“Oh,” Holly said, sagging a little with relief.
The phone call. Her iPhone ringing on the kitchen counter before Tatiana had accidentally thrown it across the house, before she’d touched the stove and burned her fingers. She and Tatiana were back to the banalities of phone calls. “That’s right,” Holly said. “I already forgot. The phone rang, didn’t it? I’d better see if that was Dad.”
She began to turn toward the door, but Tatty said to her, “It wasn’t Dad.”
“Well,” Holly said, “I need to check to make sure,” and she left her daughter sitting on the toilet with her Barbie bandages, and made her way quickly back to the dining room, the phone, the little billions of slivers of glass. Seeing those shimmering on the floor in the light from the picture window, Holly hoped that she’d remembered to recharge the battery on the handheld vacuum. Often that wasn’t something Holly remembered to do until the Cheerios had already been dumped on the floor, or something like this—like shattered glass—and the thing was dead in her hands.
She picked her iPhone up off the floor and looked at it, scrolled down through the recent calls.
Another Unavailable. It hadn’t been Eric who’d called.
Still, she should call her husband, shouldn’t she? She scrolled down her list of contacts until she found his name, and touched it with her index finger. She held the phone against her ear, where it felt warm, and imagined the vibration of it in Eric’s breast pocket. He wasn’t answering. Maybe he was already back in the car with his parents. Surely, if they were checking Gin into the hospital for the night, or anything serious like that, he would have called. The ringing went to what she thought at first was his voice mail:
Holly heard the double click that meant that no one was going to answer, that she was being passed on to a machine instead of her husband. But then, instead of a recording of Eric’s stiff business voice saying “This is Eric Clare, and I’m away from my desk at the moment . . . ,” there was—laughter.
A woman’s laughter.
(A very young woman? Or perhaps a child?)
The laughter was not shrill, or hysterical, but a kind of simple, mirthful, amused laughter—sounding close, and intimate, and familiar in her ear. Still, the sound of it, the surprise of it, made Holly gasp and hang up before she even realized she’d done it, and then she quickly put the phone down on the table, where she just looked at it, not understanding, shaking her head. And, then, looking at the phone, she saw that the photograph she used as her iPhone wallpaper had changed.
By itself?
The froth and glow of the waterfall, and Eric and Tatiana smiling before it, was gone. Now there was just an image of Tatiana. Close-up. Her nose, and her eyes.
Holly picked up the phone and looked more closely at the photograph.
Apparently something had happened to the phone in its flight and in its fall. Had it broken? Had it rearranged her personal settings? Was that how she’d reached a stranger instead of Eric—connecting to that girlish laughter instead of his voice mail?
Apparently.
And her wallpaper photograph had been replaced with this—a fragment of another photograph. Nose, eyes, a photograph of Tatiana, but—
No.
Holly looked more closely. It wasn’t a different photo. It was still the waterfall photograph, but zoomed in. The frame had narrowed so that the only part of the photograph that remained in view was this bit of Tatiana’s face—her nose, her eyes. God. Technology. Its quirks and mysteries. Holly was baffled, but she was glad that the phone still worked at least. She picked it up and tried Eric again, and this time he picked up on the first ring.
“Sweetheart,” Holly said to him, so grateful to hear his voice, to make this connection across the miles and through the blizzard. Being able to speak to him at that moment felt crazily almost as miraculous as having met him in this life at all. Having lived long enough to meet Eric, and to fall in love with him, and to bring Tatiana into their lives, and to become a family, as if there’d been no chance involved at all, as if it were fate—a fate full of near-misses and blessings and miraculous connections. “Are you okay, Eric? Is your mom okay?”
“I don’t—Holly,” he said. He sounded weary. He sighed. He said, “She’s confused, Holly. I mean, she’s really confused. She thinks she’s in Europe. She’s speaking French to the doctors, and when they don’t understand her she starts crying. She thinks they’re Germans.”
“Oh my God,” Holly said. “Oh, Eric.”
