Mind of Winter

by Laura Kasischke

  Tatiana’s hair tangled. She tore pages out of books. She refused to eat dinner some nights, and then would wake up in the middle of the night hungry and crying. Her teachers said that she sometimes fell asleep on the playground at recess, slumped on the swing set, instead of playing with her friends. She’d never mastered fractions, and she had no interest until she was eleven years old in learning to tie her shoe. She lost her breath when she ran up the basement stairs. She sometimes caught colds that lasted for weeks. She wasn’t perfect. She wasn’t immortal. And, Holly thought, she was even more perfect because of it:

  When Tatiana took ballet lessons, she wasn’t the most talented dancer, but she was the one who looked happiest to be dancing. She would look around her at the other tiny ballerinas, smiling encouragement at them. And she’d pulled herself up out of the indoor public pool after her first swimming lesson and shouted what her teacher had said to her, for all the other mothers in the steaming and echoing chamber to hear: “Mom, I am like a fish!”

  “Every day your daughter makes me happy,” the secretary at JFK Elementary said to Holly. Miss Beck was an enormously obese woman whose hair was as long and black as Tatty’s.

  “There’s no child here sweeter than she is. There never has been. There never will be.”

  Everyone had loved Tatty. Everyone had said how beautiful she was, how thoughtful, how special.

  “Tatiana,” Holly said. She loosened her grip, but she did not let go of her daughter’s wrist. She said, “Tatty, honey. Please. You can tell me anything. I have always told you that. Please. Just tell me what’s the matter. Please.”

  Tatty opened her eyes, stood her ground, let Holly stare into the eyes, but she did not seem to be staring back. Her eyes looked blank, as if they were turned inward—but they also appeared suspicious, as if Tatty were somehow looking beyond Holly’s mind, seeing through the back of Holly’s skull to something that was lurking behind her. Now that Tatiana had spat out the meat, her jaw was clenched, and her lips, now cerulean blue, remained sealed. When Holly smoothed a hand down her black hair, her daughter stiffened at the touch.

  “My God,” Holly said—and now that the whole awful day seemed to be nearing some kind of culmination, her anxiety actually seemed to lift. There was something terrible happening, something terribly wrong with Tatty, some secret her daughter had been keeping. Now there could be no going back to slammed bedroom doors, and denial. Now it was here in the room with them, and it was dreadful, yes, but it was no longer dread. Dread was the slow approach of the injured cat dragging its hind legs across the yard. Dread was when, after listening to her mother wail behind a closed door, there was silence. There had been dread in that silence because there was still the opportunity to refuse the facts. It had, of course, been dreadful when her sister had come out of their mother’s bedroom then and said, “Holly, honey. Come in here and kiss Mommy good-bye. She isn’t suffering anymore”—but this was not nearly as terrible as dread. Mommy’s eyes were closed in relief.

  Now Holly was ready. She could face whatever it was. The dread had passed with the denial. She said, “Say it, Tatty. Tell me. I love you. I loved you from the first moment I saw you. I will always love my Baby Tatty.”

  Holly wasn’t surprised that the words didn’t change Tatiana’s expression. She hadn’t really expected that they would. Tatiana was beyond the reach of such sentiments at the moment. Holly let go of her daughter, and Tatiana stepped away. She looked from her mother’s face to the blizzard beyond her. After that, she glanced at her hands, greasy and bloody from the meat, and then she wiped them down the front of her black dress, and then looked back at Holly, smirked, and said, without emotion, “That wasn’t Baby Tatty.”

  “What do you mean?” Holly tried to control her voice. It was too loud, wasn’t it? Her heart began to pound again, audibly. Anyone, she thought, in the house—maybe even outside the house—could have heard her heart pounding.

  “You are so blind,” Tatiana said.

  “What are you talking about, Tatty?”

  “You were so in love with me, with my big dark eyes, and when you came back you never even asked where I was.”

  “What?” Holly asked.

  “You came back to get me and you never asked where I was.”

