Mind of Winter

  Holly had looked up to the open door to find that an astonishing amount of light was pouring from a window, or from a great wall of windows, somewhere behind that nurse, and the nurse’s hair, pale and cut close to her head, was glowing like a halo. That nurse (whom they never saw again, although they asked to) had a cherubic face, a stunning smile—straight teeth and glistening lips. She could have stepped off a cloud or out of a movie screen, bearing this child. She could have passed for any number of supernatural beings—angel, fairy, goddess—or an actress hired to play the part of one that day. It was hard to look away from her face, to look at what she was holding in her arms.

  Eric always claimed that Tatty had been wrapped in a blue blanket, but Holly knew she hadn’t. Their daughter had been wrapped in a dirty-gray blanket, and it had looked to Holly as if the sun were trying to launder it, bleach it white, bless it. The sun was trying to make the baby shine. The sun wanted Holly to love the child, to take pity on her, to take her home. The sun couldn’t have known that no effort on its part was needed for that. Looking from the nurse’s face to the baby wrapped in gray in her arms, it was all Holly could do not to fall to her knees, not to cry aloud. Instead, she grabbed Eric so hard that, later, walking away from their first trip to the orphanage, they would laugh that she’d left him battered and bruised—and, in fact, she had. When Eric took off his shirt that night they saw that he had a purple mark in the shape of a small conch shell just above his elbow.

  When the nurse had stepped fully into the room, Holly stood, and the baby was placed in her arms.

  Holly took her daughter in her arms, and before she saw or felt or heard her, she loved her—as if there were an organ and a part of the brain that was love’s eye or nose or ear. The first sense. It had never been needed before. Now Holly realized that it was, in fact, the sharpest of her senses.

  The second sense: smell. Holly would always associate her daughter and her love for her daughter with that secondary sensory impression—the ripe, rich Allium sativum, muddy hoofprint of that clove in its torn papery wrapper around her neck, at her chest, between herself and her baby. And a dirty diaper. And the scent of sour milk and cereal soaked into the damp neckline of the ratty, tatty gown they’d dressed her in, as if to sell her to them—as if they’d need to be persuaded to snatch her up!—with a few faded daisies on it for good measure.

  And Holly remembered how, then, too, she’d wanted to write it down. She’d wanted to say something about it on a piece of paper before she lost the words. But, of course, there was no time then. Even in the bathroom after they’d had to return their daughter to that nurse and walk away, Holly couldn’t write it down. With her naked ass on the cold porcelain, fishing through her purse while her husband paced around outside the thin door, she couldn’t find a pen.

  NOW, SHE NEEDED to find a pen to write this down:

  Something had followed them home from Siberia.

  From the orphanage. Pokrovka Orphanage #2.

  Holly needed a pen and a half hour alone before the in-laws and the roast in the oven and the Coxes. God, the Coxes. Who would sit at the table waiting for her to entertain them. And their terrible son, who seemed to have been born without a soul. Holly had not wanted to write in so many weeks, months, years—and if she didn’t do it now, if she could not wake up fully and find a pen, if she did not have a half hour alone, it would pass, and perhaps the desire would never, ever, come back.

  She moved her hand over to Eric’s side of the bed, to the place she hoped to find empty, the place she needed to find vacant beside her, the sheets cool, Eric gone, so that she could have a few moments alone—

  But he was there, and Holly felt him twitch awake, and then Eric sat up so fast the headboard slammed against the wall behind him, and Holly was fully awake then, too, realizing that there was far too much light in the bedroom, and Eric, realizing it, too, was out of bed fast, standing over her, shouting, “Jesus Christ. We overslept. Fuck. It’s ten thirty. My parents must already be sitting at the fucking airport, and the fucking Coxes will be here in an hour. Where in the hell is Tatiana? Why didn’t she wake us up? Jesus Christ. Holly. I gotta go!”

