And Patty! Patty would be a sugarplum, a fairy princess, a little beauty queen! She would hold Holly’s hand and chatter about something girly and nonsensical and silly. And all the stories that Pearl and Thuy were sick of hearing, Holly would happily listen to a million times. Except for Tatiana, there was no one on earth whom Holly loved more than her goddaughter, and although she fervently hoped that Thuy and Pearl lived long and healthy lives, she also couldn’t help fantasizing that they might die (painlessly!) so that she could take custody of Patty. Holly joked about this with Thuy and Pearl, who forgave her the ill-will, being pathetically grateful to her for loving their only daughter so much, but Holly did not exactly tell them that, not infrequently, she stood in the doorway of the guest room and thought about how, if her dear friends died, she would rip the built-in bookcases out of it and paint the walls sea-foam green for their daughter, who would then be her daughter, and give the room a mermaid motif. She’d think about how, as sisters, Patty and Tatiana would make such a pretty portrait between herself and Eric:
One dark and elegant and chiseled from marble, and one soft, with a crooked smile, and full of light.
Although Patty was not, Holly felt, the most intelligent child she’d ever known (for one thing, she was never quiet or still long enough to think), she was easily the most pleasant. She was a purely American child. She expected everything to be fine, because everything always had been fine. How wonderful it was to be in the presence of such an untroubled human being!
Holly turned from the picture window and crossed the living room to Tatiana’s room, where she stood as quietly as she could outside the door, holding her breath to see if she could hear anything coming from the other side. The light tapping of her keyboard, the opening and closing of drawers?
No. All Holly could hear, even with her breath held, was the snow falling outside—on the roof, on the lawn, against the window glass. It did not sound damp to her, as she’d supposed it was from the sticky coating it had bestowed on the birdbath angel. It sounded, instead, sandy. Crisp. Holly breathed in, rubbed her eyes, went back to the living room, back to the picture window, and looked more closely at the backyard beyond it.
Yes, the snow was pebblish now. Grainy. It was unrelenting, this snowfall. Now she could no longer see that angel at all.
She went back to the kitchen, to the oven, and looked in.
The roast, just beginning to sizzle in there, had begun to smell like food instead of flesh. Most of the time, Holly avoided red meat, for health reasons she’d read about in women’s magazines, but whenever she smelled meat roasting, she recognized that she was, at heart, a carnivore. Across from the dry cleaners downtown there was a bad diner, the Fernwood, which had been cited several times in the last few years for sanitation violations—but the Fernwood vented its kitchen onto the sidewalk, and every time Holly went to pick up the dry-cleaned clothes she smelled the frying burgers, and could easily imagine herself in a forest, wearing animal fur, ripping a hunk of meat off a bone with her teeth, and the incredible pleasure her ancestors must have found in that.
Holly took a look at her iPhone, which was still at rest on the kitchen counter. Apparently only Unavailable had called (twice) since Eric’s call. If Eric didn’t arrive home soon, she would call him. Though she hoped she didn’t have to. She feared that if he was on the freeway with his addled parents the distraction of a phone call wouldn’t help, especially in this weather. Holly wasn’t the kind of person prone to imagining fatal car accidents, sudden disasters. In her experience, tragedy struck with a lot of warning—centuries’ worth, really—and, in the end, it surprised you mostly with how much forewarning it had given you, how much room for suffering beforehand. No. Eric would not be killed in a car accident on Christmas. At worst, he would be stuck in a snowbank.
Holly left the kitchen island and went to the buffet, where she kept her mother’s wedding china, and the crystal—or what was left of it since three of her mother’s iridescent water glasses had been smashed. She opened the glass doors. Little pink rosebuds were painted onto the creamy white plates and cups and saucers in there, rimmed with gold. Janet, her oldest sister, had been given the dinnerware when their mother died, and then she’d passed it on to Melissa, the middle sister, when it was certain that she would, herself, die. But Melissa couldn’t stand it, she said, that reminder of their mother and their sister, all that hopeful dinnerware, and she’d dumped it on Holly’s doorstep in bubble wrap, in boxes.
Originally Holly had thought that she, too, would not be able to stand it, and she’d left it boxed in the basement for years.
Until they’d brought Tatiana home.
It was then that Holly had felt the tug of the past, and she’d gone to the basement, opened the boxes, and found that, miraculously, the dinnerware had been purged of its association with her mother and her sisters by its long years in those boxes in the basement. She and Eric bought a cabinet specifically in which to store it, and, now, for every special occasion, Holly brought it out and felt pleased with herself for owning it, for being alive to enjoy it after the other women, whose enjoyment had been cut short by a damaged gene, were gone. They did not begrudge her, and they didn’t haunt that cabinet, but sometimes, particularly holidays like Christmas, Holly could feel her own ghost standing just beside her, wishing that she, too, could reach into the china cabinet and touch something as solid and delicate as a plate, hold it in her hands:
But Holly’s ghost couldn’t, made of destiny, as she was—whereas the flesh-and-blood Holly, thanks to modern medicine, had been able to shrug her destiny off like a coat.
WELL, OF COURSE, it hadn’t been that easy.
There had been, for instance, the cold recovery room in which Holly had woken up alone, slowly blinking back into the world, understanding that she had no ovaries, no breasts, no nipples under all her bandages. That her most personal parts had been removed, and who knew where they were now, without her?
And, for the first few months after her surgeries, Holly had felt, horribly, as if she’d been turned into a machine, an unkillable robot. She had terrible dreams in which she was searching for her body parts on shelves lined with thousands of other body parts, floating in thousands of jars. In the dreams, Holly was convinced that her soul had been located in one of those body parts, and now her soul was trapped for eternity in formaldehyde and glass.
But all this passed with time and with the artistic genius of her plastic surgeon, who had provided her with far more beautiful breasts than she’d had in real life, and with the counsel of the nurse who’d assisted Holly’s double mastectomy and oophorectomy (why had that word needed to hold two eggs in its name?), who’d told Holly that she’d had, herself, a kind of out-of-body experience during Holly’s surgery, understanding that what they were accomplishing in that surgical theater was the undoing of a chain of fate that had plagued Holly’s female forebears for a thousand years. “We were snatching you out of that long line of early female deaths.”
That nurse, at Holly’s bedside after the surgery, wearing white, had been rubbing Holly’s hand as she spoke to her, explaining that there would certainly have been no escape, that even if Holly herself had not died because of the mutation (or killed herself in despair of it, as her middle sister, Melissa, had) she’d have passed it down to children, who would have passed it down. It had to be stopped. All that suffering. They could now actually trace her 185delAG BRCA1 mutation back to what might have been the single Indo-Egyptian woman who first bore it and passed it down to Holly.