Mind of Winter (21 page)

Pearl and Thuy were the kinds of mothers who seemed determined that every hour of their child’s life be filled with memorable and seasonal pleasures and events. They took Patty to orchards and to cider mills and on hayrides in the fall. In the spring they walked with her through the woods to sketch the wildflowers they found (and did not pick!). There was the beach in the summer, of course, and Christmas began in late November with the
Nutcracker
(in Chicago) and the Ice Capades (in Detroit) and the stringing of cranberries and popcorn. Holly thought of them on the couch together now, snowed in and glorious, and she thought how much she wished she’d had their model for motherhood when Tatiana was still a child.

Because Tatiana was no longer a child, was she?

It was a terrible thought. Tatty’s childhood was over! Holly walked over to the kitchen island and rested her hands on the cool and tomblike granite. It was a deep-sea blue, nearly black, but inside the smoothed stone there were tiny silver flecks. She wished she had more energy. She wished she felt strong enough to call out to Tatty again, to tell Tatty to come out of her room, to take off her terrible black shoes and that dress, to put on her white tank top and yoga pants, to wear her fuzzy slippers, and to bring a blanket. Holly would make hot chocolate, popcorn. If there weren’t any good old movies on TV the two of them could sit and watch the blizzard outside the picture window. Holly would keep her arm around the thin blue shoulders of her daughter.

But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t bear it. The thought of going to that door and knocking on it again, of stepping into Tatty’s room—she couldn’t even do that, could she? She couldn’t even knock on the door. If the door were locked, if Tatiana had hooked closed that door on Holly with the lock that she herself had provided, what would Holly have to face then? And if it wasn’t? That would be even worse. Holly could not bear that, either, to step into that room and find her daughter’s cold back turned to her again.

Maybe later, but not now.

Instead, she went back to the picture window and looked out.

One must have a mind of winter
.

Wallace Stevens.

Wallace Stevens was the insurance executive poet whose name Eric was trying to remember when he blamed Holly for her own writer’s block, insisting to Holly that it wasn’t motherhood and her job in corporate America that was giving her writer’s block. (“Look at that poet, you know, that guy, the insurance guy . . .”). That her problem was, instead—

Well, Eric had a billion accusatory explanations for Holly’s writer’s block over the years, hadn’t he?

Beyond the window, there was now a high wall made of snow. The flakes that composed it no longer had the individuality that snowflakes were always being ballyhooed as having. They’d come together in solidarity, instead. They were shrugging off any claim to personal distinction. They might, each one of them, be different from the others, but they were far too alike to be differentiated. They could never have been sorted, or given names. Together they formed a door, and closed themselves.
Wait
—

No.

That wasn’t quite true.

There was no
door
, just the illusion of one.

What those flakes formed together was a
window
—a window behind this window, which Holly stepped closer to. She put her face to the glass, and cupped her hands around her face, and realized that if she narrowed her eyes against the light she could make out the fence between their yard and Randa’s. She could even see the snowchild of the birdbath, and the cloth bags she’d tied around the roses in the fall against that fence.

Those cloth bags were gray-white, like the falling snow, and were now covered with snow, so that Holly could only really see their outlines against the cedar boards of the fence back there. From here, obscured by blizzard, those sacks protecting her roses looked like heads, lined up, seven of them, against Randa’s fence. Skulls full of roses, minds made of roses, hidden in there so that they could stay warm and dormant, so that her rosebushes had some chance of living through the Michigan winter:

One must have a mind of roses.

Now, it was hard to believe that, out there, covered in those bags and dormant (whatever
dormant
meant: somewhere between sleeping and dead?) were her Teasing Georgia, her Mardi Gras, her Cherry Parfait, her Falstaff, her Purple Passion, and her Black Magic—the one she called her Tatiana. Holly had placed the sacks over those herself, back in October.

