Ksyusha hadn’t heard about this. During the fuel crisis, she was barely old enough to form memories.
“Or the two Russian girls who went missing over the summer,” Chander said. “The media report on it constantly. They show us the police officers and the girls’ mother until I know those faces better than I knew my own neighbors growing up. But what about that Even girl who disappeared three years ago? Who covered that? Who even thinks about her anymore?”
“The girl from Esso?” Ksyusha asked. “Lilia.”
He paused. “You knew her.”
“No,” Ksyusha said. “Not really. Her brother worked in our herd one summer, that’s all. How would you know her?”
“I didn’t.” Chander looked at Ksyusha with new care. “I heard about it when I flew through Esso that fall.”
Ksyusha had just started university when that girl went missing. Lilia Solodikova. Though Lilia graduated from the village’s high school only the year before Ksyusha, their paths at home had hardly crossed. Even Chegga, who had taken Lilia out on a few early dates, lost track of her in their teen years. Lilia got low grades. As small and sweet-looking as a child, she acted shy in public, but was rumored by classmates to be reckless with men. People said Lilia would let them touch her for money. The boys in Esso shouted after her as she passed. There were times that Ksyusha, up late on a school night, looked out her bedroom window and saw Lilia’s tiny body crossing into the shadows of the village’s athletic field.
Lilia and Ksyusha were nothing alike, yet for months after Lilia’s departure, Ksyusha heard warnings from her parents, her brother, and Ruslan. Don’t go out alone. Guard yourself. Avoid temptation. Don’t talk to strangers. Chegga swore Lilia had been murdered by some jealous admirer. It was then that Ruslan first decided Ksyusha and he should stay constantly in touch.
“What do you think really happened to her?” Chander asked.
“She ran away,” Ksyusha said.
“Is that true?” he said. “I heard that she didn’t leave a note. She just vanished.”
“She…” Ksyusha hesitated. “I was already living here in the dormitory when everyone in Esso started talking about it. I can’t say what happened exactly. But Lilia wasn’t so happy at home. Her brother, the one who worked that season for my grandparents, was crazy. Their older sister had already left because of it. Their father was dead, and their mother was…Lilia didn’t have much to keep her living there.” She smiled at him. “Maybe Lilia also became an au pair in Australia.”
He did not smile back. “Did she seem like the type of girl to run away?”
“Who’s the type of girl to do anything?” Ksyusha said. She shrugged. “I really didn’t know her, Chander. I don’t think we ever spoke.”
“I see,” he said. “I just think about her story when I see the city news.”
“No, I do, too.” Lilia, who was nothing more than a source of minor rumors when she and Ksyusha lived blocks away from each other, had changed the course of Ksyusha’s life in the three years she’d been gone. The constant check-ins now. The scheduled calls.
Ksyusha supposed she ought to be grateful. If that girl hadn’t left her life behind, would Ruslan have been so determined to hang on?
“The village police gave up on her instantly, didn’t they? Meanwhile, the city sends out search parties for the missing sisters all the time. People here talk about those girls even when they have nothing to say,” Chander said. “A white guy, a dark car, in the city center…that could be anyone.”
Chander was right. In the city, Lilia might as well have never existed. Reporters behaved as though the sisters from this summer invented the act of vanishing.
But that obliteration was almost certainly why Lilia left. Ksyusha wasn’t like Lilia, but she understood her. The belief that nothing better would come. The trap of family. The plan in secret for some desperately needed escape. Ksyusha used to feel that way, too, before Ruslan chose her.
Chander’s hands hung over his bent knees. His voice was low. “A white guy and a dark car. They’re everywhere,” he said. “You know what I mean.” She did. Chander wasn’t insulting Ruslan. He wasn’t even talking about his own ex-girlfriend. He was onto something else, deep common knowledge, an ache that was native.
Would Chander and Ruslan get along, if they met independent of her? They were only a year apart: Ruslan twenty-seven, Chander twenty-six. Ruslan was pricklier, fiercer, and Chander more studious, but if they’d gone to the same school or been called to a single army unit, they would have inevitably become friends. One white, one Koryak, each never doubting where he belonged.
Ksyusha skipped practice the last Friday of November, as she had the month before, to clean the apartment for Ruslan’s visit. Alisa was staying at a friend’s house for the weekend (“I don’t want to hear your gross noises together,” she’d said and laughed when Ksyusha squirmed). On her knees, Ksyusha scrubbed under the bathtub, while music blasted from her phone. The place smelled like synthetic oranges. She was aware of her kneecaps on the linoleum, the weight of her body warm with sweat, and all at once it hit her. She was happy. Really happy. Happier than she had ever been before.
All fall, small pleasures had come together. Now Ksyusha had everything: a boyfriend, a new home, good grades, a talent, and a friend.
Ksyusha’s conversations with Ruslan were different from those with Chander. More about the neighbors they knew, the memories they shared, the desire that continued to knot them together. And when Ruslan was stressed, behind schedule on a project or harangued by his supervisor, he used their phone calls to search for her missteps. Where have you been? Who were you with? Are you sure? She squeezed out the sponge. The orange smell was sharp in her nose. She didn’t mind his scrutiny, really, because she became better when he watched her, but how nice it was to spend three afternoons each week away, saying just what she thought to a person who would only sympathize.
How lucky to have them both. Ruslan in all his tempers, and Chander coming to her with no demands. After years of telling herself that Ruslan in Esso was enough—more than enough! she corrected herself—Ksyusha had discovered someone new in Petropavlovsk. Some people had nobody and nowhere; Ksyusha now had two.
By the time Ruslan arrived, it was nearly eleven. Before starting his drive he had worked in Esso all morning leveling dirt roads in preparation for asphalt. They had sex on the futon, his body electric, his duffel bag dropped on the floor and the air still sparkling from cleaning solutions. Ksyusha touched him with a fresh appreciation.
His voice afterward was rough in her ear. “Did you have a good day waiting for me?”
“I had a perfect day,” she said.
He studied her. “What’d you do?”
She slipped a hand over his side to pull him closer. The smooth lines of his ribs slid by her fingers. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.”
They were quiet. “Show me one of your dances,” he said finally, as he had the last time he came down, and she pressed her face against his chest and groaned but got up. The moonlight through the window lit her bare body. He rolled onto his side to get a better look.
Ksyusha chose a favorite routine. The paired one where Chander knelt. She leaned forward, beckoning. Shimmying. Her fingers pulled the air. She tipped toward Ruslan, then away, and stepped and spun and smiled. He watched her. For years, in bed with him, she had been shy, self-conscious, but she turned now in the white light without hesitation. Forward. Away again. Her body flowed into the next step, the next, as easily as a river following its course. She was dancing well. She knew it. She moved as if these steps didn’t want a partner—as if she were fine on her own.