Zoya peeled the tongues, salted the vegetables, dressed the salad, sliced the bread. When Sasha woke up, Zoya fed the baby in the kitchen while skimming through the photo feed on her phone. Kolya was supposed to be back at half past five. Fifteen minutes past that, with no Kolya in sight, their daughter began crying. Baby on her shoulder, Zoya walked a loop through the apartment: from Sasha’s room, wallpapered with ducks, to the master bedroom with its shining television screen, into the bathroom, out again, a hundred thousand times.
Her husband unlocked the doors at ten to seven. Kolya had people with him—two other officers and one of the female assistants. Thudding feet, happy talk. “Look how big she is,” the assistant cried as soon as she saw the baby in Zoya’s arms. Zoya said hello. She was flayed. How pathetic she must look, with the table set, the meat on the stove, her baby fussy, and her whole day displayed for ridicule. Kolya had brought three guests home to see how Zoya waited for him like she had nothing else to live for. Zoya could have run away today. They didn’t know. She could have flown over a volcano. She could have moved to St. Petersburg.
Kolya shook off his jacket. When the assistant held out her hands, Zoya, shiny-eyed with shame, put the baby in them. Then Zoya slid back into the kitchen and whisked the dinner plates away.
Before they finished lining up their boots in the hall, Zoya took out a bottle, five shot glasses, and the platter of food from this afternoon’s tea. “What a hostess!” her husband said when he saw. She held up her face to be kissed. This time she could smell him, a sharp, sweet booziness. “Pour us a round, my queen,” he said, and she did.
“Queen,” one of the men said, “do you know what your king accomplished today?” The other man snickered. “He earned himself a letter of reprimand.”
“Ah, Fedya, you ruin a woman’s mood that way,” the assistant said. “Don’t tell her such things.” In her uniformed arms, the baby squirmed.
Zoya faced her husband. “What happened?”
He smiled at her. His collar was less crisp than it had been when he left. “They pulled a body from the bay this morning. Yevgeny Pavlovich congratulated us for finding one of the Golosovskaya girls. I told him, Sir, if finding a corpse that size makes you hopeful, just wait, we’ll drag in a sea lion.”
The assistant sat up straighter to imitate the major general’s voice. “Bodies swell in water. Didn’t you know?” Fedya and the other man laughed.
“So I heard. Swell to a meter taller than where they started,” Kolya said. “Swell enough to turn from a twelve-year-old girl to a middle-aged fisherman.”
“You can’t talk that way to your supervisor,” Zoya said. “Even if he’s wrong, you should work with him, respect him…”
The guests were already picking up their drinks. “A toast to our major general,” the assistant said, one hand supporting the baby and the other around a glass. “And to you, Kolya. Your many accomplishments in this career.”
Kolya passed Zoya a shot. “To my success,” he said to her. His voice was rough. Everyone drank; Zoya, too, vodka singing in her throat.
“One day, Kol,” Fedya said, “I’ll write you a letter of commendation.” He collected their glasses on the kitchen table and poured a second round. “You’re right. Dragging the bay is pointless. The bodies of those girls are floating off Fiji by now.”
“Cheers to that,” the other officer said.
Zoya shook her head. “That’s no good toast.”
Kolya took his glass anyway, clinked it, tossed the alcohol back. He wiped his mouth. “Pointless, yes, but only because the sisters didn’t drown. They were taken.”
“This again,” the assistant said. “Don’t interrupt,” said the other officer, and the assistant said, “Dima!”
“They were absolutely taken,” Zoya said. Her husband nodded. The baby whimpered. “There was a witness.”
Fedya’s face was soft and scornful. “You call her a witness?”
“She saw something,” Zoya said. Her husband used to come home energized about this case, excited. Zoya remembered: two kids, a big guy, and a shiny dark car, he reported the witness saying. That, and I want his car-wash tips.
“They were taken by someone off the peninsula,” Kolya continued. “That’s why we haven’t uncovered any trace of them, dead or alive. They’re not hidden in a garage or buried in the woods or floating in the bay. They’re gone. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell the major general for months now.”
Fedya took up the bottle again to refill their glasses. The vodka glugged. “If that’s so, if they were killed somewhere on the mainland, then what does it matter? Let this drowned body be called one of the girls. Listen to your wife. Stop arguing with your superiors. Otherwise you’ll wind up where you did in the fall—”
“Enough,” Kolya said. The assistant giggled at the end of the table.
“Looking at Moscow got you nothing but embarrassment,” Fedya said. “In the future, you’ll be wiser to keep any ideas to yourself.”
“Hear that?” Dima said, leaning over to pinch the assistant’s slim waist. His hand bumped Sasha’s head and the baby howled.
Kolya’s mood was darkening. Zoya waved away her glass. “Is that what you’re going to write in my letter of commendation?” Kolya asked. “How good I’ll be at shutting up?”
“What else would I write about?” Fedya said. “Your failure to find an imaginary kidnapper? Your years of monitoring the speeds on city boulevards?”
Sasha was really worked up now. Kolya was raising his voice. Zoya took the baby from the assistant, who smiled as if they knew each other well, and excused herself into the bedroom.
The baby didn’t want to eat, so Zoya walked her until the girl’s unhappy mouth relaxed again. With talk like this, Kolya’s side of the bed was sure to stay empty past midnight. Zoya set down Sasha on the orange duvet and lay beside her. On her stomach, the baby lifted her head, arms, and legs, paddling through the air but going nowhere.
“That’s not how you crawl,” Zoya said. Sasha went on. Zoya watched her fat limbs work. After a minute, the baby looked wide-eyed at her. Zoya put her hand on her daughter’s back, where her palm fit warm in that arch. “Sasha,” she said. “Sashenka. I wish you could talk to me.”
The sisters were taken. Their bodies could be somewhere near. Before the baby, Kolya would talk to her about his work, but since Sasha’s birth, Zoya seemed to have lost her curiosity, lost nearly all her appetites. She used to have theories about the girls for her husband: the man that abducted them drove them west, to the villages on the coast of the Okhotsk, and kept them alive in his root cellar. He lived too far from his neighbors for anyone to notice. His car wasn’t on the footage from gas station surveillance cameras because he’d carried fuel in his trunk. Those theories had disintegrated from disuse, and now all Zoya kept were images: a shining car, a round face, a floating child. Picturing those things gave her no relief.
What did was picturing pleasure. If only these guests would drink faster so the end of the night could come. She did not especially like talking to the detective version of Kolya anymore, but after people came over, he was always sweet with her. A tipsy Kolya reminded Zoya of the months before she graduated: going to parties, flirting with friends, winding up with him in these same sheets. She turned the baby stomach-up and cupped Sasha’s small face in one hand.
They first met when Kolya pulled her over. Not yet lieutenant, he was Sergeant Ryakhovsky then, watching for traffic violations. She had been going too fast down Komsomolskaya. She was twenty, in the summer before her last year of university, leaving work to stop at the apartment before heading back out to a birthday dinner. And he was twenty-four and seemed so much older. On the gravel-rough side of the road, he watched her from behind his sunglasses. Her cheeks burned under her foundation. He was tall, broad-shouldered, unimpressed. He held on to the sill of her car door with one hand and looked down the length of his arm. She tried to tell him she was in a rush, going to an engagement. The cars behind his back whooshed by. Finally, he said, “Go on, then.” No ticket.