Several years before, when she and her neighbor were still on speaking terms, Randa had asked Holly (politely, Holly had to give her that) what it was that Holly was spraying on the roses. Randa told Holly that she
loved
the roses, loved to see them blooming along the fence line that they shared, and loved being able to look over her fence and see them in all their glory and perfection. Still, she wondered, could whatever it was Holly sprayed them with poison her poodle? Or, say, Holly’s chickens? Or the birds that came to their backyard feeders? Or anything else?
Her little boy, or Tatiana?
Randa’s questions became more hysterical the longer she was allowed to ask them. Was it a pesticide? Was it a carcinogen? Were there any organic alternatives?

Holly had simply lied. In truth, she sprayed the roses with diazinon, malathion, and something else, something called Knock-Out. And, no, you couldn’t grow roses like this without poison. There were no
organic
poisons—or, you might say, all poisons were
organic
(of, related to, or deriving from living matter; of, relating to, or affecting a bodily organ
). The earth itself was the ultimate poison, and the sun—they were all being slowly killed by radioactive fallout from the sun. She didn’t bother to argue with Randa. Instead, she said, “Yes. It’s all organic.”

“Phew,” Randa said. “Thanks for not being offended that I asked!”

But Holly
had
been offended:

She’d been offended by Randa’s ignorance, and then been offended by her gullibility. She’d been offended that anyone could be so naïve as to think that roses like these might be able to fend off their own aphids and fungi and black spot without help from humans and the toxins they concocted in their factories. She was offended by Randa’s innocent idea that Holly had any options (other than not grow the roses at all) but to spray them with something potentially deadly. Roses like this were worth some risks, weren’t they? She felt a little guilty, yes, especially about Rufus the poodle, who spent most of his time sniffing around the fence between their yard and Randa’s, where the roses happened to be growing. But, after all these years, Rufus was still alive, and Holly had felt much less guilty since Randa had confronted her (
attacked
her) about the cat.

AH, TRIXIE:

Back there, near the roses, under the snow, along the fence line, there was a little grave mound in honor of Trixie, on top of which Tatiana had placed a small ceramic cupid they’d bought at Target.

Eric had been in California on business, so Holly’d had to dig the grave herself, and it had been winter then, too, and the ground had been so solid that Holly could hardly make a dent in it with Eric’s shovel, so it had been a shallow grave. Really, a shamefully shallow grave.

Holly should have known that it wasn’t deep enough, that something could come and dig the body up. But it had also been
so cold
that day that she’d assumed that Trixie’s body, inside a cardboard box, would be frozen stiff by nightfall. No animal could have sniffed out such a frozen dead thing, surely, and by the time the body thawed?

Well, what did Holly know about dead bodies? It wasn’t until the snow melted in March and Holly went out there to check on her roses, to peek under their hangman’s hoods, that she noticed that the grave
had
been dug up, and that the cardboard box was in damp shreds, and that the cat was gone. Luckily, she discovered this on a Saturday morning, and Tatty and Eric were still in bed, and Holly was able to hurry to the garage and to fake a grave mound and to replace the ceramic cupid, which had rolled on its chubby face beside the empty grave.

HOLLY STEPPED AWAY
from the window.

She remembered, then, the roast, cooling now in the cold oven:

Twelve pounds at 12.99 a pound. She couldn’t just leave it to spoil. She would wrap it, she decided, and put it in the refrigerator. If Tatty would agree to eat any of it with her later, Holly would just slice off enough for the two of them and finish cooking that on a tin plate in the oven or, if she was in a hurry, in the microwave.

But when she turned to face the kitchen she saw that Tatty was already there, and that the roast had been taken out of the oven. It was on the kitchen counter now, and Tatty was bent over it with a knife and fork, and she was chewing!

“For God’s sake, Tatty!” Holly called out. “I kept asking you if you wanted something to eat, and you just ignored me. Let me
cook
that before you
eat
it.”

But Tatty didn’t look up, and her mouth was, apparently, too full of raw meat to speak. She just chewed and chewed, ignoring Holly—and before she could possibly have swallowed the bloody lump of meat that was already in her mouth, Tatiana was carving off another piece, and stuffing that piece in her mouth. Witnessing this, Holly went from annoyed to alarmed:

“Tatty! My God! You’re going to choke. Stop it! Please!”

