Mind of Winter (16 page)

Her shoulder bumped into Holly’s arm as she hurried past her toward the kitchen counter and the iPhone. She lunged at it as if it were in flight, as if she were trying to catch it rather than simply trying to snatch it off the counter before the call went to voice mail.

“Tatty,” Holly said, “for God’s sake. If it’s Daddy we’ll call him right back, and if it’s not—”

Then, as if the phone
did
have wings and agency of its own, or as if it had been thrown, it flew off the kitchen counter and traveled, low and fast, across the kitchen and into the dining room, to the dining room table, where it smashed into one of Holly’s mother’s water glasses, which fell to the floor with a shattering finality that seemed predestined, or deliberate, or both.

“Tatiana!” Holly shouted.

What had happened? And it had happened so quickly! Apparently in her rush to grab the iPhone, Tatiana had somehow
thrown
it instead—swatted it, sent it flying across this room and into the next.

“For Christ’s sake!”

Holly hurried out of the kitchen and over to the dining room table. The cell phone lay unharmed on the surface of the table, but her mother’s iridescent water glass was no longer a water glass. It was a thousand shimmering, scattered bits. That water glass was nowhere now—and, also, everywhere. Who knew how far the glass slivers of it had flown? Holly would be sweeping and vacuuming those little billions up from the corners and from under the furniture and even off the windowsills for years. The water glass had
exploded
when it hit the floor.
Atomized.

The iPhone, on the other hand, being utterly expendable (Holly had even bought the replacement insurance on it), was unharmed. In fact it was still lit up where it lay, displaying Holly’s wallpaper—an image of Tatiana and Eric standing in front of a waterfall.

On the phone, in that photograph, the two of them were illuminated, in miniature, and the waterfall behind them looked like feathers instead of water—as if a few hundred pillows had just been broken open behind them while they stood smiling into Holly’s cell phone. The precision of that photograph was incredible. Somehow Holly’s iPhone camera had managed to capture not only the very second of those particular smiles on the faces of her husband and daughter, but the individual drops of that waterfall’s frothing water in mid-fall. It revealed the scene for exactly what it was—something mild and violent at the same time, a moment rushing past them, while utterly frozen forever. And all of it on a device the size of a child’s hand! Secured for eternity on a handheld electronic device! If this stuff weren’t so ubiquitous, it would have seemed supernatural.

Holly stepped back, away from the scene of the water glass, shaking her head, and when she turned back around she saw that her daughter hadn’t moved from where she’d been standing when the iPhone first sailed from her hand. But Tatiana held that hand to her mouth now, pressing it to her lips, as if the hand were injured or she were trying to stifle a scream.

“Jeez, Louise,” Holly said—opting for levity, because what was the point of getting angry? She’d had twelve water glasses, until Tatty had broken three, and then she had nine, and, well, now she had eight. It was, at least, an even number again! Thuy’s words came to Holly’s mind:
You can’t reason with a toddler, so why get angry with one?

She’d said this in response to Holly’s compliment—how incredibly patient Thuy was with Patty—and the words, the truth of them, had stung Holly, who immediately flashed on an image of herself standing over Baby Tatty, telling her to go directly to her room after being caught ripping the pages out of the
Webster’s Dictionary
one by one. Holly remembered the way Tatiana had looked around her then, as if she had no idea where to go, which room was hers. She’d only been living in this house for six months, and still she woke up every morning calling out
Please?
in Russian:
Puzhalsta
?
Puzhalsta? Mama Anya?

Why, indeed, get angry with a toddler, or a child of any age? When Thuy had laughingly tossed off this noble truth, Tatiana was already twelve years old, and Holly had wished herself, desperately, back in time. She wanted to take Thuy’s advice—but all those early years were lost! All those little seconds she could have valued more, cherished better, in which she could have practiced more patience, professed more love, brought her daughter home from Wee Ones and taken her straight to the park—gone!

