Mind of Winter (25 page)

And she
was
fine!

Although she was larger (startlingly larger) and thinner and smaller at the same time, and although her eyes seemed to have shrunk and her hair had grown longer and shinier than it could possibly have grown in only those months, and although she was too pale (like all the children in the Pokrovka Orphanage #2!), she looked healthy. She had been potty-trained. Her cheeks were scarlet red, and although that flush had turned out to be rouge that had been applied by the nurses to the baby’s cheeks, Tatiana did not look unhealthy even after Holly discovered the makeup on a white paper towel after washing, gently, her daughter’s face for the first time in the airplane potty.

Of course, Tatiana did not look happy to see Eric and Holly when they arrived at the orphanage in the spring—but why would she? How could she possibly have remembered them from their visit at Christmas? A visit that was, anyway, so brief? She didn’t
resist
them when they wrapped her in the blanket they’d brought with them, or when they changed her clothes into the little white cotton dress Gin had sewn for the occasion. When they left the orphanage together forever, Tatiana did not look back at the nurses—not even Anya, who had been, back at Christmastime, her favorite. Yes, that was a little disconcerting, that the nurse who’d cared for her for nearly two years seemed like a stranger to her. But Tatiana seemed unharmed. She seemed to have been well taken care of, for which they’d bribed the orphanage staff, although it did bother Holly that Baby Tatty did not look up when she spoke her name.

“Tatiana?”

Baby Tatty seemed not to recognize that name at all. So the nurses hadn’t called her Tatiana, had they, as they’d been asked to do?

But of course that mattered so much less than everything else—that she hadn’t been starved, or beaten, or dropped to the floor, or left so long in her crib that she had, as the orphanage’s children famously had, a flattened skull, a bald spot.

And soon enough she began to answer to her name.

ONLY ONCE, WHEN
they had been home in Michigan for two weeks, did Holly ever say the other name.

“Sally.”

Baby Tatty had been sitting on the living room floor, almost exactly in the place where Tatiana knelt now before the Christmas tree, and Holly, standing behind her, had said quietly, but loudly enough that she could have heard her, “Sally?”

Baby Tatty did not turn around.

“Sally?” A little louder this time, but still there had been no response.

Holly thought she should be grateful, that this child no longer answered to the name they must have called her in Siberia, that she had internalized her new name. But she didn’t. Instead, Holly had felt a coldness spread across her chest.

It started behind her ribs—but the coldness also encompassed the area of her reconstructed breasts. She thought of the younger Tatiana, the one the nurses had called Sally, at Christmas, on that first Christmas Day, and how she’d looked into Holly’s eyes as she cradled her, how she’d reached one small pink hand, with its perfect tiny fingernails out, and slipped it into Holly’s reconstructed cleavage, into a gap between two buttons of her white blouse:

Her eyes.

Holly had never before and had never since seen such eyes.

Those had been Sally’s eyes.

This child, who’d been brought home with them only weeks before, was not Sally.

HOLLY TRIED TO
straighten up. She pushed the white boots out of the way. They were splattered with blood from the roast, and there was a slick puddle of blood near the front door. She reached overhead, using the doorknob of the coat closet to pull herself up until she was standing. There was a shooting pain in her back, but Holly felt sure the pain would go away after a while. There could be nothing wrong with her spine, after all, if she was standing. She inhaled, gazing at her daughter’s back:

All that dark, shining hair.

EVENTUALLY, HOLLY HAD
forgotten the coldness she’d felt that day when the child, who had not been called Tatiana—and who, then, surely had been called Sally—did not answer to her name.

No! Why would she? She answered to Tatiana now! How quickly a name, replaced by another, would be forgotten. No matter how long they’d called her Sally, now she knew herself to be Tatiana.

Forget
Sally
, Holly had thought, and she had gone so far as to name one of the hens
Sally.
It had seemed so innocuous, even charming. It was the name they might have given their daughter, but they hadn’t. Now Holly gave it to her hen, and it secretly pleased her to hear that name on her daughter’s lips. (“Sally laid an egg under the bushes!”) Holly had never told Tatiana that Sally had once been her own name. Why would she?

She had never been Sally.

