Julia Phillips - Disappearing Earth

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…”