She took her daughter by her shoulders so quickly that she almost knocked Tatiana over—so thin, that frame, so frail!—and she pulled her to her hard, cupping the back of Tatiana’s skull in a hand just as she had when Baby Tatty had been small enough to carry on her hip from room to room, from crib to bath, from car to playground. “What’s wrong, my sweetheart?” she asked again.
Tatiana let her forehead rest on her mother’s shoulder, but she said nothing and didn’t raise her arms to return Holly’s embrace. It was like holding a mannequin, except that Tatiana smelled like tea tree oil and citrus fruit and fields full of unearthly flowers—flowers that had been raised in factories and tinkered with until their scents conformed to some inventor’s idea of the scent of the perfect flower.
And something else. Something not quite right. A bit of rotten fruit, again. Just a whiff. And then Holly felt that urgency return.
Something had followed them home from Russia!
There was something in all of this. Something about it that, without time to sit at a desk and puzzle it out in words with a pen, Holly feared she would never understand! And, yet, the very thing she was doing—embracing her child—made it impossible to slip away, to find the pen and paper or to boot up the computer.
And even if she’d had the time—then what? What would she write? Something had followed them home from Russia? It was meaningless! It explained nothing! And Holly was no longer a writer, had not been one for years and years, had not written a decent sentence or a real line of poetry since way back then, back in those days of dinners served on airplanes, back when you could wait at the gate for your loved ones to disembark from the plane and the snowplows roared out into the roads at the first few flakes. Holly knew that she could be given all the time in the world, and despite this conviction that she had something to write and no time to write it, there would be nothing. How many beginnings had she jotted down in the last eighteen years, and how many of those jottings had led to anything but frustration and an ill-temper that lasted for days? Hundreds of beginnings, resulting in nothing. What could possibly have been the point of trying to break her writer’s block, and, no less, on Christmas day?
And still she felt the need to push her daughter (gently) away from her. Holding her, asking her what was the matter—it was just more futility, more fruitlessness. Her daughter, even if she knew what was wrong, wasn’t going to answer, would never offer any explanation for her tears or her moping or moodiness. If pushed, she would simply start up the argument about Holly oversleeping again, or the plastic bag. It would be a waste of both their time.
Holly loosened her grip on her daughter, and Tatiana, who’d remained stiff through the embrace, straightened up, stepped away, and headed silently back to her bedroom. Holly heard the door close with an efficient little click, and then (surely not) could she have heard Tatiana slip the hook into the lock’s eye? That hook and eye she had refused even to acknowledge since Holly had installed it for her? Was that the kind of day this was going to end up being? Was Holly never going to be forgiven for having overslept?
She shook her head at the place where her beautiful, impossible, impossibly beautiful daughter had vanished from the hallway, and continued to stand and stare at that emptiness until the oven behind her beeped that it was preheated sufficiently to slip the roast into it. Holly picked up the mushroom carton, ripped the plastic off of it, ran cold water over the fleshy nubs, and dumped them into the pan with the meat. She still had at least, she wagered, an hour to deal with potatoes and onions, and almost everything else—the mashed sweet potatoes and fruit salad and the dinner rolls—had been purchased premade at the store. This was not going to be one of her more impressive Christmas feasts. But what difference did it make? She couldn’t care less what the Coxes thought of her, and Eric’s family—well, how many impressive Christmas feasts was she really obligated to prepare for them in a single lifetime?—and Thuy and Pearl and Patty would have been pleased with nothing but a couple of beers (Thuy), sweet potatoes (Pearl), and fruit salad (Patty).
Holly turned her back on the kitchen and went to the window to assess the snowfall. As she’d expected from the snowplow action, the accumulation since she’d last looked outside was truly surprising. The wind was blowing the flakes sideways as they fell, yet there was still a kind of organization to the mass of it on the ground, as if someone were taking great pains to distribute the snowfall evenly over the lawn. The birdbath—which was a cement angel bearing a water dish in her hands—was completely cloaked. Holly realized that the snow must be sticky and damp, because it clung to every bit of the angel, even the bottom of her wings, and her whole face was swathed as if in bandages. Because that angel was only slightly smaller than life-sized, she looked, disguised like this, as if she could have been a child or a little adult, frozen out there in the backyard, still holding out that plate imploringly, as if begging for something from the picture window and the cozy comfortable interior beyond it. Please?
WHEN THEY’D ARRIVED in Siberia on their first trip there, Eric and Holly were picked up by a driver at the airport for a three-hour trip to the hostel run by this orphanage—this, after having traveled by plane and train and bus and again by plane for nearly twenty-four hours. In the car, in the backseat, Eric had immediately fallen asleep, but Holly had been unable even to close her eyes. Never in her life had she been more awake. She’d stared out at the snow and the landscape, and the landscape and the snow, as they became one and the same passing by. The people and their houses and their vehicles and their farm animals—all of them were buried, blurred. Snow ghosts, all of them, everything, for two hundred miles. Holly could not make out a single detail, and early on she gave up trying, yet never felt the slightest desire to close her eyes. It was a kind of comfort, really, to look out at this country and find it to be populated by nothing but apparitions.
NOW SHE PUT a hand to the picture window and watched as the space between her warm fingers filled with fog against the cold glass. It was like that landscape out there. The angel birdbath was an impression, not a figure, and the rest was obliteration. Then she snapped out of it, remembering the roast and the guests and the chores left to be done, and she took her hand away from the window, looked at her watch, gasped at the time. The guests should be here within an hour. Or less. Although she realized it had been nearly an hour already since she’d last heard from Eric. And the airport was only an hour away. Unless they’d closed down the freeway, he should have been home with his parents by now. Surely, he would be here with them any minute. And the brothers and their families would be next. Holly had given the Coxes a slightly later arrival time than the others, so as not to risk their getting there before Gin had been given time to embrace her sons and grandchildren, and to weep for a little while, as she always did.
Thuy, Pearl, and Patty were going to a church service that wouldn’t be over until 1:30, and then they needed to stop back at the house and pick up the presents and the bread pudding Pearl had made. So, they would be the last, but, for Holly, the most welcome, of all the guests. Holly knew that Thuy would bring a six-pack of some kind of imported beer, and that she would proceed to drink each one steadily over the course of the afternoon into the evening until she was goofily drunk. Pearl would fawn all over Tatiana—beg to hear her sing her latest madrigal tune and to see every photograph on her iMac and to peruse every song she’d downloaded onto iTunes. Surely this attention from her dearest “aunt” would jog Tatty out of her bad mood.