Five wives behind him,
What’s he gonna do?
“Sells his pottery, they say, for a thousand and two.
I’m only thirty-eight, so whoop-de-do.
Man, I think I’m coming down with the flu.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure
I’m coming down with the flu.”
He kept playing while he watched Nadia at the computer, her earrings catching the light. He sang, “If you look closer, it’s easy to trace, the track on Nadia’s ears, whoa, oh.” She kept typing. “Nadia?”
She looked up but kept her fingers on the keys. She had taught herself to type on his mother’s old typewriter. Of course she had. “Yes?”
“You know that story I told you about our dog Walter and the cliff?”
She nodded.
“You insisted my father might have gone down there after him. Why do you think that?”
She tilted her head. “Why do you ask?”
“I keep thinking about it…and some other things. You’re either psychic or… Did you know my mom somehow? Or did Lettie tell you? And, if so, what can you tell me about Walter?”
She studied the keys in front of her, dropped her hands to her sides, scrunched her fingers under her thighs.
She took a deep breath and said, “Your mother’s diaries.”
He watched her watching him. Outside, a few of the goats berated one another. “But Aunt Snag told me years ago, right after the accident, that she burned them. And I saw her take them out of the trunk.”
“No, you must come with me.” She set the computer down on the couch next to her, and Kache followed her upstairs, up to his parents’ room, to her hiding place in the closet, to the cardboard box. It was true that Snag had packed them in a box, but it was also true that she had not followed through and burned them.
“So you’ve read some of these? She said they weren’t that kind of journal—she never wanted anyone to read them. Snag had explicit instructions to burn them.”
“I think we know by now that your aunt Snag, she does not keep promises about these things.”
“Did you read some of them?”
“Kache, I am sorry. I was alone, and the loneliness tightens my bones. Like a friend, your mother felt to me.”
“So how many have you read?”
She bowed her head, her hair still sticking up in the back. “I have read them all. Many, many times.”
He sucked in air. “Were you planning on telling me? Or just letting me think you had all this intuition and wise insight? That you just instinctively knew when to hand me my guitar? Or how to make my favorite casserole? Or weird shit, like the way you organize the pantry by colors? None of that’s you, right? It’s just you mimicking my mother, because you’ve had no life of your own.” He stood and walked the length of the bedroom, still gripping the neck of his guitar. “Why don’t you just change your name to Bets? Or better yet, why don’t you tell me why you didn’t learn things from your own mother? Since you know every goddamn thing about me since I was born—from when I said my first word and when I took my first shit to the night I screamed at my father to go fucking kill something—why don’t you tell me one goddamn thing about you?”
He waited for her to bolt, to take Leo and run into her room—his old room—and lock the door, but she didn’t. She stood there, taking it.
“It was wrong of me. I knew when I was reading that her writing, this was not intended for anyone but herself. Yet I could not stop. It was so much a comfort. I believe her words; they keep me alive. The books, yes. And your mother’s words also. Do you understand what I say? Alone, it would be okay to slip out of this life. But I was having a mom and a best friend and a sister all at once that kept me here. And you and Denny, you were brothers to me.”
“Great.” Kache stopped himself from saying she probably liked Denny better anyway. Jesus. Was he still a teenager? “This is way too weird. You’re a Russian spy, a blond voyeur who’s been sitting here absorbing everything I’ve been avoiding for the last twenty years.”
“Perhaps this is time for you to read some of your mother’s words.”
“And go against her wishes? No. See, I respect her.”
She picked one up. It had a blue tattered cover. “Start with this one.”
“I guess I should pay heed to your recommendation, since you’re the head librarian of my mother’s soul.”
“This is dramatic thing you say. To read them all is not necessary. But read this one at the least. And this one.” She handed him another notebook with a red cover.
He took them only so she wouldn’t have them, threw them in the box, took that too, and headed downstairs. He wanted to get into the truck and drive away, but he stood in the living room instead, holding his mother in his arms. Her journals had not been burned. She was there, in the box, and Nadia knew her better than he did.
