Mind of Winter (24 page)

She had just kept walking, while holding the smooth stones between her palate and her tongue. They comforted her. They tasted rusty, like lake water, but also like blood. And she liked the way their cold lifelessness seemed to warm and soften as she sucked. After a while, Holly had tucked the stones side by side beneath her tongue.

They were her ovaries, she thought, crazily, but somehow certainly. They were her ovaries returned to her! Her ovaries had washed up here from wherever it was the surgeon had tossed them when he’d plucked them out of her. And now they were back inside the soft fleshy tissue of her. She imagined that she felt them throbbing. She imagined she felt them breathing, almost, as if they had gills. She imagined that they were attaching themselves to her again. Eventually, Holly thought, she could swallow them and they would come to life inside her. They would sprout blood vessels, attach themselves back to her, disease-free.

She’d still been weak from the surgeries, Holly knew, that day. Surely that was the reason for such thinking. There’d been some complications, additional surgeries needed, and that had been the first real walk into the world Holly had been able to take alone for months. She’d not been right. After she spat the stones out, she gagged, and then vomited on the sand.

HOLLY TOOK HER
knuckles out of her mouth and said, looking up from where she sat in the hallway to her daughter’s bedroom door, “Are you asleep in there, Tatty?” She said it softly, not really having meant for Tatty to hear. If Tatty was sleeping in there, she should just be allowed to sleep. Tatty was tired. Tatty was hungry. Soon Eric would be home. He could talk to Tatty. He could talk to them both.

But Tatty did hear:

A few quiet seconds went by before, from her bedroom, there was an angry shriek—sounding part grief, part frustration—and a sound like a fist punching the headboard of the bed, and then Tatty screaming, “Go away! Leave me the fuck alone! That’s what you do best!”

Holly stood quickly and, to steady herself, put one hand against the wall, palm laid flat between two framed photographs. She took a breath. She looked into one of the photographs. In it, Tatiana had her arms around Eric’s neck. They were smiling. Behind them, a green riverbank. They were standing on the deck of a paddleboat floating down the Mississippi River. It had been a summer vacation, a family road trip they’d taken when Tatty was eleven. Holly had wanted to show her America! She’d wanted to show her Russian daughter America—as if, somehow, Tatty needed to see this country more than any other midwestern child needed to see this country!

But Tatiana wasn’t like those other midwestern children, whose Americanness was utterly unremarkable. Unlike them, Tatiana might so easily still be in Siberia—or somewhere close to Siberia, not even Siberia! The nurses had said they couldn’t be certain that her biological family was not from Kazakhstan, or even Outer Mongolia. They could have been northerners. Migrants. There were still nomadic tribes from that area who made their way south in the early summer—the time of year when Tatiana would have been born—for work, or with herds of animals. The woman, or girl, who gave birth to Tatiana could have come from the north, given birth in Siberia, and returned, leaving Tatiana behind.

But she could just as easily have taken Tatty back with her. Or stayed in Siberia to raise her baby. And, in that case, whatever concrete apartment block, or isolated wooden farmhouse, or yurt that mother was living in would be Tatiana’s home now.

Eric always said, “We’ll take her back someday. We’ll travel all around the area. Maybe we can take the Trans-Siberian Railway, and—”

“Maybe,” Holly would say, pretending. But she would
never
do such a thing! Tatiana should never see that place! Holly never forgot the nurses urging her to name the baby Sally, or Bonnie (“Bonnie and Clyde, right?”) or
she will be back.
Holly had known all along, hadn’t she, that they were right?

“Maybe,” Holly would say. “But in the meantime, Tatiana needs to see the United States. It’s more hers than ours.”

Eric hadn’t asked Holly what she meant by that, and Holly couldn’t have explained it if he had.

Now Holly looked from the paddleboat snapshot on the wall to the photograph on the other side of her palm:

In this one Tatiana wore a reindeer-fur hat that Holly had bought for her off the Internet, imported from the Buryatia Republic. Tatty smiled thoughtfully in this photograph, looking like a very typical American girl, but with something ineffably exotic about her—some quality of her elegant face that was brought out by the fur hat and its implications of a vast, snowy continent far away, and long-lost blood relatives who may or may not have been wondering, at that very moment, what had happened to this little girl they had given away.

