Holly nodded. She remembered. She remembered everything.
“So what difference does it make, Mommy? If they hadn’t broken Sally, they would have kept me behind that door. It was her or me. You loved your Tatty, right? Sally had bigger eyes and she wasn’t sick, but I have more beautiful hair. And my skin is pale blue. For all these years you had your Tatty, and you loved her. Didn’t you?”
Holly nodded and nodded, nodded and nodded, while tears spilled down her neck, under her dress, between her breasts:
Oh God, how much she had loved her daughter. How much she had loved her daughter.
“It’s just that something followed us home from Russia, Mommy. Remember?”
“Yes.” Holly sobbed it.
Tatiana shook her head. She said, “Oh poor Mommy. If only you could have found some time to sit down and write about it.”
“Yes,” Holly said.
“Poor Mommy. Poor Mommy.”
“Yes,” Holly said. She was no longer denying. She said, “What did they call you, honey? Before they let you out from behind the door, before they broke your sister?”
Tatiana shrugged. She shook her head a little as if trying to remember, but couldn’t. “I don’t know,” she said. “Why would I remember? Jenny? Betty? No—Bonnie. But I’m Tatiana now.” She laughed a little, and then stood up, holding a present she’d taken out from under the tree. She crossed the living room, bringing it with her. Still, she was just a flat blackness—the featureless, perfect cutout of a girl with graceful arms and flowing hair. Tatiana handed the present to Holly. It was something flat, wrapped in shiny green paper.
“I made it for you,” she said.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Holly said. “Thank you, Tatty.” She took the gift from her daughter’s hand. She said, “Daddy said it was something special this year. I’m so sorry I overslept, Tatty. I’m so sorry we didn’t have time to open presents.”
“Open it now,” Tatty said, sweetly and gently. “Open it now, Mama. It’s not too late.”
Holly’s throat filled with emotion—gratitude. The incredible kindness of those words: It’s not too late. She peeled back the paper at the seam and let the green paper fall to the floor between herself and her daughter. It was a book. The covers were a soft and fawn-colored leather, and the binding was hand-stitched, and the pages were heavy, white, and blank. “Oh,” Holly said, holding it in her hands.
“It’s for your poems,” Tatiana said. “The ones you never wrote. I made it myself.”
“Oh,” Holly said again, but by the time she had stood from her kneeling position to take her daughter in her arms, Tatiana was gone.
SO QUICKLY, HAD she returned to her room?
Holly tried to follow, but it was hard to walk. She had to use her arms to try to swim through the air to get to the hallway, to get to Tatiana’s room. She had to step over the piece of meat that lay unmoving on the floor where she’d dropped it, and by the time she got to the bedroom door, it was just about to close between them, and Tatiana was saying, “Now you have all the time you need.”
“No!” Holly shouted, grabbing for the knob, trying to push the door open just as Tatiana slid the hook into the eye of the lock. “No! Please, honey!”
But suddenly there was no sound now on the other side of the door. Not even the sound of the bedsprings. Holly knocked, hard, and then she stepped back. She thought again about throwing her weight against it, and how easily the lock would snap away from the door and the frame, but even as she thought of it, she knew she would never do it. If she were the type of woman who could throw her weight against a door and break the lock, how many times would she have done that by now in this life?
It was like the rubber band! Holly’s whole life, she’d protected herself, or she’d been protected. Her sisters used to cut advertisements for the Humane Society out of the magazines that Holly read so that she never saw the photographs of homeless cats and dogs. She thought of Annette Sanders, who’d died in a car crash, drunk, years after Holly’s therapy had ended. She recalled how simple it had been to step out of that room in Siberia, to escape the hydrocephalic boy and the beautiful smiling girl on the floor, strapped to a bedpan.
One must have a mind of winter.
Holly lifted her hand to knock on the door again, and then, as if the sound had been programmed to stop her, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” began to play on her iPhone from the living room, where it still lay on the dining room table.
AS SHE HURRIED to the phone, Holly felt a piece of glass, a small one, but very sharp, stab her in her heel.
It hurt, but she didn’t stop to pluck it out. She found her phone just before it stopped ringing (And what did you see, my darling young one?), picked it up, touched the answer button with her finger, and said, trying to keep her voice steady, “Hello?”
“Holly, honey.”
“Thuy?”
“Yeah. How are you guys doing over there? Did Eric get back there with his parents?”
“No.”
“No? Oh dear. Did they check Gin into the hospital then? Is she okay?”
“I don’t know,” Holly said. “It’s been a while since I spoke to him. He was with her in a room. His dad was having chest pains, too.”
“Oh my God,” Thuy said. “Stress. Do they think she could have had a stroke?”
“I don’t know,” Holly said. “She’s confused.”
“Oh, Holly, I’m so sorry. This isn’t the Christmas we thought it would be, is it? Have you been outside at all?”
“No.”
“It’s incredible. If it ever stops, we’re going to have some serious shoveling to do. But we’ll try to come over tomorrow, okay? Will you call when you get news from Eric about his mom? I mean, I know we only see her at Christmas, but we’re all really fond of Gin. And Gramps, too, of course. I even wish we could have seen the Coxes today. And your sisters-in-law. Especially what’s-her-name.”
“Crystal.”
“Ah, yes, Crystal. She’s the one who says ‘Gosh golly’ when she drops something, instead of ‘Oh, shit,’ right?”
“Yes,” Holly said. And then she said, “I also dropped something.”
“Oh, shit. Or, I mean, ‘Gosh golly!’ What’d you drop, hon?”
Holly said nothing. She stepped over to the picture window again. She realized that it must be later than she thought. The sky behind the blizzard seemed to have turned pewter blue. Now, if she squinted, Holly could see that the hangman’s hoods on her roses were casting long shadows over the accumulated snow.
Thuy said, “Are you still there, Holly? Are we breaking up?”
“I’m here,” Holly said.
“Well, we ate tuna casserole and opened presents, and we watched It’s a Wonderful Life. What’d you and Tatty do?”
Again, Holly said nothing. She saw a bird swoop from a branch of the dogwood tree in the backyard to the ground. It appeared, now, to be doing a little dance on the cat’s empty grave.
“I’m going to take the hoods off the roses,” she finally said. “They can’t see.”
“Huh?”
Holly got on her hands and knees, still holding the phone to her ear. She saw that, despite her vacuuming, there was broken glass all over the living room floor. This couldn’t all be from the one water glass, could it? She stood back up, using her free hand to brush the sharp dust off her knees. It cut into her hands with its nearly invisible, razor-sharp flakes.