Mind of Winter Read online

  Still, Holly could feel angry in her mind, couldn’t she? She would allow herself that today. Thoughts were free, right? It wasn’t as if she and Tatty were psychically linked. Tatty couldn’t hear her thoughts. Holly didn’t say it out loud, didn’t even move her lips to it, but again she thought it:

  God damn Tatiana.

  Did she have to be a little self-righteous bitch on Christmas Day?

  Did everything have to be about her?

  Was there not even a shred of gratitude in her?

  Did she ever consider what her life might have been like if Eric and Holly hadn’t come along? This was something Holly would never, never, say to her daughter, but she could think it, couldn’t she?

  “Tatty?”

  This time she shouted her daughter’s name loudly enough that there’d be no mistaking that she expected an answer—but she didn’t have time to hear whether or not she got one before “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” started playing in her palm. She glanced down: Unavailable.

  Holly smirked, shook her head, called out (not nicely: she knew this wasn’t nice), “Hey, Tatty. It’s Unavailable. I’m answering this one for you!”

  She pressed the green icon and held the phone to her ear. “Hello?” she said loudly enough for Tatiana to hear.

  “Hello, Mrs. Judge?”

  Surprisingly, this was not a robot. This was a young woman. Nonnative speaker of English. Although she hadn’t said enough for Holly to determine what her first language would be, there was no pause between “hello” and “Mrs.,” and “Judge” was pronounced as if it rhymed with stooge not fudge.

  “Yes, this is Holly Judge,” Holly said, pronouncing her last name correctly. Judge was her maiden name. She’d never taken Eric’s name—Clare—because, frankly, she thought when she married Eric that she had a career as a published poet ahead of her, and “Holly Clare” sounded to her more like a kind of doughnut than a serious writer.

  “Merry Christmas, Holly Judge.”

  “Thank you. What can I do for you? I’m busy. If you’re selling something—”

  “No, no, no, ma’am. I’m calling from . . . ” The caller said a name that might have been May-um. May-hem. Maim. Maine? The young-sounding woman did not go on. She seemed to expect that Holly would respond to that place-name (whatever it was), as if she’d recognize its significance.

  “What? Maine?” Holly asked. It was, she supposed, time to get actively hostile. What corporation or catalog company was in Maine? Garnet Hill? Lands’ End? Holly had bought a jacket from a Land’s End catalog for Eric for his birthday a couple of months ago. Surely they weren’t calling her on Christmas?

  But then again, why not? Capitalism was, God knew, running amok these days. With the economy collapsing, why not have people from foreign countries—people you could pay pennies an hour—calling Americans to sell them goods and services on Christmas Day?

  “What are you selling?” Holly asked.

  “I’m telling you I’m calling from mayum for you. I still found your phone number.”

  The voice sounded unprofessional, Holly thought. Young and informal and untrained. “Okay. I’m hanging up on you now,” she said into her iPhone. “I have no idea what this is about, and you’re not telling me, so—”

  “I’ll call back Mrs. Judge in forty minutes when I find lab-i-lus. I am excited to find you home and lab-i-lus will speak of it.”

  “No,” Holly said. “Don’t call back.” She placed her thumb on the red end bar on her phone. However, the seconds continued to tick around its little screen, indicating that the line had not been disconnected. She pressed the button again, and then she held the phone to her ear, listening to the seashell sound of it, and then a gasp followed finally by dead air, and she turned, still with the phone against the side of her face, and screamed—

  Holly hadn’t even realized she was screaming until she managed to close her mouth on it, almost snapping it back out of the air, when she realized that it was simply Tatiana standing there, only inches away. “My God,” Holly said. “Where did you come from? I never heard you.” Her heart was still racing, pulsing hard at her temples. “I didn’t mean to scream, but you really scared me.”

  Tatiana’s eyes looked both dark and bright, like black, polished stones. When Holly was a child, soon after her mother’s diagnosis, her father had bought a rock tumbler and taken up the hobby of rock collecting, and many nights of her childhood Holly had fallen asleep to the sound of that grinding and pummeling. It was a miracle, how he could put a homely gray lump of something into the round barrel, and remove it, a week later, shining, full of colors that must have been there all along, but hidden. Looking into her daughter’s eyes Holly thought of how those stones had come out of the tumbler bearing, it seemed, almost no relation to the stones that had gone in.