“And now Dad’s having trouble breathing. All the stress, of course. So, he’s in one room and Mom’s in the other room, and Tony and Jeff and I just keep moving from one to the other.”
“Your brothers are there?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought the blizzard—”
“Well, you know, it was an emergency. They got here. Where there’s a will, there’s—”
“I should be there, too,” Holly said. Her heart began to beat harder. He needed her. If his brothers could get to the hospital, she could have gotten there, too, and she hadn’t even tried!
“You most certainly should not be here, Holly,” Eric said. “The last thing I need right now is to have to worry about you and Tatty out on the roads in this. Please, please, don’t do anything like try to drive here, Holly. Just stay where you are.”
“Okay,” Holly said—and although she did still feel guilty, remiss, she realized that she was also relieved. Relieved that this was Eric’s problem, and his brothers’. Relieved that she could hang up the phone and simply wait for more news. Relieved that, truly, nothing at all was going to be required of her.
She talked to Eric for a little while longer about the awful doctors, the awful weather, the nature of Gramps’s chest pains. They talked about Jeff and Tony, and about how hard it had been for them to get to St. Joseph’s Mercy on the freeways. Eric asked about the Coxes and Thuy and Pearl, and Holly told him that they couldn’t make it through the blizzard, either. He asked what she and Tatty were doing, and Holly chose to say nothing about the burned fingers. There was nothing he could do for Tatty’s fingers now except worry. She said, “We’re fine. We’re just squabbling.”
“Don’t,” Eric said.
“Don’t what?” Holly asked.
“Don’t squabble with Tatty. She’s so excited about Christmas, Holly. She’s got something really special for you. You haven’t opened your presents yet?”
“No,” Holly said.
“Well, this is a big one. Tatty’s been working on it for—well, I shouldn’t have even said this much. But we shouldn’t have overslept, Holly. This is a big Christmas for Tatiana, I think. It’s the first year she really took charge of getting gifts for us on her own. It’s a kind of milestone.”
“Oh dear,” Holly said. How blind she’d been! How could Eric have known this, and so clearly, and not Holly? It explained everything! Poor Tatty! It wasn’t the gifts she was getting that she’d been disappointed about, it was the ones she was giving! “Oh God, Eric. Okay. I’m so glad you told me. Consider the squabbling a thing of the past. I’m going to go make it up to her right now. I love you, Eric.”
“I love you, too,” he said. “Tell Tatty I love her, too.”
“I will, of course. Of course I will. As soon as she wakes up.”
“She’s asleep?” he asked.
“Well, yes. She’s been sleeping a lot today.” Holly wasn’t sure why she was lying. She’d left Tatiana in the bathroom, wide awake, of course, with her Barbie-bandaged fingers. “But I’ll get her out of bed,” she said. “We’ll open a couple of presents without you if that’s okay.”
“I think that’s great,” Eric said.
They said their good-byes then, and when they were done Holly listened to the connection being severed, which was the sound of a very tiny ax felling a very thin-trunked tree.
HOLLY TOOK THE phone away from her ear and looked at the photograph there again.
Tatty.
Those
eyes.
It was as if the iPhone had decided that none of the rest of it mattered. Not the Jet-Black Rapunzel hair, not Eric, not the waterfall. Just Tatiana’s eyes.
It was eerie, really. How many other parts of the picture could have been singled out? A button? A bit of white froth? Tatiana’s perfect smile? Maybe, Holly thought, Steve Jobs had wired it this way, ingeniously arranged it so that even when your iPhone broke it did something to amuse and astonish you. “Tatty?” Holly called out. “Tatty, you should come and see this.”
“See what?” Tatty said, and Holly turned around to find her daughter standing behind her, looking over her shoulder at the iPhone in Holly’s hand.
“Oh,” Holly said. “There you are. Look. The phone must have been damaged, and now the only part left of that image of you and Daddy at the waterfall is your eyes.”
Tatty took the device from Holly’s hand, looked closely, and then she shook her head and laughed.
