Mind of Winter (13 page)

“Maybe you’d be inspired to write some poems again!” Roberta had said.

The suggestion had made Holly cringe and wish she’d never told Roberta that she’d once been a poet. “I don’t think clearheadedness is what’s standing in the way of my poetic inspiration,” Holly had said.

“Well, how do you know unless you get high?”

Roberta had gone on and on about how fun it would be to get stoned together, and eventually the nostalgia of it—silliness, youth, camaraderie—began to intrigue Holly. So one Saturday night when Eric was out of town, and Tatiana was out, Roberta had come over with a joint, and she and Holly had lit it up on the patio—an instantaneous fog of surreal entertainment (Holly had felt that her bare feet had turned to rubber, which instead of being alarming had seemed hilarious) but suddenly at the center of the cloud of sweet smoke, the giggling and Doritos and Roberta’s unintelligible story of the first time she’d gone snorkeling, stoned, there were Tatiana and Tommy, home from the high school football game hours early, standing beside them on the patio. Holly really couldn’t face
that
condemnation again today, whether she deserved it or not. She would just let her daughter sulk in her room until Eric, his parents, and his siblings finally arrived.

THE CARROTS, WHEN
Holly pulled them out of the crisper, looked shaggier than she’d remembered them. Fine little hairs now covered them, and the green tops seemed almost as if they’d grown longer since she’d brought them home two days ago from the grocery store. They looked, now, like they’d be a lot more work to clean and shred for the carrot salad (Gin’s overly sweet recipe/tradition) than she’d thought they would be. Like everything else, this was something Holly should have attended to last night instead of finishing that bottle of Sauvignon Blanc with Eric at dinner. And then the eggnog.

She held the carrots in her hands. Was this actually even the same bunch she’d brought home from the store? Was it possible these were an older bunch, some purchase she’d stashed and forgotten about months ago? Holly put them down on the counter, went back to the refrigerator, opened and closed the other crisper. No other carrots.

Well, she supposed, it was natural that carrots might continue to grow after being closed up in the cold dark of the refrigerator crisper for a couple of days. Didn’t they say that the hair and fingernails of a corpse continued to grow in the grave? Carrots were, after all, roots. The cold dark was where they’d thrived before they’d been yanked out of the ground. Why
wouldn’t
they mistake the refrigerator for the earth? Holding the whole bunch under the faucet, letting the water from the tap run over them, it was easy to imagine them underground—the way they would be feeling, feeling,
feeling
their way around down there, like long, creeping fingers.

God, how hungry the first person who ever dug up a carrot and ate it must have been! These were nothing like slices of roast beef. Who was the first person to give that dirty thing a taste, and then to call over the rest of the clan and persuade them to try it?

Holly took the chopping block out from under the sink, set it on the cupboard, and pulled a knife out of the drawer. She hated knife work, really. She knew there were special classes one could take just to learn how to hold a knife—something she’d never been able to do. If she ever had the time, maybe she would take such a class, but, in the meantime, she just held a knife clumsily in one hand and a shaggy carrot in the other.

Unlike Tatiana, she’d never helped out her mother in the kitchen—or, if she had, she had no memory of it. Holly had taught herself to cook through trial and error. By the time Holly would have been old enough to help, or to remember helping, her mother had given up and let Holly’s sisters take over the running of the household. So, Holly’s memories of the kitchen mostly consisted of being gently pushed out of it by Janet or Melissa while something bricklike unthawed itself in the oven and someone checked a loaf of Wonder Bread to make sure it hadn’t gotten moldy. (Something Wonder Bread seemed perversely immune from, but still . . .) “Go watch TV, Holly. We’ll call you when it’s ready.” So that’s what Holly had done.

All through the years of her mother’s slow death and her sisters’ servitude and her father’s enslavement by the U.S. Postal Service and her much older brother’s boring and inexorable suicide-by-Beefeater-and-tonics (so much more dramatic and prolonged than Melissa idling to death one night in a garage!), Holly had been lying on a floral couch with her dead grandmother’s afghan pulled up to her chin while one or another of the family cats slept on her ankles, and watching
Gilligan’s Island.

If only, Holly thought, she could take Tatty back there, to that doomed family (really, like a horrible fairy tale, how they’d started dying one by one as soon as Holly had been born!) and point out the lonely child on the couch who had once been Holly herself. She would say to Tatiana, “
This
is why you should be happy to be asked to help your mother with Christmas dinner. By the time your mother was your age, her own mother, her sister, and her fucking brother were dead. And the rest of them were well on their way.”