  It wasn’t that Holly did not notice, every day, how beautiful her daughter’s eyes were, but had they ever really been this beautiful? She couldn’t look away from them. They were the most beautiful eyes on earth.

  HOLLY AND ERIC had both, upon first seeing Tatiana during that Christmas trip to Pokrovka Orphanage #2, been stunned by her eyes. Lying in bed at the hostel that night, they repeated to each other maybe twenty times, “My God, did you see that child’s eyes?”

  Those eyes!

  Everyone had told Holly and Eric before they left for Siberia not to get their hearts set on one particular child, that some adoptive parents had been through this process four or five times. You might be certain, for instance, that you were fated to have a particular child only to find out, after the medical exam, that there was something terribly wrong. And even when the child passed the medical exam, there were risks. Whether the medical examiners were even qualified, or sober, was a question in a country like Russia. Whether they had an interest in hiding the truth about a child from prospective Western parents was another. There had been couples—plenty of them!—who’d come back to Siberia after the required three months to find, to their horror, that defects they’d not noticed—attachment disorder, failure to thrive, lung diseases, heart diseases, autism, muscular atrophies, bone dysplasia, fetal alcohol syndrome—were now undeniable.

  And although the orphanage nurses pretended to be dispassionate, they were often very invested in the children and in their own fantasies of those children’s American lives. They might refuse to acknowledge these defects, or try to hide them. Sometimes they’d rouge sick children’s cheeks or cover their patchy-bald heads with knitted caps, or put makeup on bruises that might have indicated blood disorders. If a couple had already fallen completely in love with a certain child, they would be easy to fool. They would be home in the United States with their child before they noticed that something was horribly wrong.

  But Eric and Holly always joked, afterward, that they’d done exactly what they’d been warned not to do. They’d fallen completely and deeply in love with Tatty upon first sight. Those eyes were to blame. Holly had memorized those eyes during their first trip to Siberia, and had kept them in the very forefront of her mind during the long three months before they could go back to take custody of those eyes.

  When they’d gone back for their second (and final) visit to the Pokrovka Orphanage #2, it was still a month shy of Easter. This time Holly would not be remiss. She filled two suitcases with nothing but gifts. There were stuffed white rabbits for the orphans—seventeen of them!—chocolates for the nurses, marshmallow eggs, jelly beans, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups wrapped in their seasonal pastels, as well as less seasonal gifts. Holly had picked out half a dozen of the most expensive little bottles of perfume she could buy at the mall, along with silver necklaces and earrings and panty hose. She and Eric had burst into that orphanage—its smell of sodden towels, urine, bleach—bearing all these gifts, along with three bouquets of flowers they’d bought at the train station.

  And there she was!

  Their daughter!

  She was still in the same crib—fourth from the wall, seventh
from the hallway—with her name written in Magic Marker on a piece of cardboard in the Cyrillic alphabet, all swirls and spikes: Tatiana. (Holly had very forcefully requested that their daughter be called Tatiana for those three months, not Sally.) Although she did not seem to recognize them (how could she?) Tatiana had made no sound of protest—no sound at all, really—when Holly rushed to her and snatched her from the crib.

  She had changed, of course. Three months is a long time in the life of a toddler. She was not the same baby she’d been when they left, of course. Now she was an older and more stoic version of the affectionate, enormous-eyed baby they’d left behind. Her hair was longer, lusher. She was no longer puffy-limbed, like a baby, but thinner, like a child.

  But she was still Tatiana/Sally. Holly breathed her in, shed tears into her daughter’s glossy hair, and then pulled back to look into her heart-shaped face.

