugged. “They were fine? They kept looking for a while?”

Eva must not have mentioned the case was cold. “They’re always looking,” Marina said.

Alla Innokentevna grimaced. “How nice.”

They sat under the roars of the crowd.

“Eva told you my girl is missing, too.”

“Right,” Marina said. “Your teenager.”

The organizer looked over Marina’s head. Her face was drawn. “Not a teenager anymore. Lilia was eighteen when she disappeared, but that was four years ago.”

“Eva said she ran away.”

“That’s what the village police told us.” Alla Innokentevna met Marina’s eyes again. “The police say many things, don’t they? To stop citizens from pestering them.”

Marina did not want to talk about this. As if she and Alla Innokentevna had had the same conversations with the police.

“I have a question for you,” Alla Innokentevna said. “About the authorities in Petropavlovsk. I heard they were very aggressive. They searched for months. And they came up with many theories, organized searches, interviewed people. Is that the case?”

“Many theories. They did. Yes.”

“Are you satisfied?”

“Oh,” Marina said. Cheers and hoots sounded around them. “I’m outrageously happy.”

After a moment, the organizer smiled. The corners of her eyes did not crease. “Aren’t we all,” she said. “Then I have a second question. A request.”

Wherever Marina went, people tried in this way to consume her.

Alla Innokentevna took a breath and dipped her face down, setting her earrings swinging. “Tell me, how did you influence them to stay so active? You paid them.”

“No,” Marina said.

“You must have paid them, I think,” Alla Innokentevna said. “Otherwise what reason would they have to continue? I understand, believe me. Who did you contact there? How much did you give?”

Everyone’s lurid questions. Their suppositions. Every conversation Marina had had over the past year was long, unbearable, one after the next in a rhythm as steady as dirt shoveled into a hole.

“I called the ministry in Petropavlovsk,” Alla Innokentevna said. “After it happened, I went to the city police station in person. They didn’t listen to me. But they listen to you. Don’t you have their ear?”

Marina pressed on her chest. If there were a price for the discovery of a missing person, she would have paid it to the authorities in August, ten times over. “You’re wrong,” she said. “The police do what they will without me.”

“I am asking you as a mother.”

“Asking what? Alla Innokentevna, I can’t help.”

“Simply tell me how.” Alla Innokentevna was close. She smelled of shampoo, lotion, ash from the morning’s fire. Suffocating. “And I could do something for you, if you like. We have, for example, poachers up here to write about. There are stories I could show you exclusively.”

Marina shook her head. “I don’t do those kinds of stories anymore.”

“No? You can ask me anything.”

Eva, hands around her mouth, shouted encouragement toward the stage. The skull on the pole circled endlessly. Anything, the organizer said. What answers could Alla Innokentevna have for her? Marina might ask what it was like to see your child turn thirteen, or fifteen, or graduate from high school. How it felt to know, and not just suspect, that if you had been a better parent, more attentive, more responsible, then your baby would not be gone today. How to go on.

Anything? Marina would take a piece of nonsense for her editor to slot into the arts section. She focused on the warm spot of her fist over her breastbone. “Tell me,” she said, “what inspired you to establish the cultural center?”

Alla Innokentevna drew away. Behind her glasses, her eyelids lowered. “Love for my community,” she said. “Quote me on that in your article. They don’t have that in the city, do they? No.” The organizer turned back toward the lasso game on the stage, and Marina, too, faced forward.

Petya returned with three shallow bowls of salmon soup on a tray. Alla Innokentevna did not budge, so he ate standing, and Marina and Eva spooned up their own portions without any more attempts at conversation. A native boy came onstage to try his luck. He raised the lasso and rocked on his heels, waiting. The deer skull spun. As Marina ate, and even after she set her bowl and spoon on the ground, she felt the presence of the organizer weighing on her, like someone’s foot stepping on her chest. Alla Innokentevna wanted to use Marina’s loss of Alyona and Sophia; she had failed the first time, but she would try again.

Marina put her head down. Her hiking boots were spattered with mud. The crowd erupted in applause and she knew the boy had finally lassoed it.

When Alla Innokentevna left to introduce the next event—an hour-long dance marathon for children—Petya took his seat back. Eva asked Marina, “How are you doing? Are you going to dance in the adult one?”

“For an hour?” Marina said. “No.” On the stage, schoolkids moved in thick-limbed imitation of the earlier dance ensemble. One little girl was even decked out in a tiny leather tunic with a matching strap around her forehead. The girl swayed, arms in the air.

“For three hours,” Eva said. “The adult one’s longer. Petya and I are going to do it—aren’t we, my love?” Petya agreed. “We danced through the whole thing last year. It’s fun. Think about it.”

“I am,” Marina said, though in truth she was thinking about her grandmother’s soup recipes, her father’s lessons in her childhood about chopping wood. Anything to keep out of her mind the thought of what she had not been able to do for her daughters. Marina scanned the scene for another distraction. She saw children—girls waving to their parents, smiling on the stage, arranging their arms like ballerinas.

Marina stood from the bench. “I’ll be back,” she told her friends and made her way toward the trees.

The forest muffled the music’s high notes so only the bass came through. Marina found the tent. The afternoon was drawing on. She checked her phone—no service—and slipped it into her jacket pocket anyway. Then she crawled onto her sleeping bag.

Rain came light on the tent top. The sound was soft crackles. The distant music did not interfere. She, Alyona, and Sophia used to lie in her bed together, when the girls did not want to sleep alone. Her daughters would talk across the pillows until late. Their high, precise voices on either side; Sophia’s head heavy against Marina’s bare arm; the twinkling spearmint smell of Alyona’s brushed teeth.

Surface tension, Marina reminded herself. The reflection and refraction of light through water. If this weather continued, she would run out of rain trivia. The raindrops made noises like a thousand parting lips.

Eventually she checked the time to make sure the kids’ marathon was well over. Adjusting her hood, Marina crawled out and zipped the tent flap shut behind her.

The path took her back to the clearing. Adult couples were onstage now, with drums throbbing behind them; Marina spotted Eva tossing her head and Petya stomping to the beat. Choral singing and prerecorded gull cries played through the sound system. As Marina edged around the back of the stage, Alla Innokentevna’s voice came over the speakers. “Aren’t they wonderful? Let’s hear you cheer.” A yell went up on the other side of the banner. “How long can they last?” Alla Innokentevna asked the crowd. No one responded to that.

