Mind of Winter Read Online Free Page A

hadn’t been for the other American couple staying at the hostel run by the orphanage. That couple had thought to bring gifts for their new baby—blankets and booties wrapped in green and red paper—and fancy soaps and chocolates and silk scarves for the nurses. It was, Holly realized, exactly what they should have done themselves, but by then it was too late. They were seven thousand miles away from Macy’s.
    “It’s okay,” the other American mother-to-be said to Holly. “They don’t really do Santa here or anything. Mostly they celebrate New Year’s, not Christmas. Just a lot of drinking. No one is expecting a present.”
    But arriving at the orphanage bearing not a single gift for their child or her caretakers on December 25 mattered to Holly. Terribly. Unforgettably. Her first failure as a mother. What difference did it make if she was the only one who knew or cared about it? She was the only one who needed to know or care.
     
    HOLLY LOOKED TO the tree. Tatty must have plugged it in. The miniature lights glowed dimly, like electrical pencil tips, in the brightness pouring in through the picture window. Those lights looked futile to Holly—not really lights in all this brightness. Just little nubs of effort. Overly effortful. She wanted to unplug them again, until later, when the darkness gave them some reason for being lit, but she didn’t, because Tatty wanted them on.
    Tatty was excited, it seemed, for Christmas, although that was hard for Holly to appreciate. These days her daughter was so rarely excitable about anything except Tommy, being at that age where, if she’d been offered a million dollars, she would simply roll her eyes and languidly offer up her hand to take it. She’d managed to infuriate Holly the other day by saying “one of the reasons” she’d been “dreading Christmas” was that Tommy and his father would be in Jackson Hole the entire week. “No Tommy. Tommy’s my Jesus Christ.”
    “Tatty,” Holly had said. “Don’t be blasphemous.”
    “Oh. Okay,” Tatty said, and then pretended to hold a joint to her lips and inhale.
    Holly had turned her back on her daughter fast.
    But despite the fact that Eric and Holly had still been asleep, Tatty must have gotten out of bed and come to the living room to plug in the Christmas tree lights. Like a little girl again. And her disappointment that Eric was already gone indicated that she’d wanted to open her presents, as they’d always done, first thing on Christmas morning, before the relatives had to be picked up and the guests arrived—although this year there were no surprises for Tatiana under the tree. She knew perfectly well what her presents were, having been careful to write down the specifics (even with the ISBN numbers for some of them!) so that Holly could order them off the Internet.
    Still, Tatty had woken up before Holly and Eric, and she’d come out here, alone, to turn on the Christmas tree lights, as if, despite her teenage “dread” of family and holidays and Tommy out of town, she was excited about Christmas.
    Holly went to her daughter’s closed bedroom door and said, “Honey? Tatty?”
    No answer. Of course. There was never any answer at first, any longer, when Holly came calling. These days Tatty liked to make her mother work for it.
    “Tatty. Can you open the door?”
    There was the sound of her daughter’s chair legs scraping against the wood floors. She must have been pushing herself back from her desk, away from her computer. It was such a familiar sound to Holly that she sometimes heard it in her imagination when her daughter wasn’t even in the house.
    “The door’s not locked,” Tatiana said loudly enough for Holly to hear her but not so loud it would sound like Tatiana was actually inviting her mother in. It was intended to sound begrudging, and also exasperated, indicating that Holly should know full well that the door wasn’t locked. It was what she always said when Holly knocked on her