  Of course, it was natural that the eyes were not as startling at twenty-two months old as they had been at nineteen months. Not as long-lashed, perhaps. They did not seem as large. The child’s face had grown, of course, along with the rest of her. That’s how it was with everyone, wasn’t it? Now it was her hair that set her apart from all the orphans: the Jet-Black Rapunzel. And the milk blue of her complexion. Her maturity, too. Three months had changed so many things! Tatiana did not need a bib any longer. She did not even wear a diaper. She was still two months away from being two years old, and she held a fork like an adult at a five-star restaurant. She wiped her mouth with a cloth when she was done eating!

  She was gorgeous. She was breathtakingly gorgeous that spring day at the Pokrovka Orphanage #2, just as she was now, standing with one hand on the surface of the kitchen island, twirling an earring in her earlobe with the other, seeming not displeased to have crept up on her mother and scared her enough to make her scream.

  “Tatty,” Holly said briskly. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t want to give her daughter the satisfaction of having unnerved her; it was that she felt ashamed at having allowed her daughter to unnerve her. She tried to sound all business: “I’ve got bad news. Thuy and Patty and Pearl can’t come. It’s a bad blizzard. That’s why everyone else is late. We’re going to have to call Daddy and see what’s going on.”

  Tatiana said nothing. She just stared at Holly. There was that hint of satisfaction in the curve of her lips, but her eyes looked—

  Had she been crying? Was that why her eyes were so large and—

  What?

  So sad? She seemed to wear the expression of a child abandoned. Maybe all this emotion did have something to do with Tommy. Could they have had an argument? Tatiana always insisted that she and Tommy (“Unlike you and Daddy”) never argued, but there was a first time for everything.

  Or maybe it was her period, arriving early. Holly realized that Tatiana had changed dresses. She was wearing a black one now, lower cut. It made her look thinner and much less festive, but at least it didn’t have that awful, choking, lacy neckline Ginny always opted to attach to any female garment she sewed. Holly didn’t recognize this black dress, actually, but Tatty owned at least twenty dresses, and it might have been something she’d bought at the mall without Holly, anyway—or maybe at that teenagers’ secondhand shop they all liked (Plato’s Closet) and to which Holly objected (lice, bed bugs, crabs).

  “I’m sorry, Tatty. I know you wanted to see them, and to see Patty.”

  Tatiana had changed her earrings, too. She was wearing silver studs now instead of Thuy and Patty’s opals. It made Holly want, unhelpfully, to sigh or roll her eyes. She couldn’t help thinking Tatiana had changed the earrings because Holly had mentioned that it was nice of her to wear them. Apparently the mother of a teenage girl wasn’t even allowed to compliment her daughter’s thoughtfulness without consequences. But Holly didn’t say anything. She and Tatty were, it seemed, back to normal, and she didn’t want to disrupt that. Her daughter was out of her bedroom at least.

  “Who was that?” Tatiana asked, glancing at the iPhone in Holly’s hand.

  Holly looked back at her phone. “Thuy,” she said. “I told you. They were driving back from church, and—”

  “No,” Tatty said. “After that. There was another call.”

  “Oh,” Holly said, nodding. “Sorry. That was your friend Unavailable. She said she’d call back in forty minutes or so, after she learned to speak English. It seems that scam artists don’t get Christmas Day off after all.”

  “No rest for the wicked,” Tatty said.

  Holly blinked and shook her head a little. What? Had she misheard? That wasn’t like anything Tatty would ever say. Such a platitude would have sounded more natural on her own lips than on her daughter’s. Holly shrugged and said, “That’s right. I guess.”

  “Don’t answer when she calls back,” Tatty said.

  “No,” Holly said, and nodded again at her daughter’s common sense and change of heart. “There’s no law that says you need to answer the phone every time it rings. There’s voice mail now. And Unavailable is never a good bet.”

  “That’s right,” Tatty said. “And it’s not Christmas today in Russia anyway.”

  Holly nodded, but she was surprised that Tatiana knew, or remembered, this fact. When Tatty was very little, Holly had thought it might be fun to celebrate Christmas on the Russian Orthodox holiday as well, in honor of Tatiana’s origins—but this had angered and confused Tatiana, who at first pushed the gifts away that Holly gave her and said, “It’s not Christmas.”

