Mind of Winter

by Laura Kasischke

  Holly snapped more loudly this time, as if to summon Tatty from a trance. It worked. She looked up at her mother, and then she held out her hand for Holly to see.

  Holly gasped when she saw the fingertips, and grabbed hold of Tatiana’s wrist, looking more closely at the hand, and then spreading out the fingers so that she could see more closely.

  They were burned! The middle three fingers. They were swollen, reddish, purplish. They were blistered. Holly found that she couldn’t say anything, although she managed to pull her daughter by the wrist to the kitchen sink, turn on the cold water, and plunge her daughter’s hand under the faucet. Tatty yelped, tried to snatch her hand away from it, but Holly held on, keeping the fingers firmly under the water’s flow.

  “Ouch, ouch, Mommy,” Tatty cried out. “Please. Please, Mama!”

  But, although she was crying out, Tatiana wasn’t trying to get away any longer. There was no point. Holly was both panicked and ferocious now, and Tatiana could never have wrestled herself out of her grip.

  Jesus Christ! What had happened? Could this be a second-degree burn? Or worse? The darkened, blistered skin was peeling away, ragged as lace now, exposing pale, new skin beneath the old. Blanched! Tatiana’s fingertips had been blanched! As if she’d plunged her hand into a boiling pot, and kept it there.

  “Oh my God, Tatty,” Holly said. She held tight to her daughter’s wrist but turned to look at her daughter’s face. “Tatty, how did this happen?”

  Tatty shook her head. Her eyes were enormous. She said, as if from far away, “I don’t know, Mommy. I don’t know. I never even touched it.”

  “Touched what, honey? What burned you?”

  “Your iPhone.” Tatiana stated it like a fact, but there was awe in it, too.

  “No, sweetheart,” Holly said, and looked over her shoulder at the stove behind Tatty. “You must have touched the stove. I thought I’d turned it off, but it must be burning hot somehow.”

  “No,” Tatty said. “I didn’t touch the stove.”

  “You touched something that was burning,” Holly said. “But it’ll be okay. We’ll get some ointment on it. I’ll look up burns on the Internet, and we’ll see how serious this is. We’ll make sure it doesn’t get infected.”

  Tatiana looked away from Holly, back down to her hand, and then back at Holly. She did not look reassured. She looked as if she doubted Holly had any idea at all what she was talking about, or any power in a matter such as this.

  Holly had a flash of anger that Eric wasn’t here. He’d always been the only one of the two of them who’d ever been able to soothe or bolster Tatty. Tatty had never (infuriatingly!) taken Holly’s word for anything. Holly’s telling Tatiana that everything would be all right (whether it was a bruise or a bad grade or a tornado warning) had never elicited anything but this very expression of doubt she wore right now. Holly looked back down at the fingers, and she couldn’t help but make a hissing sound between her teeth.

  The burn looked terrible. It was quite possible, wasn’t it, that they’d have to go to the ER later today? For only the second or third time in Tatiana’s childhood did Holly wish that they had a family doctor, or a pediatrician she could call. But there’d never been any reason for one. Tatty was so healthy that they’d never even needed antibiotics or cough medicines—a lucky thing, because Holly was absolutely not going to subject her child to one more vaccine or unnecessary checkup in this life, after what she’d been through in Russia, and she knew that taking her daughter to a physician would open that Pandora’s box. Despite what they said, this was not a free country, not when it came to making decisions about your own child’s health care.

  And poor Baby Tatty! She had suffered so much medical invasion already, with all the prodding and poking and sticking with needles she’d been put through during the adoption process. No. Holly would never again allow her daughter to be given vaccines for diseases that she would never be exposed to—rubella! polio! smallpox! And although their opinions differed when it came to dental care, she and Eric were in complete agreement on the medical establishment. Eric despised doctors, had only been to the one, once, in all the years that Holly had known him, and that was at her insistence because of the (benign, yet ever-growing) bump on the back of his hand. Eric firmly believed that it was the job of doctors to find diseases where none existed, and to exacerbate disease where they found it. So Holly and Eric simply, easily, lied about the vaccines and the checkups on the yearly school forms, and Holly signed her own name under “Attending Physician”—and in all those years no one had once called her on it because, as everyone knew, no one ever looked at those forms because those vaccines weren’t necessary!

