“Every day your daughter makes me happy,” the secretary at JFK Elementary said to Holly. Miss Beck was an enormously obese woman whose hair was as long and black as Tatty’s.
“There’s no child here sweeter than she is. There never has been. There never will be.”
Everyone had loved Tatty. Everyone had said how beautiful she was, how thoughtful, how special.
“Tatiana,” Holly said. She loosened her grip, but she did not let go of her daughter’s wrist. She said, “Tatty, honey. Please. You can tell me anything. I have always told you that. Please. Just tell me what’s the matter. Please.”
Tatty opened her eyes, stood her ground, let Holly stare into the eyes, but she did not seem to be staring back. Her eyes looked blank, as if they were turned inward—but they also appeared suspicious, as if Tatty were somehow looking beyond Holly’s mind, seeing through the back of Holly’s skull to something that was lurking behind her. Now that Tatiana had spat out the meat, her jaw was clenched, and her lips, now cerulean blue, remained sealed. When Holly smoothed a hand down her black hair, her daughter stiffened at the touch.
“My God,” Holly said—and now that the whole awful day seemed to be nearing some kind of culmination, her anxiety actually seemed to lift. There was something terrible happening, something terribly wrong with Tatty, some secret her daughter had been keeping. Now there could be no going back to slammed bedroom doors, and denial. Now it was here in the room with them, and it was dreadful, yes, but it was no longer dread. Dread was the slow approach of the injured cat dragging its hind legs across the yard. Dread was when, after listening to her mother wail behind a closed door, there was silence. There had been dread in that silence because there was still the opportunity to refuse the facts. It had, of course, been dreadful when her sister had come out of their mother’s bedroom then and said, “Holly, honey. Come in here and kiss Mommy good-bye. She isn’t suffering anymore”—but this was not nearly as terrible as dread. Mommy’s eyes were closed in relief.
Now Holly was ready. She could face whatever it was. The dread had passed with the denial. She said, “Say it, Tatty. Tell me. I love you. I loved you from the first moment I saw you. I will always love my Baby Tatty.”
Holly wasn’t surprised that the words didn’t change Tatiana’s expression. She hadn’t really expected that they would. Tatiana was beyond the reach of such sentiments at the moment. Holly let go of her daughter, and Tatiana stepped away. She looked from her mother’s face to the blizzard beyond her. After that, she glanced at her hands, greasy and bloody from the meat, and then she wiped them down the front of her black dress, and then looked back at Holly, smirked, and said, without emotion, “That wasn’t Baby Tatty.”
“What do you mean?” Holly tried to control her voice. It was too loud, wasn’t it? Her heart began to pound again, audibly. Anyone, she thought, in the house—maybe even outside the house—could have heard her heart pounding.
“You are so blind,” Tatiana said.
“What are you talking about, Tatty?”
“You were so in love with me, with my big dark eyes, and when you came back you never even asked where I was.”
“What?” Holly asked.
“You came back to get me and you never asked where I was.”
“No,” Holly said. “Tatty—”
“I’m not Tatty.”
Holly gasped, put a hand to her mouth. She said, “No.” She was ready to deny this with no idea what she was denying, and no idea why she was trying to grasp her daughter’s wrist so tightly again. Tatiana broke away and ran back toward her room, and Holly ran after her, but she wasn’t quick enough, and the bedroom door closed between them, and there was the sound of the hook in the eye, and Holly, hearing that, began to cry, backed up in the hallway, leaned against the wall.
“No,” she said again, still denying, and she put her flooding face in her hands, tried to suppress the sound of her sobs, ashamed to have her daughter hear them, as if to cry was to admit something, to acknowledge the truth of it.
AFTER THAT LONG winter back in the States, with their Baby Tatty waiting for them in Siberia, spring had come like a pastel explosion. It was so dazzling to look out the back door at the roses budding and the lilacs blooming that Holly almost couldn’t do it, and finally the day came that they could return to the Pokrovka Orphanage #2:
Holly and Eric had walked through the orange doors, said a quick prevyet to the nurses, and gone straight to the crib.
Tatiana! Baby Tatty! Their daughter!
Her hair was longer, and her eyes were not as large in her face, but her cheeks were flushed, and she looked as healthy and beautiful as she had three months earlier, even if she was too thin—
But all the toddlers at the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 were too thin! None of them had the chubby cheeks of American toddlers. None of them had fat little arms and legs. There was only so much food at the orphanage, and only so many nurses to feed it to so many children. Holly and Eric had given the nurses an extraordinary sum of money before they’d left after their first visit at Christmas, at the advice of the Canadian couple. By Russian standards it had been thousands of dollars! They’d been sure to imply that, if Tatiana was well taken care of while they were back in the States without her, there would be even more money when they returned to fetch her. Anya, in particular—they’d paid her, when they’d left to return to the States, as much as the poor girl probably made in a year at the orphanage!
And although Eric and Holly were rich beyond the wildest dreams of these young Siberian women, Eric and Holly were not rich. It had been a sacrifice, that money. It had been paid so that the Tatiana they left behind at Christmas would be the Tatiana they returned for in the spring: happy, healthy. Well-fed.
They would leave their little Tatiana in her crib in that terrible gray orphanage over the course of a bitter winter, return to their comfortable home, and when they came back, she would be there, shining as they’d left her, the same baby they’d left, but with only those few subtle changes:
A little thinner. A little paler, bluer, with longer hair, with smaller eyes.
But they’d paid so much money, and they loved her so much. It was impossible to think that she’d suffered in their absence, to see the thin limbs as some sign of—
What?
THEY’D LOVED HER so much, from the first moment they saw her on Christmas Day in her crib. They would have taken her home that moment, if not for the Russian bureaucracy, the iron-fisted rule that they must leave her behind and return for her three months later. They’d been given no choices in that matter.
But how could you explain that to a baby when you placed her back in her crib in such a place, and left? How could you explain that, even later, even now that she was a teenager? How could you tell your daughter We left you there without us, knowing how cold it was, how neglected you would be, that anything could happen to you—but we loved you, we loved you so much, we paid so much money for them to take care of you, so that when we came back you would be the same child we’d left behind us! Money was all we had to offer, and we offered it all!
You could never explain such a thing to a child. But it shouldn’t have mattered anyway! Tatiana could not possibly have any memory of that time, those months after they fell in love with her, and then left her, could she?