Mind of Winter Read Online Free

standing completely still in the bedroom’s threshold. “Tatty, Jesus,” Holly said. It took her a second to catch her breath. “You scared me. How long have you been standing there?”
    “Merry Christmas,” Tatiana said. “Sheesh. I thought you and Daddy were going to sleep until New Year’s Eve.” She sighed that dramatic teenager sigh she’d perfected in the last year—a sigh that managed to convey in a single breath both bitterness and detachment, a sound that never failed to remind Holly of the snow in Siberia. Holly had expected that snow to accumulate, as it did in the northern Michigan of her childhood, and to organize itself into banks and walls. But it didn’t. It just drifted. Endless drifting. There was nothing, it seemed, that could stop it. It was snow, it was solid, it could be seen, but it was one with the wind. Exactly like that teenage-girl sigh.
    “We were tired,” Holly said, trying not to sound overly apologetic. Why should she be?
    “I guess so,” Tatty said.
    “I got up a couple of hours ago, and you were dead asleep, so I went back to bed.”
    “I wasn’t asleep,” Tatty said. “I haven’t been asleep for hours. You know that.”
    “Well, you sure looked asleep.” Always an argument, Holly thought. She passed by her daughter in the doorway, smelled mint on her, and tea tree oil shampoo, and L’Occitane Verbena, two bottles of which they’d bought at the mall because Tatty didn’t want to share a bottle with Holly, although Holly couldn’t wear it anyway, as it turned out. It gave her a headache. She added verbena to the list of flowers she couldn’t wear the scent of for more than ten minutes without feeling sick—lily of the valley, magnolia, gardenia.
    “Are we going to have breakfast? So we’re not opening gifts? Did Daddy go to the airport already? Wasn’t he supposed to take me ?” Hostile, rhetorical questions. Tatty wasn’t whining. The tone was reproachful, challenging.
    “Look,” Holly said, turning around at the kitchen island, trying not to sound as defensive as she felt. “Why didn’t you just wake us up if you’ve been so anxious for all these things? Daddy flew out the door because Gin and Gramps are probably already at luggage claim. And I’ve got ten million things to do. Can’t you eat a bowl of cereal or something?”
    “What about presents?”
    Holly parted her lips, shook her head, exhaled, turned to the coffeepot, punched the blue eye to turn it back on—the coffee had been set to brew at 7 a.m., and had long since grown cold in the glass decanter.
    “Presents will have to wait until Daddy gets back. You know what your presents are anyway.”
    Tatiana turned then, and headed back toward her room. Her white tank top was almost too bright to look at with all her dark hair between her shoulder blades, and her hips swayed, and her white yoga pants were so high and tight between her legs it was almost obscene. The cheeks of her sweet baby bottom. Pulling against her crotch. Holly hated thinking what a man would think, looking at that beautiful bottom. And then she remembered, with the swiftness of a slap, that although her daughter might pretend to be, and look like, a woman now, she was, truly, just a child. And it was Christmas. Holly should have set an alarm. “Sweetheart,” she called after Tatty, softening, sorry, but her daughter was already closing the bedroom door behind her.
     
    IT HAD BEEN Christmas, too, the first time they went to Siberia, first saw Tatty, although, after all their exhaustion and elation and the weeks of preparation for their travels, Eric and Holly had completely forgotten about the holiday, or the significance of arriving at the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 for the first time on the morning of December 25.
    But there were no signs of Christmas at the orphanage that day, since, for the Russians, Orthodox Christmas was still thirteen days away. Eric and Holly might have forgotten about it entirely, themselves, if it