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“You’re gonna need to get some real boots before folks start mistaking you for a tourist from California. Thought you were at least in Texas, my man.” He shook his head and winked. “You tell your aunt and grandma I said hello, will you?”
Kache nodded. “Will do, Duncan. Same goes for Nancy and the kids.”
That opened up another ten minutes of conversation, with Duncan Clemsky filling Kache in on every one of his five kids and sixteen grandchildren, and seven seconds of Kache filling Duncan in on the little that Kache had been up to for the last twenty years. “Yeah, you know … working a lot.”
On the way back to Snag’s, Kache decided that if she didn’t bring up the homestead that evening, he would just come out and ask her if she’d sold it. Part of him hoped she had, the other part hoped to God she hadn’t.
FIVE (#ulink_81f7530b-858d-5405-9a8e-0b91f319adf3)
Snag filled the sink with the hottest water she could stand while Kache cleared the dinner dishes. She’d decided on Shaklee dishwashing liquid, since she’d used Amway for lunch and breakfast, and now she was trying to decide how on earth to tell Kache about the homestead.
Staring at her reflection in the kitchen window, she saw a chickenshit, and a jealous sister, and there was no hiding it. Looking at it, organizing the story in her mind, lining it up behind her lips: This is how I let it happen. It started this way, with my good intentions but my weaknesses too, and then a day became a week became a year became a decade became another. I hadn’t meant for it to happen like this, I hadn’t meant to.
She squeezed more of the detergent; let the hot water cascade over her puffy hands. She laid her hands flat along the sink’s chipped enamel bottom, where she couldn’t see them beneath the suds. If only she were small enough to climb into the sink and hide her whole self, just lie quietly with the forks and knives and spoons until this moment passed and she no longer had to see herself for what she really was. Sometimes drowning didn’t seem so horrible when she thought of it in those terms. Better than dying the way Glenn and Bets and Denny had. She shivered even though her hands and arms were immersed in the liquid heat.
It would have brought them honor in some small way, if she’d done the simple thing everyone expected of her. Simply take care of the house and Kache. But she’d failed at both.
“Aunt Snag?” Next to her, he held the old Dutch oven with the moose pot roast drippings stuck on the bottom. There were never any leftovers with Kache, even now that he was a grown man. “Are you okay? Want me to finish up, you catch the end of the news?”
“No … Well … Okay.” She dried her hands on the towel and started to walk out, but turned back. “I’ve got to tell you something, hon, and it’s not going to be pretty. You’re going to be real upset with me, and I won’t blame you one bit.”
“You sold the homestead.” It was a statement, not a question.
“What?” she said, though she’d heard him perfectly.
“You sold it. You sold the homestead.”
“No, hon. I didn’t. I didn’t sell it.”
He smiled, sort of, a sad, tight turning up of his mouth, while his shoulders relaxed. “I guess I’ll need to go out. Check up on things. I’ve been meaning to ask. But it’s hard, thinking about driving up, seeing it for the first time, you know? Do you go out there a lot?” Still such youthfulness to his face. He didn’t seem like a grown man who’d seen a lot of life. Snag couldn’t tell what it was, exactly. Trust? Vulnerability?
She said, “Not a lot, no.”
“Just enough to take care of things.” His voice didn’t rise in a question.
“No, not that much even.’ She breathed in deep, searched in her pockets and up her sleeve for a tissue. “I haven’t been out there at all.”
“This spring?”
“No. I mean not once. Not at all.”
“All year?”
“No, Kache. Not all year. Not ever. Not once. I never went out like I told you I did. I planned to a million times, but I never closed it up, never got all your stuff, never put things in storage. I never …”
He stood with his mouth agape for what seemed to Snag like a good five minutes. “Wait a second. You said you’d been renting it out. No one has been out there since I left? Not even the Fosters? Or the Clemskys? Jack? Any of those people? They would have been glad to help. They would have insisted on it.”