Marina emerged beside the food booth. One of the cooks looked at her, waiting for a dinner order. “What do you have?” Marina asked.

“Soup.”

“Just soup? Fish soup?”

“Fish soup and reindeer blood soup,” the cook said. Marina was already taking bills out of her pocket. “The blood soup,” she said, passing the cook a hundred-ruble note.

Marina held the hot plastic bowl in both hands as she shouldered her way to a spot, twenty meters from the stage, that was relatively free of other people. The evening stank of smoke. Strong alcohol and charred meat. The broth in her bowl was clear brown, and at its bottom were countless suspended droplets, darker, solid, a heap of stones on the floor of a lake. She watched the dancers while she ate. Eva, spotting her from the stage, waved with both arms high, and Marina raised her spoon to signal back.

Getting to the dregs, she put the bowl to her mouth and drank. Slivers of green onion slid down her throat. She lowered the bowl. The comment-seeking reporter stepped in front of her. “Marina Alexandrovna.”

Immediately her body began to shut itself down. “Yes.”

“Your friend told us about your situation.” Behind him, the photographer, who looked barely out of his teens, hung on to his camera. The reporter said, “We’re very sorry for your loss.”

“What friend?” Marina knew, she knew, that Alla Innokentevna had arranged this ambush. Not only had the organizer herself been after Marina all day but she had enlisted the other villagers to lay claims to Marina’s tragedy.

But the reporter corrected her. “Your friend, the woman—” He pointed toward the stage.

“I see,” Marina said. Eva.

“She explained what happened. I’m the editor of Novaya Zhizn, Esso’s newspaper. We have four hundred and fifty readers, and we can run a piece in our next edition, put the call out around the village. Do you have a picture with you of your girls?”

Marina heard the pulse in her ears. Felt the blood in her stomach. Constant, constant, these small tortures. Everyone behaving as though their offer of assistance would change her world. “On my phone,” she said. “But it’s back at the tent.” She put the bowl on the ground, the spoon in it. Placed her hands in her pockets. “Oh. No,” she said when her fingers bumped against a screen. “I have it. It’s here.” If she moved slowly, she could last on the oxygen left in her lungs.

The reporter said, “You just tell us in your own words, and I’ll record you. Their picture?” She slid her phone out of her pocket. “Perfect. Great.” He gestured to the photographer, who raised the camera to cover his face.

The reporter’s recorder drifted toward her mouth. Music thumped around them. “When you’re ready,” the reporter said.

She lifted the phone to her collar. Glass and metal touched her there, hard over her clavicle, and she lowered the phone again. She looked into the black, strange eye of the camera. Opening her mouth, expecting to choke, she spoke.

“Please help me find my daughters, Alyona Golosovskaya and Sophia Golosovskaya, who went missing from the center of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky last August. August fourth. Alyona is twelve years old now. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt with stripes across the chest and blue jeans. Sophia is eight and was dressed in a purple shirt and khaki pants. They were taken by a heavyset man in a big, new-looking car that was black or dark blue. If you have any information, call Major General Yevgeny Pavlovich Kulik at 227-48-06, or contact your local police department.” Marina had memorized these descriptions and numbers early on. Her face in the circle of the camera lens was a person trapped in a well.

“Would you please show us?”

She unlocked her phone, scrolled to the photo roll, and held up her older girl’s school portrait. “Alyona.” The shutter clicked. She flicked the screen. “Sophia.” They were well lit and smiling. “We are offering a reward. If you know anything, call the police.”

The camera still pointed at her. Again the shutter click. The reporter asked, “Is there any message you’d like to send your girls?” He enunciated to make his later transcription easier. This was a favor he had done her, this little feature. This transaction. One column of type in exchange for her life. “What would you like to tell them?”

“That I love them,” she said. And there it was—the constriction. The weight coming down. “That I’m desperate for them. I love them more than anything in the world.”

“That’s good. That’s enough,” he said. “An awful incident. We’re certainly glad to help.”

She edged her body away from him and shut her mouth to draw air in through her nostrils. The air did not reach deep enough to give her relief.

The photographer said, “A big guy in a black car?” She nodded. It was all she could do to inhale through her nose. The photographer said, “A Toyota?”

“Just a big black car,” the reporter said. “Black or dark blue. Isn’t that right, Marina Alexandrovna?”

The photographer stared at Marina. This was the difference after people found out—the raw curiosity. “You should talk to Alla Innokentevna.”

Marina said, “She already talked to me.”

“What did she say?”

“That—” Marina stopped, unable to continue.

“She mentioned Lilia? Her daughter?”

The reporter broke in to stop the younger man. “They already spoke, she said.”

All this year had gone this way: coworkers approached Marina at her desk, or old classmates sent her emails, or her parents’ friends took her aside if they saw her grocery shopping to tell her they had figured out how to find her daughters. Meanwhile the detectives told Marina they knew nothing and expected less. Your theories don’t help me, she no longer had the oxygen to say.

“We’ll print it next Saturday,” the reporter told Marina. “You never know, maybe they were taken north. This might make all the difference.” She tilted her head back. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Marina Alexandrovna?”

Marina’s pulse was too loud. She saw it, then, the sign from last fall that she had reached a peak of terror: the edges of her vision pulled in black. The world darkened. She tried to think of something, anything—the combination lock she used at university. Her and Eva’s old locker numbers. The best time of year to pick wild garlic. Anything before her girls were born. Anything to keep them out of her mind in this moment.

The dark receded. Lowering her head, she saw the people dancing. The reporter’s hand hovered a centimeter beyond Marina’s jacket sleeve.

Marina turned away. She wove across the clearing until she reached the woods.

The music followed her. People shouted back and forth—the crowd was getting drunker. Marina opened her mouth to swallow air. Again her vision narrowed. Light among the trees was even dimmer than out on the grass.

A fact: the statistical likelihood that her daughters would be found at this point was infinitesimal. Wherever they went, they were there now permanently, no matter the number of search parties organized or pleas printed on a front page. Marina was not ignorant. A missing child is most likely to come home in the first hour after disappearance. Every hour after that, the chance of a happy reunion decreases; by the time twenty-four go by, a missing child is almost certainly dead. Three days into the girls’ absence, the city police began to speak of recovering bodies, not rescuing children. And many hours, and many days, had passed since then.