Holly shook her head, trying to shake that thought out of her mind:

Yes, she had looked like a different child, perhaps, when they went back.

Longer. Thinner, but larger. Older than they’d expected her to look, having grown and changed more over the course of those months than they’d known was possible. But there were familiar features! The eyes were smaller, yes, and the hair was longer, but they were essentially the same features. It was natural, surely, to come upon a child you hadn’t seen for many weeks and to find her changed. To see her almost as an older sister to the child you’d left behind. Children changed so quickly, and in ways you could not anticipate. That Baby Tatty had changed so much, that she answered to no name that Eric or Holly or the nurses called her, that her hair—

Well, Tatiana hadn’t been the only child with that kind of hair in the orphanage! It was surprising how luxurious a small child’s hair could be! Behind that forbidden door, Holly had seen a girl with nearly such shining black hair. That girl, who seemed little more than an infant (although it was impossible to tell, as she was so malnourished), was sitting bare-bottomed, strapped to a plastic bedpan. Her face was pale and smooth as stone, and she stared up at Holly, and then—horribly!—she seemed to recognize Holly. That little girl had smiled at Holly with such a beatific expression it was as if she were trying to distract this onlooker from the horror of her situation—her broken and imperfectly healed limbs, her crooked spine.

Yes, Holly remembered now! That had
not
been their first visit when Holly had snuck into that room. It had been their
second
, when they’d come back for their baby!

And it had not been the boy with the hydrocephalic head that had sent her hurrying out of the room! It had been the smile of that familiar little girl with her enormous dark eyes, to whom something horrible had happened:

She’d been beaten. Or dropped. She would never walk. She was completely broken.

And Holly had hurried from the room, closed the door, heard the words of Annette Sanders in her ear so close and clear it was as if the therapist were standing beside her, and she had done it:

She had forgotten.

NOW HOLLY WATCHED
as Tatiana pulled a present out from under the tree and seemed to read the tag on it. She said, quietly, to her daughter’s beautiful back, “Sally?”

Tatiana didn’t turn around, but she said, sounding disappointed, “I’m not Sally. You know that, Mommy.”

Holly said nothing for a long time, letting the pain in her back turn into a numbness, until she finally managed to take a breath deep enough to speak, and then she asked her daughter’s back, “Then where is Sally, honey? Where is Sally?”

Tatiana shrugged. But it wasn’t the coquettish shrug from earlier in the day. It wasn’t the shrug of teenage apathy, ennui. It was a shrug of sadness, of utter despair.

“Oh, Tatty,” Holly said. “Was it Sally who tried to call, honey? Does Sally know my phone number?”

Tatiana shook her head. Maybe, now, she was laughing a little, or trying not to cry. Holly couldn’t tell, seeing only her daughter’s back. Tatiana said, “Sally doesn’t need a phone number. The phone is connected to everything now, Mom. You know that.” She reached up and waved a hand through the air, and then she turned around.

Now Tatiana was exactly the black silhouette Holly had expected earlier. She looked like a flat cardboard cutout against the window, the blizzard shivering its brilliant static all around her. All of Tatiana’s edges were sharp, but the rest of her was gone, and she said, again, more insistently, “You
know
that, Mom. Where are the wires, otherwise? It’s all open now. It’s everything.”

Tatiana was right, wasn’t she? Holly nodded. She
did
know, didn’t she? Had she
always
known?

Still, she needed to know more:

“Where is Sally, then?” she asked.

“Oh, honey,” Tatiana answered, sounding ancient, far away. “You left your little Sally in Russia, didn’t you?”

Holly nodded again. Again, she’d known that. She’d always known that. No snap of a rubber band could have forced that from her mind, although she’d managed to keep that door locked for a very long time.

“Remember Sally? Behind that door? But I looked enough like Sally, didn’t I? You brought me home instead.”

Holly bent over then, holding her own face in her hands, and then she sank to her knees despite the pain that forked lightning up her spine. She was still denying it, that pain, wasn’t she? She said into her hands, not yet crying, “Just tell me then, Tatiana. Just tell me. What happened to Sally?”

