Disappearing Earth

NEW YEAR’S

Though it was only eight o’clock, Lada was well on her way to drunk. She had helped finish another bottle before Kristina came back to the kitchen. Kristina returned to the group looking like a billboard model for cell service, with her phone propped in one hand, her bikini, and her blond bangs. “Guess who’s coming?” she shouted over the music as she slid into place on the banquette. Lada was distracted by the tinsel flattened on the bottoms of Kristina’s feet. Silver sparkles vanished under the kitchen table. “Masha.”

“Who?” said a guy at the end of the table.

“Masha!” Kristina said. Her face was quick, pleased, her lips flushed brighter pink by vodka. Lada listened, not believing. “Masha Zakotnova.”

“Who?” the guy said again, more sourly. A few people laughed.

Masha. The music was too loud. Lada wanted sobriety now as much as she had wanted festivity before. She focused on the food in front of her: cake, cured meats, salted and braided cheeses; ribbons of orange peel; pillars of boxed juice. An apple—she would have an apple. She reached over the tablecloth to take one. In the heat of their holiday rental house, which was slick inside with steam from the sauna down the hall, the fruit was surprisingly cold. Lada pulled the apple to her lap. “Give it,” the man squeezed next to her said and plucked it from her bare thighs. He started peeling it clean with a paring knife.

Lada turned her attention back to Kristina. “So what,” she asked, “tonight?”

“Yes, tonight,” Kristina said. “Do you not want her to?”

“No, no,” Lada said. “No. Why would I not?”

“Good, because she’s already on her way.” Someone uncapped a new bottle, and Kristina passed her glass down to be filled. “She’s getting a taxi from her parents’ place. I told her there are no extra beds but she said she would be fine on the floor.”

“Is she cute?” Kristina’s cousin asked. “My bed might have some room.”

“You’re not her type,” said Kristina, as her glass was passed back. She raised the glass to the group. “Who has a toast?”

The man gave Lada her apple. Sliced and cored now. Lada popped a piece into her mouth and raised her drink after him. Her final one, she promised herself. “To the New Year,” the man said. “May we meet tomorrow healthy and happy.”

“May we have all our appetites satisfied,” said the cousin, baring his animal teeth at the table. The girl next to him shoved him and made their side of the banquette jolt. Lada’s shot burned down her throat. She took another apple slice. Around the table, people were talking over each other. Lada was heavy with alcohol, slow to comprehend.

How could Kristina say whether Masha liked any particular type? Masha was…they hadn’t seen Masha in seven years, since after their first year of university. Lada and Kristina hadn’t actually been friends with her since the summer before that. Masha had earned herself a scholarship spot at St. Petersburg State University. Before she left, the three of them spent weeks watching comedies in bed together and promising to call each other every day, but when Masha moved away for school, she disappeared. At first she replied to texts by saying course work kept her too busy to talk, then she stopped responding at all.

Once first-year exams were finished, Masha’s parents had invited Lada and Kristina along to the airport to see their daughter in for the summer. They met a girl at security who was thinner, wary. Whose body was stiff in their arms when they hugged her. Who may have been coming home for a season but was determined not to stay.

And that was that. Masha ignored their messages all summer. By the time the fall semester began, they had to assume Masha had already flown back west to school. The New Year’s holiday break came, then another summer vacation, and so on through all five years of university with hardly a word out of St. Petersburg. Kristina managed to keep in touch, but only scarcely; she chatted with Masha online then reported the most interesting bits: Masha had graduated with honors, found a job with a Western company that paid her salary in euros, moved with a roommate to an apartment just south of Nevsky. Meanwhile Kristina and Lada were living with their parents after wrapping up their provincial degrees. Kristina worked at a sporting goods store on the tenth kilometer and Lada was a receptionist at the Avacha Hotel. It wasn’t practical, Kristina said, for Masha to come see them in Petropavlovsk. The long flight back wasn’t worth it. Masha’s rent in St. Petersburg was twenty-eight thousand rubles a month.

