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

a secret, and Siberia was the vast white secret at the center of it. At the Pokrovka Orphanage #2, all Eric and Holly could be sure of was what they could see before them, that which they could weigh in their arms, that which they could explore with their senses. Otherwise, there was only an inscrutable expanse beyond the rattling institutional windows and the paperwork—the reams and reams of paperwork, which, despite its meticulous detail, revealed nothing about anything at all.
    Later, when Holly thought of that woman from Nebraska (although she tried not to), she imagined her still walking. That woman could have made a circuit of Asia several times by now, cradling that mattress in her arms.
    And what of the Russian aunt, cradling the boy in his soft and delicate sweater? Where were they now, these many years later? Holly imagined a boy standing at the center of a long line. He would have a thin mustache, acne, maybe a facial twitch. And the sweater that his Nebraskan mother had knitted for him would either have unraveled long ago or been sold. Holly tried not to think of him, either, because when she did she could not help but think of Tatiana in that line behind him—her hair cropped short, and her shoes comfortable, practical, caked with mud.
    “Tragic,” Eric had called it.
    “Well, they could have adopted another baby,” Holly pointed out. “There were a billion of them.”
    “Well, they wanted that baby,” Eric had said, angrily. “Just like we wanted Tatiana. They’d already bonded. They’d imagined a whole life with him.”
    “It was time to start imagining again, I guess,” Holly had said, feeling that she would somehow be betraying her own good luck, the fate that had brought Tatiana so effortlessly into her arms, if she admitted that what had happened to the Nebraskans could have happened to anyone. Eric had simply looked at her with what she felt was disapproval, and they never spoke of the Nebraskans again after that.
     
    HOLLY STEPPED OUT of the shower. The drain made the heaving sucking sounds it always made as it emptied the tub. She stepped onto the lilac rug, wrapped herself in her towel, stepped over to the bathroom window, and looked out.
    Snowy day. A surprisingly white one. Usually in this part of the state, with the wind blowing off Lake Erie and then over the decaying auto factories before it fell into their yard, the snow was gray, nothing like the Bing Crosby snowfalls of her youth. Usually that gray snow didn’t shine in the branches, but, instead, just fuzzed up the landscape, which was mostly flatness and emptiness at this time of year, although some dead leaves still held on to the tree branches and here and there a stubborn evergreen would point its arrow at the gray sky.
    But this was a lot of snow. And it was Christmas-white. This could almost be called a blizzard, Holly supposed, and she thought of Eric on the road home with his parents. She pictured his windshield and the wipers barely keeping up with the white piling up on him. It made for a prettied-up landscape, but the driving would be treacherous.
    Again, she thought of her dream, and waking from it, and the need to write something, to make or create or weave something from the materials of her psyche.
    But what was the hurry?
    Jesus, she’d had plenty of time to write in the last twenty years, and she hadn’t written then . She’d had one whole summer off—the summer before they’d adopted Tatty, and what had she done with all that time? Instead of writing she’d rented herself a booth in a local antiques mall and filled it with junk she bought at garage sales, which no one but she herself would ever want. She’d completely wasted the months of June, July, and August—the months for which she’d been awarded a nice little grant from the Virginia Woolf Foundation for a manuscript of fifteen poems she’d submitted to them along with a page detailing how she’d use the money to “take time off from my job to