She’d even deluded her poor mother into believing that she, her youngest daughter, “ate like a bird,” when, in truth, Holly, as a child, had been ravenous, nauseated, polite. And thank God she had been, since how many meals did she ever really even get to eat that had been prepared by her mother before her mother died? And how hard must it have been for that poor woman simply to prepare a meal? What if Holly had decided to announce one night that she would only eat eggs laid by cage-free chickens, or that she was philosophically opposed to Cheez Whiz?
And after Holly’s mother could no longer stand in the kitchen long enough to heat up a pot of Campbell’s soup, the job of feeding the family had gone to Janet and Melissa—both of them teenagers, clueless, desperate, grief-stricken, and, Holly supposed, resentful, although she could not remember a single word or event that might have indicated that. Somehow they’d managed to keep the family running on Swanson’s lasagna, frozen meatballs, and pizzas—and it would never have occurred to anyone to announce that he or she did not eat processed foods.
The shower water continued to run in a burning rivulet down Holly’s spine, and she felt as if that heat, that water, might unzip her. She imagined it doing so, the flesh opening at her spine, and how it would feel, then, to step out of her body.
Who would she be then? Where would she go? She recalled the sense she’d had, looking down at her dead mother’s blank face, that one might actually do that. Escape her body. That the body was a kind of cage. That the self, the soul, was cage-free. That being cage-free was the goal, attained by death.
Ha! That had been before she and Eric had themselves owned cage-free chickens! Free-range life hadn’t worked out so well for their chickens, had it? Some bloody feathers and screeching. They’d called those hens, until the bloody feathers and gang violence, by endearing names. Petunia. Patrice. Sally. But they were not tame, sweet, happy birds. They should have been kept under lock and key.
Holly closed her eyes as the water fell on her face. God, how she would have loved to stuff the plug into the drain and just let the tub fill with scalding water, lie back in it, close her eyes. Why was she so tired? She’d woken up less than an hour earlier, later than she’d slept in years.
WAS IT THE eggnog and rum?
But how cozy that had been, cuddled up on the couch with Eric in the living room, lit up only by the lights of the Christmas tree. Tatiana had gone to bed already, and there was the hush of the house and the snowfall outside and all their memories of that first Christmas—Siberia, Baby Tatty, the ratty blanket, and that baby’s enormous eyes. She’d already had lustrous dark hair, but she was not the Jet-Black Rapunzel yet. The nurses weren’t calling Tatiana that until Eric and Holly returned, fourteen weeks later, to legally and completely claim her:
How shocked they’d been to find how much their child had changed in those weeks—her hair grown down around her shoulders, and her face narrower, her eyes no longer shockingly large, more in proportion to her changed face.
Was it possible, they’d asked themselves, that Tatiana was even more beautiful fourteen weeks later than she’d been during their first visit?
Of course.
And she’d grown even more beautiful every month since!
Eric had gotten up from the couch and fixed them another rum and eggnog. He brought it back, and they talked some more about that Christmas and their first glimpse of Tatiana. It was what they’d reminisced about every Christmas since then. Their daughter. About how nervous they’d been. About the garlic necklaces. About the vicious dog that had chased them down the street the first time they’d left the hostel to go to the Pokrovka Orphanage #2, and how they’d arrived sweating in their down coats and must have looked to the nurses like crazy people.
Until after midnight, Holly and Eric had sat with their drinks in the light of the Christmas tree, long after Tatiana had gone to her room to sleep. So many years having passed in what had seemed like an instant, they laughed again about how no one had seemed to know where, or if, the Pokrovka Orphanage #1 existed, and how distinctly Russian that seemed. How everything in the country was referred to by its number, but the number seemed never to correspond to any order or sequence. If there was a bus #37, it was sure to arrive at bus stop #4 long before bus #1.
What they hadn’t talked about was that they’d forgotten, then, that it was even Christmas that day. They’d arrived at the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 on December 25 to see the baby who would be theirs, and they’d failed to bring a single gift.
No gifts! Not for their child, and not for her caretakers, and although the day was not their Russian Orthodox Christmas, those nurses must have been only too aware of the tradition of gifts on December 25 after so many hundreds of other American families had passed through the orphanage at the end of December bearing them.
And the other American couple who were staying at the hostel had brought Christmas gifts! They hadn’t forgotten, arriving at the orphanage with the kinds of things that young Siberian women could never be able to buy for themselves—perfume, complexion soap, leather gloves. And for the child they wanted to adopt, those parents had brought bibs and booties and a hand-knitted sweater.
“Oh, my God,” Holly had said, fingering the delicate, tiny sweater the woman from Nebraska had brought with her—into the sleeves of which she was just then stuffing the rosy, pudgy arms of the son she desperately wanted. What was that sweater knitted from? Angora? Cashmere? Mohair? Holly knew nothing about yarn, about knitting, about what kind of animals offered up such a softness. Were they baby camels, some sort of special llama? Were the animals sheared, or skinned? And how was it that this yarn was like dental floss, unbreakable, while also seeming to be made of cloud?
“This is exquisite,” Holly had said, fingering that sweater, and she’d meant it. “What in the world is it made of?”
But the Nebraskan woman had never really told her. Instead, she’d said, as if Holly herself must be a knitter and would know what this meant, “Little billions.”
Little billions?
Was that some kind of knitting strategy, or a brand, or a pattern?
“Well, it’s incredible,” Holly said, neither wanting to reveal that she did not know what “little billions” were, or to hear a long explanation of what they might be.
“Thank you,” the Nebraskan had said, then pulled her ruddy Russian baby away from Holly and turned her back. Over the woman’s shoulder, that little boy looked teary-eyed with joy, as if he’d finally found the great love of his life, and the sweater he’d been born to wear, and the mother in whose arms he’d been born to be held. The woman from Nebraska was sexless and ageless and humorless, Holly thought—but she had a passionate soul, which Holly saw fully, shining brightly, the next morning when the woman and her small, quiet husband got the news that the boy in the sweater had been given, the night before, to the sister of the biological father. Apparently that had been the plan all along, but the sister had procrastinated on the paperwork until she was told that an American couple was there, ready to take the baby home with them.
It was the Nebraskans’ second trip to Siberia (as required by Russian law) in their quest to take possession of this boy. Until this, they’d never heard a word about a sister, and this was the very day they thought they would fly home with him, bringing him to the nursery it took Holly almost no imagination to picture: filled with stuffed animals, decorated with stenciled airplanes, a crib made up with pale blue sheets.