Kolya was dressed and leaving. “Good luck today,” she said. After their apartment doors shut behind him, her head cleared, her heart emptied. Sasha, freshly fed, would not wake again for two more hours. This was Zoya’s time now.
This was theirs.
Zoya was not headed for the balcony just yet—she could credit herself with that much patience. Instead she washed her husband’s breakfast dishes. Then she set the electric kettle, filled her teacup, and sat down with her phone, scrolling through pictures of other people’s pets and weddings and vacations. One of her coworkers had posted about a route for ecotourists through icy central Kamchatka.
Zoya put the phone down. She had not left her neighborhood since Sasha’s birth. Across the table, the kitchen wallpaper showed overlapping palm leaves.
She shook out another cigarette and slid open the door.
The men below were finished with their site walk-through. They had come from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, to gather in the doorframe across her street. Their building was a concrete husk built level by level by their gloved hands. They had ripped up the sidewalk around the structure and erected scaffolding. At the edge of the lot, they had made a shack from scrap wood with a roof of corrugated metal. Zoya wanted to see inside. Their five-man crew ducked in there every few hours: when they all arrived, to break for tea, for lunch, to rest, and when the day was done. On the evenings her husband worked late, Zoya could catch them holding the shack’s door open and filing out in street clothes. The last man would close the door behind him. The shack, the building, and she would all be left waiting for them to come back tomorrow.
She took another drag on her cigarette. The men broke away from each other. Their generator coughed, whirred.
The air on her arms was fresh and cold. The streets below were zebra-striped with melting snow. Four kilometers downhill, the city center spread out, its buildings dark, parking lots empty, ship repair yard motionless. Early last fall, before Zoya’s leave started, she stood here watching the flashing blue lights of emergency vehicles. She’d imagined Kolya finding the Golosovskaya sisters on those far cliffs. He would be celebrated on television and get promoted to senior lieutenant, maybe captain. At work, her colleagues would gather around her for all the details. Then the blue lights turned off, the snow fell, the searches stopped, and Sasha was born.
These days, Zoya turned her thoughts to nearer fantasies. The men below lugged buckets of mixed concrete. They used a crane last month to stack slabs for floors, walls, and ceilings. Now they were tending to details—pouring staircases, ripping out support frames. They bent their necks in concentration as they moved. Looking down at them, Zoya bent her neck the same way.
The sun shone white above the distant water. Tossing the butt over the balcony railing, Zoya went back inside, where she washed her hands and smelled them. The smoke hung on her skin—so what? It flavored her. She brushed her teeth, applied perfume, and stroked on makeup as carefully as she used to on those mornings before she left for class or work. Foundation, concealer, bronzer, brow pencil. She ran texturizer through her hair and braided it into a yellow fishtail. Above the collar of her robe, she rose beautiful as a newlywed.
Until November, Zoya would have gotten dressed, driven to the park office, greeted her colleagues in ecological education, and started the day. An inspector might stop by, bragging of poachers apprehended. A movie producer might call from Germany for a permit to film in protected territory. The park director might announce a team visit to a far base, so all of them, research and protection and education and tourism, would have to shut off their computers and hurry to their cars and drive to the airfield, where they’d board a helicopter bound for the Valley of the Geysers or Kronotskoye Lake.
Now, instead, Zoya took her flawless face into the kitchen to wipe the counters clean. She reorganized the row of shoes in the foyer. When Sasha woke up crying, surprised all over again at the world in front of her eyes, Zoya nursed her. “How’d you sleep?” Zoya asked. “Any nightmares?” Sasha’s tiny mouth worked against Zoya to tug milk forward. The leaves printed on the kitchen walls were frozen tropical.
At eleven o’clock Zoya called her husband. He did not pick up. With the permission that gave her, Zoya called Tatyana Yurievna on the second floor to ask if she could watch Sasha—“I’ll be quick,” Zoya told her. “No more than an hour.” Groceries, Zoya explained, but it did not matter. Tatyana Yurievna loved the baby. The neighbor made up games with spoons and songs and measuring cups, and when she came over to babysit, which was often, three or four times a week, she never minded if Zoya took too long to wend her way back home.
The day cracked open. Zoya rushed to dress—satin button-down, smooth belt, dark jeans, and tall heeled boots—and stood by the door to wait. Her lungs expanded to breathe the air outside. The baby began to cry. Zoya tugged off her boots, unbuttoned her blouse, and lifted Sasha to feed. Sasha’s head rested against Zoya’s satin sleeve. Sasha had Zoya’s same eyes: pale, glacial. The blank eyes of a drowned girl. Zoya kissed her daughter on the forehead to undo those thoughts.
The knock. “There’s my darling,” Tatyana Yurievna cooed when Zoya opened the doors.
“An hour,” Zoya promised. She pulled her boots back on and stepped out the door.
She could do anything now—anything. She emerged from her apartment building into the cool light. Her boots were snug around her calves. Her skin was tight, too, with expectation. Across the street, the building hid the workers. Zoya walked forward to line up with the hole of its doorway. Then she stopped to take out a cigarette. Only a minute outside, and her fingers were already cold, stiff. She flicked her lighter, but the flame did not catch.
The building hummed with machines inside. Zoya was too early. Prickling with wasted anticipation, she put the cigarette back in its pack. The men were not yet on break.
So it was the grocery store. Zoya went there flat and frustrated. After she paid, she checked the time—still a few minutes before noon. Instead, then, of turning left out of the store and returning to her apartment, she headed for the end of the block. A set of marble stairs brought her into the courtyard of the city church, which shone, gold-domed, like new money. She chose a bench, took out her phone, and navigated to the profile of the girl she met at New Year’s who lived in St. Petersburg.
At that holiday rental house, Zoya’s husband actually felt sorry for the girl, who had seemed serious, even standoffish, refused the men, and left in the morning without saying goodbye. “There’s the old maid you could’ve been if you never met me,” Kolya whispered into Zoya’s ear. Nine days later, Zoya went into labor.
The world-traveling old maid. Her stomach flat, her orange bikini. Locking the phone, Zoya shut her eyes.
She could live another life. It wasn’t too late. If she boarded the bus to the park office, she would make it there in time to surprise them all in the middle of their lunches. The building would smell like it always had, that mix of paper, rags, and bleach. The eco-education girls would kiss her cheeks and the park director would come over to squeeze her hands. They might say, Zoyka! What perfect timing. We’ve got an extra spot for you on today’s trip. A flight over the Klyuchevskaya stratovolcano—a helicopter to South Kamchatka Sanctuary. Her coworkers would treat Zoya just as they did when she was newly graduated, a tour leader through the park’s visitor center. When she was young and unburdened.
But there wasn’t really time to get to the office and back this afternoon, or any. They would ask her for stories, for pictures of the baby. And what did Zoya have to show, beyond her infant’s blank expression? Almost half a year spent indoors. What could she say to them?