Mind of Winter Read Free Page B

woken up with, the Thing that accounted for the unexplained tragedies of the last thirteen years?
    And what were those? Nothing! They were all still alive, after all, weren’t they? What else was there, then, beyond the ordinary misfortunes one suffers in thirteen years in a typical American town? The average calamities of a normal family? There’d been a great many more joys than sorrows in these thirteen years!
    Sure, she’d had her notebook and her laptop stolen. But the thief who’d snatched her purse at the coffee shop hadn’t been after her poems. He’d been after her cash. Purse snatching happened to a lot of women who left their purses on their tables when they got up to refill their coffee cups. And how stupid had it been to leave a laptop (hard drive not backed up!) in a big-city hotel and expect it to be safe in a safe ?
    And the rest of it? The housekeeper? Kay’s daughter’s accident? The cat had suffered the usual death of a domesticated animal, slipping out the door and dashing into the road. And the hen, Sally. What did they expect? Holly and Eric had known nothing about chickens and their habits when they’d gotten them. It was something the whole neighborhood had figured out at the same time when their town full of clueless academics and software company employees had passed the ordinance allowing backyard chickens.
    And the changes to her marriage? Well, she and Eric were, simply, older. Holly sometimes forgot that. Instead of looking hard at Eric’s face, or her own in the mirror, on a daily basis, Holly had gotten used to looking, every morning, into the faces from the past that were framed on the wall in the hallway outside the bathroom:
    She and Eric thirteen years earlier, standing with their backs to the bare institutional wall of the Pokrovka Orphanage #2, while, in Holly’s arms, the wide-eyed Baby Tatty looked up into her new mother’s eyes. In this photograph, each of their images held the suggestion of who, in thirteen years, they would be. Eric’s red hair was already a little gray at the temples, and his fitness, his physique (all that running and basketball: he’d been only forty-two then) was already beginning to diminish a little with his bad knee. His torso looked thin under his white shirt, and it was easy to imagine that the man in this photograph would grow even thinner as he aged instead of fatter.
    And herself. Holly had been thirty-three, and her hair was still naturally blond. She hadn’t yet needed glasses, really (or had still been too vain to wear them), and although she, too, had weighed more then than she did now, that weight had been arranged differently on her. She’d worn her soft padding in other places.
    And Baby Tatty already had the gaze that made her Tatiana . Those eyes were fiercely black, and her hair was already longer than Holly had ever seen on such a young child. In the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 the nurses had called her Jet-Black Rapunzel. Anyone looking at the photograph framed and nailed up in the hallway would have known that she’d become what she was now—a long-legged teenage beauty, still with that silken hair around her shoulders, and those dark eyes.
    “Tatiana?” Holly called as she stepped into the hallway, rubbing her forehead. It was, she realized, true. She had a hangover. Not a serious one—but she feared that last rum and eggnog might haunt her all day.
    “Tatiana?” she called out again. There was no answer. Could Tatiana have left the house? But where, why? If not, she couldn’t still be asleep. Now, she would have to have been willfully determined to make no sound in response to Holly’s calling her—which would have been some kind of punishment, perhaps, for Holly, for sleeping. Holly rubbed her eyes with a thumb and forefinger, sighed, readied herself to call out to her daughter again and then gasped, startled nearly to screaming when she found her daughter only inches away, staring at her, disapprovingly it seemed, and