But Tatiana wasn’t like those other midwestern children, whose Americanness was utterly unremarkable. Unlike them, Tatiana might so easily still be in Siberia—or somewhere close to Siberia, not even Siberia! The nurses had said they couldn’t be certain that her biological family was not from Kazakhstan, or even Outer Mongolia. They could have been northerners. Migrants. There were still nomadic tribes from that area who made their way south in the early summer—the time of year when Tatiana would have been born—for work, or with herds of animals. The woman, or girl, who gave birth to Tatiana could have come from the north, given birth in Siberia, and returned, leaving Tatiana behind.
But she could just as easily have taken Tatty back with her. Or stayed in Siberia to raise her baby. And, in that case, whatever concrete apartment block, or isolated wooden farmhouse, or yurt that mother was living in would be Tatiana’s home now.
Eric always said, “We’ll take her back someday. We’ll travel all around the area. Maybe we can take the Trans-Siberian Railway, and—”
“Maybe,” Holly would say, pretending. But she would never do such a thing! Tatiana should never see that place! Holly never forgot the nurses urging her to name the baby Sally, or Bonnie (“Bonnie and Clyde, right?”) or she will be back. Holly had known all along, hadn’t she, that they were right?
“Maybe,” Holly would say. “But in the meantime, Tatiana needs to see the United States. It’s more hers than ours.”
Eric hadn’t asked Holly what she meant by that, and Holly couldn’t have explained it if he had.
Now Holly looked from the paddleboat snapshot on the wall to the photograph on the other side of her palm:
In this one Tatiana wore a reindeer-fur hat that Holly had bought for her off the Internet, imported from the Buryatia Republic. Tatty smiled thoughtfully in this photograph, looking like a very typical American girl, but with something ineffably exotic about her—some quality of her elegant face that was brought out by the fur hat and its implications of a vast, snowy continent far away, and long-lost blood relatives who may or may not have been wondering, at that very moment, what had happened to this little girl they had given away.
And they could never have guessed, those long-lost blood relatives, what had happened to that little girl.
How could they possibly have pictured a room like Tatiana’s? The shelves of Harry Potter books and Little House on the Prairie. The iMac and iPod and iPad. The bin of stuffed animals, and the closet full of clean clothes, and the cabinet full of Tatty’s Russian nesting doll collection, and all those lacquered boxes with Russian fairy-tale scenes painted on them?
No. Only the child herself, perhaps, would have been recognizable. The Jet-Black Rapunzel hair. The enormous dark eyes.
“That’s our child!” they might have cried out, seeing her. “Sally! Our Sally!”
“PLEASE, SWEETHEART,” HOLLY said, taking her hand away from the place where it rested between those two photographs on the wall.
Now Tatty was quiet again in her room:
Hush, hush, little fish. Hush, hush, little fish. We are here on earth to make a wish. We close our eyes, and then we start, to make a wish with all our heart….
Holly tiptoed away from the door, and then she made her way back to the kitchen.
There, the beef in its roasting pan was on the counter where Tatiana had left it. The carving knife still lay in the sink. Holly’s hands were trembling, but she was able to bring down the aluminum foil and cover the meat with a silvery piece of it. Beneath that shiny foil, the roast looked like a model of a mountain range, or—much worse—like a severed head. The long head of an animal such as a horse, or a goat. That mound of meat was so large it would be hard to make a place in the refrigerator for it again, in its roasting pan this time instead of its wicked plastic bag. Perhaps, Holly thought, she should take it out to the garage, where it was certainly cold enough to keep the meat from spoiling. Though she didn’t like the idea of the garage—the gas cans out there, the vehicle fumes and garbage pails.
Maybe she could just leave it covered in foil in the backyard?
She looked to the picture window, and beyond it to the snow. It looked sanitary. It looked like a place you could leave your Christmas feast and not have it poisoned. Although there were some dangers, of course. Even in a town as far from the wilderness as this one, there was some wildlife. Whatever had dug the cat out of its grave might come for the roast beef. But Holly wouldn’t leave the roast beef out overnight, of course. She—
“Do it,” Tatiana said. “Get that dead thing out of the house.”
“Okay,” Holly said. “Okay.”
Holly did not bother to turn away from the window, to look around to see where Tatty’s voice had come from. She must still be in her bed, surely. She could not be, as she seemed to be, so close to Holly’s ear:
That voice—it could have come from anywhere. Her daughter’s voice seemed to coming from the back of Holly’s mind, from inside her. A mind full of roses. Or a mind of winter. Holly would do as her daughter’s voice told her. She went to the coat closet and opened it.
Inside, their boots and shoes were lined up neatly. Keeping the coat closet tidy was Tatty’s chore. It was the first chore she’d been given, as a very little girl, and she’d always done it carefully, taken it seriously. She’d given that closet, apparently, a special cleaning for the company that was to have come today. She’d put extra hangers in the closet for the extra coats, and she’d taken a pair of her father’s work boots down to the basement to make room for the boots and shoes of the guests.
Hanging at the center of the closet was Tatty’s red cloth coat. Beside it was Holly’s white jacket, stuffed with the tiny white feathers of what must have been hundreds of white birds. Sometimes those feathers managed to escape from the jacket, and Holly would find them on her sweaters and in her hair—small, magical surprises from the sky. She slipped the jacket off the hanger and put it on. She picked up her slip-on nylon boots and set them on the floor where she could step into them when she returned with the roast in her hands. So she wouldn’t have to walk across the house in them to fetch the pan. Holly did not like shoes in the house. There had always been tracks on her childhood floors from her father’s and brother’s boots, and since no one had ever scrubbed them off, those boot prints had accumulated until it looked as if an army had been quartered in their house for years.
Barefoot, Holly went back to the kitchen and picked up the pan by the handles.
She returned to the hallway and slid her right foot into her right boot, and then she lifted her left foot to do the same with the other boot. But the platter of meat was heavy. Much heavier, somehow, than Holly had expected—although she’d been the one who’d lifted it from the meat case at the supermarket and placed it in her cart, hadn’t she? And she was the one who’d brought it from the car into the kitchen, and moved it from the refrigerator to the roasting pan and the pan to the stove.
No one knew more about the weight of that meat than Holly did, but, still, when it shifted in the pan at the same time as Holly raised her foot above her boot, it was as if she’d stupidly believed that this enormous piece of solid flesh would be weightless, insubstantial, could defy the laws of gravity, and that somehow she would be able to balance it and herself in thin air at the same time.