Truly, those bulbs appeared, now, to contain no light at all, as if they’d been emptied of light. Sapped. Drained. And Holly stared at them for a full minute before she realized that, actually, they were no longer glowing at all. Holly went over to the tree and saw that the plug had been pulled from the socket. She bent over to plug it back in, and wondered if Tatiana had unplugged the lights, if this was yet another teenage passive-aggressive act. Was Tatty sending some message that Christmas was over, or ruined, or pointless, or—?
“Is this what you wanted?” Tatiana asked. Holly turned to find her standing in the living room with the handheld vacuum cleaner.
“Yes,” Holly said. “Thank you.”
“Not a problem,” Tatiana said.
Holly expected her to turn on her heels then and head back to her room, but she didn’t. Tatty stood close to Holly, smiling at her with what looked, hearteningly, like a bit of affection, or at least like sympathy, and then she asked, “How in the world did you break all this glass, Mommy?”
Holly sagged away and narrowed her eyes at her daughter, realizing that it had not been sympathy at all. It had been smug condescension. Holly tried to control the anger in her voice, but said, “You’re hilarious, Tatiana. Really hilarious. Now, would you please just get out of here?”
Again, Tatiana shrugged. What was with this shrugging? Was this some new teeny-bopper affectation? Maybe some teenage actress had done this in a movie, and all the girls were imitating it now? Tatty turned around and walked slowly back to her room. Sauntered back to the room. Those ridiculous shoes with their hard little heels were going to scuff up the floors, Holly realized—and, my God, when had Tatiana changed back into that black dress? Hadn’t she gone into the basement wearing Gin’s red velvet? How could she have emerged in this black dress? And what the hell was the point of changing clothes four times for a party that wasn’t going to happen?
Before Tatty could close the bedroom door (slam the bedroom door) Holly called out, “When I get this cleaned up, we’re going to eat. We’re both cranky!”
The door slammed on the word both.
FOR SEVERAL SECONDS Holly stood still, trying simply to swallow, trying to blink back the tears of frustration and rage that were threatening to fill her eyes. Then she turned to the task at hand, squinting her eyes at the splinters of glass on the floor. She tested the vacuum cleaner to see if the battery was charged, and, miraculously and thankfully, it was. She bent over:
It wasn’t going to be easy to vacuum up all this glass. In fact, Holly was quite sure she never would. For years she would be finding little slivers of it in the cracks between the floorboards. She would find it in the most far-flung corners of the house, where she least expected to find it, long after this accident had been forgotten. A better housekeeper would have a whisk broom, and a dustpan, and would sweep the big pieces into that first. But Holly had no whisk broom. There was a broom—somewhere, surely. Garage? But she didn’t know for sure because she never used it. It was quicker and easier, although perhaps less effective, to vacuum the wooden floors with the upright and, when things accumulated in the corners that couldn’t be reached by the upright, to dash around with this handheld, assuming it was charged. There was something about the broom, motorless and primordial, that never seemed suited to any task Holly set out to do. And now, of course, she associated that broom with Concordia.
Black-haired Concordia, who looked so much more like a mother to Tatiana than Holly herself did. Is that why Tatty had loved her so much? The first time the housekeeper came for her weekly cleaning after they’d brought Baby Tatty home from Russia, Tatty had gasped as Concordia walked in the door with her plastic tote filled with sponges and sprays. Then Baby Tatty had rushed the housekeeper at the speed of light, and thrown her arms around her legs. When Concordia, laughing and speaking in baby-talk Spanish to Tatiana, had crouched down to take the child in her arms, Tatiana had clung to her neck, laughing with a kind of delight that Holly had not yet heard from her. And, after that, Saturdays were Concordia Day, and Tatty would sit near the front door like a loyal puppy waiting for her master, and then she and Concordia would play cleaning games all day.
“Seems like we’re paying her to babysit, not to clean,” Eric had said—not critically, for he loved Concordia, too—while watching the housekeeper chase after Tatiana with a broom, singing a nursery song in Spanish.
And then, the accident. The lawsuit. Their expensive lawyer had fended that off handily, but they’d never seen Concordia again. If she’d left that broom behind, Holly had no idea where it was, and simply thinking of it made her want to sit down among the tiny bits of glass and weep—for herself, for Concordia (whose ankle would never, apparently, properly heal because of the kind of fracture she’d sustained), and, of course, for Tatty.
Holly decided to pick up the big pieces first with her hands—and, naturally, immediately she cut her index finger. A drop of incredibly bright red blood snaked down the finger into the palm of her hand before she could stick the finger in her mouth. It didn’t hurt, and when she looked at it, except for the mess in her palm (it was incredible how bright her blood looked to her in the glare from the picture window), there seemed to be nothing but the most superficial of wounds. A pinprick, really, would have been worse. Holly ignored it and continued to gather up the big shards. She carried a few of those, mixed with a little of her blood, to the garbage can under the sink and tossed them in.
The stem of the water glass had snapped into two nearly equal-sized sections, so Holly picked those up and put them on top of the dining room table. Then she bent over with the handheld and vacuumed up all the tiny bits and the glassy dust that could be seen with the naked eye. Still, those pieces and that dust didn’t, in the end, seem to be nearly enough to have composed an entire water glass before it smashed, so she got back down on her hands and knees and felt around on the floor. A bit of blood from the cut on her finger smeared across the floorboards as she did so—and, indeed, some very finely ground bits of glass stuck to her palms, particularly the bloody one. Finally, Holly sat back on her heels, ran the vacuum over the general area, and then stood up and went to the sink to rinse her hands.
There was only so much she would be able to do.
Again, a better housekeeper would—what?
Well, maybe a better housekeeper would know some method for completing this task, some way to be certain there was no glass left on the floor. A damp microfiber cloth? Duct tape? This was the kind of thing that her sister Janet would have known. But Janet was long gone. Janet was as broken and dispersed as their mother’s water glass by now.
No. For God’s sake, do not think of Janet, today of all days…
It was easier than Holly had thought it would be for one to put people and events out of her mind. Until the few counseling sessions she’d had with Annette Sanders, Holly had thought that the mind had a will of its own, somehow, and ruminated of its own volition. But Annette Sanders had taught her otherwise. She had made Holly wear a rubber band around her wrist, and told her that, every time Janet’s last days or Melissa’s suicide came to mind, Holly was to snap the rubber band and think of something else.