Olya should have kept her tongue behind her teeth. But she asked, “Weren’t the natives always here?”
Valentina Nikolaevna’s face, the same oval as her daughter’s, tipped up toward the screen. She wore mascara to make her eyes look more alive. “They used to stay in the villages where they belong.”
The sisters were last seen in the center, the reporter repeated, which meant nothing in a city of two hundred thousand people and a peninsula twelve hundred kilometers long. These warnings had already faded to background noise. When the missing girls’ mother appeared on-screen, Valentina Nikolaevna said, “There she is.” She pressed her manicured hand between Olya’s and Diana’s place mats to make sure she had their attention. “It’s awful, isn’t it? Tragedy. That poor woman…it’s only her, no husband, and she works all the time. I read in the younger one’s class records that she didn’t come a single time to meet our teachers.” She glanced at Olya then lifted her chin. “No father, and the mother gone. That’s how such situations happen.”
And Olya did want to say something then, to say how dare you or shut up or I know you’re talking about me, but she didn’t try. Diana would not permit it. Instead Olya stirred the soup in her bowl. Valentina Nikolaevna left her job every day at three; she sat in her renovated kitchen, with her dumb husband stuck at his research in the volcanological institute uphill, and made up her mind that Olya had a flawed family structure—because Olya’s mother had a skill, because she had to travel, because they didn’t have the money to hang around painting their lashes and watching the evening news and fretting over two random little girls.
Olya’s apartment was different. Olya’s mother was fun. When home, Olya’s mother took the best clothes—a Red Army garrison cap, a silk robe bought in Kyoto during student months studying abroad, a leather pencil skirt—out of her closet for the girls to try on. If another friend followed Olya and Diana over, Olya’s mother greeted them in Japanese. Her cheeks rose as she spoke, smiling but trying to hide her smile, so Olya always associated the language’s swinging sounds with her mother’s flickering happiness. A couple months ago, Diana, full of phrases she learned from anime, tried to answer, and Olya’s mother propped one hand on her hip and chattered away. Diana tried for ten seconds to look like she understood. Then her mouth stretched in distress. Olya’s mother smiled and said, “I’m joking, sunshine.”
Silly and clever and trusting and fun. Olya could not ruin that by calling her mother now.
She crouched and hid her face in her elbow. On the other side of the street, trees rustled. Wind was passing through the gully. Cars kept going carelessly by.
Diana was Olya’s friend. Her best friend. They had known each other since the first year of school. No matter how odd Diana could be, distant in one second and overeager the next, Olya loved her, and for all Olya’s rattiness, her fidgeting during lessons, the sharp things she said sometimes to their classmates, Diana loved her back. Diana used to sleep over when Olya’s mother was out of town. She combed out Olya’s hair and braided it into one brown tail that became skinny as a chewed-up pencil at the end. Every so often she borrowed Olya’s T-shirts to wear to school, the less laundered the better, because she enjoyed having their intimacy pressed against her back—and Olya did not influence her to do those things. Diana tried hard with Olya for the same reasons Olya did with her: out of history, out of desire, out of care.
The sleeve of Olya’s jacket was warm from tears. When she straightened out her arm, she found a starburst pattern in the crook of her elbow, the folded place where the fabric had stayed dry.
She stood and texted Diana again. Can you talk? Watched the screen. No response.
Even if Diana were allowed to text right now, she wouldn’t have anything new to say. Another excuse. The missing girls, Olya told her at least once a week, had nothing to do with them: they were little kids, bobbleheaded, the older barely into middle school.
After their last class today, when Olya mentioned going to the city center, Diana had brought them up again. As if that place were responsible for their absence. Olya said, “Can’t you just call home and ask if you can go?” So while the other kids were shoving toward the street, while the teachers were shouting at everyone’s backs, Diana said into her cell, “Okay, Mama. I know she is. I will.”
Diana hung up and Olya said, “You didn’t even try.” Diana shook her head. “I tried,” she said, and Olya said, “You didn’t.” Diana dipped her head so her pupils were covered by blond fringe. She looked albino in those moments. “She told me she doesn’t want us going there. I listen when people tell me what to do,” Diana said. The I was made to sound like an accusation.
I listen, Olya had not said. Olya was an excellent listener.
For example, Olya heard the truth behind what Valentina Nikolaevna was saying. That the missing girls were strangers—they didn’t matter. That Valentina Nikolaevna just hated Olya, hated her mother, for no reason, because they were brave enough to survive on their own.
Another bus chugged to a stop in front of Olya. The wooden board propped in its front window announced its route: this one went not back to Olya’s apartment but toward the other end of the city, the repair yard district and Zavoyko. She touched the pass in her pocket. She could get on it. She could do anything she wanted. She was alone.
So she did. The bus took her down past the police station, the hospital, the lines of flower stands and bootleg DVD vendors, the brand-new grocery store with its apples imported from New Zealand, the lower campus of the pedagogical university. Pressed on all sides by grown-ups, Olya held on to a hanging strap. It was too crowded to take out her phone so she imagined the picture instead. Diana didn’t look good in it. Rounded shoulders and high-contrast whiteheads. A classmate tipping into the frame with her skirt riding up one leg. All of them shiny from the flash.
An old lady down the aisle was staring at Olya. Probably thinking about Olya’s so-called frightening behavior. Olya shook her head so tangles fell forward and hid her face.
When the bus pulled over next, Olya got out, elbowing against late commuters. She emerged from their bodies to find the city center still busy. There was the statue of Lenin, his jacket billowing out and high school boys on their bikes around his feet. The wide municipal building, the brilliant burning hills. The volcano—only its peak was visible from here. To Olya’s right, a pebbled beach sloped into the bay. St. Nicholas Hill stood to the side. Car exhaust mixed with the smells of grease and salt water. The missing sisters had been imbeciles to get themselves lost from this place.
Olya checked her wallet and turned toward the food stands.
“I have eighty-six rubles,” she told a vendor, who nodded toward the posted price list. “Can I get a hot dog, though?”
“That’s a hundred and ten.”