It took all Snag had not to bolt out of there. Moments came and went. Empty glasses clinked behind the bar and a commercial came on for a cruise line, causing Snag to wish she was in the tropics alone on a ship of strangers rather than in the town bar confessing her sins to Gilly, who still hadn’t pulled her hand away. She squeezed Snag’s and said. “That is a tragic story. And I’m so sorry. But the biggest tragedy is that you’ve been blaming yourself for bad weather one day twenty years ago. You are a sensitive, caring, strong woman, Snag. But I’m sorry, your thoughts don’t have that kind of power.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I do understand. More than you think. And I understand that loving your sister-in-law did not make that plane crash into that mountain. I guarantee it.”
“But you weren’t even there. There’s even more to it, I—”
“I don’t need to know specifics. I don’t care. I know that you weren’t even in that plane when it crashed. Planes crash everywhere, but they especially like to crash in Alaska. You need to knock off this excuse for not living your life. Right this second.”
Snag exhaled. The breath kept coming. She had never told a soul, and now she’d just spilled it to a woman she didn’t know all that well. True, she hadn’t spilled everything, but she’d let go of enough to unplug the dam. Snag was making a scene but nobody except Johnny and Bobby and Rex were there to witness it, and they were enthralled with golf up on the television. Gilly went to the bar for more drinks and brought back a stack of napkins, which Snag used to mop her face.
A crowd started gathering as the band set up. Snag waved at Marion Tilloko, Kache’s old girlfriend and singing partner, whose grandfather’s room was three doors down from Lettie’s. Gilly waved too.
Snag leaned across her fresh drink and said, “I still have never, not once, gone out to the homestead since right after the crash. I lied to my mom and Kache about that too.”
“Are they mad about it?”
Snag shook her head. “Miraculously, no.”
“So there’s only one thing left to do then.”
“What’s that?”
“Let yourself off that hook you set back in nineteen-eighty-friggin’-five.”
TWENTY-NINE
Snag had left a note for Kache, Down at the Spit Tune listening to the band. Come join us!—which only further intensified Kache’s anguish. The band. Not a band. The band was still playing at the same old bar, Rex in the early years ignoring the fact the band was comprised of teenagers under the legal drinking age. Kache used to play for the band, and they were going to be HUGE. That’s what they said, and that’s what everyone in town said and that’s what the newspaper reporter from Anchorage said. But this was all before Kache bailed.
How was it a man could neglect his passion? How was it he could leave behind the most important thing in the world to him, besides his family? It had been a strange relief to head down to Austin without his guitar. Head down to the exact place he’d planned to dive into nothing but music, music, music—accepted to UT on a music scholarship. The University of Texas wasn’t so quick to offer the scholarship in accounting, but when Kache pointed out his perfect grades, not just in music, but in math, science, and English—his volunteer work at the native village, his SAT scores—they pulled something they referred to as a hush-hush redistribution of funds and got him into the business department on a full ride. So there had been that hurdle. And then the daily hurdles of being in a town known for its abundance of music in most every bar, on most every street corner, not to mention all the festivals the whole city embraced—South by Southwest and Austin City Limits, to name a couple—and the way he’d practically bump into people like Shawn Colvin and Steve Earle and John Prine—his heroes sitting across a restaurant having lunch with a friend or hunched down in an aisle in a used bookstore or walking out of the pharmacy as he was walking in.
But he preferred dealing with all that to dealing with what hit him when he played. He’d tried at first, still at home, in the weeks after they died. But the music always took him back to that last awful night.
That last awful night Kache had retreated to his bedroom, locked the door, and strummed as loud as possible over his dad’s yelling and banging, his threatening to kick down the door, until he finally did. He pushed his face into Kache’s, but Kache kept on playing as loud as possible. He smelled Scotch and the onions from the casserole Aunt Snag had brought. He’d seen his dad drunk before but not often and not like this. All three of the adults were cutting loose that night and now his dad was getting ugly. After the complaints about Kache’s inability, his laziness around the homestead, it always came down to his music, as if it were a personal affront and the cause of all the evil in the world. It didn’t matter that Kache worked so hard at school and his music; it only mattered that he didn’t work hard enough at home.
