The House of Frozen Dreams

by Seré Prince Halverson

  She stared at him. “Shit damn.”

  He smiled. He always smiled when she swore, which seemed to make it less effective, less satisfying, but she still liked to swear whenever the occasion called for it. “Shit,” she said again.

  “They say it happens,” he said, and reached across the back of the seat to place his large hand on that soft space he said he liked between her shoulder and her neck.

  FORTY-NINE

  Sleep deprived as she felt with all the late night goings on with Gilly, Snag set her mind to scheduling a dinner with Kache out at the homestead. She hadn’t seen him in weeks. She dialed his number as she walked, pulling the wagon with her deliveries, waving to the passersby who called out to her. Kache didn’t answer, which wasn’t a big surprise. He was busting out ten different projects. But Snag swore she’d keep calling until they set a date.

  Nadia had been allowed more than enough time to acclimate to people. She’d been in town—Snag had heard it from about five different people. Something about Kache’s cousin.

  Ha! More-than-kissing-cousin. If she could sleep with Kache she could certainly say howdy and shake hands with Snag. She’d been out to see Lettie, and even to Anchorage, for Pete’s sake.

  Not that Snag had minded delaying the visit for her own reasons. But now she was determined to face down her failure and her breach and stand herself in that house and come what may.

  Snag had procrastinated on scheduling the dinner for another reason besides her own issues and trying to accommodate the Old Believer. It was worry over Lettie. Lettie wasn’t very strong and it was a long trip, a long way from the hospital if anything should go wrong. Since they’d stopped giving Lettie the blood pressure meds, she was doing much better mentally, but Snag knew that wasn’t so physically. But Gilly had said she’d go, and since Gilly was a nurse that made Snag feel better.

  Kache and Snag kept missing each other at the Old Folks’, playing a lot of phone tag, leaving rambling messages to keep each other caught up. The fact that he was not only sleeping with, but living with this woman, gave Snag some concerns. But what are you going to do? It wasn’t her business. She was finally in her own business, and what a joyous relief. She was sixty-five and she was in love and for the first time, someone was loving her right back.

  But she had to at least get out and meet Nadia. It was odd. First of all, that Kache was involved with a woman from the Old Believer village—it wasn’t like they mingled with the heathen much. But even odder: Snag, herself had once, long ago, had an encounter with an Old Believer. At least, she was pretty sure she was an Old Believer. It was so long ago, but still vivid in her mind. The Winkels’ was the very last homestead before you reached the remote Russian village, so Snag supposed that if any family were to have multiple rendezvous with Old Believers, it could very well be the Winkels of Caboose, Alaska.

  Snag was thirteen years old, down at the beach, loading the wheelbarrow with coal and a metal pail with mussels. One of those summer days that stretch on and on. She was content, alone, with the sunshine warm on the back of her neck and arms as she foraged among the rocks. The tide was out, and it was so bright that the dimpled wet sand mirrored the mountains. She heard something and looked up, half expecting the bear and cubs they’d been spotting all summer, but instead saw a girl about her age strolling down the beach. She wore a long, brightly flowered dress and carried a kerchief, her blonde hair blowing behind her. She walked directly up to Snag and said hello. Snag heard an accent but didn’t know where the girl was from. She could have come walking across the water from the USSR for all Snag knew.

  The girl asked if she had water and Snag let her drink from the thermos. The girl said, “I have walked much farther than I had planned. Are you a boy?”

  “No.”

  “But your hair is short and you wear trousers and you are tall like boy.”

  “Yep. That’s right. But I’m a girl.”

  The girl flung her hair so that the wind caught it again, a silk flag threaded with gold. “I am girl also.”

  “Obviously.”

  “I am married. I am going to have baby.”

  “No way. You’re too young for all that.”

  “It is because of my culture.” Her lip trembled and her chin crinkled up in an attempt to hold in her emotion. Snag nodded as if she understood.

  The girl said, “You have this pretty face. Like pretty boy.”

