After she hung up, she gave Mila the pen. Mila scribbled in the bottom circle of an 8 Nadia had written. “Don’t,” Nadia said and flipped to a blank page. To her mother, Nadia said, “Can I take the car today?”
Her mother hesitated, and Nadia leaned into Mila’s back. “CAN I TAKE THE CAR, I SAID?”
“Where?” her mother asked.
“OUT.”
Nadia’s mother twisted her mouth up. “Okay,” Nadia said to that knot of disapproval. She got up and plucked the keys off their wall hook beside the portrait of Stalin.
“Mama, I’m going with you,” Mila said. She held on to Nadia’s thighs as Nadia put her coat on.
“Your grandmother misses you too much to let you go, Milusha. I’ll be back soon,” Nadia said. “Be good.” And Nadia was gone.
The cold grabbed her lungs in two fists. Wind off the Sea of Okhotsk polished the streets here with dark ice. In only a few years, she had gotten used to Esso—its clean puffs of snowflakes, its mounds of spotless snow, its seeming calm. Wooden fences lined garden plots in people’s backyards. Horses had brushed their noses against Mila’s palms when Nadia took her out walking. Palana, facing open water, looked vicious in comparison.
Nadia might like that viciousness now. Before moving again, she would need to research her options, collect a few paychecks, call landlords across Europe. While she waited for the car’s engine to warm up, she experimented with the idea of pausing for a bit in Palana. Why not? Let the town see what she had made of herself. Spend some time at the edge of the sea.
Slava was waiting at a table when she got to the café. Five years on, he looked okay. Just okay, she told herself, glad for it. Time had carved lines around his mouth and on his forehead. His skin was darkened in a stripe over his eyes—he must be out on the snowmobile these days. And his hair was too long in the back. Compare that to Chegga, whose hair Nadia buzzed in their bathroom monthly.
Stop with Chegga, already. Nadia was moving on. She had evaluated herself in the bathroom mirror this morning, and felt herself attractive, or no more unattractive than she had been. She stood a little differently since having Mila—her pelvis pushed at a new angle—but the change was nothing stark. And her clothes had improved.
She took the empty seat. Slava stood up too late to pull it out for her and settled for kissing her cheek instead. “How many summers, how many winters. Hello, beautiful,” he said.
“Hi. Tea?” He signaled to the waiter. “You don’t work today?” she asked.
“I work nights. This is late for me to even be up. Two black teas,” he told the boy.
“Mine with lemon,” she said, and the boy nodded.
“How have you been?” Slava asked.
She opened her hands under the table. Since they last saw each other, Nadia had turned eighteen, had a baby, fallen for Chegga, moved to Esso, started at the bank, taken charge of a household. Gotten engaged—or at least talked a lot about marriage. “You first,” she said.
He laughed. “You heard it all. I work nights. Not much else. I was married for a bit—did your mother tell you?—but we’re separating. You don’t know her. She came after you left.”
After Slava broke up with her, Nadia had, for the first and only time in her life, cried so hard she vomited. There was a particular period of teenagehood when she behaved more childishly than Mila did now. Pregnancy certainly had not helped. Her heart had been fragile, its chambers shifting as easily and dangerously as volcanic earth. Slava got in there before the ground hardened.
Hearing about his marriage did hurt a little. Despite the length of his hair. Once in her life, one time, she would like someone to love her completely, with no room left for anything else.
“In Esso I live with my man,” she said. “We’re very happy. He’s a photographer.” The waiter came with their glasses and she busied herself for a few seconds by stirring.
She glanced up to see Slava appraising her. “So happy you came here to meet me?”
“Well,” she said, then ran out of words.
He sipped his tea, steam rising. “How’s your mother?”
Nadia squinted and leaned toward him. “What?”
“How’s your— Oh,” he said and laughed. Just that, the deep noise, unlocked something in her again. She looked away.
“She’s the same as she was,” Nadia said, “only more.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“Not me,” she said. “I’ve transformed.”
He smiled at her over the lip of his glass.
This was an adorable affectation—the café. When they last knew each other, Slava was all cheap beer and cheaper spirits. He might have knocked someone to the ground for suggesting he had ever been in the proximity of a moka pot. And Nadia used to like his posturing; like Chegga with the infamous Lilia Solodikova, Nadia had her own youthful fixations, her embarrassing things to adore.
But Nadia had matured. Girls younger than she were already graduating from university, for God’s sake. They were grown women. Nadia herself was adult enough to have a half-grown child.
“How’s your daughter?” Slava said, and Nadia started in her seat. If he could read her mind, she would have to stop thinking about his hair.
“Precious. Five already. Do you have any of your own?”
“I don’t know,” Slava said. Grinned. “I’d like to meet her.”
“Hmm,” Nadia said. She changed the subject to his parents, his brothers. The animals he was trapping these days. When he smiled, he showed those familiar teeth, the top two angled in toward each other to make a crooked gate. She let that old sweet sight wash over her until their teas were drunk and done.
In the car, though, Nadia was glad to be alone again. Sitting beside Slava had made her recall herself at her clingiest. In Esso, surrounded by family and old friends, Chegga had relished going over his school years, but Nadia did not want to soak in the memory of who she used to be.
A local embarrassment. A girl who sought her joy in other people—in men. She began to learn her error only after Mila’s father left, when from him, reeling, she stumbled into Slava’s bed. She had never wanted to get out. After that ended, she sincerely thought of dying.
She had been seventeen, four months pregnant, in love twice over with nothing to show for it. Sobbing into her pillowcase while her parents watched TV in their bedroom. She used to ask, How can I go on?
Then she figured it out. She could go on. She had loved Chegga, his big heart, his bigger promises, but what brought true joy in this life was a climbing salary, a full belly, a firmly connected radiator pipe.
Neighbors’ dogs lifted their heads to watch her drive down their street. The animals sat in sockets of ice under fence posts. Nadia pulled up to her parents’ house, turned the engine off, and heard a child crying. Taking her purse under the puffed arm of her coat, she got out—yes. Mila. “Where’s my girl?” Nadia called, letting herself inside.
“Mamochka!” A wet-faced Mila pitched around the corner toward her.
“Hi, kitten,” Nadia said. “Hi, turtledove. Have you been torturing your grandparents?” Her daughter shook her head. Mila must have taken her hair out and retied it herself; before breakfast, Nadia had arranged it in a clean braid, but now Mila wore two lopsided pigtails. Great lumps of black hair rose across her skull. Nadia took her hand. “I think you were.”
“In here,” Nadia’s father called.
Mila led Nadia down the hall to the bedroom. The sound of the television drew them along. They found Nadia’s parents sitting up on the bed, her mother darning a pile of already mended socks. A news program played at top volume: results of a Euro qualifying match, cease-fires called for the day in eastern Ukraine, rail service restored between the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. “Happiness, it’s happiness,” a Ukrainian commuter told the reporter. Light from the screen flashed across the fleece blanket under Nadia’s parents’ feet.