Mind of Winter Read Online Free Page B

door. Tatty made a point of insisting that she didn’t lock her bedroom door—that she did not now , nor had she ever , nor would she ever have a reason to lock her bedroom door—ever since Holly had secured a hook and eye to the door and jamb so that her daughter could be assured of privacy.
    “Be assured of privacy ?” Tatty had said, sounding affronted, when Holly had installed the lock. “Huh?”
    “Well,” Holly had said. “When I was your age I was always worried that someone would walk in on me in my bedroom, so I wanted to make sure you felt that your privacy was being respected in our house.”
    “Uh, gosh, thanks,” Tatty had said, narrowing her eyes and shaking her head. “And what would I be doing in here that I’d need privacy for, Mom?”
    Holly had actually flushed then, as if some dirty thought she’d had was being read aloud. She shrugged. She said, “I don’t know. That’s the point! Now you can lock your door so Daddy and I can’t barge in.”
    Tatiana had turned her back to her mother, returning to her computer, the screen of which displayed a half-written paper on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—an amendment so dull and obscure that Tatiana had been given extra credit for being willing to take it on.
    Holly had simply stood and looked at her daughter’s shoulders, all that lovely, innocent hair cascading down her back.
     
    JET-BLACK RAPUNZEL, THE nurses had called her.
    So much lovely, inky, straight long hair, even at nineteen months of age.
    And all these years later her skin was still like an infant’s—poreless and pristine. Even when she spent a summer day outside without sunscreen, Tatiana didn’t tan or burn. Her complexion was the color of milk stained with a drop of blue food coloring. At her temples, a darker blue, and sometimes under her eyes and around her mouth.
    “Yeah, but when has Tatty ever once spent a summer day outside without sunscreen?” Thuy would have asked, laughing.
    Locked up. In a tower. As if she were Rapunzel.
    No. That had not been Holly’s mothering modus operandi. It had never been her MO. What she’d wanted for Tatiana, from the very beginning, was freedom. Wasn’t that why she’d installed the hook and eye for her, so that Tatiana could have secrets? So that she could—
    What?
    Conceal some kind of contraband?
    Such as . . . ?
    Condoms?
    Look at pornography on the Internet? Is that what Tatiana had thought her mother was giving her permission to do? Was that what Holly was giving Tatiana permission to do?
    Christ, not consciously. None of those things had consciously crossed Holly’s mind. It was a symbolic gesture, wasn’t it? It was meant to let Tatiana know that she was trusted, that she had rights in their house.
    And even if she did do something for which she needed privacy in her room, why not? Why not offer up that freedom to her? What would the point be of trying to dissuade a teenager from such things? Tatiana had friends whose parents tried to vet every image their children saw. Their neighbor, Mary Smithers, whose daughter used to wander over to play with Tatty until they moved away a few years ago, had asked Holly to please give her a call before she allowed Bethany to watch anything on the television. “We want to control what she’s seeing,” Mary Smithers had said, not even shying away from the word control .
    Eric and Holly had felt almost scandalized about this, as if they’d found out that Mary Smithers was sending Bethany to a nunnery. It was not the way they wanted to raise their child, not in this day and age. They wanted Tatiana to feel she had her own agency, a right to make her own decisions. This was something they’d determined together before they’d even brought her home from Russia, that they would raise their child to be a freethinker and that they would discuss all things freely. They pitied little Bethany, having a mother who didn’t trust her enough to be in the presence of a