AH, TRIXIE:
Back there, near the roses, under the snow, along the fence line, there was a little grave mound in honor of Trixie, on top of which Tatiana had placed a small ceramic cupid they’d bought at Target.
Eric had been in California on business, so Holly’d had to dig the grave herself, and it had been winter then, too, and the ground had been so solid that Holly could hardly make a dent in it with Eric’s shovel, so it had been a shallow grave. Really, a shamefully shallow grave.
Holly should have known that it wasn’t deep enough, that something could come and dig the body up. But it had also been so cold that day that she’d assumed that Trixie’s body, inside a cardboard box, would be frozen stiff by nightfall. No animal could have sniffed out such a frozen dead thing, surely, and by the time the body thawed?
Well, what did Holly know about dead bodies? It wasn’t until the snow melted in March and Holly went out there to check on her roses, to peek under their hangman’s hoods, that she noticed that the grave had been dug up, and that the cardboard box was in damp shreds, and that the cat was gone. Luckily, she discovered this on a Saturday morning, and Tatty and Eric were still in bed, and Holly was able to hurry to the garage and to fake a grave mound and to replace the ceramic cupid, which had rolled on its chubby face beside the empty grave.
HOLLY STEPPED AWAY from the window.
She remembered, then, the roast, cooling now in the cold oven:
Twelve pounds at 12.99 a pound. She couldn’t just leave it to spoil. She would wrap it, she decided, and put it in the refrigerator. If Tatty would agree to eat any of it with her later, Holly would just slice off enough for the two of them and finish cooking that on a tin plate in the oven or, if she was in a hurry, in the microwave.
But when she turned to face the kitchen she saw that Tatty was already there, and that the roast had been taken out of the oven. It was on the kitchen counter now, and Tatty was bent over it with a knife and fork, and she was chewing!
“For God’s sake, Tatty!” Holly called out. “I kept asking you if you wanted something to eat, and you just ignored me. Let me cook that before you eat it.”
But Tatty didn’t look up, and her mouth was, apparently, too full of raw meat to speak. She just chewed and chewed, ignoring Holly—and before she could possibly have swallowed the bloody lump of meat that was already in her mouth, Tatiana was carving off another piece, and stuffing that piece in her mouth. Witnessing this, Holly went from annoyed to alarmed:
“Tatty! My God! You’re going to choke. Stop it! Please!”
She came up behind her daughter and yanked the carving knife out of her hand. She didn’t really expect Tatty to grab for it, but she held it up and away from her daughter anyway. Holly knew how sharp this knife was. Only a few days earlier, foolishly, she’d left it point-side up in the dishwasher drainer and, reaching in to get a clean spoon for her cereal, she’d stabbed herself—quickly, but thoroughly—in the very center of her palm.
Tatiana’s eyes were huge again. They’d never been larger, really. Had they? They were twice their usual size! Was this a symptom of something? Some sort of vitamin deficiency? Was this what the eyes of a person in a manic state looked like? Could Tatty be displaying symptoms of some mental illness she’d not yet presented? Mental illness had been something a few coworkers (not necessarily well-meaning, in Holly’s opinion) had suggested to her when she’d first begun discussing her interest in adopting a child from overseas:
What about the child’s mental hygiene? What about her genes? Wouldn’t a child in a state-run institution be likely to have alcoholic parents? Criminal parents? Schizophrenic parents? If the child were already nearly two years old, who could know what sort of abuse she’d suffered in an orphanage already and what that might mean for her psychological development?
Holly had been made furious by this line of questioning and reasoning, and, after the second or third such suggestion, she’d said, “Well, I guess if my own gene pool were perfect, like yours, I’d be more concerned. But since lethal gene mutations run the length of it, I have more compassion about that than some people might. I mean, unless you’re suggesting that people with bad genes shouldn’t have parents, or that people with bad genes shouldn’t have children…”
Holly had managed, with this shaming tirade, to inspire a couple of abject apologies. And, after that, word must have gotten around the office because no one brought the subject up again.
Still, Holly would not have been human if she had not worried about this herself.
Something, of course, had gone terribly wrong in Tatiana’s lineage. How else did a beautiful healthy black-haired baby girl end up in an orphanage famous all over Russia—all over the world—for its stark interior, its lack of central heating, its meager food rations, its poor staffing (so poor that many of the children who spent their infancies in the Pokrovka institutions could be identified by the permanent bald spots at the back their heads, resulting from having been left on their backs in their cribs without being picked up or held for so long)?
No one in Siberia had ever been able (or willing?) to tell Holly and Eric one word about Tatiana’s biological parents—except that Tatiana had been born “in the East,” which might have been meant to imply that Tatty was of Romany or Mongolian descent, in other words “gypsy” or “Asian.” Of course, this didn’t matter to Eric and Holly. The only thing that concerned them at that point—after that first glimpse of Tatty/Sally’s enormous dark eyes, after they’d fallen utterly in love with her—was whether or not there was anything they should know about her genetics in order to help her, not reject her.
But you couldn’t blame the director or the staff of the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 for not trusting that. They’d seen hundreds of American couples pass through their doors, profess love for a child, find out that the child’s birth mother was a drug addict, or a prostitute, or the victim of incest, or in some way genetically inferior to themselves, then leave the orphanage in search of another child to fall helplessly in love with. Surely it was concern for the children that kept the orphanage staff from divulging too much information.
Not until the very last hour of their last trip to Siberia—with the adoption finalized and Tatty standing stalwartly beside them (she would not be picked up), wearing a little white dress and coat that Holly had brought with her from the States (along with those little white leather shoes), with the first leg of their journey home (train to St. Petersburg) about to begin—would anyone even listen to questions about Tatiana’s origins, let alone answer them:
“Do you believe her mother gave her up, or that she died?” Holly asked Anya, the nurse who clearly loved Tatiana the most, and who, coincidentally, spoke the best English.
Anya cast her blue eyes quickly up to the ceiling, and said, “To this world, the mother is dead.”
This utterance revealed nothing, of course. Dead to this world did not necessarily mean dead. Clearly all of the children in the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 had been born into poverty, or into substance abuse that led to poverty, or they were the products of illicit relationships, or had been born to very young mothers, mothers who were themselves children.