“Well, you weren’t,” she said.
“Listen, I was a kid,” he said. “I acted like an idiot. But I’ve grown up. I want a family. Please don’t punish this little girl now for the mistake I made back then.”
She could tell he had rehearsed that line. “My God,” she said. “Tonight’s not a good night for us, okay? Forget about it.” He was not finished, she knew, but she was hanging up.
The whole thing made her want to laugh. Or scream. She’d felt the same way when she saw her positive pregnancy test: this must be a joke, this must be a joke, the feeling bubbling in her throat. Slava called again and she silenced the buzzing phone. His voice, his words, the suggestion (we were young) churned inside her.
Too bad she had nowhere for this hysteria to go. She could not call Chegga back, she would never tell Mila, and she had made no real friends from school to now. Some girls shared such things with their mothers, but not Nadia…just imagine screaming this phone conversation into her mother’s crumpled ear.
Nadia did laugh then, loud and bitter. It was impossible to tell how much her mother perceived (the affair with Ivan Borisovich, the liquid few months with Slava, the late-night anguish, the growing belly) and how much was lost in background noise. They never even had a real conversation about the baby coming; in Nadia’s second trimester, her parents simply started to make little comments—how soulless it was to raise a child into capitalism, how much better communal living had been for families, how important it was never to lift one’s hands over one’s head during pregnancy.
It was understood that Nadia had done a bad thing but that thing itself was never discussed. Her mother had not even looked directly at Nadia’s enormous stomach when Nadia was admitted to the town hospital’s maternity ward. And after the birth she certainly never suggested that Nadia would be a fit parent. That one generation might pass on any skill or knowledge to the next. Instead, her mother fussed about the nurses, the neighbors, Nadia’s diet and vanity and laziness.
Nothing had changed. When Nadia came back out to the living room, her mother was there scowling. “Where have you been? I’ve had to set you up all by myself.” Her mother bent, back stiff, to smooth the last corner of a sheet over the couch cushion. Nadia scooped up Mila and felt her waist warmed by her daughter’s legs.
“Mama, I’ll do that,” Nadia called. Mila in her arms, she crowded close to the cushion until her mother was forced to step away. “You could’ve waited ten minutes for me,” Nadia said, though she knew she spoke only to herself.
Her mother hung over them for a few more minutes. Nadia concentrated on kissing Mila’s neck to make the girl giggle. Her darling girl. Everyone had something to say, doubts and whispers, but look at her daughter—Mila’s long legs, her belly-out posture, her little fingernails, the wisps at her hairline. Her cheeks so round they swelled her profile and hid the corners of her smile. Look at what Nadia had done for Mila and what she was going to do.
Nadia phoned the main Sberbank office in the morning. It was closed, but even hearing its prerecorded menu of options, its vowels stressed with a Moscow accent, felt promising. After that she called the Far Eastern branch for an email address, too, so she was able to write to headquarters from her laptop. To pass the day, Nadia’s parents took her and Mila to a fairy-tale puppet show at the Palace of Culture. The four of them sat in a row on a wooden bench. The lights in the auditorium went down. A curtain rose, and there appeared papier-mâché heads, ruffled costumes, hands lifting to make frogs and foxes and roosters fly through the air.
“Let’s see a movie,” Nadia said to her daughter afterward. To her parents, she explained, “There’s no cinema in Esso.”
Nadia’s mother frowned. “There are films to watch at home.”
“Don’t wait for us,” Nadia said. “We’ll walk back when we’re finished.”
The cinema sat a floor above the puppet theater. When she and Mila got up there, they found the place dark. Mila started getting weepy. “Cinemas don’t work in the morning,” Nadia told her. “I’m so sorry. I forgot.” They wandered back downstairs, where they found a booth selling berry hand pies, and Nadia peeled off a bill for two of those instead.
Sticky with berry juice, Nadia and Mila moved through the halls to study the murals. Nadia’s cell vibrated, showing Slava’s number. She silenced the call and took Mila’s hand.
The paintings on the walls showed a swirl of men in wolf skins. Nadia’s parents had brought her here as a child. “Milusha, do you want to go fishing tomorrow with Grandpa?” Nadia asked. “I used to go when I was your age.”
Mila squeezed her fingers. “What’s it like?”
The rich rotten smell of low tide—the endless flatness of the sea. And her father, hooking the bait, blood running thin down his forearms. “It’s nice,” Nadia said.
“I’ll catch a dolphin. But we won’t eat it.” Mila shook her head at the thought. “It’ll live with us.”
“Great idea.” Nadia squeezed back. “You know what? I’m going to get us our own house soon.”
“For us and Daddy?”
“For us and the dolphin,” Nadia said. “We’ll buy a place on the beach so it can visit all its friends when it likes. And we’ll have a fancy bathroom. We’ll put in a tub big enough for it to live.”
In the building’s lobby, Nadia zipped Mila’s coat, then belted her own. They pushed out into the cold together. Snow crystals in the wind brushed like fine-grit sandpaper across their exposed skin.
A familiar white hatchback was parked at the curb. Nadia moved toward the car cautiously. Her father was napping in the passenger seat. Her mother, as Nadia got closer, tipped her head in their direction, lifted one hand from the steering wheel, and waved.
Nadia boosted Mila into the backseat and climbed in after. “I told you WE WOULD WALK,” she said. The car smelled like salted fish inside. Her father blinked awake.
“Mila will get sick in this cold,” her mother said. “You should know that.”
“She’s fine. She’s all wrapped up.”
Her father turned in his seat and reached out to stroke Mila’s purple sleeve. “These new coats,” he said. “Manufactured in China. Terrible.”
The prickling in Nadia’s nose was back. “No, this one’s quality, Papa. It’s well made.” He shook his head.
Nadia put her own fingers on Mila’s sleeve. The refined slip of it. She ran her hand down to reach Mila’s damp palm. Pushed back against the headrest and widened her eyes against tears.
More and more and more, Chegga’s mother had condemned her for wanting. As though everyone in their generation was not already enjoying all they had taken for themselves—pensions, marriages, friendships, history, the values they were sure were wasted on their children, the sweeping moral high ground.
“What movie did you see?” her mother called backward.
“Communist Killers from Outer Space,” Nadia said. They were not listening anyway.
Nadia did not pick up either Chegga’s or Slava’s calls that night. She had no energy for conversation. On the couch, Nadia read Mila a story about a bear cub, watched her drowse off, and folded herself around the girl to wait for sleep. Tomorrow they would go to the library. They would keep themselves busy until Nadia figured out where to go next. And they would have fun doing it—because they had each other, which was what mattered—Nadia and Mila, forever.
She woke with her pulse thudding. Someone was pounding on the front door. The room was silvery, divided into strips of light and dark, and Mila lay on her stomach in the crack between the cushion and the couch back. The sound of a man’s voice outside. Nadia’s father’s feet coming down the hall.