Mind of Winter

by Laura Kasischke

  NOW, AS HOLLY looked into her nearly grown daughter’s stricken and pale blue face, and although it was all out of chronology, out of context (Tatty was sad that Thuy and Pearl and Patty wouldn’t be here for Christmas, not that she’d been taken to day care as a toddler!) she thought, Dear God, do I have to be punished for all of eternity for having left her there, screaming, at Wee Ones? For not having done the “better planning”? For not having had the courage to tell Eric that it didn’t matter, that we would have to start planning for it that very day because I would not be abandoning my daughter at that place ever again?

  Why couldn’t she have quit her job?! At least for those first prekindergarten years? To keep the tiny girl by her side, to spare her that separation? Holly and Eric had lived on nothing all through their twenties—one crappy car and a two-bedroom apartment—and their lives had been completely filled with inexpensive comforts and joys! Why couldn’t they have done it for a few years later in their lives, too?

  But, of course, no one did that. Some of the mothers who brought their children (even younger than Tatiana) to Wee Ones arrived in cars that cost the annual salaries of two of the day-care workers who watched their children nine, ten, eleven hours every day. She had no idea why those mothers had done it, but why had Holly done it? How quickly those years had come and gone! And what had she been doing all those hours and days of her daughter’s earliest years while she watched Dora the Explorer in a colorful institution surrounded by strangers—her sippy cup empty, her eyes dry, her little chin pointed upward toward the television as if to say that she had suffered worse, that she had suffered before, that she could suffer again?

  No. Surely, no. It hadn’t been that bad. Tatiana had made friends (although, where were those friends now?) and she’d grown to love the day-care ladies (although, where were those day-care ladies now?). And after that one terrible morning Tatiana had never again cried upon being left at Wee Ones! The tantrums she threw after that (and she did throw tantrums) were not about being left somewhere, but in reaction to others leaving:

  Thuy might stop by the house for the briefest or longest of visits, but as soon as she picked her jacket up off a kitchen chair and started to put it on, Tatiana would blanch, stagger over to Thuy, pleading as if she were a child being left alone on the Titanic, Don’t go. Sometimes there were even Russian words—words Holly had assumed her daughter had long since forgotten—uttered, sobbed, or screamed. Sometimes that well-timed Tickle Me Elmo or graham cracker managed to calm her down, but often she just had to be left to sob until she fell asleep, curled on the couch or standing with her head resting against a wall. They were terrible sobs, the sobs of the utterly bereft. But those sobs had nothing to do with Wee Ones.

  A SINGLE TEAR slid down Tatiana’s cheek. It was turned so silver by the bright blizzard light shining in from the picture window that it looked like a drop of mercury.

  “Sweetheart!”

  Holly forced her daughter into an embrace again—and this time it was a hard embrace. This embrace was a demand. This embrace, Holly knew even as she executed it, was being stolen from Tatiana against her will. Tatiana, in reaction, went even stiffer, and she put her hands to her face so that her forearms and elbows were between her own body and Holly’s. She inhaled a ragged breath, and then the silver tears seemed to pour out of her, into her hands, slipping through her fingers and onto her chest. It was as if Tatiana contained inside of her a sudden, tiny waterfall.

  “My God,” Holly said. “Sweetheart, sweetheart, my darling. We’ll have a good Christmas. I promise. And tomorrow Thuy and Patty and Pearl will come over and we’ll have our usual Christmas. Look!” Holly said, and she let go of Tatiana and went to the oven, turned the knob to off. “Look! I’ll save the roast until the snow melts, for when we can all be together again. You and I will just eat the Coxes’ son’s vegan salad! I’ll make that! How does that sound? You’ll like that, right? We’ll dig into the dinner rolls and the creamed herring and the sharp cheddar cheese. And when Daddy and Gin and Gramps get here, we’ll—”

  “What?” Tatiana asked, looking up from her hands, sober now, understanding. “Where are they?”

  “You didn’t hear me on the phone with Daddy?” Holly asked.

  “No.”

  “Well . . .” Carefully, Holly began to lie. “Well, everything’s fine. They’ve stopped, though, because of the snow.”