  “No,” Holly said. “Tatty—”

  “I’m not Tatty.”

  Holly gasped, put a hand to her mouth. She said, “No.” She was ready to deny this with no idea what she was denying, and no idea why she was trying to grasp her daughter’s wrist so tightly again. Tatiana broke away and ran back toward her room, and Holly ran after her, but she wasn’t quick enough, and the bedroom door closed between them, and there was the sound of the hook in the eye, and Holly, hearing that, began to cry, backed up in the hallway, leaned against the wall.

  “No,” she said again, still denying, and she put her flooding face in her hands, tried to suppress the sound of her sobs, ashamed to have her daughter hear them, as if to cry was to admit something, to acknowledge the truth of it.

  AFTER THAT LONG winter back in the States, with their Baby Tatty waiting for them in Siberia, spring had come like a pastel explosion. It was so dazzling to look out the back door at the roses budding and the lilacs blooming that Holly almost couldn’t do it, and finally the day came that they could return to the Pokrovka Orphanage #2:

  Holly and Eric had walked through the orange doors, said a quick prevyet to the nurses, and gone straight to the crib.

  Tatiana! Baby Tatty! Their daughter!

  Her hair was longer, and her eyes were not as large in her face, but her cheeks were flushed, and she looked as healthy and beautiful as she had three months earlier, even if she was too thin—

  But all the toddlers at the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 were too thin! None of them had the chubby cheeks of American toddlers. None of them had fat little arms and legs. There was only so much food at the orphanage, and only so many nurses to feed it to so many children. Holly and Eric had given the nurses an extraordinary sum of money before they’d left after their first visit at Christmas, at the advice of the Canadian couple. By Russian standards it had been thousands of dollars! They’d been sure to imply that, if Tatiana was well taken care of while they were back in the States without her, there would be even more money when they returned to fetch her. Anya, in particular—they’d paid her, when they’d left to return to the States, as much as the poor girl probably made in a year at the orphanage!

  And although Eric and Holly were rich beyond the wildest dreams of these young Siberian women, Eric and Holly were not rich. It had been a sacrifice, that money. It had been paid so that the Tatiana they left behind at Christmas would be the Tatiana they returned for in the spring: happy, healthy. Well-fed.

  They would leave their little Tatiana in her crib in that terrible gray orphanage over the course of a bitter winter, return to their comfortable home, and when they came back, she would be there, shining as they’d left her, the same baby they’d left, but with only those few subtle changes:

  A little thinner. A little paler, bluer, with longer hair, with smaller eyes.

  But they’d paid so much money, and they loved her so much. It was impossible to think that she’d suffered in their absence, to see the thin limbs as some sign of—

  What?

  THEY’D LOVED HER so much, from the first moment they saw her on Christmas Day in her crib. They would have taken her home that moment, if not for the Russian bureaucracy, the iron-fisted rule that they must leave her behind and return for her three months later. They’d been given no choices in that matter.

  But how could you explain that to a baby when you placed her back in her crib in such a place, and left? How could you explain that, even later, even now that she was a teenager? How could you tell your daughter We left you there without us, knowing how cold it was, how neglected you would be, that anything could happen to you—but we loved you, we loved you so much, we paid so much money for them to take care of you, so that
when we came back you would be the same child we’d left behind us! Money was all we had to offer, and we offered it all!

  You could never explain such a thing to a child. But it shouldn’t have mattered anyway! Tatiana could not possibly have any memory of that time, those months after they fell in love with her, and then left her, could she?

  Holly forced herself to stop crying. She went to her daughter’s door. She said, “Please. Tatty,” to it.

  But she felt panicked now, no longer in control at all, and as she lunged for the door she could smell her own adrenaline on herself, under her arms and at the back of her neck—the smell of damp children’s sweaters in a small, institutional room.

  Surely Tatty wouldn’t do anything to harm herself, would she?