And they could never have guessed, those long-lost blood relatives, what had happened to that little girl.

How could they possibly have pictured a room like Tatiana’s? The shelves of Harry Potter books and
Little House on the Prairie
. The iMac and iPod and iPad. The bin of stuffed animals, and the closet full of clean clothes, and the cabinet full of Tatty’s Russian nesting doll collection, and all those lacquered boxes with Russian fairy-tale scenes painted on them?

No. Only the child herself, perhaps, would have been recognizable. The Jet-Black Rapunzel hair. The enormous dark eyes.

“That’s our child!” they might have cried out, seeing her. “Sally! Our Sally!”

“PLEASE, SWEETHEART,” HOLLY
said, taking her hand away from the place where it rested between those two photographs on the wall.

Now Tatty was quiet again in her room:

Hush, hush, little fish. Hush, hush, little fish. We are here on earth to make a wish. We close our eyes, and then we start, to make a wish with all our heart. . . .

Holly tiptoed away from the door, and then she made her way back to the kitchen.

There, the beef in its roasting pan was on the counter where Tatiana had left it. The carving knife still lay in the sink. Holly’s hands were trembling, but she was able to bring down the aluminum foil and cover the meat with a silvery piece of it. Beneath that shiny foil, the roast looked like a model of a mountain range, or—much worse—like a severed head. The long head of an animal such as a horse, or a goat. That mound of meat was so large it would be hard to make a place in the refrigerator for it again, in its roasting pan this time instead of its wicked plastic bag. Perhaps, Holly thought, she should take it out to the garage, where it was certainly cold enough to keep the meat from spoiling. Though she didn’t like the idea of the garage—the gas cans out there, the vehicle fumes and garbage pails.

Maybe she could just leave it covered in foil in the backyard?

She looked to the picture window, and beyond it to the snow. It looked sanitary. It looked like a place you could leave your Christmas feast and not have it poisoned. Although there were some dangers, of course. Even in a town as far from the wilderness as this one, there was some wildlife. Whatever had dug the cat out of its grave might come for the roast beef. But Holly wouldn’t leave the roast beef out overnight, of course. She—

“Do it,” Tatiana said. “Get that dead thing out of the house.”

“Okay,” Holly said. “Okay.”

Holly did not bother to turn away from the window, to look around to see where Tatty’s voice had come from. She must still be in her bed, surely. She could not be, as she seemed to be, so close to Holly’s ear:

That voice—it could have come from anywhere. Her daughter’s voice seemed to coming from the back of Holly’s mind, from inside her. A mind full of roses. Or a mind of winter. Holly would do as her daughter’s voice told her. She went to the coat closet and opened it.

Inside, their boots and shoes were lined up neatly. Keeping the coat closet tidy was Tatty’s chore. It was the first chore she’d been given, as a very little girl, and she’d always done it carefully, taken it seriously. She’d given that closet, apparently, a special cleaning for the company that was to have come today. She’d put extra hangers in the closet for the extra coats, and she’d taken a pair of her father’s work boots down to the basement to make room for the boots and shoes of the guests.

Hanging at the center of the closet was Tatty’s red cloth coat. Beside it was Holly’s white jacket, stuffed with the tiny white feathers of what must have been hundreds of white birds. Sometimes those feathers managed to escape from the jacket, and Holly would find them on her sweaters and in her hair—small, magical surprises from the sky. She slipped the jacket off the hanger and put it on. She picked up her slip-on nylon boots and set them on the floor where she could step into them when she returned with the roast in her hands. So she wouldn’t have to walk across the house in them to fetch the pan. Holly did not like shoes in the house. There had always been tracks on her childhood floors from her father’s and brother’s boots, and since no one had ever scrubbed them off, those boot prints had accumulated until it looked as if an army had been quartered in their house for years.

Barefoot, Holly went back to the kitchen and picked up the pan by the handles.

