Natasha cleared her throat. “I’m sorry I interrupted you.”
“The footage is online,” Denis said. “We can watch it, if you like.”
Natasha took up her tea so she could widen her eyes at her mother over the rim of the cup. Her mother said, “We’re not going to spend our holiday on the computer. Lev, your turn. What have you been reading?”
The alien stuff had started when Denis was in year nine. He spent his high school evenings watching space-invader movies. If she didn’t have homework to finish, Natasha would sit on their couch beside him, take Lilia in her lap, and giggle at the cardboard ships suspended from wires. Denis, too, used to laugh when a scene got ridiculous. At the beginning of his shift toward outer space, he had been willing to participate in ordinary life.
Not anymore. Lev and Yulka knew a different Denis, a different family, a different world than the green-dream one in which Natasha grew up. Still, Natasha could make these days more comfortable for her children. They deserved better than a mad uncle and a self-conscious mother on her third straight morning of a champagne headache. “What do you two want to do today?” she asked.
“Ride horses,” Yulka said.
Lev sighed. “You can’t ride horses in the winter,” he said, and Yulka said, “Yes, you can,” and he said, “No, you can’t,” and Natasha interrupted them both to say, “Shhh.” They continued the argument whispering. Natasha looked over at her mother, who looked back in expectation. Natasha always forgot her own household authority when her family came to town.
The absurdity of it: that Natasha, barely able to meet her obligations as a sister or daughter, was now in charge of school and work and two children of her own. “What do you think,” her mother asked the table, “of ice skating?”
Denis tried next as Natasha parked them in front of the sports complex. “In 2008 at Yenikent—”
“Just a minute,” she called over her shoulder. “I’m trying to concentrate.” They were in her husband’s car. Yuri was at sea again; he had sent her a picture, a full day late, of him celebrating the New Year in some Pacific port past the International Date Line. Beer in hand and a wink toward the phone’s front camera. Natasha sent him back a selfie with her middle finger raised. Then she followed that almost instantly with a picture of herself lit by the lamp on their bedside table, her top lowered, her lips and cheeks spun by the low wattage into dark gold. The story of their marriage: a little love, a little rage, a lot of ocean water.
Shifting the gears with an ear for the same rising engine noises Yuri would attend to, Natasha eased the car into place. Her mother peered at the bumper ahead. From the back of the car, Denis said, “Yenikent.”
“One minute,” Natasha said, unbuckling her seatbelt and fully intending never to ask him to go on.
Once they were out of the car, though, she was not as convinced of silence as she had been. The children ran a few paces ahead. Her brother was subdued. He walked beside her and their mother with his back rounded. Natasha ought to ask him about the Turkish compound—she could ease him into the telling with his own words—the most significant extraterrestrial image ever caught on tape, she knew he would say—except she did not want to.
The tree branches stretching above the sidewalk were frosted white. Snow capped the iron fence that lined the skating rink. The ice today was busy with families, and young couples held hands while they glided in laps. “So crowded. I don’t know how you stand living in the city,” her mother said. She spoke in Even so the kids wouldn’t understand.
Natasha made herself busy looking for her wallet. In Even, too, she said, “I don’t know when you’ll get tired of telling me that.” Her mother snorted.
The prices above the cashier’s head were taped onto a printed sign. Natasha would like to see what was under the tape—the entrance fees were probably twice as much as they had been before last month’s devaluation. She paid for her mother’s rental skates and laced Yulka’s blades on. In his own bulky black skates, Lev stepped up to his uncle and asked, “Aren’t you going to do it?” Denis shook his head. “Why’d you come, then?”
“Don’t be rude,” Natasha said. “Denis, are you sure you don’t want to skate?” Another head shake. Her kids were already making their way onto the ice. She considered asking her brother if he wanted a hot chocolate, but he was a grown man. He could find his own refreshments. She knotted her laces and pushed off.
Flight 1628. Height 611. It went on and on and on.
The skates were snug around her ankles. She passed on one foot through a cluster of strangers, and once she had room, she surveyed the rink. There was Lev, with a couple classmates he had bumped into, and Yulka holding hands with Natasha’s mother. Denis, at the rink’s edge, caught Natasha’s eye, and she waved. Then she looked across the ice for Lilia, like always. Just in case. Imagine finding Lilia’s face in the pale city crowds, only a few kilometers from Natasha’s apartment, after more than three years. But Lilia wasn’t there.
Natasha’s limbs felt loose, liquid. She leaned to the left and glided past another group.
It was down to the two of them, then. Natasha and Denis. She knew that but somehow she forgot, searching for their sister every time she entered a crowd. It was down to them…
Making another turn, Natasha looked again for Denis’s slouched body. He had propped his elbows on the rink wall.
The afternoon air was crisp on her skin. The sun was a cold, clear circle, a hole in a white sky. On what seemed like her hundredth loop, Natasha’s husband called. His voice came through a second delayed. She waited for the connection to clear.
“Nice picture,” Yuri said.
She grinned into the phone. “Thanks.”
“I showed all the guys.”
“The first picture or the second one?”
“The second one. I’m joking,” he said before she could start. “How are the kids?”
She found them immediately. Yulka’s knit hat and Lev’s red-and-gray jacket. “Fine. Bickering, but fine.”
“Is your mom helping?”
“Sure. She’s perfect.”
“You’re perfect,” he said. She touched light fingers to her blemished forehead. He went on: “I’ve been missing you.”
“Turn the sub around, then. We’re at Spartak. I want to be skating in circles with you.”
“I want to be stuck in one warm place with you,” he said, and she laughed. After twelve years of deployments, they were good at these phone calls. Better, in fact, than they were at living in the same cramped apartment. At home, Yuri got bored, bothersome; when he was on sea duty, he was only his best, with no time to show anything more.
Everyone looked better at a distance. Everyone sounded sweetest when you did not have to hear them talk too long. After her husband hung up, Natasha skated past her brother at the wall, their mother cleaning her glasses beside him. Loving someone close-up—that was difficult.
Lilia had understood. She left for just that reason, Natasha knew. After all, Natasha and Yuri had moved away from the village after high school to get some distance from their relatives—Yuri’s drunken parents, Natasha’s mother’s strictures, Denis’s rambling. Lilia must have done the same, only farther, beyond Kamchatka. And with no warning.
Natasha and Yuri were already living in the city by the time it happened. Natasha would get texts from her sister filled with small-town rumors, romantic troubles, the choicest Denis quotes. Their mothership surveilled Earth from the outer atmosphere. Or Radar was tracking the pin-shaped crafts. Natasha texted back invitations for her sister to see the kids, and Lilia said later, later, that she missed them, that she would come soon.