  Surprisingly, this didn’t sting. It sounded like a compliment. She grinned, despite herself.

  “Will you do me favor?” the girl asked. “A secret favor?”

  Snag nodded, knowing she would do whatever the girl asked.

  “Will you kiss me?” Kiss her? That was the last thing Snag had imagined, but now it began to seem like the most natural thing in the world, kissing this girl, on this beach, on this day.

  So Snag said, “Yes.” She set down her pail next to the wheelbarrow half full of coal and she placed her arms around the girl’s waist, the way she had seen men do in the movies. The girl knew what she was doing far more than Snag did, which of course wasn’t saying much, but they managed to kiss and kiss, and kiss even more. To this day it remained one of Snag’s sweetest, loveliest memories. They took a break from the kissing and watched the sky settle into layers of reds, yellows and lavenders, which reflected in foam cresting the quieted waves. Eventually, the girl rose from where they’d been sitting on a large piece of sun-bleached driftwood. She said, “Tide is returning. I have to go back.”

  Snag asked, “Can you meet me here tomorrow?”

  “No. I cannot come back again. Not ever.”

  Snag hung her head.

  “I am sorry.” She reached out and hugged Snag and Snag held her tightly against her chest, where deep inside she felt something shift, a permanent settling in. “Goodbye.”

  “So long,” Snag said.

  The girl let go and began to work her way back along the beach in the direction from which she’d come. Then she turned. “My name,” she called out over the cries of the gathering gulls, “is Agafia!”

  As vivid a memory as it was, many times Snag wondered if she’d merely imagined her. Snag was young, confused; she knew enough not to try to kiss any of her friends at school. There weren’t any, really, she wanted to kiss. And here this girl with lips the color of fireweed comes out of nowhere and disappears just as quickly? So Snag sometimes wondered if it actually took place. Nothing more than a desperately needed daydream of a perplexed adolescent. Still, she found herself on this particularly ordinary day, pulling her red wagon with vigor, the wheels turning as her mind turned up that name: Agafia. Strange, the things we remember.

  As Snag rounded the bend above the McNicols’ Jellies and Jams shop, she spotted a row of cormorants resting on a driftwood log, holding their wings open to dry like flashers exposing themselves. “Why aren’t you proud of yourselves?” she asked them.

  Her phone rang, but the birds just stared at her like they were beyond annoyed with cellphones. It was Kache, inviting her and Lettie to Thanksgiving. After she asked what to bring, she asked if there was anything she needed to be careful about, that might offend Nadia.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know—the religious thing. There must be a lot she doesn’t approve of.”

  “Aunt Snag, I told you. She isn’t an Old Believer. I mean, she came from them, but she doesn’t subscribe to their belief system.”

  “I see.” Snag felt as if she had one leg over the edge of a bridge. She didn’t know if the water below was freezing or warm, too shallow or deep enough, but it called to her just the same. “So. Gilly’s going to come with us. Is that okay? I thought it would be good for mom to have a nurse out there.”

  “Of course. That would be good. I like Gilly.”

  “Me too. A lot.”

  “She’s great.”

  “She’s incredible,” Snag added. “Did I tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Oh, just tha
t Gilly is my girlfriend?”

  “Yeah, I know you’re friends. You’ve been hanging out at the Spit Tune, right?”

  “And we go other places. Like,” Snag stopped walking to catch her breath and steady herself. “Bed. We go to bed.”

  “Oh?” And then, “Ohhhh. Oh, I get it.” And then, “That’s cool.”

  “Is it? Cool with you?”

  “You know what I really want to say, Aunt Snag? Good for you. It’s about fucking time. I’m happy for you. In fact, that just made my day.”

  A lump in her throat. Some days it just felt like the whole world was on your side. “That’s sweet of you, Kache. Thank you. And I’m looking forward to meeting your Nadia.”

  “Better not call her mine. It might get me in trouble. She might start quoting mom’s Betty Friedan books.”

