Free Mind of Winter by Laura Kasischke Page B

scraping against the pavement. It really was a blizzard, then, wasn’t it? These days it seemed that the snowplows only came out during emergencies. Cutbacks. And this was Christmas! Imagine the overtime the city had to pay a snowplow driver on Christmas Day. Like the U.S. Postal Service, snowplowing had been a service Holly used to take for granted. There was a time (only ten years ago?) when the snowplows came out just, it seemed, for the show of it:
    Give us a flurry, a dusting, a glaze , it had seemed, and we’ll make it rue the day!
    But those days seemed like longer ago than a decade now—like those old-fashioned days when they used to serve you dinner on airplanes, or pump your gas for you, or carry your groceries out to the car. And now, of course, they were talking about shutting the post office down.
    How much snow must have fallen for them to be willing to pay overtime to the snowplowers on Christmas Day?
    Holly glanced over at Tatty, who was staring at the carton of mushrooms in her hands as if completely baffled by them.
    “Did you hear that?” Holly asked.
    “Hear what?” Tatty said, under her breath, still looking down at the mushrooms.
    That profile:
    The lowered eyes. The fixed stare. An ancient beauty carved by someone whose identity was lost to time. And the ancient message of it, which seemed to be, Gaze upon me, I’m here and also not here, of you and apart from you.
    Tatiana’s cold marble profile unnerved Holly. She said, “Just put those down, Tatiana. I’ll do it.”
    Tatiana continued to stare into the carton of mushrooms.
    Holly said, too loudly, “Did you hear me?”
    Tatiana seemed, then, to hear her, but it was as if she’d picked Holly’s voice up on a walkie-talkie from miles away. She shook her head a little, placed the carton of mushrooms carefully in the sink, looked over at Holly—and then Holly realized that the attitude she’d taken to be Tatiana’s annoyance at having been asked to do a chore was not that.
    Tatiana had been crying!
    “Honey!” Holly said, turning from the meat to her daughter, wiping her bloody hands on her dress—because who cared? There were more important things, and the dress was so busily floral a bit of blood would simply look like part of the ridiculous pattern. “Oh my God, what’s wrong?”
    She took her daughter by her shoulders so quickly that she almost knocked Tatiana over—so thin, that frame, so frail!—and she pulled her to her hard, cupping the back of Tatiana’s skull in a hand just as she had when Baby Tatty had been small enough to carry on her hip from room to room, from crib to bath, from car to playground. “What’s wrong, my sweetheart?” she asked again.
    Tatiana let her forehead rest on her mother’s shoulder, but she said nothing and didn’t raise her arms to return Holly’s embrace. It was like holding a mannequin, except that Tatiana smelled like tea tree oil and citrus fruit and fields full of unearthly flowers—flowers that had been raised in factories and tinkered with until their scents conformed to some inventor’s idea of the scent of the perfect flower.
    And something else. Something not quite right. A bit of rotten fruit, again. Just a whiff. And then Holly felt that urgency return.
    Something had followed them home from Russia!
    There was something in all of this. Something about it that, without time to sit at a desk and puzzle it out in words with a pen, Holly feared she would never understand! And, yet, the very thing she was doing—embracing her child—made it impossible to slip away, to find the pen and paper or to boot up the computer.
    And even if she’d had the time—then what? What would she write? Something had followed them home from Russia? It was meaningless! It explained nothing! And Holly was no longer a writer, had not been one for years and years, had not written a decent sentence or a real line of poetry since way back then, back in those days of dinners served on airplanes, back