Lada had nothing to say to this shallow news. “Oh,” she offered when Kristina tried. Or “Nice.” She didn’t want anything of hers, not even a tone of voice, relayed to the other side of the country for them to laugh over. Ooh, our Lada’s jealous, Kristina would love to tell Masha—Kristina took any gossip she could get. How bizarre that, of all the people to stay connected to, Masha had chosen Kristina, with her whispers, her tales. Growing up, Kristina and Masha were not the ones bonded to each other. It was Lada and Masha who were close, carrying their hearts in each other’s chests.

That was what it felt like to Lada, anyway. Like Masha had everything of her. They lived in neighboring buildings and sat next to each other in every class. If Masha found a good book, she read the entire thing out loud to Lada. Those readings took weeks sometimes. Lada lay on Masha’s bedroom carpet while Masha’s deliberate voice rose off the bed. Lada heard all of Sherlock Holmes that way: the investigator’s words in Masha’s mouth. It is not for me, my dear Watson, to stand in the way. Like that. When Masha left, she took Lada’s love with her, and she never returned to give it back.

Oh well. Lada chewed on another piece of apple. Masha was coming. Here, tonight.

Maybe it was better this way—to see Masha once tonight, up close, instead of being surprised as she walked someday down their once-shared street. This way, Lada could greet her and get over her all in the year that was ending, and meet the New Year free of this old wound.

The song changed to something faster. The man beside Lada poured her another drink. “No, I don’t need it,” she said.

“It’s all right,” he said, sliding the glass her way.

The steamed-up windows behind him blotted out any stars, so the night beyond looked flawlessly dark. No lights streamed by from cars. Lada sighed. Her skin was softened from her trip into the sauna after she first arrived. The rounded muscle of this man’s thigh was pressed to hers, and the seam between them was slippery. Lada leaned toward his ear: “Thank you,” she said. Enunciating.

“It’s nothing.”

She could smell new sweat and old cigarettes. “Remind me of your name?” she asked. “Whose friend are you?”

He smiled at her. His bare chest was wide, showing the purple marks of old acne scars. “I’m Yegor. Tolik’s friend.” Lada shook her head, and he pointed across the table at a dark-haired stranger. “Tolik’s my uncle’s godson,” Yegor said. “My uncle actually invited me. He’s always pushing me to get out more.”

“Funny. My family probably wants me to stay in more,” Lada said. She took the shot and smiled back. “You live with your uncle?”

“I have my own place.”

“In Petropavlovsk?”

“Up north.”

“Oh, I remember.” She’d forgotten because Yegor didn’t look northern. But someone had mentioned the villages when his car first pulled in. Tolik, she supposed.

“Whose friend are you?” he asked.

“Kristina’s.” Masha’s. Not anymore—but maybe again.

Masha was coming here. Strange. Lada herself knew barely any of the people in this house: Kristina and her boyfriend and her cousin. Two girls from Lada and Kristina’s graduating class at university, one of whom had brought her detective husband along. Lada recognized the husband’s face from the evening news. At the other end of the table, he was arguing about local politics through a mouthful of food. And Lada knew Yegor, now, too. Then the group spiraled out into friends of friends of friends. Beyond the nine of them at this table, another five were taking a turn in the sauna.

As a girl, Masha had never been much for parties. On Masha’s twelfth birthday, she, her mother, and Lada hiked the Avachinsky volcano. That was ages ago. Still, Lada remembered the day perfectly…the acid-yellow leaves at the volcano’s base, the raw rust-colored soil at its summit, the mineral taste from their water bottles, and the steady pump of their legs. After the Golosovskaya sisters disappeared last summer, Lada looked at the girls’ school pictures and saw her own childhood. The hours she and Masha spent wandering Kamchatka as a pair. She could shut her eyes and pretend she still occupied that younger body. Flat-chested, weightless. Masha, ahead of her, so small.

Back then Masha wanted nothing more than time alone together. She changed in St. Petersburg, though. She had changed a lot.