  Of course, not to take your child to the doctor in this country was an unspeakable taboo, like corporal punishment, or like incest, so the only person Holly had ever confessed it to had been Thuy, who’d grown, herself, into a healthy adult without having seen a physician in childhood. The conditions under which Thuy had been raised certainly had not allowed for yearly checkups! And look at her! Her hair was blue-black glossy and down to her elbows when she didn’t wear it in a bun. Her skin was flawless. She ran six miles a day. Her smile was the only smile Holly had ever seen that could have rivaled Tatty’s for wholesome beauty. Thuy had promised not to judge Holly about it “as long as my Baby Tatty never gets sick. If that little angel gets sick, you’re going to have to answer to Auntie Thuy if you don’t get her to a doctor—or if it turns out she got sick because you didn’t.”

  “That won’t happen,” Holly had said. “She won’t get sick because I won’t take her to the doctor. She’ll be like you.”

  Thuy had considered this, twisting a pearl bracelet around on her wrist as she did, seeming to accept it, but then she said, “Well, honey, you must have some confidence in modern medicine.” Holly knew that Thuy was talking about her prophylactic mastectomies, her oophorectomy.

  “True,” Holly had said, ready for this (she’d thought about it for years), “but that’s all that can be done. The only thing modern medicine can do for you is rid you of body parts and tumors. After that, if you get a disease, you die. Believe me, Thuy. I know. I watched my mother and my sister and all the ways ‘cures’ kill you—slowly and horribly—of diseases you might not even have known you had if you hadn’t gone to the doctors.”

  “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil?” Thuy had said, doing the monkey hand motions.

  “Yes,” Holly had said.

  “And, Holly, not taking Tatty to the doctor isn’t because you have, you know, regrets? I mean, all your talk of being a robot . . . ?” Thuy made an expression, half sadness, half mock horror. “You’re not, you know, thinking you’re going to spare Tatiana some similar fate?”

  “I have a genetic mutation,” Holly said. “Tatiana doesn’t have one. She has no fate. My family fate is over. We’re either all dead, or we’re robots.”

  Thuy had punched Holly in the arm with playful force and then said, “Sorry that was so hard. But it didn’t hurt, right?”

  “I feel nothing,” Holly had said, and they’d laughed.

  HOLLY LOOKED UP from Tatiana’s fingers, having to blink in the blizzard-light blazing through the picture window. She said, as steadily as she was able, “Daddy will be home soon. If we need help or advice in the meantime, we’ll call Thuy,” as much to reassure herself as Tatiana.

  “It doesn’t hurt anymore anyway,” Tatty said, pulling the hand out from under the cold water. Still, the expression on her face was pained, and the tone of her voice was that of someone who’d simply resigned herself to feeling pain.

  “Come on,” Holly said. “Let’s very, very carefully towel the fingers off and look at them in the light, and then we’ll find something to put on the burn.”

  She continued to hold Tatty’s wrist, leading her daughter over to the picture window.

  At least all this useless light would be good for something.

  Seeing her daughter’s fingertips in the bett
er light, Holly tried to swallow down her alarm. She was, frankly, scared now. She considered the burning, and the blizzard. What if this was serious? What if she needed to get help for Tatty and couldn’t back out of the driveway and Eric couldn’t get home to help?

  There were the neighbors, of course, but did Holly really know any of them well enough to be comfortable knocking on their doors in a snowstorm on Christmas Day to ask for help? Even in an emergency?

  Well, it didn’t matter what she was comfortable with, did it? She’d have to do it, for her daughter. After having vowed never again to speak to the neighbors on either side of them—both of whom had complained, bitterly, about the chickens, years ago—she would have to swallow her pride. She would have to do that, even if it was hard. The neighbors had not complained to Holly and Eric—that would have been one thing, a better thing—but to everyone else in the neighborhood instead. Holly had found herself one day walking down the street with Tatiana, finding out from every neighbor she passed that the two closest to them had called the police about Holly and Eric’s chickens, that because of Holly and Eric’s chickens they were demanding a repeal of the statute allowing residential homeowners to have backyard chickens.

