The detective evaluated her, then waved in dismissal toward the street. A police car, engine humming, sat at the curb. “How long have you been here?”
“Maybe an hour.”
“Have you seen anyone suspicious?”
“I haven’t seen anyone. I’ve seen you, that’s all.”
“No one else approached you? No man in a dark car?” Olya shook her head. “Don’t roll your eyes while I ask you questions,” the detective said.
“I didn’t.” It felt surprisingly good to lie to a stranger.
“I hope you understand the risk of being out here by yourself.”
“Oh, I’m not,” Olya said. She smiled up at him. “My mother just got out of work. She’s coming to get me—she should be here any minute.” On her lap, under her folded hands, her phone vibrated. Olya started. “That’s actually her calling right now.”
The detective shifted his feet. Though his glasses and clothes made him look authoritative, his face behind them was smooth, young. He pulled a business card from his back pocket and handed it to her: LT. NIKOLAI DANILOVICH RYAKHOVSKY. A number below and a shield embossed in the corner. “Call if there’s anything you want to tell me,” he said. “And let your mother know when she arrives that this is no place to leave a little girl.”
Nodding, Olya lifted the phone to her ear. “Hi, Mama. Yeah? Soon? Great.” She watched the detective leave, rocks shifting under his weight. The phone kept vibrating against her cheekbone.
After the detective climbed into his car, Olya lay back down. She looked at the glowing screen. One missed call from Diana. Unlocking her phone, Olya cleared the notification, opened their text message thread, and waited for Diana’s explanation to arrive. She pictured its letters, its sloppy dashes. Nothing appeared. She locked her screen again.
To tell the truth, Olya did not want to call back.
Olya all alone out here. She liked it more than she knew she would.
In the sunset, the pebbles on the shore shifted their color from black and gray to honey. Amber. They were brightening. Soon the stones would glow, and the water in the bay was going to turn pink and orange. Spectacular in the city center, where people feared to have their pretty daughters go.
When Olya turned her head on the bench slats, electric white and yellow lines appeared in her peripheral vision. Her hair had caught the light. Her jacket, too, was sun-soaked. Saturated.
Golden Olya. She concentrated on that light in the air. Even if Diana came to the apartment to explain things or arrived at school with a written apology from Valentina Nikolaevna, or if Olya’s mother, home next week, announced she found a new job, well salaried, teaching grammar in the university, so she would never have to leave for long again, or if the kidnapped girls returned, or if the police stopped patrolling, or if Petropavlovsk went back to normal…even if all of that happened, Olya wouldn’t tell them how the colors changed here. She would share nothing. They would never find out they missed the most beautiful day of autumn, while Olya, alone, had been in its very center.
How good Olya would feel to keep this secret. How safe it was inside herself.
OCTOBER
“We forgot the tent,” Max said, turning to Katya. The beam of her flashlight flattened his features. His face was a white mask of distress. The forest around them was black, because they’d left Petropavlovsk so late—his last-minute packing, his bad directions. His fault.
In the harsh light, he was nearly not beautiful anymore. Cheekbones erased, chin cleft illuminated, lips parted, he looked wide-eyed into the glare. Katya and Max had been together since August and as of September were officially in love. Yet the tent. Disgust rippled through her. “You’re not serious,” she said. She caught the tail of her repulsion before it passed; she had to hold on to it, a snake in the hand, otherwise she would forgive him too soon.
“It’s not here.”
Katya handed him the flashlight and started to dig through the trunk. Shadows lengthened and contracted against their things: sacks of food, sleeping bags, two foam mats. A folded tarp to line the tent floor. Loose towels for the hot springs, a couple folding chairs, rolled trash bags that unraveled as she shoved them. Katya should have packed the car herself, instead of watching his body flex in the rearview mirror this evening. Pots clanked somewhere deep in the mess.
“Max!” she said. “How!”
“We can sleep outside,” he said. “It’s not that cold.” She stared back at his outline above the circle of light. “We can sleep in the car,” he said.
“Magnificent.” We forgot, he said, we, as if they together kept one tent in one closet of one shared home. As if they jointly made these mishaps. As if she had not needed to leave the port early this afternoon, drive twenty minutes south through the city to shower and change at her own place, drive thirty-five minutes north to get to his apartment complex on time, then wait eighteen long minutes in his parking lot for him to come out.
He’d told her earlier in the week he would bring his tent. His car, a dinky Nissan, didn’t have four-wheel drive, so they were taking hers, and he had loaded such a stack of stuff into the trunk—enough to merit a second run up to his apartment, a return trip with his arms full—that Katya told herself he had it handled. Instead of checking she tuned her car radio to local news of a shop robbery, an approaching cyclone, another call for those two little girls. She gripped her steering wheel. Once Max finally climbed into the passenger seat, she said, “That’s everything?”
Nodding, he leaned to kiss her. “Let’s get going. Take me away,” he said then. She checked the time (forty-one minutes late) and shifted into reverse.
Now they were going to spend the night in her mini SUV. Dependable as the Suzuki was, bringing them these four hours north of the city over roads that turned from asphalt to gravel to dirt, it made terrible sleeping quarters. Two doors, two narrow rows of seats, no legroom. The gearshift would separate them from each other. Neither of them would have space to lie down.
Katya sighed and Max’s shoulders bowed in response. She wanted to touch those shoulders. “It’s okay,” she said. Her disgust slithered off to wait for his next error. “It’s all right, bear cub, it happens. Would you gather us some wood?”
Once the flashlight was off bobbing between trees, Katya moved her car over the flattened patch of weeds where a tent was meant to be staked. The mistake had been hers in not asking earlier…next time they’d do better. Max was simply the sort of person, like so many others, whom she had to supervise.
Soil shifted under her tires. She didn’t turn the headlights back on. Slowly, her eyes were adjusting to the dark. She had visited these woods as a child, and though she must be seeing two decades of growth, the birch trees in the starlight looked to her exactly as they had when she was a girclass="underline" aged and grand and magical. The world outside had steadily warped, become less predictable and more dangerous, while spots like this were protected. Here, there was no radio news, no city stresses, no schedule to disrupt. The tent had served as the last opportunity for disappointment. There was no reason left to get worked up. Katya had to remember that.
When she opened the door, her keys chimed in the ignition. She pulled them out and the nighttime rushed in. Bats chirping, insects whirring. Dry leaves brushing against each other at the tops of the trees. Max, far in the woods, cracking branches for their fire. The steady waterfall noise of the hot springs.