NOVEMBER
There was a blister on Valentina Nikolaevna’s chest that never healed. Dark, it rested four centimeters below her clavicle, on the freckled plain of skin exposed by low collars. It had started as a spot, and then the spot swelled, popped, scabbed over, and continued to grow. Under the skin was hard with blood.
Valentina told herself the blister would fade in its own time. After every shower, she covered it with a small adhesive bandage. The blister didn’t hurt, but the look of the thing, a bodily purple when exposed, unsettled her. During the first week or two she wore the bandage, a few people asked what happened, but once a month had passed, nobody noticed it anymore. That fabric strip became her affectation—like wearing a silly hat or whistling. Her daughter ignored it. Not even her husband was bothered as they moved past each other on their paths through the house.
She believed the spot came from working outside. Maybe she’d pinched her skin leaning over a shovel. After Diana was born, Valentina had encouraged her husband to spend as much time as possible at their dacha all together; those two little girls’ abduction in August only emphasized the point she had been making to him for more than a decade. Family, she told him, over everything. A child raised in a close and loving family would grow up safe and healthy. Just look at the alternative—parents neglecting their duties, children wandering the city center, elementary school students vanishing. Now Valentina made sure that every weekend was reserved for the three of them. Her husband grumped over the forty-minute drive out to the countryside, and Diana, ever more teenage, got sullen, but Valentina would not have it any other way. She tended her garden there in satisfaction. Afterward, she always discovered some new scratch or bruise or scab. Wonderful as keeping a place outside Petropavlovsk was, the dacha held its risks, too: Valentina got to have her own space, her own chunk of hardened soil, along with all the wounds and inconveniences that gave. Only in late fall, when her vegetables were buried under snow, did Valentina look up from the sink in her office’s bathroom and really notice the humped bandage in the mirror. She counted on wet fingers. She had been putting that strip on daily since April, the better part of a year.
At forty-one, Valentina was far from old, but she was not unused to the peculiarities of the body. Her wrists were weaker these days. Her leg hair was lighter, thinner. If she ate sweets, her stomach cramped—the other women in the school office made a joke of offering her chocolates during their breaks for tea, and Valentina shook her head in wider swings every time. She and her husband, who had maintained a good distance from each other even as newlyweds, entirely fell off having sex a few years before, and she had seen her breasts deflate as if in answer.
Still, she had remained confident. Watchful of budgets at work and Diana’s school assignments at home. Valentina prided herself on taking care of her domains: the garden, the kitchen, the school office’s file cabinets. Certainly her own skin, she would have said. The reflection of this brown and purple circle made her fear all her competencies were about to disappear.
Adding up the months shook her. That Friday at lunch she finally went to the doctor. He leaned over her chest to study the mark: high as a knuckle, hard as a screw. The blister was small enough to fit under her bandage, but not as small as it once had been. “This is serious,” he said.
She raised her fingers to the top of her sternum. She had come to his office for a tidier answer than that. “How serious?”
“You’ll have to go to the hospital.” She hardly knew this doctor—she had seen him three years earlier, for a tetanus shot after she stepped on a hand rake. He had only just received his degree then. She chose this clinic because it was private and so offered a class of service, prompt, discreet, that she admired. On both that visit and this one, she hadn’t spent more than ten minutes in the waiting room. She hadn’t told anyone else that she was coming in today because she expected to make it back before the end of her lunch break.
“Why?” she said. “It’s just a blister—can’t you take care of it here?”
The doctor stepped away. He had given no sign of remembering her when he first entered the room. He turned toward her file. “We’re not equipped,” he said. “You’ve got to have it out as soon as possible. We’ll call the hospital and you’ll head over there straightaway.”
Valentina collected her things, followed him out to the front desk, and paid her bill. The girl at the desk took her cash and got on the phone. Valentina no longer had her bandage on. The blister, which for months had sat uncomplainingly over one rib, felt hot. She touched the skin around it but not the thing itself. It might have opened again but she was afraid to look down and check. Hanging up, the girl nodded at the doctor. The girl’s face was rude, slack, careless. “Fine,” the doctor said. “Go on, they’re expecting you.”
The walk across the parking lot left Valentina’s eyes sore from snow brightness. Wet flakes rushed toward her car. She let the engine warm and scrolled through her phone past her husband’s name. What comfort could he give her? He was no authority. Instead she called the school to say she would be out for the rest of the day.
“Is everything all right?” her colleague asked.
“It’s nothing,” Valentina said. Her voice was steady enough to convince even herself.
“Well, when you do get back, Lieutenant Ryakhovsky wants you to call him.”
Valentina straightened. “Did he come in again while I was gone?”
“No. He called.”
“Did he say anything about the Golosovskaya girls’ father?”
“No.”
Snow was piling up on Valentina’s windshield. She flicked the wiper switch. “Try harder to remember,” she said, as crisp as she could manage.
“I do remember,” her colleague said. “The whole thing was very memorable. He asked you to call and then he hung up.”
Valentina raised her hand toward her blister before gripping the steering wheel instead. This was exactly what she had feared—she allowed one disruption, a bandage removed, and her whole life crumbled after. She was missing important calls at work and allowing the younger women there to speak disrespectfully to her. She would have to discuss it with the principal when she returned.
“I suppose if there were any urgent matter the detective would ask for my cell number,” Valentina said. “So I’ll deal with it on Monday.”
Her colleague wished her a good weekend and hung up.
Valentina shifted into gear, rolled into the wet lines made by other people’s tires, and started to climb the hill that would bring her to the regional hospital. She would wrap this up then go back to her routine. Nothing to worry about, she told herself—just a chilly day, a task pending, a quick doctor’s visit.