The House of Frozen Dreams

by Seré Prince Halverson

  “Man-made mountains.” They fell into a trance, staring at the building. Mountains and skyscrapers. Kache thought of the planes flying into the Twin Towers, and of his parents’ plane flying into the mountain. The light changed and he pulled gently on Nadia’s hand. “It’s okay. We can go now.”

  There were no tall buildings or traffic lights in Caboose. So the woman who understood the chemical properties of soil now needed to be reminded that red meant stop and green meant go.

  In the department store, she touched everything. “We sew all our sarafans, everything.” She walked around all the shoes, picking them up, smelling the leather, putting them back down. She ran her hands along the racks of clothes. “I do not need these. It is too much. You spend too much of the money.”

  “No, I want to.”

  She shook her head. “I cannot. The camera? Now this? No.”

  “Look. You saved our entire house. Believe me, I owe you a lot more money than this. Please. It makes me happy.”

  “It does?”

  “It does. You need clothes.” He elbowed her. “Besides, I want my old jeans and T-shirts back.”

  Her eyes veered up and she pursed her lips. Finally she nodded. “Okay. But only if you promise to deduct.”

  Nadia circled around the floor and came back empty handed. “How do you choose something from all of this? Where do you begin?”

  “Well, let’s see,” is what he said, but what he thought was that he had absolutely no idea, and also that he didn’t want to let on that he didn’t know his way around the women’s department of Nordstrom. He could do this. Sure, Nadia could do just about anything, but he had the upper hand on this one.

  She pulled out one of her earplugs and tilted her head, and then said, “Come with me,” offering her hand. She followed the music pumping from downstairs in the younger styles. The escalator held her in a daze until Kache demonstrated how to step onto it, insisting that she not try to film and step on at the same time. Once downstairs, she went straight to a pair of jeans and pulled the hanger off the rack. “I like these,” she said. Silver studs curving along the front pockets, not unlike the gold studs that curved along her ear. Nadia had a sense of style. She picked out long sweaters with big loose necks and tall boots that wouldn’t last a day on the homestead. “That’s okay,” she explained, “I can wear them tonight.” She picked out a few short skirts and some tights. (For gathering coal on the beach? he thought but didn’t say.) A black leather jacket and a more practical brown wool one that fit her perfectly. Almost everything she tried on looked damn good on her. He sat outside the dressing room and kept his mind busy thinking about sneaking in and helping her shed that last pair of snug fitting corduroys.

  They carried big bags to the truck. Then he took her to the museum, but she kept her movie camera in her backpack and told him she’d been living in the past her entire life, she already knew the way people used to live. “Who cares about these things? I still use that tool right there for berry picking. And they keep it in glass case? I want to see something new. I want to see how city behaves.”

  So Kache took her downtown during the lunch hour. It wasn’t Manhattan, but people were out walking quickly, crowding up the street corners, filling up the restaurants. Huge baskets overflowing with flowers hung from the lampposts. Down on Spenard, the homeless men slouched with outstretched cups and the drug dealers asked them if they wanted to get high and the alcoholics zig-zagged out of the bars. Nadia filmed everything but when she finally pulled the camera away from her face, Kache saw that she was crying.

  “I understand this homelessness. If it had not been for your house, I would have died alone, outside, cold, hungry.”

  “I doubt that,” Kache said, tucking her under his arm. “Knowing you, you would have gnawed enough branches to build yourself a shelter and a hunting spear in no time.”

  “You are a funny one, Kachemak Winkel.” She used his full name sometimes, the way his mother had. He dug into his wallet to hand her a small wedge of bills to pass out and she thanked him earnestly, again promising to pay him back.

  When the sun began to set, she stood in front of another glass building and watched the reflected yellows and pinks and reds splash across the façade, pointing her camera at the actual mountain scene, then back to the reflection and to the mountains again.

