Julia Phillips - Disappearing Earth

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.”