“You goddamn lazy-ass! You pompous little shit. Don’t you ever lock your goddamn door on me again, you understand?” When Kache didn’t answer, he said, “You understand me?”
Kache had been silently shaking but he tried for boldness. “No. I don’t understand you. I never will.”
His dad pulled Kache up by his hair and then did what he’d never done. He punched him, hard, and blood spurted like a surprise from Kache’s nose. Despite himself, tears filled his eyes while the blood filled his hand.
Kache said what he’d never said before. “I hate you. Why don’t you just go fucking kill something? Go shoot your animals and leave me alone.”
Snag stepped over the door, calling “Bets, bring ice!” and chewed out Glenn, who stumbled away. “What are you, some kind of monster?” she yelled after him. But even Aunt Snag, who Kache had never seen drunk, slurred her words. She grabbed a T-shirt off the floor, not knowing it was Kache’s favorite, a Blaze Foley T-shirt Marion had bought him at a concert in the Lower 48 and brought back last summer. Snag held Blaze Foley up to Kache’s nose and let the blood soak in. Kache closed his eyes and wished for Denny, but he was out on a date. None of this would have happened if Denny had been home. His dad wouldn’t dare touch Kache in Denny’s presence. Kache couldn’t believe he’d done it at all.
Then it was his mom crouching over him, smoothing back his hair saying, “I’m sorry, honey, I’m so sorry. That’s not your dad, it’s the drink,” but he smelled the Scotch on her too. What the hell was everyone getting so drunk for? What had started as a nice enough meal with Aunt Snag over and a game of Scrabble planned for later but never played, had turned into a drunken brawl of an evening. Even later, as he lay on his bunk bed, pumped up with some painkillers leftover from his mom’s knee surgery, he heard more yelling and crying. He re-hung the door as best he could, given his drugged state and lack of carpentry skills, then nailed it shut and refused to come out. Maybe if Denny had come home, he might have worked himself into Kache’s room and talked him into joining them. But Denny had spent the night at his girlfriend’s.
The next morning, Kache wouldn’t acknowledge his father’s pleas for forgiveness. Instead, he played his guitar over his dad’s words. “I’m sorry as a man can be, son. It was wrong of me. Kachemak? Please forgive me.”
The front door slammed. He stopped playing. His parents’ footsteps on the front porch, the gravel. He quietly opened his window, straining to hear. The hunting and fishing gear thrown in the truck bed. Doors creaking open.
His dad said, “He’ll be all right.”
“Maybe I should stay with him.” These were the last words he’d ever hear her speak.
“Sometimes, Bets, a man needs his space. Let’s give him that. Come on, hon. I told Den we’d pick him up by now.”
One door slammed, the engine growled into a roar, and then Kache peeked out, saw his mother look up to his window. He wanted to step forward, wave, tell her to wait, but he stayed to the side and watched her climb in and pull her door shut. It would have been so easy to stop them. The time it would have taken him to pack up his stuff would have delayed th
em, could have changed everything. But he didn’t stop them. He watched the truck churn dust from the gravel as it turned and made its way up the road, until they were gone.
This is what Kache had heard whenever he’d tried to play the guitar again all those years before: His dad screaming his dad threatening Kache saying those words I hate you I hate you, go fucking kill something, his mom consoling his dad apologizing and then the doors shutting the truck starting and leaving without Kache on their way to pick up Denny. Denny. The big brother that always stuck up for him.
He ran his fingers down along his nose, then back up. He needed to pick up new strings. The thought taunted him, as he sat on the bed in Snag’s guestroom, holding his old guitar. He didn’t know if the background noise of that night would still be there when he played.
