Mind of Winter

by Laura Kasischke

  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.”

  “No!” Holly shouted, grabbing for the knob, trying to push the door open just as Tatiana slid the hook into the eye of the lock. “No! Please, honey!”

  But suddenly there was no sound now on the other side of the door. Not even the sound of the bedsprings. Holly knocked, hard, and then she stepped back. She thought again about throwing her weight against it, and how easily the lock would snap away from the door and the frame, but even as she thought of it, she knew she would never do it. If she were the type of woman who could throw her weight against a door and break the lock, how many times would she have done that by now in this life?

  It was like the rubber band! Holly’s whole life, she’d protected herself, or she’d been protected. Her sisters used to cut advertisements for the Humane Society out of the magazines that Holly read so that she never saw the photographs of homeless cats and dogs. She thought of Annette Sanders, who’d died in a car crash, drunk, years after Holly’s therapy had ended. She recalled how simple it had been to step out of that room in Siberia, to escape the hydrocephalic boy and the beautiful smiling girl on the floor, strapped to a bedpan.

  One must have a mind of winter.

  Holly lifted her hand to knock on the door again, and then, as if the sound had been programmed to stop her, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” began to play on her iPhone from the living room, where it still lay on the dining room table.

  AS SHE HURRIED to the phone, Holly felt a piece of glass, a small one, but very sharp, stab her in her heel.

  It hurt, but she didn’t stop to pluck it out. She found her phone just before it stopped ringing (And what did you see, my darling young one?), picked it up, touched the answer button with her finger, and said, trying to keep her voice steady, “Hello?”

  “Holly, honey.”

  “Thuy?”

  “Yeah. How are you guys doing over there? Did Eric get back there with his parents?”

  “No.”

  “No? Oh dear. Did they check Gin into the hospital then? Is she okay?”

  “I don’t know,” Holly said. “It’s been a while since I spoke to him. He was with her in a room. His dad was having chest pains, too.”

  “Oh my God,” Thuy said. “Stress. Do they think she could have had a stroke?”

  “I do
n’t know,” Holly said. “She’s confused.”

  “Oh, Holly, I’m so sorry. This isn’t the Christmas we thought it would be, is it? Have you been outside at all?”

  “No.”

  “It’s incredible. If it ever stops, we’re going to have some serious shoveling to do. But we’ll try to come over tomorrow, okay? Will you call when you get news from Eric about his mom? I mean, I know we only see her at Christmas, but we’re all really fond of Gin. And Gramps, too, of course. I even wish we could have seen the Coxes today. And your sisters-in-law. Especially what’s-her-name.”

  “Crystal.”

  “Ah, yes, Crystal. She’s the one who says ‘Gosh golly’ when she drops something, instead of ‘Oh, shit,’ right?”

  “Yes,” Holly said. And then she said, “I also dropped something.”

  “Oh, shit. Or, I mean, ‘Gosh golly!’ What’d you drop, hon?”

  Holly said nothing. She stepped over to the picture window again. She realized that it must be later than she thought. The sky behind the blizzard seemed to have turned pewter blue. Now, if she squinted, Holly could see that the hangman’s hoods on her roses were casting long shadows over the accumulated snow.

  Thuy said, “Are you still there, Holly? Are we breaking up?”

  “I’m here,” Holly said.

  “Well, we ate tuna casserole and opened presents, and we watched It’s a Wonderful Life. What’d you and Tatty do?”

  Again, Holly said nothing. She saw a bird swoop from a branch of the dogwood tree in the backyard to the ground. It appeared, now, to be doing a little dance on the cat’s empty grave.

  “I’m going to take the hoods off the roses,” she finally said. “They can’t see.”

  “Huh?”

  Holly got on her hands and knees, still holding the phone to her ear. She saw that, despite her vacuuming, there was broken glass all over the living room floor. This couldn’t all be from the one water glass, could it? She stood back up, using her free hand to brush the sharp dust off her knees. It cut into her hands with its nearly invisible, razor-sharp flakes.

  “You still there, Holly?”

  “Yes,” Holly said. She turned her palms down so that she couldn’t see if they were bleeding.

  “Well, before we get cut off, Patty wants to say hi to you, and I’d like to say Merry Christmas to my Tatty, okay?”

  “Okay,” Holly said.

  “Okay, hold on then, Holly. Come here, Patsy Baby. Auntie Holly wants to say hi.”

  From the other side of town, but so close (so close it seemed!) to Holly’s ear, the little girl’s voice was high and light and sweet, sounding like the rim of a glass ringing at the flick of a fingernail.

  “Hi?”

  “Patty, sweetie,” Holly said. “Did Santa bring you any presents.”

  “What?”

  “I asked if Santa brought you any presents.”

  “What?”

  “Can you hear me, Patty?”

  “What?”

  After that there was no sound at all for a few seconds except for the little girl’s breathing. She still sounded so close that Holly could even hear her swallow. Then Patty whispered something, and then perhaps she held the telephone to her chest because Holly could hear her healthy little-girl heart beating loudly in her ear. It was as if Holly herself had put her ear to Patty’s tiny chest.

  How small her heart must be!

  You could probably fit it in the palm of your hand—and still the sound of it managed to fly through the air for twenty miles between their houses. Please, Holly thought, please let it be that Santa brought her gifts, and that Thuy and Pearl can keep Patty believing in Santa for many years to come. What a holy, simple pleasure.

  “Holly?”

  It was Thuy again.

  “Is everything okay there? Patty said she can’t understand you. She said you’re not speaking English. Uh, you are speaking English aren’t you, hon?”

  “I have to speak English,” Holly said. “I only know a few words of Russian. I tried to learn more. I’m no good with languages.”

