Incredible, it seemed, that the nurses had simply let Eric and Holly walk out of the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 with a fairy princess! Just a calm farewell, and the door opened, and now they had this little girl all to themselves. Forever! (Of course, that it had cost them thousands of dollars, piles of paperwork, and nearly two years of their lives wasn’t forgotten, but here it was! This day! Seeming sudden and miraculous and completely unearned!)
After they’d managed to stop laughing (trying to do so as quietly as they could so as not to awaken their restlessly dreaming daughter), Holly said, “Well, we’ll never know what she meant. So maybe her mother had a heart defect. It doesn’t mean Tatty does.” She looked down at Tatty then, the little blue-pink seashells of her fingernails, her long dark hair. “Clearly Tatiana doesn’t. And so maybe Tatty had a sister who died. Well, so did I. Two of them.”
And after that, neither Tatiana’s genealogy nor her mitochondrial DNA, nor her mother or sister was ever mentioned again. They never speculated whether Tatiana might have inherited her love of horses from some Mongol ancestor or whether her lovely singing voice had been passed down from a gypsy grandmother. They never again wondered aloud whether there’d been a sister, whether the sister had died or might still be out there somewhere, alive. Neither of them speculated as to whether there might be manic depression tucked away in those genes, as there was in Holly’s, or heart disease, cancer, anything. Their daughter had come to them without a legacy. She was so beautiful and perfect she did not need one.
BUT, NOW, LOOKING into her daughter’s face—her huge eyes, her mouth full of raw meat and a little pink rivulet of animal blood trickling down her chin—Holly felt terribly afraid.
She was, herself, the one holding the enormous knife over her head, but she was afraid. Afraid of her daughter.
No one is born without a legacy.
How had she let herself believe otherwise all these years?
Of all people, Holly should have understood that genes are destiny. That the past resides inside you. That unless you hack it off yourself, perhaps, or have it surgically removed, it follows you to your dying day.
It was why she’d wept inconsolably one night years ago when Eric had said, beside Holly in bed, after having passed by the open door of the bathroom where Tatiana stood at the mirror brushing her glossy black hair: “My, God, her mother must have been a beauty.”
Holly had sat up fast, and found herself to be weeping before she even knew he’d wounded her.
“Oh sweetheart, oh sweetheart,” Eric had said. “What a stupid, stupid, stupid thing for me to say.”
He’d thought she was jealous! He thought that she’d heard in it the implication that she was not, herself, Tatiana’s mother. But that wasn’t it. He’d held her so tightly then that she thought she might break, but she let him, as she grieved there in his arms for the mother of Tatiana, for a woman she knew, in her heart, was dead.
Now Holly could see in her daughter’s enormous dark eyes not only herself but the Christmas tree behind her, and the picture window filled with blizzard beyond that, and even her daughter’s reflection in that window—and the girl in that reflection looked unfamiliar to her. She was not the same child they’d plucked, that first Christmas, out of her crib at the Pokrovka Orphanage #2.
“Tatiana.”
Holly said her daughter’s name quietly the first time, but when her daughter lunged at her, she screamed it:
“Tatiana!”
Tatty grabbed at the knife in Holly’s hand, spitting the half-chewed meat out in her mother’s face as she did, as Holly managed to swing away and to throw the knife over her daughter’s shoulder. It clattered into the sink behind Tatiana, and Holly took hold of her delicate wrist and held it fast. And then everything seemed to stop:
They both stood still in the kitchen, breathing hard, neither of them saying a word. The only sound was their heavy breathing—except for what might have been, beyond that, the very light, sandy silence of snow falling on top of more snow. And, Holly thought, could she perhaps hear Tatiana’s heart in her chest? Or was that the sound of her own heart?
The two of them stood like this for a long minute—so still it was as if a spell had been cast on them. Tatiana was not struggling to release her wrist from her mother’s grip. Perhaps it was clear to her that her mother, the larger and stronger of the two of them, was not going to let go. She went very stiff, instead, and then she sagged, seeming to admit her defeat.
“What’s the matter with you, Tatiana?” Holly finally asked, in a voice that sounded so calm she hardly recognized it as her own. “Tatiana, what’s wrong with you?”
Tatiana said nothing.
She closed her eyes, and Holly could see how beautifully and naturally blue her daughter’s eyelids were. Until Tatiana, Holly had never seen anything like it. She used to stand over Baby Tatty’s crib and gaze down at her daughter’s closed eyes, and marvel.
She’d adopted a china doll! Or she’d somehow found, as if under a cabbage or in a nest near the chimney, a child so glorious in every detail that she couldn’t be of this world. She had to be special. She might have supernatural powers, be immortal! Such a child would have to live forever!
Of course, she didn’t. She wasn’t perfection. No one was. But that was fine:
“Perfection is terrible,” Sylvia Plath wrote in a poem. “It can’t have children.”
And this fact, that she wasn’t perfect, revealed itself so gently as Tatiana grew older that, rather than being a disappointment to Holly, it made Tatiana even more magical. She wasn’t, for instance, the first child in her kindergarten class to learn to read, but when she did Tatty was so wildly enthusiastic and so proud of herself that she read everything. She sat buckled into the child seat as Holly drove her to school and shouted out every word she saw that she could read:
Stop! For! May! See! Sale! One! Buy! Buy!
Holly tried to praise her after every word, but if she was distracted somehow and forgot, Tatty would reach up and touch Holly’s shoulder with her little hand (the soft, pawlike hand of a five-year-old!) and say, “Mommy? Did you hear?”
Those hands!
They’d been sticky, sweetly sticky, no matter how clean they were. On weekend mornings Tatty would climb into Eric and Holly’s bed and pat their faces until they were awake. Tatty would climb out of her own bed with her eyelids and lips ruby-blue, her hair a rat’s nest. It would take Holly half an hour to brush the tangles out.
Tatiana’s hair tangled. She tore pages out of books. She refused to eat dinner some nights, and then would wake up in the middle of the night hungry and crying. Her teachers said that she sometimes fell asleep on the playground at recess, slumped on the swing set, instead of playing with her friends. She’d never mastered fractions, and she had no interest until she was eleven years old in learning to tie her shoe. She lost her breath when she ran up the basement stairs. She sometimes caught colds that lasted for weeks. She wasn’t perfect. She wasn’t immortal. And, Holly thought, she was even more perfect because of it:
When Tatiana took ballet lessons, she wasn’t the most talented dancer, but she was the one who looked happiest to be dancing. She would look around her at the other tiny ballerinas, smiling encouragement at them. And she’d pulled herself up out of the indoor public pool after her first swimming lesson and shouted what her teacher had said to her, for all the other mothers in the steaming and echoing chamber to hear: “Mom, I am like a fish!”