Wild At Heart: A Novel

by Tucker, K. A.

  “Isn’t this our private lake?”

  “Yup.” He sucks back a sip from his bottle of beer. “Phil probably didn’t care, though.”

  “Phil was probably already unconscious from whiskey by now.” My focus trails the departing taillights. “Wonder if they trespass on Roy’s property, too.”

  “I hope so. Screw Roy.” He frowns as he inspects the sliver in his index finger, earned while fussing with the gate into the animal pen earlier.

  “How’s Bandit doing out there with his new friend?”

  Jonah chuckles. “He’s confused. I cleaned out the chicken coop and locked him in there for the night so they can see each other but they’re separated.” He drags his index finger along a row of book spines on the bookshelf tucked beneath the stairs. It’s stuffed with dust-covered books, magazines, and board games.

  Much like every other corner of this house, stuffed with one thing or another. I opened a closet earlier and was assaulted by an avalanche of mismatched Tupperware containers.

  “I don’t know where to start,” I admit, fumbling with the stack of black garbage bags, my gaze drifting to the garish five-light chandelier hanging above. It’s too small for the double-story room, and three of its bulbs have burned out. “Did you see a ladder anywhere?” Phil has left everything else. He must have left a ladder, too.

  “Think I saw one in the workshop. We’ll get to that tomorrow.” Jonah stretches his arms above his head as he saunters over to me. “Start with this.” He tops up my wine to brimming. “And this.” He flips open the lid on a pizza box—the one without cheese, for me—that we grabbed at the only pizza shop in Trapper’s Crossing on our way home. “I’ll haul the mattress upstairs and we can make our bed. And then we’ll crack that bottle of champagne and relax. Tomorrow, we’ll start dealing with everything else.”

  “You make it sound so easy.” My arm feels heavy as I reach for my drink. My mental exhaustion has drained me.

  He gently clinks the neck of his bottle against my glass. “It is.”

  “I’m glad you think so.” I plaster on an innocent smile and pat the extra-large yellow rubber gloves on the counter. “Because these are for you, to scrub the drunk-man pee off that bathroom floor up there.”

  He slips my glass from my hand and scoops me into his arms. “Told you, Calla, I don’t care. I have you and my planes, we have this place …” His eyes are bright and wistful as they roam the beams in the pitched ceiling. “We have it all.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “What did the contract say?”

  “I’d have to go back and check.”

  “Well, you must be able to do something.” My mother’s astonished tone carries well over the phone’s speaker, even from thousands of miles away. “Bill him for a cleaning company or for your time. At the very least, you need to complain to the agent. Didn’t they inspect it before you arrived?”

  I stifle my groan, knowing I’m about to get an earful as I admit, “There was no agent. It was a private sale.” A lawyer in Wasilla managed all the paperwork—the contract, the title and lien search, and a bunch of other things I don’t care to know about.

  “No agent!” She makes a sound. “Well, no wonder!” To say my mother is unimpressed that we haven’t heeded her warnings and rented rather than bought is a glaring understatement.

  “I’m sure it saved them some money on commission fees, Susan.” Simon’s typically calm voice is a challenge. I can picture them squaring off in the living room—my mom with her face painted and her hair coiffed, spearing Simon with an exasperated look; Simon, with his afternoon cup of tea in hand and a BBC special on mute in the background, his eyebrows arched in a “she’s a grown woman, living with a grown man, making her own decisions and mistakes” way.

  “We did save money. Phil knocked the price down by six percent,” I confirm, reaching deep into the cabinet with a gloved hand to fish out something metal from the corner. I frown at the manual hand beater that appears. Likely forgotten about decades ago. One for the donation box. “Whatever. It’s not the end of the world. The upstairs is completely cleared out and we’re making good headway down here.” Four days in and we’ve turned over decades’ worth of household goods and sentimental junk from almost every cupboard. Our main floor looks like a hoarder’s paradise but there’s a system to the chaos—boxes line the narrow hallway, waiting for Jonah to haul burnables to the fire; items worth keeping are piled on the kitchen counters and the small dining table, for washing and organizing later; donations for the local Salvation Army fill the living room floor. Everything else goes straight into a black plastic bag. There are seventeen bags of trash and counting.