Snag leaned against the counter for support, inhaled and exhaled. “Don’t you see? I insisted it was taken care of. I told them I’d hired someone … to scrape the snow off … patch the roof … run water in the pipes.”
“I don’t understand. Why?”
“Embarrassed by then. I hadn’t even been out since you left, to water the houseplants, or—I’d never planned to be so negligent—clean out the pantry.” She fell silent. The water dripped on and on into the sink. “I left it all. I tried, I drove part way dozens of times but then I’d chicken out and turn the car around.”
Kache didn’t scream and holler at her like she’d expected. He hugged her, a big old bear of a hug. In his arms, the sense that she might not be worn down to a nub by shame after all. But grace dragged another weight of its own. He said her name, tenderly, and sighed. “You know it’s the anniversary today, almost to the hour?” She nodded because she did know without thinking about it, the way a person knows they’re breathing. He told her it was okay, that he did understand, more than he wanted to admit, that he’d fought the same problem in trying to come back.
She was glad she didn’t use the line she’d been holding onto in case she needed it, the fact that at first, way back when, she’d waited for him to return so they might go together. And that’s what she’d pictured happening now, the two of them braving the drive out together. But forgiving or not, he’d already let go of her, grabbed the car keys, called out, “I’ll be back in a while. Don’t wait up,” and was tearing out of the driveway when she whispered, “Wait.” But she knew. Even though he’d reacted with kindness, she could see the shock pumping through him and that he needed to put some distance between them. It scared her to have him go off upset. The tires screeched like they did when Kache was still a teenager, as if they’d woken up the morning after the crash and no time had passed at all.
SIX (#ulink_adc0aa33-210c-55aa-bcff-062a2422463b)
Kache couldn’t get to the house fast enough now. Now that too much time had passed and the place would most likely have rotted to ruins. The cabin Grandma Lettie and Grandpa A.R. built with their own hands in the early Forties, added onto in the Fifties. The place that his mom and dad added onto again, then transformed into a real house in the Seventies. The house Kache grew up in and loved and the only place he ever called home. Reduced to a pile of moldy logs.
He guessed that when he got out to the homestead it would be dark. The days were already starting to get longer and in less than a month would go on until midnight, though that didn’t help him now. He had no idea if the moon would show up full or a sliver, waxing or waning. Yes, he knew the DIY network lineup by heart but he’d lost track of the night sky long ago. He reached under the seat for the flashlight he figured Snag would have stowed there and set it next to him. Plenty of gas—he’d filled it that afternoon, so he’d make it out and back with some to spare.
Keeping an eye out for moose, he drove the first part of the road, the paved part, fast. Here the houses stood close enough to see each other, all facing south to take advantage of the view—the jagged horizon of mountains marooned across six miles of Kachemak Bay.
Kachemak. A difficult name to have in this town, the kids teasing him in his first years at school, when the teacher let his full name slip out during roll call instead of the shortened version he’d insisted on—pronounced simply catch—the kids adding Bay onto the end of it. Then in high school, the girls blushing and calling him What a Kache, asking him if he would write a song for them. Or the boys throwing balls of any type his way and saying Here, Kache, followed by You can’t! Kache!, which was absolutely correct.
At first his mom told him they named him for the bay because it was the most beautiful bay she’d ever seen and he was the most beautiful baby she’d ever laid eyes on. Whenever Denny protested, she’d laugh and say, “Den, I won’t lie to you. You had the sweetest little squished-up turnip face. Fortunately, you grew into your dashingly handsome self.”
Later, when Kache was sixteen and his father decided he was old enough to be let in on a secret, he told Kache that was all true, but there was more. Kache was conceived, his father said, grinning, in the fishing boat on the bay. The sun had been warm and the fishing slow—both rarities for Alaska. “Proved to be a fruitful combination, heh?” He slapped Kache on the back so hard it about knocked him over. “Denny, of course, was conceived on a camping trip to Denali.” Kache had told his dad that he didn’t need quite that much information, thank you very much.