  “Well, good. I like her already.” Snag realized she liked everybody at that moment. Kache was cool with her and Gilly. Of course, she’d left out the other part, the part he wouldn’t be so cool with. One step at a time, she told herself, as she took the last hill toward home.

  FIFTY

  How to explain to my passionate ten-year-old son that his beloved dog Walter was a broken and battered pile of agony at the bottom of a cliff? I can’t. I won’t. Glenn made his way down the treacherous drop—God only knows how he didn’t kill himself in the process—to see if he could save our dear, sweet Walter, each step full of such consternation, knowing our dog would be dead or worse.

  It was worse. Glenn said that when he found him, Walter was beyond any hope, and suffering so that he looked to Glenn with those big dark eyes and begged for him to end the pain. I’m crying still as I write this. Glenn of course had brought a gun and didn’t cry in front of Walter, but after he pulled the trigger, he confessed to me that he dropped to his knees, holding Walter to him and howling like they were of the same species. We all loved that dog. Glenn loved that dog. But he said he knew how much Kache needed that dog. And so, we must lie to our own son. And this command from Glenn, who is so matter-of-fact about life and death. “It is too much for the boy,” he told me, crying again. “We need to tell him the Disneyland version.” And so I did, but I’m afraid it was a mistake, because Kache looks at us with an underlying suspicion, though he doesn’t say anything.

  Kache closed the journal, heavy-hearted and mystified still, after so long, thinking about Walter. And his dad. It was a different version than what he’d been rehashing in his mind all these years. His father said that? To protect Kache from the truth? He had only seen his father as a bully. But now Kache wondered if there was another side to that man. Why else would his mother have stayed with him? She was a kind woman, a smart woman, a strong woman. She must have seen something in him.

  Kache walked out to the canyon, and though he saw it from a new angle, it remained impossibly deep. It still scared him.

  They had dropped the subject of visiting Nadia’s family, but that didn’t mean Kache wasn’t thinking about it. Now that they knew Vladimir wasn’t in the picture, Kache wanted Nadia to let her family know she was alive. Reconnect with them, free herself from the grip of her painful past—who wouldn’t want that? To live fully here at the homestead she needed to be able to go into town without ducking for cover.

  The college application seemed to be the strongest motivator, but she hadn’t mentioned it again and Kache suspected that Nadia liked the idea of being accepted and going to college, but just the idea, not the reality of actually leaving and traveling somewhere else to live. It would be years before she’d be ready to move away, if ever. Most likely never. That is what he kept telling himself.

  He kept quiet about her family. It was her decision.

  The last of the garden had been harvested. The last of the canning was done. He walked back home and set the journal inside, then headed back out to finish stacking the bales in the barn. Nadia was milking Mooze. When she finished, she pulled her video camera out of her pocket, filming Kache as he stacked the hay.

  “Another exciting day at the homestead,” he said, hamming it up.

  “No. Natural,” she said. So he finished his work, wondering what winter would be like, Nadia and him burrowed in the house under the new down comforter while the snow piled up and up around them for days on end. Board games, cards, movies, books. Few responsibilities except to make sure the animals weren’t freezing to death, keep the fire stoked, maybe knock down the icicles when they got so big they threatened to pierce them.

  The temperature had plummeted but they hadn’t seen a hint of snow yet. He knew that once winter set in, it would be harder to get back to Nadia’s family’s village. Nadia must have been thinking the same thing, because later, when he came back from checking the nets at the beach, she met him at the door, wearing her new brown coat and new jeans and her hiking boots they’d bought from the catalog—not the stylish ones from Nordstrom.

  “I’m ready. Let’s go,” she said, before he had a chance to pull his own boots off.

  “Go where?” he asked, but he knew. Her eyes seemed bigger, like they had that night when he first saw her face peeking from under the bed. Now she crammed her hands into coat pockets as if she was plugging them into a source of courage.

  “The village. Come, let’s go.”

  “Why this sudden change?”