  “And the old owner doesn’t want any of it?” My mother can’t seem to get past her abhorrence.

  “Nope.” I climb to my feet and head for the living room, where we’ve pushed aside the floppy couch and scuffed side tables to make room. “Jonah called him yesterday. He said to throw out whatever we don’t want.”

  “That’s bizarre.” My mom’s sigh carries over the speaker. “Where’s Jonah, anyway?”

  “At the fire pit.” He’s been out there since the sky began to lighten this morning. The plume of smoke that rises is dark and thick and full of ash, and every time he comes in to swap an empty box for a full one, he carries with him the scent of charred paper and burnt wood.

  Not that I can complain. I’ve been cleaning in the same clothes for the past four days—a baggy sweatshirt and a pair of sweatpants that I found in a dresser full of women’s clothes in the bedroom. They’re now coated in grime, dust, and cleaner.

  “Have you had a chance to photograph anything good yet?” Simon asks, with a glimmer of excitement. He once admitted that, at one point in his life, he dreamed of being a nature photographer. My own skills with the camera—his Canon that I have claimed as my own—are in part thanks to his amateur teachings.

  I smile, silently thanking him for shifting off the topic of this house. “No. Jonah said he saw a fox running along the tree line, down by the hangar, but I’ve been too busy inside cleaning to do much of anything else.” I haven’t even pulled my camera out. Diana has been harassing me to share something online, but I haven’t wrapped my head around this disaster to decide how I want to frame it for spectators.

  “Don’t get too close for the sake of a picture,” Mom warns. “Even a moose can turn on you.”

  “I don’t think that’s something we need to worry about with Calla,” Simon says dryly.

  We chatter for another five minutes before Mom signals an end to the conversation. “Well, I guess we should let you get back to it.”

  “Yeah, I’m gonna tackle these valances next.” I stretch my arms over my head, wincing with the ache in my lower back and shoulders. I long for a long, hot soak in the bathtub.

  “Ugh. Valances. I’ve never understood the point.”

  “Right?”

  “Say hi to Jonah for us.”

  “I will. And figure out when you’re coming!”

  We end the call as Jonah’s voice carries in.

  “… refuses to go back there if he’s there. Bandit seems okay with him so far, at least.” The front door creaks open.

  “I’ll ask around and see if anyone is interested,” comes a familiar female voice.

  “Somethin’ tells me there aren’t many people looking for a useless old goat who hates men. Hey, Calla, Marie’s here!” Jonah calls out, as the tall, willowy woman steps into our house.

  I peel off my rubber gloves and toss them aside before turning to meet Marie’s teal-blue eyes. It’s been two months since we last saw her, when she flew to Bangor to provide veterinarian services to the villagers.

  And now she’s here, living only fifteen minutes away.

  “Hi, Calla,” she offers, her hands fidgeting around a house plant and a gift bag in the shape of a liquor bottle. “I thought I’d stop by to see how you guys were doing.”

  I drag my fingers back through my hair, smooth
ing my wayward topknot. “It’s good to see you.” And it genuinely is good to see a familiar face while we’re in the depths of house-purging hell, even if Marie and I have exchanged little more than polite conversation and I’m one hundred percent positive she’s in love with my boyfriend.

  Marie tucks the gift bag under one arm, freeing a hand to brush a strand of long, golden-blonde hair off her face. She tucks it behind her ear. “So …” She edges around the mountain of trash bags. “How’s it going?”

  “Well … I’m wearing a dead woman’s clothes while I go through her belongings. I just found a hemorrhoid cushion in the back of the hallway closet. I’ve broken every fingernail, and I’m seriously considering opening a bottle of wine at”—I glance at my watch—“noon.”

  Marie presses her lips together to hide her smile, her gaze pausing on the bleach stains that I earned yesterday while on my hand and knees scrubbing the main-floor bath. “You look great. But you always do.”