He hit a pothole and mud splattered on the hood and windshield. Kache knew the house was probably too far out of the way and too well hidden for anyone to stumble upon. Old Believers wouldn’t want anything to do with a house outside their village, and the deepest cut of canyon on the whole peninsula added an uncrossable deterrent. Nobody with a brain would descend that canyon. The one other access besides their five-mile private road was by the beach, and only during the lowest tides. Most likely, the house stood its ground against the snow and rain and wind until the chinking filled like sponges, the roof turned to cheesecloth, the furniture rotted with moss, all his mother’s books … All those books. His mom’s paintings and her quilts and the photographs. The photographs he had never wanted, now he wanted them, even the blurry black-and-white ones he’d taken when he was five, when he’d snapped a whole roll of film with Denny’s new camera, and Denny had threatened to strangle him.
Damn it, Aunt Snag.
Where you been? Where you been?
Damn it yourself, Winkel. He hit the steering wheel, pulled on the lights, leaned forward as if that would make him get there faster.
The road turned to dirt—mud this time of year. A plastic bottle of Advil lodged between the seats rattled on and on. This was the part of the road he knew best, the part his old blue Schwinn had known so well that at one time the bike might have found its way back home without anyone riding it.
No turning around now; the pull grew stronger, magnetic.
He wasn’t the first one to leave and get pulled back. In the mid-Sixties, even his dad couldn’t wait to get away, had gone off to Vietnam in a huff of rebellion mixed with a desperation to see someone other than the all-too-familiar faces in Caboose, Alaska. But he returned with a deep disdain for the World Out There. In a few short, horrific years, he said, he’d learned a lifetime of lessons about human nature and wasn’t interested in learning more.
“I’ll take plain old nature with a minimum of the human element, thank you,” he was fond of saying.
But then he’d met Bets, and she restored his faith in humankind, or at least in womankind, and instead of the life he’d planned as a hermit bachelor, he became a family man. Still, he answered to no one (except, it was a known fact, Bets) and lived off the sea and the land for the most part, earning a decent living as a fisherman. They’d been able to transform the cabin into a real house, with huge windows facing the bay and Kenai Mountains. Bets had eased him into one compromise after the other over the years, first with a generator, and then, once Caboose Electric Association extended their service, real electricity, although they never did have central heating. She’d confided to Kache that it was next on her list, right before the Cessna crashed.
It made sense for homesteaders, like all farmers, to have large families to help with the work. But Lettie and A.R., and later Bets and Glenn, had only had two children. Fortunately, Denny, like his father Glenn before him, was able to do the work of three or four strapping boys. Kache, however, had been a disappointment, and his father had a hard time hiding just how much Kache let him down on a daily basis.
A bull moose plunged through the spruce trees, and Kache slowed to a stop and let it cross in front of him. Its long legs navigated the mud with each step before it disappeared into the alder bushes. Kache drove on and turned down their private road to the homestead. But he quickly pulled over. “Road” was an optimistic term. A churned up pathway of sludge obstructed by downed spruce and birch trunks and overgrown alders was more like it. He grabbed the flashlight, which was also optimistic, the light dim, the battery exhausted. Aunt Snag knew to keep the battery fresh, but Kache should have checked it before he left. He didn’t want to walk in the dark through moose and bear country at the onset of spring when the animals experienced the boldest of hunger pangs.