The group was shouting over each other about movies when the taxi arrived. Headlights shone through the kitchen windows. Kristina jumped up to get the door. Left by herself, Lada understood that she was tipsy, nervous, nearly naked. She should have thought to change back into normal clothes. Crazy to be dressed in a bathing suit when seeing Masha for the first time in years. And Lada’s bangs dry, curling—she touched her forehead. No way to help that now. No one else seemed to be bothered. Yegor, beside her, was an amiable slab. Lada tucked her hands under her legs and looked toward the hall.

“Everyone, here’s Masha,” Kristina called as she came back in. “Mashenka, here’s Zoya, Kolya, Tolik, Volodya, Ira, Andryukha, and Yegor. Don’t worry. We’ll remind you. Here’s our Lada.” Lada tried to rise, but she was stuck between the table and other people’s bodies. She had to crouch up. If she were free, what would she do, anyway? Hug the friend who had forgotten her? It seemed—no. Lada sat back down. Masha dropped her backpack against one wall and slid onto the banquette after Kristina.

Masha had gotten more beautiful. Her hair ended blunt at her shoulders, her skin was pale as champagne, and she was not wearing a bra. She still had that look—narrow eyes and solemn mouth—that had made Lada’s mother call her Little Auntie when they were growing up, but it had relaxed from childish primness into something more natural now. Her whole body looked fresh.

Masha stretched her arm across the table to reach Lada’s hand. “Hi.” Fingers cold from the air outside.

“Hi,” Lada said. Warmth bloomed again inside her.

“Where are you coming from?” someone asked.

Masha pulled back. “Petropavlovsk,” she said, at the same time Kristina said, “St. Petersburg.”

“I was just in St. Petersburg last month,” said one of the girls down the table.

“Oh, yeah?” said Masha. That same odd, low voice, coming out from behind teeth neat as a line of pearls. Teeth still as small and lovely and distinct as they had been when Masha was a schoolgirl.

“What do you do there?” asked the detective.

“I’m a programmer.”

“I loved it,” continued the girl, “but I couldn’t live there. Too much craziness.”

“Let’s pour our guest a drink,” Kristina said. In the back of the house, noise rose. The sauna door must have opened. Somebody in there was singing, stretching out each note. Yegor lined up more shot glasses for the friends coming down the hall.

They drank. Lada kept looking across the table. The last time she and Masha celebrated New Year’s together, they were seventeen. They went to a club; Kristina kissed a boy on the dance floor, and Lada threw up in the bathroom, and at the end of the night the girls took a taxi home together, Masha sitting in the middle. Under Lada’s throbbing temple, Masha’s shoulder had been cool relief. The city’s sidewalks were filled with people, even at three in the morning, and the sky above their taxi burst over and over into new light.

Lada caught Masha’s eye. “Did you bring a bathing suit?”

“It’s in my bag,” Masha said.

“Let’s steam,” said Yegor. The group that just got out of the sauna, shiny, thirsty, moved aside, and he pushed his way out from the table. Lada followed. The floor was wet. She stood in the kitchen doorway, letting other people squeeze past, until she saw Masha take an orange bikini out of her backpack. Then Lada turned toward the back of the house.

The sauna was shut off from the hall by a fogged-over glass door. Their group went in: Yegor, Kristina, Kristina’s boyfriend, Kristina’s cousin. Lada, who was trailed by one girl she didn’t know. The air tasted like wood. It hit them hard. Lada swallowed to breathe. Splinters in her throat all the way down.

They took places next to each other on the burning bench while Kristina’s boyfriend tipped a ladle of water onto the heater. Steam billowed up, squeezing their limbs and lungs. Masha came in through the fog. Lada squinted.

“Do you rent a place like this every year for the holiday?” Masha asked once she found a seat.

“My friend does,” said Kristina’s boyfriend. “Kostya. The skinny guy. But this is our first time. Nice, huh?”

“I like it,” said Masha. She shifted to peel her legs off the planks.

To Yegor, Kristina said, “Your first time, too?”

He said, “I visit the city whenever I can, but this is my first New Year’s.”

Kristina’s cousin laughed. “That’s right. Our northern guest. You couldn’t find a party closer to you?” Yegor leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. A rash of red was spreading across his back. “No friends at home?” the cousin asked.