  “Thanks, but I look like a vagabond,” I counter, borrowing a favorite word of Simon’s.

  Marie’s appearance is more polished than her usually casual, fresh-faced style. She’s still in jeans, but the sweater showing through her opened winter coat is pink and hugs her slender body. A light dusting of shadow coats her eyelids, a stroke of brown mascara makes her already thick fringe of lashes longer, and the beachy waves in her hair were likely created by an iron.

  I wonder if this is how she looks when she’s not the crusader, flying around Western Alaska, or if she put extra effort in, coming here today?

  Marie laughs and her focus drifts over the space. “There’s a lot of stuff here.”

  “They were married for fifty years. Do you have any idea what this is?” I ask, tapping a round plastic appliance I found in the pantry closet.

  Her nose crinkles in thought. “I think that’s a dehydrator. You know, to dehydrate fruits and vegetables and …” Her words drift as she takes in my grimace. “Some people like it.”

  I swiftly carry it over to the donate pile.

  “Anything else to burn today?” Jonah asks, shifting the empty cardboard box on the floor with his boot.

  “That stuff.” I cast a wayward hand at the pile in the corner.

  “You want me to burn our living room furniture?” Jonah looks at me, amusement in his tone.

  “It’s not ours. It’s Phil’s. We’re getting all new stuff. And why not? It’s mostly wood.”

  “How about we wait until we have something to replace it with, so we’re not sittin’ on the floor. And then I’ll take it all to the dump. Someone else can use it.”

  “Someone’s going to pull that couch out of the dump and bring it home?”

  “One man’s trash … Anything else for the fire before I put it out?”

  “Those?” I nod toward the wall of animal trophies.

  Jonah glares at me the same way he did when I tossed an old, tattered book into the burn box. “We’re not burning those.”

  “Fine. Then, just me,” I grumble, reaching back to rub the painful knots in my neck, wincing with the ache. “End my suffering.” I’m desperate to have an empty, clean house to start with.

  Jonah saunters over and drops his rough hands on my shoulders to kneads them with skilled fingers.

  I let out a deep groan of appreciation.

  “I take it that helps?” He dips his head to press a kiss against my jawline.

  Marie averts her gaze, staring intently at a cheap, framed poster print of Denali National Park that I haven’t yet taken down. Is it to give us privacy? Or is it to avoid the inevitable sting that comes with watching someone you care about being intimate with someone else? Jonah may be oblivious, but I’m not. I’m also not naive. You can’t just turn off feelings for someone because they love someone else, as much as most people would like to.

  What if our roles were reversed? What if Jonah and I were “just friends” and I had to stand idly by and watch him fall in love with another woman?

  A sharp prick of sympathy stabs my chest at that thought.

  “To be continued later,” I whisper, giving him a knowing look as I slip my hands over his, squeezing them until they stall.

  Jonah steals one last kiss from my neck before stepping away. “You got big plans for today, Marie?”

  She refocuses her attention on him. “I didn’t, but I just got called for an emergency as I was pulling in here. I have to head back to take care of a sick cat. Otherwise I would have offered to help you guys.”

  “Run. Save yourself while you can!” I moan.

  Jonah playfully swats my backside. “Got time for a quick tour?”

  “A really quick one?”

  “That works. I need to get this hellion out of here before she burns the entire place down.” He cups the back of my neck, giving it another rub. “What do you think? Drive into Wasilla to check out some new furniture?”

  “A couch?” I ask, excitement stirring in my sore limbs.

  He smirks. “Sure.”

  My hopes for finding something suitable are not high but the idea of going somewhere—anywhere—has me saying goodbye to Marie and rushing upstairs to shower in our dingy, dark bathroom with newfound energy.

  * * *

  “Calla, wake up.” A gentle hand jostles my shoulder.

  I whimper. Every muscle in my body aches.

  “Come on. You gotta see this.”

  “Is it the northern lights again?”

