Mind of Winter Read online

  Had she honestly thought, or only felt, primevally, in her Irish bones:

  Changeling?

  Holly yanked the covers off German Barbie then to find no three-year-old Tatty under there with her.

  “Tatty?!” By now, Holly was angry. She thought, she’s punishing me. Which was also ridiculous! A toddler doesn’t punish her mother.

  The rest was a blur of very precise imagery, as if Holly’s horror had been turned into a mental slideshow—fifty very clear slides of herself crashing through the house while holding, inexplicably, German Barbie in her hand by the waist, like a weapon, or like proof of something, or like Tatty herself.

  “Please! Tatty! Please! Mommy can’t find you!”

  It might have been the last place left in the house to look—the laundry basket. Holly had already torn through all the closets. Looked under the beds. She’d stumbled down to the basement. She’d checked the dryer, behind the furnace. She was crying by the time she reached the laundry basket, no longer even calling out her daughter’s name. She was feeling the breath of the nurse from the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 who’d whispered into her neck, Name her American.

  “Sally?” she’d called out, clearly having lost her mind by then. Had she thought that Tatiana might somehow answer to that first name, the one the nurses had given her in Siberia? Tatiana had never even been told about that name. Not even later, when Holly stupidly named their doomed hen Sally, had she or Eric ever told Tatty that Sally had once been her name. So it must have been some primitive, maternal instinct, calling out that infant name in search of her lost daughter.

  Still, there was no answer. Time stopped. Holly would never know how long it had taken her to lift the wicker lid of the laundry basket (lifetimes seemed to pass) and to peer into it to find her daughter squatting—froglike, staring up, feigning innocence while attempting, like a much older child or an adult, to suppress a smile, eyes cartoonishly wide with the pleasure of all this, inside the basket.

  Holly had staggered backward, leaned against the bathroom wall. She’d wiped German Barbie’s alpine apron across her tear-filled eyes while Tatty clambered out of the basket. Tatty knew, of course, that something was wrong. She threw her arms around Holly’s legs and started, herself, to cry.

  “No, no,” Holly had said, kneeling down on the cold tile, taking Tatty fully in her arms. “You didn’t mean to scare Mommy. You were being funny. But it scared Mommy because she loves you so, so, so, so much.”

  But it took an hour to calm Tatty down.

  They had to go back to her bedroom and try the whole trick again:

  This time they pretended they were Tatty, together, tucking German Barbie into the Big Girl Bed as if German Barbie were Tatiana. Then they pretended that they were sneaking out of the Big Girl Bed into the bathroom, climbing into the basket. They laughed as they did this, but quietly, secretly. Climbing into the basket had been, apparently, quite a feat. Tatty had to make several attempts before she could get it right a second time. And it must have taken truly super-toddler control to stay in that basket, squatting on Eric’s T-shirts and socks and a damp green towel at the bottom of the basket, there in the wickery dark with just a bit of light shining through the lid, listening to Mommy call her name.

  Holly and Tatty played the game. This time Mommy marched straight into the bathroom, lifted the lid of the laundry basket, and screamed in delight, “Tatty!” And Tatty burst into laughter, sprang up with her small hands above her head, and cried out, “I’m here!” Holly held up German Barbie and said, “I thought the fairies had come and exchanged my pretty Baby Tatty with this doll!”

  “No!” Tatty said. “This is me!”

  “Brilliant, really,” Eric had said that evening when Holly recounted the event of the morning to him as he stood beside their bed, changing out of his traveling clothes into a T-shirt and shorts. “She’s a genius,” he said. “I mean, that’s a level of sophistication that you really wouldn’t expect from a three-year-old. Not to mention the self-discipline.”

  Holly had to agree. It thrilled her that Eric felt that way about it, too. In the morning, she and Tatty reenacted the whole thing for Daddy. And then, for two years afterward, they played the laundry basket game at least once a week—“Where’s Tatty? Tatty?”—with Mommy’s panic and Tatty’s stealth being the crucial ingredients to the fun and hilarity. Until finally, surreptitiously, as if in a dream, those years were over, and Tatty had grown too big to hide in the laundry basket.

