Mind of Winter Read online

  Holly had simply stood and looked at her daughter’s shoulders, all that lovely, innocent hair cascading down her back.

  JET-BLACK RAPUNZEL, THE nurses had called her.

  So much lovely, inky, straight long hair, even at nineteen months of age.

  And all these years later her skin was still like an infant’s—poreless and pristine. Even when she spent a summer day outside without sunscreen, Tatiana didn’t tan or burn. Her complexion was the color of milk stained with a drop of blue food coloring. At her temples, a darker blue, and sometimes under her eyes and around her mouth.

  “Yeah, but when has Tatty ever once spent a summer day outside without sunscreen?” Thuy would have asked, laughing.

  Locked up. In a tower. As if she were Rapunzel.

  No. That had not been Holly’s mothering modus operandi. It had never been her MO. What she’d wanted for Tatiana, from the very beginning, was freedom. Wasn’t that why she’d installed the hook and eye for her, so that Tatiana could have secrets? So that she could—

  What?

  Conceal some kind of contraband?

  Such as . . . ?

  Condoms?

  Look at pornography on the Internet? Is that what Tatiana had thought her mother was giving her permission to do? Was that what Holly was giving Tatiana permission to do?

  Christ, not consciously. None of those things had consciously crossed Holly’s mind. It was a symbolic gesture, wasn’t it? It was meant to let Tatiana know that she was trusted, that she had rights in their house.

  And even if she did do something for which she needed privacy in her room, why not? Why not offer up that freedom to her? What would the point be of trying to dissuade a teenager from such things? Tatiana had friends whose parents tried to vet every image their children saw. Their neighbor, Mary Smithers, whose daughter used to wander over to play with Tatty until they moved away a few years ago, had asked Holly to please give her a call before she allowed Bethany to watch anything on the television. “We want to control what she’s seeing,” Mary Smithers had said, not even shying away from the word control.

  Eric and Holly had felt almost scandalized about this, as if they’d found out that Mary Smithers was sending Bethany to a nunnery. It was not the way they wanted to raise their child, not in this day and age. They wanted Tatiana to feel she had her own agency, a right to make her own decisions. This was something they’d determined together before they’d even brought her home from Russia, that they would raise their child to be a freethinker and that they would discuss all things freely. They pitied little Bethany, having a mother who didn’t trust her enough to be in the presence of a television. And Bethany had confided in Tatiana that “we don’t have Internet at our house because my parents don’t want me to see it.”

  What sort of message did that send? That the outside world was obscene? That you should hide your child from it rather than give her the tools to protect herself?

  “Tatiana, you’re at the age when you might have things you don’t want your parents to know about!” Holly had said to her daughter, wishing she didn’t sound as animated as she knew she sounded.

  Tatiana didn’t miss a beat. She said, “I thought you said I never needed to keep any secrets from you.”

  Holly could no longer recall how she’d responded to that, but Tatiana had never, it seemed, used that hook and eye, and whenever Holly knocked on her door Tatiana said, “God, Mom. Just come in. It’s not locked. I’m not ever going to be doing anything in here you’re not going to be able to witness.”

  NOW HOLLY TURNED the doorknob, and pushed her daughter’s door open to find that Tatiana had already changed out of her white tank top and yoga pants into the hideous red velvet dress that Grandma Gin had given to her for Christmas the year before. Eric’s mother was, unfortunately, a seamstress. And a knitter. And for every birthday and for every Christmas she made clothes for her loved ones, and loved to see her loved ones dressed in those clothes.

  “Oh, Tatty,” Holly said. “You don’t have to wear that! Grandma Gin won’t even remember!”

  “Maybe I want to wear it,” Tatiana said, turning to glare at her mother. “Maybe I love it.”

  Holly stepped all the way into her daughter’s room to the familiar clash of scents—the sweet natural smell of Tatty’s hair and skin mixed with the perfumes and lotions she used, fruits and flowers and oils, and something else this morning, something slightly fetid, or rotten. Maybe Tatiana had left a banana or an apple in a drawer? Something fermented. Not putrid, but headed in that direction.

