In the stillness, a pop song leaked through the kitchen windows. How could one person have studied so hard yet stayed so foolish?
Lada said, “You can’t say that here.”
Masha was silent.
“You could get killed. Why did you come back if you’re going to be this way?”
“What way?” Masha said. “I’m the same. You know better than anyone the way that I am.”
Lada folded her arms across her own knees, laid her cheek on them, and looked at Masha. She was trying not to be angry. “Mashenka,” she said. “Listen to me. Can’t you not?”
“No,” Masha said and smiled.
Those teeth. Her tipped and lovely face. It made Lada’s stolen heart hurt to see.
The stars scattered above them. Cold had sunk so deeply into Lada’s bones that she felt her marrow must have frozen blue. After a while, Lada said, “Will you at least promise to be careful?”
“For you?” Masha said. “I’d do anything.”
The mixed noise of people’s voices came from the house. Bottles and laughter. Though sitting out so long was risky, because Kristina’s cousin, in the kitchen, could be saying all sorts of things about what Lada and Masha were doing together in the dark, Lada could not bear to go. She’d waited years. So many parts of their friendship were lost forever, but Masha had spoken to Lada again, once, honestly, as if they were still the most precious people in each other’s lives.
My dear, my dear. My darling.
“You promise,” Lada said.
“I promise.” Though God knew Masha had broken her promises before.
Lada shifted her seat to rest her head on Masha’s shoulder. Under Lada’s temple, Masha’s cool, smooth grace. “I’d do anything for you, too,” Lada said. “Anything I was able to do.”
“I know,” Masha said. “You would if you could. I knew that.”
In front of their faces, their breath puffed white, curled up. Vanished.
“We should go in,” Lada said.
Masha said, “Will you stay with me for midnight?” Lada nodded against her. “Just like this. It’s silly to ask.”
“No, it’s not.”
“It’s my last night here.”
Boys like Yegor had come before and would come again. “We can sit,” Lada said. “That’s easy. Really.”
The night was an immense windowless room. The stars were impossibly far away. In the crisp dark, Lada pushed back against the alcohol in her blood. She willed herself to make new memories. This moment mattered in a way the trip she wouldn’t take to Esso never could. She should not forget a second of this.
Masha may have carried Lada’s love with her wherever she went, but that didn’t keep anyone safe. Besides the hiking, and the reading, the games played in their courtyard and the movies watched in bed, Lada would hold on to this: her friend bare-shouldered, stubborn. Stupid enough to speak honestly. Sitting near midnight in weather that turned their toes white against the gravel. Smiling. Beautiful Masha, all grown up yet still childish. Unafraid of what harm was sure to come to her.
JANUARY
Roswell, 1947. The Tunguska event years before. The Travis Walton abduction, the Sassowo explosions, and the Petrozavodsk phenomenon. Height 611, along the Pacific, where witnesses reported the crash of an enormous red ball. The Voronezh incident, 1989.
Natasha started hearing these tales from her younger brother while they were still in school. Since then, aided by the arrival of satellite Internet in the Esso library, Denis had expanded his repertoire: Japan Airlines Flight 1628, Chile’s El Bosque Air Force Base, Turkey’s Yenikent Compound, and the opening ceremonies of London’s Olympic Games. Outside the window of the International Space Station. The skies over Jerusalem, 2011 and 2012. The 2013 fireball that burned through Chelyabinsk. The purple lights, hovering, lowering, above the least populated parts of Kamchatka.
If aliens really did land on Earth, Natasha would ask them to start their world domination by erasing her brother’s memory. Through fifteen years of study, Denis had absorbed an encyclopedia set’s worth of information on UFO sightings, with mental volumes updated constantly. Four days into this new year, he’d already referenced every one of his false facts and started again at the top. Natasha had made her family pancakes with raspberry preserves for breakfast. Their mother was peeling an orange.
“The El Bosque Air Force Base,” Denis said.
Natasha switched her knife and fork between her hands. She did not look up at him. Her brother and mother had arrived at Natasha’s Petropavlovsk apartment the afternoon of New Year’s Eve and were due to stay another week—Natasha would have to ration out her frustration to last the whole time. Difficult, though. Now that the celebrations were over, nothing distracted her from the desire to shake Denis until his eyes rolled. Concentrating on pancakes wasn’t quite the balm she needed.
“The sighting was captured on film from seven angles.”
“We know, honey,” Natasha said, in the direction of her plate.
“The Minister of Defense saw it in broad daylight. An object—”
“An object was stalking their jets,” she recited. “I said we know.”
Their mother put her cool hand on top of Natasha’s. The smell of citrus rose between them. “Don’t,” she said, then addressed Natasha’s children: “You never do that, do you? Interrupt each other while one is trying to talk.”
Natasha flushed. “Mama.”
Their mother took back her hand. To Natasha’s daughter, she said, “Yulka, you would never be so rude, would you?” The little girl straightened in her seat at the table. “So let’s not pay any attention to the adults’ bad example. Tell me, how’s your reading going? What’s the best book you read last year?”
“Yulka reads too much. She probably can’t even remember them all,” Natasha’s son said. Natasha stabbed at a sliver of pancake. At thirty-one, a doctoral candidate, she was still getting reprimanded by her mother. Her family’s every visit turned her into a teenager again. She had snuck enough holiday chocolate over the last few days to get a line of pimples across her forehead, and this morning, she had to style her hair differently to hide them. Her whole head felt sloppy.
“The Call of the Wild,” Yulka said. “Babulya, have you read it?”
Natasha’s mother propped her chin in one palm and managed to look terribly interested. “Jack London. Of course I have.”
“Lev hasn’t.”
“Shut up,” said the boy, and Natasha slammed down her utensils, and Natasha’s mother called for order, and the morning was back to normal, just like that.
At least her kids seemed unfazed by Denis’s strangeness. Lev and Yulka, after so many school vacations spent in their uncle’s company, were used to following their grandmother’s lead: keep it light, change the subject, don’t engage. Even after the holiday’s sparklers were extinguished, movies watched, gifts opened, they had not become bored enough to turn on Denis, who was picking at his food at the other end of the table. Waiting for a prime moment to mention the Chelyabinsk meteor, no doubt.
Did Natasha insist on nattering on about her interests? Her research on saffron cod populations? No. So why was her brother encouraged to talk endlessly? She burned to ask.
She would have liked to introduce her children to Denis as he was as a boy. Still shy then, still obsessive, but more engaged with matters on the ground than in the sky. Growing up, they had spent happy summers together, the three of them—Natasha and Denis dunking each other under the warm green water of their village’s community pool, while their little sister sat on the side and screamed with pleasure.
Now Denis was single-minded, Lilia was gone, and Natasha could hardly make it through a shared breakfast.