All the Winters After

by Seré Prince Halverson

  All this walking—past junkyards and abundant summer gardens, along busy streets packed with motor homes, and up dirt roads in desperate need of grading—created a pleasant side effect, which for the first time in her life was simply a side effect and not a long-sought-after but elusive goal: Snag was beginning to lose weight. For the first time that she could remember, her pants were baggy. Her shirts were loose. Even her bras had room to spare. And people were beginning to notice, paying her compliments, telling her how great she looked when she dropped off their latest order of laundry detergent or vitamins.

  She did not look great, exactly. But she did look better, and she was happy about that. She felt lighter physically, and she also felt lighter in her soul since she’d talked first to Gilly and then her mom. She was explaining this to Gilly on Gilly’s front porch when she dropped off her Skin So Soft and Jafra peppermint foot balm.

  “Eleanor,” Gilly said. She had been calling Snag Eleanor. Gilly agreed with Lettie that it suited her better. “I’m hiking the Clammit Dymit trail tomorrow. Want to join me?”

  “That’s a steep one. I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”

  “We can take it slow. My friend Jackie had to cancel because she’s going in for a root canal, and I don’t want to go alone. Come with me.”

  Snag hadn’t been on a hike in several decades. She used to go with Bets and Glenn and the boys, and with Lettie and A. R. and Glenn when she was a kid. She’d been walking the roads up and down with her red Radio Flyer wagon loaded with orders, and though she’d been winded and sweaty at first, lately, it had been easier and easier. Why not give an honest to goodness hike a try? When she said she would, Gilly high-fived her. “I’ll pick you up at nine. Bring a sandwich, but nothing too smelly. There’ve been a lot of bear sightings lately.”

  “What would be classified as a not-too-smelly sandwich?”

  “I don’t know. Chicken instead of tuna, I suppose. Turkey would be okay. No fish. No liverwurst.”

  “You are such a cheechako, Gilly. How long’ve you lived here? You think a bear isn’t going to smell chicken or turkey?”

  “But they might be willing to overlook it, maybe wait to see what the next hiker packed.”

  “If a bear is hungry enough, it will smell toothpaste and break into a locked car in order to eat it. You know that.”

  “Okay, okay. Maybe just eat a big breakfast and we’ll get dinner afterward?”

  “Just how long is this hike?”

  “Long enough.”

  Snag didn’t sleep well that night. At about midnight, she realized she didn’t have any respectable hiking boots except for Lettie’s old ones, and those were at least a size too small. Snag had lost weight, but would that affect a person’s shoe size? At about two in the morning, she realized Kache hadn’t come home, so she worried about him. She thought about calling his cell phone, but she resisted butting in. The odds were that he was sleeping at the house and not in a ditch somewhere, and she really didn’t want to wake him up, but damn it, she wished he would call.

  At around four, she had visions of Gilly running up the trail with Snag hoisting herself up behind her, reaching for birch trunks and clutching at salmonberry bushes before sliding back to the bottom of the hill. Why, oh why had she said she would go on a stupid hike?

  At eight, she was exhausted, hungry, wondering why Kache hadn’t called and hoping he didn’t do something stupid like get himself wrapped up in bed with the Old Believer hermit woman. No, Kache was too levelheaded to do something so mindless. But wait. He was a man, and the Old Believer was a woman, and a pretty and smart one, according to Lettie. Snag called and left a message and told him she was hiking the Clammit Dymit trail. She ate breakfast, stuck her feet into Lettie’s ancient hiking boots, packed some water and a canister of mace the size of a large can of hair spray to ward off the bears, and tried to look cheerful when she heard Gilly’s honk.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-TWO

  In the living room on the opened futon, Kache lay on his side, Nadia’s back to him, Leo stretched out at the foot of the bed so that Kache’s feet veered off the edge. He needed to get up and get the fire going, but he didn’t want to move or change anything about the moment. Other than the fact he was hard—part desire, part morning wood—everything around him was soft. The rain, the dove-gray light, the skin on Nadia’s shoulder, the blanket tucked under her arm, her short wisps of hair, her sweet snore, Leo’s occasional sigh. Even the stone that had settled deep in Kache’s chest all those years ago might now float away, light as dandelion fluff.

  Contentment. The way hard physical work let you sleep easily through the night, the way a woman who understood loneliness made you feel less alone. The way the rain might make it okay to stay tangled in bed for the day—the whole, livelong day.

  He eased himself quietly, carefully, out of bed, went to the bathroom, put the coffee on, stoked the fire, and set another two logs in the woodstove. When he pulled the covers down to climb back in, he saw a large scar on Nadia’s beautiful buttock. Had she had some kind of surgery? She was still sleeping. He didn’t want to stare, so he covered her back up. He lay there, not exactly sure what he had seen. What he thought he saw didn’t look like a surgical scar; there was something sinister to it. A strange shape to it. Like two circles.

