Mind of Winter Read online

  She shook her head at the place where her beautiful, impossible, impossibly beautiful daughter had vanished from the hallway, and continued to stand and stare at that emptiness until the oven behind her beeped that it was preheated sufficiently to slip the roast into it. Holly picked up the mushroom carton, ripped the plastic off of it, ran cold water over the fleshy nubs, and dumped them into the pan with the meat. She still had at least, she wagered, an hour to deal with potatoes and onions, and almost everything else—the mashed sweet potatoes and fruit salad and the dinner rolls—had been purchased premade at the store. This was not going to be one of her more impressive Christmas feasts. But what difference did it make? She couldn’t care less what the Coxes thought of her, and Eric’s family—well, how many impressive Christmas feasts was she really obligated to prepare for them in a single lifetime?—and Thuy and Pearl and Patty would have been pleased with nothing but a couple of beers (Thuy), sweet potatoes (Pearl), and fruit salad (Patty).

  Holly turned her back on the kitchen and went to the window to assess the snowfall. As she’d expected from the snowplow action, the accumulation since she’d last looked outside was truly surprising. The wind was blowing the flakes sideways as they fell, yet there was still a kind of organization to the mass of it on the ground, as if someone were taking great pains to distribute the snowfall evenly over the lawn. The birdbath—which was a cement angel bearing a water dish in her hands—was completely cloaked. Holly realized that the snow must be sticky and damp, because it clung to every bit of the angel, even the bottom of her wings, and her whole face was swathed as if in bandages. Because that angel was only slightly smaller than life-sized, she looked, disguised like this, as if she could have been a child or a little adult, frozen out there in the backyard, still holding out that plate imploringly, as if begging for something from the picture window and the cozy comfortable interior beyond it. Please?

  WHEN THEY’D ARRIVED in Siberia on their first trip there, Eric and Holly were picked up by a driver at the airport for a three-hour trip to the hostel run by this orphanage—this, after having traveled by plane and train and bus and again by plane for nearly twenty-four hours. In the car, in the backseat, Eric had immediately fallen asleep, but Holly had been unable even to close her eyes. Never in her life had she been more awake. She’d stared out at the snow and the landscape, and the landscape and the snow, as they became one and the same passing by. The people and their houses and their vehicles and their farm animals—all of them were buried, blurred. Snow ghosts, all of them, everything, for two hundred miles. Holly could not make out a single detail, and early on she gave up trying, yet never felt the slightest desire to close her eyes. It was a kind of comfort, really, to look out at this country and find it to be populated by nothing but apparitions.

  NOW SHE PUT a hand to the picture window and watched as the space between her warm fingers filled with fog against the cold glass. It was like that landscape out there. The angel birdbath was an impression, not a figure, and the rest was obliteration. Then she snapped out of it, remembering the roast and the guests and the chores left to be done, and she took her hand away from the window, looked at her watch, gasped at the time. The guests should be here within an hour. Or less. Although she realized it had been nearly an hour already since she’d last heard from Eric. And the airport was only an hour away. Unless they’d closed down the freeway, he should have been home with his parents by now. Surely, he would be here with them any minute. And the brothers and their families would be next. Holly had given the Coxes a slightly later arrival time than the others, so as not to risk their getting there before Gin had been given time to embrace her sons and grandchildren, and to weep for a little while, as she always did.

  Thuy, Pearl, and Patty were going to a church service that wouldn’t be over until 1:30, and then they needed to stop back at the house and pick up the presents and the bread pudding Pearl had made. So, they would be the last, but, for Holly, the most welcome, of all the guests. Holly knew that Thuy would bring a six-pack of some kind of imported beer, and that she would proceed to drink each one steadily over the course of the afternoon into the evening until she was goofily drunk. Pearl would fawn all over Tatiana—beg to hear her sing her latest madrigal tune and to see every photograph on her iMac and to peruse every song she’d downloaded onto iTunes. Surely this attention from her dearest “aunt” would jog Tatty out of her bad mood.