Marina had lost them forever. She was never going to get her daughters back.

At the tent, she bent over to unzip the door and tossed her cell phone inside. The phone bounced across their sleeping bags. When she tried to stand back up, she found she could not. She could not.

They were dead. They had been dead for months. Nothing she did could save them.

The drums were thudding. Her chest was collapsing. “Marina,” Petya said from behind her. His hand on her back. “Marina. Breathe. Breathe.” He pulled her up to standing, as straight as she would go. Now both his hands were on her shoulders. “Calm down.” His familiar face. Strong when she could not be. “Marina, breathe. Look at me,” he said, and she did. He made a little circle of his lips, then pulled in air, slowly. Relaxed his mouth. Let the air out. “Do it with me.” Her lungs burned, her throat was torn. She, too, made an O of her lips, sucked in oxygen, let it out. “Slower,” he said. “Like me.” He must have followed her from the clearing. He had lost the dance marathon because of her. She focused on the pattern of his mouth.

“There you go,” he said when she got her breath back. He hugged her. Her nose pressed against his chest, and she turned her face to rest there more easily. Her hands were caught between them. She moved her lips in the way he showed.

After a long moment, he asked her, “How are you?” Marina nodded. “Can you sit down?” Nodding again, she bent her knees, and he helped her sit half in the tent with her legs propped out its doorway. He crouched beside her. She felt the phantom crush of his body, its welcome weight. She remembered Sophia’s head against her shoulder. Holding her girls in her arms when each was a newborn. That warmth. She had been so alone for the last eleven months that she believed she was going insane.

He stood up. She stared ahead at the woods, and he touched her shoulder. The soft skin behind her ear. “Hey,” he said. She looked up. Again he formed an O with his lips. Again she mimicked him. “Keep doing that,” he said. “Eva is going to be worried. I’ll be right back.”

With cool air hissing past her teeth, she watched him go. Petya, whom she saw in a blue suit at his wedding. Now he was heavier and going gray. Through the years, he had remained decent, honorable. Attuned to the dangers around him. If only Marina could say the same for herself. She turned back toward the trees. Her lips moved. The river, somewhere to her right, rushed away.

She twisted at the sound of someone approaching the tent. It was the photographer, camera on a sling around his neck.

“Please go away,” she said. She made an O of her lips and put her head down.

He crouched beside her in the wet leaves. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t want to bother you. But you said a guy in a new-looking car, right? Could it have been a black Toyota Surf?”

There is a man who lives near Esso, the photographer said, who might look like the person she had described. “This man is strange,” the photographer said. His words were low, quick. He had that northern intonation to his voice. “His name is Yegor Gusakov. He lives alone. I know he sometimes goes to the city overnight, and I know he keeps his car looking nice.”

“A man who cares for his car and sometimes goes to the city,” Marina said.

“It’s a black Toyota Surf. An SUV.”

She sat with that for a moment. “What do you mean, he’s strange?”

The photographer shifted his feet in his crouch. “We were in the same year in school, and he was always by himself, people felt sorry for him. He took advantage of that.”

Marina kept her eyes down. The photographer’s boots were dark with rainwater above the soles.

He kept talking. Yegor had been interested in the daughter of Alla Innokentevna years before that girl disappeared, he was saying. “It was more than a crush. He was almost obsessed with her. Lilia talked about it back when we were kids.”

Marina glanced up at him. He was staring at her, anticipating her response.

“Lilia ran away from home,” she said. “Isn’t that so?”

“Some people say that. Some people don’t.”

“You don’t,” she said.

The photographer paused to choose his next words. “Listen, did Alla Innokentevna tell you what Lilia looked like?” Marina shook her head. “She was older than your daughters,” the photographer said, “but short. Small. She was eighteen but she looked younger. I…wonder if someone might have hurt her. She could’ve run away herself, but she wouldn’t have stayed away like this, I think, so long.”

Marina worked on the muscles in her mouth. The tent’s plastic rustled under her weight.

“You think he did something to her?” she asked.

“He could have. He might have.”

“Have you reported this to the police?”

“The police didn’t pay any attention to Lilia. Anyway, there was never anything to report. Only suspicion. He’s creepy. But then—”

“I mean about my daughters,” she said. “The car.”

“I just— No.” His forehead wrinkled. “I didn’t know about any car.”

She slit her eyes at him. His anxious face, his bent knees. “You just said—”

“Those pictures you showed us, I’ve seen those before. There were posters up here with their faces. But I never put them together with her. There was no…I’ve never heard about any kidnapper.”

She closed her lips. Then she said, “What do you mean, never heard?”

“The posters said two Russian girls in the city were missing. Nothing else.”

Did no call for a kidnapper ever go out through the peninsula? What had the police been doing all this time? By winter, Marina knew, authorities were already turning their attention toward custody battles, or swimming accidents, or trafficking off Kamchatka. But before that? When had the major general first discounted their witness? Was it in the first weeks of the investigation? The first days?

“I never heard about some man who took the girls away in a black car,” the photographer said.

“Black or blue,” Marina said. Her head was back down.

Music filtered through the trees. The sound of the river. “I can take you to see him,” the photographer said. “Yegor’s house is twenty minutes away. We can drive there.”

“You want me to go driving alone with you.”

The photographer flushed and sat back on his heels. “No, I’m not— I understand. You’re thinking of your daughters? So am I. I’m not trying to get you in a car alone.” He was short-haired, solid, very young. “You can bring your friends. We can do whatever you like.”

Around them, the cheers from the marathon. Marina evaluated the photographer. Eager as he was, he seemed genuine, someone sincere. Certain.

The major general, telling her the girls drowned, hadn’t looked so sure of himself. “All right,” Marina said. The photographer stood and held out a hand to help her up. She reached backward for her phone, tucked it into her pocket, and followed.

At the edge of the clearing, Eva and Petya met them. Petya had his arm around Eva’s shoulders. “What’s going on?” Eva said. “Petya told me the Esso reporter upset you. Do I owe you an apology?”

The drizzle was starting up again. Where the evening sun should have been, at the base of the sky, was only a bleary white spot. Marina introduced them to the photographer, who said, “I’m Sergei Adukanov. Call me Chegga. I was telling your friend—”

“Chegga lives here,” Marina said. “He knows a man with a big black car.”

