Mind of Winter Read Online Free PDF

I said, with a needle, okay? It’s called sewing! Just forget it. What did you come in here for anyway?”
    “I just wanted to say Merry Christmas,” Holly said, wishing she could sound more apologetic, less exasperated. She tried to soften it. “And I’m so sorry we overslept. When Daddy gets back with Gin and Gramps we’ll open presents right away, okay?”
    There was a little twitch at the corner of Tatiana’s mouth. It broke Holly’s heart to see it! That was Tatty at four years old being told that she couldn’t go to the birthday party because she had a fever! Tatiana had never been the type to burst into tears. Instead, she bore emotions like—
    Like an orphan, like a child who’d been abandoned and who’d understood, fully and early, that life was not fair.
    “Oh, Tatty, I wish I’d woken up earlier—” Holly felt it this time, sincere remorse and sorrow.
    “Mom, jeez, I’m a big girl.”
    Tatiana turned her back, as if on the whole idea that it had mattered—the oversleeping, the disappointment.
    But it was Christmas morning! And maybe Tatty had thought this Christmas would be like all the Christmases of those early years—all those mornings that had started at dawn with Tatty’s clammy hands on their cheeks (“Mommy! Daddy! It’s Christmas!”) and the ripping open of presents that were complete surprises. The stockings magically stuffed with little plastic animals and butterfly barrettes. That whole Santa hoax, which Holly had put an end to early, against Eric’s wishes—but, honestly, who thought that was a healthy myth? An intruder, bearing gifts. And then to find out it’s all been a lie, perpetrated by your parents?
    But maybe Tatty, this morning, had wanted to relive those early years, and the excitement, but then her parents, exhausted from their jobs and a late Christmas Eve dinner with too much wine and then the rum and eggnog, had practically slept until noon!
    “Sweetheart,” Holly said, and stepped over to her daughter. She reached out her arms and took the faux red velvet package of her daughter into her arms. Tatty was stiff, but she didn’t pull away. Holly breathed in the musky citrusy flowery scent of her. Some of that was store-bought, but some of it was just Tatty, the scent she was born with, that sweetness even the garlic around Holly’s neck hadn’t managed to extinguish. To Holly, that baby had smelled as if she’d been plucked from a nest made of viburnum switches in the branches of a balsam fir. It even occurred to her that the nurses might have sprayed the baby with something to cause her to smell like this. Since they’d seemed so eager to sell Tatiana to Holly and Eric—insisting “Never cries! Never sick!” and dressing her in the little cotton dress with the faded daisies, surely the best thing they could find among the orphanage tatters—it didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that they might have doused her in air freshener for special effect.
    Holly inhaled, and continued to hold her fifteen-year-old baby in her arms. Tatiana didn’t pull away, and finally she softened and rested her forehead on her mother’s shoulder. They stayed that way for several seconds until Holly heard—vaguely, maybe from underneath a cushion or a pillow somewhere—the sound of her own cell phone playing Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and she broke the embrace to hurry after it.
     
    IT WAS ERIC on the phone:
    “Holly. We’re in the car already. Forty-five minutes from home.”
    “Are your parents okay?” Holly asked. “Was their trip okay?”
    “Okay,” Eric said, and the tone of it indicated to Holly that something was, actually, not okay, but also that his parents were in the car with him and he couldn’t say what it was that was wrong.
    “Okay . . . ,” Holly said. “Should I be prepared for something unexpected?” She instinctively lowered her voice when she asked it, although she knew that both of Eric’s parents were so