  And Patty! Patty would be a sugarplum, a fairy princess, a little beauty queen! She would hold Holly’s hand and chatter about something girly and nonsensical and silly. And all the stories that Pearl and Thuy were sick of hearing, Holly would happily listen to a million times. Except for Tatiana, there was no one on earth whom Holly loved more than her goddaughter, and although she fervently hoped that Thuy and Pearl lived long and healthy lives, she also couldn’t help fantasizing that they might die (painlessly!) so that she could take custody of Patty. Holly joked about this with Thuy and Pearl, who forgave her the ill-will, being pathetically grateful to her for loving their only daughter so much, but Holly did not exactly tell them that, not infrequently, she stood in the doorway of the guest room and thought about how, if her dear friends died, she would rip the built-in bookcases out of it and paint the walls sea-foam green for their daughter, who would then be her daughter, and give the room a mermaid motif. She’d think about how, as sisters, Patty and Tatiana would make such a pretty portrait between herself and Eric:

  One dark and elegant and chiseled from marble, and one soft, with a crooked smile, and full of light.

  Although Patty was not, Holly felt, the most intelligent child she’d ever known (for one thing, she was never quiet or still long enough to think), she was easily the most pleasant. She was a purely American child. She expected everything to be fine, because everything always had been fine. How wonderful it was to be in the presence of such an untroubled human being!

  Holly turned from the picture window and crossed the living room to Tatiana’s room, where she stood as quietly as she could outside the door, holding her breath to see if she could hear anything coming from the other side. The light tapping of her keyboard, the opening and closing of drawers?

  No. All Holly could hear, even with her breath held, was the snow falling outside—on the roof, on the lawn, against the window glass. It did not sound damp to her, as she’d supposed it was from the sticky coating it had bestowed on the birdbath angel. It sounded, instead, sandy. Crisp. Holly breathed in, rubbed her eyes, went back to the living room, back to the picture window, and looked more closely at the backyard beyond it.

  Yes, the snow was pebblish now. Grainy. It was unrelenting, this snowfall. Now she could no longer see that angel at all.

  She went back to the kitchen, to the oven, and looked in.

  The roast, just beginning to sizzle in there, had begun to smell like food instead of flesh. Most of the time, Holly avoided red meat, for health reasons she’d read about in women’s magazines, but whenever she smelled meat roasting, she recognized that she was, at heart, a carnivore. Across from the dry cleaners downtown there was a bad diner, the Fernwood, which had been cited several times in the last few years for sanitation violations—but the Fernwood vented its kitchen onto the sidewalk, and every time Holly went to pick up the dry-cleaned clothes she smelled the frying burgers, and could easily imagine herself in a forest, wearing animal fur, ripping a hunk of meat off a bone with her teeth, and the incredible pleasure her ancestors must have found in that.

  Holly took a look at her iPhone, which was still at rest on the kitchen counter. Apparently only Unavailable had called (twice) since Eric’s call. If Eric didn’t arrive home soon, she would call him. Though she hoped she didn’t have to. She feared that if he was on the freeway with his addled parents the distraction of a phone call wouldn’t help, especially in this weather. Holly wasn’t the kind of person prone to imagining fatal car accidents, sudden disasters. In her experience, tragedy struck with a lot of warning—centuries
’ worth, really—and, in the end, it surprised you mostly with how much forewarning it had given you, how much room for suffering beforehand. No. Eric would not be killed in a car accident on Christmas. At worst, he would be stuck in a snowbank.

  Holly left the kitchen island and went to the buffet, where she kept her mother’s wedding china, and the crystal—or what was left of it since three of her mother’s iridescent water glasses had been smashed. She opened the glass doors. Little pink rosebuds were painted onto the creamy white plates and cups and saucers in there, rimmed with gold. Janet, her oldest sister, had been given the dinnerware when their mother died, and then she’d passed it on to Melissa, the middle sister, when it was certain that she would, herself, die. But Melissa couldn’t stand it, she said, that reminder of their mother and their sister, all that hopeful dinnerware, and she’d dumped it on Holly’s doorstep in bubble wrap, in boxes.

