Mind of Winter (11 page)

Pearl, Holly knew, was trying to get Thuy off the hook, and off the phone. She knew that they would have liked to come for Christmas, but it wouldn’t ruin their day now that they couldn’t. They were probably planning to make a fire in their woodstove, cuddle up on the couch with Patty. They’d probably stocked the fridge and freezer with things they could make a Christmas dinner with, in the event that this would happen. It might even have seemed like a relief to them, staying home, just the three of them, instead of being here, dealing with Holly’s in-laws and the Coxes. But Holly couldn’t stop herself. She said, “You’re sure? This will be the first Christmas in fourteen years you haven’t been over here. Tatiana will be heartbroken. She’s already in a terrible mood.”

“Oh, Holly,” Thuy said, and Holly could imagine her making a face at Pearl, maybe pointing at the phone receiver, shaking her head. “It’s impossible. Really. Or we’d be there, hon. It’s truly not possible.” She enunciated and emphasized each of her last three words, as if Holly, not Thuy, were the nonnative English speaker.

“Bleh,” Holly said. “I hate you. I love you. You’re ruining my life.”

Thuy laughed then, recognizing the humor as permission to get off the phone and get on with her own life, with her own family, with her own Christmas. “Well, tell Tatiana we love her,” she said.

“I will,” Holly said, “if she comes out of her bedroom today.” She wanted to tell Thuy about Tatiana. Her bad mood. She’d locked Holly out of her room! Although Thuy had been a mother half as long as Holly had, Thuy always had the best mothering advice.

“Oh, no,” Thuy said. “What’s wrong with Tatty?” But the tone didn’t invite Holly to go into detail. The conversation was winding down, not up. Holly had known Thuy for two decades and logged hundreds of hours on the telephone with her. She knew when Thuy was standing at the counter, ready to walk out the door, and, conversely, when she was settling into her lounge chair, ready to chat for hours, by the length of the pauses between her sentences (although there’d been less and less of the latter since Pearl had moved in, and almost none now that they had a child together).

“I don’t know,” Holly said. “She’s just grumpy, I guess.”

“Everything okay with Tommy?”

“I think so,” Holly said, but in truth she hadn’t thought about the possibility that there was some problem with Tommy. “That’s a good thought, though. I’ll ask her.”

“Okay, Holly. Merry Christmas, my dear. Call later if you need to vent. But, honestly, I wouldn’t get too excited about a big party at your place today. This isn’t our grandmothers’ white Christmas.”

“Hmm,” Holly said. “That could be good, or that could be bad. I’ll let you know. Bye-bye.”

“Bye, babe.”

And that was it. The line between them was severed—or, now that there were no telephone lines, the band of energy, the ghost-wave that had carried their voices to one another was—what? Snuffed? How did that work? Holly had never even understood how the
old
system worked—how sound had traveled through wires strung from one pole to the next across the country, let alone got transported across oceans. But at least that system had made an intuitive kind of sense. The sound was in the wires, and if you had to call overseas the system became more complicated, and astonishingly expensive, so you didn’t do it very often, and when you did the voices you heard sounded very far away—echoes and buzzings accompanying the voices—and sometimes you used to be able to hear the murmurs of other conversations taking place under the conversation you were having, and all of this had made the process of speaking to a disembodied person over a great distance seem possible, physical.

But, now, the voice of someone in Siberia would sound as close or as far as someone down the block. Often, Tatiana, just calling home from Tommy’s house two blocks away, sounded on her cell phone as if she were calling from Siberia. Conversely, when Eric had called on his cell phone from Tokyo two summers ago, it had sounded as if he were standing just outside the closed front door.

ERIC.

Christ, in all this melodrama with Tatiana, Holly had managed to forget all about Eric and his parents in the car, trying to get home from the airport in a snowstorm. She looked at her watch again. What if Eric had gotten stuck in a snowbank, or gotten into a fender bender? That’s as far as her imagination would take her, but it chilled her. Why hadn’t he phoned to let her know where he was?

“Tatiana?” Holly called out. She needed to break the news about Pearl and Thuy and Patty to her daughter, but she also just needed company now. She needed someone with whom to discuss the day’s changed plans. Should she bother with the mashed potatoes now? Was anyone going to make it here for Christmas dinner? Should she start making phone calls, and to whom? “Tatty?”

