She talked to Eric for a little while longer about the awful doctors, the awful weather, the nature of Gramps’s chest pains. They talked about Jeff and Tony, and about how hard it had been for them to get to St. Joseph’s Mercy on the freeways. Eric asked about the Coxes and Thuy and Pearl, and Holly told him that they couldn’t make it through the blizzard, either. He asked what she and Tatty were doing, and Holly chose to say nothing about the burned fingers. There was nothing he could do for Tatty’s fingers now except worry. She said, “We’re fine. We’re just squabbling.”
“Don’t,” Eric said.
“Don’t what?” Holly asked.
“Don’t squabble with Tatty. She’s so excited about Christmas, Holly. She’s got something really special for you. You haven’t opened your presents yet?”
“No,” Holly said.
“Well, this is a big one. Tatty’s been working on it for—well, I shouldn’t have even said this much. But we shouldn’t have overslept, Holly. This is a big Christmas for Tatiana, I think. It’s the first year she really took charge of getting gifts for us on her own. It’s a kind of milestone.”
“Oh dear,” Holly said. How blind she’d been! How could Eric have known this, and so clearly, and not Holly? It explained everything! Poor Tatty! It wasn’t the gifts she was getting that she’d been disappointed about, it was the ones she was giving! “Oh God, Eric. Okay. I’m so glad you told me. Consider the squabbling a thing of the past. I’m going to go make it up to her right now. I love you, Eric.”
“I love you, too,” he said. “Tell Tatty I love her, too.”
“I will, of course. Of course I will. As soon as she wakes up.”
“She’s asleep?” he asked.
“Well, yes. She’s been sleeping a lot today.” Holly wasn’t sure why she was lying. She’d left Tatiana in the bathroom, wide awake, of course, with her Barbie-bandaged fingers. “But I’ll get her out of bed,” she said. “We’ll open a couple of presents without you if that’s okay.”
“I think that’s great,” Eric said.
They said their good-byes then, and when they were done Holly listened to the connection being severed, which was the sound of a very tiny ax felling a very thin-trunked tree.
HOLLY TOOK THE phone away from her ear and looked at the photograph there again.
Tatty.
Those eyes.
It was as if the iPhone had decided that none of the rest of it mattered. Not the Jet-Black Rapunzel hair, not Eric, not the waterfall. Just Tatiana’s eyes.
It was eerie, really. How many other parts of the picture could have been singled out? A button? A bit of white froth? Tatiana’s perfect smile? Maybe, Holly thought, Steve Jobs had wired it this way, ingeniously arranged it so that even when your iPhone broke it did something to amuse and astonish you. “Tatty?” Holly called out. “Tatty, you should come and see this.”
“See what?” Tatty said, and Holly turned around to find her daughter standing behind her, looking over her shoulder at the iPhone in Holly’s hand.
“Oh,” Holly said. “There you are. Look. The phone must have been damaged, and now the only part left of that image of you and Daddy at the waterfall is your eyes.”
Tatty took the device from Holly’s hand, looked closely, and then she shook her head and laughed.
At first, Holly was just relieved to hear the sound of Tatiana’s laughter. The old Tatty, again! It sounded like the laughter that Tatty used to let loose at some funny cartoon on television, or at Trixie batting crazily at a peacock feather. It was the good old laughter of the preteen Tatty, laughing happily, unironically, at something funny, at something pleasing. Thank God she’s going to snap out of her funk, Holly thought. It had been far too long since Holly had heard that laughter. She hadn’t heard it in so long! In days! Weeks! Perhaps she hadn’t heard that delighted little laugh since—
No.
Holly took a step back to look at her daughter, and realized that she recognized that laugh—not from Tatty’s childhood, but from only moments ago. That had been the laughter on the other end of her iPhone when she’d misdialed Eric’s number, hadn’t it? That was the laughter she’d heard when she thought she was reaching Eric’s voice mail. That laughter had been this laughter: Tatty’s laughter!
Holly took the iPhone from her daughter’s hand carefully and said, “Something’s gone wrong with this phone, Tatty. This picture, for one thing, changing like that, and then when I called Daddy, I got a recording of your laughter instead of his voice mail.”
Tatiana was still smiling. She shrugged and said, “Oh, well. Who cares? Still works, right?”
“Right,” Holly said, looking at it, at her daughter’s eyes on the screen.
Tatiana glanced back down at the phone, too, and then she looked from Holly’s palm to the floor at her feet, at the place where the water glass had shattered, and said, “You’d either better put shoes on or sweep that up, Mom.”
Holly looked down, too. Tatiana was right, of course. Holly was still in her stocking feet. If she stepped on broken glass, she would most certainly be cut by it, and she did not want to add that to the events of what had turned out to be a very dangerous day! She looked at Tatiana’s feet then, to make sure that she, at least, was wearing shoes. She was. She was wearing unfamiliar little, black pointed shoes. Lace-up shoes with a low heel.
Vintage shoes? Junk shop shoes? Holly had never seen these shoes before, and if she had, she would have advised Tatiana to throw them out. They were very, very ugly shoes. Whatever material they were made of—some kind of material that might once have been shiny but was now very dull and scuffed—was cracked. Animal skin, she supposed, but not leather. And the laces almost appeared to be mildewed—stiff, ratty. Holly said, “Tatty, where did you get those shoes?”
Tatty looked down at her shoes, too. She laughed again, as if the shoes were a surprise to her as well, or as if they were a joke she might have been playing on her mother. She said, “I don’t know. They’re just shoes.”
Holly continued to consider the shoes, which looked like something Dorothy might have worn in The Wizard of Oz. They weren’t exactly Victorian, but a style fashioned after the styles of the Victorians—maybe in a place that had not been inhabited during the Victorian era, so that there was nothing left behind to compare them to. These were shoes that were utilitarian, but their maker had also attempted a quick stab at femininity—those pointy toes. It wasn’t exactly that they looked old, Holly realized. These shoes looked as if they’d simply been worn on a few very long hikes through mountains, or across snowy fields. They looked as though, perhaps, many different girls or women had worn them over the course of a very long, bad year. They looked, Holly realized, like Soviet shoes: like the kind of shoes the nurses at the orphanage might have worn if they hadn’t needed to wear flat canvas shoes as part of their uniform, or that the desperate-looking women Eric and Holly had seen around Oktyabrski would have been wearing, if Holly and Eric had bothered to go out into the streets and look at the shoes that the women in that town wore.
THE ONLY TIME that Eric and Holly had spent more than a necessary hour (walking back and forth from the hostel to the orphanage) on those streets of Oktyabrski, had been on December 26. After having forgotten to bring gifts with them from the States, Holly had insisted that they go shopping. She thought she might be able to find something for Baby Tatty, something for the nurses, and for Marina Valsilevna, the orphanage director. She’d been told by the other prospective parents, back at the hostel, that gifts and money to the workers there might help to encourage them to take particularly good care of your child between the first visit and the second—during those long, required weeks between your first trip to the orphanage to meet the baby and the second one, to claim your baby. These parents suggested that the nurses might be bribed, in effect, to be attentive during those months that were going to have to be spent half a world away.