Julia Phillips - Disappearing Earth

The two of them sat in the parked car. The music from the campground beat on.

“My mother believes…My mother was right,” Natasha said. “Someone killed Lilia.” In the dark, she turned toward Marina. “Isn’t that so?”

“Oh. I don’t know,” Marina said. Natasha waited. “It could have been like you thought. Yegor made your sister uncomfortable. So she left.”

“But she would’ve called us,” Natasha said. “At some point. She would have called me.”

Marina had no response. There was nothing to say. Natasha had found her answer.

And should Marina feel glad about that? About at last knowing something, anything at all? Because she did not feel it. Where gladness should be, or despair, or gratitude for Natasha’s presence, or desperation to acknowledge the thing they shared, there was brutal vacancy. Natasha was looking at her without expectation. Marina folded her hands and pictured three small bodies, Lilia, Alyona, Sophia, among the warm dark colors of beets and carrots, with roots winding around them and dirt packed into their mouths.

The music faded and a voice yelled for order over the speaker system. “I’m sorry,” Natasha said. “I can’t just sit here. The ceremony’s starting. Do you want to join? Or—” She faltered. “I’ll leave you, if you like. I can come back to take you to our house when it’s done. I just need to get up, get out…”

Two hours. Or three. Ryakhovsky said the police would come. Didn’t he? They would track Yegor down. They would uncover the girls where they lay. Two or three hours, and after that, an eternity.

And Marina would spend all that time like this. Sitting alone. Thinking about decomposition. Kept waiting, as Alla Innokentevna had been, for the happiness that would never again arrive.

“All right,” Marina said. She heard herself speak and watched herself stand from a distance. “We can go.”

When they got to the fenced border of the clearing, Alla Innokentevna was at the microphone. “We celebrate this Nurgenek on the last day of June,” the organizer was calling out. “We make a circle in a tribute to the solstice sun.”

Natasha clutched Marina’s hand. On Marina’s other side, a stranger reached for her. The whole mass of people was falling into formation. Marina looked for Eva and Petya, though the night made it impossible to spot anyone from a distance. They would have to search the circle to find her afterward. That was fine.

The drums bumped up in volume. “During these long summer days,” Alla Innokentevna said, “the old sun dies, and the new one is created. The gates of the spirit world open. This is a time when the dead walk among us. Those who are living can be reborn.”

Dancers crossed the grass. The flaps of their costumes trailed behind them, distorting their silhouettes. Breaking into the circle, they remade the formation, gripping the hands of tourists, locals, children.

Natasha tugged on Marina’s arm. Their circle began to revolve around the wet lawn. “Repeat after me,” Alla Innokentevna instructed the crowd. “Nurgenek…” Marina let the Even words wash past her. She could not replicate those syllables—soft vowels all in a row. Around her, other Russians tried and failed to catch the sounds. One man was shouting. A few people laughed.

They turned faster. The grass was slippery. “Tell the neighbor to one side, ‘Happy New Year,’ ” Alla Innokentevna said. “Tell the neighbor to your other side that you wish them peace.” Marina pictured the peeling shutters on Yegor Gusakov’s windows. The hanging line of Alyona’s cell phone charm.

Alla Innokentevna’s words rose above the drumbeat. “We pass from one year to the next. You will be given a branch of juniper and a strip of cloth. The branch represents your past worries, and the cloth is your wish for the future. When you come to the first fire, throw the branch of your worries in, and jump across.” Her voice, amplified, carried no hint of irony. “Hold your wish tight as you go to the next fire. You will be walking between worlds.”

Marina listened so that she would not think of the turned earth in Yegor’s garden. She would not think of the likelihood her breath would not last the night. Or the impossibility of waiting hours to hear a helicopter. Or the lie that wishes could change history. She would not think of her girls’ hands, smaller, hotter, of how they would feel in hers at this moment, of how Alyona and Sophia would half-run to keep up with the turning tide. If she could only get them back, how perfect Marina’s life would be. She must not think of that.

“This is a powerful time,” said Alla Innokentevna. “Dreams come true. You will jump past the second fire to enter the New Year. And when you tie up your cloth on the other side, your wish will be fulfilled.”

No longer pulled in a loop, Marina was instead drawn straight ahead, toward the edge of the clearing, where the woods began. The trees were lit orange at their bases by twin fires. A choir of voices sang in the recording.

The line of bodies in front of Marina headed for the glow. On the far edge of the clearing, from a tangle of smoke and trees, an unbroken line wound back out onto the grass. Marina saw the first fire—a campfire, really, no taller than her knees. They were getting close. A teenager in beaded leather passed out juniper and cloth.

The air smelled spicy. Freshly snapped branches. It smelled like childhood summers, her grandfather’s lessons, and rivers waded years before with her children. Natasha dropped her hand to take the two objects. Then Marina, too, grasped them, the fabric thin and swinging, the juniper scratching her palm.

Common juniper. “Your worries and your wish,” the teenager called over the noise.

Her worries. Her wish was simple—Alyona, Sophia—and for a terrible moment she allowed herself to believe it, that she and Natasha and Chegga and her friends could actually make them come home, that the major general and his detectives would succeed at last, that her family would be restored. That Lilia’s family would track down their daughter, their sister. That they, too, would be healed. Jump the fires, tie up the fabric, and trust in your power to shape the coming year. But no. Alyona, Sophia, and Lilia were murdered. No amount of ceremony, no prescription or intervention, no big black car could alter the truth of that. Missing children, Marina reminded herself, do not return.

She was up to the first fire. She held her false beliefs in two fists: the juniper, that she could leave suffering behind. The strip of cloth, that her daughters would come back to her.

What was she walking toward? The next year would be like the last. So would the next, and the next, and the next—there was no chance of change. The phone charm would not really be Alyona’s. Or the detectives would let Yegor slip away. Her girls could no longer be rescued. Lilia was years gone. Marina would learn to close her ears to strangers; she would return to the newspaper; she would sedate herself with pills; she would continue to survive. But if she had the choice, she would not do any of that—she would go backward. To her children, her best work, her happy fact of a childhood. Where the whole world waited to be discovered. Where everyone had something to teach her and no one had ever been lost.

She turned around. The woman behind her shouted, “Jump over.”

Marina could no longer speak. The attack was on her.

The teenager stepped toward her and pointed at the flames. “You jump over. It’s the fire of the old year.”

Marina’s hands were full. She could not press them flat to her chest, and she knew how much she needed them there, how soon she would choke without their comfort. What was the point of all this? She was trying to push out of the line but people kept coming. Eva and Petya were in the woods without her. Natasha was gone. The teenager was calling out instructions. Alla Innokentevna’s voice was everywhere, booming over the loudspeakers. They were making her keep moving.