  HOLLY BENT HER head under the stream of shower water, which was too hot—but that was better than too cold, and there was barely enough time left to shower and get ready for the guests, and for Christmas dinner, let alone adjust the temperature of the water. Her hair felt dry and rustically cut. She’d gotten it trimmed a week ago, and it was too short. It felt unfamiliar to her, like a wig, or like a doll’s hair. She wouldn’t bother to shampoo and condition it. What was the point, since she wouldn’t have time to blow it out or use the curling iron? She had far too much to do to fuss with her personal appearance. Now however Holly was going to look when Eric’s siblings got here—and Pearl and Thuy, and the awful Coxes—was going to be some compromised vision of what she’d wanted to look like. She’d wanted to look rested and joyful and lovely, but she wouldn’t.

  Oh, God . . .

  When Holly remembered the Coxes she also remembered, with the sharpness of a poke of a pencil in the side, that she had to assemble the ingredients for the vegan dish Mindy Cox had suggested Holly make for her horrible son.

  Bulgur and sweet potato pilaf.

  Jesus.

  As if Christmas dinner weren’t already hard enough to assemble. Whatever happened to polite people not discussing religion, politics, or money with people outside their own families, and everyone eating, and being grateful for, whatever they were served at a dinner party?

  Or, if they couldn’t manage that, staying home?

  Why must everyone be informed of the tastes and requirements and politics of everyone else’s diets? Their lactose intolerances. Their tree nut allergies. Their aversion to farm-raised salmon, red meat, gluten. Nearly every night of her entire childhood life Holly had carefully eaten around the things on her plate that horrified her. The soft-boiled carrots. The stringy, deep maroon Mystery Meat. She would dig to the bottom of her salad to find the iceberg lettuce that had remained untouched by the French dressing without ever considering asking her sister to please not drench her salad in French dressing.

  She’d even deluded her poor mother into believing that she, her youngest daughter, “ate like a bird,” when, in truth, Holly, as a child, had been ravenous, nauseated, polite. And thank God she had been, since how many meals did she ever really even get to eat that had been prepared by her mother before her mother died? And how hard must it have been for that poor woman simply to prepare a meal? What if Holly had decided to announce one night that she would only eat eggs laid by cage-free chickens, or that she was philosophically opposed to Cheez Whiz?

  And after Holly’s mother could no longer stand in the kitchen long enough to heat up a pot of Campbell’s soup, the job of feeding the family had gone to Janet and Melissa—both of them teenagers, clueless, desperate, grief-stricken, and, Holly supposed, resentful, although she could not remember a single word or event that might have indicated that. Somehow they’d managed to keep the family running on Swanson’s lasagna, frozen meatballs, and pizzas—and it would never have occurred to anyone to announce that he or she did not eat processed foods.

  The shower water continued to run in a burning rivulet down Holly’s spine, and she felt as if that heat, that water, might unzip her. She imagined it doing so, the flesh opening at her spine, and how it would feel, then, to step out of her body.

  Who would she be then? Where would she go? She recalled the sense she’d had, looking down at her dead mother’s blank face, that one might actually do that. Escape her body. That the body was a kind of cage. That the self, the soul, was cage-free
. That being cage-free was the goal, attained by death.

  Ha! That had been before she and Eric had themselves owned cage-free chickens! Free-range life hadn’t worked out so well for their chickens, had it? Some bloody feathers and screeching. They’d called those hens, until the bloody feathers and gang violence, by endearing names. Petunia. Patrice. Sally. But they were not tame, sweet, happy birds. They should have been kept under lock and key.

  Holly closed her eyes as the water fell on her face. God, how she would have loved to stuff the plug into the drain and just let the tub fill with scalding water, lie back in it, close her eyes. Why was she so tired? She’d woken up less than an hour earlier, later than she’d slept in years.

  WAS IT THE eggnog and rum?

