Mind of Winter (12 page)

She had changed, of course. Three months is a long time in the life of a toddler. She was not the same baby she’d been when they left, of course. Now she was an older and more stoic version of the affectionate, enormous-eyed baby they’d left behind. Her hair was longer, lusher. She was no longer puffy-limbed, like a baby, but thinner, like a child.

But she
was
still Tatiana/Sally. Holly breathed her in, shed tears into her daughter’s glossy hair, and then pulled back to look into her heart-shaped face.

Of course, it was natural that the eyes were not as startling at twenty-two months old as they had been at nineteen months. Not as long-lashed, perhaps. They did not seem as large. The child’s face had grown, of course, along with the rest of her. That’s how it was with everyone, wasn’t it? Now it was her hair that set her apart from all the orphans: the Jet-Black Rapunzel. And the milk blue of her complexion. Her maturity, too. Three months had changed so many things! Tatiana did not need a bib any longer. She did not even wear a diaper. She was still two months away from being two years old, and she held a fork like an adult at a five-star restaurant. She wiped her mouth with a cloth when she was done eating!

She was gorgeous. She was breathtakingly gorgeous that spring day at the Pokrovka Orphanage #2, just as she was now, standing with one hand on the surface of the kitchen island, twirling an earring in her earlobe with the other, seeming not displeased to have crept up on her mother and scared her enough to make her scream.

“Tatty,” Holly said briskly. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t want to give her daughter the satisfaction of having unnerved her; it was that she felt ashamed at having allowed her daughter to unnerve her. She tried to sound all business: “I’ve got bad news. Thuy and Patty and Pearl can’t come. It’s a bad blizzard. That’s why everyone else is late. We’re going to have to call Daddy and see what’s going on.”

Tatiana said nothing. She just stared at Holly. There was that hint of satisfaction in the curve of her lips, but her eyes looked—

Had she been crying? Was that why her eyes were so large and—

What?

So sad? She seemed to wear the expression of a child abandoned. Maybe all this emotion
did
have something to do with Tommy. Could they have had an argument? Tatiana always insisted that she and Tommy (“Unlike you and Daddy”) never argued, but there was a first time for everything.

Or maybe it
was
her period, arriving early. Holly realized that Tatiana had changed dresses. She was wearing a black one now, lower cut. It made her look thinner and much less festive, but at least it didn’t have that awful, choking, lacy neckline Ginny always opted to attach to any female garment she sewed. Holly didn’t recognize this black dress, actually, but Tatty owned at least twenty dresses, and it might have been something she’d bought at the mall without Holly, anyway—or maybe at that teenagers’ secondhand shop they all liked (Plato’s Closet) and to which Holly objected (lice, bed bugs, crabs).

“I’m sorry, Tatty. I know you wanted to see them, and to see Patty.”

Tatiana had changed her earrings, too. She was wearing silver studs now instead of Thuy and Patty’s opals. It made Holly want, unhelpfully, to sigh or roll her eyes. She couldn’t help thinking Tatiana had changed the earrings because Holly had mentioned that it was nice of her to wear them. Apparently the mother of a teenage girl wasn’t even allowed to compliment her daughter’s thoughtfulness without consequences. But Holly didn’t say anything. She and Tatty were, it seemed, back to normal, and she didn’t want to disrupt that. Her daughter was out of her bedroom at least.

“Who was that?” Tatiana asked, glancing at the iPhone in Holly’s hand.

Holly looked back at her phone. “Thuy,” she said. “I told you. They were driving back from church, and—”

“No,” Tatty said. “After that. There was another call.”

“Oh,” Holly said, nodding. “Sorry. That was your friend Unavailable. She said she’d call back in forty minutes or so, after she learned to speak English. It seems that scam artists don’t get Christmas Day off after all.”

“No rest for the wicked,” Tatty said.

Holly blinked and shook her head a little. What? Had she misheard? That wasn’t like anything Tatty would ever say. Such a platitude would have sounded more natural on her
own
lips than on her daughter’s. Holly shrugged and said, “That’s right. I guess.”

“Don’t answer when she calls back,” Tatty said.

“No,” Holly said, and nodded again at her daughter’s common sense and change of heart. “There’s no law that says you need to answer the phone every time it rings. There’s voice mail now. And Unavailable is never a good bet.”

