When her friend’s car pulled up, Oksana climbed into the back. Max was in the passenger seat. His eyes were wide with apology. “I’m so sorry, Oksana, really. I don’t know what could have happened.”
“You don’t know?” Oksana said. “I know. You let him out.”
“I mean I didn’t realize.” They were rolling down a pitted road together. Katya’s hand was on the gearshift and Max’s hand was on Katya’s thigh. Oksana hated this: the cozy pair, the pain inflicted. Why did she ever have Max and Katya over? Oksana grew up training herself to be independent, strong, less trusting than her mother, and still somehow she ended up inviting in those who hurt her.
She pressed her forehead to the window. “Where to?” Katya asked.
“The cross-country ski track. We spent a lot of time there this winter.” Oksana stared out. “It’s good it’s getting dark,” she said to the car. “I’ll be able to spot his fur in an instant.”
Malysh might have left because he, like her husband, hated Max’s company. Max’s boasts, Katya’s laughter, their infiltration into Oksana’s home. They swung through the ski base’s empty parking lot, where they scanned the snowless skiing paths and the limitless forest. Oksana lowered her window to shout. No movement came from between the trees.
Through the hours Ryakhovsky interviewed Oksana at the police station in August, he had been dismayed at her inability to describe the sisters’ kidnapper. “Think again,” he said. “Go over it once more. You saw these children climbing into a strange man’s car and you didn’t pause at all?”
“How could I have seen he was a strange man?” Oksana said. “He looked common to me.”
Ryakhovsky narrowed his eyes. He struck Oksana as a boy playing in a police uniform. “My superiors need you to produce something,” he said. “A memory, a detail. There must have been something in the experience that stood out to you.” She stared at him. “Do you try to be this useless?” he asked. “You work at it in your spare time?”
“It must come naturally to me,” she said. The words were bitter on her tongue.
The long, long list of what she had not seen. All that she failed to do. At Oksana’s direction, Katya turned the car back to the street, looped around the traffic circle, and headed toward the city center. Meanwhile Max described to them Malysh’s behavior this afternoon. The dog had been normal, even mellow, sniffing at Max’s empty hands then returning to the bedroom to rest while Max gathered the work he had left the evening before. “Malysh wants an adventure, that’s all,” Max said. “He’ll come back when he’s tired himself out.” Oksana kept her eyes on the sidewalks. After some silence, Max said, “This afternoon Romanovich—”
“Please stop talking to me,” Oksana said, and he did.
They passed the squat block of the library, the gold-topped church, and the pedagogical university. They slowed at the monument of a full-size tank at the corner of Leningradskaya and Pogranichnaya. The tank’s armament tipped toward the twilit sky. In the blackness of every sagging bus shelter, Oksana looked for Malysh’s body. The summer’s missing-person posters, rippled from a year’s rain and snow, were sealed with packing tape to the shelter walls. For the first time, Oksana really understood how the Golosovskaya girls’ mother must feel. Because Malysh was not in the bus shelters. He was nowhere.
From the open window, Oksana called his name. Every so often some group of teenagers shouted back. The car continued south, past rows of stand-alone metal garages and the twinkling lights of the container terminal. It took more than an hour to climb from one point of their crescent city to the other. Katya and Max murmured to each other in the front seats. Once they reached Zavoyko, where Petropavlovsk’s hills rose into cliffs facing the black ocean, Katya turned them around.
Oksana pictured Malysh somewhere bloody in the dirt. Could not help it—as they passed other cars, she searched between their headlights for pale fur, and when their car was alone on the road, she imagined all the places her dog might be crumpled.
You believe that you keep yourself safe, she thought. You lock up your mind and guard your reactions so nobody, not an interrogator or a parent or a friend, will break in. You earn a graduate degree and a good position. You keep your savings in foreign currency and you pay your bills on time. When your colleagues ask you about your home life, you don’t answer. You work harder. You exercise. Your clothing flatters. You keep the edge of your affection sharp, a knife, so that those near you know to handle it carefully. You think you established some protection and then you discover that you endangered yourself to everyone you ever met.
Even the man she married had put her at risk. One terrible Sunday last June she and Anton parked at the foot of a little mountain outside the city and hiked to the clearing on top. Oksana sat down to settle her breath, while Anton threw a stick for Malysh. The dog’s black lips were wet with excitement. Listening to Anton’s voice, the joke in it suddenly surfacing, Oksana lifted her head in time to see her husband throw the stick over the cliff and Malysh run after. She screamed. She saw it: the dog’s perfect body following, its arc, its vanishing, she would not be able to stop it, she would have to watch him go. The noise ripped through her. In that instant, she was so prepared for tragedy that she could not believe how Malysh gave up the game and turned back to jog toward Anton. Her hands were already on the ground. Her mouth was open and wailing.
Malysh, all dumb with life, was looking at her husband, expecting the next stick. She threw her arms around the dog’s neck. He smelled like exertion, the outdoors, and her devotion. “What is wrong with you?” she shouted at Anton.
“Don’t be silly, come on,” he said. “He never would’ve jumped.”
Her eyes were filled with the vision of her dog doing exactly that. “He trusts you.”
“This is an animal descended from wolves. You understand? His grandparents survived in the tundra. He has a hundred times more survival instincts than you or me.” She buried her face in Malysh’s side. “Sana, I was fooling around,” Anton said, and she cried out, “It wasn’t funny.”
They returned to the car that afternoon the way they so often ended up walking, with Oksana ten meters ahead and her husband letting her go. The dog ran back and forth between them—galloping up to one and turning back to the other. In the hundredth round of this, Oksana dug her hands into his fur. “Stay with me,” she commanded. They were far enough ahead of her husband that she could no longer hear Anton’s feet. Malysh’s body trembled under her. He stuck to her side for an instant, shaking, then dashed backward to find Anton and shepherd them together again.
There were worse times of her life before that afternoon. When none of her school classmates spoke to her for three months after she bit a boy at recess. When her mother pulled out the photo albums every holiday and made Oksana stare at pictures of her father as a young stranger deployed in Afghanistan. When Oksana lost her scholarship in her third year of university, or could not get out of bed after her mother moved to the mainland, or stopped her birth control but never got pregnant, or found those strings of text messages on Anton’s phone. Worse periods, yes, but no worse moment, because no other grief distilled so well into a single instant: that stick sailing off into the sky and her dog following.
Katya guided the car around a curve. The streets poured past their windows. Rising curbs, parked cars, empty intersections. Collapsed single-family houses, snapped-together prefabricated buildings. Teenagers fell away and old drunk men took their places. Apartment lights turned out on the hills.
Watching for evidence of Malysh, Oksana saw Kamchatka as it really was. The August day she walked past the kidnapping, the weather was warm, and the air in the city center smelled good, salt and sugar and oil and yeast. Anton had gotten down on his knees that morning to apologize for the other woman—at the time he swore there was only that one. And Oksana forgave him. While she left her desk, picked up Malysh, and drove the dog to the center for a walk by the water, she felt light. Hopeful. Even in the parking lot, after she secured the leash and let Malysh out of the car, the city looked beautiful to her. The sun was bright, brilliant, playing across the dark panels of freshly washed hoods. In front of her, two elf-faced girls climbed into leather seats in a big car. Oksana believed the world might be wonderful.