Dust motes danced in the sunlight, the only things in the house that weren’t stagnant. The same photos, the same afghan draped over the back of the couch. The same doodads and trinkets, the same three throw pillows, the same yellowed magazines, the same carpets, the same mismatched lamps. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was. He would chop some wood. That would be better than a drive, better than standing here, and it might help clear his head. Nadia had taught him a trick or two about chopping wood, and he had become much better at it than he had been as a teenager. That was something new.
He carried the box outside and set it down next to him. He almost saw his dad, walking in front of him, that apelike gait, hunched over, determined, not just walking the land but taking it on. Swinging the ax with equal parts ease and force. The crack through the logs might have been his voice. Then a flash of movement in the peripheral. He turned his head but saw nothing. This was different from the clear memories of his dad—and it had happened a few times. He was sure it was a wild animal minding its own business, but sometimes he felt like maybe his dad or Denny really were watching him, assessing his new skills. Crazy.
As Kache split and stacked the wood, he wished he could split his thoughts that cleanly and pull them apart. Throw his love for this place in this pile, the haunting sadness of it and the strange tricks his mind insisted on playing in that one. His desire to hold Nadia’s jewel of a face up to his? In the first pile. The weird fact that she knew more about his early life than he did would go in the other pile. And so on, sorting it out, splitting the darkness and the light until he had enough to build a bonfire of the darkness and build a life with all the rest.
Enough to build a bonfire. Would he burn the journals?
He had said mean things to Nadia, things he already regretted. But…like a brother? Add the fact that she kept doing things that reminded him of his mother. There was Freud again, fingers on chin, nodding. But if you took all that away, which would happen in time, once they knew each other, the real person would emerge and not just these glimpses through the ghosts. He needed to know more about her—her, Nadia. He didn’t even know her last name. Why exactly was she here? A fair question. A start. She had listened to his rage and hadn’t run for cover. She was getting stronger day by day, just as he was. She could handle some gentle interrogation now without running to hide under the bed. But then her answers would move into the house too, along with all the ghosts and all the relics.
Shit, the place was already way past crowded.
Even so, he wouldn’t burn those journals. He couldn’t. Nadia still needed them. Maybe he did too.
He stuck the ax into the stump and started stacking the wood.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SEVEN
Lettie and A. R. hurried to get the cabin done before winter busted in. While she split wood, aiming for the tree stump beneath the log, instead of for the log—Frank Newberry had taught her that after she’d hounded him—she lost herself in the rhythm of it. Up, back, over, c
rack, pull, her feet planted out to the sides. Up, back, over, crack, pull. Muddy? Hell yes. Her feet, her trousers, her hair even. Up, back, over, crack, pull.
The rhythm of it reminded her of the rhythm of the wooden swing her father had hung for her when she was small, intending it to amuse her for a year or two until she outgrew it. But she never outgrew the swing, not really. From the first time she got it going by herself, pumping her thick legs hard enough, she thought, Leave the adults indoors to do their washing and futzing; this is what they mean when they sing those songs, with their hopeful words and their tears, despite themselves, slipping down their cheeks: “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” If she kept trying, maybe she might touch heaven with her toes; it certainly seemed possible from her perspective in the swing. “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” It never happened like that exactly. But sometimes, with the sun just so on her face, sometimes she had a feeling. The breeze picked up her hair and smoothed it back from her face as if something—or someone maybe—was telling her she was indeed beautiful. She knew she was not, was quite plain, in fact—big-rumped, wide-faced, and bespectacled as she was—though everyone agreed she had a fine nose. But that feeling. She thought it might be the presence of God everyone talked about. She didn’t feel compelled to define it. The presence of love? She didn’t know the answer. She didn’t have to. But it was because of that silly swing that, in her own small way, she did believe in miracles, in mystery.