Eva’s face sharpened in the low light. Her muscles tightened enough to pull on her bones and make her eyes large. Sometimes Marina forgot, from Eva’s chatter about horror movies watched and festivals attended, that Eva, too, had loved Marina’s daughters. Marina almost wanted to give her own apology for offering this false hope now.

The photographer told the group about Yegor Gusakov. When he mentioned Alla Innokentevna’s daughter, Petya squinted. “One minute. Please. You think this has something to do with Alyona and Sophia?”

“Lilia looked younger than she was,” Chegga explained, “and this guy might be—”

“Did you just find out about this case?” Petya asked. “Because it’s very easy, when you first hear about it, to jump to conclusions. But when you actually know the people involved, and when you see the steps of the investigation, you understand this is not so simple to solve.”

The photographer chewed on his cheeks. “I understand that. I’m not naïve.”

Petya turned to Marina. “You need to protect yourself. This sounds like village gossip.”

“Maybe,” Marina said. “So I want to ask Alla Innokentevna for the truth.”

Couples still danced on the stage. Their arms waved in the air to the beat. As her group crossed the grass clearing, Marina counted the kilometers between Esso and Petropavlovsk, the number of seats in a Toyota SUV. Could someone have driven from the city to here without notice? The roads did empty outside city limits. She saw that yesterday. And after he took the girls in the late afternoon, he would have driven into the night, unseen…and if he had carried extra fuel cans in his trunk, instead of stopping at a gas station, he could’ve gone the whole way without talking to anyone…

But the police must have searched the villages. They told Marina they looked everywhere.

But Chegga said he hadn’t talked with any officers. He had never heard a description of the kidnapper before. To recover the girls, the city authorities only sent out posters with Alyona’s and Sophia’s photos and birth dates. Alla Innokentevna had warned Marina to expect this: To stop us, the police say many things…

But it should not have mattered if the details coming out of Petropavlovsk’s headquarters were false. Marina herself had called the Esso police station in August. She had called every regional branch on the peninsula. They told her then they had no record of any kidnappings or lost children.

But Marina did not ask them about any eighteen-year-old they presumed had left home.

Behind the stage, in damp shadow, they found the organizer talking to a younger woman. “Alla Innokentevna,” Chegga called. “Forgive us for interrupting.”

The organizer frowned from him to Eva to Marina. “Go ahead.”

Hours earlier, Alla Innokentevna had said she would take any questions. She had dipped close to Marina to offer her assistance and request help. And it had taken Marina all day, all this terrible year, to understand what to ask for. Marina said, “Would you tell me what really happened with your daughter? With Lilia?”

The younger woman next to the organizer flinched. She wore no glasses, and her skin was unlined, but she looked like Alla Innokentevna—the same full lips and rounded jawline. Alla Innokentevna took her by the arm and said, “Don’t get into it, Tasha.”

“The police told you she ran away, correct?” Marina said. “They told me my daughters must have been lost while swimming. But someone else saw them climb into a car with a man that day—a big, dark, shiny car.”

“You’re the Golosovskaya girls’ mother,” the younger woman said.

“Alla Innokentevna, did you know Yegor Gusakov bought himself a nice car a few winters ago? A large black one?” Chegga asked.

The younger woman said, “Who? Which Yegor?”

Alla Innokentevna’s eyebrows were high. She kept her hand tight on the younger woman’s elbow. “You wouldn’t know him. He finished school between Denis and Lilia. He lives toward Anavgai…You’re joking,” Alla Innokentevna said to Marina. “This is the favor you want from me? To chase down this boy?”

“I’m coming to you to ask for information.”

“Information.”

“About this man. What this man might have done.”

Alla Innokentevna turned to the photographer. “Is your mother in the village or out with the herd now? What would she think, to see you mislead someone in this way?”

Chegga shifted from side to side on the wet ground. Rain droplets hung on his buzzed hair. Marina said, “I was told this Yegor spends some nights in Petropavlovsk. Is that true?” The organizer sighed. “So it could be him. It’s possible.”

Alla Innokentevna shook her head.

“In Esso!” the younger woman said. “No. It’s not to be believed…”

Alla Innokentevna spoke in another language to her. That was Even, Marina guessed. To Marina, Alla Innokentevna said, “Has someone explained to you yet what Yegor Gusakov is like?”

Next to her, Chegga made a disapproving noise. Marina spoke over him. “I hear he’s strange.”

“I’m sure you do hear that. It’s what people say about anyone who acts different,” said Alla Innokentevna. “They talk the same way about my son—they say he’s strange and they worry about danger.” The younger woman said something in Even, but Alla Innokentevna continued. “They’re wrong. Yegor is harmless. Not very clever. He is not a criminal mastermind, do you understand what I mean? He is just a sad boy who always wanted friends.”

Chegga said, “Respectfully, I don’t agree.” The organizer held up both palms. “He was always watching Lilia when we were children. Maybe he wanted her for himself.”

Marina had never been able to watch herself pleading on television or hear her own voice crack on regional radio. After experiencing those moments, she did not want to relive them. But here, behind a stage crowded for a dance contest, near the end of a day at a rural holiday, she saw for the first time what she must have looked like. Alla Innokentevna’s expression broke open, a split fruit, exposing four years of rotten loss. Her lips parted. Devastation. Her nostrils flared. Her eyes, for a second, did not see the festival, and then they focused, and she clenched her teeth, and she shut herself up again.

“I see,” Marina said.

Alla Innokentevna looked straight at her. “You want to know if Lilia ran away.” Marina nodded. “No. Clearly not. She got into trouble here—she’d been getting into trouble for years—and someone hurt her.”

“Mama,” the younger woman said.

“And no one cared,” Alla Innokentevna said. “I told the authorities. No one listened.”

“I’m listening,” said Marina. Seeking inside Alla Innokentevna the parent she recognized.

Alla Innokentevna said, “No. You are trying to convince me, like our police captain did, of a fairy tale. Lilia was not taken from us over a schoolboy’s interest. She got into something worse.”

The speakers boomed as someone on the stage made an announcement. “Chegga is bringing us now to look at this man,” Marina said.

“Go look, then.”