Still, nothing.

God damn her. That little bitch. Holly decided just to let herself feel that anger. Usually, she tried to stuff it down, to remind herself that Tatty was still a child, and that she herself had been no picnic when she was a teenager. When she felt this angry at Tatty she always tried to remind herself how badly she’d wanted a child. What about that? Had she thought it would all be rainbows and gumdrops?

Well, she and Eric had gotten nearly fourteen years of rainbows and gumdrops and kisses every day and love cards every holiday and birthday, construction paper cards carefully decorated with crayons:
I love you so much, Mommy. Daddy I love you to the moon!
Holly would tell herself that she would just have to focus on those memories as Tatty passed through these few years during which she did what teenagers are supposed to do: separate themselves as best they can from their parents so that they can go out into the world on their own.

Still, Holly could feel angry in her mind, couldn’t she? She would allow herself that today. Thoughts were free, right? It wasn’t as if she and Tatty were psychically linked. Tatty couldn’t hear her thoughts. Holly didn’t say it out loud, didn’t even move her lips to it, but again she thought it:

God damn Tatiana.

Did she
have
to be a little self-righteous bitch on Christmas Day?

Did everything
have
to be about her?

Was there not even a
shred
of gratitude in her?

Did she
ever
consider what her life might have been like if Eric and Holly hadn’t come along? This was something Holly would never,
never
, say to her daughter, but she could think it, couldn’t she?

“Tatty?”

This time she shouted her daughter’s name loudly enough that there’d be no mistaking that she expected an answer—but she didn’t have time to hear whether or not she got one before “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” started playing in her palm. She glanced down: Unavailable.

Holly smirked, shook her head, called out (not nicely: she knew this wasn’t
nice
), “Hey, Tatty. It’s Unavailable. I’m answering this one for you!”

She pressed the green icon and held the phone to her ear. “Hello?” she said loudly enough for Tatiana to hear.

“Hello, Mrs. Judge?”

Surprisingly, this was not a robot. This was a young woman. Nonnative speaker of English. Although she hadn’t said enough for Holly to determine what her first language would be, there was no pause between “hello” and “Mrs.,” and “Judge” was pronounced as if it rhymed with
stooge
not
fudge.

“Yes, this is Holly Judge,” Holly said, pronouncing her last name correctly. Judge was her maiden name. She’d never taken Eric’s name—Clare—because, frankly, she thought when she married Eric that she had a career as a published poet ahead of her, and “Holly Clare” sounded to her more like a kind of doughnut than a serious writer.

“Merry Christmas, Holly Judge.”

“Thank you. What can I do for you? I’m busy. If you’re selling something—”

“No, no, no, ma’am. I’m calling from . . . ” The caller said a name that might have been May-um. May-hem. Maim. Maine? The young-sounding woman did not go on. She seemed to expect that Holly would respond to that place-name (whatever it was), as if she’d recognize its significance.

“What? Maine?” Holly asked. It was, she supposed, time to get actively hostile. What corporation or catalog company was in Maine? Garnet Hill? Lands’ End? Holly had bought a jacket from a Land’s End catalog for Eric for his birthday a couple of months ago. Surely they weren’t calling her on Christmas?

But then again, why not? Capitalism was, God knew, running amok these days. With the economy collapsing, why not have people from foreign countries—people you could pay pennies an hour—calling Americans to sell them goods and services on Christmas Day?

“What are you selling?” Holly asked.

“I’m telling you I’m calling from
mayum
for you. I still found your phone number.”

The voice sounded unprofessional, Holly thought. Young and informal and untrained. “Okay. I’m hanging up on you now,” she said into her iPhone. “I have no idea what this is about, and you’re not telling me, so—”

“I’ll call back Mrs. Judge in forty minutes when I find
lab-i-lus.
I am excited to find you home and
lab-i-lus
will speak of it.”

