Julia Phillips - Disappearing Earth

“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.