“That’s right,” Tatty said. “And it’s not Christmas today in Russia anyway.”

Holly nodded, but she was surprised that Tatiana knew, or remembered, this fact. When Tatty was very little, Holly had thought it might be fun to celebrate Christmas on the Russian Orthodox holiday as well, in honor of Tatiana’s origins—but this had angered and confused Tatiana, who at first pushed the gifts away that Holly gave her and said, “It’s not Christmas.”

“It is in Russia!” Holly had said, and began to unwrap Tatiana’s gifts for her. Eric was at work, so it was just the two of them, and Tatiana wanted nothing to do with the unwrapped presents—a Russian nesting doll, a Russian lacquer box with a brightly smiling Snow Maiden on it, and a pair of black mink mittens. Holly, who’d done some research, tried to explain the concept of Grandfather Frost to her, but Tatty put her hands over her ears and said, again, “It’s not Christmas,” and she never, to Holly’s knowledge, had looked at those Russian gifts again, although Holly kept them dusted for her on a shelf in her bedroom.

“No, you’re right,” Holly said. “It’s not Christmas in Russia. It is here, though. Would you mind setting the table now? Until we get word that no one’s showing up at all, we have to pretend we’re having Christmas dinner per usual, right?”

“Right,” Tatty said, and although it sounded noncommittal, dispassionate, she headed obediently over to the table.

The roast made the sound of splattering fat inside the oven, and when Holly opened the door, the succulent smells rushed out to her, along with the heat, which turned the silver chain around her neck to a burning trickle of heat conduction. The meat, lit up under the oven bulb, was still bloody, but now it was at least browning a little at both ends. Although the smell flipped that primitive carnivorous switch inside her, the sight of the meat still repulsed Holly. She’d seen roadkill a lot like this—and also photos of carnage, horrible scenes in violent movies with leg stumps, dead babies, human remains.

Still, Holly’s stomach rumbled. She was hungry. Neither she nor Tatiana had eaten at all today. As soon as she’d shut the oven, she was thinking about sitting down with a knife and eating that meat. “The roast sure smells good, doesn’t it?” Holly said over her shoulder to Tatty.

But there was no answer. Holly looked into the dining room. Tatty wasn’t there. The table was not set. Not a single dish or water glass or utensil had been touched, and Tatty was gone.

“Tatty?”

No answer.

It was a small house. If Tatty couldn’t hear her mother’s voice she was either in the bathroom with the door closed, or she’d gone outdoors or down to the basement, or she had her bedroom door shut again and was purposely not responding. Holly started down the hallway, shaking her head and ready for the argument she’d been trying to suppress all day if that’s what Tatty wanted, and saw that the bathroom door was open and the light was on (how many times had she asked Tatty to remember to turn the overhead lights off when she left a room?), and then she continued on to Tatiana’s room.

Door closed.

“Tatty?” Holly said to the closed door for—what?—the
thousandth
time today. She raised a hand to knock, and then she thought
to hell with it.
It wasn’t as if she couldn’t set the table and prepare the Christmas dinner and clean it all up afterward herself. She’d managed it for years, with only that brief stretch of time when Tatty was between nine and fifteen, old enough not to be in the way and actively eager to be helpful. This, Holly thought, was going to be the new normal for a while. Just like they’d all told her: “Try to remember how sweet she was, to sustain you when she’s a teenager!”

Holly recalled how other mothers had seemed to delight in saying such things to her when beautiful four-year-old Tatty came running across the park to throw herself into her arms, crying out, “Mommy, I love you!”

So, why should it surprise Holly so much that they’d been right?

NOW THE SNOW
beyond the picture window looked like a staticky wall, like something that was being built from the ground up rather than falling from the sky. Now there was either no breeze—and the heavy flakes were simply, in their density, floating—or there were so many flakes falling that they replaced themselves more quickly than the eye could detect. Holly knew, several seconds before the song started up, that her cell phone was about to start playing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” but it wasn’t precognition. There was a flash of light from the phone, so quick it was nearly subliminal. She looked at the iPhone as Bob Dylan began to sing, and she recognized the local area code. It was the Coxes.

