Laura Kasischke - Mind of Winter

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.”

Tatiana was right, wasn’t she? Holly nodded. She did know, didn’t she? Had she always known?

Still, she needed to know more:

“Where is Sally, then?” she asked.

“Oh, honey,” Tatiana answered, sounding ancient, far away. “You left your little Sally in Russia, didn’t you?”

Holly nodded again. Again, she’d known that. She’d always known that. No snap of a rubber band could have forced that from her mind, although she’d managed to keep that door locked for a very long time.

“Remember Sally? Behind that door? But I looked enough like Sally, didn’t I? You brought me home instead.”

Holly bent over then, holding her own face in her hands, and then she sank to her knees despite the pain that forked lightning up her spine. She was still denying it, that pain, wasn’t she? She said into her hands, not yet crying, “Just tell me then, Tatiana. Just tell me. What happened to Sally?”

“Oh, Mama. What difference does that make? You were gone a long, long time. So much can happen. It was a very bad place. They broke that other baby. They dropped that baby, or they did something else, something terrible, to that baby. She would never be okay. So they put her away. You weren’t supposed to go in there, remember? They gave you this baby instead, and you love her, don’t you? They gave you Sally’s sister, just a little older. You never knew the difference, did you? You loved me, didn’t you?”

“Oh, yes. Oh, God yes, sweetheart. I’m so sorry for Sally, that they broke her, that she’s still there. But we have you now! We love you. We don’t know that other girl. You’re our baby. We don’t need any other baby. But Tatiana, why didn’t they let us see you, the first time, at Christmastime? Why didn’t they tell us that Sally had a sister?”

Tatiana sighed, sounding sad, weary, as if she were being asked to explain something for the hundredth time, or something so obvious it did not require explanation:

“Because Sally’s sister was sick , Mom. Sally’s sister had blue lips and blue skin and blue eyelids. Sally and Tatiana’s mother died when we were babies. They told you that, even if you wouldn’t listen. Sally was fine, until they hurt her, but they knew that the other sister was going to die, like their mother. And no one wants to take home a baby who will die, Mommy. Do they? They knew nobody wanted to bring me home to such a happy place just to die.

“But then they broke the other baby! They broke Sally! And you wanted that baby! I looked like her because she was my sister. And they knew you would be home a long time before you would believe that anything was wrong. You would pretend you didn’t see it as long as you could. They rouged my cheeks, remember?”

Holly nodded. She remembered. She remembered everything.

“So what difference does it make, Mommy? If they hadn’t broken Sally, they would have kept me behind that door. It was her or me. You loved your Tatty, right? Sally had bigger eyes and she wasn’t sick, but I have more beautiful hair. And my skin is pale blue. For all these years you had your Tatty, and you loved her. Didn’t you?”

Holly nodded and nodded, nodded and nodded, while tears spilled down her neck, under her dress, between her breasts:

Oh God , how much she had loved her daughter. How much she had loved her daughter.

“It’s just that something followed us home from Russia, Mommy. Remember?”

“Yes.” Holly sobbed it.

Tatiana shook her head. She said, “Oh poor Mommy. If only you could have found some time to sit down and write about it.”

“Yes,” Holly said.

“Poor Mommy. Poor Mommy.”

“Yes,” Holly said. She was no longer denying. She said, “What did they call you, honey? Before they let you out from behind the door, before they broke your sister?”

Tatiana shrugged. She shook her head a little as if trying to remember, but couldn’t. “I don’t know,” she said. “Why would I remember? Jenny? Betty? No— Bonnie . But I’m Tatiana now.” She laughed a little, and then stood up, holding a present she’d taken out from under the tree. She crossed the living room, bringing it with her. Still, she was just a flat blackness—the featureless, perfect cutout of a girl with graceful arms and flowing hair. Tatiana handed the present to Holly. It was something flat, wrapped in shiny green paper.

“I made it for you,” she said.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Holly said. “Thank you, Tatty.” She took the gift from her daughter’s hand. She said, “Daddy said it was something special this year. I’m so sorry I overslept, Tatty. I’m so sorry we didn’t have time to open presents.”

“Open it now,” Tatty said, sweetly and gently. “Open it now, Mama. It’s not too late.”

Holly’s throat filled with emotion—gratitude. The incredible kindness of those words: It’s not too late. She peeled back the paper at the seam and let the green paper fall to the floor between herself and her daughter. It was a book. The covers were a soft and fawn-colored leather, and the binding was hand-stitched, and the pages were heavy, white, and blank. “Oh,” Holly said, holding it in her hands.

“It’s for your poems,” Tatiana said. “The ones you never wrote. I made it myself.”

“Oh,” Holly said again, but by the time she had stood from her kneeling position to take her daughter in her arms, Tatiana was gone.

SO QUICKLY, HAD she returned to her room?

Holly tried to follow, but it was hard to walk. She had to use her arms to try to swim through the air to get to the hallway, to get to Tatiana’s room. She had to step over the piece of meat that lay unmoving on the floor where she’d dropped it, and by the time she got to the bedroom door, it was just about to close between them, and Tatiana was saying, “Now you have all the time you need.”

“No!” Holly shouted, grabbing for the knob, trying to push the door open just as Tatiana slid the hook into the eye of the lock. “No! Please, honey!”