Mind of Winter by Laura Kasischke

seventeen, Holly suggested to Tatiana that she keep a condom in her purse, just in case.
    “ What? ” Tatiana had said. Her ruby-blue lips had parted in an expression of true horror.
    Holly had repeated herself. The condom. She said she thought it best that Tatiana and Tommy wait, of course, but that she knew that sometimes teenagers—
    “Oh my God , Mom,” Tatiana had said. Her dark eyes were wide, her mouth an astonished zero. Holly could see her teeth in there. A perfectly white mountain range. Tatiana had never even needed braces, those teeth were so perfect. Choking back tears, it seemed, Tatiana said, “I have no idea what you were doing when you were my age, but that’s not what Tommy and I are doing.”
    “Well, Tatiana,” Holly had said, and she’d gone on to explain that, at Tatty’s age, Holly and her boyfriend also hadn’t planned to have sex, but, since no one had been open enough with Holly to tell her about contraception, she’d been unprepared, and she’d gotten pregnant, and had an abortion. It had been a terrible experience. Thank God, she’d told Tatty, it was possible to get an abortion at Planned Parenthood at fifteen without your parents’ permission, because if her father had found out—
    Tatiana, then, had collapsed onto her bed and burst into tears and refused to be comforted until Holly had promised never to raise the subject again. Holly agreed, but she insisted that Tatiana know that she could come to Holly whenever she needed—
    “I know! I know! Stop talking! I don’t want to hear about you! I don’t want to know about your mistakes! I’m nothing like you!”
    For a terrible second Holly was sure that Tatiana would say the words she’d dreaded and expected all those years:
    You’re not my mother.
    But she didn’t. Not then. Not ever. Only once, when she was four years old, Tatiana had asked, tentatively, “Mom, do you know who my real mother was?”
    To hear those two words together, real and mother , had made Holly’s eyes fill instantly with tears, the physical response happening before she’d even processed those two words in her consciousness.
    But, as she’d always planned to do, Holly told Tatiana the truth—that she didn’t know anything about her biological mother. That, given the conditions in the town that Tatiana was born in, it was likely that her mother had been a teenager, maybe an orphan herself, probably very poor, very uneducated:
    The whole area had been teeming with abandoned children. The orphanages, of course, were full of them, but there were also older abandoned children everywhere, who’d either never been institutionalized or who’d been released, and they rushed at the passersby at every bus stop and crosswalk, asking for money, or for something—your watch, your candy bar, your scarf—and running alongside you with their hands cupped, shouting into your face. Holly and Eric had been warned not to talk to these street children, and not, under any circumstances, to stop or give them money, that if you did so these children would steal your purse while you were fishing through it. Or worse. There was a story of one couple who’d gone to Siberia to adopt a baby and had been badly beaten by a pack of children in an alley after stopping to offer them food. The prospective mother had been permanently blinded by a blow to her head. The question Holly had wanted answered—did they still adopt the baby?—could, apparently, not be answered.
    When they were still back in the States, being given these dire warnings by the adoption agency’s overseas travel director, Holly could not imagine hurrying past an abandoned child at a bus stop. But, as it turned out, it was easy. There were so many of them, so badly dressed, so filthy, so rude, that they did not seem like children. And this, it turned out, was the attitude of the Russians themselves toward these children—that they were not, exactly, children, that they were tainted by bad genes, even