“Katyush,” Max said. “Please. They’re gone. The search isn’t useful anymore.”
Max, of all people, announcing what was or wasn’t useful. Katya shifted her fingers on his leg and he fell silent.
They stooped under her open trunk door to change into their bathing suits. Away from the fire, they had goose bumps. Their breath fogged. Katya adjusted her shoulder strap and Max grabbed her. He backed her up until her legs hit the car. They kissed for a long time under the metal canopy, where neither of them had room to stand up straight. They bent into each other like two praying hands, but Katya wasn’t thinking of God. She forgot lost children. She was thinking of Max, his arms, his fingers, his mouth, his fine teeth, the urgency under her skin.
Eventually she had to pull away. She was in her bikini and rubber sandals, and the cold had numbed her feet. Max, in his briefs and old sneakers, shone in the dark.
He crossed his arms on his chest. “So where are we going?” he asked.
The hot springs were calling—hissing, bubbling. “Come on,” she said and led him away from camp, along the stream, on a narrow path through the trees until they came to the clearing that held the baths.
Five rubber-and-wood structures, aboveground pools fed by hoses from steaming wells. The rotten-egg smell of the springs was thick here. Warm mud slid under their feet. Katya and Max left their shoes at the base of one bath’s stairs and climbed in. The heat dragged up their bodies. Katya exhaled into the swirling air. “Heaven,” Max said, and she sank next to him in the sulfuric water to her chin.
The steam unwound. Above them were a million tiny stars. The night was blue and black, outlined by autumn constellations, and Katya, staring up, found a satellite blinking its way across the sky. The longer she watched, the deeper the heat reached inside her. It bled into her organs. It cleared her mind.
Near him, she couldn’t think of anything but him. But when they were a little apart she returned to herself, and she liked that woman she came back to. Someone…capable. Someone who maintained standards, who met commitments, who produced results. Someone who would be disappointed in a man who acted the way Max so often did. She should be disappointed with him.
Max slid through the water toward her. His skin was slick from dissolved minerals. Against her back, the wooden edge of the pool was slippery. He tucked his fingers into her bathing suit bottom, and she stiffened, holding on to that bit of her own brain.
“Not here,” she said.
“Then where?” he said in her ear.
“In the tent,” she whispered back.
He pulled away.
That had come out meaner than she meant. “I’m joking,” she said. Now he was far away from her.
“Huh,” he said, his voice separated from his body by a wall of steam.
“It was a joke.”
“Funny.”
“Don’t—” she started, and then stopped. Should she apologize? Try to explain? If he made mistakes, though, he had to accept the consequences. She, too, should accept the truth in front of her: what had propelled her into a weekend’s liaison in August wasn’t enough to sustain a relationship through the fall. Let alone beyond. The snake slithered up her throat. Max could not handle responsibility. Each of them would be happier in the long run with anybody else.
Between them, heat puffed. The water hissed and trickled.
Back at the car, they changed into dry clothes, stepped into sleeping bags, and hopped into their seats: Katya in the driver’s, Max in the passenger’s. Both of them already sweating from the effort. It was going to be a miserable night. She peeled off her long-sleeved shirt. “Should we buckle ourselves in?” she asked, turning to him, smiling, but above his sleeping bag, his shoulders were still high and offended.
This was their romantic trip. She leaned across the gearshift and he pecked her on the lips. “Night,” he said.
“Good night.” She pressed her forehead to her window, her swaddled feet against the brake. How much longer could she do this? Max was sweet, he was gorgeous, but he was not the hero they had both pretended…
The world outside was muffled. The chirps from the forest were quiet, then quieter, then gone.
She woke to a screech.
Shadow at her window. There was a man. A huge man, a killer—whoever’d taken those girls—Katya had slipped her bare arms out of her sleeping bag overnight, and she froze that way, half-unwrapped, terrified. A pane of glass away from danger. Her shirt was twisted. Her chest was pounding. It was almost light out. Not a man—a bear.
A brown bear on its hind legs. Scraping noises came from the roof over her head. The bear fell heavy on all fours beside her door, and dust puffed from its fur. It stepped forward, reached the front of the car, and stood again, its paws pushed to the navy metal of Katya’s Suzuki.
From the other side of the windshield, pressed back hard on her seat, she could see its claws, each one huge and yellow and savage, resting on the hood.
“Max,” she said through stiff lips.
He was breathing heavily beside her. The bear lowered its enormous head and extended a white-flecked tongue. It gave a long lick to the car’s hood, where she’d laid out the salmon the night before. Her fault.
Max was shifting. His sleeping bag rustled but she could not turn to see. The bear kept dragging its face across the car. Max took her hand, and her breath caught. She felt his heartbeat in his fingers, and her own pulse, in her throat, in her mouth.
Their fire was long out. The trees around them were black brushstrokes against a powder sky. In this grainy dawn, the bear was hyperreal, saturated with color, its face dirty and snout bleached and eyes shining through the dimness.
One massive paw drew back across the hood. From under its claws, the terrible screeching came again.
Max released his grip on her. Shifted his hand up. Touched the center of the steering wheel. They sat.
“Yes?” he whispered.
The bear hadn’t yet looked up at them. She couldn’t swallow. Max waited, his hand hovering over her lap, until she was able to speak again.
“Yes,” she said.
He pressed, and the horn exploded in noise. The bear flew back from the car. It hurried away awkwardly on two legs—a giant baby—then twisted onto all fours and ran faster than she could’ve imagined into the trees. Before the horn had finished blaring, the animal was gone in the darkness. And Max was laughing.
He opened his door and fell out, dragging himself free from the bag. “Holy shit,” he said from the ground, which was streaked white with frost. Katya was trapped in her seat. In his thin T-shirt, Max came around the front of her car to peer at the silver scratches in the paint. “Holy shit!” He looked through the windshield at her. His face was bright and brilliant. “Katyush, it took your antenna!”
She leaned forward, but the horn beeped again and she jerked back. “It—” She opened her door and reached up, feeling the snapped-off place where her car’s antenna had been. If they had slept in the tent? “Oh my God,” she said. She was trembling.
He couldn’t stop laughing. He was moving so quickly. She, meanwhile, was stuck, she didn’t trust her legs, she couldn’t stand, but only Katya or Max needed to be competent at a time, and for now he was the one. He looked wonderful doing it. He pulled her fingers off the antenna socket. Her body was cold with late-arriving fear; his mouth was hot. With both arms around his neck, she clutched him. She touched without stopping. She lifted her hips off the seat and he pushed her sleeping bag down. Against his cheek, she said the word love, she said love, but he covered her lips with his. She let the rest go.