  They drove to the airport so she could see the jets from a distance, and down to the harbor so she could see the last of the season’s cruise ships. They walked around the university because she said she wanted to pretend she was a college student.

  As bicycles and pedestrians passed them, rushing to classes, Nadia smiled, tilted her head and said, “Did you study for that test?”

  “Which one? Human biology? I pulled an all-nighter. I’m gonna ace it.”

  Nadia grinned. “You are a very serious student of this subject.”

  “You’re the valedictorian.”

  Kache had wanted to take her to a nice restaurant for dinner, but she opted for a movie at a theater because she’d never seen a movie on the big screen. They watched Batman Begins. Actually, Kache watched Nadia watching Batman Begins. And he took the popcorn from her to hold because she kept spilling it when she jumped.

  She had never been in a hotel. When the elevator lurched, she laughed and grabbed him. Then she said, “Why is there no thirteen?”

  “Because people think it’s bad luck. Thirteen is supposed to be an unlucky number, so no one wants to stay on the thirteenth floor.”

  “So there it is empty with no rooms on this floor?”

  “No, there really is no floor.”

  “There is only big gap of air? Layers of clouds?” She scoffed, shaking her head.

  “No. They just name one floor twelve and the next one right after that is fourteen. They just skip thirteen.”

  “And people do not know that fourteen is really thirteen? That people on the floor fourteen are—how do you say that—really screwed?”

  A man who’d just entered the elevator chuckled. Kache smiled. “It’s more of a gesture, I think. Everyone overlooks it.”

  “I have a secret for you,” Nadia whispered. “People are strange. And not very smart.”

  The man laughed again as he stepped out—onto Floor Fourteen. “Wish me luck, sweetheart,” he said.

  The man was old enough to be her father. Kache wondered what her father and mother were like. Which of her brothers and sisters looked like her? Were they smart like she was?

  What a loss for the family. The grief they must have felt, must still feel. He wished he could somehow talk her into visiting them. Highly unlikely, he knew. As unlikely as Denny, his dad and mom, running to catch the elevator, saying they were so sorry they’ve been gone so long, they had been stuck on the thirteenth floor.

  When the elevator door closed and the elevator resumed its trip upward, she said, “Why did he call me sweetheart? I am not his sweetheart. This man, I do not know. See what I say? Strange cookies, these people.”

  In their room she stood and filmed the view through the window, the cars and the people down below. She had never been more than two stories up. She was starting to commentate what she filmed. “Here we are, on the eighteenth floor, which is really the seventeenth floor. This, apparently is a secret phenomenon. You heard it here first, folks.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  She sighed. “From you. About ten minutes ago. Do you not remember having this discussion in the elevator?”

  “No, I mean the ‘you heard it here first, folks’?”

  “I do not know. The movie, perhaps? Something I read?”

  “You’re all ears and eyes.”

  “And camera.” She patted the side of it. “I want to make beautiful movies.”

  “And so you will, I suspect.”

  “I need to learn how.”

  “You mean my mom didn’t have a book on filmmaking?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, let’s go to th
e bookstore and buy one and you’ll be making Academy Award-winning films by the time you flip through it.”

  She touched his shoulder. “You are angry?”

  “No, of course not. Why?”

  “You are talking funny. You are angry I read your mother’s books?”

  “No, no, not at all. I’m just … kind of in awe. It seems like there’s nothing you can’t do.”

  “You are wrong. There is much I have not done and cannot do. I cannot even leave the homestead until you came there. And I cannot sing like you or understand talking in groups of people, and many other things. I need college.”

  “Nadia, you could teach at a college.”

  She shook her head and dropped her chin.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I hide away in stillness and the world spins on. I have wasted much.”

  He put his arms around her. “Nothing has been wasted on you.”

  “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

  “See? Now where did you hear that?”

  “Many times, in the old magazines. Advertisements for the United Negro College Fund. But I am not Negro.”

  “No. And you might want to say African American instead of Negro.”