But Holly
had
tried, hadn’t she? She’d sat on the floor countless times and played Candyland with her daughter, and Chutes and Ladders—the games that Holly herself had so wanted to play as a child, but which no one had the time to play with her. She
had
taken Tatty to the park. And the beach. And the zoo. And the
Nutcracker
! They’d gone horseback riding. They’d traveled. They’d eaten in expensive restaurants and little diners, and even if Holly hadn’t attended a church with Tatiana (as Thuy and Pearl did with Patty), they’d toured a few of the world’s largest cathedrals, attended Handel’s
Messiah
at Hill Auditorium every December.

Still, by the time Thuy gave Holly this advice (which she’d never intended as advice, only the uttering of a fact), the past was already chiseled in stone, and unalterable, and every moment of Holly’s and Tatty’s lives together was recorded on that stone, and had been from the beginning, and would be until the end. Although Holly had, really, no religious or mystical views at all, she felt keenly, the longer she lived, the inevitability of every second of her life, especially since Tatiana had been in it.

SO, THERE WAS
certainly no sense crying over another broken water glass! No sense chastising Tatty about an accident! And it
was
an accident. Holly had seen the whole thing herself. Tatiana had not thrown the phone or smashed the glass on purpose.

Still, the mania of lurching to answer the cell phone—all that teenage-girl melodrama—was something Holly would have liked to challenge her daughter on. She would have liked to ask Tatty if it might not be possible to
take it down a notch.
But she wasn’t going to say that. Not in the middle of this fragile day. She said, instead, trying to tease Tatiana, “That’s quite an arm you’ve got there. Major league.”

But Tatty didn’t laugh, and did not take her fingers from her lips.

Holly swallowed a sigh.
More
melodrama. Still, she tried not to change her tone. She tried to keep it light—or “lite,” as all her salad dressings might call it—and said, “You okay, Tatty?”

Tatty continued to utter nothing, and this time Holly did sigh. She managed, however, not to roll her eyes, and congratulated herself on that. “Okay, Tatty,” Holly said, and touched her daughter’s shoulder. “It’s no big deal.” Still, no response. “Earth to Tatty.” Holly snapped her fingers (playfully) near her daughter’s ear.

Then Tatiana drew her fingers away from her mouth, and looked at them, studied them. Her dark eyebrows nearly met above the bridge of her nose, considering the fingertips.

Holly snapped more loudly this time, as if to summon Tatty from a trance. It worked. She looked up at her mother, and then she held out her hand for Holly to see.

Holly gasped when she saw the fingertips, and grabbed hold of Tatiana’s wrist, looking more closely at the hand, and then spreading out the fingers so that she could see more closely.

They were burned! The middle three fingers. They were swollen, reddish, purplish. They were
blistered.
Holly found that she couldn’t say anything, although she managed to pull her daughter by the wrist to the kitchen sink, turn on the cold water, and plunge her daughter’s hand under the faucet. Tatty yelped, tried to snatch her hand away from it, but Holly held on, keeping the fingers firmly under the water’s flow.

“Ouch, ouch, Mommy,” Tatty cried out. “Please. Please, Mama!”

But, although she was crying out, Tatiana wasn’t trying to get away any longer. There was no point. Holly was both panicked and ferocious now, and Tatiana could never have wrestled herself out of her grip.

Jesus Christ! What had happened? Could this be a second-degree burn? Or worse? The darkened, blistered skin was peeling away, ragged as lace now, exposing pale, new skin beneath the old.
Blanched!
Tatiana’s fingertips had been blanched! As if she’d plunged her hand into a boiling pot, and kept it there.

“Oh my God, Tatty,” Holly said. She held tight to her daughter’s wrist but turned to look at her daughter’s face. “Tatty, how did this happen?”

Tatty shook her head. Her eyes were enormous. She said, as if from far away, “I don’t know, Mommy. I don’t know. I never even touched it.”

“Touched what, honey? What burned you?”

“Your iPhone.” Tatiana stated it like a fact, but there was awe in it, too.

“No, sweetheart,” Holly said, and looked over her shoulder at the stove behind Tatty. “You must have touched the stove. I thought I’d turned it off, but it must be burning hot somehow.”

“No,” Tatty said. “I didn’t touch the stove.”

“You touched something that was burning,” Holly said. “But it’ll be okay. We’ll get some ointment on it. I’ll look up burns on the Internet, and we’ll see how serious this is. We’ll make sure it doesn’t get infected.”

