Mind of Winter by Laura Kasischke Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    Instead, that morning, the Nebraskan woman went to the boy’s empty crib at the Pokrovka Orphanage #2, took the mattress out of it, held it in her arms (nothing but a plastic-covered mattress, not even a sheet left on it), and walked straight out the door of the orphanage into the snow, without stopping for her coat. As far as Eric and Holly knew, she had never come back.
    Though of course, she had to have come back. Her husband had stayed behind, standing speechless at a window for a long time before he turned on the nurses, demanding answers:
    “Where is our boy? Who is this ‘sister’?!”
    But the nurses would tell him nothing. The nurses in the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 had, it seemed, taken vows of silence. You could not have tortured information out of them about anything—not the other adoptive parents, not the other babies, not the biological parents of the babies, not what was behind “that door”—the one that was always kept closed (and which Holly would regret opening, later)—or what would happen to all the babies who were not adopted:
    Nothing.
    It was all a secret. The entire country was