  Then he was gone:

  Holly had barely put her feet on the floor when she heard the sound of Eric’s car in the garage, and the garage door opening. Eric was not the kind of man to squeal his tires on the way out of the driveway, but nevertheless he did, and Holly heard it for what it was—the implication of blame. Of course. Of course if his parents were already waiting at the airport, worried or sick or complaining, it would somehow be her fault. When Eric’s siblings arrived later they would say, “Why in the world was Eric late to get Mom and Dad?”—as if the question were the answer because both were directed at Holly.

  And, as Eric had said, where the hell was Tatiana? Could she still be asleep? Had Holly peeked into her daughter’s room only an hour or two ago (pale arm, pale coverlet?) or had that been a dream? Was it before or after that when she’d woken, knowing that something had followed them—

  Holly still felt the need to write it down, and felt surprised and pleased that she still felt the need. But what, exactly, had she wanted to write down? That something had returned from Siberia with them? That it had somehow followed them? Was that the explanation she’d woken up with, the Thing that accounted for the unexplained tragedies of the last thirteen years?

  And what were those? Nothing! They were all still alive, after all, weren’t they? What else was there, then, beyond the ordinary misfortunes one suffers in thirteen years in a typical American town? The average calamities of a normal family? There’d been a great many more joys than sorrows in these thirteen years!

  Sure, she’d had her notebook and her laptop stolen. But the thief who’d snatched her purse at the coffee shop hadn’t been after her poems. He’d been after her cash. Purse snatching happened to a lot of women who left their purses on their tables when they got up to refill their coffee cups. And how stupid had it been to leave a laptop (hard drive not backed up!) in a big-city hotel and expect it to be safe in a safe?

  And the rest of it? The housekeeper? Kay’s daughter’s accident? The cat had suffered the usual death of a domesticated animal, slipping out the door and dashing into the road. And the hen, Sally. What did they expect? Holly and Eric had known nothing about chickens and their habits when they’d gotten them. It was something the whole neighborhood had figured out at the same time when their town full of clueless academics and software company employees had passed the ordinance allowing backyard chickens.

  And the changes to her marriage? Well, she and Eric were, simply, older. Holly sometimes forgot that. Instead of looking hard at Eric’s face, or her own in the mirror, on a daily basis, Holly had gotten used to looking, every morning, into the faces from the past that were framed on the wall in the hallway outside the bathroom:

  She and Eric thirteen years earlier, standing with their backs to the bare institutional wall of the Pokrovka Orphanage #2, while, in Holly’s arms, the wide-eyed Baby Tatty looked up into her new mother’s eyes. In this photograph, each of their images held the suggestion of who, in thirteen years, they would be. Eric’s red hair was already a little gray at the temples, and his fitness, his physique (all that running and basketball: he’d been only forty-two then) was already beginning to diminish a little with his bad knee. His torso looked thin under his white shirt, and it was easy to imagine that the man in this photograph would grow even thinner as he aged instead of fatter.

  And herself. Holly had been thirty-three, and her hair was still naturally blond. She hadn’t yet needed glasses, really (or had still been too vain to wear them), and although she, too, had weighed more then than she did now, that weight had been arranged differently on her. She’d worn her soft padding in other places.

  And Baby Tatty already had the gaze that made her Tatiana. Those eyes were fiercely black, and her hair was already longer than Holly had ever seen on such a young child. In the Pokrovka Orphanage #2
the nurses had called her Jet-Black Rapunzel. Anyone looking at the photograph framed and nailed up in the hallway would have known that she’d become what she was now—a long-legged teenage beauty, still with that silken hair around her shoulders, and those dark eyes.

  “Tatiana?” Holly called as she stepped into the hallway, rubbing her forehead. It was, she realized, true. She had a hangover. Not a serious one—but she feared that last rum and eggnog might haunt her all day.

  “Tatiana?” she called out again. There was no answer. Could Tatiana have left the house? But where, why? If not, she couldn’t still be asleep. Now, she would have to have been willfully determined to make no sound in response to Holly’s calling her—which would have been some kind of punishment, perhaps, for Holly, for sleeping. Holly rubbed her eyes with a thumb and forefinger, sighed, readied herself to call out to her daughter again and then gasped, startled nearly to screaming when she found her daughter only inches away, staring at her, disapprovingly it seemed, and standing completely still in the bedroom’s threshold. “Tatty, Jesus,” Holly said. It took her a second to catch her breath. “You scared me. How long have you been standing there?”

