The House of Frozen Dreams

by Seré Prince Halverson

  It had been almost one year since he’d returned. He had lived more in this one year than he had in the two decades he’d been gone, and that was no exaggeration. Frozen plates had shifted within him as well. He felt closer to his mother here, and Denny. Sometimes he even felt that the memories he had of his father were incomplete, perhaps unfair. That he and his dad had lived their relationship in a sort of endless winter, cold and cut off from each other, shouting through blizzard after blizzard of misunderstanding. He wished there was a way to go back and get to know him better.

  Being here was one way to try, at least. And he knew that becoming a father himself was another way. Not that that was any reason to have kids. But now he wanted them. He wanted Nadia and a couple of kids and a life right here on this land his grandparents had homesteaded and his father had lovingly and tenaciously tended. Wasn’t that strange? To want exactly what his father had once had? Sure, Kache wanted to be a different kind of father. Gentler, much less controlling and stubborn. But not entirely different, not 100 percent different. “And that,” he said to Leo, who had given up on the mysterious rodent and now tilted his head, waiting for Kache at the gate, “is damn near a revelation.”

  As they walked toward the house, Kache removed his glove and checked inside the pocket of his down vest. Still there. The envelope he’d folded and stuck in there earlier that morning when he’d picked up the mail at the post office. She’d gotten her application in late, after Snag had somehow come up with the necessary papers, practically bursting with pride when she presented them, but not offering up any details, at least not in front of him. She and Kache still hadn’t really spoken other than quick exchanges about Lettie, and he knew it was up to him to change that.

  The envelope was addressed to Nadia and had a return address with the words Academy of Art and San Francisco in it. The envelope was too thick to see through, even when he snuck in and held it up to the high-watt sunlamp Aunt Snag kept under her bathroom sink for when she was experiencing Seasonal Affective Disorder and needed to get her serotonin level up. Kache hoped Nadia wouldn’t need the lamp after she read the contents of the envelope.

  He loved that she had this dream, that she had already learned so much about film and art and life and the world on her own. He loved that she was so well-read and capable, so talented at whatever she tried. Yes, he was taken aback at times, insecure especially at first. But he had grown; he could handle it. He felt challenged by her in the best way possible. He knew that a college application was not enough. Not enough to adequately prove all of her astounding qualities to skimming eyes looking for SAT scores and athletics and volunteerism and debate club involvement. And he knew that she liked the idea of living in a city, but would despise the reality. The crowds, the pollution, the constant noise, the push and pull and hustle. She was a woman of this land. It was woven into her very being, as it was into his. They were relaxing into a life together. He’d even gotten Denny’s old Landcruiser running again, thinking maybe—who knew?—maybe one day Nadia would want to drive again. She’d said her dad had taught her years ago. Now that Vladimir was gone and her family knew she was alive, he could picture her eventually driving to town herself, maybe even with a couple of kids buckled in the back seat.

  But he would not say any of this to Nadia right now. He would let her open the letter and he would hold her and assure her that all would be well, because he knew it would be.

  But when she opened the letter, instead of dropping her head into her hands as he had predicted, her eyes widened and she said, “Holy damn, holy hell, holy SHIT DAMN!” and grabbed his arms and jumped up and down and then ran to the door, flung it open, and shouted, “HOLY SHIT DAMN!” once more.

  He stood in the same spot by the kitchen while she hummingbirded around him until she finally flopped herself over the arm of the futon and lay there, the missing tears making their late entrance, pooling now in her eyes.

  Kache closed the door and sat at the end of the couch. He lifted her stockinged feet and placed them in his lap and said, “I take it that means you got in?”

  She laughed and nodded, and the nod set the tears free so they slid down the sides of her temples toward her ears.

  “Nadia, I’m so proud and happy for you,” he said, and he meant it.

  She sat up and threw her arms around his neck. “You are? Really? Thank you.”

  “Of course I am. How could I not be?”