So it wasn’t beyond her scope of belief when, after three months in Alaska, she, Lettie Winkel, missed her first period. And then her second. At age thirty-four, she was going to be a mother. A mother. She watched the other women with interest. How those with babies let them suckle at their full breasts. How a woman might take her toddler’s face in her hands, kiss his forehead, and pat him on his bottom as he turned to seek out more mischief. How they were always, always tending to meals, whether it be preparing, dishing up, washing up, or putting away. And in the middle of this, Lettie stood, her hand on her belly, amazed. The wonder!
There was the nausea, exhaustion too. She fought the intense desire to lie down and sleep the next seven months away, to become a bear, perhaps. But her desire to finish the cabin won out. Now it had to be done. And A. R., so tickled about the baby he seemed more energetic, even sang while he fit logs, started the chinking.
They finished just before the first snow. Huddled inside, with two small windows and a door, Lettie and A. R. were as proud and giggly as two kids who’d just finished their very own blanket fort on a clothesline pole.
“I love you, Lettie,” he said to her that night. Ran his hand over and over her stomach. “You were right, you know. About coming here. It was the right thing for us.”
“Because of the baby?”
“Well, the baby, yeah. But not just the baby. It’s you. And me too.”
The snow gave the land a singularity of purpose. During the summer, there was so much to do, so much to see, taste, touch, smell, hear. But in the winter, it was the silence she heard. Whiteness was what she smelled, touched, tasted, saw. A big, thick blanket tucked around her, summoning her to do nothing but rest in the womb of the cabin. And wait.
Inside her too, the baby rested. Waited. Moved about. The baby was all she thought about, it seemed. She touched her belly and closed her eyes. Tried to imagine the unseen face, the unheard cry. Tried to feel the knob of the baby’s head inside her, imagine it curled into the nape of her neck, where she stroked its tiny hairs with her own strong and able fingers.
One of the younger women commented on Lettie’s age. She hadn’t meant to be unkind, but it stung. Certainly, Lettie wasn’t young, but women older than her became mothers. She looked out and felt as cragged and ancient as the mountains. But the jolt inside her, a romp like a bear cub, and then another, said something else. There was one window of opportunity for Lettie to be a mother (perhaps it was more like the tiny porthole on that slamming ship), and this was it.
She was embarking on change as deep and quick as the Alaskan tides. She knew then she wasn’t having a baby. She was having two babies. She knew it in the marrow of those tired bones, where earned wisdom flowed. And if she could survive the birth—Oh please, let me survive it—she would be the best damn mother any of those younger women had ever laid their clear, wide eyes on.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-EIGHT
Snag sat, watching her mother breathe. The in, the out, the up, the down of Lettie’s breath filled Snag’s own chest with a sweet sadness—gratitude for what had been, dread of what was to come.
She started singing her mom’s favorite song. “The water is wide. I can’t cross over. And neither have I wings to fly…”
Gilly stuck her head through the doorway. “I just love that song. You are one sweet daughter, Snag Winkel. Sweet voice too.” And then she was gone down the hall in a flurry of nurse busyness.
Snag felt her cheeks go red and turned back to her mom. “Build me a boat, that can carry two…” Theirs had been an easy mother-daughter relationship, as far as mother-daughter relationships went. Snag grew up worshipping the ground Lettie walked on, which also happened to be the ground Lettie worshipped. Because Lettie’s religion, if you chose to call it that, was steeped in those four hundred acres overlooking Kachemak Bay. Lettie told Snag she’d only been half alive before she and A. R. moved to Alaska from Kansas. She was even convinced whatever had caused her infertility had died on the boat trip up; Lettie arrived on this shore, suddenly Mrs. Fertile Myrtle. As a token of her gratitude for Snag and Glenn, she’d offered up herself—with years and years of hard work and dedication to their land.