  There was certainly no sense in telling Tatty that Gin was having some sort of health issue, was there? That they were at St. Joseph’s Mercy Hospital? At the emergency room? If Tatiana had to eventually be told at all (Holly still expected that this would be a false alarm and that they’d walk through the door any minute) it could certainly wait until a little later.

  “Even the Coxes aren’t coming?” Tatiana asked.

  “No,” Holly said. “That’s the good news.”

  Ah! Thank you, Jesus! Holly had found the Tickle Me Elmo! The graham cracker! Despite herself, Tatiana was smiling now.

  And such a smile! Despite the poor nutrition of her infancy and the fact that Holly (although she knew she should have) had rarely denied Tatty candy or soda, those teeth were brilliantly white. Without whiteners! And perfectly straight, without braces! Strangers would seem to comment on her smile nearly every time they left the house. “Wow,” they’d say when Tatty looked at them and bestowed that smile upon them in return for an ice-cream cone or a receipt, “that’s a million-dollar smile,” or, “Your smile just made my day!” or, “Where did you get that smile?”

  Of course, that was the one that pained Holly, for Tatiana did not “get that smile” from Holly, or Eric. The origins of that smile were somewhere east of the Urals and west of Lake Baikal on the Ukok Plateau. It wasn’t, in fact, unthinkable that the smile had been carried in the genes of Mongolian warriors or the prostitutes from Moscow and St. Petersburg who’d been pushed over the Urals during the revolution. There’d been some strange bragging that Holly had found on the Internet when they’d first begun to research the Pokrovka Orphanage #2, that the girl children in that area were the most beautiful in Siberia because they were descendants of those prostitutes.

  Who knew where Tatiana’s smile came from? In the permafrost of that plateau, one of the world’s oldest mummies had been exhumed in 1993. She was called the Ice Maiden, and the reconstruction of her face was made into a cast-iron bust that was kept behind glass at the Altai Regional Museum, and although Eric and Holly hadn’t visited, they’d bought a postcard of the Ice Maiden bust from a vendor near the bus station. Holly kept that postcard in a file with all of Tatiana’s adoption paperwork. That maiden wasn’t smiling, but she could easily have been Tatiana’s mother—her heart-shaped face and elegant nose—although she’d been born and died in the fifth century BCE.

  Of course, the people who asked Tatiana, “Where did you get that smile?” did not mean to question the genetics of it—or did they? Sometimes Holly wondered. Were they asking where the smile came from because they could see that Holly was not Tatiana’s biological mother?

  “Of course not!” Thuy had said. “Christ, no one does that. Not these days, anyway. Half the kids in this town are adopted. Or mixed race! No one means a thing when they say, ‘Where’d you get all those blond curls,’ to Patty! And they say it all the time! They know perfectly well that I’m her mother and that she didn’t get them from me!”

  Holly had nodded, and pretended to take Thuy’s assessment as the final word on the subject, but she knew that it was different with Thuy and Patty. In the case of Thuy and Patty, they would not be implying anything like that—but Thuy was Vietnamese, and she was a woman married to a woman. It was clear that she had not created her daughter with her own DNA, and it would have been political incorrectness of the highest order to mean such a thing in such a situation. But Tatiana and Holly, out in the world, were not such an easy target to miss. They were white, and although Holly was tall and blond with a short nose, blue eyes, and pale and freckled skin, there
could be other explanations for the differences between a daughter and her mother. A dark father with a fabulous smile? A man to whom this blond mother might be married? When the bicycle repairman said, “Wow. Where’d you get that smile?” might he not have been genuinely and innocently wondering about Tatiana’s genetic material? Tatiana would always just shrug modestly and cast her eyes downward, saying, “I don’t know,” while still smiling. She didn’t betray it if any of this crossed her mind as well.

  “Well your dentist must love you,” one old volunteer at the library had said once. At that Holly had pulled Tatty along before anything else could be said. In fact, Holly had only taken Tatiana to a dentist one time in her life. When they’d refused to let Tatty come a second time for a cleaning without dental X-rays, Holly wouldn’t bring her back. There was no way Holly was going to let her daughter be exposed to that kind of radiation, aimed at her face, for nothing. Anyone could see that her teeth were healthy, perfect. Holly’s teeth were perfectly fine, too, and she hadn’t been to a dentist herself in two decades. She simply took good care of her teeth—and now of Tatty’s teeth, too. It took no more than a quick glance inside her daughter’s mouth to see that she had no cavities, that her teeth were pristine.