“Be nice,” Kristina warned.

“I don’t mind driving,” Yegor said. “As long as I get here and have a good time.”

In the steam, Masha’s head was bowed. Lada asked her, “How long have you been back?”

Masha lifted her face. “I got in yesterday morning.”

The girl Lada did not know said, “I can’t,” and stepped down to the floor. She was blotched pink and white. Opening the door, letting in a current of cool air, she stepped out.

Kristina’s cousin scooted over on the bench toward Masha. A fingertip touched Lada’s thigh—Kristina, poking her to point them out. This cousin was a few years older. He probably met Masha when they were kids, but he wouldn’t remember that bookish girl. In the bright bands of her bikini, her skin below yellowed ivory, her bobbed hair swinging, Masha looked sophisticated enough to have skipped childhood altogether.

Yegor leaned over to Lada. “More?” he asked. Sweat tracked down his thick arms.

“If you want,” Lada murmured back.

He stepped down and dragged the ladle through the bucket of water. Though he didn’t look around, he seemed to be doing it for her.

Just seeing him move gave Lada a base comfort. He wasn’t attractive, no, but when she looked at his wide shoulders and soft waist, she resolved to like him. He looked like her father and her uncles and a hundred kids she’d stood behind in line at school. She would allow him many awkward moments for the sake of that familiarity.

Men might look different in St. Petersburg. More artistic. But a man like Yegor, from the north, lonely, who drank too quickly and did girls favors and would drive eight hours to attend a party, belonged only here on Kamchatka. He came from the humblest part of this place. When he turned the ladle, the room exploded in new heat.

He came back to sit closer. Their slick knees touched. Again, Lada felt that poke from Kristina, who was not saying anything. They were all paired up now—two by two by two. The cousin was telling Masha something quiet, so Masha bent forward to hear. Sweat trailed between her shoulder blades and spine.

Yegor’s knee kept pressing on Lada. This was different from the kitchen, where they were crammed together. Here, Yegor was letting Lada know he was certain of her. If she wanted to sleep with him, she could.

Maybe she would. Yegor was a little sad, a little forced, but he had peeled that apple for her. He would be a fine choice for tonight. Lada pressed back.

It was good. Masha was home, and the return felt better than Lada had thought it would. Lada had pictured fearing the woman who came back to them. Instead, she found someone who was still recognizable. Changed but not entirely strange. Masha’s voice, her mouth, her funny habits. Lada tried to see the situation with her buried sober mind…it was true, she believed that things were all right.

Anyway, now Masha had the chance to see Lada with this man, who was emphatic with his desire. Lada and Masha never kissed boys growing up—they never tried. Now they were women, and could do whatever, within limits, that they liked.

“Mashenka, how’s your family?” Kristina asked.

Masha looked up. The skin under her eyes was drawn tight by the temperature. “Fine,” she said. “Normal.”

Lada’s leg was hotter in the spots where Yegor’s touched. “How’s Vanya?” she asked Masha.

“Is that your boyfriend?” asked the cousin.

“My brother,” said Masha. “He’s good.” She smiled, her teeth precise white in the room’s mist. “He’s graduating from high school this year.”

“No!” Lada said.

“He’s applying to university in Vladivostok. He wants to be a businessman.” That little boy who used to follow them outside and watch them play. Once, when Masha’s parents were out for the night, the girls told him ghost stories until he wet his pants. Now he was going to learn how to run a company.

“Good for him,” said Kristina. She pushed her bangs back from her forehead. Her bare face was all cheekbones and lips. “Good for both of you world travelers.”

“You’re cosmopolitan, then, aren’t you?” asked the cousin.

“I don’t know,” said Masha. “No. Not really.”

“You don’t miss Kamchatka life?” he asked. She shook her head. “You don’t miss Kamchatka men?”

“No.”

“You haven’t met the right one.”

Kristina’s fingers trailed on Lada’s leg. The steam lifted all the blood to Lada’s head. Masha’s discomfort was apparent in the line of her back—that beautiful back—her muscles, stripped and tensed and sleek—and Lada wanted to say, Masha, it’s New Year’s, relax, let him touch you, because Lada would let Yegor take her to bed tonight. Masha, she wanted to say, just do it. Be with us again.

