Now Holly looked from the paddleboat snapshot on the wall to the photograph on the other side of her palm:
In this one Tatiana wore a reindeer-fur hat that Holly had bought for her off the Internet, imported from the Buryatia Republic. Tatty smiled thoughtfully in this photograph, looking like a very typical American girl, but with something ineffably exotic about her—some quality of her elegant face that was brought out by the fur hat and its implications of a vast, snowy continent far away, and long-lost blood relatives who may or may not have been wondering, at that very moment, what had happened to this little girl they had given away.
And they could never have guessed, those long-lost blood relatives, what had happened to that little girl.
How could they possibly have pictured a room like Tatiana’s? The shelves of Harry Potter books and Little House on the Prairie. The iMac and iPod and iPad. The bin of stuffed animals, and the closet full of clean clothes, and the cabinet full of Tatty’s Russian nesting doll collection, and all those lacquered boxes with Russian fairy-tale scenes painted on them?
No. Only the child herself, perhaps, would have been recognizable. The Jet-Black Rapunzel hair. The enormous dark eyes.
“That’s our child!” they might have cried out, seeing her. “Sally! Our Sally!”
“PLEASE, SWEETHEART,” HOLLY said, taking her hand away from the place where it rested between those two photographs on the wall.
Now Tatty was quiet again in her room:
Hush, hush, little fish. Hush, hush, little fish. We are here on earth to make a wish. We close our eyes, and then we start, to make a wish with all our heart. . . .
Holly tiptoed away from the door, and then she made her way back to the kitchen.
There, the beef in its roasting pan was on the counter where Tatiana had left it. The carving knife still lay in the sink. Holly’s hands were trembling, but she was able to bring down the aluminum foil and cover the meat with a silvery piece of it. Beneath that shiny foil, the roast looked like a model of a mountain range, or—much worse—like a severed head. The long head of an animal such as a horse, or a goat. That mound of meat was so large it would be hard to make a place in the refrigerator for it again, in its roasting pan this time instead of its wicked plastic bag. Perhaps, Holly thought, she should take it out to the garage, where it was certainly cold enough to keep the meat from spoiling. Though she didn’t like the idea of the garage—the gas cans out there, the vehicle fumes and garbage pails.
Maybe she could just leave it covered in foil in the backyard?
She looked to the picture window, and beyond it to the snow. It looked sanitary. It looked like a place you could leave your Christmas feast and not have it poisoned. Although there were some dangers, of course. Even in a town as far from the wilderness as this one, there was some wildlife. Whatever had dug the cat out of its grave might come for the roast beef. But Holly wouldn’t leave the roast beef out overnight, of course. She—
“Do it,” Tatiana said. “Get that dead thing out of the house.”
“Okay,” Holly said. “Okay.”
Holly did not bother to turn away from the window, to look around to see where Tatty’s voice had come from. She must still be in her bed, surely. She could not be, as she seemed to be, so close to Holly’s ear:
That voice—it could have come from anywhere. Her daughter’s voice seemed to coming from the back of Holly’s mind, from inside her. A mind full of roses. Or a mind of winter. Holly would do as her daughter’s voice told her. She went to the coat closet and opened it.
Inside, their boots and shoes were lined up neatly. Keeping the coat closet tidy was Tatty’s chore. It was the first chore she’d been given, as a very little girl, and she’d always done it carefully, taken it seriously. She’d given that closet, apparently, a special cleaning for the company that was to have come today. She’d put extra hangers in the closet for the extra coats, and she’d taken a pair of her father’s work boots down to the basement to make room for the boots and shoes of the guests.
Hanging at the center of the closet was Tatty’s red cloth coat. Beside it was Holly’s white jacket, stuffed with the tiny white feathers of what must have been hundreds of white birds. Sometimes those feathers managed to escape from the jacket, and Holly would find them on her sweaters and in her hair—small, magical surprises from the sky. She slipped the jacket off the hanger and put it on. She picked up her slip-on nylon boots and set them on the floor where she could step into them when she returned with the roast in her hands. So she wouldn’t have to walk across the house in them to fetch the pan. Holly did not like shoes in the house. There had always been tracks on her childhood floors from her father’s and brother’s boots, and since no one had ever scrubbed them off, those boot prints had accumulated until it looked as if an army had been quartered in their house for years.