  Originally Holly had thought that she, too, would not be able to stand it, and she’d left it boxed in the basement for years.

  Until they’d brought Tatiana home.

  It was then that Holly had felt the tug of the past, and she’d gone to the basement, opened the boxes, and found that, miraculously, the dinnerware had been purged of its association with her mother and her sisters by its long years in those boxes in the basement. She and Eric bought a cabinet specifically in which to store it, and, now, for every special occasion, Holly brought it out and felt pleased with herself for owning it, for being alive to enjoy it after the other women, whose enjoyment had been cut short by a damaged gene, were gone. They did not begrudge her, and they didn’t haunt that cabinet, but sometimes, particularly holidays like Christmas, Holly could feel her own ghost standing just beside her, wishing that she, too, could reach into the china cabinet and touch something as solid and delicate as a plate, hold it in her hands:

  But Holly’s ghost couldn’t, made of destiny, as she was—whereas the flesh-and-blood Holly, thanks to modern medicine, had been able to shrug her destiny off like a coat.

  WELL, OF COURSE, it hadn’t been that easy.

  There had been, for instance, the cold recovery room in which Holly had woken up alone, slowly blinking back into the world, understanding that she had no ovaries, no breasts, no nipples under all her bandages. That her most personal parts had been removed, and who knew where they were now, without her?

  And, for the first few months after her surgeries, Holly had felt, horribly, as if she’d been turned into a machine, an unkillable robot. She had terrible dreams in which she was searching for her body parts on shelves lined with thousands of other body parts, floating in thousands of jars. In the dreams, Holly was convinced that her soul had been located in one of those body parts, and now her soul was trapped for eternity in formaldehyde and glass.

  But all this passed with time and with the artistic genius of her plastic surgeon, who had provided her with far more beautiful breasts than she’d had in real life, and with the counsel of the nurse who’d assisted Holly’s double mastectomy and oophorectomy (why had that word needed to hold two eggs in its name?), who’d told Holly that she’d had, herself, a kind of out-of-body experience during Holly’s surgery, understanding that what they were accomplishing in that surgical theater was the undoing of a chain of fate that had plagued Holly’s female forebears for a thousand years. “We were snatching you out of that long line of early female deaths.”

  That nurse, at Holly’s bedside after the surgery, wearing white, had been rubbing Holly’s hand as she spoke to her, explaining that there would certainly have been no escape, that even if Holly herself had not died because of the mutation (or killed herself in despair of it, as her middle sister, Melissa, had) she’d have passed it down to children, who would have passed it down. It had to be stopped. All that suffering. They could now actually trace her 185delAG BRCA1 mutation back to what might have been the single Indo-Egyptian woman who first bore it and passed it down to Holly.

  “Think of that woman,” the nurse had said, her dark green eyes filling with tears. “Thank God that you were born in America at the end of the twentieth century. These are remarkable times.”

  And, thank God, Tatiana could have no such gene, surely. Holly would pass on the uncontaminated dinnerware to Tatiana, who would pass down the dinnerware to her own mutation-free daughter someday.

  CAREFULLY, HOLLY LIFTED the saucers off the stack and set them down on the dining room table behind her. She and Eric had put the leaf into the center of the table before they’d gone to bed, and Holly had thrown the tablecloth over it.

  “Tatty?” she called. “Time to set the table, Tatty!”

  There was no answer. Tatiana was still in her room with the door closed.

  (But, surely, not locked?)

  “Tatty?” Holly called out more loudly—so loudly that only if Tatiana had headphones and was blaring the kind of music she never listened to would she not have been able to hear. “Tatty? Hey! I need you to help, hon! Dad will be here with Gin and Gramps any second! We need to set the table!”