  Holly pushed hard on the door, meeting with the hook and eye, and then she took a step back, realizing how little pressure it would take to break through the hook and eye:

  It wasn’t a security system. It was only a psychological divider. Holly had simply wanted Tatiana to feel that there was a place she could have privacy when she needed it—the way Holly had needed that when she’d wanted to write. When she’d needed to be alone. When, as stupid as it seemed to her now, she’d expected to uncover, in her private mind, behind a locked door, in a small room, a poem.

  Oh, perhaps she’d expected Tatiana to write those poems! Perhaps she’d thought her daughter would write her own poems for her!

  But Tatiana had no need of poems. And she hadn’t wanted the door between them to be locked. That had been the problem all along, hadn’t it? Holly was the one who wanted to be alone. She should never have had a child! She had been made barren for a reason—and she’d always known it, although she’d never allowed herself to think it! Once, she’d slapped Eric, hard, when, after she’d burst out crying on a Monday night when Tatiana was four years old and demanding macaroni and cheese instead of the chicken breast she’d been served (this, after work all day and ballet class all night), he’d said, “Maybe you never wanted to be a mother, Holly. What did you think it would be like?”

  Yes, she’d slapped him. But he’d known!

  Worse, she’d known: He’d been right!

  No.

  No. She had wanted it! All mothers became frustrated. All mothers had regrets. Holly loved her daughter. Her daughter was the one thing in this world that Holly had been born to love. Without Tatiana, there was nothing; there had never, ever been anything without Tatiana. If—

  HOLLY PUSHED GENTLY on the door between them again, not breaking it in, but feeling how easily the lock she’d installed there would give way if she pushed harder.

  She said to the door, loudly, her voice shaking, “Tatty, I’m so selfish. I’m a selfish person. But, God, I love you. I love everything about you. More than I ever knew I could ever love anything, I love you. Please, please, stay in this world with me.”

  There was no sense in trying to protect her pride now. Every minute of Tatiana’s childhood had been leading to this moment, and the only thing that mattered in Holly’s life now, the only thing that could ever matter was showing this beautiful creature how much she had been loved from the very beginning.

  This child that Holly was so privileged to have—having cheated, having cheated fate, for this child she was so privileged to call her daughter!

  To the door, again, even more loudly, Holly said, “I never wanted anything more than I wanted you.”

  Really?

  Are you so sure?

  Remember, you wanted to be a poet, Holly. Even this morning, after sleeping so late, you just wanted to be alone, you wished—

  “No! I haven’t been the mother I could have been, true, but please, Tatty, let me try again. Let me keep trying. Now I know. Now that I know, I—”

  Holly pushed the door open a little more this time, but only enough to put her eye to the crack.

  In there, she could see Tatiana lying in the bed, again with her back to the door. Pale arm, dark hair across the pillow. Now her back was bare, and the coverlet was off. Gin’s red dress was on the bedroom floor, and the black dress was hanging over the back of her desk chair. Tatiana couldn’t be asleep already, again, could she? Not with all the noise Holly was making in the hallway.

  Still, her daughter didn’t move at all when Holly said, “Please, Tatiana,” and then screamed it: “Tatty! Please! Please open the door!”

  Somehow she couldn’t do it yet—break the lock, the symbolic lock—and barge into her daughter’s room. She didn’t know why. She had put it there herself so that Tatiana could escape her mother—hadn’t she?—so how could Holly break that promise by breaking that lock?

  And why would she? What would be the point? There was nothing in the room Tatiana could harm herself with, was there? No knives, certainly no guns, not even any scissors that Holly knew of. There were no medications, no Drano, no heavy rope, none of the things a teenage girl might use to cry for help, or to kill herself, or both.

  So Holly backed away, feeling ashamed for having screamed. She sat down in the hallway. She put the knuckles of her right hand into her mouth. They were sore. From the knocking. Chafed. Not bloody, though. They tasted like dry bones, or stones, between her lips, and Holly recalled how, several months after her surgeries, after her breasts and her ovaries were gone, she’d felt so sure she would live forever, but also that she was completely empty—that she was nothing but a shell now. That she was not a woman with a future, but a mannequin, a statue, a robot. In one of her first outings after the bandages and the tubes had been removed, she’d gone for a walk along the beach, and had come upon two white stones, side by side, being washed around by a wave, and she’d bent over, picked up the stones, and put them in her mouth.