  Her bed, at least, was neatly made. On her floor and desk were dozens of photographs of Tommy that Tatiana had printed up from her phone and left strewn and curled everywhere, but that was the only messiness. Everything else was folded, dusted, tucked away—tidying that Tatiana must have done because there were guests coming over. Although Tatty had grown testy and impatient with her parents in the last year or two, she was ever respectful of the other adults in her life, adhering strictly to all the codes of conduct one followed in deference to them—even the ones Holly found ridiculous, like calling Tommy’s father Mr. MacClean after all this time. Holly and Eric had insisted right away that Tommy, and all of Tatiana’s friends, call them by their first names.

  Holly made a little circuit around her daughter, looking at the red dress:

  The velvet was cheap, heavy—not really velvet. Some kind of polyester Gin must have bought at some thrift fabric shop. She would have bought a whole bolt of it, Holly knew, and made napkin rings or placemats with the leftovers. The dress went down to Tatty’s ankles like some kind of Old World costume. No neckline. Fake pearl buttons up the back. And the shoulders were ruffled. The pattern must have been from the eighties. It was awful.

  “Honey, how can you even get into that? You’ve filled out so much since last year—” Her daughter had gone from an A cup to a C in the last twelve months, and they’d had to buy all new bras, and had taken half a dozen of her old tops to Goodwill since then.

  “Obviously, I let it out,” Tatiana said, shaking her head.

  “What?” Holly asked.

  “I let it out,” Tatiana said. “You know, with scissors, with thread?” She pantomimed sewing, and then Holly looked at the dress. It looked, in its way, flawless. Ginny was all about precision. The clothes she made were ugly and out of fashion, but they were meticulously constructed.

  “How?” Holly asked.

  “Jeez, Mom. Like I said, with a needle, okay? It’s called sewing! Just forget it. What did you come in here for anyway?”

  “I just wanted to say Merry Christmas,” Holly said, wishing she could sound more apologetic, less exasperated. She tried to soften it. “And I’m so sorry we overslept. When Daddy gets back with Gin and Gramps we’ll open presents right away, okay?”

  There was a little twitch at the corner of Tatiana’s mouth. It broke Holly’s heart to see it! That was Tatty at four years old being told that she couldn’t go to the birthday party because she had a fever! Tatiana had never been the type to burst into tears. Instead, she bore emotions like—

  Like an orphan, like a child who’d been abandoned and who’d understood, fully and early, that life was not fair.

  “Oh, Tatty, I wish I’d woken up earlier—” Holly felt it this time, sincere remorse and sorrow.

  “Mom, jeez, I’m a big girl.”

  Tatiana turned her back, as if on the whole idea that it had mattered—the oversleeping, the disappointment.

  But it was Christmas morning! And maybe Tatty had thought this Christmas would be like all the Christmases of those early years—all those mornings that had started at dawn with Tatty’s clammy hands on their cheeks (“Mommy! Daddy! It’s Christmas!”) and the ripping open of presents that were complete surprises. The stockings magically stuffed with little plastic animals and butterfly barrettes. That whole Santa hoax, which Holly had put an end to early, against Eric’s wishes—but, honestly, who thought that was a healthy myth? An intru
der, bearing gifts. And then to find out it’s all been a lie, perpetrated by your parents?

  But maybe Tatty, this morning, had wanted to relive those early years, and the excitement, but then her parents, exhausted from their jobs and a late Christmas Eve dinner with too much wine and then the rum and eggnog, had practically slept until noon!

  “Sweetheart,” Holly said, and stepped over to her daughter. She reached out her arms and took the faux red velvet package of her daughter into her arms. Tatty was stiff, but she didn’t pull away. Holly breathed in the musky citrusy flowery scent of her. Some of that was store-bought, but some of it was just Tatty, the scent she was born with, that sweetness even the garlic around Holly’s neck hadn’t managed to extinguish. To Holly, that baby had smelled as if she’d been plucked from a nest made of viburnum switches in the branches of a balsam fir. It even occurred to her that the nurses might have sprayed the baby with something to cause her to smell like this. Since they’d seemed so eager to sell Tatiana to Holly and Eric—insisting “Never cries! Never sick!” and dressing her in the little cotton dress with the faded daisies, surely the best thing they could find among the orphanage tatters—it didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that they might have doused her in air freshener for special effect.

