Five years from now, or fifty, Nadia expected she would enter this room to find her parents this same way. She bent down to her daughter. “Your notebook is in the front pocket of my suitcase. Want to bring it?” Mila left and Nadia checked her phone. No missed calls. Chegga might not try again until the evening.
Mila came back with the breast-filled notebook. “Go get a pen out of the drawer in the kitchen table,” Nadia said. Her mother looked up, questioning, but Nadia did not repeat herself. Instead Nadia sat on the rug to wait for her daughter to return.
One day soon Nadia would have her own television. A bedroom with tall windows for Mila. Fine new socks, machine-made in Europe, that she could ship by the carton back here. While Mila drew smiling faces, their eyes and cheeks and mouths decorated by ink flowers, Nadia finger-combed the girl’s hair and put it in place. Nadia’s father snored above their heads. A tiny, soothing noise.
The afternoon drifted away, at once quiet and too loud. A few minutes before five, Nadia plugged in her phone to charge and went to the kitchen to help with dinner. They were having buttered macaroni and fish. Nadia’s father played with Mila while the room steamed up. Once the time to eat came, Nadia’s mother portioned out servings, as she had when Nadia was little. Mila kept eating noodles with her fingers until Nadia smacked her hand.
Nadia did not miss Chegga. She and Mila were doing fine. So when she got back to her phone and saw he had called twice, she decided she should let him know.
He picked up on the first ring. “What were you thinking?”
She tucked one arm under the other. “Hello to you, too.” Almost a week had passed since they heard each other’s voices. He did not sound like he was savoring hers.
“You’re really at your parents’ place?”
“Where else would I be?”
“How much did those tickets cost us?”
“Christ, Chegga,” she said. “Twenty-five thousand.” Nearly all her cash. He let out a goose’s hiss at that, kkkh, air forced from the back of his throat. “Mila flew half-price. And I took all my time from work, because we weren’t going to use it together, anyway. Right? We weren’t?”
“Unbelievably selfish,” he said. “We were. Why weren’t we?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. Full of baked fish, half a meter from her framed graduation portrait on her parents’ dresser, she knew again the cold clarity of that early-morning flood. She had followed him, his feet bare, hers in rubber boots, through the dirty water. He carried Mila, who clung to his shoulders like he was some sort of savior. Meanwhile Nadia, behind them, stared at his neck. The neat bottom of the haircut she had given him. The white rectangle of the open door ahead. The silhouette of some passerby already loitering to ask what their trouble was. “I don’t think a cross-country trip was going to work out for us. You couldn’t even put a roof over our heads.”
“There was never an issue with the roof,” he said. Now she was the one making exasperated noises. “Don’t you act like that,” he said. “I have done everything for you.”
“Everything for me!”
“Without me, you would’ve still been living at home, fighting with your mother, working some ridiculous job to support Mila. Shoveling coal at Palana’s hot-water plant.”
“Fuck you,” she said, just to hear him sputter. Nobody liked it when a woman cursed. “I’m supposed to be glad that you brought me to Esso? So I could fight with your mother instead?”
“Don’t talk about my mother.”
“Don’t talk about mine.”
“Don’t…” He fell quiet. When he started again, he spoke more slowly, deliberately. “Do you know what I thought? Before I found your little note. That something happened to you two. That you had been hurt.”
“You’re out of your mind,” she said.
“That I would have to show Mila’s picture around the village. There’s the gift you spent twenty-five thousand to give me. You don’t remember Lilia?”
All of his worst qualities were coming back to her: his cheapness, his stubbornness, his eagerness to insert himself into other people’s lives. Even his little sister had warned Nadia about this; in the wooden changing stall after swimming that January day, while pulling down Mila’s bathing suit straps, Nadia had asked, “Was he in love with this Lilia or something?” Ksyusha shook her head. “Then why bring her up?”
Tugging on her jeans, Ksyusha kept her eyes down. She had come back from university for the holidays with muscled legs from dance classes and a tense jaw, Nadia thought, from too much schoolwork. How exhausting it must be to be as smart as Ksyusha. All that possibility held tight under Ruslan’s arm. Ksyusha said, “Chegga likes the drama. The disappearance. He has fun making up theories instead of admitting she ran away.” She stuffed her swimsuit into her purse. “Can I tell you the truth?”
Nadia nodded.
Ksyusha reached out to cup her hands over Mila’s ears. “Lilia was a whore,” Ksyusha said. Her expression was harder than Nadia ever remembered seeing before. “She was sweet, but she slept with everyone. Chegga didn’t love her. He just loves talking about people, and she’s the easiest to talk about, because she’s not here anymore.”
A whore, Ksyusha said. And Nadia had thought herself sufficiently humiliated when she saw herself in the cat-killing classmate swimming near them. Chegga had devoted himself to Nadia so quickly, so fully—was that because he loved her drama? When they met, she was barely out of school, raising a child on her own. And he had coaxed her and Mila into moving. Sworn he cared. Promised happiness. All that because he saw her as what she used to be? Had he only swapped her into Esso to fill that place?
“I remember,” Nadia said. The words were raw. The phone beeped and she drew it away to look at the screen. “You’re right, Chegga. Mila and I are exactly like your Lilia. We would rather get ourselves killed than live near you anymore.” Again the beep. He was going to shout. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’m getting another call.”
“Slava?” she said when she switched over. Her voice was too loud.
“Hey. What are you doing?”
She waited to collect her breath. Then: “Nothing.”
“I thought I could come over,” he said.
Five years ago this offer would have been a firework. It did not burst and burn the same way now. “No,” she said. “It’s late. Mila’s bedtime’s soon.”
“That’s fine. I told you, I’d like to meet her.”
Alone in the room, Nadia shook her head.
He said, “I’ve been thinking— You know, we were so young.” Nadia didn’t respond. Her high school picture on the dresser smirked back at her. “…I wondered if I might be her father.”
“No,” Nadia said.
“No?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you weren’t. And you aren’t. My period was three weeks late when we first slept together.” Mila’s father was older, married. He was someone who was glad to make love to Nadia in his car by the coastline but stopped picking up her calls after she told him the blood had not come. She went for Slava then in the hope he could undo what had already happened.
Slava was silent. “All right,” he said. “That doesn’t change, though—I was there. And I still…I could have been there all this time.”