  “It is in Russia!” Holly had said, and began to unwrap Tatiana’s gifts for her. Eric was at work, so it was just the two of them, and Tatiana wanted nothing to do with the unwrapped presents—a Russian nesting doll, a Russian lacquer box with a brightly smiling Snow Maiden on it, and a pair of black mink mittens. Holly, who’d done some research, tried to explain the concept of Grandfather Frost to her, but Tatty put her hands over her ears and said, again, “It’s not Christmas,” and she never, to Holly’s knowledge, had looked at those Russian gifts again, although Holly kept them dusted for her on a shelf in her bedroom.

  “No, you’re right,” Holly said. “It’s not Christmas in Russia. It is here, though. Would you mind setting the table now? Until we get word that no one’s showing up at all, we have to pretend we’re having Christmas dinner per usual, right?”

  “Right,” Tatty said, and although it sounded noncommittal, dispassionate, she headed obediently over to the table.

  The roast made the sound of splattering fat inside the oven, and when Holly opened the door, the succulent smells rushed out to her, along with the heat, which turned the silver chain around her neck to a burning trickle of heat conduction. The meat, lit up under the oven bulb, was still bloody, but now it was at least browning a little at both ends. Although the smell flipped that primitive carnivorous switch inside her, the sight of the meat still repulsed Holly. She’d seen roadkill a lot like this—and also photos of carnage, horrible scenes in violent movies with leg stumps, dead babies, human remains.

  Still, Holly’s stomach rumbled. She was hungry. Neither she nor Tatiana had eaten at all today. As soon as she’d shut the oven, she was thinking about sitting down with a knife and eating that meat. “The roast sure smells good, doesn’t it?” Holly said over her shoulder to Tatty.

  But there was no answer. Holly looked into the dining room. Tatty wasn’t there. The table was not set. Not a single dish or water glass or utensil had been touched, and Tatty was gone.

  “Tatty?”

  No answer.

  It was a small house. If Tatty couldn’t hear her mother’s voice she was either in the bathroom with the door closed, or she’d gone outdoors or down to the basement, or she had her bedroom door shut again and was purposely not responding. Holly started down the hallway, shaking her head and ready for the argument she’d been trying to suppress all day if that’s what Tatty wanted, and saw that the bathroom door was open and the light was on (how many times had she asked Tatty to remember to turn
the overhead lights off when she left a room?), and then she continued on to Tatiana’s room.

  Door closed.

  “Tatty?” Holly said to the closed door for—what?—the thousandth time today. She raised a hand to knock, and then she thought to hell with it. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t set the table and prepare the Christmas dinner and clean it all up afterward herself. She’d managed it for years, with only that brief stretch of time when Tatty was between nine and fifteen, old enough not to be in the way and actively eager to be helpful. This, Holly thought, was going to be the new normal for a while. Just like they’d all told her: “Try to remember how sweet she was, to sustain you when she’s a teenager!”

  Holly recalled how other mothers had seemed to delight in saying such things to her when beautiful four-year-old Tatty came running across the park to throw herself into her arms, crying out, “Mommy, I love you!”

  So, why should it surprise Holly so much that they’d been right?

  NOW THE SNOW beyond the picture window looked like a staticky wall, like something that was being built from the ground up rather than falling from the sky. Now there was either no breeze—and the heavy flakes were simply, in their density, floating—or there were so many flakes falling that they replaced themselves more quickly than the eye could detect. Holly knew, several seconds before the song started up, that her cell phone was about to start playing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” but it wasn’t precognition. There was a flash of light from the phone, so quick it was nearly subliminal. She looked at the iPhone as Bob Dylan began to sing, and she recognized the local area code. It was the Coxes.

  “Holly? This is Tom. Have you looked out the window lately?” Tom Cox laughed as if he’d made a clever joke, maybe at Holly’s expense. Surely he knew she didn’t like him. He must have assumed, over the years, that she’d been privy to some of Eric’s office conflicts. And Tom Cox wasn’t a complete idiot. He would know that while a man might choose to remain pals with someone he worked with, and despised, the man’s wife didn’t have to like him.