Barefoot, Holly went back to the kitchen and picked up the pan by the handles.
She returned to the hallway and slid her right foot into her right boot, and then she lifted her left foot to do the same with the other boot. But the platter of meat was heavy. Much heavier, somehow, than Holly had expected—although she’d been the one who’d lifted it from the meat case at the supermarket and placed it in her cart, hadn’t she? And she was the one who’d brought it from the car into the kitchen, and moved it from the refrigerator to the roasting pan and the pan to the stove.
No one knew more about the weight of that meat than Holly did, but, still, when it shifted in the pan at the same time as Holly raised her foot above her boot, it was as if she’d stupidly believed that this enormous piece of solid flesh would be weightless, insubstantial, could defy the laws of gravity, and that somehow she would be able to balance it and herself in thin air at the same time.
Of course, she couldn’t.
Holly lost her balance, and then she lost her grip on the roasting pan, and then it all fell away from her—the meat in the pan and the floor to which she collapsed—and the roast landed with the solid, awful sound of a baby being dropped. From a nurse’s arms.
How many nights had she woken up, after that first trip to Siberia, from dreams that the baby she and Eric had claimed for their own, their Baby Tatty, far away in Siberia, left behind in that gray impoverished institutional place, had been dropped to the floor?
Sometimes Holly wasn’t even dreaming.
She might be driving to work, daydreaming about the future, about the baby, about bringing the baby home, about the day she would finally have her daughter in her arms, and in her imagination was carrying the baby to her crib (the bumper and the comforter and mobile, all smiling ducks, hundreds of ducks smiling despite the fact that they had bills instead of mouths) and placing her baby into the crib, and teaching her the English word for home, and Holly would be seeing it all so vividly in her mind, bearing that sweet weight, that she would actually lurch behind the steering when she clearly saw a nurse, somewhere far away and in that other place, dropping the baby, the perfect Baby Tatty—
“PERFECT,” TATIANA SAID from somewhere beyond her mother.
Holly lay on her side now on the braided rug on the floor between the front door and the coat closet. She looked up. It seemed to her that Tatiana should be nothing but a silhouette above her, backlit as she was by blizzard from the picture window—but, instead, it was as if some spotlight from the floor where Holly lay was trained on Tatiana. Her daughter looked larger than life, standing there in more vivid detail than Holly had ever seen her before, looking down. Her eyes were sad. She was shaking her head. She was wearing Gin’s velvet dress and Thuy’s earrings again. “Mommy,” she said. “What happened?”
“I dropped everything, Tatiana,” Holly said. It was a relief to admit it.
Tatiana nodded.
Holly said, “I’m so sorry, honey. You must be so hungry.”
“I told you, I’m not hungry anymore, Mommy,” Tatiana said. She leaned over to offer Holly her hand, and Holly tried to take it, but it was j
ust out of her reach. Tatiana continued to hold it out, and Holly continued to try to take it, but she couldn’t reach it, she couldn’t catch it. The look on Tatiana’s face grew agitated then, and impatient again, so Holly quit trying. She said, “I’m okay here, Tatty.”
Tatiana nodded and turned away, making her way over to the Christmas tree. Holly could still see her from where she lay on the braided rug by the coat closet. Tatiana knelt down in front of the tree.
“Tatty?”
But Tatiana didn’t answer her and didn’t turn around.
Holly’s back hurt more than perhaps it should have from such a short fall, but she managed to push herself up into a sitting position. Surely she hadn’t injured herself very badly in such a minor spill. The floor was hard, but it wasn’t as if she’d fallen from a great height. Even a baby falling from a nurse’s arms to the floor from that height would not be seriously injured, would she?