  Those were the next-door neighbors, but then there’d been Randa, in the house behind theirs, who’d openly blamed Holly for the traumatic death of Trixie, their cat. The worst part of Trixie’s death, for Randa, seemed not to be the suffering of that sweet cat, but that her six-year-old had witnessed it:

  “Why can’t you take care of your pets?” she’d screamed at Holly, who had stood in her own backyard, helplessly, while Randa’s voice shook with rage, as if Holly had done something hideous to an animal on purpose. She’d never spoken with Randa again. Or, really, to any of the neighbors. If she felt it would have done any good, she would have gone from house to house and explained to them that she, too, felt terrific shame about what had happened to the animals, and that it had happened while they were under her care, but anyone could see that these were mostly events out of her control, that they were things she would never, never, have allowed to happen if she could have prevented them. If she’d thought it would do any good, Holly would have agreed that, frankly, they were right.

  She couldn’t take care of her pets.

  As a child, she’d never had anything even remotely resembling a pet. Not even a fish. Her mother had been sick. So sick. There had been sounds coming from her bedroom that no child should have to hear, and Holly had heard them all! Could there be no sympathy for a woman who’d had a childhood like that? It had been hard enough for her sisters (children themselves, really!) to take care of her, let alone a pet! No, they could never have had a pet! So Holly really had no idea what she was doing with the animals, just as the neighbors had accused her, and she was willing to admit that. But she’d wanted the pets for Tatty! So that her daughter could have what Holly hadn’t. And no one was sorrier than Holly that it hadn’t worked out. That it had been so disastrous.

  But Holly would never have had the opportunity to explain herself to them, without appearing to them to be a madwoman. So she avoided them instead of beseeching them. It was a loss, though. Neighbors. She wished more than ever that they were her close friends, that she felt comfortable calling them on Christmas Day, asking for help, telling them that something might be terribly wrong.

  Certainly, though, none of them were monsters. They’d help, and gladly, if Holly and Tatiana needed help. They held no grudge against Tatiana, of course. Holly knew this for certain. Although Tatiana never talked to Holly about it, Holly knew that Randa sometimes came out to the waist-high fence when Tatiana was in the backyard, and she and Tatty would have what seemed like long conversations with each other as Randa’s little boy ran around with a stick. The two of them seemed to be laughing. Occasionally Randa would touch Tatty’s arm. Holly could see that gesture from the window where she watched.

  Randa would help. And Randa was a hospital administrator—which didn’t make her a medical professional, of course, but surely she would know what to do in the case of a burn like this. If the snow was so deep that they couldn’t drive or walk around the block and had to climb over the fence to get her, they could do that. It was a low fence.

  Holly looked back down at Tatiana’s fingers and was relieved to see that they seemed to be changing color. They were pinker now. Yes, a layer of skin had torn away, but maybe the skin underneath it was undamaged. Maybe this was just a superficial burn, like a sunburn. Maybe the skin that was peeling away from the fingertips wasn’t dark because of the burn, but had simply been ashed black from some sort of residue Tatiana had touched on the stove. Admittedly, Holly didn’t keep the top of the stove as clean as she might. On many occasions, she herself had come away from the appliance with dirt on a sleeve or a smudge on her elbow or dirty fingertips.

  To appraise the situation even more closely, Holly squinted.

  Now the peeled-away skin looked superfluous, and the skin underneath did not look particularly tender or overly exposed. It looked like the new skin had been waiting under the old skin for quite a while. There were even fingerprints, it seemed to Holly, there beneath the old fingerprints, which had been there all along, in the shadows, ready to take over.

  But, of course, why not? Didn’t their cells renew so quickly that, really, every year they were wearing an entirely new suit of flesh? Hadn’t Holly read that somewhere? It was a miracle, really, the way, despite the shedding of the old skin, there were always those same fingerprints and birthmarks and scars floating to the surface, proof that you were the same person you’d been before your old cells had flaked away.

