Mind of Winter

Mind of Winter by Laura Kasischke Page A

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Authors: Laura Kasischke
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the youngest of them. It was an attitude that was held even toward infants , and it was the reason, Holly and Eric had been told, that there were so many available babies to adopt in Russia. Russians did not want these castoffs. Even childless, desperate Russians did not want to adopt these children.
    “Russians are exactly like Americans,” the overseas director (who was Bolivian, herself) had told Holly and Eric, “except that they’ve been through centuries of pure hell. Like Americans, they’re affectionate and sentimental and egotistical”—at this, Holly and Eric had looked at one another, amused by this description of themselves, which was clearly an insult—“but not nearly as naïve. This is why it’s so easy for Russians to take advantage of Americans. They understand Americans because they are like them, but they believe that Americans will always choose not to see basic truths that Russians are born understanding.”
    Of course, she did not tell Tatiana this, but Holly imagined that Tatiana’s mother and father could have been among those Siberian street children. Abortions were so common and so readily available as a form of birth control in Russia (there was, it seemed, no taboo against them, and they were offered so far into a woman’s pregnancy that, Holly had been told, some of the babies one found in orphanages were actually the result of abortions that didn’t “take”) that unless the mother was too strung-out on drugs or vodka to obtain the procedure, she might simply have been too young even to understand that she was pregnant until her baby was being born. And, since they’d been assured by the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 that Tatiana had no drugs in her system at birth, and clearly did not have fetal alcohol syndrome, it seemed that she could easily have been the abandoned child of one, or two, of those thousands of other abandoned children.
    “We’ll never know,” Holly had told Tatiana of her birth mother. “But I’d be honored to always-always-always-always be your real-real-real-real mother.” She’d taken her daughter in her arms, and they’d stayed like that, with their faces pressed together, mixing their tears, and it had been, and would always be, the sweetest moment of Holly’s entire life.
     
    AFTER THE DISHES and the glasses and silverware were set on the tablecloth (Holly still planned to leave the arranging to Tatiana), she glanced again at the picture window.
    Now absolutely everything out there except the snow itself had been erased by the blowing snow. Christ, Holly thought, this isn’t a snowfall any longer. This is a blizzard. There’d been no word about a blizzard on Christmas Day that Holly had heard. No weather warnings on the radio or the television at all. Until yesterday, when flurries had been predicted, they’d actually been suggesting that this year it might not even be a white Christmas.
    Holly went to the kitchen island to pick up her iPhone and, just as she did, Dylan started singing his haughty warning again, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard rain— all that foreboding captured somehow in a space as small as the palm of a child’s hand—and the screen lit up the name Thuy.
    “Thuy,” Holly said into the phone.
    “Holly,” her friend said. “Merry Christmas. But, Jesus, have you looked outside?”
    “I know, I know,” Holly said. “I can’t believe it. Eric’s still on his way back from the airport with his parents. And I expected his brothers and their families to start showing up one carload at a time by now, but no one’s here except me and Tatty.”
    “Sweetheart, they’ve closed down the freeway. If your relatives aren’t already in town, they won’t be showing up for hours . You’d better start making some phone calls. And don’t leave the house! Patty, Pearl, and I barely made it home from church. It took us an hour to drive ten miles. Pearl’s on her back on the floor right now,

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