It wouldn’t even be something a child that age would remember, would it? Think of Thuy, who’d fled Vietnam with her mother and grandmother on an open boat. Thuy had been four years old, and she’d spent three days tucked between her mother and the body of her grandmother, who’d died in the boat in the middle of the ocean—but Thuy’s earliest memory was of shaking the hand of Mickey Mouse at Disneyland.
After Eric and Holly returned to the States after that first trip for those three long months before they could go back for their daughter, Holly tried never to think about what could potentially harm her baby still in Siberia—accidents, negligence, abuse, disease, spoiled food—during the long winter they were separated.
They’d done all they could do, hadn’t they? They’d bribed the nurses to take care of the baby, and to call her Tatiana, not Sally. There’d been promises of more money to come if the baby was fine upon their return.
And she was fine!
Although she was larger (startlingly larger) and thinner and smaller at the same time, and although her eyes seemed to have shrunk and her hair had grown longer and shinier than it could possibly have grown in only those months, and although she was too pale (like all the children in the Pokrovka Orphanage #2!), she looked healthy. She had been potty-trained. Her cheeks were scarlet red, and although that flush had turned out to be rouge that had been applied by the nurses to the baby’s cheeks, Tatiana did not look unhealthy even after Holly discovered the makeup on a white paper towel after washing, gently, her daughter’s face for the first time in the airplane potty.
Of course, Tatiana did not look happy to see Eric and Holly when they arrived at the orphanage in the spring—but why would she? How could she possibly have remembered them from their visit at Christmas? A visit that was, anyway, so brief? She didn’t resist them when they wrapped her in the blanket they’d brought with them, or when they changed her clothes into the little white cotton dress Gin had sewn for the occasion. When they left the orphanage together forever, Tatiana did not look back at the nurses—not even Anya, who had been, back at Christmastime, her favorite. Yes, that was a little disconcerting, that the nurse who’d cared for her for nearly two years seemed like a stranger to her. But Tatiana seemed unharmed. She seemed to have been well taken care of, for which they’d bribed the orphanage staff, although it did bother Holly that Baby Tatty did not look up when she spoke her name.
“Tatiana?”
Baby Tatty seemed not to recognize that name at all. So the nurses hadn’t called her Tatiana, had they, as they’d been asked to do?
But of course that mattered so much less than everything else—that she hadn’t been starved, or beaten, or dropped to the floor, or left so long in her crib that she had, as the orphanage’s children famously had, a flattened skull, a bald spot.
And soon enough she began to answer to her name.
ONLY ONCE, WHEN they had been home in Michigan for two weeks, did Holly ever say the other name.
“Sally.”
Baby Tatty had been sitting on the living room floor, almost exactly in the place where Tatiana knelt now before the Christmas tree, and Holly, standing behind her, had said quietly, but loudly enough that she could have heard her, “Sally?”
Baby Tatty did not turn around.
“Sally?” A little louder this time, but still there had been no response.
Holly thought she should be grateful, that this child no longer answered to the name they must have called her in Siberia, that she had internalized her new name. But she didn’t. Instead, Holly had felt a coldness spread across her chest.
It started behind her ribs—but the coldness also encompassed the area of her reconstructed breasts. She thought of the younger Tatiana, the one the nurses had called Sally, at Christmas, on that first Christmas Day, and how she’d looked into Holly’s eyes as she cradled her, how she’d reached one small pink hand, with its perfect tiny fingernails out, and slipped it into Holly’s reconstructed cleavage, into a gap between two buttons of her white blouse:
Her eyes.
Holly had never before and had never since seen such eyes.
Those had been Sally’s eyes.
This child, who’d been brought home with them only weeks before, was not Sally.
HOLLY TRIED TO straighten up. She pushed the white boots out of the way. They were splattered with blood from the roast, and there was a slick puddle of blood near the front door. She reached overhead, using the doorknob of the coat closet to pull herself up until she was standing. There was a shooting pain in her back, but Holly felt sure the pain would go away after a while. There could be nothing wrong with her spine, after all, if she was standing. She inhaled, gazing at her daughter’s back:
All that dark, shining hair.
