Cancer. But that was a different time, a different world. Back then Valentina wore red kerchiefs, and pledged allegiance to the party, and practiced handstands in their building’s courtyard, and came home to the hot mixed smells of boiling water and yeast. These days, they tell you. And there’s treatment—and tests. And it wasn’t cancer, because if it were, she would be sure about it. The blister throbbed. Signaling right, Valentina pulled into the hospital’s driveway, under the painted metal arch that announced the facility, and into a half-full lot.
The hospital was poured from concrete. As a child, Diana had cried in this waiting room until her pretty face swelled up. Valentina and her husband dressed the girl in a clean set of pajamas for her surgery. Should Valentina have brought spare clothes for herself? No, that was excessive; they needed a set for Diana because she had to enter a sterile operating room that day. But Valentina’s procedure would be brief. It did not compare. The mark on her chest was tiny.
The waiting room was saturated by the sweet, stale smell of liquor. Old men sat with their hands pressed to their bellies. A mother kept her arm around her daughter, whose leg was streaked with iodine and blood. Valentina moved past them to the desk of the admitting nurse. “Dr. Popkov called on my behalf,” Valentina said.
The nurse squinted at her computer monitor and looked up. A native woman. Valentina wanted to return to her doctor’s office, the good clean Russian service offered there. “Of course,” the nurse said. She tapped a few pages together on her desk. “Sign these, then come with me.” Valentina pulled her purse higher on her shoulder. Around them, the sick people groaned.
They took a corridor back, leaving the bleeding children, drunken men, and scuffed plastic chairs behind. The nurse led her up two flights of stairs. On the third floor, they emerged into a wide hall, tiled in green squares and lined by shut doors. The nurse opened one door, took Valentina past a row of red medical waste bins, and motioned her into a room. “Dr. Popkov—” Valentina started to say.
The nurse shook her head. Native as she was, she seemed responsible. Brows fading to gray, mouth unsmiling but not unkind. “Someone will be in to see you soon,” she said.
The door closed. Valentina put her hand in her purse and felt for her phone. But who could she call? What would she say? “I’m at the hospital and I don’t exactly know why,” she’d tell her husband, and he would go silent, or question her, or laugh. The idea that Valentina did not know. It was laughable. It put her to shame. So she shut her bag again. The room was small, windowless. There was no chair, so she hoisted herself up to sit on the exam table. Her slacks snagged on its cracked vinyl.
She reminded herself to sit up straight. Over minutes, though, her spine hunched, her belly folded. All these months she had told herself it was a common blood blister. She couldn’t trust her own judgment anymore. “Serious,” the doctor had said. Her hands were shaking. To stop them, she crossed her arms over her chest and listened. The room made a clean case around her. No sound from outside the door.
The next person who came in, she would ask to explain the diagnosis. If they didn’t know, she would say, “Call my doctor, please.” She opened her purse again to find the phone number. The purse held her clinic receipt, filled out in pen by the front desk girl; her wallet, suede, rubbed shiny at its corners; a pack of mints; a tube of mascara; folded attendance records. She had forgotten she brought those papers with her. She took them out and smoothed their creases over her thighs. Tardiness and truancy. The student names in their columns wavered.
Valentina focused on the door handle. It did not turn.
The ground outside the dacha would be frozen after today’s cold. Tonight at the apartment she would thaw pelmeni for her husband and Diana. Nothing too taxing. It would be dark by the time she got home; she might be tired, and a meal pulled from the freezer was the best she would be able to manage. That, a stiff drink, and a long sleep. In the morning she would call the detective at the police station for an update on his investigation. Then she and her husband and Diana would drive out of Petropavlovsk as a family.
For the first few weeks after the Golosovskaya girls’ kidnapping in August, her husband fancied himself the expert on abduction. He worked at the volcanological institute with the crime’s only witness. He came home with reports of black cars and no bodies as if neither of those things was communicated daily at the city’s markets. But once the police turned their attention away from the fat ghost created by a distracted dog walker, Valentina became a better source of information. Lieutenant Ryakhovsky hung around the elementary school office to speak with her long after he had finished his interviews with the girls’ teachers and classmates. Valentina would open the sisters’ student files before the detective and discuss suspects while he reviewed their papers. He’d come by that very Monday, when the snow started, to tell her they were stopping the civilian searches entirely.
“Because of the weather,” he said. “That, and the fact we haven’t found a thing.”
Valentina swiveled in her chair to face him. His broad shoulders were bowed over her desk as he flipped through Sophia Golosovskaya’s file. “Did you look at airplane or ship logs? The city is so crowded in the summer.”
“That’s true,” he said.
“A foreigner could have easily taken them.” Valentina’s parents had moved to Kamchatka in 1971 for her father’s officer assignment, so she grew up knowing the region at its best. Military funding used to stuff the stores with food. There were no vagrants, then, no salmon poachers, and no planes but Soviet military jets overhead. The peninsula was so tightly defended that even other Russians needed government permission to enter. But when the country changed, Kamchatka went down with it. A whole civilization lost. Valentina was sorry for her daughter, for all the children, who would grow up without the love of a motherland. “My husband thinks a Tajik or an Uzbek,” she said.
Lieutenant Ryakhovsky glanced up from the papers. He didn’t bother to talk to the other women in the administrative office; Valentina, as the office manager and the keeper of records, was the sole person he had to consult. “You heard the suspect description?” Valentina pursed her lips. He continued: “The witness didn’t say a Tajik.”
“That’s what I told my husband. But she didn’t describe a Russian, either,” Valentina said. “She didn’t describe anyone in particular. Just a man.”
He shrugged. “That’s all we’ve got. In any case, the girls probably aren’t with anyone, foreigner or not, anymore. We’ve been dragging the bay for bodies.” He flipped a page over. “My supervisors don’t believe they could’ve been taken off the peninsula.”
“People behave like Kamchatka is an island,” Valentina said. “I have my doubts. If it’s so secure, how do migrant workers keep showing up? Where do the drugs in our schools come from?”
“Are there drugs in our schools?” he asked.
“Most likely.”
His head was back down. “We haven’t seen any evidence of that.”
Valentina crossed her ankles around the column supporting her seat. Week after week, the detective visited, studied the same folders, sought out her ideas. She must have something to provide. She asked, “You got nothing from gas station surveillance cameras?” He didn’t respond. “How about people’s dash cams? No one driving that day happened to record a dark car?”
“We asked the public. We reviewed all the footage turned in. Nothing.”
“You interviewed the mother?”
“Many times.”
“No boyfriends? Nobody hanging around?” He shook his head. “It must have been a stranger, then.” Sophia’s last school picture looked up at them from the file. The girl’s pale eyebrows, skinny lips, sharp chin. Valentina could not remember the older sister outside news broadcasts, but she knew she had seen this one the year before in the school halls. Her narrow shoulders. Her high voice. Her colorful backpack thudding on her hips as she turned in to a classroom. Valentina could not bear to picture her in the hands of a sexual predator. “What about the girls’ father?” she asked.