“Holly? This is Tom. Have you looked out the window lately?” Tom Cox laughed as if he’d made a clever joke, maybe at Holly’s expense. Surely he knew she didn’t like him. He must have assumed, over the years, that she’d been privy to some of Eric’s office conflicts. And Tom Cox wasn’t a complete idiot. He would know that while a man might choose to remain pals with someone he worked with, and despised, the man’s wife didn’t have to like him.

“Yeah, actually, I’m looking out the window now, Tom,” Holly said. “It’s snowing.”

“Snowing, ha! That’s a good one! Well, oh—just a second here, Mindy’s taking the phone, tell Eric, I—”

“Holly, it’s Mindy. I’m
so
sorry. I know you’ve probably been working yourself sick getting Christmas together for all of us, and we were
so
excited to be there, but we just went outside to assess the situation, and, God, we can’t even
see
the street from our driveway. I mean,
nothing’s
going anywhere.”

Mindy Cox made so many apologies and went into so much detail about the blizzard, and the road, and their car, and the impossibility of even shoveling enough snow to walk
out
to the car, that Holly realized something she’d been somehow too myopic to see until then—that Mindy didn’t like her or Eric, either. That she hadn’t wanted to come over for Christmas. That she had been, perhaps, dreading it for days. That her heart had sunk when Tom had told her they’d been invited, and that maybe they’d even been arguing about it, but what could they do? This was the kind of relationship Tom and Eric had, and all of their livelihoods depended on the continuation of this relationship. Tom would feel he owed it to Eric, who would have felt not only slighted but unnerved if Tom had turned him down, and Mindy Cox had been praying all night for a blizzard, and God had come through for her.

After much reassurance, Holly said good-bye, exhausted by all the pretense, all the false bonhomie. And, yet, after Mindy Cox hung up, Holly continued to hold the iPhone to her ear, feeling inexplicably bereft. She felt even sadder than she’d felt about Thuy and Patty canceling! Ridiculous! What did it say about her that she was this upset to have been rejected by people she had not wanted to be with in the first place?

But suddenly she
did
want to be with them. Suddenly Holly realized that the Coxes had been an intrinsic part of the day, a part of her life, a part of the plan—and that putting up with them had been for herself, and no one else. Wasn’t their company—on Christmas but also on earth!—one of the consolations of being a human being? Now she realized, too late, that she’d even actually wanted to feed their tiresome son his vegan salad. That poor, awful child, with a haircut out of
The Great Gatsby
but a face like a tangle of wires.

Still, she reassured herself, Christmas dinner wasn’t entirely a dead issue yet. None of Eric’s siblings had called yet to say they couldn’t be there. The call of the tribe might be strong enough for them to make it through anything to be here with their parents and one another on Christmas Day. They could still begin to arrive, car by car, hungry, complaining, stomping the snow off their boots in her hallway. Holly needed to boil the potatoes!

Setting the iPhone down on the kitchen counter, Holly considered calling out to her daughter again—but that was just out of force of habit. She didn’t expect Tatiana to respond, and did she even want Tatty’s help now, knowing how begrudging it would be? A better mother, Holly knew, might force the child out of her room in order to interact with her. (Hadn’t she read an article about that in
Good Housekeeping
? Hadn’t one of the rules been never to let your child isolate herself, to maintain physical proximity even when the two of you were angry at one another?) A better mother would exert whatever energy it took to get the child to confess what was wrong (something with Tommy? or
had
she gotten her period?)—but that was, frankly, far more energy than Holly herself had left after the long, wrangling morning, and her low-grade hangover.

She was also fearful.

Tatiana was in the kind of mood, it seemed, in which she might say anything. She might not say the most hurtful thing (
You’re not my real mother!
), but she might hint at it (
I’m nothing like you!
), or she might, as she already had today, without words, taunt Holly for the marijuana smoking.

That
was an issue that never failed to put Tatiana squarely in the right and Holly squarely in the wrong—the
one time
Holly had indulged in
one puff
since Tatiana had come home with them from Russia. A huge mistake, no doubt about it, but a small one in the scheme of things, surely? Holly’s favorite coworker, Roberta, fourteen years her junior, had been dying to get Holly stoned (“It would be so fucking fun!”) ever since the two of them had swapped college stories one day, literally around the office watercooler.