The walls were hissing. Kristina slid down off the bench. Her shoulders shone with sweat. “I’m going outside.”

Masha stood up fast. Lada, too, got to her feet, and the edges of her vision blotted black. The boys would follow. Kristina led them out of the sauna up the noisy hall.

Opening the house’s front door, Kristina shrieked at the cold. It wasn’t yet midnight, but the sky was black, black. Millions of stars blinked down. Kristina’s boyfriend pushed her out onto the iced-over cement step, and they all squeezed after. People in the kitchen were shouting. The detective’s voice rose above the rest. When the door shut, the racket from the house was muted.

Though Lada had braced herself, the outside air came like nothing. She couldn’t yet feel it through the sauna’s leftover warmth. From the clarity of the air, the crystals on the ground, she knew the night was far below zero. Her nerves must have sizzled out. On the base of her spine, a hand touched, steady. She looked down at her arms and saw them steam.

Yegor, behind her, leaned forward so his lips touched her ear. “You’re so tiny.”

She supposed that was a compliment. “I’m all grown up,” she said and eased her weight back to press against his palm.

“Really. How tall are you?”

“One meter fifty-five.” One meter fifty-four.

His hand rested on her back. “Have you ever been to Esso?” he asked. “I could take you.”

Someone shoved against them. On the other side of the step, Masha said, “Stop it.”

“Come on,” Kristina’s cousin said. “What’s your problem?” Masha had moved away from the rest of them. The cousin was holding up his hands.

“I’m not interested,” Masha said, in that flat tone. My dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

The cousin lowered his arms. He was tall like Kristina, with her same pout. On his face that mouth looked soppy. “Fucking lesbian.”

He spoke like he was serious. People died for less. Lada felt the cold then. She was frozen.

“Don’t say things like that to her,” Kristina said.

“So what if I am?” said Masha. “At least I’m not a fucking pervert.” She stepped down into the snow and gravel and pulled herself up into a different part of the group. Everyone was silent. Kristina’s long neck bent forward.

The cousin said they made him sick. He was going back inside.

The other two men went, too. Yegor last, but he went. It was only them then—Lada, Masha. Kristina. Like it used to be.

Masha sat down on the edge of the step. Her bikini bottom wrinkled in back. “It’s too cold to sit,” said Kristina. “You’ll go barren.”

Masha did not answer.

A car flashed by the opening of the driveway. Its headlights lit up the trees. Someone was going late to another celebration. “Forget it,” Kristina said and turned around.

The door shut again. Finally just the two of them. Lada lowered herself to the step, and the cement scraped the backs of her thighs.

“He didn’t mean anything by it,” she told Masha. “Are you okay?”

Masha looked straight ahead. Her arms were crossed on her knees. Everyone’s cars were lined up on the driveway in front of them. “This is my last time coming here,” she said.

“Kristina’s cousin is an idiot. Stay the night.”

Masha nodded at the iced-over yard. “Here, I mean. Home. Kamchatka.”

The night was filling Lada’s lungs with ice. “You just got back,” she said.

“Yeah, well,” Masha said. Her shoulders were raised. The way she sat was as it ever was. “My parents wanted me to come this winter. Now they say they don’t want me to anymore.”

“That’s not true.”

“That’s what they told me tonight.”

The sauna warmth was long gone. Masha’s skin was raised in white goose bumps. Lada wanted to touch that skin—the impulse crested inside her. It had once been so easy to reach Masha. She was the girl that Lada knew, and she wasn’t, all at once.

“But you’re happy in St. Petersburg,” Lada said. “Right? Kristina says you are—you have been.”

“I guess,” Masha said. She rested her head on her crossed hands to watch Lada. “I have to find a new apartment when I get back. I just broke up with my girlfriend.”

“Oh,” Lada said. The roommate. Kristina had said Masha had a roommate.

