Mind of Winter Page 11

  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.

  Or (of course!) Eric had called them before they’d had a chance to call him—or Holly, or the house. That was it. Eric had called his brothers from the freeway, just as he’d called her, when he and his parents had first left the airport, to tell them about the “confusion.” At that point, they’d told Eric that there was no way to make it through the snow to the house for the day. Eric had been in the car, in a blizzard, on the freeway, facing a crisis with Gin, and of course he hadn’t thought to call Holly to tell her about the cancellation.

  Still, it was hard to shake the feeling that she had been rebuffed. Eric’s brothers and their wives would have known that Holly was at home cooking, setting the table, arranging things, expecting them. Wouldn’t it have made sense to call her, to apologize, even if they were sure that Eric would let her know? Which he hadn’t. There was a cliché in her throat—a lump—and tears, which she blinked back, in her eyes.

  Holly glanced down at her feet. They felt cold and cramped without slippers or shoes on the bare tile of the kitchen floor. Through the black nylon of her stockings, Holly could see the intricate bone structure under the skin. They had become, suddenly it seemed, bony feet. This was something new about her body. Something she was only noticing now. These were like an old woman’s feet.

  On only one occasion in all those years had Holly glimpsed Gin’s naked feet—long ago when, during a summer visit from Gin and Gramps, Tatiana, only four or five years old, had begged her grandmother to come into the blow-up pool in the backyard with her.

  Poor old Gin would never, of course, have denied such a request. Although she could do no more than remove her orthopedic shoes and her flesh-colored socks (Holly was sure the woman had never owned a bathing suit, even as a child), Gin did manage to step into Tatty’s little vinyl pool with her, and that’s when Holly saw her mother-in-law’s feet.

  They looked to Holly like awful, plucked birds. Emaciated, wingless things, prepared for a meager prison meal or a third-world soup. Holly thought she could actually see the blood moving through the veins in those feet, collecting in little lozenge-sized clumps before pumping on. She’d felt sick with pity for those feet. She’d thought no wonder the old woman hobbled so badly. How did Gin even manage to walk? And how much longer could someone with feet so damaged, so exhausted, continue to walk this earth at all?

  Holly looked down at her feet and recognized that they were not yet like Gin’s, but that, if she lived long enough—unlike her mother, her sisters—they would be one day, and then she realized that, all around her feet, there was something dark, or dirty, spilled on the floor.

  Dust? Ash? What was this?

  Holly lifted a foot and touched the sole of it to see if it was damp, if she could be standing in a puddle of something. It wasn’t. This wasn’t from the tiny bit of blood that had dripped onto the floor from the roast. That little trickle couldn’t account for this darkness spreading around her. She took a sponge out of the sink, got on her knees, and ran the sponge over the floor.

  Nothing.

  Nothing came off the floor with her sponging, and whatever this darkness was, it wasn’t sticky or grimy. She ran her hand around the spot, and found it dry, and realized that there didn’t seem to be anything spilled there, recently at least. That circle was simply a darker darkness than the rest of the floor.

  Had the ceramic tiles (expensive, baked clay, burgundy, installed only two years before) begun to discolor? Or had they been discolored all along, and was she only now, in the snow-glare pouring in through the picture window onto the shiny surfaces of the kitchen, noticing it?

  Holly pressed harder with the sponge, but nothing happened.

  Or, did it?

  Was it her imagination, or did the dark circle seem to spread, to bloom, as she moved the sponge over it?

  “What are you doing?”

  Startled, Holly looked up to find Tatiana standing above her, wearing the red velvet dress again, gazing down on Holly with an annoyed expression, as if Holly might have spilled something that Tatiana had wanted to drink, or as if she’d broken a dish that Tatiana had particularly liked and was now ineptly picking up the pieces. It must have been, Holly thought, the expression Tatiana had received from Holly a hundred times in the first five or six years of her life in this house—her mother, looking down at her from her adult height, looking at the broken glasses or the torn book or the spilled juice, saying, “What did you do?”

  “Jesus,” Holly said. “You surprised me. I thought you were still in your room.”

  “Mom, what are you doing?” Tatiana asked again, still with that expression of annoyed surprise.

  “Well, there’s something on the tiles, it seems,” Holly said. “I can’t sponge it up, though. But see how all of this is darker, this whole circle? It’s like a stain, or discoloration, or maybe—”

  “It’s you.”

  Holly looked up at her daughter.

  “It’s you, Mom.”

  Holly didn’t want to ask Tatiana what she meant. She didn’t trust her now. It seemed that she could find something to criticize in anything Holly did or said. Who knew what she was going to find ridiculous about Holly this time? What joke at Holly’s expense she might make. She didn’t ask Tatiana to explain, but continued to regard her.

