Andrea White - Radiant Girl

“I agree,” Sergei said. After a pause, he added, “I’ve always wanted to go back to the amusement park.”

“Do you think about the past much, Sergei?” I asked.

“My brothers and I used to hunt and fish. Almost every weekend,” Sergei said. His voice was dreamy.

“I miss that, too,” I said. “Did you ever see our cottage in Yanov?”

“No,” Sergei said.

“It was surrounded by woods. My grandmother and grandfather lived there,” I said. “My grandmother used to tell me stories in front of our stove.”

“Mine, too,” Sergei said. “I was always terrified of Baba Yaga and her house on chicken legs.” He paused, remembering. “But I loved to hear my granny talk about her domovyk .”

“Yours had one, too?” I asked, excited.

“Yes,” Sergei said. “She called him ‘a peculiar, little fellow.’ She said he ate only bread.”

Sergei’s comment reminded me of Granny Vera’s story about her domovyk stealing a loaf of bread. “What else did your grandmother say?”

“How long do you think before the bus leaves?” Sergei asked, and his question brought me back to the present.

“At least forty-five minutes.” I reminded him, “Remember that photographer .” I couldn’t keep the scorn out of my voice. But if Sergei shared my scorn for the nuclear industry, he didn’t show it.

“We should go,” he said.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“I’ll lead,” Sergei said. Before I could answer, Sergei bent down and ran toward the candy-striped bar. When he reached it, he squatted underneath. Every second, I expected to hear a man’s voice ring out, but he slipped by the guardhouse without incident. Careful not to kick any gravel or to scuff my shoes, I followed.

In just a few moments, I joined him under the cover of the nearby woods. We hid behind a pine tree and looked back at the checkpoint.

Sergei grinned. “So much for the airtight security system.”

I laughed as I plunged into the woods. “Let’s go.” My forest was much denser, greener and taller than I remembered.

“There’s no path,” Sergei said.

“It’s just overgrown,” I said. “I know the way.”

Welcome home , Katya , the trees seemed to say. Welcome home .

Unlike the town, the forest was as wide-awake as I had ever seen it and more beautiful than I remembered. It seemed that birds and squirrels inhabited every tree, that all the bushes were budding and that green grass blanketed every inch of the ground. Sparrows, magpies and blackbirds sang in the trees. The wind blew fluffy seeds past me. It was the spring that I hadn’t experienced. The spring that the accident had stopped.

“My father and I liked to hunt boar,” Sergei said. “We had just killed a big sow. Its body was at the taxidermist in Kiev on the day of the accident. It’s the only thing my parents let me keep.”

“All I have is a motorcycle poster,” I confessed. “I didn’t even get to keep my other birthday presents. My new Barbie—that Angelika gave me, actually,” I paused, thinking about my teen room and the things I had left behind. “And a beautiful matryoshka .”

“A motorcycle poster?” Sergei asked.

“Did you know the Boikos, my neighbors? Their son, Boris, was a fireman.”

“No,” he said.

“Boris gave it to me,” I said.

“Your boyfriend?” he teased.

“No, he was engaged,” I said simply.

When I was younger, I had needed a bicycle to make the trip from Pripyat to Yanov. Particularly in the winter, the trip had been exhausting. But now, we had already reached my lane.

At first, I couldn’t believe it. The Ancients, those old homes, had survived the Great Patriotic War and others. But now, they had disappeared. As if the ground had grown boils, mounds of dirt bulged where these wooden cottages had once graced the earth.

“Is this Yanov?” Sergei asked.

The all-consuming ache that I felt started in my stomach but quickly spread out into my limbs, filling my head. I wondered if cancer hurt like this. My cottage was truly gone. And the Ancients were buried, too. Until I saw this field of dirt, I had never truly believed my father. When I didn’t answer, Sergei said, “I’m sorry, Katya.”

I began running to shut out the pain. “Help me find my house, Sergei,” I called. I counted mounds until I arrived at what I guessed was the location of our dear cottage. I couldn’t be sure because our oak tree was buried, also.

I pointed at a heap of dirt, all that was left of the home my grandfather had built to keep our family safe so long ago. “I think this is it.”

Sergei and I both hunted around in the grass which had grown past our ankles. Eventually, I stepped on something. I bent down and scraped the dirt off a slat of wood. It was blue, but more faded than I had remembered it. “A piece of our shutters.”

I wanted to kneel there and dig until I reached our cottage. I wanted to rescue it from its tomb of earth and let it feel the sun again.

“Hey, what’s this?” Sergei said. He raised a chain—Noisy’s chain, still spiked to a chunk of earth.

I ran to him and grabbed it out of his hand.

“What is it?” Sergei asked.

Noisy had been such a good dog. “It’s my dog’s.” I stood there squeezing the end of that mud-encrusted chain. “I should have found some way to sneak him out.”

At least I had let Noisy loose before we left. Perhaps he had found his way out into the forest.

“My sister brought our cat, Aneta,” Sergei said quietly. “But the police took her at the clinic in Kiev.” He shrugged. “They killed her anyway.”

I dropped the chain, and its clank sounded so final as it hit the ground

The lumpy field looked like nothing more than an abandoned construction site—never loved by anybody. My home had vanished as completely as if it had never existed. It was as if my childhood had never existed either. The achy sadness crept up my throat. What if the boulder was gone, too? That’s when I realized something that I should have known all along. It was the boulder that I had come for, the boulder that I wanted to see. The boulder would make everything feel right again.

“Could we go just one more place? Then we’ll go to the Ferris wheel. I promise.”

I knew that Sergei was ready to return, that he didn’t understand what we were doing in that desolate field, but I also hoped he understood how I felt losing Noisy and everything else.

Sergei nodded and started walking alongside me. “But we should hurry.”

I tore down the path toward the stream. It was completely overgrown, but just as before, I knew exactly which way to head. I walked another few yards and a deer jumped across the path. I watched its white tail bob around in the forest until it disappeared.

So beautiful….

The branches slapped my legs. My head, arms and legs began itching as if I were being attacked by a swarm of invisible mosquitoes. I didn’t want Sergei to get impatient, so I hiked as fast as I could. The clomp of Sergei’s boots sounded behind me. Once we ran into vegetation so dense that I had to find a way around.

“Are you sure you know where you’re going?” Sergei called out.

The trees blocked my view of him. “Yes!” I yelled just as we entered a familiar clearing.

When I turned the bend, I noticed the stream first. I knew that the water was radioactive now, but it rushed past, as innocent and as carefree as always.

Next to it, shimmering in the morning light, I spotted the boulder. With all the changes and destruction, somehow, my boulder had managed to remain exactly the same. I felt like it had waited for me. Was Vasyl here, too? Is this where he had led me?