Laura Kasischke: Mind of Winter

IT HAD BEEN Christmas, too, the first time they went to Siberia, first saw Tatty, although, after all their exhaustion and elation and the weeks of preparation for their travels, Eric and Holly had completely forgotten about the holiday, or the significance of arriving at the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 for the first time on the morning of December 25.

But there were no signs of Christmas at the orphanage that day, since, for the Russians, Orthodox Christmas was still thirteen days away. Eric and Holly might have forgotten about it entirely, themselves, if it hadn’t been for the other American couple staying at the hostel run by the orphanage. That couple had thought to bring gifts for their new baby—blankets and booties wrapped in green and red paper—and fancy soaps and chocolates and silk scarves for the nurses. It was, Holly realized, exactly what they should have done themselves, but by then it was too late. They were seven thousand miles away from Macy’s.

“It’s okay,” the other American mother-to-be said to Holly. “They don’t really do Santa here or anything. Mostly they celebrate New Year’s, not Christmas. Just a lot of drinking. No one is expecting a present.”

But arriving at the orphanage bearing not a single gift for their child or her caretakers on December 25 mattered to Holly. Terribly. Unforgettably. Her first failure as a mother. What difference did it make if she was the only one who knew or cared about it? She was the only one who needed to know or care.

HOLLY LOOKED TO the tree. Tatty must have plugged it in. The miniature lights glowed dimly, like electrical pencil tips, in the brightness pouring in through the picture window. Those lights looked futile to Holly—not really lights in all this brightness. Just little nubs of effort. Overly effortful. She wanted to unplug them again, until later, when the darkness gave them some reason for being lit, but she didn’t, because Tatty wanted them on.

Tatty was excited, it seemed, for Christmas, although that was hard for Holly to appreciate. These days her daughter was so rarely excitable about anything except Tommy, being at that age where, if she’d been offered a million dollars, she would simply roll her eyes and languidly offer up her hand to take it. She’d managed to infuriate Holly the other day by saying “one of the reasons” she’d been “dreading Christmas” was that Tommy and his father would be in Jackson Hole the entire week. “No Tommy. Tommy’s my Jesus Christ.”

“Tatty,” Holly had said. “Don’t be blasphemous.”

“Oh. Okay,” Tatty said, and then pretended to hold a joint to her lips and inhale.

Holly had turned her back on her daughter fast.

But despite the fact that Eric and Holly had still been asleep, Tatty must have gotten out of bed and come to the living room to plug in the Christmas tree lights. Like a little girl again. And her disappointment that Eric was already gone indicated that she’d wanted to open her presents, as they’d always done, first thing on Christmas morning, before the relatives had to be picked up and the guests arrived—although this year there were no surprises for Tatiana under the tree. She knew perfectly well what her presents were, having been careful to write down the specifics (even with the ISBN numbers for some of them!) so that Holly could order them off the Internet.

Still, Tatty had woken up before Holly and Eric, and she’d come out here, alone, to turn on the Christmas tree lights, as if, despite her teenage “dread” of family and holidays and Tommy out of town, she was excited about Christmas.

Holly went to her daughter’s closed bedroom door and said, “Honey? Tatty?”

No answer. Of course. There was never any answer at first, any longer, when Holly came calling. These days Tatty liked to make her mother work for it.

“Tatty. Can you open the door?”

There was the sound of her daughter’s chair legs scraping against the wood floors. She must have been pushing herself back from her desk, away from her computer. It was such a familiar sound to Holly that she sometimes heard it in her imagination when her daughter wasn’t even in the house.

“The door’s not locked,” Tatiana said loudly enough for Holly to hear her but not so loud it would sound like Tatiana was actually inviting her mother in. It was intended to sound begrudging, and also exasperated, indicating that Holly should know full well that the door wasn’t locked. It was what she always said when Holly knocked on her door. Tatty made a point of insisting that she didn’t lock her bedroom door—that she did not now , nor had she ever , nor would she ever have a reason to lock her bedroom door—ever since Holly had secured a hook and eye to the door and jamb so that her daughter could be assured of privacy.

“Be assured of privacy ?” Tatty had said, sounding affronted, when Holly had installed the lock. “Huh?”

“Well,” Holly had said. “When I was your age I was always worried that someone would walk in on me in my bedroom, so I wanted to make sure you felt that your privacy was being respected in our house.”

“Uh, gosh, thanks,” Tatty had said, narrowing her eyes and shaking her head. “And what would I be doing in here that I’d need privacy for, Mom?”

Holly had actually flushed then, as if some dirty thought she’d had was being read aloud. She shrugged. She said, “I don’t know. That’s the point! Now you can lock your door so Daddy and I can’t barge in.”

Tatiana had turned her back to her mother, returning to her computer, the screen of which displayed a half-written paper on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—an amendment so dull and obscure that Tatiana had been given extra credit for being willing to take it on.

Holly had simply stood and looked at her daughter’s shoulders, all that lovely, innocent hair cascading down her back.

JET-BLACK RAPUNZEL, THE nurses had called her.

So much lovely, inky, straight long hair, even at nineteen months of age.

And all these years later her skin was still like an infant’s—poreless and pristine. Even when she spent a summer day outside without sunscreen, Tatiana didn’t tan or burn. Her complexion was the color of milk stained with a drop of blue food coloring. At her temples, a darker blue, and sometimes under her eyes and around her mouth.

“Yeah, but when has Tatty ever once spent a summer day outside without sunscreen?” Thuy would have asked, laughing.

Locked up. In a tower. As if she were Rapunzel.

No. That had not been Holly’s mothering modus operandi. It had never been her MO. What she’d wanted for Tatiana, from the very beginning, was freedom. Wasn’t that why she’d installed the hook and eye for her, so that Tatiana could have secrets? So that she could—

What?

Conceal some kind of contraband?

Such as…?

Condoms?

Look at pornography on the Internet? Is that what Tatiana had thought her mother was giving her permission to do? Was that what Holly was giving Tatiana permission to do?

Christ, not consciously. None of those things had consciously crossed Holly’s mind. It was a symbolic gesture, wasn’t it? It was meant to let Tatiana know that she was trusted, that she had rights in their house.

And even if she did do something for which she needed privacy in her room, why not? Why not offer up that freedom to her? What would the point be of trying to dissuade a teenager from such things? Tatiana had friends whose parents tried to vet every image their children saw. Their neighbor, Mary Smithers, whose daughter used to wander over to play with Tatty until they moved away a few years ago, had asked Holly to please give her a call before she allowed Bethany to watch anything on the television. “We want to control what she’s seeing,” Mary Smithers had said, not even shying away from the word control .