Laura Kasischke: Mind of Winter

And, as Eric had said, where the hell was Tatiana? Could she still be asleep? Had Holly peeked into her daughter’s room only an hour or two ago (pale arm, pale coverlet?) or had that been a dream? Was it before or after that when she’d woken, knowing that something had followed them—

Holly still felt the need to write it down, and felt surprised and pleased that she still felt the need. But what, exactly, had she wanted to write down? That something had returned from Siberia with them? That it had somehow followed them? Was that the explanation she’d woken up with, the Thing that accounted for the unexplained tragedies of the last thirteen years?

And what were those? Nothing! They were all still alive, after all, weren’t they? What else was there, then, beyond the ordinary misfortunes one suffers in thirteen years in a typical American town? The average calamities of a normal family? There’d been a great many more joys than sorrows in these thirteen years!

Sure, she’d had her notebook and her laptop stolen. But the thief who’d snatched her purse at the coffee shop hadn’t been after her poems. He’d been after her cash. Purse snatching happened to a lot of women who left their purses on their tables when they got up to refill their coffee cups. And how stupid had it been to leave a laptop (hard drive not backed up!) in a big-city hotel and expect it to be safe in a safe ?

And the rest of it? The housekeeper? Kay’s daughter’s accident? The cat had suffered the usual death of a domesticated animal, slipping out the door and dashing into the road. And the hen, Sally. What did they expect? Holly and Eric had known nothing about chickens and their habits when they’d gotten them. It was something the whole neighborhood had figured out at the same time when their town full of clueless academics and software company employees had passed the ordinance allowing backyard chickens.

And the changes to her marriage? Well, she and Eric were, simply, older. Holly sometimes forgot that. Instead of looking hard at Eric’s face, or her own in the mirror, on a daily basis, Holly had gotten used to looking, every morning, into the faces from the past that were framed on the wall in the hallway outside the bathroom:

She and Eric thirteen years earlier, standing with their backs to the bare institutional wall of the Pokrovka Orphanage #2, while, in Holly’s arms, the wide-eyed Baby Tatty looked up into her new mother’s eyes. In this photograph, each of their images held the suggestion of who, in thirteen years, they would be. Eric’s red hair was already a little gray at the temples, and his fitness, his physique (all that running and basketball: he’d been only forty-two then) was already beginning to diminish a little with his bad knee. His torso looked thin under his white shirt, and it was easy to imagine that the man in this photograph would grow even thinner as he aged instead of fatter.

And herself. Holly had been thirty-three, and her hair was still naturally blond. She hadn’t yet needed glasses, really (or had still been too vain to wear them), and although she, too, had weighed more then than she did now, that weight had been arranged differently on her. She’d worn her soft padding in other places.

And Baby Tatty already had the gaze that made her Tatiana . Those eyes were fiercely black, and her hair was already longer than Holly had ever seen on such a young child. In the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 the nurses had called her Jet-Black Rapunzel. Anyone looking at the photograph framed and nailed up in the hallway would have known that she’d become what she was now—a long-legged teenage beauty, still with that silken hair around her shoulders, and those dark eyes.

“Tatiana?” Holly called as she stepped into the hallway, rubbing her forehead. It was, she realized, true. She had a hangover. Not a serious one—but she feared that last rum and eggnog might haunt her all day.

“Tatiana?” she called out again. There was no answer. Could Tatiana have left the house? But where, why? If not, she couldn’t still be asleep. Now, she would have to have been willfully determined to make no sound in response to Holly’s calling her—which would have been some kind of punishment, perhaps, for Holly, for sleeping. Holly rubbed her eyes with a thumb and forefinger, sighed, readied herself to call out to her daughter again and then gasped, startled nearly to screaming when she found her daughter only inches away, staring at her, disapprovingly it seemed, and standing completely still in the bedroom’s threshold. “Tatty, Jesus,” Holly said. It took her a second to catch her breath. “You scared me. How long have you been standing there?”

“Merry Christmas,” Tatiana said. “Sheesh. I thought you and Daddy were going to sleep until New Year’s Eve.” She sighed that dramatic teenager sigh she’d perfected in the last year—a sigh that managed to convey in a single breath both bitterness and detachment, a sound that never failed to remind Holly of the snow in Siberia. Holly had expected that snow to accumulate, as it did in the northern Michigan of her childhood, and to organize itself into banks and walls. But it didn’t. It just drifted. Endless drifting. There was nothing, it seemed, that could stop it. It was snow, it was solid, it could be seen, but it was one with the wind. Exactly like that teenage-girl sigh.

“We were tired,” Holly said, trying not to sound overly apologetic. Why should she be?

“I guess so,” Tatty said.

“I got up a couple of hours ago, and you were dead asleep, so I went back to bed.”

“I wasn’t asleep,” Tatty said. “I haven’t been asleep for hours. You know that.”

“Well, you sure looked asleep.” Always an argument, Holly thought. She passed by her daughter in the doorway, smelled mint on her, and tea tree oil shampoo, and L’Occitane Verbena, two bottles of which they’d bought at the mall because Tatty didn’t want to share a bottle with Holly, although Holly couldn’t wear it anyway, as it turned out. It gave her a headache. She added verbena to the list of flowers she couldn’t wear the scent of for more than ten minutes without feeling sick—lily of the valley, magnolia, gardenia.

“Are we going to have breakfast? So we’re not opening gifts? Did Daddy go to the airport already? Wasn’t he supposed to take me ?” Hostile, rhetorical questions. Tatty wasn’t whining. The tone was reproachful, challenging.

“Look,” Holly said, turning around at the kitchen island, trying not to sound as defensive as she felt. “Why didn’t you just wake us up if you’ve been so anxious for all these things? Daddy flew out the door because Gin and Gramps are probably already at luggage claim. And I’ve got ten million things to do. Can’t you eat a bowl of cereal or something?”

“What about presents?”

Holly parted her lips, shook her head, exhaled, turned to the coffeepot, punched the blue eye to turn it back on—the coffee had been set to brew at 7 a.m., and had long since grown cold in the glass decanter.

“Presents will have to wait until Daddy gets back. You know what your presents are anyway.”

Tatiana turned then, and headed back toward her room. Her white tank top was almost too bright to look at with all her dark hair between her shoulder blades, and her hips swayed, and her white yoga pants were so high and tight between her legs it was almost obscene. The cheeks of her sweet baby bottom. Pulling against her crotch. Holly hated thinking what a man would think, looking at that beautiful bottom. And then she remembered, with the swiftness of a slap, that although her daughter might pretend to be, and look like, a woman now, she was, truly, just a child. And it was Christmas. Holly should have set an alarm. “Sweetheart,” she called after Tatty, softening, sorry, but her daughter was already closing the bedroom door behind her.