His cellphone was useless; no service. He should turn back. Get in the car and head into town and return tomorrow. But his dad, his mom, Denny—they seemed so close: a slap on his back, an arm around his shoulders, as certain as the cold on his feet, and he shivered from both. He smelled the fire from their woodstove, as if they kept it burning all these years. All around him they said his name in all its variations and tones, so achingly clear: “Kache, honey?” “Oh, Kaa-achemak, there’s my Widdle Brodder …” “Did you hear me, Son? Pay attention.” He heard their snow machines, though there wasn’t any snow, though there wasn’t any them. He didn’t believe in heaven, exactly, but this place was thick with recollections and maybe something more. If their spirits watched him, somehow, from somewhere, didn’t he want to prove he had become capable of more than any of them thought possible? But had he? No. A city boy number-cruncher-turned-couch-potato who wore pretty boots and forgot a decent flashlight would hardly invoke awe. Still. If they were waiting, they’d been waiting twenty years and he didn’t want to make them wait another day.
He made his way through the mud, tripping, sinking, until the full moon rose from behind the mountains. Like a helpful neighbor in the nick of time, it shined its generous gold light through the cobalt sky. A wolf howled, holding a single lonely note in the distance. The scent of spruce and mud and sea kept dredging up the imagined hint of smoke. All those scents had always come together here. Even in the summers, a fire burned in the woodstove.
Now Kache spotted the downed trees clearly without the flashlight, and he walked as quickly as his mud-soaked city boy boots would allow—until the last bend, where he stopped and readied himself for what lay ahead.
It was then, as he stood on the road that was no longer a road, breathing deep, heart hammering, that the realization jarred him. The familiar scent. The spruce, the soaked loamy earth, the sea; yes, yes, yes. But wood smoke? It was too strong, too distinct now, not merely his imagination. It was definitely the smell of wood burning, and coal too.
He edged around the last corner, saw the house through the boughs of spruce and naked birch and cottonwoods. It stood, not a dejected pile of logs, but tall and proud, glowing with warm light.
What?
Who?
Smoke rose straight up from the chimney, as if the house raised its hand. As if the house knew the answer.
SEVEN (#ulink_bb61b293-4385-585a-9a16-c140752f5ede)
Kache stood, staring, the cold mud oozing into his boots and now through his socks. The house stared back as it always had in his mind, glowing with light and life in the middle of the cleared ten acres.
Who in the hell?
Sweating, watching, allowing for the strangest glimmer of hope. Maybe he really had been dreaming, really had been sleeping, and now that he’d finally awoken, life might resume as it had before? Maybe all and everyone had not been lost? Maybe only he had been lost.
In these last two minutes he felt more alive than he had in two decades. Maybe he’d been under some sort of spell, broken at last on this anniversary. His mom would love the mysticism and synchronicity of that.
He shook his head, boxed his own ears. What he needed was common sense. His dad would have reamed him for not grabbing Aunt Snag’s .22 that hung on the enclosed back porch. As much as Kache hated guns, never got himself to actually shoot one, he knew it was crazy to approach the house without carrying one, especially given the lights and smoke. His dad used to say it didn’t matter if you were far to the left of liberal, if you walked by yourself in the boondocks of Alaska, you should carry a gun.
His feet started moving forward anyway. Forward to his old house, his old room. Who in the hell?
Inside, a dog barked. A shadow passed by one of the windows. The shade went down, snapped up again, quick as a wink, then shut. The other shade went down. The soft light behind them off now, replaced with the dark he’d expected to find in the first place.
He pressed his back against the old storage barn, took deep breaths and tried to line up his thoughts, which kept ricocheting off each other. He should go back, return in daylight with the gun. Call Clemsky, Jack O’Connell, a few of the others. He licked his palm and made a small circle on the mud-covered window beside him. He peered in. It was dark, and he barely made out the outline of his dad’s Ford pickup. Aunt Snag had even left that, probably driven it home that day from where his dad had parked it by the runway. She should have used it. That would have meant something.
The dog was going nuts now, continuously barking. Kache pushed on the storage barn side door; it wasn’t locked, opened easily. Along the wall he felt for the shovel, the hoe, the rake. He decided on the sharp, stiff-bladed rake. Better than nothing.
Hovering behind a warped barrel, then a salmonberry bush, he tried the back door of the house, knowing it would be locked. He crept along to the first kitchen window, remembering. That window never did lock. He slid it open, pulled himself up on one knee, lowered the rake in first, then jumped down inside with a thud.
