Laura Kasischke - Mind of Winter

It was as if the iPhone had decided that none of the rest of it mattered. Not the Jet-Black Rapunzel hair, not Eric, not the waterfall. Just Tatiana’s eyes.

It was eerie, really. How many other parts of the picture could have been singled out? A button? A bit of white froth? Tatiana’s perfect smile? Maybe, Holly thought, Steve Jobs had wired it this way, ingeniously arranged it so that even when your iPhone broke it did something to amuse and astonish you. “Tatty?” Holly called out. “Tatty, you should come and see this.”

“See what?” Tatty said, and Holly turned around to find her daughter standing behind her, looking over her shoulder at the iPhone in Holly’s hand.

“Oh,” Holly said. “There you are. Look. The phone must have been damaged, and now the only part left of that image of you and Daddy at the waterfall is your eyes.”

Tatty took the device from Holly’s hand, looked closely, and then she shook her head and laughed.

At first, Holly was just relieved to hear the sound of Tatiana’s laughter. The old Tatty, again! It sounded like the laughter that Tatty used to let loose at some funny cartoon on television, or at Trixie batting crazily at a peacock feather. It was the good old laughter of the preteen Tatty, laughing happily, unironically, at something funny, at something pleasing. Thank God she’s going to snap out of her funk , Holly thought. It had been far too long since Holly had heard that laughter. She hadn’t heard it in so long! In days! Weeks! Perhaps she hadn’t heard that delighted little laugh since—

No.

Holly took a step back to look at her daughter, and realized that she recognized that laugh—not from Tatty’s childhood, but from only moments ago. That had been the laughter on the other end of her iPhone when she’d misdialed Eric’s number, hadn’t it? That was the laughter she’d heard when she thought she was reaching Eric’s voice mail. That laughter had been this laughter: Tatty’s laughter!

Holly took the iPhone from her daughter’s hand carefully and said, “Something’s gone wrong with this phone, Tatty. This picture, for one thing, changing like that, and then when I called Daddy, I got a recording of your laughter instead of his voice mail.”

Tatiana was still smiling. She shrugged and said, “Oh, well. Who cares? Still works, right?”

“Right,” Holly said, looking at it, at her daughter’s eyes on the screen.

Tatiana glanced back down at the phone, too, and then she looked from Holly’s palm to the floor at her feet, at the place where the water glass had shattered, and said, “You’d either better put shoes on or sweep that up, Mom.”

Holly looked down, too. Tatiana was right, of course. Holly was still in her stocking feet. If she stepped on broken glass, she would most certainly be cut by it, and she did not want to add that to the events of what had turned out to be a very dangerous day! She looked at Tatiana’s feet then, to make sure that she, at least, was wearing shoes. She was. She was wearing unfamiliar little, black pointed shoes. Lace-up shoes with a low heel.

Vintage shoes? Junk shop shoes? Holly had never seen these shoes before, and if she had, she would have advised Tatiana to throw them out. They were very, very ugly shoes. Whatever material they were made of—some kind of material that might once have been shiny but was now very dull and scuffed—was cracked. Animal skin, she supposed, but not leather. And the laces almost appeared to be mildewed—stiff, ratty. Holly said, “Tatty, where did you get those shoes?”

Tatty looked down at her shoes, too. She laughed again, as if the shoes were a surprise to her as well, or as if they were a joke she might have been playing on her mother. She said, “I don’t know. They’re just shoes.”

Holly continued to consider the shoes, which looked like something Dorothy might have worn in The Wizard of Oz. They weren’t exactly Victorian, but a style fashioned after the styles of the Victorians—maybe in a place that had not been inhabited during the Victorian era, so that there was nothing left behind to compare them to. These were shoes that were utilitarian, but their maker had also attempted a quick stab at femininity—those pointy toes. It wasn’t exactly that they looked old, Holly realized. These shoes looked as if they’d simply been worn on a few very long hikes through mountains, or across snowy fields. They looked as though, perhaps, many different girls or women had worn them over the course of a very long, bad year. They looked, Holly realized, like Soviet shoes: like the kind of shoes the nurses at the orphanage might have worn if they hadn’t needed to wear flat canvas shoes as part of their uniform, or that the desperate-looking women Eric and Holly had seen around Oktyabrski would have been wearing, if Holly and Eric had bothered to go out into the streets and look at the shoes that the women in that town wore.

THE ONLY TIME that Eric and Holly had spent more than a necessary hour (walking back and forth from the hostel to the orphanage) on those streets of Oktyabrski, had been on December 26. After having forgotten to bring gifts with them from the States, Holly had insisted that they go shopping. She thought she might be able to find something for Baby Tatty, something for the nurses, and for Marina Valsilevna, the orphanage director. She’d been told by the other prospective parents, back at the hostel, that gifts and money to the workers there might help to encourage them to take particularly good care of your child between the first visit and the second—during those long, required weeks between your first trip to the orphanage to meet the baby and the second one, to claim your baby. These parents suggested that the nurses might be bribed, in effect, to be attentive during those months that were going to have to be spent half a world away.

One of the would-be fathers, a Canadian man, had told Holly, “I don’t want to scare you, but it’s crossed my mind that there’s not that much in it for them to take care of our kids once this first trip is over and the adoption’s under way. I mean, right now they’re dressing them up and all, trying to sell us on them. But once the show’s on the road—I mean, maybe they’ll figure, well, these kids are going off to live these rich North American lives, so we can neglect them in favor of the others.”

“Not that they seem to be lavishing them with attention at the moment,” Holly had said, and then had asked the Canadian man if he’d been, yet, into the wing with the older children—some of whom, in lieu of diapers, appeared to be spending the day on the floor, strapped to bedpans. And if that was happening in there, what in the world was going on behind the door they’d been forbidden to open?

“Well, it could be even worse, but those children aren’t my problem, so I’m just going to do what I can to make sure our baby is taken care of in our absence,” the Canadian had said, clearly annoyed at Holly’s interest in the welfare of children who would not be theirs. “Before me and my wife leave we’re going to give the nurses these.” He opened up a shoulder satchel and showed Holly that it was full of iPods.

“Do they have computers here?” she asked. “To use these with?”

The Canadian appeared annoyed by the question, and it crossed Holly’s mind that he hadn’t thought about that until she mentioned it.

Still, it would be the thought that counted, wouldn’t it?—along with the intimation that there would be more where that came from when they returned for the second time, if all was well while they were gone…

So Holly asked Eric to go into the town with her to see if there was anything worth buying for sale.