“My mother and brother don’t grasp that,” Natasha said. “No one needed to take Lilia. She left on her own. Because who could stand living with him? Talking incessantly about what does not exist. Hearing that, and only that, who wouldn’t keep her own secrets? Who wouldn’t go?”
After a minute, Anfisa said, “Take a sip.” She took the kettle from the counter to top off Natasha’s drink.
Natasha looked up at her friend. “You understand,” she said. She was so grateful.
Reaching out, Anfisa wrapped her fingers around Natasha’s wrist. That warm, soft skin. The kettle shone silver between them. Anfisa’s hand eased back any anger.
“It must be so hard to have an invalid in the family,” Anfisa said. “Which category is Denis in? The second?”
Natasha opened her mouth. Shook her head. “No, Denis isn’t—None.” She was startled out of her own words. Anfisa seemed sure that Denis fit into a government invalid group, that he received disability pay. That he was sick. “He’s not.”
“Oh,” Anfisa said. “I thought…You were just saying he can’t work.”
“He can work. He has a job right now.”
“But isn’t that what you’ve been telling me? There’s something wrong.”
“Don’t say that,” Natasha said. “There’s nothing wrong. Denis is strange. That’s all.”
“More than strange.” Anfisa’s fingers were still on Natasha’s wrist. “It’s like you said, isn’t it? Hard to live with that. Who in your sister’s place wouldn’t go?”
Anfisa’s hand still, still, still there. Still there. Natasha had said those things, yet repeated by Anfisa they were foul. They made her siblings into caricatures. Anfisa did not know. The memory came up inside Natasha like vomit: not Lilia herself, her wit and freshness, but the village women who came over after Lilia left to gossip about a teenage girl gone missing. How they hugged Natasha and her children, how they wiped their wet faces on her cheeks. Their appraisal of her household. The blow of judgment.
Natasha took her arm back. She was done with the taste of the tea. “It’s time for me to leave.”
“Come on.”
“I’ve already been here too long. They’re at home waiting.”
Anfisa looked skeptical. “Uh-huh,” she said. Though Natasha knew this situation was her own fault—she had given every reason, by sneaking away from her apartment to complain, for her neighbor to judge her family—she could not stand the look on Anfisa’s face. Anfisa did not really look like Lilia. She was too old. Her jaw and cheeks and brow bones were highlighted in shimmering powder. She dangled herself like a lure; for the sake of a drinking partner, she had baited Natasha into intimacy.
Anfisa followed Natasha to the door. “I’m sorry if I offended you.”
Natasha pulled her boots back on. “No. But they’re leaving in three days. I should spend more time with them while I have the chance.” Dressed for the cold, Natasha faced her neighbor. “Unlike you, I actually like being with my family,” she said. Anfisa’s expression kept that sly cat look, and Natasha wished she had come up with something more cutting. Or no—already she wished she had said nothing at all; already she regretted speaking. Always regretting. As if a comment made in anger was like another slap.
The building’s stairwell was dark. The sun was already behind the mountains.
She had not told Anfisa details of Denis as a boy—the community pool, the way he spoon-fed baby Lilia cereal, how all three of them gathered grass together to feed the horses fenced in neighbors’ yards—or Denis as a younger man. The herders that summer said that they wouldn’t need his help in the future, but he had done well for himself in the field. Crossing the parking lot, Natasha swayed with guilt. Her coat was open. She dialed Yuri’s number again. The recording piped into her ear, cannot be accessed, always cannot be accessed, like the thousands of times she had called Lilia with no luck, and she flung her phone down at a snow pile. It slotted sideways into the white. Quick, she crouched, scooped the phone back out, and pressed the home button—the screen still worked. Natasha wiped the phone over and over across one bare palm. For days, for years, she had been making the stupidest choices.
Anfisa was not Lilia. Lilia was kind and clever and had the wisdom to keep her views private. She was living in Moscow, or St. Petersburg, or Luxembourg. Natasha liked to picture her in Europe. Lilia was an elegant young woman now. Maybe she had finally enrolled in university. Maybe she had gotten married. Maybe she even had a child or two of her own.
Lilia, Natasha promised herself, fingers freezing, was traveling the world. And one day she might come back to them. For now, Natasha would have to deal with her brother without a sibling who could carry stories between them.
Denis was fine. He was just on the more idiosyncratic end of normal. He was all Natasha had at the moment, and so she needed to be kinder, not dismiss him, value having him nearby.
On her landing, with her keys out, Natasha could hear conversation. She let herself back in. Peeking around the corner, she found Denis and Lev still on the couch. Yulka had joined them there. The three of them in a row, holding her accountable.
Natasha turned away to hang her wet coat. Her fingers hurt from cold. “Where’s Babulya?” she called to the children.
“She went out to meet her cousin again,” Yulka said.
“How nice,” Natasha said. Trying hard to sound loving.
“But we wanted to stay here.”
Natasha went to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water. She came out and took the armchair. Her face was flushed. “What have you all been talking about?”
Yulka glanced at her uncle. Lev said, “Nothing.”
Natasha sipped her water. She put the glass down at her feet, leaned forward, and squeezed Denis’s shoulder. He glanced at her with surprise and, she hoped, pleasure. “You only have a couple more days in the city,” she said. “What would you like to do?”
“It’s not safe to be out too much,” Denis said. “Remember London. Petrozavodsk.”
“I do,” she said.
Yulka said, “Mama, Uncle Denis told us that he met aliens.”
Natasha took her hand back and touched her forehead. “All right.”
“Are they actually real?”
She only hesitated for an instant. “No, bunny,” she said, then addressed her brother: “You know that, Denis.”
His expression flattened. His eyes half-shut. Natasha felt it then, the familiar grief of looking for someone who would not be recovered.
“See, I told you,” Lev said to his sister. Natasha watched her brother. She was listening.
Roswell. Tunguska. Chelyabinsk. Jerusalem. Natasha was waiting for Denis to change. And she, too, would be different—she was going to be an excellent sister. She would let go of this anger. She was not angry. She just wanted to hear what else Denis had to say.
FEBRUARY
Revmira woke up knowing it was February 27. The date bore down on her. She dressed slowly, sadly, under its weight, and came out to the kitchen to find her husband boiling their coffee. “Good morning,” she said.
“Morning,” Artyom said, and she knew from the line of his shoulders over the stove that he knew what day it was, too.
She got out cheese and ham for breakfast. While she prepared two plates at the counter, he poured their cups. The teaspoon clinked as he mixed sugar into hers. They had been together twenty-six years, nearly half Revmira’s life, and still she was surprised by Artyom’s kindness. He was the easiest man she had ever known. But then she had only known two.
“How’d you sleep?” he asked.
She shrugged, put their breakfast sandwiches down, and took her seat. “Are you on call today?”