Laura Kasischke - Mind of Winter

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 just 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?