  “Merry Christmas,” Tatiana said. “Sheesh. I thought you and Daddy were going to sleep until New Year’s Eve.” She sighed that dramatic teenager sigh she’d perfected in the last year—a sigh that managed to convey in a single breath both bitterness and detachment, a sound that never failed to remind Holly of the snow in Siberia. Holly had expected that snow to accumulate, as it did in the northern Michigan of her childhood, and to organize itself into banks and walls. But it didn’t. It just drifted. Endless drifting. There was nothing, it seemed, that could stop it. It was snow, it was solid, it could be seen, but it was one with the wind. Exactly like that teenage-girl sigh.

  “We were tired,” Holly said, trying not to sound overly apologetic. Why should she be?

  “I guess so,” Tatty said.

  “I got up a couple of hours ago, and you were dead asleep, so I went back to bed.”

  “I wasn’t asleep,” Tatty said. “I haven’t been asleep for hours. You know that.”

  “Well, you sure looked asleep.” Always an argument, Holly thought. She passed by her daughter in the doorway, smelled mint on her, and tea tree oil shampoo, and L’Occitane Verbena, two bottles of which they’d bought at the mall because Tatty didn’t want to share a bottle with Holly, although Holly couldn’t wear it anyway, as it turned out. It gave her a headache. She added verbena to the list of flowers she couldn’t wear the scent of for more than ten minutes without feeling sick—lily of the valley, magnolia, gardenia.

  “Are we going to have breakfast? So we’re not opening gifts? Did Daddy go to the airport already? Wasn’t he supposed to take me?” Hostile, rhetorical questions. Tatty wasn’t whining. The tone was reproachful, challenging.

  “Look,” Holly said, turning around at the kitchen island, trying not to sound as defensive as she felt. “Why didn’t you just wake us up if you’ve been so anxious for all these things? Daddy flew out the door because Gin and Gramps are probably already at luggage claim. And I’ve got ten million things to do. Can’t you eat a bowl of cereal or something?”

  “What about presents?”

  Holly parted her lips, shook her head, exhaled, turned to the coffeepot, punched the blue eye to turn it back on—the coffee had been set to brew at 7 a.m., and had long since grown cold in the glass decanter.

  “Presents will have to wait until Daddy gets back. You know what your presents are anyway.”

  Tatiana turned then, and headed back toward her room. Her white tank top was almost too bright to look at with all her dark hair between her shoulder blades, and her hips swayed, and her white yoga pants were so high and tight between her legs it was almost obscene. The cheeks of her sweet baby bottom. Pulling against her crotch. Holly hated thinking what a man would think, looking at that beautiful bottom. And then she remembered, with the swiftness of a slap, that although her daughter might pretend to be, and look like, a woman now, she was, truly, just a child. And it was Christmas. Holly should have set an alarm. “Sweetheart,” she called after Tatty, softening, sorry, but her daughter was already closing the bedroom door behind her.

  IT HAD BEEN Christmas, too, the first time they went to Siberia, first saw Tatty, although, after all their exhaustion and elation and the weeks of preparation for their travels, Eric and Holly had completely forgotten about the holiday, or the significance of arriving at the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 for the first time on the morning of December 25.

  But there were no signs of Christmas at the orphanage that day, since, for the Russians, Orthodox Christmas was still thirteen days away. Eric and Holly might have forgotten about it entirely, themselves, if it hadn’t been for the other American couple staying at the hostel run by the orphanage. That couple had thought to bring gifts for their new baby—blankets and booties wrapped in green and red paper—and fancy soaps and chocolates and silk scarves for the nurses. It was, Holly realized, exactly what they should have done themselves, but by then it was too late. They were seven thousand miles away from Macy’s.