  She sat back and looked at him directly, wiping her eyes and nose with her sleeve. “Wait, let me get Kleenex,” she said before hopping up and then returning to rest her gaze on him. A particle of Kleenex stayed trapped in one of her eyebrows. “Kache, you know this means many changes for us.”

  He chuckled, though he didn’t mean to. “You’re thinking of accepting? Of actually going?”

  “No. I am not thinking. I have already thought, for many years. I am going.”

  “And how are you going to manage that?”

  “Read the letter. There is scholarship. And work studies. They say I can get a loan for the rest. And to assist me to adjust to this city living, there are people. I am part of their ‘unique circumstances’ program.”

  A scholarship? “I’m not talking about the money. I’m talking about conducting yourself in a city of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people. I’m talking about a million different stimuli bombarding your senses twenty-four hours a day.”

  “You need to stop this talk. Now.”

  “Nadia, do you need me to point out to you that you were afraid to step foot off this property because of one man who probably left Alaska a decade ago?” Kache could not believe what was pouring out of his mouth. He did need to stop. He took one deep breath, then another.

  “Are you mocking me?”

  “No. Of course not. Forget all that. Look, Nadia, I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant. You’ll go, and of course I’ll go with you. I’m really happy for you. I’m being an asshole. As cities go, San Francisco is one of the best. It will be an adventure. We can go for what? A couple of years? How long is art school?”

  Nadia stood. She crossed her arms, then uncrossed them and let them down at her sides. “Kache … you know I love you, yes? You know how grateful I am to you? I hope you can understand this thing that is very hard to understand, even for me it is hard. This is something I am afraid to ask of you. Here is where you should be. Here you are happy.”

  He held both her hands, even went down on one knee, and it all came out. “It’s because of you, I’m finally at home here. I love you, Nadia.” He said it. But that wasn’t all, and there was no more holding back; the words had a will all their own. “I want to marry you. I want us to have babies if you want that too. Marry me, marry me, Nadia. Please?”

  “Kache.” She knelt too, held his face to hers, her breath a little stale but he wanted to gulp it in anyway. “I love you. So very much. But I—I am not right for you. There is this thing I must do. This thing I must, to go and do alone. Please try to understand.”

  He stood. “Oh, that’s great.” He laughed again. His voice trembled. He was fucking out of control. “Yeah, you haven’t had enough ME time, right? Ten goddamn years was not enough. We finally found this, what we have, each other, this place, all the good goddamn stuff that everybody wants and you’re going to throw it away so you can learn how to make better videos to post on YouTube? That is perfect.”

  “Your mother was right about your sarcastic streak, I see.”

  “Would you please stop doing that? I hate that shit. You’re such a voyeur.”

  Nadia winced, still kneeling on the floor where Kache had left her. “I know you hate it. That is another reason—it cannot be right between us. All I know is you and your family. I have no me to know.”

  “That’s such classic bullshit. What, did you get that from one of my mother’s self-help books? And now we’re talking never? To think I wanted us to have kids, to be a family. What an idiot I am. We went from for always to never because of
one typed letter with an impressive letterhead? Wow, you’re loyal. I get it. You’re only loyal when you have to be. When there’s nowhere else to go.” He got up off the couch and threw the pillow they’d bought together in town and it hit the lamp they’d ordered online, which crashed to the floor. “Well, I do have somewhere to go. See ya.” He grabbed his coat and stopped to pull on his boots.

  Nadia finally rose from her knees. “Is that why you push me to see my family? Knowing they will not accept me? Knowing I will only have you, your family, your house, your history?”

  “Nadia. Is that what you think?”

  “I do not know what I think! What is me, and what is—”

  “I’ve gotta get out of here.”

  She grabbed his arm. “No, I’ll go. This is your home.”

  “How will you go?”

  “What about the Spit Tune? You are supposed to play there again tonight, yes?”

  “I’ll still do it. You’re worried you won’t be able to film it, is that it? You can drive the Landcruiser. Drive yourself there.” He pulled away from her.