“Tatty?” she called then (again, force of habit) over her shoulder. Why not give it one more try? Tatty was going to have to come out of there eventually. She’d need to use the bathroom, if nothing else. She’d grow hungry, wouldn’t she? And even with a roomful of electronics (and an Internet connection that could attach her to any corner of the globe and any other connected person on that globe in a matter of nanoseconds) surely she’d get bored, wouldn’t she? And, anyway, of course, when Gin and Gramps got here, Tatiana would be by their sides. Gin and Gramps had seven other grandchildren, each of them biological, but not one of them was as devoted, as in love, as respectful, as reverential of her grandparents as Tatiana.

Three Christmases earlier, Eric’s brother had posed all those grandchildren around Gin and Gramps, and taken a photograph, and then posted it later, of course, on Facebook. In the photograph there were seven freckled, blue-eyed children ranging in age from three to twenty standing in a semicircle around the old couple in their black clothes. Each child bore a cautionary resemblance to one or both of the grandparents—that portrait seeming to whisper
These are your future faces, these black-clothed elders, this is what happens to pretty little freckled people who survive on this planet for eighty years, see how time and the sun and gravity will wither and bend you, beware
—except for Tatiana.

She was the Jet-Black Rapunzel at the center of that portrait. And even though it could not have been more clear that Tatty bore no biological relationship to these grandparents,
she
was the one standing at the center of the photograph with one hand on each of her seated grandparents’ shoulders. She was the closest to them, and she was the happiest to be there. Gin had an arm crossed over her chest, and her spotted hand was at rest on Tatiana’s wrist. Gramps had his head tilted in Tatiana’s direction as if he were trying, lovingly, to listen to his granddaughter’s heartbeat. Someday, Holly felt sure, some descendant would unearth (or, in the case of electronic photographs,
download
?) this portrait, and would point out Tatiana and wonder aloud,
Where did this one come from?
But it would also be clear that the story this photograph told was that Tatiana, stranger in a strange land, was the one who loved and
was
loved best.

“Tatty?” Holly called again. Then, speaking as loudly as she could without feeling absurd: “I’m worried about Gin and Gramps and Daddy, aren’t you? They should have been here a long time ago.”

Holly turned the faucet off and held still, a carrot in one fist and a knife in the other. She listened for the creaking of Tatty’s bedsprings, but didn’t hear a sound. She placed the carrot and the knife in the bottom of the sink, dried her hands on a dish towel, and stepped over to her iPhone again, checked her messages. No one had called. And why the hell not? They all had cell phones. Probably each of Eric’s siblings’ cars held three or four cell phones! They were
all
late,
very
late, by now—and whether it was because they were on the freeway in a blizzard or not, late was late, and people called their hostesses to explain why they were late. Right?

Holly looked for Eric’s name in her list of contacts. She’d never figured out how to put him on speed dial, and had never memorized his number since all she had to do was touch his name to reach him (although she did occasionally wonder what would happen if her phone fell into a lake, sank to the bottom, and she needed to call from a pay phone).

Eric picked up on the third ring. “Hello.” Not a question. He knew who it was from the name on his own cell phone, and he had clearly been expecting her to call.

“Eric,” Holly said. “What’s going on? Are you stuck on the freeway?”

“No,” he said. “Not anymore. I was going to wait to call you until I had some idea of what to say. We’re at the emergency room. St. Joseph’s Mercy. Something’s wrong with Mom. We’re in a room with her now, waiting for the doctor.”

“What?”

It was the only word that came to Holly’s mind. She wasn’t really asking Eric to repeat himself, but when she heard him sigh impatiently she realized that’s what he thought she was asking, that she hadn’t heard him. He hated cell phones, became irate when a call started to break up or someone hadn’t heard what he’d said. He’d go on and on about how bad the phone service had become these days, and how back in the old days you were connected to a cord, yes, but you could carry on a
fucking conversation
. Pointing out to him that now you could be standing in the center of a forest while talking to someone at the top of a mountain did no good. He’d ask what difference it made if you couldn’t
communicate
. For his birthday, she’d bought him an iPhone, which he’d returned to the store. He’d apologized, saying that it was a thoughtful gift, but he didn’t want to carry a tiny high-powered mainframe on which he could compute astronomical algorithms, or check Facebook. He wanted a phone.