  Holly lifted the salad plates out. Then she stopped to see if she could hear the sounds of Tatty headed out of her room. The scraping of the chair legs on the wood floor. But there was no sound. Holly felt a familiar sense of dejection, rising up from her stomach into her throat. It was a kind of unhappiness that reminded her, sickeningly, of her own high school days—of being ditched by friends or being jilted by a boy. She’d nearly forgotten that kind of despair—how it was physical, absolute—and she had to steady herself with a hand on the back of a dining room chair, truly feeling that silly-weak with it.

  What was wrong with her? This was ridiculous, this abject sorrow over nothing, so much worse today than the ordinary aggravation she felt, and had gotten used to feeling, when Tatty took her time answering a question or responding to a call for assistance. That feeling, Holly had fully expected of motherhood. She remembered, acutely, the exasperated expressions her mother, before she died, had directed at her when she was rude, or late, or begrudging. But to feel so wounded, so grieved, by her daughter and by behavior that was, of course, completely normal teenage behavior? This was inappropriate, really, and she needed to shake it off before Tatty saw it on her face.

  “Darn it, Tatty!” Holly inhaled, stepped away from the buffet, and headed for Tatty’s closed bedroom door. There she knocked with her knuckles, hard, and then stepped back to listen.

  Still nothing.

  “Tatty. What are you doing? Didn’t you hear me say I needed your help with the table?”

  This time Holly heard what sounded like a sigh, and found it reassuring. At least her daughter was—

  What? Still willing to acknowledge the sound of her mother’s voice, even if it caused her nothing but vexation?

  Still, if Tatty was lying in her bed behind that door, she didn’t budge, didn’t even roll over. After all these years in a small house together, Holly well knew the sound and meaning of every squeak of her daughter’s bedsprings. And her daughter was not moving in there.

  “Tatiana.”

  This time Holly tried to make it sound patient. She was going to give her daughter the benefit of the doubt. Maybe Tatiana had fallen deeply asleep. Maybe she had menstrual cramps. Holly knew her daughter’s cycle well, and although it seemed too early for PMS, the body wasn’t a computer, perfectly programmed. Holly hadn’t, herself, had a period since she was twenty-four, but she’d never forgotten the ones she’d had. The blank ache that preceded the blood, as if all that soft pottery held in the triangle between her hips were hardening. The vague nausea, too—and always an electrode-like prickling at the temples, around the eyes and sinuses, as if she had inhaled salt water. It had never been enough pain to cry out, but it had always been enough to leave Holly feeling like a captive in her body, like a slave wrapped in chains. Now, seeing the expression on her daughter’s face when she was having cramps of her own could bring it all back to Holly in waves of ghost-pain where her ovaries used to be.<
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  “Tatiana.”

  Holly put her hand on the doorknob. She was going to have to do the very thing she’d told Tatiana she wouldn’t do—enter her room without permission. But she’d given Tatiana fair warning. This was ridiculous. She could not be allowed to hide out and mope in her room all day. As Holly spoke her daughter’s name, she turned the doorknob (“Tat—”), but the syllable caught in her mouth and the door wouldn’t open, and Holly realized that the hook and eye were latched on the other side.

  She let go of the doorknob and stepped back. Jesus Christ. Holly sighed so deeply that it sounded, in her throat, like a growl as the air passed out of her, out of the depths of her and over her tonsils and back into the world. Jesus. Christ. Okay. So, Tatiana was, apparently, going to punish Holly all day for having overslept on Christmas. Go to hell, Holly felt like saying, but instead she stepped away from the door and said to it, as steadily as she could, “When you decide to grow up, please feel free to join us.”

  Please feel free to join us.

  Of course, there was no one else in the house at the moment, and Holly felt the weakness of that. For the first time that day, Holly felt a cool wash of relief about the company on the way, even the Coxes. There wasn’t the slightest possibility that Tatty, being the kind of girl she was, would behave this way around guests. She’d be polite to everyone, and happy to see them, and she’d interact politely with Holly because of this, and by the time the day was over the fake Holly and the fake Tatty (“Sweetheart, can you whip the cream?” “Sure, Mom”) would have metamorphosed into the real Holly and Tatty.