The next week, on her drive home, lights flared again in her rearview mirror. She pulled over with her heart quick and hands sweating. She had not been speeding, or she did not think she was. After five agonizing minutes, her passenger door opened, and he slid into the seat. His sunglasses were off. He smiled.
Six months later he moved into the apartment. They got married a few weeks after her final exams. By then, she was full-time at the park, and on her first day back after the wedding her coworkers kept bringing her champagne in a mug to celebrate, while their director pretended the drink was only milky tea. Zoya and her husband stayed happy for a while; when she found out she was pregnant, he held her and kissed her cheeks. She was crying. He did not ask her why. Now he took her car to and from the police station, while she stayed home and would for ages more. Two years, at least, Kolya said. That was what the baby needed. Enough time had passed that Zoya no longer wrapped herself up in romance over their second meeting, when he slipped into her passenger seat. His unfamiliar body strapped into its uniform, looking so adult, so sure, and hiding the man she would marry.
She had been away from the guests too long. Zoya carried Sasha back through the dim hall toward their voices—still arguing. Then someone in the kitchen said, “Illegals.”
Zoya clutched the baby to her. The workday was over. The migrants were gone—but maybe one of her husband’s guests had stepped out on the balcony in time, looked down on them leaving, seen Zoya’s ashes, and found her out—
She came to the kitchen doorway. “Waste of our time,” her husband said. “They call us then say nothing when we arrive.”
“They’re not the ones who call,” Fedya said.
“Then who? Who else gives a shit? Over nothing. Paint and five thousand rubles’ worth of fuel. They stood and looked at me like they had nothing to do with it,” Kolya said. “Scuttling off afterward like a pack of rats.”
Compact and dangerous, lifting mixed concrete. Black hair shining. And their accents. Zoya could go for hours on a single word. All day…if she had to be alone all day, why couldn’t it be with them, in the cold, by the unfinished building, on the other side of the street…
Sasha wiggled. Zoya waved her hand in front of the baby’s eyes to keep her quiet. She forced herself to ask: “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” her husband said.
“Vandalism,” said the assistant.
Fedya corrected her. “Just kids being kids. Graffiti at a construction site. Broken bottles, stolen tools.”
“Where was that?” Zoya asked.
“Nowhere,” her husband said, filling up their glasses. Then he relented. “On the eighth kilometer.” By the library and the volcanological institute. Far from here.
She pictured those workers on the eighth kilometer—like hers but not. The kind of men not strong enough to protect themselves from petty crimes. “So what—” she asked, and as she did, Dima started in saying, “To our—” He stopped, lowering his glass. Zoya waved him on. “To our long days of work,” Dima said, “and our longer nights of pleasure.”
“Good to hear it’s going well,” said Fedya after they all swallowed.
“So fucking rude,” said the assistant.
“Watch your mouth,” said Dima. He put a hand over the assistant’s lips. To the rest of the table, he explained, “Anfisa’s insulted because it’s not just nights with us anymore. She’s good for mornings, too.”
“What a gentleman,” said Anfisa from behind his fingers. Fedya refilled their glasses. “What honor. What chivalry.”
“What did you do,” Zoya asked her husband, “about the vandals?”
“There was nothing to do,” he said.
“My gallant prince,” Anfisa said to Dima. “See what happens if you keep speaking so sweetly to me. Our nights can get much shorter.”
“Long lunch breaks, too,” said Dima. Fedya snorted. “Our Anfisa is a twenty-four-hour kind of girl.”
Zoya said, “But if things were taken. If tools are gone. Don’t you have to catch whoever took them?”
“Why do you suddenly care?” asked her husband. He looked like the tired version of the officer she first met. At her car window, in her passenger seat—unpredictable. “Why should you tell me how to do my job? Do I tell you how to do yours? ‘Sit at home, get fat, and tend to the baby’?”
“Kolya,” Dima said.
“Ridiculous,” her husband muttered to the table.
This wasn’t her job. Or it shouldn’t be. The dinner Zoya had cooked for them sat on the stove. Her husband did not know what she was capable of. Outside, the construction site was empty. The ground there was a mix of mud and snow, and four floors above, Zoya held her child, kept quiet among strangers, waited for tomorrow.
In bed later, Kolya was tender. His cropped hair brushed against her jaw. “Forgive me?” he asked. She hummed, a neutral noise. “They treat me like a child…they make me lieutenant, put me on this case, then treat me like I’m inferior.” His breath on her neck. “I wish I’d never heard of these sisters. I could simply stay home with you.”
She stared up into the dark. “Don’t be angry,” he murmured.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. He held her tighter and she kissed his forehead.
Hello, miss, the migrant will say.
The sound of his voice will wet her mouth. She will say back, Hello. She will check that no one’s watching. She will point to the shack. Take me in there, she will say.
Inside, she will back up until she hits a table. Then she will reach, grip the surface, scoot herself up to sit. His eyelids will be heavy as he watches her body. His pupils will dilate. Shining black. Forearms thick with muscle, jaw clenched, he will be ready for her. Beyond the thin wall, she will hear the others. She will open her hands.
Zoya had always wanted them. Always wanted, and never touched. Before she found these workers, there were others, the men pushing carts through the market, the ones sweeping the block where she was raised. Long before she met her first blond boyfriend, she watched the migrants. And even lying next to her husband, she wanted them still. This was not some fetish, she believed. This was something more. She was not a woman made for sitting home and nursing. She craved things darker, stranger, out of bounds.
Tomorrow. She will give herself three hours. If she can find a sufficient excuse—a doctor’s appointment, maybe. No one will know. One afternoon, and then Zoya will return home, tell Tatyana Yurievna she’s sick, go to the shower and soap away the marks left by the workers’ fingers. She’ll wash slowly, wishing they could stay. And after that she will make it as Kolya’s wife and Sasha’s mother. No more visions of dead children. No desires to undo herself. After tomorrow, she will have enough to make it through.
Zoya fell asleep into that fantasy. She dreamed of geysers and woke to the sound of running water. Her husband was already in the shower. In the kitchen, she brought out eggs to boil, bread to slice, white cheese from the refrigerator’s bottom drawer. The room smelled like a charred pan. Beyond her balcony, the morning was getting so bright.
The kettle was almost bubbling. The bathroom door opened, the bedroom door shut. Watching the sky, gray shot through with yellow, Zoya took her pack and lighter off the top of the refrigerator, slid open the balcony door, and stepped outside.