  He chuckles. “It’s almost nine. The sun’s already coming up. Come on.”

  I crack my eyelids to find Jonah already dressed and holding the red terry-cloth robe I bought at the Wasilla Target the other day.

  “This better be worth it.” With a shiver, I pull myself out of bed and trail Jonah downstairs. The gentle gurgle of my father’s coffeemaker brewing a fresh pot carries through our empty main floor. Seven days in and everything of Phil’s that we’ve decided not to keep is gone, to the dump or the thrift shop, or charred to ash. Even the animal heads have found a temporary home in the workshop because I couldn’t handle them watching me anymore. And after three days of spelling out all the disgusting things that have likely spilled into the moss-green sisal rug, Jonah finally agreed to roll it up and drag it outside. He’s left it next to the old couch that I also made him remove, in preparation of our new one arriving Friday from a warehouse in Anchorage.

  I wasn’t expecting to find anything in the furniture shop in Wasilla when we went that day but, lo and behold, they had the perfect midcentury modern sectional in a dark briar-gray tweed material. Of course, Jonah balked at the price tag. It took two days of whittling him down until I threw it on my credit card and told him he needs to get on board. I am far more excited than I ever thought I could be about a couch.

  All that’s left in the house are piles of things I need to clean and organize, furniture that we’ll use until we can replace with new purchases, and a thousand repairs and improvements to make—wood floors to refinish, bathrooms to remodel, nail holes to fill, cracked outlet covers to swap out, door handles to tighten, hinges to oil, appliances to replace. The list goes on and it’s daunting at times, but we have time. Most importantly, though, this log cabin is finally starting to feel like ours and not Phil’s.

  I turn toward the kitchen and coffeemaker, but Jonah loops an arm around my waist and pulls me in the opposite direction, past the crackling fire in the stone hearth, and toward the living room bay window.

  “Oh, wow …” Two moose stand at the edge of the frozen lake no more than thirty feet away, grazing on dead foliage. The entire vista before me is awe-inspiring—the vast expanse of freshly fallen, crisp snow, the sun that has been hiding behind cloud cover for days on end visible and climbing, its yellow glow bouncing off the stark, white landscape blinding in its intensity. Not until we moved in did I truly appreciate our house’s location—on a peninsula of sorts, where we get the morning sunrise from the east and the evening sunset from the west.

  �
��They’re probably gonna disappear the second I start the tractor to clear the snow,” he murmurs low in my ear, as if they can hear us. And maybe they can.

  “That one on the left is huge.” I’ve only ever seen moose from the air, flying above.

  “Yeah. She’s probably nine hundred … maybe a thousand pounds. The males can weigh up to eighteen hundred.”

  “How do you know it’s a she? I mean …” I tip my head to the side, but I can’t see anything from this angle.

  Jonah chuckles. “Definitely that, or the fact that she has no antlers. The males lose their antlers every winter, but they start growing new ones right away.”

  “Well, aren’t you a wealth of knowledge.”

  “You know, this is all in that wildlife book I gave you for Christmas. That you told me you’ve already read.”

  “I was just testing you,” I lie, the humor in my voice betraying me.

  “Uh-huh.” He smirks. “The smaller one beside her is a bull calf. She probably had him last summer.”

  The two enormous animals continue to graze, undisturbed and seemingly unaware of our presence, though the mother’s ears twitch a few times. “I need to get a picture of this before they leave.” I make to move but Jonah’s hands on my hips hold me in place.

  “Don’t worry, they tend to stay within a five-mile radius so you’ll be seeing them around. Just don’t get too close.” He steals a kiss from my neck.

  I lean back against Jonah’s chest, content as we watch the mother and her baby. “I’m shocked Phil didn’t add them to the wall.”

  “Nah. He would have liked having the wildlife around here.”

  And so do I, I realize, as I take in the picturesque scene. “Okay. Fine. You’re allowed to wake me up for stuff like this.”

  His deep chuckles carry through the quiet morning, earning another twitch of the moose’s ears.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Do you think we can fit a bigger tub in here?”