  But how cozy that had been, cuddled up on the couch with Eric in the living room, lit up only by the lights of the Christmas tree. Tatiana had gone to bed already, and there was the hush of the house and the snowfall outside and all their memories of that first Christmas—Siberia, Baby Tatty, the ratty blanket, and that baby’s enormous eyes. She’d already had lustrous dark hair, but she was not the Jet-Black Rapunzel yet. The nurses weren’t calling Tatiana that until Eric and Holly returned, fourteen weeks later, to legally and completely claim her:

  How shocked they’d been to find how much their child had changed in those weeks—her hair grown down around her shoulders, and her face narrower, her eyes no longer shockingly large, more in proportion to her changed face.

  Was it possible, they’d asked themselves, that Tatiana was even more beautiful fourteen weeks later than she’d been during their first visit?

  Of course.

  And she’d grown even more beautiful every month since!

  Eric had gotten up from the couch and fixed them another rum and eggnog. He brought it back, and they talked some more about that Christmas and their first glimpse of Tatiana. It was what they’d reminisced about every Christmas since then. Their daughter. About how nervous they’d been. About the garlic necklaces. About the vicious dog that had chased them down the street the first time they’d left the hostel to go to the Pokrovka Orphanage #2, and how they’d arrived sweating in their down coats and must have looked to the nurses like crazy people.

  Until after midnight, Holly and Eric had sat with their drinks in the light of the Christmas tree, long after Tatiana had gone to her room to sleep. So many years having passed in what had seemed like an instant, they laughed again about how no one had seemed to know where, or if, the Pokrovka Orphanage #1 existed, and how distinctly Russian that seemed. How everything in the country was referred to by its number, but the number seemed never to correspond to any order or sequence. If there was a bus #37, it was sure to arrive at bus stop #4 long before bus #1.

  What they hadn’t talked about was that they’d forgotten, then, that it was even Christmas that day. They’d arrived at the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 on December 25 to see the baby who would be theirs, and they’d failed to bring a single gift.

  No gifts! Not for their child, and not for her caretakers, and although the day was not their Russian Orthodox Christmas, those nurses must have been only too aware of the tradition of gifts on December 25 after so many hundreds of other American families had passed through the orphanage at the end of December bearing them.

  And the other American couple who were staying at the hostel had brought Christmas gifts! They hadn’t forgotten, arriving at the orphanage with the kinds of things that young Siberian women could never be able to buy for themselves—perfume, complexion soap, leather gloves. And for the child they wanted to adopt, those parents had brought bibs and booties and a hand-knitted sweater.

  “Oh, my God,” Holly had said, fingering the delicate, tiny sweater the woman from Nebraska had brought with her—into the sleeves of which she was just then stuffing the rosy, pudgy arms of the son she desperately wanted. What was that sweater knitted from? Angora? Cashmere? Mohair? Holly knew nothing about yarn, about knitting, about what kind of animals offered up such a softness. Were they baby camels, some sort of special llama? Were the animals sheared, or skinned? And how was it that this yarn was like dental floss, unbreakable, while also seeming to be made of cloud?

  “This is exquisite,” Holly had said, fingering that sweater, and she’d meant it. “What in the world is it made of?”

  But the Nebraskan woman had never really told her. Instead, she’d said, as if Holly herself must be a knitter and would know what this meant, “Little billions.”

  Little billions?

  Was that some kind of knitting strategy, or a brand, or a pattern?

  “Well, it’s incredible,” Holly said, neither wanting to reveal that she did not know what “little billions” were, or to hear a long explanation of what they might be.

  “Thank you,” the Nebraskan had said, then pulled her ruddy Russian baby away from Holly and turned her back. Over the woman’s shoulder, that little boy looked teary-eyed with joy, as if he’d finally found the great love of his life, and the sweater he’d been born to wear, and the mother in whose arms he’d been born to be held. The woman from Nebraska was sexless and ageless and humorless, Holly thought—but she had a passionate soul, which Holly saw fully, shining brightly, the next morning when the woman and her small, quiet husband got the news that the boy in the sweater had been given, the night before, to the sister of the biological father. Apparently that had been the plan all along, but the sister had procrastinated on the paperwork until she was told that an American couple was there, ready to take the baby home with them.