  “You read your mother’s story of Walter.”

  “I did.”

  “And this is something you were afraid to do, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it is good that you read it, yes?”

  He nodded.

  “I am ready. I want to be brave also. And I see how much you miss your family and what a gift it would be to see them. You can’t. But me, I have this ability to make this trip. And the tide, it is very low and will get lower. Besides. If I am going to get my transcripts and birth certification for college, I must go now.” She sounded like she was presenting all the reasons to herself more than to Kache. She headed for the truck, determined long-legged strides that reminded him of a moose starting across the road no matter what. She opened the truck door, closed herself in, rolled down the window. “Hurry before my mind it changes or the tide comes in.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  If there was a way to present herself in the most favorable light and still be truthful, Nadia did not know of it. That morning she had tried on her sarafan, the colors still fairly bright because she never once wore it after she’d first arrived at the house. She covered her head in a scarf. She stared at her reflection, her cropped bangs peeking out, her earrings, the tiny diamond in her nose. She looked like a gypsy. She did not feel like herself at all, and the one thing she wanted was to present herself truthfully. There was no redemption in facing a lie with more lies. She changed into her new clothes and tried to imagine what her family’s reaction would be. Would they recognize her? There was also the temptation to present Kache as her husband and not her live-in lover. Neither was ideal, but certainly a marriage would be preferred. Except what if Vladimir was still there? What if he still claimed she was his wife? They would think of her as an adulterer. And that would just be the beginning.

  She should not think ahead this much. As they bounced and swayed along the drive up to the main road, she felt for the old handgun in her coat pocket.

  She inhaled deeply and said, “I do not know what to expect. But I do know we will be miles from anyone who can help us if Vladimir is there and threatening us. Therefore, I have one of your father’s pistols in my pocket.”

  Kache looked at her then back at the road. “That’s probably overkill. So to speak.”

  “I think you are right. I hope you are right. But in case you are not.”

  “Do me a favor and at least put it in the glove compartment.” She obliged, and took out the pair of sunglasses she kept there and put them on, even though metallic-rimmed clouds shrouded the sun and seemed to have hooked themselves on the jagged tips of the mountains.

  She’d started on this trip back
many times over the years, when the isolation chiseled her fear down to a sharp root. She wanted her mother and her father, her sisters and brothers. She heard the folk songs they would break into around the dinner table. She would sing them in Russian, alone in the house, her lone voice eerie, not in any way comforting: Farewell curly locks, Farewell auburn hair, Farewell blue eyes, I won’t be seeing you again. She would cook some of her mother’s dishes—the leposhki and rebnea katlette—and sit down at the table by herself. A bite, warm, delicious—browned bread dough pancakes, the salmon and mashed potato balls—but she could not get much of it past the lump in her throat.

  She’d pack a small bag, picturing her parents’ full house, the noise—the laughter, the teasing, the scolding. But, also, the plenty she did not miss. Even if she had married Niko instead of Vladimir she would no longer fit back into the village. The role of being a khoziaki, a house-hostess, the pressure to have children one after the other. The tight unyielding grip on a way of life she believed was meant to be left where it belonged, hundreds of years in the past. She did not fit in with people who separated themselves over how many fingers they used to make the sign of the cross, when she did not feel compelled to make the sign of the cross at all, no matter how many fingers.

  No. All of that would fade away once she hugged her mama and papa again. But then there was Vladimir. Always Vladimir and his promise to kill them all.

  And so she would unpack her bag and go out to the lone birch tree and rest her forehead against it. “You understand,” she would say. “You are not in the grove with your brothers and sisters and mother and father. I will come and talk to you and we can ease each other’s sorrow. The sparrows in your branches sing and from my hands eat. It is good for you to be here, and for me to be here.” This brought comfort until another bout of loneliness would take over and she would go through it all again. Sometimes it was the birch tree that would bring her back to herself. Sometimes it was the garden, or Leo, or the noble mountains across the bay. Lately it had been Kache and the video camera.