  Holly inhaled, and continued to hold her fifteen-year-old baby in her arms. Tatiana didn’t pull away, and finally she softened and rested her forehead on her mother’s shoulder. They stayed that way for several seconds until Holly heard—vaguely, maybe from underneath a cushion or a pillow somewhere—the sound of her own cell phone playing Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and she broke the embrace to hurry after it.

  IT WAS ERIC on the phone:

  “Holly. We’re in the car already. Forty-five minutes from home.”

  “Are your parents okay?” Holly asked. “Was their trip okay?”

  “Okay,” Eric said, and the tone of it indicated to Holly that something was, actually, not okay, but also that his parents were in the car with him and he couldn’t say what it was that was wrong.

  “Okay . . . ,” Holly said. “Should I be prepared for something unexpected?” She instinctively lowered her voice when she asked it, although she knew that both of Eric’s parents were so deaf they’d never be able to hear her through Eric’s cell phone even if he had the speaker turned on.

  “Maybe,” Eric said. “Some confusion. Didn’t expect it.”

  Didn’t expect it. Holly inhaled and exhaled with her mouth away from the phone receiver so he wouldn’t hear. If it hadn’t been so predictable, and so fucking tragic, she would have snorted at him. She would have laughed. She would have said, “You didn’t expect it. Well, what the hell did you expect?” How long was it going to take Eric to realize how elderly and infirm his parents had become?

  Instead, Holly said, “Oh dear. Okay. We’ll just do our best. Just get them home, Eric.”

  She punched the end button on her telephone. As usual, the line would not be cut off at first, and Holly had to punch END again and again until the connection was severed. When she put the phone down and turned around, Tatiana was standing on the other side of the kitchen island, smoothing her black hair with one of her elegant hands—long-fingered, nails painted red (to match her dress?). She asked, grimly, “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  Holly shrugged. “I don’t know, Tatty. Daddy’s got his parents in the car, and he just said, ‘Confusion.’ They’re getting older, sweetheart. It’s hard for them to travel. But they’ll be here soon, and we can take care of them. I better take a shower.”

  Holly smiled at Tatty, who did not return her smile. Christ. Was Tatty, like Eric, going to take offense now at any suggestion Holly made that Gin and Gramps were old? How long was this denial going to last? Was Holly the only one who could see what was going on here—that this elderly couple should not be traveling alone, should not be living on their own? Was she the only one who’d noticed how quickly and completely things had been going downhill for Gin and Gramps in the last couple of years? She turned in the direction of the bathroom. To her back, Tatiana said, “Merry-juana Christmas.”

  Holly inhaled sharply, but she checked the impulse to turn around. She could not turn around. If she did, she would have to face some expression she didn’t want to see on her daughter’s face—disapproval, contempt, dislike? She didn’t want to see it or to acknowledge it—especially not now, with addled family members and unpleasant colleagues (and friends, good friends, don’t forget them) on the way. She would never have time to get everything ready before they all arrived for Christmas dinner. She still had a shower to take, and a roast to cook, and a table to set, and a bed to be made, and—

  And then it came back to her like a bit of breeze stirred up gently by a few cold fingers:

  That something she’d wanted so badly to write about when she woke up.

  She’d wanted, needed, to write it down because it was the beginning of something she had to understand, or to express, or to unearth, or to face, yet she still hadn’t found two seconds to grab a pen and to be alone to write.

  Something had followed them home.

  And it had been here in the house with them for thirteen years now. Holly had known it was here! But it was only this morning that she’d woken up knowing that she’d known.

  If only she hadn’t overslept. Certainly, now, there was no time to write. But if she hadn’t overslept, would she have had this revelation and this need to write?