  “Okay. But I still have a mind I do not want to waste. Is there United Ex-Old Believer College Fund?”

  “No. But it’s not a bad idea.” Kache leaned his butt against the ledge that stuck out from the window. He tried imagining Nadia going to college. She looked like a college student. But he couldn’t see her there because then he would have to see his home without her in it.

  He gently pulled her to him and they stood at the window, looking out at the wide vista of city lights between them and the Chugach Mountain range.

  “I like being here,” she said. “Way up in the sky.”

  The next morning after they ordered room service and had breakfast in bed, Nadia talked Kache into singing and playing his guitar in a park so she could film him. At first he resisted. But she had agreed to come to Anchorage, so he agreed to play a song for a couple of squirrels.

  Soon there was a crowd not just of squirrels, but clapping, foot-stomping people. Bills and coins dropped into his guitar case by the handfuls and before long covered the felt lining in the bottom of it. Kache hadn’t played in public since he was eighteen. People kept approaching him, asking where he played, if he had a CD or a website or was he on iTunes? Kache kept shaking his head saying, “No, man, sorry. This is all I have, right here.”

  A short sinewy man handed Nadia his card and told her to have Kache call him. Nadia laughed when she showed it to Kache. “As if I were in charge of you or something. Your boss.”

  “He owns a bar. He probably thought you were my manager. Like a guy playing for pennies at the park has a manager.”

  “Pennies? You make $357.”

  “You made it. It was your idea. You were the event coordinator. And you inspired their favorite song. Did you see how much they liked the ‘Nadia, You Unknotted Me’ song?”

  “Everyone was clapping to it and some even danced.”

  Kache lifted his shoulders. “I just showed up and played, so give me ten bucks and we’ll call it good.”

  “Really? I have never had money.”

  “That 347 bucks will last you a long time back at home.”

  Her eyes flashed and she started to respond, then stopped.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing. It is a lot of money. I know it will not pay for all, but I want to pay for some of my clothes, not only this deduct you pretend to do.”

  “Wait, I have an idea … Put this in your college fund.” She smiled at that and agreed that she would.

  She slept the entire four-hour drive to Caboose. She had been a trooper, but although she seemed to want to take the whole city in her arms and bring it back with them—a huge bouquet of streetlights and cars and people and buildings—she was also exhausted by it.

  His cellphone rang. It was Greg Barrow, reporting that Vladimir Tolov had left the Old Believer village about ten years ago. None of them had heard from him since. He’d asked around town too and no one he’d talked to knew him.

  Kache thanked Greg, and pulled into the Caboose Safeway parking lot to pick up a few things they needed. The news about Vladimir wasn’t a surprise. Still, he couldn’t wait to tell Nadia. But she was sound asleep. He would just be a minute. He covered her with his jacket so she wouldn’t get cold and locked up the truck, cupped his hand against the window and looked in. She was so tired and so pretty. He’d surprise her with a bag of Peanut M&Ms. She couldn’t get enough of the things.

  Inspired by the Halloween display, he grabbed a fancy five-piece carving set—the photos on the back looked like the pumpkins had been carved up by Renoir. Those definitely hadn’t been around when he was a kid, at least not in Caboose.

  In the dairy aisle, while he checked dates on yogurt, he heard a familiar voice sing, “My boyfriend’s back and he’s looking at the yogurt, hey yadi ya, my boyfriend’s back.”

  He turned to see Marion pushing a cart up the aisle. “Hey, Mare,” he said and gave her a hug.

  “I keep telling the guys you’ll be down to the Spit Tune. I say, ‘Don’t worry. He promised.’”

  “I did?”

  “Practically. Almost, anyway. How’s it going?” Her dark eyes went from teasing to genuine. “Snag said you’re working hard at the homestead. I’d love to see that place again. Lots of memories. Is it tough to be out there?”

  “Thanks for asking. Actually, I’m enjoying it. Surprised?”