  “It’s okay,” the other American mother-to-be said to Holly. “They don’t really do Santa here or anything. Mostly they celebrate New Year’s, not Christmas. Just a lot of drinking. No one is expecting a present.”

  But arriving at the orphanage bearing not a single gift for their child or her caretakers on December 25 mattered to Holly. Terribly. Unforgettably. Her first failure as a mother. What difference did it make if she was the only one who knew or cared about it? She was the only one who needed to know or care.

  HOLLY LOOKED TO the tree. Tatty must have plugged it in. The miniature lights glowed dimly, like electrical pencil tips, in the brightness pouring in through the picture window. Those lights looked futile to Holly—not really lights in all this brightness. Just little nubs of effort. Overly effortful. She wanted to unplug them again, until later, when the darkness gave them some reason for being lit, but she didn’t, because Tatty wanted them on.

  Tatty was excited, it seemed, for Christmas, although that was hard for Holly to appreciate. These days her daughter was so rarely excitable about anything except Tommy, being at that age where, if she’d been offered a million dollars, she would simply roll her eyes and languidly offer up her hand to take it. She’d managed to infuriate Holly the other day by saying “one of the reasons” she’d been “dreading Christmas” was that Tommy and his father would be in Jackson Hole the entire week. “No Tommy. Tommy’s my Jesus Christ.”

  “Tatty,” Holly had said. “Don’t be blasphemous.”

  “Oh. Okay,” Tatty said, and then pretended to hold a joint to her lips and inhale.

  Holly had turned her back on her daughter fast.

  But despite the fact that Eric and Holly had still been asleep, Tatty must have gotten out of bed and come to the living room to plug in the Christmas tree lights. Like a little girl again. And her disappointment that Eric was already gone indicated that she’d wanted to open her presents, as they’d always done, first thing on Christmas morning, before the relatives had to be picked up and the guests arrived—although this year there were no surprises for Tatiana under the tree. She knew perfectly well what her presents were, having been careful to write down the specifics (even with the ISBN numbers for some of them!) so that Holly could order them off the Internet.

  Still, Tatty had woken up before Holly and Eric, and she’d come out here, alone, to turn on the Christmas tree lights, as if, despite her teenage “dread” of family and holidays and Tommy out of town, she was excited about Christmas.

  Holly went to her daughter’s closed bedroom door and said, “Honey? Tatty?”

  No answer. Of course. There was never any answer at first, any longer, when Holly came calling. These days Tatty liked to make her mother work for it.

  “Tatty. Can you open the door?”

  There was the sound of her daughter’s chair legs scraping
against the wood floors. She must have been pushing herself back from her desk, away from her computer. It was such a familiar sound to Holly that she sometimes heard it in her imagination when her daughter wasn’t even in the house.

  “The door’s not locked,” Tatiana said loudly enough for Holly to hear her but not so loud it would sound like Tatiana was actually inviting her mother in. It was intended to sound begrudging, and also exasperated, indicating that Holly should know full well that the door wasn’t locked. It was what she always said when Holly knocked on her door. Tatty made a point of insisting that she didn’t lock her bedroom door—that she did not now, nor had she ever, nor would she ever have a reason to lock her bedroom door—ever since Holly had secured a hook and eye to the door and jamb so that her daughter could be assured of privacy.

  “Be assured of privacy?” Tatty had said, sounding affronted, when Holly had installed the lock. “Huh?”

  “Well,” Holly had said. “When I was your age I was always worried that someone would walk in on me in my bedroom, so I wanted to make sure you felt that your privacy was being respected in our house.”

  “Uh, gosh, thanks,” Tatty had said, narrowing her eyes and shaking her head. “And what would I be doing in here that I’d need privacy for, Mom?”

  Holly had actually flushed then, as if some dirty thought she’d had was being read aloud. She shrugged. She said, “I don’t know. That’s the point! Now you can lock your door so Daddy and I can’t barge in.”

  Tatiana had turned her back to her mother, returning to her computer, the screen of which displayed a half-written paper on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—an amendment so dull and obscure that Tatiana had been given extra credit for being willing to take it on.