  Thuy laughed. She said, “Well, something’s wrong with the phone then. Let me talk to my Tatty before it goes completely dead, okay? We’ll try later, and we’ll get over there tomorrow if we can shovel ourselves out of here.”

  “Hang on,” Holly said.

  She held the iPhone to her own chest as she tiptoed across the glass-strewn living room to her daughter’s bedroom door. She touched the doorknob, carefully at first, thinking it might somehow burn her hand the way the iPhone had blistered Tatiana’s fingertips. But the doorknob was cold. She turned it and pushed against the door, thinking that she would hit the obstruction of the hook and eye. But she didn’t. The door was unlocked. It’s unlocked, Mom. I never lock the door!

  “Tatty?” Holly said to her daughter’s naked back. Both of Tatiana’s arms were inside the sleeves of Gin’s red velvet dress, as if she’d tried to slip it over her head but it had been too difficult, as if her arms were too stiff. As if she were as unbendable as a Barbie doll. Her nightgown lay on the floor, and her black ballet slippers were tucked under her nightstand.

  “Tatty?”

  Holly knelt down beside Tatiana’s bed, but she was careful not to touch her daughter, who looked so naked, so vulnerable, so like a child, abandoned. Holly would never want to scare her, or to wake her, or to hurt her. There had been so many times since she and Eric had brought Tatiana home from the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 that Holly had thought to herself, Thank God I didn’t bring her into this world myself. She’d thought, really, that it would have been a kind of sin to snatch a soul out of whatever other world there might be out there, to bring her into this one. Surely, she thought, wherever babies resided before they were born, it was more peaceful, less dangerous, than here. Surely the souls of the unborn and the dead were never again tucked into these bodies—so soft! so exposed! so defenseless!—and left to fend for themselves. What could possibly be worse than this? Than to place a soul as exquisite as Tatiana’s into the body of a dying animal?

  Because the moment she’d been born she’d begun to die, hadn’t she?

  But Holly hadn’t done that, had she? It wasn’t Holly’s fault. She’d only snatched Tatiana out of a terrible orphanage, and brought her here, to the happiest country in the world. To a place full of technological amazement, medication, sanitation—no more garlic around anyone’s neck when there was an outbreak of the flu!

  Holly laughed out loud, remembering that.

  Then she heard Thuy’s voice calling out to her from the miraculous box she held in her hand (again, that voice, so clear, although her friend was so far away) and she thought of Thuy simply waking up one day from her infant slumber with her hand in the hand of Mickey Mouse. How wonderful. How blessed. How lucky Holly was to have such a friend. To her daughter’s back, Holly said, “Thuy wants to say Merry Christmas to you, honey.”

  Of course, Tatty didn’t roll over. She didn’t even sigh in exasperation. She was so peaceful, despite the red velvet dress that looked uncomfortably tangled in her arms.

  Tatiana had never opened the shades that morning, but Holly could see through the crack between the shade and the sill that it was growing darker out there.

  Still, the whole night would be lit up by this blizzard, wouldn’t it? Holly would turn up the heat. (The heat! Another marvel of their American life together! How well Holly remembered the cold, bare, hard floor of the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 that Christmas so long ago.)

  But first she would pull the coverlet over her daughter’s bare back, because she must keep that poor pale blue back covered.

  HOLLY PUT THE iPhone down on the floor and, with it, Thuy’s tiny, crystal-clear voice.

  Hearing that, Holly pictured her friend as a little girl inside a whirling teacup at Disneyland, her long black hair whipping behind her:

  “Becky! Are you having fun? Becky?”

  Thuy’s mother had changed her daughter’s name to Becky when th
ey took up residence in California, and it hadn’t been until college that Thuy had changed it back, herself, to her Vietnamese name. It had been one of the reasons that Holly had wanted Tatiana to have a name that spoke of her origins.

  Because you can’t just forget where you’ve come from, can you?

  Because it was important not to forget, not to pretend, wasn’t it?

  Wasn’t that what Holly had been so sure of? Wasn’t that why she kept a box of condoms in the linen closet for Tommy and Tatiana to use, despite Tatiana’s tearful insistence that We’re not going to have sex, Mom. Why do you always have to push these things? Why can’t you just let me be a kid?

  And Eric had been furious. He’d said, “Jesus, Holly. All the shit you seem able to keep your head buried in the sand about, and this is when you decide to have to be all open and groovy? She doesn’t need this!”

  But what had Eric meant? What did Holly keep her head buried in the sand about? What?

  What do you think you’ve kept so nicely buried out there, you bitch?

  Holly spun around fast.

  She held her hand to her mouth to keep herself from screaming:

  The girl in the black dress was back. She stood directly in front of Tatty’s floor-length mirror. She wore the felt slippers of a child in the Pokrovka Orphanage #2.

  How well Holly remembered those! They’d all worn such slippers. Those slippers had looked fragile on their feet, as if rags had been tied around their ankles simply to give the appearance of shoes. And this girl in the black dress, her legs looked as if they’d been broken and reset imperfectly. Her arms were limp. Her head did not look as if it rested properly on her neck. Holly had seen that, too! She’d seen children like that behind that door, tangled in their own misshapen limbs, not even bothering to cry. She’d seen them smile.

  The girl shouted something at Holly in Russian—but, this time, Holly understood. It was as if she’d spoken Russian all her life! The girl, who was wearing Tatiana’s broken body, screamed, “She has a bad heart!” This girl, even with her limp arm, managed to raise her fist to her chest and pound on it. “Even your fucking neighbor Randa told you! ‘Your daughter’s fingernails are blue! Her eyelids are blue! Why do her lips turn so blue? It’s not even cold!’ And what did you do? You stopped talking to her! You blamed it on how she reacted to the chickens, but you knew it was because of what she would say about Tatty if you ever spoke to her again: ‘Tatty needs to see a doctor!’ ”