  “I have enough footage.”

  “That’s what I thought. You’ve gotten everything you need.”

  “Kache, this you do not understand. I do not mean to hurt you. I do not want you to feel like your grandfather.”

  “My grandfather? What, did you find a journal of his too?”

  Nadia wept so hard that Leo started whining, pressing his nose against her legs and hands. The Kleenex was now useless, and Kache watched her try to stop the deluge on her face with both sleeves of her sweater. He grabbed his scarf off the coat rack and handed it to her.

  He wanted to hold her, to tell her again how much he loved her and wanted her to stay, but instead he stepped over the ice and mud to his truck, started it, and turned the radio up so loud he heard nothing else, not the engine roaring, or Nadia crying, or Leo whining, or the voice in his head telling him he was quite the asshole, after all.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  Kache had nowhere to go but Snag’s. A Honda sat next to her truck in the carport—Gilly’s, no doubt. He knocked on the door and waited. He didn’t remember ever knocking on Snag’s door.

  She called to come in and waved through the kitchen window. They both said hi and stood in the living room while Gilly grabbed her keys and purse and headed back to work. After she left, Snag started to get her cleaning supplies out, but Kache took her arm and pulled her back into the living room. They both sat, Snag in her rocker and Kache on the sofa, and Kache dropped his head into his hands.

  “Oh hon. Does that mean you forgive me?”

  He nodded. “We all wish we’d handled things differently.” Was it fair to blame Snag for falling in love with his mom? It turned out he and Snag both fell for smart, brave, kind women they couldn’t have. He was so tempted to turn on the television but he let the sadness keep rolling in until it filled every corner of the room, of him.

  In time, Snag cleared her throat and began to speak. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you, Kache. It’s a long story, but I want you to know it.”

  Kache nodded, then leaned back on the couch to listen.

  “I was home from college, cleaning windows for the summer. One day your mom talks me into playing hooky from work. We head toward Anchorage, up by Turnagain Arm, and the tide was out, coming in, but still way out there. This is long before they put up all those warning signs. Bets got an inkling that we should go clamming. ‘Oh, Snag, let’s!’ she said. She had never been, and of course I wanted to be the first to take her so I said, ‘Why not?’ I had pails in the back of the truck for cleaning windows, and I always kept a shovel and a couple pairs of hip boots on hand.”

  She told Kache how the extra hip boots had been his dad’s and four sizes too big, but Bets wore them anyway, and Snag teased her about swimming in boots before they ever got to the water. “But she traipsed along against the wind—your mom always was such a trooper—her hood tied tight around her head like a little kid.” Snag gave her a couple of pointers about looking for the indent in the sand and how you had to dig fast before the clam burrowed itself deeper. “Pretty soon I was loading my pail and Bets had gone off to load up her own. I got lost in the hunt, and next thing I know, Bets is yelling, ‘Snag! Help! I’m stuck in the sand!’”

  Snag said she looked up and her heart stopped. “You know that crude saying about the Alaskan tide comes faster than a sailor just home from leave? It was never so true.” Bets had gone out too far, and Snag saw where the darker glacial silt, the stuff they call Alaskan quicksand, began. There was no way Snag could reach her without getting stuck herself. Soon the water swirled around Bets’ ankles.

  “Any other person would have been screaming their fool head off. But not your mom. She stayed calm, staring down the waves. Such dignity. She yelled over the wind, ‘Snag Winkel, don’t you go blaming yourself for this, okay? I should have never insisted in the first place, and then to wander out here like an idiot. I’m a few rungs short of a full ladder.’ She was thinking of me while she faced her death head on. And then she hollered, ‘Wait, the ladder!’”