The barking stopped, became a whine and growl. He pictured a hand muzzled around the dog’s nose. Kache tried to make himself smaller by crouching, then slipping along the wall. The thought came to him: I am not the intruder here. This is my house. He’d forgotten, taken on the attitude of a thief instead of a protector, and now he stood straight with his rake, as if that would shift the perspective of whoever was upstairs, as if the moment was a black-ink silhouette that changed depending on how you looked at it.
The whining, the growling. Kache could smell his own nerves, so of course the dog could. He ran his hand along the blue-tiled kitchen counter, up to the light switch, flicked on the lights. Nothing had changed. As always the woodstove warmed the large living room, which had once held four rooms before his mom and dad remodeled. The same furniture stood in its assigned places. His mother’s paintings still hung heavily on the thick, chinked walls. Photos of the four of them, baby pictures, wedding pictures, Christmas pictures all lined the top of the piano. He ran his finger along the top; free of dust. Games and books crammed the shelves. Kache fingered the masking tape his mother had sealed along the broken seam of the Scrabble box. He fought urges to throw the rake, to vomit, to leave.
Upstairs, another growl. Kache choked out, “Hello?” He listened. Nothing. “Hello?”
Then, rage. He pounded up the stairs. “Answer me! Answer me!” He flung open doors and flipped on lights to bedrooms that stood like shrines to the dead. All as they’d left it. In his room, a yellowed poster of Double Trouble was still stapled to the wall, Stevie Ray Vaughan still alive and well. As if neither his plane nor Kache’s family’s plane had ever gone down. As if Kache still slept in the bottom bunk and dreamed of playing the guitar on stage.
Under the bed, the dog let out barks like automatic ammunition, scrambling his claws on the wood floor. Kache held out the rake. “Who’s there!” An arm shot out, fist clenched around the handle of Denny’s hunting knife. But even more startling than the knife: the arm, clad in the sleeve of his mother’s suede paisley shirt. The shirt Kache and Denny bought in Anchorage for her birthday, and that she referred to as the most stylish, most perfect-fitting shirt on the planet that had somehow forged its way to the backwoods of Alaska. “Mom?” Kache whispered under the barking dog. “Mom?” he said louder, his eyes filling.
The dog poked his nose out, then was yanked back by the collar. A husky mix. Kache bent down, trying to see through the thick darkness. “Mom? That’s not you?”
The knife retreated and the hand reappeared, unfolded. Not his mother’s hand. It spread, splayed and pressed its fingers on the floor, until a blonde head emerged, and then a face looked up. Not his mother’s face. That was all he saw. It was not his mother’s face, and a new grief slammed him to his knees.
Mom.
Minutes went by before he realized the dog was still barking and this other face that was not his mother’s looked up at him for some kind of mercy, and though he hated the face for not belonging to his dead mother, he saw then, that it was a woman’s face, that it was round, that blue eyes begged him, that lips moved, saying words.
“Kachemak? It is you? You are not dead?”
EIGHT (#ulink_1d27a0ab-1b61-5f22-9b38-5e1dad7db067)
There had only been one visitor, years before.
Kachemak had caught her so completely unprepared that her heartbeat seemed to be running away, down to the beach, while the rest of her waited.
He looked older, his face more angled than in the photographs. But he still had the same curly hair, though shorter now, and the same heavy brows. His height—taller than the rest of the family in every photo—also gave him away. He asked her to call the dog off, and so she did, and pulled herself out from under the bed though her arms wobbled like a moon jellyfish. She shoved her trembling hands in her pockets and tried to appear brave and confident.
And yet she felt grateful it was him. She knew that Kache, as the family called him, was a gentle soul. But she also knew it was possible for a man to appear kind and yet be brutal. She fluctuated between this wariness and wanting to reach out and hold him as a mother would a child—even though he was older by ten years.
