She took the tube out of the linen closet and read the side of it. The description and the directions looked promising. She twisted the cap off and brought the tube over to Tatiana, who was still sitting, expressionless, on the toilet seat. Holly said, “Hold out your fingers, sweetie.”
Tatiana did as Holly told her—just as she’d pulled down her panties to go potty in the tiny lavatory of the twin-propeller airplane that had flown them from Irkutsk to Buryatia. What could Baby Tatty have been thinking then? She’d walked on her own little feet so few times on earth, and now she was on a shaking thing in the sky over the earth. A stranger was telling her it was time to pull down her panties and to pee and that everything would be okay, but telling her this in a language she did not speak. Still, she had done it, peed in the potty, pulled her panties back up, returned with Holly to her seat, walking as steadily as she could on that wobbling craft, and she had not cried.
HOLLY SQUEEZED THE clear gel onto her daughter’s fingertips, and then she bandaged each one of them with a Barbie Band-Aid. How long had they had those things in the linen closet? Or was it, rather, that Tatiana, despite how mature she seemed, had really just emerged from childhood such a short time ago that they were still surrounded by her childhood things?
“All better?” Holly asked, holding the hand with the bandaged fingers in her own.
Tatiana said nothing.
“Are you okay, Tatty?” Holly asked—and, yes, this time there was an edge to it. Her patience was thinning again. Okay, she thought—okay, so there’d been an accident, and Tatty had touched the stove, and her fingertips had been burned. But now it was time to move on, as they said. Right? “Tatty? Did you hear me?”
Finally Tatiana looked up and made eye contact with Holly, and this time it was Holly who found herself glancing away. Her daughter’s eyes looked too shiny to her. Both too bright and too dark to stand. Tatty inhaled, seeming ready to say something she’d been holding in for a while, and Holly felt unaccountably worried about what it would be, could already feel herself beginning to form excuses, denials, but Tatty only said, “They called again.”
“Oh,” Holly said, sagging a little with relief.
The phone call. Her iPhone ringing on the kitchen counter before Tatiana had accidentally thrown it across the house, before she’d touched the stove and burned her fingers. She and Tatiana were back to the banalities of phone calls. “That’s right,” Holly said. “I already forgot. The phone rang, didn’t it? I’d better see if that was Dad.”
She began to turn toward the door, but Tatty said to her, “It wasn’t Dad.”
“Well,” Holly said, “I need to check to make sure,” and she left her daughter sitting on the toilet with her Barbie bandages, and made her way quickly back to the dining room, the phone, the little billions of slivers of glass. Seeing those shimmering on the floor in the light from the picture window, Holly hoped that she’d remembered to recharge the battery on the handheld vacuum. Often that wasn’t something Holly remembered to do until the Cheerios had already been dumped on the floor, or something like this—like shattered glass—and the thing was dead in her hands.
She picked her iPhone up off the floor and looked at it, scrolled down through the recent calls.
Another Unavailable. It hadn’t been Eric who’d called.
Still, she should call her husband, shouldn’t she? She scrolled down her list of contacts until she found his name, and touched it with her index finger. She held the phone against her ear, where it felt warm, and imagined the vibration of it in Eric’s breast pocket. He wasn’t answering. Maybe he was already back in the car with his parents. Surely, if they were checking Gin into the hospital for the night, or anything serious like that, he would have called. The ringing went to what she thought at first was his voice maiclass="underline"
Holly heard the double click that meant that no one was going to answer, that she was being passed on to a machine instead of her husband. But then, instead of a recording of Eric’s stiff business voice saying “This is Eric Clare, and I’m away from my desk at the moment…,” there was—laughter.
A woman’s laughter.
(A very young woman? Or perhaps a child?)
The laughter was not shrill, or hysterical, but a kind of simple, mirthful, amused laughter—sounding close, and intimate, and familiar in her ear. Still, the sound of it, the surprise of it, made Holly gasp and hang up before she even realized she’d done it, and then she quickly put the phone down on the table, where she just looked at it, not understanding, shaking her head. And, then, looking at the phone, she saw that the photograph she used as her iPhone wallpaper had changed.
By itself?
The froth and glow of the waterfall, and Eric and Tatiana smiling before it, was gone. Now there was just an image of Tatiana. Close-up. Her nose, and her eyes.
Holly picked up the phone and looked more closely at the photograph.
Apparently something had happened to the phone in its flight and in its fall. Had it broken? Had it rearranged her personal settings? Was that how she’d reached a stranger instead of Eric—connecting to that girlish laughter instead of his voice mail?
Apparently.
And her wallpaper photograph had been replaced with this—a fragment of another photograph. Nose, eyes, a photograph of Tatiana, but—
No.
Holly looked more closely. It wasn’t a different photo. It was still the waterfall photograph, but zoomed in. The frame had narrowed so that the only part of the photograph that remained in view was this bit of Tatiana’s face—her nose, her eyes. God. Technology. Its quirks and mysteries. Holly was baffled, but she was glad that the phone still worked at least. She picked it up and tried Eric again, and this time he picked up on the first ring.
“Sweetheart,” Holly said to him, so grateful to hear his voice, to make this connection across the miles and through the blizzard. Being able to speak to him at that moment felt crazily almost as miraculous as having met him in this life at all. Having lived long enough to meet Eric, and to fall in love with him, and to bring Tatiana into their lives, and to become a family, as if there’d been no chance involved at all, as if it were fate—a fate full of near-misses and blessings and miraculous connections. “Are you okay, Eric? Is your mom okay?”
“I don’t—Holly,” he said. He sounded weary. He sighed. He said, “She’s confused, Holly. I mean, she’s really confused. She thinks she’s in Europe. She’s speaking French to the doctors, and when they don’t understand her she starts crying. She thinks they’re Germans.”
“Oh my God,” Holly said. “Oh, Eric.”
“And now Dad’s having trouble breathing. All the stress, of course. So, he’s in one room and Mom’s in the other room, and Tony and Jeff and I just keep moving from one to the other.”
“Your brothers are there?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought the blizzard—”
“Well, you know, it was an emergency. They got here. Where there’s a will, there’s—”
“I should be there, too,” Holly said. Her heart began to beat harder. He needed her. If his brothers could get to the hospital, she could have gotten there, too, and she hadn’t even tried!
“You most certainly should not be here, Holly,” Eric said. “The last thing I need right now is to have to worry about you and Tatty out on the roads in this. Please, please, don’t do anything like try to drive here, Holly. Just stay where you are.”
“Okay,” Holly said—and although she did still feel guilty, remiss, she realized that she was also relieved. Relieved that this was Eric’s problem, and his brothers’. Relieved that she could hang up the phone and simply wait for more news. Relieved that, truly, nothing at all was going to be required of her.