If he hurried, he could get to Jeff’s Music to buy those strings before it closed.
Or he could turn on Snag’s TV, lie back on the couch, catch The House that Jack and Jack Jr. Built and call it a day. It wasn’t like he hadn’t been working his ass off.
THIRTY
In the last month Nadia had gone from plotting her escape to looking forward to Kache’s arrival every morning. Now she might have ruined their friendship.
Since Kache had first showed up, she’d given up one of her favorite pastimes. What had once seemed to be intimately hers alone and a means of survival, in his presence felt like rampant stealing. Even after he left in the evenings, though she was tempted, she resisted.
But she kept slipping up. Conversation was still challenging to her, and though she craved it, it drained and confounded her—how much of the thoughts in her head should she transpose into words and let out her mouth to travel the air to enter Kache’s ears? What was good for him to know? What would cause him unnecessary pain? What was she meant to keep for only herself?
Elizabeth had meant to keep the journals to herself, Nadia knew this from their content. Nonetheless she had read the journals so often and so thoroughly that she often had difficulty drawing the line between her thoughts and Elizabeth’s. Handing Kache the guitar and asking him to play that song had been stupid, and he might be gone for good now. Just like Lettie.
And so out of loneliness for Kache, and in order to stop unknowingly quoting Kache’s own mother, Nadia convinced herself she should take a quick peek and refresh her memory. She took her three favorite notebooks out of the cardboard box where she’d first found them packed away in Elizabeth and Glenn’s closet. She positioned herself between old boots and slippers and the hems of heavy coats, and counting on Leo to bark if the truck turned down the road, opened a journal and read:
Blessed, blessed summer is upon us and I have the energy of eight of my winter selves. So much to be done, but let me at it and let me feel the sun on my arms and hair and back for 18 hours straight. The garden is boiling over, the cabbage ballooning into the ridiculous, Sunflowers bigger than my face. Gladiolas! Pansies! Roses! The beans are reaching for the sky, will soon be vining themselves around a star. The same goes for Denny and especially Kache, the notches in the door jamb need to be updated almost weekly.
“Oh, Elizabeth,” Nadia whispered. “I have missed you.”
And then this:
We are a family of extremes, relying on each other in a land of extremes. We go forth in a constant state of alertness: for shifts in the sea and sky, for crashing of enormous antlers or huge claws through alders, for yet another clashing of personalities. We are a bear, a moose, a wolf, and an eagle all living under this small roof, the illusion of shelter amidst the magnificence.
Now she wondered who Kache was supposed to be in that scenario. She could imagine him as a moose or an eagle or even a wolf too. How did his mother see him? Leo barked and Nadia dropped the notebooks into the box, scrambled out from her hiding place and ran down the stairs, only to see the same moose cow and her calf that showed up every day, lumbering across the yard, Kache still nowhere and it was late morning. What if he did not forgive her?
She had pictured the two of them setting off for the beach to clear the fishing nets; much easier with two. But she shouldn’t wait any longer, She certainly shouldn’t be hiding in the closet when the sun gave itself so freely and completely, a thick slab of warm butter spreading out from the low sky to every corner. Brightness abounded. If only she had a big box in which she could store some of this light for the winter; when it stayed dark for most of the day, she could lift the lid and let the light reach out to warm her.
Two salmon and four cod, along with three starfish, four sea anemones. A half-dozen Dungeness crabs, all a fraction under legal size, not that anyone was checking. Nadia let the crabs go anyway—the bigger ones had more flavorful meat—and turned her attention to the salmon and cod. They eyed her warily, flipping and then resting, stillness except for gills gasping. She did not like this particular requirement. A part of her wanted to free them, but she clubbed each once, swiftly, with enough muscle to get the job done quickly.
She identified with each fish tangled in the net, with each rabbit she trapped, each chicken whose neck she wrung, each spruce hen she shot. She was the Vladimir in their story.