“Oh, Mama. What difference does that make? You were gone a long, long time. So much can happen. It was a very bad place. They broke that other baby. They dropped that baby, or they did something else, something terrible, to that baby. She would never be okay. So they put her away. You weren’t supposed to go in there, remember? They gave you this baby instead, and you love her, don’t you? They gave you Sally’s sister, just a little older. You never knew the difference, did you? You loved me, didn’t you?”

“Oh, yes. Oh, God yes, sweetheart. I’m so sorry for Sally, that they broke her, that she’s still there. But we have you now! We love you. We don’t know that other girl. You’re our baby. We don’t need any other baby. But Tatiana, why didn’t they let us see you, the first time, at Christmastime? Why didn’t they tell us that Sally had a sister?”

Tatiana sighed, sounding sad, weary, as if she were being asked to explain something for the hundredth time, or something so obvious it did not require explanation:

“Because Sally’s sister was
sick
, Mom. Sally’s sister had blue lips and blue skin and blue eyelids. Sally and Tatiana’s mother died when we were babies. They told you that, even if you wouldn’t listen. Sally was fine, until they hurt her, but they knew that the other sister was going to die, like their mother. And no one wants to take home a baby who will die, Mommy. Do they? They knew nobody wanted to bring me home to such a happy place just to die.

“But then they broke the other baby! They broke Sally! And you wanted
that
baby! I looked like her because she was my sister. And they knew you would be home a long time before you would believe that anything was wrong. You would pretend you didn’t see it as long as you could. They rouged my cheeks, remember?”

Holly nodded. She remembered. She remembered everything.

“So what difference does it make, Mommy? If they hadn’t broken Sally, they would have kept me behind that door. It was her or me. You loved your Tatty, right? Sally had bigger eyes and she wasn’t sick, but I have more beautiful hair. And my skin is pale blue. For all these years you had your Tatty, and you loved her. Didn’t you?”

Holly nodded and nodded, nodded and nodded, while tears spilled down her neck, under her dress, between her breasts:

Oh
God
, how much she had loved her daughter.
How much
she had loved her daughter.

“It’s just that something followed us home from Russia, Mommy. Remember?”

“Yes.” Holly sobbed it.

Tatiana shook her head. She said, “Oh poor Mommy. If only you could have found some time to sit down and write about it.”

“Yes,” Holly said.

“Poor Mommy. Poor Mommy.”

“Yes,” Holly said. She was no longer denying. She said, “What did they call you, honey? Before they let you out from behind the door, before they broke your sister?”

Tatiana shrugged. She shook her head a little as if trying to remember, but couldn’t. “I don’t know,” she said. “Why would I remember? Jenny? Betty? No—
Bonnie
. But I’m Tatiana now.” She laughed a little, and then stood up, holding a present she’d taken out from under the tree. She crossed the living room, bringing it with her. Still, she was just a flat blackness—the featureless, perfect cutout of a girl with graceful arms and flowing hair. Tatiana handed the present to Holly. It was something flat, wrapped in shiny green paper.

“I made it for you,” she said.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Holly said. “Thank you, Tatty.” She took the gift from her daughter’s hand. She said, “Daddy said it was something special this year. I’m so sorry I overslept, Tatty. I’m so sorry we didn’t have time to open presents.”

“Open it now,” Tatty said, sweetly and gently. “Open it now, Mama. It’s not too late.”

Holly’s throat filled with emotion—gratitude. The incredible kindness of those words:
It’s not too late.
She peeled back the paper at the seam and let the green paper fall to the floor between herself and her daughter. It was a book. The covers were a soft and fawn-colored leather, and the binding was hand-stitched, and the pages were heavy, white, and blank. “Oh,” Holly said, holding it in her hands.

“It’s for your poems,” Tatiana said. “The ones you never wrote. I made it myself.”

“Oh,” Holly said again, but by the time she had stood from her kneeling position to take her daughter in her arms, Tatiana was gone.

SO QUICKLY, HAD
she returned to her room?

Holly tried to follow, but it was hard to walk. She had to use her arms to try to swim through the air to get to the hallway, to get to Tatiana’s room. She had to step over the piece of meat that lay unmoving on the floor where she’d dropped it, and by the time she got to the bedroom door, it was just about to close between them, and Tatiana was saying, “Now you have all the time you need.”