  Eric, of course, wouldn’t have approved if he knew, but Holly let the name of a dentist in a neighboring town (not the dentist Eric went to) roll off her tongue often enough that he must have assumed they were getting themselves to that dentist every six months or so. Which would have been completely unnecessary.

  The proof was in the smile.

  NOW, IN RESPONSE to Holly’s joke about the Coxes, Tatiana was smiling that smile—and Holly felt wildly grateful for it, as if she’d been granted a pardon while on death row. She still felt under that mantle of guilt and suspicion for having overslept, but she was overjoyed to think that, despite everything, the day might not be a disaster. That her daughter didn’t hate her, would not hide in her room (with the door locked!) all day. That, instead, they would play some board game at the table—there being no reason any longer to set the table—and then that other little fantasy, that maybe Holly could slip away to the bedroom with a pen at some point, excavate her notebook from the bottom of her dresser drawer, and write.

  Not unexpectedly, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” started up on Holly’s iPhone then. It would be Eric, she thought. Or one of his brothers. Or one of their wives. Selfishly, Holly felt no urgency to speak to any of them now that Tatiana was smiling, and it seemed that their Christmas together might progress happily enough without anyone’s company. Of course, if she could have helped Eric with his parents, she would have, but, since she was snowbound here anyway, what could she say to her husband on the telephone that would help?

  Holly glanced at the iPhone on the kitchen counter but made no move to pick it up. “Maybe I just won’t answer,” Holly said. “Like you told me.”

  “What?” Tatiana asked.

  “You and I will just pretend we’re on a desert island for the rest of the day. If they need us they can leave a message.”

  Holly smiled, although Dylan kept singing, and Tatiana looked alarmed, and asked, “What? What are you talking about, Mom?”

  Her shoulder bumped into Holly’s arm as she hurried past her toward the kitchen counter and the iPhone. She lunged at it as if it were in flight, as if she were trying to catch it rather than simply trying to snatch it off the counter before the call went to voice mail.

  “Tatty,” Holly said, “for God’s sake. If it’s Daddy we’ll call him right back, and if it’s not—”

  Then, as if the phone did have wings and agency of its own, or as if it had been thrown, it flew off the kitchen counter and traveled, low and fast, across the kitchen and into the dining room, to the dining room table, where it smashed into one of Holly’s mother’s water glasses, which fell to the floor with a shattering finality that seemed predestined, or deliberate, or both.

  “Tatiana!” Holly shouted.

  What had happened? And it had happened so quickly! Apparently in her rush to grab the iPhone, Tatiana had somehow thrown it instead—swatted it, sent it flying across this room and into the next.

  “For Christ’s sake!”

  Holly hurried out of the kitchen and over to the dining room table. The cell phone lay unharmed on the surface of the table, but her mother’s iridescent water glass was no longer a water glass. It was a thousand shimmering, scattered bits. That water glass was nowhere now—and, also, everywhere. Who knew how far the glass slivers of it had flown? Holly would be sweeping and vacuuming those little billions up from the corners and from under the furniture and even off the windowsills for years. The water glass had exploded when it hit the floor. Atomized.

  The iPhone, on the other hand, being utterly expendable (Holly had even bought the replacement insurance on it), was unharmed. In fact it was still lit up where it lay, displaying Holly’s wallpaper—an image of Tatiana and Eric standing in front of a waterfall.

  On the phone, in that photograph, the two of them were illuminated, in miniature, and the waterfall behind them looked like feathers instead of water—as if a few hundred pillows had just been broken open behind them while they stood smiling into Holly’s cell phone. The precision of that photograph was incredible. Somehow Holly’s iPhone camera had managed to capture not only the very second of those particular smiles on the faces of her husband and daughter, but the individual drops of that waterfall’s frothing water in mid-fall. It revealed the scene for exactly what it was—something mild and violent at the same time, a moment rushing past them, while utterly frozen forever. And all of it on a device the size of a child’s hand! Secured for eternity on a handheld electronic device! If this stuff weren’t so ubiquitous, it would have seemed supernatural.