All this time she’d pictured him a boy like Niko, not a man like Vladimir. And all this time she’d thought him dead. She’d figured it out on her own, but then Lettie had confirmed. “You may as well be here. They’re all gone,” she’d said and snapped her fingers. “And Lord knows they’re never coming back.”
When Nadia asked, “Was it the hunting trip?” because she’d seen a reference to it on the calendar and elsewhere, Lettie nodded and held a finger to her lips while a single tear ran down her worn cheek and Nadia never asked her about it again. They’d had an unspoken mutual agreement not to pry, to leave certain subjects alone.
But now Kache stood before her, older, a grown man who had called her “Mom.” Was Elizabeth alive too?
“Who are you?” he asked. She shook her head. She should have not spoken earlier, should have pretended she did not understand English. But already she’d given herself away. “Look—do you know me?” he said. “You called me by name. You thought I was dead? Do I know you?”
She shook her head again, walked back and forth across the small room, touching chair, lamp, bed as she went. Moving like this, she could turn her head and glimpse him sideways without feeling so exposed face to face. The years had marked him, but he still had a youthful expression, those big dark eyes. Though Lettie had stayed clear of certain topics, Nadia knew so much about the boy: a gifted musician, an awkward teenager who felt out of place on the homestead, who fought bitterly with his father and had been a constant disappointment to him, but whose mother understood him and felt sure he would find his way. Nadia knew when he lost his first tooth (six-and-a-half years old), when he said his first word—moo-moo for moose—(ten months old). How he cried when his mother read him Charlotte’s Web.
“Can you stop pacing?”
She stopped. They stood in the lamplight, he staring at her, she staring down at her slippers. His mother’s slippers. He didn’t know anything—not one thing—about her, not even her name. All these years and years and years nameless, unknown. Only Lettie knew her, and Lettie must be dead. Nadia was afraid to ask.
“What’s your name?” Kache said. “Let’s start with that.”
Leo let out a long sigh and rested his head on his paws, sensing no more danger. How could a dog get used to having another human around so quickly?
Squaring her shoulders, taking a deep breath, she said her name. “Nadia.” She wanted to shake him and call out, I AM NADIA! but she kept quiet, still, erect.
He held out a large hand. “I’m Kache.”
She kept her hands in her pockets and her eyes to the ground, even though part of her still wanted to hug him, to comfort him. She practiced the words in her head, moved her lips, then put her voice to it without looking up: “Your mother is alive?”
“No. She died a long time ago.”
At once the new hope vanished. “Then why do you ask this, if I was your mother?”
“My brother and I gave her that shirt.” She felt her face flush. “I lost my head for a minute. You scared the hell out of me. And I still have no idea who you are.” She looked up to see him cross his arms and take an authoritative stance, then she turned her eyes back to the floor.
It was her turn now to speak. This, a conversation. She was conversing with the boy she thought had died, whose bed she slept in, whose jeans she wore, always belted and rolled up at the cuffs. She had talked to herself, to Leo, to the chickens and the goats and the gulls and the sandhill cranes, to the feral cats, to any alive being, driven by the fear that she might forget how to talk. She hadn’t spoken to another human except for Lettie, four years ago. But here she was, speaking with someone, in English, no less, which is what felt natural to her now after reading nothing but English all this time.
“Nadia.” He nodded as he said it, as if he liked the name.
Her name. It twisted through her, and she hung her head as tears leaked down her cheeks. Soon a sob escaped, and then another. She did not cry often. What was the point? But here she was, crying for every day she hadn’t.
“What’s wrong? I won’t hurt you, don’t cry …” but she could not stop. She had been so alone, so utterly alone for too many years, more than were possible and now, all changed. Here was someone she knew, someone who now knew her name, knew she was alive, someone who might help her or might turn on her. He touched her arm and she jumped. He stepped back and said again, “It’s okay, I won’t hurt you.”
