Holly forced herself to stop crying. She went to her daughter’s door. She said, “Please. Tatty,” to it.
But she felt panicked now, no longer in control at all, and as she lunged for the door she could smell her own adrenaline on herself, under her arms and at the back of her neck—the smell of damp children’s sweaters in a small, institutional room.
Surely Tatty wouldn’t do anything to harm herself, would she?
Holly pushed hard on the door, meeting with the hook and eye, and then she took a step back, realizing how little pressure it would take to break through the hook and eye:
It wasn’t a security system. It was only a psychological divider. Holly had simply wanted Tatiana to feel that there was a place she could have privacy when she needed it—the way Holly had needed that when she’d wanted to write. When she’d needed to be alone. When, as stupid as it seemed to her now, she’d expected to uncover, in her private mind, behind a locked door, in a small room, a poem.
Oh, perhaps she’d expected Tatiana to write those poems! Perhaps she’d thought her daughter would write her own poems for her!
But Tatiana had no need of poems. And she hadn’t wanted the door between them to be locked. That had been the problem all along, hadn’t it? Holly was the one who wanted to be alone. She should never have had a child! She had been made barren for a reason—and she’d always known it, although she’d never allowed herself to think it! Once, she’d slapped Eric, hard, when, after she’d burst out crying on a Monday night when Tatiana was four years old and demanding macaroni and cheese instead of the chicken breast she’d been served (this, after work all day and ballet class all night), he’d said, “Maybe you never wanted to be a mother, Holly. What did you think it would be like?”
Yes, she’d slapped him. But he’d known!
Worse, she’d known: He’d been right!
No.
No. She had wanted it! All mothers became frustrated. All mothers had regrets. Holly loved her daughter. Her daughter was the one thing in this world that Holly had been born to love. Without Tatiana, there was nothing; there had never, ever been anything without Tatiana. If—
HOLLY PUSHED GENTLY on the door between them again, not breaking it in, but feeling how easily the lock she’d installed there would give way if she pushed harder.
She said to the door, loudly, her voice shaking, “Tatty, I’m so selfish. I’m a selfish person. But, God, I love you. I love everything about you. More than I ever knew I could ever love anything, I love you. Please, please, stay in this world with me.”
There was no sense in trying to protect her pride now. Every minute of Tatiana’s childhood had been leading to this moment, and the only thing that mattered in Holly’s life now, the only thing that could ever matter was showing this beautiful creature how much she had been loved from the very beginning.
This child that Holly was so privileged to have—having cheated, having cheated fate, for this child she was so privileged to call her daughter!
To the door, again, even more loudly, Holly said, “I never wanted anything more than I wanted you.”
Really?
Are you so sure?
Remember, you wanted to be a poet, Holly. Even this morning, after sleeping so late, you just wanted to be alone, you wished—
“No! I haven’t been the mother I could have been, true, but please, Tatty, let me try again. Let me keep trying. Now I know. Now that I know, I—”
Holly pushed the door open a little more this time, but only enough to put her eye to the crack.
In there, she could see Tatiana lying in the bed, again with her back to the door. Pale arm, dark hair across the pillow. Now her back was bare, and the coverlet was off. Gin’s red dress was on the bedroom floor, and the black dress was hanging over the back of her desk chair. Tatiana couldn’t be asleep already, again, could she? Not with all the noise Holly was making in the hallway.
Still, her daughter didn’t move at all when Holly said, “Please, Tatiana,” and then screamed it: “Tatty! Please! Please open the door!”
Somehow she couldn’t do it yet—break the lock, the symbolic lock—and barge into her daughter’s room. She didn’t know why. She had put it there herself so that Tatiana could escape her mother—hadn’t she?—so how could Holly break that promise by breaking that lock?
And why would she? What would be the point? There was nothing in the room Tatiana could harm herself with, was there? No knives, certainly no guns, not even any scissors that Holly knew of. There were no medications, no Drano, no heavy rope, none of the things a teenage girl might use to cry for help, or to kill herself, or both.
So Holly backed away, feeling ashamed for having screamed. She sat down in the hallway. She put the knuckles of her right hand into her mouth. They were sore. From the knocking. Chafed. Not bloody, though. They tasted like dry bones, or stones, between her lips, and Holly recalled how, several months after her surgeries, after her breasts and her ovaries were gone, she’d felt so sure she would live forever, but also that she was completely empty—that she was nothing but a shell now. That she was not a woman with a future, but a mannequin, a statue, a robot. In one of her first outings after the bandages and the tubes had been removed, she’d gone for a walk along the beach, and had come upon two white stones, side by side, being washed around by a wave, and she’d bent over, picked up the stones, and put them in her mouth.
She had just kept walking, while holding the smooth stones between her palate and her tongue. They comforted her. They tasted rusty, like lake water, but also like blood. And she liked the way their cold lifelessness seemed to warm and soften as she sucked. After a while, Holly had tucked the stones side by side beneath her tongue.
They were her ovaries, she thought, crazily, but somehow certainly. They were her ovaries returned to her! Her ovaries had washed up here from wherever it was the surgeon had tossed them when he’d plucked them out of her. And now they were back inside the soft fleshy tissue of her. She imagined that she felt them throbbing. She imagined she felt them breathing, almost, as if they had gills. She imagined that they were attaching themselves to her again. Eventually, Holly thought, she could swallow them and they would come to life inside her. They would sprout blood vessels, attach themselves back to her, disease-free.
She’d still been weak from the surgeries, Holly knew, that day. Surely that was the reason for such thinking. There’d been some complications, additional surgeries needed, and that had been the first real walk into the world Holly had been able to take alone for months. She’d not been right. After she spat the stones out, she gagged, and then vomited on the sand.
HOLLY TOOK HER knuckles out of her mouth and said, looking up from where she sat in the hallway to her daughter’s bedroom door, “Are you asleep in there, Tatty?” She said it softly, not really having meant for Tatty to hear. If Tatty was sleeping in there, she should just be allowed to sleep. Tatty was tired. Tatty was hungry. Soon Eric would be home. He could talk to Tatty. He could talk to them both.
But Tatty did hear:
A few quiet seconds went by before, from her bedroom, there was an angry shriek—sounding part grief, part frustration—and a sound like a fist punching the headboard of the bed, and then Tatty screaming, “Go away! Leave me the fuck alone! That’s what you do best!”
Holly stood quickly and, to steady herself, put one hand against the wall, palm laid flat between two framed photographs. She took a breath. She looked into one of the photographs. In it, Tatiana had her arms around Eric’s neck. They were smiling. Behind them, a green riverbank. They were standing on the deck of a paddleboat floating down the Mississippi River. It had been a summer vacation, a family road trip they’d taken when Tatty was eleven. Holly had wanted to show her America! She’d wanted to show her Russian daughter America—as if, somehow, Tatty needed to see this country more than any other midwestern child needed to see this country!