At first, Holly was just relieved to hear the sound of Tatiana’s laughter. The old Tatty, again! It sounded like the laughter that Tatty used to let loose at some funny cartoon on television, or at Trixie batting crazily at a peacock feather. It was the good old laughter of the preteen Tatty, laughing happily, unironically, at something funny, at something pleasing. Thank God she’s going to snap out of her funk, Holly thought. It had been far too long since Holly had heard that laughter. She hadn’t heard it in so long! In days! Weeks! Perhaps she hadn’t heard that delighted little laugh since—
No.
Holly took a step back to look at her daughter, and realized that she recognized that laugh—not from Tatty’s childhood, but from only moments ago. That had been the laughter on the other end of her iPhone when she’d misdialed Eric’s number, hadn’t it? That was the laughter she’d heard when she thought she was reaching Eric’s voice mail. That laughter had been this laughter: Tatty’s laughter!
Holly took the iPhone from her daughter’s hand carefully and said, “Something’s gone wrong with this phone, Tatty. This picture, for one thing, changing like that, and then when I called Daddy, I got a recording of your laughter instead of his voice mail.”
Tatiana was still smiling. She shrugged and said, “Oh, well. Who cares? Still works, right?”
“Right,” Holly said, looking at it, at her daughter’s eyes on the screen.
Tatiana glanced back down at the phone, too, and then she looked from Holly’s palm to the floor at her feet, at the place where the water glass had shattered, and said, “You’d either better put shoes on or sweep that up, Mom.”
Holly looked down, too. Tatiana was right, of course. Holly was still in her stocking feet. If she stepped on broken glass, she would most certainly be cut by it, and she did not want to add that to the events of what had turned out to be a very dangerous day! She looked at Tatiana’s feet then, to make sure that she, at least, was wearing shoes. She was. She was wearing unfamiliar little, black pointed shoes. Lace-up shoes with a low heel.
Vintage shoes? Junk shop shoes? Holly had never seen these shoes before, and if she had, she would have advised Tatiana to throw them out. They were very, very ugly shoes. Whatever material they were made of—some kind of material that might once have been shiny but was now very dull and scuffed—was cracked. Animal skin, she supposed, but not leather. And the laces almost appeared to be mildewed—stiff, ratty. Holly said, “Tatty, where did you get those shoes?”
Tatty looked down at her shoes, too. She laughed again, as if the shoes were a surprise to her as well, or as if they were a joke she might have been playing on her mother. She said, “I don’t know. They’re just shoes.”
Holly continued to consider the shoes, which looked like something Dorothy might have worn in The Wizard of Oz. They weren’t exactly Victorian, but a style fashioned after the styles of the Victorians—maybe in a place that had not been inhabited during the Victorian era, so that there was nothing left behind to compare them to. These were shoes that were utilitarian, but their maker had also attempted a quick stab at femininity—those pointy toes. It wasn’t exactly that they looked old, Holly realized. These shoes looked as if they’d simply been worn on a few very long hikes through mountains, or across snowy fields. They looked as though, perhaps, many different girls or women had worn them over the course of a very long, bad year. They looked, Holly realized, like Soviet shoes: like the kind of shoes the nurses at the orphanage might have worn if they hadn’t needed to wear flat canvas shoes as part of their uniform, or that the desperate-looking women Eric and Holly had seen around Oktyabrski would have been wearing, if Holly and Eric had bothered to go out into the streets and look at the shoes that the women in that town wore.
THE ONLY TIME that Eric and Holly had spent more than a necessary hour (walking back and forth from the hostel to the orphanage) on those streets of Oktyabrski, had been on December 26. After having forgotten to bring gifts with them from the States, Holly had insisted that they go shopping. She thought she might be able to find something for Baby Tatty, something for the nurses, and for Marina Valsilevna, the orphanage director. She’d been told by the other prospective parents, back at the hostel, that gifts and money to the workers there might help to encourage them to take particularly good care of your child between the first visit and the second—during those long, required weeks between your first trip to the orphanage to meet the baby and the second one, to claim your baby. These parents suggested that the nurses might be bribed, in effect, to be attentive during those months that were going to have to be spent half a world away.