Tatiana looked away from Holly, back down to her hand, and then back at Holly. She did not look reassured. She looked as if she doubted Holly had any idea at all what she was talking about, or any power in a matter such as this.

Holly had a flash of anger that Eric wasn’t here. He’d always been the only one of the two of them who’d ever been able to soothe or bolster Tatty. Tatty had
never
(infuriatingly!) taken Holly’s word for anything. Holly’s telling Tatiana that everything would be all right (whether it was a bruise or a bad grade or a tornado warning) had never elicited anything but this very expression of doubt she wore right now. Holly looked back down at the fingers, and she couldn’t help but make a hissing sound between her teeth.

The burn looked terrible. It was quite possible, wasn’t it, that they’d have to go to the ER later today? For only the second or third time in Tatiana’s childhood did Holly wish that they had a family doctor, or a pediatrician she could call. But there’d never been any reason for one. Tatty was so healthy that they’d never even needed antibiotics or cough medicines—a lucky thing, because Holly was absolutely
not
going to subject her child to one more vaccine or unnecessary checkup in this life, after what she’d been through in Russia, and she knew that taking her daughter to a physician would open
that
Pandora’s box. Despite what they said, this was
not
a free country, not when it came to making decisions about your own child’s health care.

And poor Baby Tatty! She had suffered
so
much medical invasion already, with all the prodding and poking and sticking with needles she’d been put through during the adoption process. No. Holly would
never again
allow her daughter to be given vaccines for diseases that she would never be exposed to—rubella! polio! smallpox! And although their opinions differed when it came to dental care, she and Eric were in complete agreement on the medical establishment. Eric despised doctors, had only been to the one, once, in all the years that Holly had known him, and that was at her insistence because of the (benign, yet ever-growing) bump on the back of his hand. Eric firmly believed that it was the job of doctors to find diseases where none existed, and to exacerbate disease where they found it. So Holly and Eric simply, easily, lied about the vaccines and the checkups on the yearly school forms, and Holly signed her own name under “Attending Physician”—and in all those years no one had once called her on it because, as everyone knew, no one ever looked at those forms because those vaccines weren’t necessary!

Of course, not to take your child to the doctor in this country was an unspeakable taboo, like corporal punishment, or like incest, so the only person Holly had ever confessed it to had been Thuy, who’d grown, herself, into a healthy adult without having seen a physician in childhood. The conditions under which Thuy had been raised certainly had not allowed for yearly checkups! And look at her! Her hair was blue-black glossy and down to her elbows when she didn’t wear it in a bun. Her skin was flawless. She ran six miles a day. Her smile was the only smile Holly had ever seen that could have rivaled Tatty’s for wholesome beauty. Thuy had promised not to judge Holly about it “as long as my Baby Tatty never gets sick. If that little angel gets sick, you’re going to have to answer to Auntie Thuy if you don’t get her to a doctor—or if it turns out she got sick because you
didn’t
.”

“That won’t happen,” Holly had said. “She
won’t
get sick because I
won’t
take her to the doctor. She’ll be like you.”

Thuy had considered this, twisting a pearl bracelet around on her wrist as she did, seeming to accept it, but then she said, “Well, honey, you must have
some
confidence in modern medicine.” Holly knew that Thuy was talking about her prophylactic mastectomies, her oophorectomy.

“True,” Holly had said, ready for this (she’d thought about it for years), “but that’s all that can be done. The only thing modern medicine can do for you is rid you of body parts and tumors. After that, if you get a disease, you die. Believe me, Thuy. I know. I watched my mother and my sister and all the ways ‘cures’ kill you—slowly and horribly—of diseases you might not even have known you had if you hadn’t gone to the doctors.”

“See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil?” Thuy had said, doing the monkey hand motions.

“Yes,” Holly had said.

“And, Holly, not taking Tatty to the doctor isn’t because you have, you know, regrets? I mean, all your talk of being a
robot . . .
?” Thuy made an expression, half sadness, half mock horror. “You’re not, you know, thinking you’re going to spare Tatiana some similar fate?”