But Alaska was the same land that had taken away not only Glenn, but Bets and dear Denny too. When Snag had brought that up once after the accident, Lettie had said she didn’t see it that way. They’d loved their lives here in Alaska, doing what they enjoyed. Sure, they might not have gotten in a plane crash if they’d lived in LA or Tallahassee, but who was to say? Lettie didn’t blame Alaska for the accident. But she might blame her daughter, once she heard the whole story.
When Lettie woke, Snag didn’t waste any time. “Mom, I really need to talk with you.”
Lettie rubbed her eyes and reached for her glasses. “Last time I tried to have a heart-to-heart with you, you ran out of the room. Or crawled was more like it.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking of everything you said. Thinking and thinking. All this time, I didn’t know you had a clue about me, and I wonder why we didn’t talk about this back when it would have been helpful—back when I was a young woman instead of an old lady.”
“You’ve still got time to get it right.” Lettie sighed. “But that’s no excuse for me. I thought I was being a good mom to keep quiet and let you find your way. But we didn’t live in an area where you got much guidance. It wasn’t like we had a gay pride parade on the spit. You could have used some straight talk about being a lesbian. There, I said it.”
Snag’s ears felt hot. The heat spread down her chest, and she took off her cardigan.
“But I felt ill-equipped back then,” Lettie continued. “Honey, I didn’t even know what a lesbian was when I was growing up.”
“I didn’t either. I thought I had a horrible affliction.”
“That’s my fault. Because, by then, I knew better and should’ve helped.” Lettie leaned in and lowered her voice. “And then the whole thing with Bets.”
Snag stared at her mom, her ears pounding. “Wait. You knew?”
“It was obvious you always had feelings for her. It wasn’t a big secret.”
“It wasn’t?” Snag felt the blush wash over her from forehead to toes. They kept the place so warm.
“Not to me, anyway. It was all over you every day.”
“Oh. That’s great, Mom. Thanks.”
“Honey. You can’t hide what you can’t hide.” Lettie took Snag’s hand in her own even more brown-spotted, ve
in-mapped one. They sat in the silence for a while, Lettie drawing her thumb back and forth over Snag’s knuckles, the way she had since Snag was a little girl, as if each knuckle were a large, treasured pearl.
Snag finally spoke. “Since we’re confessing all today”—though Snag was decidedly not confessing all—“I have a question for you.”
“Go ahead.”
“You’re not taking your pink pill, are you?”
“Hell no.”
“And you know you will probably die without it?”
“I know I’ll die with it or without it, and I know I’m ninety-eight. I’m sufficiently aware of the consequences.”
Snag bent over Lettie and cradled her in her arms, and her mother grabbed onto her shoulders. They held each other while the squeak of a cart went past the room. Snag was sixty-five years old, and she wanted to stay right there, forever and a day, finally fully exposed but still tight in this nook of arms where she’d always felt safe.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-NINE
Kache lay on the bed in Aunt Snag’s guest room and turned to the place in his mother’s journal that Nadia had marked with a cloudberry leaf. This is what he read:
FIGHT IN WINTER
We woke to the aluminum morning
Our fight hanging low over us
Like smoke in the cold.
Outside the smoke from our chimney fails
To rise, carves an ugly road that runs
Parallel to earth but goes nowhere.
On a warmer day, the smoke could sail.
In a warmer place, it would lift easily as a sigh
Instead of lie here a scar.
He closed the notebook. He had a decision to make. He knew Bets Winkel one way, as a boy knows his mother. She’d made it clear these notebooks were for her eyes only, and he had always honored that. Truth be told, he hadn’t had the slightest hint of interest as a kid. But those few lines revealed a side to her he’d never even glimpsed. Was he meant to? After all these years, he still missed her, at times even desperately. But he realized he missed his idea of her, because he never got the chance to know her fully. He only knew her in relation to him. She was the one who had fed him, taught him, stuck up for him, encouraged him. Who was Bets Winkel when she wasn’t mothering him? And did he have a right to know all the things that Nadia already knew?
All the Winters After Page 16