“You can come with us. If we see anything that seems—if you see anything connected—to Lilia—I’ll give his name, his description, his license plate number to the city police. We can go together—”

Alla Innokentevna spat the name out. “Yegor Gusakov, of all people, is not the one who killed her.”

“No one killed her!” her daughter cried. “Mama, all they’re saying is that this Yegor happens to match their kidnapper’s description—that maybe he frightened Lilia before she left.”

“Someone killed her,” Alla Innokentevna said. To Marina, she said, “Like someone killed your daughters. You fool yourself by believing otherwise. You want a different answer so badly, but it will not come.”

Someone touched the base of Marina’s back very gently. Eva. The crowd, beyond the banner, was cheering. Alla Innokentevna had to be right. For years, the organizer had occupied the place Marina was pushed into last summer. She had been surrounded by people who stared, whispered, asked questions, but never changed her prospects of recovering what was lost. Two or three summers from now, Marina might speak the same way; she might come to accept that they were gone, that their bodies would never be found, and that the only recourse left would be bribing the police to make up a theory with a better chance of placating her.

But not yet. “So you won’t go,” Marina said.

Alla Innokentevna said something in Even to her daughter. The daughter shook her head. “She won’t,” her daughter said. Tasha. Natasha. “But if you really think this could have something to do with my sister, I will. I’ll come along.”

Petya in the driver’s seat, Eva in the passenger’s, Marina and Chegga and Natasha, Alla Innokentevna’s daughter, in the back. The photographer leaned forward to give directions. When he broke off, Natasha said, “So what did he do to scare Lilia? She never mentioned him, I don’t think. I don’t remember that name.”

“Oh,” Chegga said. “He left her gifts. These…She used to say he left things outside your house.” He did not seem as confident as he had when spinning tales on the campground. Alla Innokentevna had subdued them all.

“Gifts,” Natasha repeated, quieter. “I don’t remember.” Then: “Tell me again? What does he look like?”

“White. But built like me,” Chegga said.

The sky was passing from gray-blue to gray, drizzly twilight to drizzly dusk, out the car windows. The river curved away to their left. Marina, watching it go, tallied the results of this last year: her girls abducted. Her home empty. Her simple job, chosen for the ease with which she could care for her family around it, now pointless, and her top desk drawer stocked with tranquilizing tablets. Some nights she dreamed of her daughters and woke up sobbing, and the pain then was as fresh and sharp and new as it had been in the sixth hour after they went missing, as horrendous as a knife stuck in her womb. And now she was chasing another fantasy. She was choosing to push the weapon back in herself.

“What are we hoping to do?” Petya asked. “See this man? Ask him about the girls?”

“I can ask him about my sister,” Natasha said.

“See him, yes,” Marina said. “See his car. Take pictures to find out if our witness can identify them.”

“Shouldn’t we go to the Esso police station?” Eva asked. Natasha clicked her tongue.

“They’re a subsidiary of the city station,” Marina said. The voice coming out of her mouth was steady, journalistic, a leftover from an earlier time. “For any real crimes, the Esso officers turn to Petropavlovsk. Only the city can organize search and rescue teams.”

From the front, Petya said, “Marina. What are you expecting?”

“Nothing,” Marina said. That was almost entirely true.

Petya laced his fingers in his wife’s ponytail. Natasha, leaning forward to look at Marina, said, “I hope my mother didn’t upset you too much.”

“She spoke honestly,” Marina said. “I appreciate that.”

“I suppose,” Natasha said. In the deepening evening, she was shadow and highlight, blue and bronze. “She’s had a difficult life. Not just since my sister left, but before that, too…she’s very strong.”

“You think Alla Innokentevna is wrong, though,” Chegga said. The shadow over Natasha’s eyes shifted. “About this. You think Lilia ran away.”

“I know she did,” Natasha said. “Life in a village is not what most eighteen-year-old girls dream of. Lilia had so many reasons to go.” She was quiet. “Maybe Yegor was one more.”

“Could be,” Chegga said.

“Maybe Lilia saw something in him that no one else did,” Natasha said. “Something sinister.”

The car was quiet. Eva turned in her seat to study Marina.

“I followed your case all year,” Natasha said. “I have two children, too, similar ages. I would’ve contacted you right away if I imagined there were some connection between us—that the person who pushed my sister out of the village could’ve hurt your girls. But I didn’t know. Lilia didn’t tell me. And Esso seemed a world away from what happened with your daughters. I never thought…”

Marina said, “I didn’t either. Nobody did.”

The road bumped underneath them. On either side, the flashing woods. Dark trees and summer leaves. Marina, resting her forehead against the glass, pictured her girls. How Alyona’s arms freckled in the summertime—how Sophia hooted back at the sea lions when Marina took her to the city’s rookery. Rain trickled across the window. “The next left,” Chegga said. “Are you ready?” Eva asked. Marina exhaled into her daughters’ memories.

They crossed a bridge, went down dirt, passed a metal sign marking ten kilometers to the center of Esso. Chegga pointed out the windshield. Petya rolled to a stop on the packed ground; the road they had been traveling was empty, but he pulled over regardless, to give space for any coming car to pass. On the opposite side of the road, between birch trees, was a tended parcel of land. A narrow path made of laid planks led to the door of a two-story wooden house.

The house was painted white. It sat fifteen meters away. Its windows were shuttered and its lights were off. A small garden plot in the yard held young plants. Parked in the unpaved driveway was a black SUV, which shone under the dimming clouds like coal.

“Well? Is that it?” Chegga asked.

Petya said, “We don’t know.”

Beside Marina, Chegga raised his camera, snapped a picture, put it back down in his lap. No one else moved. “Is he home?” Eva said to break the silence.

“The house is dark,” Natasha said.

In the front, Petya said, “Marina, you should stay in the car. Until we know more.”

Chegga blew air between his lips. He lifted the camera over his neck and handed it to Petya. Then he nudged Natasha. “Let me out,” he said. “I’ll find out if anyone’s there.”

“I’ll come with you,” Natasha said.

Chegga shook his head. “Just wait. If he’s there, we were classmates, we’re familiar with each other, I’ll come up with something to talk with him about. And you all can see what he looks like.”

