Lada turned her attention back to Kristina. “So what,” she asked, “tonight?”
“Yes, tonight,” Kristina said. “Do you not want her to?”
“No, no,” Lada said. “No. Why would I not?”
“Good, because she’s already on her way.” Someone uncapped a new bottle, and Kristina passed her glass down to be filled. “She’s getting a taxi from her parents’ place. I told her there are no extra beds but she said she would be fine on the floor.”
“Is she cute?” Kristina’s cousin asked. “My bed might have some room.”
“You’re not her type,” said Kristina, as her glass was passed back. She raised the glass to the group. “Who has a toast?”
The man gave Lada her apple. Sliced and cored now. Lada popped a piece into her mouth and raised her drink after him. Her final one, she promised herself. “To the New Year,” the man said. “May we meet tomorrow healthy and happy.”
“May we have all our appetites satisfied,” said the cousin, baring his animal teeth at the table. The girl next to him shoved him and made their side of the banquette jolt. Lada’s shot burned down her throat. She took another apple slice. Around the table, people were talking over each other. Lada was heavy with alcohol, slow to comprehend.
How could Kristina say whether Masha liked any particular type? Masha was…they hadn’t seen Masha in seven years, since after their first year of university. Lada and Kristina hadn’t actually been friends with her since the summer before that. Masha had earned herself a scholarship spot at St. Petersburg State University. Before she left, the three of them spent weeks watching comedies in bed together and promising to call each other every day, but when Masha moved away for school, she disappeared. At first she replied to texts by saying course work kept her too busy to talk, then she stopped responding at all.
Once first-year exams were finished, Masha’s parents had invited Lada and Kristina along to the airport to see their daughter in for the summer. They met a girl at security who was thinner, wary. Whose body was stiff in their arms when they hugged her. Who may have been coming home for a season but was determined not to stay.
And that was that. Masha ignored their messages all summer. By the time the fall semester began, they had to assume Masha had already flown back west to school. The New Year’s holiday break came, then another summer vacation, and so on through all five years of university with hardly a word out of St. Petersburg. Kristina managed to keep in touch, but only scarcely; she chatted with Masha online then reported the most interesting bits: Masha had graduated with honors, found a job with a Western company that paid her salary in euros, moved with a roommate to an apartment just south of Nevsky. Meanwhile Kristina and Lada were living with their parents after wrapping up their provincial degrees. Kristina worked at a sporting goods store on the tenth kilometer and Lada was a receptionist at the Avacha Hotel. It wasn’t practical, Kristina said, for Masha to come see them in Petropavlovsk. The long flight back wasn’t worth it. Masha’s rent in St. Petersburg was twenty-eight thousand rubles a month.
Lada had nothing to say to this shallow news. “Oh,” she offered when Kristina tried. Or “Nice.” She didn’t want anything of hers, not even a tone of voice, relayed to the other side of the country for them to laugh over. Ooh, our Lada’s jealous, Kristina would love to tell Masha—Kristina took any gossip she could get. How bizarre that, of all the people to stay connected to, Masha had chosen Kristina, with her whispers, her tales. Growing up, Kristina and Masha were not the ones bonded to each other. It was Lada and Masha who were close, carrying their hearts in each other’s chests.
That was what it felt like to Lada, anyway. Like Masha had everything of her. They lived in neighboring buildings and sat next to each other in every class. If Masha found a good book, she read the entire thing out loud to Lada. Those readings took weeks sometimes. Lada lay on Masha’s bedroom carpet while Masha’s deliberate voice rose off the bed. Lada heard all of Sherlock Holmes that way: the investigator’s words in Masha’s mouth. It is not for me, my dear Watson, to stand in the way. Like that. When Masha left, she took Lada’s love with her, and she never returned to give it back.
Oh well. Lada chewed on another piece of apple. Masha was coming. Here, tonight.
Maybe it was better this way—to see Masha once tonight, up close, instead of being surprised as she walked someday down their once-shared street. This way, Lada could greet her and get over her all in the year that was ending, and meet the New Year free of this old wound.
The song changed to something faster. The man beside Lada poured her another drink. “No, I don’t need it,” she said.
“It’s all right,” he said, sliding the glass her way.
The steamed-up windows behind him blotted out any stars, so the night beyond looked flawlessly dark. No lights streamed by from cars. Lada sighed. Her skin was softened from her trip into the sauna after she first arrived. The rounded muscle of this man’s thigh was pressed to hers, and the seam between them was slippery. Lada leaned toward his ear: “Thank you,” she said. Enunciating.
“It’s nothing.”
She could smell new sweat and old cigarettes. “Remind me of your name?” she asked. “Whose friend are you?”
He smiled at her. His bare chest was wide, showing the purple marks of old acne scars. “I’m Yegor. Tolik’s friend.” Lada shook her head, and he pointed across the table at a dark-haired stranger. “Tolik’s my uncle’s godson,” Yegor said. “My uncle actually invited me. He’s always pushing me to get out more.”
“Funny. My family probably wants me to stay in more,” Lada said. She took the shot and smiled back. “You live with your uncle?”
“I have my own place.”
“In Petropavlovsk?”
“Up north.”
“Oh, I remember.” She’d forgotten because Yegor didn’t look northern. But someone had mentioned the villages when his car first pulled in. Tolik, she supposed.
“Whose friend are you?” he asked.
“Kristina’s.” Masha’s. Not anymore—but maybe again.
Masha was coming here. Strange. Lada herself knew barely any of the people in this house: Kristina and her boyfriend and her cousin. Two girls from Lada and Kristina’s graduating class at university, one of whom had brought her detective husband along. Lada recognized the husband’s face from the evening news. At the other end of the table, he was arguing about local politics through a mouthful of food. And Lada knew Yegor, now, too. Then the group spiraled out into friends of friends of friends. Beyond the nine of them at this table, another five were taking a turn in the sauna.
As a girl, Masha had never been much for parties. On Masha’s twelfth birthday, she, her mother, and Lada hiked the Avachinsky volcano. That was ages ago. Still, Lada remembered the day perfectly…the acid-yellow leaves at the volcano’s base, the raw rust-colored soil at its summit, the mineral taste from their water bottles, and the steady pump of their legs. After the Golosovskaya sisters disappeared last summer, Lada looked at the girls’ school pictures and saw her own childhood. The hours she and Masha spent wandering Kamchatka as a pair. She could shut her eyes and pretend she still occupied that younger body. Flat-chested, weightless. Masha, ahead of her, so small.