  Holly stepped back, away from the scene of the water glass, shaking her head, and when she turned back around she saw that her daughter hadn’t moved from where she’d been standing when the iPhone first sailed from her hand. But Tatiana held that hand to her mouth now, pressing it to her lips, as if the hand were injured or she were trying to stifle a scream.

  “Jeez, Louise,” Holly said—opting for levity, because what was the point of getting angry? She’d had twelve water glasses, until Tatty had broken three, and then she had nine, and, well, now she had eight. It was, at least, an even number again! Thuy’s words came to Holly’s mind: You can’t reason with a toddler, so why get angry with one?

  She’d said this in response to Holly’s compliment—how incredibly patient Thuy was with Patty—and the words, the truth of them, had stung Holly, who immediately flashed on an image of herself standing over Baby Tatty, telling her to go directly to her room after being caught ripping the pages out of the Webster’s Dictionary one by one. Holly remembered the way Tatiana had looked around her then, as if she had no idea where to go, which room was hers. She’d only been living in this house for six months, and still she woke up every morning calling out Please? in Russian: Puzhalsta? Puzhalsta? Mama Anya?

  Why, indeed, get angry with a toddler, or a child of any age? When Thuy had laughingly tossed off this noble truth, Tatiana was already twelve years old, and Holly had wished herself, desperately, back in time. She wanted to take Thuy’s advice—but all those early years were lost! All those little seconds she could have valued more, cherished better, in which she could have practiced more patience, professed more love, brought her daughter home from Wee Ones and taken her straight to the park—gone!

  But Holly had tried, hadn’t she? She’d sat on the floor countless times and played Candyland with her daughter, and Chutes and Ladders—the games that Holly herself had so wanted to play as a child, but which no one had the time to play with her. She had taken Tatty to the park. And the beach. And the zoo. And the Nutcracker! They’d gone horseback riding. They’d traveled. They’d eaten in expensive restaurants and little diners, and even if Holly hadn’t attended a church with Tatiana (as Thuy and Pearl did with Patty), they’d toured a
few of the world’s largest cathedrals, attended Handel’s Messiah at Hill Auditorium every December.

  Still, by the time Thuy gave Holly this advice (which she’d never intended as advice, only the uttering of a fact), the past was already chiseled in stone, and unalterable, and every moment of Holly’s and Tatty’s lives together was recorded on that stone, and had been from the beginning, and would be until the end. Although Holly had, really, no religious or mystical views at all, she felt keenly, the longer she lived, the inevitability of every second of her life, especially since Tatiana had been in it.

  SO, THERE WAS certainly no sense crying over another broken water glass! No sense chastising Tatty about an accident! And it was an accident. Holly had seen the whole thing herself. Tatiana had not thrown the phone or smashed the glass on purpose.

  Still, the mania of lurching to answer the cell phone—all that teenage-girl melodrama—was something Holly would have liked to challenge her daughter on. She would have liked to ask Tatty if it might not be possible to take it down a notch. But she wasn’t going to say that. Not in the middle of this fragile day. She said, instead, trying to tease Tatiana, “That’s quite an arm you’ve got there. Major league.”

  But Tatty didn’t laugh, and did not take her fingers from her lips.

  Holly swallowed a sigh. More melodrama. Still, she tried not to change her tone. She tried to keep it light—or “lite,” as all her salad dressings might call it—and said, “You okay, Tatty?”

  Tatty continued to utter nothing, and this time Holly did sigh. She managed, however, not to roll her eyes, and congratulated herself on that. “Okay, Tatty,” Holly said, and touched her daughter’s shoulder. “It’s no big deal.” Still, no response. “Earth to Tatty.” Holly snapped her fingers (playfully) near her daughter’s ear.

  Then Tatiana drew her fingers away from her mouth, and looked at them, studied them. Her dark eyebrows nearly met above the bridge of her nose, considering the fingertips.