The car door opened, they both climbed out, Natasha came back, the car door shut again. Chegga was crossing the road. He followed the wooden path up to the house. Petya had his eye to the viewfinder of the camera. Eva muttered something—do you know how to—and he shushed her. At the house’s door, Chegga pressed a buzzer, knocked. If this was him, Marina thought. If this was him. After her long struggle to breathe. How could she survive knowledge?

Chegga knocked again. No one in the car spoke. Chegga, waiting, tilted his head, considered the house. Finally, he turned, shrugged at them, and started walking back.

Marina was swinging her legs out of the car. “Please be careful,” said Eva. But then she, Petya, and Natasha were getting out, following. The four of them crossed the road together. The woods and fields around them were green and brown and black. No other buildings were visible. Far away, a dog barked.

The smell in the air was smoke, diesel, wild grass, mud. Chegga met them at the edge of the property, where the plank pathway touched the road, and took his camera back. Empty-handed, Petya said, “What now?”

Natasha was looking up at the house with her brows knit. She walked a few meters onto the pathway, its boards creaking, before stopping. Eva trailed after with her hands in her jacket pockets. The six shuttered windows on the house’s second story looked like eyes squeezed shut. Chegga took a picture of the building. The parked vehicle. The surrounding woods.

Marina stepped into the wet green yard. She felt the rest of them watching her. Not looking back for their confirmation, she walked across the grass. Toward the black car. She could hear the swish of Petya’s feet behind her.

It was big. And it did gleam. Close up, Marina could see spatters of mud on the bottom of the trunk door, caked earth in the tread of the tires, but as a whole the car looked well maintained. She tried to picture the man who lived here washing it. A white man, Chegga had said; Marina got that far, to the skin, and no further. In her mind, his face was a smudge, a bleach mark. She took a picture of his license plate with her cell phone, then backed up to get the whole vehicle in frame—back, side, front, side. A scratch, perhaps ten centimeters long, rose from one wheel well. Marina traced one hand along the paint. She continued looking.

Petya peered into the car’s trunk while Marina studied the seat belts, the footwells, trying to focus on what the car contained. The seats were leather. An icon glued to the glove compartment showed the Virgin Mary outlined in painted gold. Between the dashboard vents and the front windshield was a curled plastic wrapper off a cigarette pack. An auxiliary cord trailed across the center console.

She jabbed at a window. Pressed one flat hand there, like she could push through it, she could push in. “That’s hers,” she said.

“What?” Petya said.

“That’s from her phone.” Marina was rapping on the glass. “There. There. It’s Alyona’s.” Hanging from the rearview mirror, a strip in the shadows, was the tiny yellowed bird charm that Alyona had had fixed to her cell phone. But no. No, it could not be. Marina tried to put both palms to the glass, but her own cell, clutched in her right hand, got in the way. She pulled back and scrabbled for her speed dial, for her daughter’s number, pressed call for the millionth time this year, but nothing, obviously, no fucking service out here, and even if there were there would be no ringing. Alyona’s phone had stopped ringing that first day. Marina’s eyes burned. She slammed on the window so hard she heard cracking and she did not know whether it was her cell or her hands or the glass or her heart that made the noise. Was this really happening? But there it was. Petya was right behind her now and she hit again at the window—should she break it? A rock?—should she take a picture?—because there it was, Alyona’s phone charm, that trinket, a carved ivory crow hanging from a black cord. There it was.

“Where?” Petya asked. He was crowding close. Marina pointed. “On the mirror,” she said. “There.”

He peered in. They had lost too much light since leaving the campground, so it was hard to see—why didn’t they come earlier? But the charm was visible all the same. That little bird, bone-colored, that Alyona had hooked to one corner of her slim black phone. Alyona’s mouth had turned down in concentration while her fingers worked over the lanyard loop.

“That gold thing?” Petya said. “That’s hers?”

“The one hanging down from the mirror,” Marina said. Her voice was loud. She did not recognize the sound of it.

The others were at the car, too, now, though Marina had not noticed when they crossed the yard. Eva was wiggling in next to Petya to look. Chegga was straining, camera in his hands, to see for himself, and saying to Natasha, “Can you find anything of Lilia’s? Can you see?”

Natasha’s forehead was pressed to a window. Chegga pushed forward. Natasha said quietly, “I don’t know what to look for.”

Marina’s hands were fists. She had to get closer. She unwound her fingers and hoisted herself onto the hood, the car’s body rocking on tires underneath her. She pulled her legs up—Petya’s anxious hands boosting her—and then she was kneeling on the top of the hood, staring down now, directly through the windshield. Around the neck of the mirror was wound a thin gold chain, and looped around the mirror itself was a sliver, a charm, a nothing, a piece of tourist trash. But Alyona’s. Marina said, “It’s hers.” She knew the thing perfectly.

She remembered when they got it. Alyona had picked it off a table of identical animal carvings last spring. At the outdoor market on the city’s sixth kilometer. The three of them were there that day to find Sophia new sneakers, and Sophia was dragging her feet past the stalls, complaining, because she, too, wanted a cell phone, and also some trinket to hook on to it—that one, Mama, please! When you get a little older, Marina had told her younger daughter, I’ll get you your own phone that you can make look however you like, but for right now, you’ll share your sister’s…After August, that argument undid Marina. She could hardly bear to tell the police what she had said, let alone what she’d been thinking. She had given her children a single device between them, an object easily destroyed, with nothing more than a chunk of fake ivory on a cord to defend themselves.

Chegga’s camera was clicking. Inside the car was dark. Airless. The charm did not swing.

“Why did he take it off her phone?” Marina said. “Where is her phone?”

Eva was wide-eyed. Natasha kept her face to the window.

Alyona’s phone had been off, Marina knew, since the afternoon the girls disappeared. But the desire to call her daughters was flooding her. She had to hear them. “Where are they?” Marina said. So loud. “Where are they?”

The hood was hard under her knees. “Take a minute, Marina,” Petya said. “Look again. A thousand souvenirs like this one are sold on the streets every tourist season. This one is hers? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said. Even as she said it, she thought, Am I? Am I? A thing like this, generic. But I know it. Except why would he save it? Display it? If this is true, if this is actually happening, where is Alyona? Her phone dismantled—where is Sophia? With him? Yegor? Who is that? Where is he? Did they go into this house? Are they buried in this garden? In the forest? Are they on the side of the road between here and Petropavlovsk? He might have. He. How am I still breathing? How? This charm.