EVENTUALLY, HOLLY HAD forgotten the coldness she’d felt that day when the child, who had not been called Tatiana—and who, then, surely had been called Sally—did not answer to her name.
No! Why would she? She answered to Tatiana now! How quickly a name, replaced by another, would be forgotten. No matter how long they’d called her Sally, now she knew herself to be Tatiana.
Forget Sally, Holly had thought, and she had gone so far as to name one of the hens Sally. It had seemed so innocuous, even charming. It was the name they might have given their daughter, but they hadn’t. Now Holly gave it to her hen, and it secretly pleased her to hear that name on her daughter’s lips. (“Sally laid an egg under the bushes!”) Holly had never told Tatiana that Sally had once been her own name. Why would she?
She had never been Sally.
Holly shook her head, trying to shake that thought out of her mind:
Yes, she had looked like a different child, perhaps, when they went back.
Longer. Thinner, but larger. Older than they’d expected her to look, having grown and changed more over the course of those months than they’d known was possible. But there were familiar features! The eyes were smaller, yes, and the hair was longer, but they were essentially the same features. It was natural, surely, to come upon a child you hadn’t seen for many weeks and to find her changed. To see her almost as an older sister to the child you’d left behind. Children changed so quickly, and in ways you could not anticipate. That Baby Tatty had changed so much, that she answered to no name that Eric or Holly or the nurses called her, that her hair—
Well, Tatiana hadn’t been the only child with that kind of hair in the orphanage! It was surprising how luxurious a small child’s hair could be! Behind that forbidden door, Holly had seen a girl with nearly such shining black hair. That girl, who seemed little more than an infant (although it was impossible to tell, as she was so malnourished), was sitting bare-bottomed, strapped to a plastic bedpan. Her face was pale and smooth as stone, and she stared up at Holly, and then—horribly!—she seemed to recognize Holly. That little girl had smiled at Holly with such a beatific expression it was as if she were trying to distract this onlooker from the horror of her situation—her broken and imperfectly healed limbs, her crooked spine.
Yes, Holly remembered now! That had not b
een their first visit when Holly had snuck into that room. It had been their second, when they’d come back for their baby!
And it had not been the boy with the hydrocephalic head that had sent her hurrying out of the room! It had been the smile of that familiar little girl with her enormous dark eyes, to whom something horrible had happened:
She’d been beaten. Or dropped. She would never walk. She was completely broken.
And Holly had hurried from the room, closed the door, heard the words of Annette Sanders in her ear so close and clear it was as if the therapist were standing beside her, and she had done it:
She had forgotten.
NOW HOLLY WATCHED as Tatiana pulled a present out from under the tree and seemed to read the tag on it. She said, quietly, to her daughter’s beautiful back, “Sally?”
Tatiana didn’t turn around, but she said, sounding disappointed, “I’m not Sally. You know that, Mommy.”
Holly said nothing for a long time, letting the pain in her back turn into a numbness, until she finally managed to take a breath deep enough to speak, and then she asked her daughter’s back, “Then where is Sally, honey? Where is Sally?”
Tatiana shrugged. But it wasn’t the coquettish shrug from earlier in the day. It wasn’t the shrug of teenage apathy, ennui. It was a shrug of sadness, of utter despair.
“Oh, Tatty,” Holly said. “Was it Sally who tried to call, honey? Does Sally know my phone number?”
Tatiana shook her head. Maybe, now, she was laughing a little, or trying not to cry. Holly couldn’t tell, seeing only her daughter’s back. Tatiana said, “Sally doesn’t need a phone number. The phone is connected to everything now, Mom. You know that.” She reached up and waved a hand through the air, and then she turned around.
Now Tatiana was exactly the black silhouette Holly had expected earlier. She looked like a flat cardboard cutout against the window, the blizzard shivering its brilliant static all around her. All of Tatiana’s edges were sharp, but the rest of her was gone, and she said, again, more insistently, “You know that, Mom. Where are the wires, otherwise? It’s all open now. It’s everything.”
Mind of Winter Page 19