  Snag told him she’d understood immediately. She tore up to the parking lot and drove the truck right onto the beach, stopping to check the sand so she could get as close to Bets as possible. She pulled open the long steel ladder and with every ounce of strength she had, flung it out and aimed it at Bets, who, eventually, was able to grab the end of it. Snag rested the other end on the tail of the truck bed and, with Snag’s guidance, Bets pulled one leg out of the oversized hip boot, and then the other and crawled up the ladder and onto the truck bed and into Snag’s embrace.

  “She had been so brave, so composed. We clung on for dear life and kissed each other’s wet freezing cold cheeks and I remember the taste of salt—all mixed in from our tears and our sweat and the ocean—and we swore we’d never tell a soul how stupid we’d been, how close we’d come to tragedy, and I kept that promise until now.”

  Kache leaned forward, let his elbows rest on his knees. “Wow. My mom always warned us about those mudflats but never said she had personal experience with them.”

  “The reason I’m telling you all this now, Kache? When that plane went down, I think your mom somehow gave them courage like she’d given it to me. In those split seconds? When someone else would have been screaming obscenities, she took in all their fear and wrapped them in all her love and acceptance. That’s who she was.”

  Kache liked hearing this about his mom. But he knew Snag was wrong about one thing. He shook his head. “It’s nice to tell ourselves these stories, ease our survivor’s guilt. But no. You know they were scared shitless, Mom included, no matter how brave she was, no matter how amazing she was and no matter how none of them deserved to die that way. They did. And it was fucking terrifying. Every goddamn second of it. You know it and I know it. And to make it less than that seems cowardly. There’s no way we can rely on lines like, ‘At least they didn’t suffer,’ because they did, and we can’t say, ‘At least they’re in a better place’ because there was no better place to the three of them than that homestead.”

  Kache took a deep breath. “We’ll never know if Dad was thinking of you or me or anything other than getting through the cloud-filled corridor. We’ll never know, Snag. All we know is that they died and we’ll miss them every single day for the rest of our lives.”

  And then he went on. He couldn’t stop talking. He told her about Nadia and the fight.

  Snag said, “You are so much like your dad.”

  “You mean my mom.”

  “Well, that too. But you’ve definitely got some Winkel in you.”

  “Such as?”

  “Winkels never forget anything.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, I’ve definitely got that gene.”

  “Which is why I know you didn’t just forget to ask for Nadia’s school papers.”

  He stared at her. “Yes I did.”

  “Hon, if you really
want to call off the bullshit, let’s be consistent. You didn’t want her going off to art school, just like your dad didn’t want you going off to music school. I’m not saying it was completely conscious. But we instinctively want to keep those we love close and safe. Problem is, irony kicks in when we try to play that game. Your dad, for instance, used to say how rock and rollers always died in plane crashes.”

  “He did not.”

  “He did.”

  Kache ran his finger down his nose. “He just hated my music.”

  “Then why did I always catch him on the nights your band played, parked outside the Spit Tune with the heater blasting and his windows rolled down?”

  “You did not.”

  “I did.” She sighed. “Your daddy loved you, Kache. He just had strange ways of showing it sometimes. But you’ve got your mama in you too. You can do better than he did.”

  Kache leaned back against the sofa cushion and stared at a crack in the plaster. “I guess I won’t be needing to stay here tonight after all.”

  “Well, there’s a piece of good news.” She stretched and hugged him, said she had to run some errands, that she’d see him later at the Spit Tune. Kache tried Nadia’s cellphone but it went straight to voicemail. He thought she might at least charge it after he’d left. He had an hour to kill—not enough time to drive out and apologize before the show. So he grabbed his guitar, sat back down, and started playing with a song idea that had come to him on his way into town.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  In Kache’s old room, where she’d slept for the ten years before he came back, she patted the bottom bunk to tell Leo it was okay, and he curled up at her feet and watched her, worrying.

  She never imagined that a dream coming true would be so difficult. She never thought it possible to love someone this much and still feel it might be right to say goodbye. She loved him more than she’d ever imagined caring for another person. But still Nadia felt that what she had to offer him lacked a wholeness.