  She had just kept walking, while holding the smooth stones between her palate and her tongue. They comforted her. They tasted rusty, like lake water, but also like blood. And she liked the way their cold lifelessness seemed to warm and soften as she sucked. After a while, Holly had tucked the stones side by side beneath her tongue.

  They were her ovaries, she thought, crazily, but somehow certainly. They were her ovaries returned to her! Her ovaries had washed up here from wherever it was the surgeon had tossed them when he’d plucked them out of her. And now they were back inside the soft fleshy tissue of her. She imagined that she felt them throbbing. She imagined she felt them breathing, almost, as if they had gills. She imagined that they were attaching themselves to her again. Eventually, Holly thought, she could swallow them and they would come to life inside her. They would sprout blood vessels, attach themselves back to her, disease-free.

  She’d still been weak from the surgeries, Holly knew, that day. Surely that was the reason for such thinking. There’d been some complications, additional surgeries needed, and that had been the first real walk into the world Holly had been able to take alone for months. She’d not been right. After she spat the stones out, she gagged, and then vomited on the sand.

  HOLLY TOOK HER knuckles out of her mouth and said, looking up from where she sat in the hallway to her daughter’s bedroom door, “Are you asleep in there, Tatty?” She said it softly, not really having meant for Tatty to hear. If Tatty was sleeping in there, she should just be allowed to sleep. Tatty was tired. Tatty was hungry. Soon Eric would be home. He could talk to Tatty. He could talk to them both.

  But Tatty did hear:

  A few quiet seconds went by before, from her bedroom, there was an angry shriek—sounding part grief, part frustration—and a sound like a fist punching the headboard of the bed, and then Tatty screaming, “Go away! Leave me the fuck alone! That’s what you do best!”

  Holly stood quickly and, to steady herself, put one hand against the wall, palm laid flat between two framed photographs. She took a breath. She looked into one of the photographs. In it, Tatiana had her arms around Eric’s neck. They were smiling. Behind them, a green riverbank. They were standing on the deck of a paddleboat floating down the Mississippi River. It had been a su
mmer vacation, a family road trip they’d taken when Tatty was eleven. Holly had wanted to show her America! She’d wanted to show her Russian daughter America—as if, somehow, Tatty needed to see this country more than any other midwestern child needed to see this country!

  But Tatiana wasn’t like those other midwestern children, whose Americanness was utterly unremarkable. Unlike them, Tatiana might so easily still be in Siberia—or somewhere close to Siberia, not even Siberia! The nurses had said they couldn’t be certain that her biological family was not from Kazakhstan, or even Outer Mongolia. They could have been northerners. Migrants. There were still nomadic tribes from that area who made their way south in the early summer—the time of year when Tatiana would have been born—for work, or with herds of animals. The woman, or girl, who gave birth to Tatiana could have come from the north, given birth in Siberia, and returned, leaving Tatiana behind.

  But she could just as easily have taken Tatty back with her. Or stayed in Siberia to raise her baby. And, in that case, whatever concrete apartment block, or isolated wooden farmhouse, or yurt that mother was living in would be Tatiana’s home now.

  Eric always said, “We’ll take her back someday. We’ll travel all around the area. Maybe we can take the Trans-Siberian Railway, and—”

  “Maybe,” Holly would say, pretending. But she would never do such a thing! Tatiana should never see that place! Holly never forgot the nurses urging her to name the baby Sally, or Bonnie (“Bonnie and Clyde, right?”) or she will be back. Holly had known all along, hadn’t she, that they were right?

  “Maybe,” Holly would say. “But in the meantime, Tatiana needs to see the United States. It’s more hers than ours.”

  Eric hadn’t asked Holly what she meant by that, and Holly couldn’t have explained it if he had.