Opening the living room door, Nadia found the shock of her parents and Slava. Her parents in their pajamas. Slava, by the smell of the hallway, drunk. The overhead light was on. Slava’s face was red. That color in his skin, the slur in his speech, brought her right back to high school.
She shut the door behind her. “What are you doing here?” she hissed. “Go home!”
“Nadia, this—” said her father.
“I’m sorry, Papa,” she told him.
“I’ve got to ask you something,” Slava said.
Nadia threw her hands up. It had to be two in the morning. “You haven’t heard of a text message?”
Her mother, soft in a worn nightgown, squeezed against her to get a better look at the scene. “Is that Vyacheslav Bychkov? What is he doing here so late?”
“I’m very sorry to wake you,” Slava said. He was overenunciating. “I needed to talk—”
“I know your brother,” Nadia’s mother called toward him.
Slava blinked at her. Nadia waved in the air. “Enough! Leave!”
“Nadechka, you’re not listening, you’re not hearing me,” he said. “I wanted— Okay, I was thinking. You could come home with me. My wife— No, it’s my house, you know, it’s only me now. You and your daughter could stay there with me. As long as you like. You look just the same as you did,” he said. Speaking much too loudly. “You could come there. And our daughter.”
“Who, Mila?” Nadia’s mother asked, and Nadia turned.
“Mila is—” Nadia halted. “Get out,” she said, “get out, get out.” She pushed forward, past her parents, to Slava’s stinking chest. Citrus and vodka. She hoped he’d choke. Pressed too close to Slava’s jacket, that smell, the chill carried in from outside, she said, “Mila isn’t yours.” Still he did not leave.
Nadia kept talking. Let everyone go deaf together. “I told you I was already pregnant when we met. Can’t you remember? Or have you drunk yourself too stupid to recall?” The other day’s smile was loose on Slava now. “You were a fling,” she said. “Not a very good one. If I were you, I’d be ashamed to show my face in this house.”
Slava sneered. She used to want to hurt him, then to make him jealous, to cause him regret, but seeing this look gave no satisfaction now. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d be ashamed to show my face in this town.”
Her father pressed on the front door before locking it. Slush on the floor. Alcohol in the air. Slava was gone.
“I’m really sorry,” Nadia said again. Her father wouldn’t look at her. He was dressed in his pajamas, dark sweatpants. His mouth made a slit. Disapproval.
Nadia was vibrating in the silence. If they would just look at her—she was no longer a disobedient child; she had a job at a bank; she walked her daughter daily to preschool in a scenic village. She was not a whore. Not Slava’s, not anyone else’s. She had tried to make of herself someone beyond scandal, beyond shame.
“Go to sleep,” her father said. Her mother, one hand on the wall, walked back toward their bedroom.
It had been a mistake to come back. A mistake. Nadia in Palana had been her worst—her most vulnerable—people saw that and took advantage. Chegga had spotted the same thing five years earlier. And yet she had spent her savings on the plane tickets back here.
All Nadia could do was return to the living room. She loathed herself so much her teeth hurt. She took extra care in closing the room’s door. A strip of light touched Mila, who could not have slept through that, but whose eyes were shut. Awake or not, the little girl did not want to be any further disturbed.
Nadia put her hand on Mila’s back, which rose and fell in the half-light of the moon. “I’m sorry,” Nadia whispered. Her head ached. She lifted her hand, crawled in beside her daughter, and took out her phone to call Moscow.
“I want to go home,” Mila said.
“That’s what I want, too, dove,” Nadia said. “I’m trying to find a home for us.”
“No,” Mila said. “Home. To Daddy.”
He’s not your fucking daddy, Nadia almost said. But she was looking at her daughter’s perfect, stubborn face.
Nadia had gone to bed on this same couch as a child. Her own mother, coming in late some nights to load laundered clothes into the wardrobe, would stand there with her arms full of folded cotton. Always almost speaking, but never opening her mouth. And Nadia, not knowing what else her mother could want to say after days of nagging, would pretend to be asleep. Nadia must have had the same set look then as Mila did now. Cheeks fat with youth, eyebrows tense, and chin set. Pure unwillingness.
When Nadia got pregnant, years ago, she promised herself she would become better. She had not been and did not know how to start. Now she’d brought Mila to this house, this town, these old grudges, and it was clear they had to leave but she did not actually know where else to go. A city abroad? Where? How would they pay for the move? Another paycheck or two wouldn’t cover the fact that Nadia had no real support. She knew no one off the peninsula. She was still the lonely child, the desperate teenager, who slept in this room with illusions.
Wherever she moved, she would be the same person. But Mila could grow up to be anyone. Mila could be encouraged by two parents, attend university, become a scientist, find a husband, buy a home, maybe even live in London. Or in the real Switzerland. She could be raised in Kamchatka’s version and move to the other. And wherever Mila ended up in the world, she would know that someone—her mother—loved her most.
Mila’s eyes were pinched so tight her lashes looked shortened. Nadia navigated to her phone’s contact list. When Nadia spoke again, her words came higher, fainter. “Then let’s go home,” she said.
Back to Esso. Because all the joy in Nadia’s life came from her daughter. The woman this child would one day be. Between the hard places in Nadia, some part, for Mila, was always open. A pipe thinned from pressure until the flood burst through. A chunk of dark stone worn down, broken off, washed free.
APRIL
The men were already at work. Zoya watched them from her kitchen balcony as she smoked. They appeared and disappeared in the window holes of the unfinished concrete building across the street. Four floors below, they looked as small as the fingers on her hand. She still recognized them. Their muddy boots; their black hair shining over the collars of their coveralls; the way they walked, muscular, strange.
Her husband knocked at the glass of the balcony door and she jumped. “What are you doing out there?” he asked.
Zoya stabbed out her cigarette. “Nothing.”
Kolya was knotting his tie. In his police uniform, he always seemed so serious. Different from the person she’d just watched finish a plate of fried eggs. She slid the door shut behind her and came over to touch his clean clothes. Smoothing her palms across his epaulettes, she said, “Handsome man.”
“All right,” he said, pleased.
The smell of his toothpaste glittered between them. Zoya raised herself on her toes to kiss him, and Kolya turned his face. “You stink,” he said. She stepped away. Ever since the baby was born, he did not like Zoya smoking. She became less bothered by this criticism when she kept a pack nearby.
The sky over Petropavlovsk was gray-pink. Kolya had half an hour before his shift started at six. Though Zoya was months into maternity leave, she maintained the habit of waking with him, making his breakfast, and seeing him off. It was as if they were both getting ready for work—as if she, too, would soon walk out into the city.