Painted cottages lined freshly paved streets in Esso proper, where Petya, at Chegga’s direction, had driven them. As soon as a lone bar of service appeared on Marina’s screen, Petya pulled over, and Marina dialed the major general’s cell number. It rang without answer, so she hung up and dialed the station. A woman picked up, took Marina’s name, and asked her to hold for a transfer. A young man’s voice came over the line.

“Marina Alexandrovna? It’s Lieutenant Ryakhovsky.”

“I need to speak to Yevgeny Pavlovich.”

Ryakhovsky paused. “The major general is on a case away from his desk.”

“It’s urgent. You have to find him immediately.”

The detective sighed and lowered his voice. “Marina Alexandrovna, may I speak honestly? It’s Saturday night. The major general left work hours ago. You don’t want to call him at this point. He won’t be sober enough to assist you.”

Eva reached for the phone to take over the conversation. Marina held up a hand to stop her. The black car, Marina told the detective. The rearview mirror. Alyona’s phone charm. Yegor Gusakov. His private trips to the city and his house shuttered. Out of Marina’s mouth, the journalist was speaking. She listed the facts.

“Tell him about Lilia,” Chegga whispered.

Also Lilia, Marina repeated. Lilia…Marina looked over Chegga’s shoulders at the shadow of Natasha. “Solodikova,” Natasha said. “Lilia Konstantinovna.”

Solodikova, Lilia Konstantinovna, Marina said. Missing four years. And Yegor Gusakov. Alyona. Sophia. The Toyota, Marina said. The color of the Toyota, the size. An SUV.

“You saw this car yourself?” the detective said, voice sharp. She said yes. “Was Yegor Gusakov there? Did you see him? Did he see you?”

The darkened windows. The car in the driveway. Had he been in the house after all? Watching them? But— No, she said. She didn’t think so. No.

“Where are you right now? This very instant?”

The village streetlights flickered on above. In Esso, Marina said.

“You’re alone?”

She met Eva’s eyes. I’m with my friends, Marina said.

“How many friends?” Four. “They know? Have you told anyone else?”

Yes. No.

“Good. Don’t.” The detective was silent. “Marina Alexandrovna,” he finally said, “you’re sure about all this?”

She nodded. He kept waiting for her answer. Yes, she said out loud.

“Give us two hours to call back,” he said. “Maybe three. I’ll—we’ll track down the major general. We’ll send a team north by helicopter. You said this man wasn’t home when you were there?” No, she said. “We don’t want him to know we are coming.” Marina inhaled. “I can reach you on this number? So for now—do you understand me?—for now, you will need to stay out of his way. Stay away from his house. Do not go there. Tell your friends the same. Wait somewhere and expect to hear from me.”

In two hours?

“I’ve got to find him first. We’ll start organizing the flight. Then up to Esso…” The other end of the line was quiet as he calculated. He said, “In three.”

But you’ll come.

“We’re coming.”

And I’ll wait, she said. She was always waiting. When Eva reached again for the phone, Marina gave it over, so her friends could hear the plan from the detective’s own mouth. Beside Marina, under the new yellow light, Chegga scrolled through the photos on his camera. Natasha stared ahead stunned.

They had decided. To the campground, to collect their things, then back to Esso where there was cell service to wait for Ryakhovsky’s call. Chegga told Marina, Eva, and Petya that they should stay at his house, with his wife and daughter. Marina listened to Eva and Petya agree. As helpful as Chegga had been, he had the same quality as everyone else over this year: he wanted to put himself inside the story. As if on instinct, Natasha roused, then— “No,” she said to the group. “Come to ours.”

“Which is closer to Yegor’s?” Petya asked.

Chegga glanced at Natasha. “They’re the same, practically. The village isn’t big. We’re two streets apart.”

“But your mother,” Eva said to Natasha. “She won’t mind?”

“She stays at the camp during the festival.” Eva nodded. “You can meet the rest of my family,” Natasha said.

Out of Esso, the houses drew farther apart, the ground under their tires grew rougher. The river alongside the road returned. Marina looked into the blackened woods. In two or three hours, just after midnight, she would hear a helicopter.

When they pulled into the rows of parked cars at the campground fence, the music coming from the clearing beyond was contemporary, electronic-sounding. “Will you come with us to pack up or would you rather wait in the car?” Eva asked.

Marina could not feel her lungs, or her throat, or the pulse in her chest or her back on the seat or her hands where they had hit the car’s glass. Nothing hurt. This was a new, not unwelcome, way of existing. “You can do it,” Marina said. “Please.”

Between the driver’s seat and the door, Petya reached back to touch her shin. “We’ll be back as soon as possible,” Eva said.

Natasha got out, too, to let Chegga slide from the car. He hugged Marina before he left. Marina, outside her own body, observed him doing it. Then Natasha got back in to sit again. She left her door open.

This is not real, Marina thought. This could not be her life.

The night was cool, the music loud. Marina checked the time on her phone, then put her head back and practiced making an O of her numb lips. Natasha was turned toward the clearing. She said something.

“What?” Marina said.

Natasha cleared her throat. “Almost the closing ceremony.”

Drums sounded through the speakers. Long research had given Marina one more fact: a body takes ten years to decompose after burial. Alyona and Sophia are buried in that man’s garden, she thought. She had practically stood on top of them an hour before. After Marina’s months of horror spent gathering information, that idea neither distressed nor soothed her now. It surfaced in her like a piece of driftwood. Ten years. It floated along.

“I always wanted what you got tonight,” Natasha said in the direction of the clearing. “An answer.”

Marina looked again at her phone. Two hours, he’d guessed, to call back.

“Any answer,” Natasha said. “I’m glad for you.” Her voice was flat and far away.

The words percolated through Marina. She said, “Thank you.”

The two of them sat in the parked car. The music from the campground beat on.

“My mother believes…My mother was right,” Natasha said. “Someone killed Lilia.” In the dark, she turned toward Marina. “Isn’t that so?”

“Oh. I don’t know,” Marina said. Natasha waited. “It could have been like you thought. Yegor made your sister uncomfortable. So she left.”

“But she would’ve called us,” Natasha said. “At some point. She would have called me.”

Marina had no response. There was nothing to say. Natasha had found her answer.