He had shown up at the new village, Altai, explaining that he’d come from the community in Oregon, that he’d felt the world encroaching and wanted freedom to worship in the purest of the old ways. But it was all just a story. Vladimir did not worship anyone but himself.
He arrived two years after the villages split over their differences. Two years after Niko had married Katarina without a second thought. Nadia’s parents hadn’t pressured her into marriage. No available suitors anyway; she was the oldest of the children in their small group. She had felt such betrayal and despair over Niko that she’d put the thought of ever marrying out of her head and instead focused on her studies. But all that changed when Vladimir arrived.
At first she’d been frightened only by his alarming beauty. He had everyone in the village swooning, even the men, who were small in number and could use his strong arms and legs to speed up the building, which had already taken too long. It didn’t matter that he was already well into his thirties and unmarried—although now Nadia questioned the validity of that story too. His eyes were the color of irises; his teeth sparkled and shone white even against a backdrop of clean snow. There was his nose, strong but not too large, and even the planes of his face depicted strength and wisdom. His beard looked like an inviting place to rest one’s head. His shoulders spread wide; he stood tall with a muscled torso.
Excitement rumbled through the whole village. Finally! Nadia would have a husband. If you listened hard enough, even the wind through the trees seemed to be saying the same thing. At last! At long last! Because Nadia, at almost sixteen, was considered by then an old maid. A spinster.
If they could see me know, she thought. If they could only see me now.
In those days, Nadia had spent much of her free time embroidering. Now she read books, but back at the village the women were expected to become experts in handiwork. In the weeks leading up to the wedding, she and her mothers and sisters prepared her trunk with the intricately woven belts all Old Believers were required to wear, along with beautiful sheets and pillowcases, dresses, blankets, and needlepoint to hang on the walls of her new home. Vladimir, accompanied by the men, came to “buy” the trunk, another old ritual that was bathed in braga and full of laughter.
At their wedding party Nadia was so nervous and excited she didn’t touch the food. Braga flowed freely. Plated towers of pellmeni and gruzdi v pyerog and katlete were passed around, aromas of meat and mushroom fillings and potatoes and dough filled the hall, but all she did was nibble on a sweet praniki.
Vladimir whispered, his lips touching the lobe of her ear, “You must eat, yes? We will both need our strength.” He winked and rested his hand on her thigh, over her skirt, beneath the table. The warmth of his hand spread everywhere, as if he touched much more than her skirted thigh.
But that night he
drank too much and fell into bed, snoring. She slept in the chair in her wedding dress, afraid to change if he should wake. She fingered her braids, trying to get used to wearing two instead of one.
The next morning he didn’t speak and she wondered what she’d done wrong. She fixed him kartoshka s echkam—potatoes with eggs—and he shoveled them into his mouth without looking at her before leaving for the day.
Nadia stood in front of the mirror throughout the afternoon. Did she have some deformity to which she was blind, something Niko and now Vladimir had seen and been repulsed by? Certain that must be the problem, she ran to her grandmother’s house. But her Baba took her in, heard her fears, and reassured her she was indeed a beautiful, smart woman any man would be honored to marry. “So he had a little too much of the braga. The man is embarrassed, that is all. Tonight, you act like nothing happened. You make him my galushshki for dinner, you brush your lovely hair and turn your flawless face to Vladimir—and he will be the happiest man in the village and beyond.”
At dinner he spoke kindly; the charming Vladimir was back. After she washed the dishes, she changed into the wedding nightgown she’d planned to wear the night before. Vladimir approached her gently at first, kissing her for a long time. Then abruptly he turned over, punched the pillow, swore, and went to sleep. This continued for many nights. Long sessions of kissing—sometimes he would touch her breasts—but then he would stop suddenly and fall asleep or get up and clomp outside. Had she been misinformed about sex? She had definitely expected more than this. She definitely wanted more than this.
The House of Frozen Dreams Page 12
