“Tasha, don’t make that face,” her mother said. “Shouldn’t we be together? We aren’t down so often, are we?” Speaking in Russian so the children would hear.
“You’re right,” Natasha said. “You’re right, you’re right.” Deprived of the release of Anfisa, she was tipping into nastiness. Natasha’s daughter, lying on a pillow at their feet, turned up the volume on the television set. The screen showed a redheaded soap-opera star.
“What should we do, then?” Natasha’s mother asked the room. “Our holiday’s already half over. How about downhill skiing instead of cross-country?”
Denis said, “Where would we go?”
“Have you looked out the window?” Natasha asked. “Do you notice any hills in Petropavlovsk?”
His chin pushed forward. To their mother, he said, “You can take the kids out on your own.”
Their mother pinched the pages of her book open. Her forehead was creased. “Denis, try not to be so sensitive. You know your sister doesn’t mean to hurt you.”
Natasha was trapped in this apartment with these family members. That truth was stunning. All the people she wanted to see were far from her. Even one day when their mother died, Natasha would remain stuck. No confidantes. Barely half a husband. She would have to look after Denis and hear his looped stories and nag her own children until they scattered.
Lev leaned forward. “Uncle Denis,” he said, “if you’re home today, I’ll stay with you.”
Denis turned in his direction. “Did I ever tell you about Travis Walton?” Lev shrugged. “An American. When Travis Walton was abducted, in 1975, his friends were witnesses. They were in the forest and saw a golden disk. The disk took Travis Walton and he was missing for five days. Finally he was returned to a gas station. When he came back, he described the Greys, who are short, with enormous heads.” Denis touched his lower eyelid. “Big brown eyes with no white in them. Five times as big as normal. Travis Walton told investigators they look right through you.”
Natasha stared ahead at the screen.
“That’s not true,” her son said.
“Lev,” Natasha’s mother warned.
“It is true. Travis Walton passed a polygraph test,” said Denis. “They don’t land in cities. But when you’re not a threat to them, and there aren’t many other people—I saw them the same way. In the wilderness. When I worked in the herds, the year before Lilia.”
“Enough,” Natasha said. Too loud. “Lev, I told you, they’re waiting for us over there. If you don’t want to come, don’t, but understand how cruel you’re being to your friend.” Her son made a face, and she knew Misha wasn’t his friend, not really. She got up anyway. “Yulka?”
Her daughter propped herself up on her elbows. “I’ll stay here, too, Mama.”
“Fine,” Natasha said. “Fine.” She went to the foyer for her coat. On the other side of the wall, the television squawked.
“Don’t go,” her mother called in Even. Natasha was sick of hearing her childhood language.
If aliens really had landed, they would have taken Denis, not Lilia, away. And didn’t Natasha wish for that? An interplanetary exchange? “I’ll be back soon,” she shouted in Russian toward the living room. They were no longer children, happy to swim together in warm water—Natasha and Denis had no bond to each other anymore.
He wanted to talk about his spaceships. Tell them, then, and see.
“Denis claims he’s hosted visitors from outer space,” Natasha told Anfisa. The neighbor raised her eyebrows. Anfisa had not shown even that much surprise when Natasha turned up without Lev, although Natasha had not said she was coming, had instead wasted the short walk over on calling Yuri’s out-of-service cell phone. He was somewhere off the coast of Canada. He would call on Sunday, if the sub stayed on schedule. For now, Natasha had to accept the rise and fall of their cell provider’s recorded messages: The number cannot be accessed. Hang up and try again…
Anfisa rested her head on one fist. Their mugs were topped off with so much liquor that the tea in them was already cool enough to drink. Natasha said, “He worked one season in the reindeer herds.” She explained it: the period in Denis’s twenties when he kept losing jobs. He was briefly employed as a daycare attendant, a cook, a shop cashier. All that was before he found the position he held now, as a night watchman for the village school. Their mother had arranged a herding apprenticeship with another Even family that lived near them. Denis accepted it without fuss. He left that year in June, when the herders swung close to Esso, and returned in September sun-darkened.
Lev entered kindergarten that fall, and Lilia started her final year of high school. The week he came home, Lilia called Natasha to report Denis’s experience of extraterrestrials. Her voice came through the phone amused. One night, out in the tundra with the herd, Denis saw a purple light overhead, she said. Simply spotting that light froze him in place. Meanwhile the deer kept grazing. The glow got bigger, filling his vision, and then creatures from outer space were on the ground beside him. They stroked his arms. They sent messages telepathically. When he thought how worried he was about losing the herd, that the deer might wander off into the tundra during this visitation, they told him not to worry, his paralysis was temporary, they had already put all the animals and the other herders back at camp to sleep.
The grasses rustling in the night breeze. The deer, barely a meter tall at the shoulder, hunkered down together to make a low, dark field of fur. The world so quiet that Denis could hear his own breath in his ears. The sweep of stars and satellites above.
“How considerate of them,” Natasha said.
Lilia laughed. Natasha should have asked more questions, probed for Lilia’s coming escape plans, but back then it seemed there was no other family sorrow to discuss. They turned the subject instead to Lilia’s classes. Which kids planned to leave Esso after high school graduation to study. Lilia said she’d do that, too, but not right away. She talked about coming down to visit Petropavlovsk. Eleven months later, she was gone.
Returning home after her sister’s disappearance was the only time Natasha ever heard that story direct from Denis. The same details: purple light, resting deer, alien mouths fixed shut while alien words in his head were echoing. He told her and their mother in the kitchen that first night. He was nervous. His breath came short. And he tacked on a new ending. “They told me they’d come back for me, but they came for Lilia instead,” he said. “She’s taken.” Pointed up. “Lilia’s safe,” he said, in a promise that stemmed from a vivid dream, a promise neither he nor anyone else on this peninsula was capable of proving.
“Phoo,” said Anfisa and shuddered. “So what really happened to her?”
“She ran away,” Natasha said. Anfisa waited. “It was hard to figure out at first because she didn’t take the bus out, she didn’t have a car, and she never mentioned leaving permanently. But afterward we put it together.”
They sat in quiet. The air around them was sticky with that pine smell, wet from steam. “My sister had secrets,” Natasha said. “She dated people I didn’t know about. She had a reputation our neighbors only mentioned after she left. Everyone at home says they saw this coming.” Even Yuri, with his hands pressed to Natasha’s back as reassurance.
“Please, these experts,” Anfisa said. “They say that now. Don’t listen.”
“But they’re right. Aren’t they? It shouldn’t have come as a surprise.” Natasha wrapped her fingers around her mug. “My mother doesn’t believe that, though. She thinks Lilia’s like the Golosovskaya sisters—killed.”
“Whatever happened with those girls is so different.”