Julia Phillips - Disappearing Earth

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.