  “Yes. But I’m glad to hear it. Glad you’re back too. I’ve missed you, Kache.” Marion would make a good friend for Nadia. The thought of Nadia made him drop his yogurt in the basket, grab a gallon of milk, and say, “I’ve gotta run.”

  “Kache, I—”

  “I really am going to try to come play with you guys soon.” They kissed cheeks and he rushed to the candy aisle to grab the Peanut M&Ms.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  In Nadia’s dream: Kache singing—interrupted now by Russian voices calling back and forth as if she’d last heard them only hours ago instead of a decade. Some complaining about the cost of toilet paper and she wondered how this fit into her dream about flying from building top to building top with Kache. Then there they were, a few Old Believers now soaring alongside of them, asking each other if they remembered to pick up the oranges that were on sale. It would be good to have the oranges. And then they were throwing the oranges at her and she woke up, up, sitting up in the truck. Where was Kache? Where was she?

  The Safeway. The parking lot. And in front of her, two Old Believer women in their bright printed sarafans, loading groceries into their truck. Did she know them? Had they seen her? She lay back down, straining to hear, but they said nothing more. The doors slammed, the engine started, the headlights glared through the windshield, while Nadia kept her face pressed to the vinyl seat. Those women could have been her little sisters and she would not know them by their voices, and perhaps not even by their faces. They were ten and eleven when she last saw them. Now they were older than she had been then, wearing two braids instead of one. Married. Grown women with families who went shopping for oranges and paper towels. It could have been her sisters or someone else from the village. It could have even been Katarina.

  When Kache finally unlocked the door, she bolted up. She shook all over. “Why did you leave me?”

  He apologized before she even told him what happened, and then apologized again after she told him. He was sincere, but still she could not believe he left her like that, asleep and unaware. Anyone might have wandered up to the truck and seen her.

  “Will these help my standing?” He held out a bag of the chocolate and peanut candies she loved.

  She grabbed them. “No. But I will eat them anyway.”

  “I won’t ever do that again. No matter how peaceful and beautiful you look sleeping, I will wake up your sorry ass. Deal?” />
  “My sorry ass? What are you saying? Because of the scar you say this?”

  “Nadia. Oh God, no. I am so sorry. It’s just an expression. I wasn’t thinking.” They were quiet until they pulled onto the road that led out of town. “I’m an idiot.”

  “What if Vladimir had seen me?”

  “Vladimir is long gone.”

  “How are you this certain?”

  He tried to take her hand but she slipped out of his grasp and folded her arms. He let out a long sigh and rubbed his eyebrows with his thumb and forefinger. “I’ve asked around.” He told her that his friend the mechanic knew many of the Believers, had found out about Vladimir from numerous sources.

  “So he has been gone all this time?”

  “He has.”

  Kache stayed silent for several miles until he said, “I bet he went back to Oregon. You said he wandered into your village one day, telling a tale, right? There were no other women of marrying age.”

  Nadia’s face fell into her hands. “I worry about my sweet sisters, if he somehow got to them. I only fled. I didn’t protect them.”

  “You protected them and yourself by leaving. He told you he would kill them all if you said anything. My guess is he moved on a long time ago. Your sisters weren’t of age yet, right? There was nothing for him there. Nadia, I can go and scope things out, pretend I just took a wrong turn.”

  “That is old trick. It is not possible to just wander in without trying with all your might to find this place. You can so-call ‘wander’ into the bigger village, Ural—even though everyone knows you are snooping, they will probably be friendly. But you have to hike into Altai, or take ATV. They’ll never believe it was accidental and it may make them suspicious, especially if you ask any questions related to me.”

  A truck approached from the other direction and she dove down to the floorboard until they passed.

  “We’ve got to think of some solution so you don’t have to hide. Look, you’ve been hinting around about going to college. Did you go to school when you lived at home?”

  “Of course. I learn English, math, many things.”

  “Then you’re going to need your school transcripts, the record of your education, your birth certificate too.”