“Well,” Holly had said, feeling more hurt than was warranted, since it wasn’t a very sentimental gift—still, she’d been excited to give it to him—“it’s a phone, too, even if it’s more than a phone.” She realized, as the words left her mouth, how much like an advertisement they sounded.

“And Steve Jobs is more than a human being,” Eric had said. “That’s why his Chinese slave workers are happy to throw themselves off the roofs of his factories as a human sacrifice to the iGods.” He hated Steve Jobs.

Holly thought she could hear some sort of hospital machine whirring behind Eric.

“You didn’t hear me?” Eric asked, and the irritation in his voice was clear. Their connection itself was, actually, crystal clear—one of those connections that made it possible even to hear the clicking of the speaker’s teeth in his mouth as he sounded out consonants.

“Yes,” Holly said—all business now. “I’m sorry. I heard what you said about Gin and the hospital. I just—I just don’t know what to say. Should we come there? Can I—”

Eric laughed with what sounded to Holly like bitter condescension. He said, “You’re kidding, right? I guess you haven’t looked outside yet today?”

“I know it’s snowing, Eric.”

“ ‘Snowing’ doesn’t exactly describe it, Holly. Don’t you two
dare
leave the house.”

Holly didn’t like his tone, but she also felt touched to hear him express concern for his wife’s and daughter’s safety, despite his distraction and anxiety and annoyance. His protectiveness was one of the hundreds of things she loved about Eric. On their very first date, strolling from his parked car to the restaurant, he’d switched places with her on the sidewalk, and Holly had understood that it was so that, if a car jumped the curb, it would kill him instead of her.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said, no longer annoyed. “What
happened
? What’s wrong with Gin?”

“I can’t go into that right now.”

“Because Gramps is there?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Can you call me back?”

“Later. Wait. I’ve gotta go. I’ll—”

“Eric, no one’s here yet. Have you heard from your brothers?”

“My brothers? Of course! No one’s coming, Holly. They’re wherever they could get a roof over their heads. If they can get anywhere at all, it will be here to the hospital. They certainly won’t be making it to Christmas dinner. Just stay home, Holly. I’ll call when I have real news. Bye.”

Before the connection was cut Holly heard Eric say a grave hello to someone who must have just walked in the door, and then what sounded like a rooster, cut off in mid-crow—but of course that couldn’t have been it. It had to have been the legs of a chair scraping against linoleum, or a door with squeaky hinges closing. But it alarmed her. She fought the urge to call back, to ask what that sound in the background had been, but calling him back would only add to Eric’s distractions. He’d said that he’d call her. And they were at St. Joseph’s Mercy Hospital, he’d said. Even if that sound had been the worst thing Holly could imagine (some sort of agonized cry for help?), they were at a
hospital.
In the emergency room. To call Eric again would be selfish, as if this crisis had anything to do with her. It didn’t, and she knew that, and so did he. Although Holly had always been fond of Gin and Gramps, they weren’t her parents. She didn’t
love
them. She knew that, and they knew that, and they felt the same way about her.

In point of fact, Holly felt she barely knew Eric’s parents, really. They’d lived hundreds of miles away from anywhere she’d ever lived since she’d been married to their son. How much time had she spent in the same room with them in all the years she and Eric had been married? Could it have totaled more than a hundred hours? Maybe not even close! And never alone. She’d never been in a room with the two of them that hadn’t also been occupied by at least ten other pale and freckled members of the Clare clan.

Still, she knew, it would be terrible for Eric, and it would be terrible for Tatty, if anything happened to either one of them. Especially on Christmas Day.

Then Holly stopped, as if slamming on the brakes before hitting a snowbank, and realized that Christmas was over—truly over. Or, more accurately, that it was not really going to be Christmas in any familiar kind of way this year at all.

Then, as if slamming into that bank of snow despite the brakes, Holly realized that none of Eric’s family members had thought to call her, to tell Holly herself that they wouldn’t be there for Christmas. They’d all called Eric, not her.

Well, she thought, that made sense, didn’t it? She tried to fight off a terrible sense of rejection, and its accompanying sense of failure, by telling herself that perhaps it had been the brothers, not their wives, who’d called. It would be only natural that the brothers would call their brother, Eric, not his wife, to update him on their progress through the blizzard, and lack thereof. They would simply have assumed that Eric would let Holly know (and why he hadn’t let her know sooner was something Holly could argue with him about at a much later date, after the crisis with Gin had passed). Eric’s brothers didn’t even have Holly’s cell phone number, she assumed. And who used landlines any longer? Obviously even the robots were calling cell phones these days.