  It was the Nebraskans’ second trip to Siberia (as required by Russian law) in their quest to take possession of this boy. Until this, they’d never heard a word about a sister, and this was the very day they thought they would fly home with him, bringing him to the nursery it took Holly almost no imagination to picture: filled with stuffed animals, decorated with stenciled airplanes, a crib made up with pale blue sheets.

  Instead, that morning, the Nebraskan woman went to the boy’s empty crib at the Pokrovka Orphanage #2, took the mattress out of it, held it in her arms (nothing but a plastic-covered mattress, not even a sheet left on it), and walked straight out the door of the orphanage into the snow, without stopping for her coat. As far as Eric and Holly knew, she had never come back.

  Though of course, she had to have come back. Her husband had stayed behind, standing speechless at a window for a long time before he turned on the nurses, demanding answers:

  “Where is our boy? Who is this ‘sister’?!”

  But the nurses would tell him nothing. The nurses in the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 had, it seemed, taken vows of silence. You could not have tortured information out of them about anything—not the other adoptive parents, not the other babies, not the biological parents of the babies, not what was behind “that door”—the one that was always kept closed (and which Holly would regret opening, later)—or what would happen to all the babies who were not adopted:

  Nothing.

  It was all a secret. The entire country was a secret, and Siberia was the vast white secret at the center of it. At the Pokrovka Orphanage #2, all Eric and Holly could be sure of was what they could see before them, that which they could weigh in their arms, that which they could explore with their senses. Otherwise, there was only an inscrutable expanse beyond the rattling institutional windows and the paperwork—the reams and reams of paperwork, which, despite its meticulous detail, revealed nothing about anything at all.

  Later, when Holly thought of that woman from Nebraska (although she tried not to), she imagined her still walking. That woman could have made a circuit of Asia several times by now, cradling that mattress in her arms.

  And what of the Russian aunt, cradling the boy in his soft and delicate sweater? Where were they now, these many years later? Holly imagined a boy standing at the center of a long line. He would have a thin mustache, acne, maybe a facial twitch. And the sweater that his Nebraskan mother had knitted for him would either have unr
aveled long ago or been sold. Holly tried not to think of him, either, because when she did she could not help but think of Tatiana in that line behind him—her hair cropped short, and her shoes comfortable, practical, caked with mud.

  “Tragic,” Eric had called it.

  “Well, they could have adopted another baby,” Holly pointed out. “There were a billion of them.”

  “Well, they wanted that baby,” Eric had said, angrily. “Just like we wanted Tatiana. They’d already bonded. They’d imagined a whole life with him.”

  “It was time to start imagining again, I guess,” Holly had said, feeling that she would somehow be betraying her own good luck, the fate that had brought Tatiana so effortlessly into her arms, if she admitted that what had happened to the Nebraskans could have happened to anyone. Eric had simply looked at her with what she felt was disapproval, and they never spoke of the Nebraskans again after that.

  HOLLY STEPPED OUT of the shower. The drain made the heaving sucking sounds it always made as it emptied the tub. She stepped onto the lilac rug, wrapped herself in her towel, stepped over to the bathroom window, and looked out.

  Snowy day. A surprisingly white one. Usually in this part of the state, with the wind blowing off Lake Erie and then over the decaying auto factories before it fell into their yard, the snow was gray, nothing like the Bing Crosby snowfalls of her youth. Usually that gray snow didn’t shine in the branches, but, instead, just fuzzed up the landscape, which was mostly flatness and emptiness at this time of year, although some dead leaves still held on to the tree branches and here and there a stubborn evergreen would point its arrow at the gray sky.

  But this was a lot of snow. And it was Christmas-white. This could almost be called a blizzard, Holly supposed, and she thought of Eric on the road home with his parents. She pictured his windshield and the wipers barely keeping up with the white piling up on him. It made for a prettied-up landscape, but the driving would be treacherous.