And should Marina feel glad about that? About at last knowing something, anything at all? Because she did not feel it. Where gladness should be, or despair, or gratitude for Natasha’s presence, or desperation to acknowledge the thing they shared, there was brutal vacancy. Natasha was looking at her without expectation. Marina folded her hands and pictured three small bodies, Lilia, Alyona, Sophia, among the warm dark colors of beets and carrots, with roots winding around them and dirt packed into their mouths.

The music faded and a voice yelled for order over the speaker system. “I’m sorry,” Natasha said. “I can’t just sit here. The ceremony’s starting. Do you want to join? Or—” She faltered. “I’ll leave you, if you like. I can come back to take you to our house when it’s done. I just need to get up, get out…”

Two hours. Or three. Ryakhovsky said the police would come. Didn’t he? They would track Yegor down. They would uncover the girls where they lay. Two or three hours, and after that, an eternity.

And Marina would spend all that time like this. Sitting alone. Thinking about decomposition. Kept waiting, as Alla Innokentevna had been, for the happiness that would never again arrive.

“All right,” Marina said. She heard herself speak and watched herself stand from a distance. “We can go.”

When they got to the fenced border of the clearing, Alla Innokentevna was at the microphone. “We celebrate this Nurgenek on the last day of June,” the organizer was calling out. “We make a circle in a tribute to the solstice sun.”

Natasha clutched Marina’s hand. On Marina’s other side, a stranger reached for her. The whole mass of people was falling into formation. Marina looked for Eva and Petya, though the night made it impossible to spot anyone from a distance. They would have to search the circle to find her afterward. That was fine.

The drums bumped up in volume. “During these long summer days,” Alla Innokentevna said, “the old sun dies, and the new one is created. The gates of the spirit world open. This is a time when the dead walk among us. Those who are living can be reborn.”

Dancers crossed the grass. The flaps of their costumes trailed behind them, distorting their silhouettes. Breaking into the circle, they remade the formation, gripping the hands of tourists, locals, children.

Natasha tugged on Marina’s arm. Their circle began to revolve around the wet lawn. “Repeat after me,” Alla Innokentevna instructed the crowd. “Nurgenek…” Marina let the Even words wash past her. She could not replicate those syllables—soft vowels all in a row. Around her, other Russians tried and failed to catch the sounds. One man was shouting. A few people laughed.

They turned faster. The grass was slippery. “Tell the neighbor to one side, ‘Happy New Year,’ ” Alla Innokentevna said. “Tell the neighbor to your other side that you wish them peace.” Marina pictured the peeling shutters on Yegor Gusakov’s windows. The hanging line of Alyona’s cell phone charm.

Alla Innokentevna’s words rose above the drumbeat. “We pass from one year to the next. You will be given a branch of juniper and a strip of cloth. The branch represents your past worries, and the cloth is your wish for the future. When you come to the first fire, throw the branch of your worries in, and jump across.” Her voice, amplified, carried no hint of irony. “Hold your wish tight as you go to the next fire. You will be walking between worlds.”

Marina listened so that she would not think of the turned earth in Yegor’s garden. She would not think of the likelihood her breath would not last the night. Or the impossibility of waiting hours to hear a helicopter. Or the lie that wishes could change history. She would not think of her girls’ hands, smaller, hotter, of how they would feel in hers at this moment, of how Alyona and Sophia would half-run to keep up with the turning tide. If she could only get them back, how perfect Marina’s life would be. She must not think of that.

“This is a powerful time,” said Alla Innokentevna. “Dreams come true. You will jump past the second fire to enter the New Year. And when you tie up your cloth on the other side, your wish will be fulfilled.”

No longer pulled in a loop, Marina was instead drawn straight ahead, toward the edge of the clearing, where the woods began. The trees were lit orange at their bases by twin fires. A choir of voices sang in the recording.

The line of bodies in front of Marina headed for the glow. On the far edge of the clearing, from a tangle of smoke and trees, an unbroken line wound back out onto the grass. Marina saw the first fire—a campfire, really, no taller than her knees. They were getting close. A teenager in beaded leather passed out juniper and cloth.

The air smelled spicy. Freshly snapped branches. It smelled like childhood summers, her grandfather’s lessons, and rivers waded years before with her children. Natasha dropped her hand to take the two objects. Then Marina, too, grasped them, the fabric thin and swinging, the juniper scratching her palm.

Common juniper. “Your worries and your wish,” the teenager called over the noise.

Her worries. Her wish was simple—Alyona, Sophia—and for a terrible moment she allowed herself to believe it, that she and Natasha and Chegga and her friends could actually make them come home, that the major general and his detectives would succeed at last, that her family would be restored. That Lilia’s family would track down their daughter, their sister. That they, too, would be healed. Jump the fires, tie up the fabric, and trust in your power to shape the coming year. But no. Alyona, Sophia, and Lilia were murdered. No amount of ceremony, no prescription or intervention, no big black car could alter the truth of that. Missing children, Marina reminded herself, do not return.

She was up to the first fire. She held her false beliefs in two fists: the juniper, that she could leave suffering behind. The strip of cloth, that her daughters would come back to her.

What was she walking toward? The next year would be like the last. So would the next, and the next, and the next—there was no chance of change. The phone charm would not really be Alyona’s. Or the detectives would let Yegor slip away. Her girls could no longer be rescued. Lilia was years gone. Marina would learn to close her ears to strangers; she would return to the newspaper; she would sedate herself with pills; she would continue to survive. But if she had the choice, she would not do any of that—she would go backward. To her children, her best work, her happy fact of a childhood. Where the whole world waited to be discovered. Where everyone had something to teach her and no one had ever been lost.

She turned around. The woman behind her shouted, “Jump over.”

Marina could no longer speak. The attack was on her.

The teenager stepped toward her and pointed at the flames. “You jump over. It’s the fire of the old year.”

Marina’s hands were full. She could not press them flat to her chest, and she knew how much she needed them there, how soon she would choke without their comfort. What was the point of all this? She was trying to push out of the line but people kept coming. Eva and Petya were in the woods without her. Natasha was gone. The teenager was calling out instructions. Alla Innokentevna’s voice was everywhere, booming over the loudspeakers. They were making her keep moving.

No one near Marina understood. Without her girls, all she had was this breathlessness. Terrible as it was—and it was, it was—it was all she had left to mother. She jumped.