  “It’ll be okay,” Holly said to her daughter. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll find some ointment and put Band-Aids on, and it might throb a bit, but we’ll get you some aspirin. Okay?”

  Tatty shook her head no, but Holly decided to ignore it. She led her to the bathroom, and Tatty followed—willingly, but sleepwalkingly, just the way she’d followed Eric and Holly out of the Pokrovka Orphanage #2, into the sunlight, and then into the dark car that would take them to the train station, to the airport, to all the stops between Siberia and Michigan—walking, walking, walking, as if it were all a dream, but also as if it were a fate there would be no point in resisting.

  SHE’D REFUSED TO be carried. Baby Tatty would not be picked up, even through the endless labyrinths of the Atlanta airport after flying, mostly awake, for nearly twenty hours.

  And, of course, being only twenty-two months old, the steps she took in those little leather shoes (which Holly had bought for her in the States and laced onto her feet in the orphanage in Siberia) were tentative by nature—baby steps. Her ankles were wobbly. She’d never had hard-soled shoes on her feet until then. She’d never so much as stepped outside the orphanage—except, Holly and Eric had been told, once, when she and a few other ambulatory children had been allowed to run around in a fenced-in area out back. But that had been just the one spring day the year before, and, except for it, all the walking days of Tatiana’s life had been spent inside the deep winter of Pokrovka Orphanage #2.

  It took the three of them twenty-six hours to reach home from Siberia, and in all that time Baby Tatty spoke not a word, stared straight ahead of her, and was willing to go wherever the person who was holding her hand was going—but she would not be picked up.

  Now it was like that again, pulling Tatiana by the wrist to the bathroom, telling her to sit down on the toilet lid while Holly started to search through the drawers, then through the linen closet, for—

  For what?

  Neosporin? Bactine? Would rubbing alcohol work? Witch hazel? Holly wasn’t sure she’d ever in her life cleaned a wound. The only two scrapes that Tatty had ever had (once, scraping her knee open while running to greet Thuy and Pearl in the driveway, and another cutting her finger on a piece of broken pottery) had been tended to by Eric. But Neosporin sounded like something Eric had mentioned in reference to a wound—and, luckily, Holly fo
und a tube of that.

  She took the tube out of the linen closet and read the side of it. The description and the directions looked promising. She twisted the cap off and brought the tube over to Tatiana, who was still sitting, expressionless, on the toilet seat. Holly said, “Hold out your fingers, sweetie.”

  Tatiana did as Holly told her—just as she’d pulled down her panties to go potty in the tiny lavatory of the twin-propeller airplane that had flown them from Irkutsk to Buryatia. What could Baby Tatty have been thinking then? She’d walked on her own little feet so few times on earth, and now she was on a shaking thing in the sky over the earth. A stranger was telling her it was time to pull down her panties and to pee and that everything would be okay, but telling her this in a language she did not speak. Still, she had done it, peed in the potty, pulled her panties back up, returned with Holly to her seat, walking as steadily as she could on that wobbling craft, and she had not cried.

  HOLLY SQUEEZED THE clear gel onto her daughter’s fingertips, and then she bandaged each one of them with a Barbie Band-Aid. How long had they had those things in the linen closet? Or was it, rather, that Tatiana, despite how mature she seemed, had really just emerged from childhood such a short time ago that they were still surrounded by her childhood things?

  “All better?” Holly asked, holding the hand with the bandaged fingers in her own.

  Tatiana said nothing.

  “Are you okay, Tatty?” Holly asked—and, yes, this time there was an edge to it. Her patience was thinning again. Okay, she thought—okay, so there’d been an accident, and Tatty had touched the stove, and her fingertips had been burned. But now it was time to move on, as they said. Right? “Tatty? Did you hear me?”

  Finally Tatiana looked up and made eye contact with Holly, and this time it was Holly who found herself glancing away. Her daughter’s eyes looked too shiny to her. Both too bright and too dark to stand. Tatty inhaled, seeming ready to say something she’d been holding in for a while, and Holly felt unaccountably worried about what it would be, could already feel herself beginning to form excuses, denials, but Tatty only said, “They called again.”