Of course, she couldn’t.
Holly lost her balance, and then she lost her grip on the roasting pan, and then it all fell away from her—the meat in the pan and the floor to which she collapsed—and the roast landed with the solid, awful sound of a baby being dropped. From a nurse’s arms.
How many nights had she woken up, after that first trip to Siberia, from dreams that the baby she and Eric had claimed for their own, their Baby Tatty, far away in Siberia, left behind in that gray impoverished institutional place, had been dropped to the floor?
Sometimes Holly wasn’t even dreaming.
She might be driving to work, daydreaming about the future, about the baby, about bringing the baby home, about the day she would finally have her daughter in her arms, and in her imagination was carrying the baby to her crib (the bumper and the comforter and mobile, all smiling ducks, hundreds of ducks smiling despite the fact that they had bills instead of mouths) and placing her baby into the crib, and teaching her the English word for home, and Holly would be seeing it all so vividly in her mind, bearing that sweet weight, that she would actually lurch behind the steering when she clearly saw a nurse, somewhere far away and in that other place, dropping the baby, the perfect Baby Tatty—
“PERFECT,” TATIANA SAID from somewhere beyond her mother.
Holly lay on her side now on the braided rug on the floor between the front door and the coat closet. She looked up. It seemed to her that Tatiana should be nothing but a silhouette above her, backlit as she was by blizzard from the picture window—but, instead, it was as if some spotlight from the floor where Holly lay was trained on Tatiana. Her daughter looked larger than life, standing there in more vivid detail than Holly had ever seen her before, looking down. Her eyes were sad. She was shaking her head. She was wearing Gin’s velvet dress and Thuy’s earrings again. “Mommy,” she said. “What happened?”
“I dropped everything, Tatiana,” Holly said. It was a relief to admit it.
Tatiana nodded.
Holly said, “I’m so sorry, honey. You must be so hungry.”
“I told you, I’m not hungry anymore, Mommy,” Tatiana said. She leaned over to offer Holly her hand, and Holly tried to take it, but it was just out of her reach. Tatiana continued to hold it out, and Holly continued to try to take it, but she couldn’t reach it, she couldn’t catch it. The look on Tatiana’s face grew agitated then, and impatient again, so Holly quit trying. She said, “I’m okay here, Tatty.”
Tatiana nodded and turned away, making her way over to the Christmas tree. Holly could still see her from where she lay on the braided rug by the coat closet. Tatiana knelt down in front of the tree.
“Tatty?”
But Tatiana didn’t answer her and didn’t turn around.
Holly’s back hurt more than perhaps it should have from such a short fall, but she managed to push herself up into a sitting position. Surely she hadn’t injured herself very badly in such a minor spill. The floor was hard, but it wasn’t as if she’d fallen from a great height. Even a baby falling from a nurse’s arms to the floor from that height would not be seriously injured, would she?
It wouldn’t even be something a child that age would remember, would it? Think of Thuy, who’d fled Vietnam with her mother and grandmother on an open boat. Thuy had been four years old, and she’d spent three days tucked between her mother and the body of her grandmother, who’d died in the boat in the middle of the ocean—but Thuy’s earliest memory was of shaking the hand of Mickey Mouse at Disneyland.
After Eric and Holly returned to the States after that first trip for those three long months before they could go back for their daughter, Holly tried never to think about what could potentially harm her baby still in Siberia—accidents, negligence, abuse, disease, spoiled food—during the long winter they were separated.
They’d done all they could do, hadn’t they? They’d bribed the nurses to take care of the baby, and to call her Tatiana, not Sally. There’d been promises of more money to come if the baby was fine upon their return.
And she was fine!
Although she was larger (startlingly larger) and thinner and smaller at the same time, and although her eyes seemed to have shrunk and her hair had grown longer and shinier than it could possibly have grown in only those months, and although she was too pale (like all the children in the Pokrovka Orphanage #2!), she looked healthy. She had been potty-trained. Her cheeks were scarlet red, and although that flush had turned out to be rouge that had been applied by the nurses to the baby’s cheeks, Tatiana did not look unhealthy even after Holly discovered the makeup on a white paper towel after washing, gently, her daughter’s face for the first time in the airplane potty.
Of course, Tatiana did not look happy to see Eric and Holly when they arrived at the orphanage in the spring—but why would she? How could she possibly have remembered them from their visit at Christmas? A visit that was, anyway, so brief? She didn’t resist them when they wrapped her in the blanket they’d brought with them, or when they changed her clothes into the little white cotton dress Gin had sewn for the occasion. When they left the orphanage together forever, Tatiana did not look back at the nurses—not even Anya, who had been, back at Christmastime, her favorite. Yes, that was a little disconcerting, that the nurse who’d cared for her for nearly two years seemed like a stranger to her. But Tatiana seemed unharmed. She seemed to have been well taken care of, for which they’d bribed the orphanage staff, although it did bother Holly that Baby Tatty did not look up when she spoke her name.
“Tatiana?”
Baby Tatty seemed not to recognize that name at all. So the nurses hadn’t called her Tatiana, had they, as they’d been asked to do?
But of course that mattered so much less than everything else—that she hadn’t been starved, or beaten, or dropped to the floor, or left so long in her crib that she had, as the orphanage’s children famously had, a flattened skull, a bald spot.
And soon enough she began to answer to her name.
ONLY ONCE, WHEN they had been home in Michigan for two weeks, did Holly ever say the other name.
“Sally.”
Baby Tatty had been sitting on the living room floor, almost exactly in the place where Tatiana knelt now before the Christmas tree, and Holly, standing behind her, had said quietly, but loudly enough that she could have heard her, “Sally?”
Baby Tatty did not turn around.
“Sally?” A little louder this time, but still there had been no response.
Holly thought she should be grateful, that this child no longer answered to the name they must have called her in Siberia, that she had internalized her new name. But she didn’t. Instead, Holly had felt a coldness spread across her chest.
It started behind her ribs—but the coldness also encompassed the area of her reconstructed breasts. She thought of the younger Tatiana, the one the nurses had called Sally, at Christmas, on that first Christmas Day, and how she’d looked into Holly’s eyes as she cradled her, how she’d reached one small pink hand, with its perfect tiny fingernails out, and slipped it into Holly’s reconstructed cleavage, into a gap between two buttons of her white blouse:
Her eyes.
Holly had never before and had never since seen such eyes.
Those had been Sally’s eyes.