“No,” Holly said. “Don’t call back.” She placed her thumb on the red end bar on her phone. However, the seconds continued to tick around its little screen, indicating that the line had not been disconnected. She pressed the button again, and then she held the phone to her ear, listening to the seashell sound of it, and then a gasp followed finally by dead air, and she turned, still with the phone against the side of her face, and screamed—

Holly hadn’t even realized she was screaming until she managed to close her mouth on it, almost snapping it back out of the air, when she realized that it was simply Tatiana standing there, only inches away. “My God,” Holly said. “Where did you come from? I never heard you.” Her heart was still racing, pulsing hard at her temples. “I didn’t mean to scream, but you really scared me.”

Tatiana’s eyes looked both dark and bright, like black, polished stones. When Holly was a child, soon after her mother’s diagnosis, her father had bought a rock tumbler and taken up the hobby of rock collecting, and many nights of her childhood Holly had fallen asleep to the sound of that grinding and pummeling. It was a miracle, how he could put a homely gray lump of something into the round barrel, and remove it, a week later, shining, full of colors that must have been there all along, but hidden. Looking into her daughter’s eyes Holly thought of how those stones had come out of the tumbler bearing, it seemed, almost no relation to the stones that had gone in.

It wasn’t that Holly did not notice, every day, how beautiful her daughter’s eyes were, but had they ever really been
this
beautiful? She couldn’t look away from them. They were the most beautiful eyes on earth.

HOLLY AND ERIC
had both, upon first seeing Tatiana during that Christmas trip to Pokrovka Orphanage #2, been stunned by her eyes. Lying in bed at the hostel that night, they repeated to each other maybe twenty times, “My God, did you see that child’s eyes?”

Those eyes!

Everyone had told Holly and Eric before they left for Siberia not to get their hearts set on one particular child, that some adoptive parents had been through this process four or five times. You might be certain, for instance, that you were fated to have a particular child only to find out, after the medical exam, that there was something terribly wrong. And even when the child passed the medical exam, there were risks. Whether the medical examiners were even qualified, or sober, was a question in a country like Russia. Whether they had an interest in hiding the truth about a child from prospective Western parents was another. There had been couples—plenty of them!—who’d come back to Siberia after the required three months to find, to their horror, that defects they’d not noticed—attachment disorder, failure to thrive, lung diseases, heart diseases, autism, muscular atrophies, bone dysplasia, fetal alcohol syndrome—were now undeniable.

And although the orphanage nurses pretended to be dispassionate, they were often very invested in the children and in their own fantasies of those children’s American lives. They might refuse to acknowledge these defects, or try to hide them. Sometimes they’d rouge sick children’s cheeks or cover their patchy-bald heads with knitted caps, or put makeup on bruises that might have indicated blood disorders. If a couple had already fallen completely in love with a certain child, they would be easy to fool. They would be home in the United States with their child before they noticed that something was horribly wrong.

But Eric and Holly always joked, afterward, that they’d done exactly what they’d been warned not to do. They’d fallen completely and deeply in love with Tatty upon first sight. Those eyes were to blame. Holly had memorized those eyes during their first trip to Siberia, and had kept them in the very forefront of her mind during the long three months before they could go back to take custody of those eyes.

When they’d gone back for their second (and final) visit to the Pokrovka Orphanage #2, it was still a month shy of Easter. This time Holly would not be remiss. She filled two suitcases with nothing but gifts. There were stuffed white rabbits for the orphans—seventeen of them!—chocolates for the nurses, marshmallow eggs, jelly beans, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups wrapped in their seasonal pastels, as well as less seasonal gifts. Holly had picked out half a dozen of the most expensive little bottles of perfume she could buy at the mall, along with silver necklaces and earrings and panty hose. She and Eric had burst into that orphanage—its smell of sodden towels, urine, bleach—bearing all these gifts, along with three bouquets of flowers they’d bought at the train station.

And there she was!

Their daughter!

She was still in the same crib—fourth from the wall, seventh from the hallway—with her name written in Magic Marker on a piece of cardboard in the Cyrillic alphabet, all swirls and spikes:
Tatiana. (
Holly had very forcefully requested that their daughter be called
Tatiana
for those three months, not Sally.) Although she did not seem to recognize them (how could she?) Tatiana had made no sound of protest—no sound at all, really—when Holly rushed to her and snatched her from the crib.