A girlfriend. Masha was so stupid. A girlfriend, Masha said outside the door, while all those big familiar men sat just on the other side of the wall. A detective. A police detective was in there. Underneath the frost, the steam, and the liquor, Lada’s anger bubbled up, and she wanted to touch Masha now, but not gently, not with fingertips where Masha’s fine arm hairs rose. She wanted to grab her by the wrist and shake. Brilliant Masha, with her scholarship spot, her tech degree. Perfect Masha, who got a job at a global firm. Gorgeous Masha, who paid twenty-eight thousand rubles a month to live with another woman. Masha had been treated her whole life like she was exceptional. If she, from that, now believed she could act this way…

Some people don’t care if you’re special. They will punish you anyway. Neighbors, for example, will report a girl, even a smart girl, with a girlfriend. The police will hurt you, if they get the chance. One person up the Okhotsk coast had been burned to death for this only a couple years earlier. Masha moved away from home at seventeen; when she thought back on life in Kamchatka, she probably pictured volcanoes, tasted caviar, remembered hikes on stone paths to the clouds. She didn’t understand what happened these days to girls as innocent as she and Lada had been. They were destroyed for it. Any girl would be. The Golosovskaya sisters, who, walking alone, made themselves vulnerable—that one mistake cost them their lives.

If you aren’t doing what you’re supposed to, if you let your guard down, they will come for you. If you give them the opportunity. Lada could not believe Masha would be naïve enough to choose to have a girlfriend. They will hurt you, Lada had to say. You could die for this.

In the stillness, a pop song leaked through the kitchen windows. How could one person have studied so hard yet stayed so foolish?

Lada said, “You can’t say that here.”

Masha was silent.

“You could get killed. Why did you come back if you’re going to be this way?”

“What way?” Masha said. “I’m the same. You know better than anyone the way that I am.”

Lada folded her arms across her own knees, laid her cheek on them, and looked at Masha. She was trying not to be angry. “Mashenka,” she said. “Listen to me. Can’t you not?”

“No,” Masha said and smiled.

Those teeth. Her tipped and lovely face. It made Lada’s stolen heart hurt to see.

The stars scattered above them. Cold had sunk so deeply into Lada’s bones that she felt her marrow must have frozen blue. After a while, Lada said, “Will you at least promise to be careful?”

“For you?” Masha said. “I’d do anything.”

The mixed noise of people’s voices came from the house. Bottles and laughter. Though sitting out so long was risky, because Kristina’s cousin, in the kitchen, could be saying all sorts of things about what Lada and Masha were doing together in the dark, Lada could not bear to go. She’d waited years. So many parts of their friendship were lost forever, but Masha had spoken to Lada again, once, honestly, as if they were still the most precious people in each other’s lives.

My dear, my dear. My darling.

“You promise,” Lada said.

“I promise.” Though God knew Masha had broken her promises before.

Lada shifted her seat to rest her head on Masha’s shoulder. Under Lada’s temple, Masha’s cool, smooth grace. “I’d do anything for you, too,” Lada said. “Anything I was able to do.”

“I know,” Masha said. “You would if you could. I knew that.”

In front of their faces, their breath puffed white, curled up. Vanished.

“We should go in,” Lada said.

Masha said, “Will you stay with me for midnight?” Lada nodded against her. “Just like this. It’s silly to ask.”

“No, it’s not.”

“It’s my last night here.”

Boys like Yegor had come before and would come again. “We can sit,” Lada said. “That’s easy. Really.”

The night was an immense windowless room. The stars were impossibly far away. In the crisp dark, Lada pushed back against the alcohol in her blood. She willed herself to make new memories. This moment mattered in a way the trip she wouldn’t take to Esso never could. She should not forget a second of this.

Masha may have carried Lada’s love with her wherever she went, but that didn’t keep anyone safe. Besides the hiking, and the reading, the games played in their courtyard and the movies watched in bed, Lada would hold on to this: her friend bare-shouldered, stubborn. Stupid enough to speak honestly. Sitting near midnight in weather that turned their toes white against the gravel. Smiling. Beautiful Masha, all grown up yet still childish. Unafraid of what harm was sure to come to her.