  In the bathroom, she yanked the shower curtain open. Tatty’s tea tree oil shampoo bottle had fallen from the edge of the tub into the bottom of it, and Holly huffed, bent down, picked it up. It was too big, this bottle, to balance with the others in the porcelain corner. She’d told Tatty they needed to buy the smaller bottle, for this very reason, but Tatty had stood in the aisle at Whole Foods with the two shampoo bottles, one in each hand, and said, “Mom. God. The nine-ounce bottle costs two dollars less than the thirty ounce. Do you know how much money we’re wasting, not to mention plastic?”

  “Tatty, honey,” Holly had said, “we don’t always have to buy the economy size of everything. There’s a little thing called convenience. It’s more convenient not to have a gigantic bottle of shampoo in the bathroom, or an industrial-sized jar of peanut butter in the pantry.”

  “Yeah, Mom, and that’s why we’re always running out of things, including money.”

  “What are you talking about?” Holly asked. When had she ever said anything to Tatty about money? Whatever money troubles she and Eric had, they were both in agreement that Tatty was never, never, to be troubled by them. They’d both been far too aware as children of their parents’ financial woes. This would not be their child’s burden.

  Still, even as Holly stood in the aisle of Whole Foods denying her daughter the enormous sea-foam-green bottle of organic tea tree oil shampoo, she was also taking it out of Tatty’s hand and putting it in the cart. This, she knew, was not the hill she wanted to die on, not here at Whole Foods, where, she would have liked to have pointed out to Tatty, no one for whom money was much of an issue shopped. Why did they even bother with economy sizes in a place that charged, unabashedly, eleven dollars for certain tiny loaves of bread?

  But what did her daughter know about the economy of any of this? She was fifteen. She was clueless. Plus, she’d been indoctrinated by the school system. Tatty would allow herself to die of thirst in the desert before she’d sip water that had been bottled in plastic. Holly wasn’t even sure that she herself had ever even heard the word sustainability until a couple of years ago, but Tatiana chanted it like a mantra, along with the name of its evil twin, Waste.

  Holly had just shoved the shampoo bottle into the corner again when it rolled, with the heavy solid sound a human head might make, lopped off, back into the bottom of the tub. This time she picked it up and took it to the linen closet. Tatty would have to fetch it and return it there from now on if this was the kind of jumbo bottle it took to make her happy in
this world.

  Holly hurried back to the shower, where the water rattled against the shower curtain, warming. No time, no time. The tiles were cold on Holly’s bare feet. She stepped over to the little lilac bathroom rug and picked her nightgown up off the floor, tossed it into the laundry basket. She thought, as she did nearly every time she opened that wicker basket, of Baby Tatty, who, as a toddler, would crawl into that basket and pull the lid down over herself.

  It had been a glorious game, one of those family ritual games that become so much a part of daily life it seems impossible that a time could ever come when it would not be played:

  “Where’s Tatty? Oh, no, Eric, where’s our baby? I can’t find her anywhere!”

  After five minutes of this, the Jet-Black Rapunzel would leap from the wicker basket and scream, “I’m here!”

  BUT, THE FIRST time, it had not been funny at all. Holly had gone that morning into Tatty’s bedroom expecting to find her in the Big Girl Bed, with which they’d only a few weeks earlier replaced her crib. Tatiana wasn’t in it. Instead, a Barbie doll, with the covers up to her plastic chin, had her head resting on Tatty’s pink pillow. Her blank blue eyes stared into Holly’s own:

  German Barbie, Second Edition, with her absurd blond braids and fixed expression of surprised delight. It was the Barbie Tatty had insisted on when Holly had excitedly pointed out Imperial Russian Princess Barbie to her on the Internet. Although Holly had ended up buying them both, the Imperial Princess never budged from the shoe box in which Tatty kept her at the bottom of the toy box, while the German Barbie slept with Tatty every night.

  “Tatty?”

  Ridiculously, Holly had spoken her daughter’s name to the awful doll. Of course, the doll said nothing, and a wave of horror passed through Holly’s body then, a kind of nausea, beginning in her stomach but sliding up her spine and into her brain. Panic.