She came up behind her daughter and yanked the carving knife out of her hand. She didn’t really expect Tatty to grab for it, but she held it up and away from her daughter anyway. Holly knew how sharp this knife was. Only a few days earlier, foolishly, she’d left it point-side up in the dishwasher drainer and, reaching in to get a clean spoon for her cereal, she’d stabbed herself—quickly, but thoroughly—in the very center of her palm.

Tatiana’s eyes were huge again. They’d never been larger, really. Had they? They were twice their usual size! Was this a symptom of something? Some sort of vitamin deficiency? Was this what the eyes of a person in a manic state looked like? Could Tatty be displaying symptoms of some mental illness she’d not yet presented? Mental illness had been something a few coworkers (not necessarily well-meaning, in Holly’s opinion) had suggested to her when she’d first begun discussing her interest in adopting a child from overseas:

What about the child’s mental hygiene? What about her genes? Wouldn’t a child in a state-run institution be likely to have alcoholic parents? Criminal parents? Schizophrenic parents? If the child were already nearly two years old, who could know what sort of abuse she’d suffered in an orphanage already and what that might mean for her psychological development?

Holly had been made furious by this line of questioning and reasoning, and, after the second or third such suggestion, she’d said, “Well, I guess if my own gene pool were perfect, like yours, I’d be more concerned. But since lethal gene mutations run the length of it, I have more compassion about that than some people might. I mean, unless you’re suggesting that people with bad genes shouldn’t have parents, or that people with bad genes shouldn’t have children . . .”

Holly had managed, with this shaming tirade, to inspire a couple of abject apologies. And, after that, word must have gotten around the office because no one brought the subject up again.

Still, Holly would not have been human if she had not worried about this herself.

Something, of course,
had
gone terribly wrong in Tatiana’s lineage. How else did a beautiful healthy black-haired baby girl end up in an orphanage famous all over Russia—all over the
world
—for its stark interior, its lack of central heating, its meager food rations, its poor staffing (so poor that many of the children who spent their infancies in the Pokrovka institutions could be identified by the permanent bald spots at the back their heads, resulting from having been left on their backs in their cribs without being picked up or held for so long)?

No one in Siberia had ever been able (or willing?) to tell Holly and Eric one word about Tatiana’s biological parents—except that Tatiana had been born “in the East,” which might have been meant to imply that Tatty was of Romany or Mongolian descent, in other words “gypsy” or “Asian.” Of course, this didn’t matter to Eric and Holly. The only thing that concerned them at that point—after that first glimpse of Tatty/Sally’s enormous dark eyes, after they’d fallen utterly in love with her—was whether or not there was anything they should know about her genetics in order to help her, not
reject
her.

But you couldn’t blame the director or the staff of the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 for not trusting that. They’d seen hundreds of American couples pass through their doors, profess love for a child, find out that the child’s birth mother was a drug addict, or a prostitute, or the victim of incest, or in some way genetically inferior to themselves, then leave the orphanage in search of another child to fall helplessly in love with. Surely it was concern for the children that kept the orphanage staff from divulging too much information.

Not until the very last hour of their last trip to Siberia—with the adoption finalized and Tatty standing stalwartly beside them (she would not be picked up), wearing a little white dress and coat that Holly had brought with her from the States (along with those little white leather shoes), with the first leg of their journey home (train to St. Petersburg) about to begin—would anyone even
listen
to questions about Tatiana’s origins, let alone answer them:

“Do you believe her mother gave her up, or that she died?” Holly asked Anya, the nurse who clearly loved Tatiana the most, and who, coincidentally, spoke the best English.

Anya cast her blue eyes quickly up to the ceiling, and said, “To this world, the mother is dead.”

This utterance revealed nothing, of course.
Dead to this world
did not necessarily mean
dead.
Clearly all of the children in the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 had been born into poverty, or into substance abuse that led to poverty, or they were the products of illicit relationships, or had been born to very young mothers, mothers who were themselves children.