  Holly could see that there was a crease from Tatiana’s pillow on her cheek. She was relieved that Tatty had been, apparently, sleeping in her room. A nap. It’s why she hadn’t answered Holly’s calls. She’d been deeply asleep—that sort of deep nap one takes on a snowy midday. Tatiana was simply tired. Very tired. That was why she was so cranky, why she’d been acting the way she had. It was surprising to find that she’d changed out of that black dress and back into Gin’s red velvet one—but who knew why she might have changed dresses, and then changed back? Wasn’t that something Holly did herself, sometimes two or three times in the morning before she went to work? There was nothing any more wrong here than there was for any mother snowbound on Christmas Day with a teenage daughter, Holly told herself firmly, and then she worked up the nerve to ask Tatty, “What do you mean it’s me?”

  “Mom, can’t you see what you’re doing?”

  Holly shook her head. She looked from Tatiana to the sponge in her hand, and then from the sponge to the dark circle around her on the floor.

  “Mom, you’re trying to scrub your shadow off the floor.”

  “What?” Holly asked.

  Why were there suddenly tears in her eyes? Why, again, did she have that feeling of complete abandonment, of having been rejected, abandoned, by everyone?

  Holly dropped the sponge and put her hand to her eyes.

  “Stand
up, Mom,” Tatiana said. Her voice was soft now. It wasn’t the voice of the loving little girl she’d been—truly, only yesterday!—but there was kindness, compassion there nonetheless. Tatiana held out a hand to help Holly to her feet (her bony feet!) and she said, “Step over to the other side of the kitchen island, Mom.” Holly did, and then Tatiana said, “Look,” pointing to the floor, to the ceramic burgundy tiles, which were now their original mono-color. There was nothing on the floor where there’d been—

  Where Holly’s shadow had been.

  “Good Lord,” Holly said, and then felt an actual tear rolling down the side of her nose, headed toward her lips, which she didn’t bother to wipe away. “I must be getting senile, Tatty. I was getting ready to go to the basement for the bleach. I was going to try to bleach my own shadow out from under me, wasn’t I?”

  Tatiana came over to Holly and put her hand on her back, right between her shoulder blades, and Holly felt herself sag a little under her daughter’s gentle touch. Tatty patted her, and laughed a little, and the sound was lovely, like a crystal bell tapped with a silver spoon. Holly laughed, too. Despite her tears, and the sense of shame and desertion she felt, she was also amused at herself. And she was so, so relieved:

  Tatty was back.

  Tatty had napped, and even if it was only going to be the two of them for Christmas—

  Well, maybe that would be wonderful! Mother and child! Maybe this would be the most memorable Christmas of all! While they waited for Eric to get home with Gin and Gramps (because surely Gin would be fine) Holly and Tatiana could play Scrabble, or read. Or, maybe, while Tatiana read, Holly could write for just a little while. If Tatty maybe took another nap, or if she were happily curled up under the afghan on the couch, texting Tommy, Holly could just say, “I’ll be back in a few minutes, Tatty. I need to write something down.” Tatiana would understand. Although she’d never been told much about it, Tatty knew that her mother used to write, had studied creative writing, and had an MFA, and that there had been a time when she was working on a collection of poems. Holly had even told her the title, Ghost Country—although she hadn’t told Tatty what the poems had been about. But Tatiana was old enough now that she might actually be proud if her mother took up writing again. She might like to hear her mother say, “I think I’ll go into the bedroom and jot a few ideas down . . .” Perhaps this would be the day, the Christmas Day, that Holly would start writing again.

  She turned to take Tatiana in her arms then—and although it wasn’t the warmest embrace she and her daughter had ever shared, their bodies still came together completely, and still fit together perfectly. Her daughter was several inches shorter than Holly, and she always would be. Holly wasn’t tall, herself, but the poor nutrition of Tatiana’s prenatal months and her first twenty-two months had surely affected her height. And who knew how tall her biological parents had been? There would never be any way of knowing what genes for height Tatiana carried. Tatty would always feel like a child in Holly’s arms. Holly would always be able to lean down and kiss the silky top of her daughter’s hair, breathing in that smell of tea tree oil shampoo and L’Occitane eau de toilette. Holding her daughter in her arms, Holly could also smell her sweet breath—mint, milk, and something else. Fruit? Fruit that had softened under a warm lamp?

  “Did you eat any breakfast?” Holly asked. “While we were still asleep this morning? Are you hungry?”

  “I’m not hungry,” Tatiana said, and Holly realized, suddenly, the most obvious thing of all:

  That was the problem! Tatiana hadn’t had breakfast! She was starving! “Oh my God, Tatiana, you need to eat something now.”

  Holly had tried to make it sound nonjudgmental—teenage Tatiana hated being told that she was hungry and needed to eat, or tired and needed to go to bed, or cold and needed to put on warmer clothes (“I’ll put on my mittens if my hands are cold, Mom. Do you think I’m a two-year-old?”)—but her daughter stiffened, took a step back, and said, “I told you I’m not hungry,” loudly, as if to a deaf woman. She narrowed her eyes.

