Mind of Winter by Laura Kasischke Read Free Book Online

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