She returned to the hallway and slid her right foot into her right boot, and then she lifted her left foot to do the same with the other boot. But the platter of meat was heavy. Much heavier, somehow, than Holly had expected—although she’d been the one who’d lifted it from the meat case at the supermarket and placed it in her cart, hadn’t she? And she was the one who’d brought it from the car into the kitchen, and moved it from the refrigerator to the roasting pan and the pan to the stove.

No one knew more about the weight of that meat than Holly did, but, still, when it shifted in the pan at the same time as Holly raised her foot above her boot, it was as if she’d stupidly believed that this enormous piece of solid flesh would be weightless, insubstantial, could defy the laws of gravity, and that somehow she would be able to balance it and herself in thin air at the same time.

Of course, she couldn’t.

Holly lost her balance, and then she lost her grip on the roasting pan, and then it all fell away from her—the meat in the pan and the floor to which she collapsed—and the roast landed with the solid, awful sound of a baby being dropped. From a nurse’s arms.

How many nights had she woken up, after that first trip to Siberia, from dreams that the baby she and Eric had claimed for their own, their Baby Tatty, far away in Siberia, left behind in that gray impoverished institutional place, had been dropped to the floor?

Sometimes Holly wasn’t even dreaming.

She might be driving to work, daydreaming about the future, about the baby, about bringing the baby home, about the day she would finally have her daughter in her arms, and in her imagination was carrying the baby to her crib (the bumper and the comforter and mobile, all smiling ducks, hundreds of ducks smiling despite the fact that they had bills instead of mouths) and placing her baby into the crib, and teaching her the English word for
home
, and Holly would be seeing it all so vividly in her mind, bearing that sweet weight, that she would actually lurch behind the steering when she clearly saw a nurse, somewhere far away and in that other place,
dropping
the baby, the perfect Baby Tatty—

“PERFECT,” TATIANA SAID
from somewhere beyond her mother.

Holly lay on her side now on the braided rug on the floor between the front door and the coat closet. She looked up. It seemed to her that Tatiana should be nothing but a silhouette above her, backlit as she was by blizzard from the picture window—but, instead, it was as if some spotlight from the floor where Holly lay was trained on Tatiana. Her daughter looked larger than life, standing there in more vivid detail than Holly had ever seen her before, looking down. Her eyes were sad. She was shaking her head. She was wearing Gin’s velvet dress and Thuy’s earrings again. “Mommy,” she said. “What happened?”

“I dropped everything, Tatiana,” Holly said. It was a relief to admit it.

Tatiana nodded.

Holly said, “I’m so sorry, honey. You must be so hungry.”

“I told you, I’m not hungry anymore, Mommy,” Tatiana said. She leaned over to offer Holly her hand, and Holly tried to take it, but it was just out of her reach. Tatiana continued to hold it out, and Holly continued to try to take it, but she couldn’t reach it, she couldn’t catch it. The look on Tatiana’s face grew agitated then, and impatient again, so Holly quit trying. She said, “I’m okay here, Tatty.”

Tatiana nodded and turned away, making her way over to the Christmas tree. Holly could still see her from where she lay on the braided rug by the coat closet. Tatiana knelt down in front of the tree.

“Tatty?”

But Tatiana didn’t answer her and didn’t turn around.

Holly’s back hurt more than perhaps it should have from such a short fall, but she managed to push herself up into a sitting position. Surely she hadn’t injured herself very badly in such a minor spill. The floor was hard, but it wasn’t as if she’d fallen from a great height. Even a baby falling from a nurse’s arms to the floor from that height would not be seriously injured, would she?

It wouldn’t even be something a child that age would remember, would it? Think of Thuy, who’d fled Vietnam with her mother and grandmother on an open boat. Thuy had been four years old, and she’d spent three days tucked between her mother and the body of her grandmother, who’d died in the boat in the middle of the ocean—but Thuy’s earliest memory was of shaking the hand of Mickey Mouse at Disneyland.

After Eric and Holly returned to the States after that first trip for those three long months before they could go back for their daughter, Holly tried never to think about what could potentially harm her baby still in Siberia—accidents, negligence, abuse, disease, spoiled food—during the long winter they were separated.

They’d done all they could do, hadn’t they? They’d bribed the nurses to take care of the baby, and to call her Tatiana, not Sally. There’d been promises of more money to come if the baby was fine upon their return.