  “Okay, okay! You’re not hungry,” Holly said, holding up her hands. “But you’d probably be in a better mood if you ate something.”

  “I’m not in a bad mood!” Tatty dramatically swept her hair away from her face and turned away, and when she did Holly saw that she was wearing the opals again.

  “Oh,” she said, knowing she ought not to comment on it even as she did. “You’re wearing your opal earrings again. What a shame that Thuy and Pearl won’t be here.” Holly made a sad clown face, sticking out her lower lip. It was a peace offering, being silly.

  “What?” Tatiana said, turning back around quickly. “Where are they?”

  “I told you, hon—the snow. They left their church service and realized that there was no way they could get here in this blizzard.” Holly gestured to the picture window, but when she looked in the direction that she herself had gestured she could see that now the snow was simply a stillness out there, as if it were a painting of snow. It seemed benign, fully penetrable, a kind of banal mirage of snow.

  “You never told me that Thuy and Pearl and Patty weren’t coming!” Tatiana shouted.

  “Of course I did,” Holly said.

  “No you didn’t!” Tatty said, and balled her fists, shaking them near her own face, as if she might strike herself. “Fuck.”

  “Tatiana!” Holly knew she should take a step forward, take those fists in her hands, but instinctively she took a step backward and put a hand to her own mouth, as if the word had come from there.

  Tatty shook her head, as if surprised herself to have said it. Her eyebrows were knitted together—this time in genuine distress.

  “What in the world is the matter with you, young lady?” Holly asked.

  “I just can’t believe it!” Tatiana said, her shoulders sagging in despair. “I wanted to see them!” She was on the verge of crying. Holly could see it. Just as when she was a toddler, Tatty’s nostrils had begun to flare, and the tip of her perfect nose was turning red. Sometimes, back in the toddler days, if Holly or Eric acted right away, they were able to prevent a meltdown at the grocery store, or just before they dropped Tatty off at the day care, if Tickle Me Elmo were brandished in the nick of time. Or if there happened to be a graham cracker handy, they might interrupt the process before it started—the flaring of the nostrils that would come next, leading to a hiccup, which would be followed by a whimper, before the sobbing began in earnest and went on and on and on, as if in response to mortal injury or unbearable grief.

  Holly would never forget the first few times she’d dropped Tatiana off at Wee Ones Preschool (which was just a fancy name for a kind of a daytime orphanage, really, because there was no actual school, “pre” or otherwise, for a two-year-old. Everyone knew this. Wee Ones was just a place where other women—women who were poorer, and who were paid—put your child down to nap and made sure she didn’t hit her head on the rail of a playpen).

  That first morning Tatiana had been pitifully excited. She’d run into the place and looked around excitedly at the other toddlers—several of whom were crying—and at the toys, most of which were on shelves too high for her to reach. But Tatiana was in wonder at the new place, the new people, the promise that it all held, and she hadn’t even looked over her shoulder when Holly left her there.

  But by the second morning Tatiana knew what it meant to be dropped off at Wee Ones—that she wouldn’t see Holly again for nine hours once she walked out the door—and Tatty’s nostrils (perfect, tiny things—her nose being one of the best features of her face full of perfect features) had begun to flare before they’d even crossed the threshold, and then the hiccup, the stifled sob, and then, when Holly, in her high heels, had stepped toward the door, Tatty had let out a scream so piercing it sounded exactly as if the child had been stabbed in the back with a long, thin knife.

  “Go!” the day-care director had said, inexplicably smiling and laughing. “She’ll be fine once you’re gone
. But if you prolong it, this will go on forever!”

  So Holly, against every instinct she had in her body and soul, had hurried out the door. And then, even worse than hearing another scream like that one was the silence on the other side of it when it closed.

  Holly had wept on and off all day. She’d called Eric, who’d told her that the worst thing she could do would be to drive back over there and pick Tatty up. It would reward her for her own misery.

  “Maybe day care is a bad idea,” Holly had said.

  “Well, do you have a better idea?”

  “Maybe I should quit my job, stay home with her?”

  “Jesus,” Eric said. “We’d have had to do a lot better planning than we’ve done to make that happen.”

  He was right, of course. There were the cars, the mortgage. How did she think they would survive on one salary? And somehow Holly had made it through that day—which had seemed, actually, longer than the ninety-three days they’d had to wait for their adoption to be approved, to return to Tatty in Siberia, and Wee Ones had seemed even farther away from her than the Pokrovka Orphanage #2.

  But when Holly had gotten back to Wee Ones that evening, the day-care ladies had all chortled and said that although Tatty had cried for quite a while—cried until she’d finally fallen asleep standing up in the center of the day-care center—she’d been perfectly happy the whole rest of the day. She’d watched Dora the Explorer. She’d asked for a second cookie. She hadn’t said a word about her mother. And they all loved Tatiana. Her dark hair. The Russian words she still blurted out when she was excited or frustrated or tired. She was loved by the day-care women just as she’d been loved at the Pokrovka Orphanage #2.