One of the would-be fathers, a Canadian man, had told Holly, “I don’t want to scare you, but it’s crossed my mind that there’s not that much in it for them to take care of our kids once this first trip is over and the adoption’s under way. I mean, right now they’re dressing them up and all, trying to sell us on them. But once the show’s on the road—I mean, maybe they’ll figure, well, these kids are going off to live these rich North American lives, so we can neglect them in favor of the others.”
“Not that they seem to be lavishing them with attention at the moment,” Holly had said, and then had asked the Canadian man if he’d been, yet, into the wing with the older children—some of whom, in lieu of diapers, appeared to be spending the day on the floor, strapped to bedpans. And if that was happening in there, what in the world was going on behind the door they’d been forbidden to open?
“Well, it could be even worse, but those children aren’t my problem, so I’m just going to do what I can to make sure our baby is taken care of in our absence,” the Canadian had said, clearly annoyed at Holly’s interest in the welfare of children who would not be theirs. “Before me and my wife leave we’re going to give the nurses these.” He opened up a shoulder satchel and showed Holly that it was full of iPods.
“Do they have computers here?” she asked. “To use these with?”
The Canadian appeared annoyed by the question, and it crossed Holly’s mind that he hadn’t thought about that until she mentioned it.
Still, it would be the thought that counted, wouldn’t it?—along with the intimation that there would be more where that came from when they returned for the second time, if all was well while they were gone . . .
So Holly asked Eric to go into the town with her to see if there was anything worth buying for sale.
But they needed to enter only two or three stores to understand that there wasn’t:
In that town there were nothing but bars, food stores, rows and rows of barracks-like apartment complexes, and a sprawling smoke-cloaked factory, in which something no one could describe to them was being manufactured. And the orphanage. There was certainly no place to buy flowers, or chocolates, or even cooking sherry. There were, instead, shelves and shelves and shelves of vodka, ranging in price from thirty rubles to forty thousand—and Holly and Eric agreed that a bottle of vodka was not at all what they wanted to give to the employees of the orphanage where Tatiana would be spending the ne
xt three months without them.
And, unnervingly, despite the factory and the rows of apartments, all the available vodka and all the children who had been born and dropped off at the orphanage, there seemed to be very few people in the town. The only vehicles parked on the streets were a bus that seemed to be made mostly of rust and two Zaporozhets, which looked like toy cars on roller skates (but cared for, it seemed from their gleaming cleanliness, lovingly). There appeared to be no men at all in town—although the few women, mostly young, were wearing short skirts and panty hose in the freezing cold, and jackets with fur collars and cinched waists, clearly intended for show, not warmth. These young women had pale faces, wore bright red lipstick, did not look at Eric and Holly when they passed them within inches on the sidewalk.
Perhaps if she’d bothered to glance down at their feet that day, Holly thought now, she would have seen that they wore boots like these on Tatiana’s feet—boots that looked like they’d been made for institutional prostitutes, women who had a job to do, who needed to look as if they were sexual, but not as if they were glamorous, or spoiled, or used to bothering with fashionable, useless things. The kind of boots, perhaps, Tatiana’s first mother might have worn.
“THEY’RE AWFUL, TATTY,” Holly said. “Those shoes.”
“Why?” Tatty asked, looking down then, too, cocking her head a little, as if amused by what she was wearing on her feet.
“Well, first of all,” Holly said, “they’ve certainly seen better days.”
“Haven’t we all?” Tatty said. Again she laughed, and Holly looked from the shoes to Tatty’s face, and considered her daughter’s expression:
Was she being sarcastic?
It was hard to tell because Tatiana’s mood seemed so lightened from the one she’d been in only half an hour earlier. It was as if her daughter had come out of the bathroom with not only her blistered fingers bandaged, but also a new personality. It was like a metamorphosis—this shrugging, this laughter, this banter. Holly would have liked to have believed, as she had originally, that this was the old Tatty—but had Tatty ever been like this? Had she ever, really, been this lighthearted?