  No, more like the letter B.

  Nadia still didn’t stir, but Kache felt restless and went outside. While he collected eggs from the hens, who seemed to be having a conversation among themselves, complaining about the turn in the weather maybe, he pondered the letter B. He drummed up the little he knew about the Old Believers, and none of it included branding a woman on her ass with a B, or any letter for that matter. When he thought of Nadia’s skin being burned or pierced through with a knife, he wanted to take a knife to whoever was responsible.

  He knew so little about her. Nadia Oleska. He knew only that she was kind and gentle and a strong, hard worker. And smart. A Renaissance woman who could do just about anything but who also danced with birds and talked to vegetables in the garden when she thought no one was around.

  And in bed, she had been surprisingly uninhibited with him. But who had she been before she came to this house?

  He cooked up the eggs with some morel mushrooms they’d gathered and brought them to her so she could eat without leaving the futon, so they might spend the whole day alone on that raft, drifting and talking and touching. She smiled and sat up against the pillows after he fluffed them behind her. The rain had built itself into a frenzy of a downpour, clouds ganging up around the mountains and pinging dimples into the bay by the millions.

  The shyness that disappeared the night before returned, but it was a transformed shyness. They looked at each other with raised eyebrows and closed-lip smiles, like two kids who had stumbled upon some secret, magical wonderland and now didn’t speak of it or anything else, each afraid they’d imagined the whole thing, until finally, Nadia’s plate cleaned, Kache blurted out, “God. That was fucking fantastic.”

  Nadia laughed. “It was. Fantastic fucking.” She wiped her mouth with the napkin. “More please.”

  “Breakfast?”

  She laughed again. “If this is what you wish to call it.” She set the tray down on the floor and leaned back over to kiss him with a bit of rhubarb jam still on her upper lip.

  The morning shed light on the things he hadn’t seen the night before. On her stomach, the small birthmark like another spot of jam, the exact pink of her nipples. The tuft of hair slightly darker than her blond head, almost brown like her eyebrows and long eyelashes. He saw tiny scars scattered randomly over her torso, almost like bird footprints in the snow or the tally marks she kept carving into the wall, and there, on her left cheek, he felt the large jagged B. He traced it with his finger, and she flipped off him.

  “What?” he asked, already wishing he hadn’t touched it.

&n
bsp; “What are you doing?”

  “Nadia. What is it? Was it some kind of rite of passage?”

  “You could call it this.”

  She lay on her back, quiet. The fire let out a loud snap, and she jumped. Kache held her tighter. He didn’t know what to say, so he said he was sorry. He lay back and looked at the coal-smoked beams on the ceiling, listened to the rain and the sizzling fire, and waited.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-THREE

  Nadia listened to Kache’s heart beating until she felt brave enough to speak. She started slowly, hesitating, not sure how much to tell but then needing, finally, to tell everything. She told him about Niko and the move her family made deeper into the woods and Niko’s marriage to Katarina. She told him about the years that followed and how she’d turned her focus from marriage to her studies. She started to tell him about the arrival of Vladimir, but the words caught in her throat.

  “I think,” she said, “we take break, yes?” They needed to go to the bathroom and refill the woodstove. Kache ran out to feed the animals, and Nadia heated up leftover potato soup for lunch. While the rain kept thrashing the roof and windows and the fire kept sputtering and breaking apart with loud cracks, they ate their soup silently.

  They left their bowls in the sink for later and returned to the living room. Kache lay down on the futon and patted the space beside him, under his arm, and Nadia climbed in.

  “Are you okay?” he asked her.

  She nodded. “Are you?”

  “Yes. I want to hear more. But only if you feel ready.”

  She did. In the crook of his arm, she told him how Vladimir had swooped in, a stranger who charmed everyone in their tiny village, and how once they married, he changed. He hurt her.

  “Hurt you how?” Kache asked.

  “It is ugly to hear this,” she said. The shame felt so hot on her face. But he held her tighter, and she told him about her wedding night and the impotent nights that followed until Vladimir brought out the knife. “From then on, there was always a knife and so there was always an erection.” Finally putting this into words made her scars ache, as if newly drawn blood might appear. “Soon, there was often my blood too. But never enough for anyone to see, once the bandages were in their places. He promised me he would set the village on fire. He said he is destroying everything and everyone if I tell a soul—and I believe him.

  “He said, ‘I will make it look like accident. A dog knocked over candle.’ He snap his fingers in my face. ‘Altai, the lost village. No one will suspect.’”

  Wiping her eyes with the corner of the quilt, she told Kache how she kept silent. She began her tasks as if she were a happy wife washing the shirts of a kind husband. But as the evening approached, the quaking in her limbs set in and wouldn’t stop, and this angered Vladimir. “He said, ‘You act like one of the foxes or squirrels in my traps. Or are you shaking with desire, you slut? You are little rabbit is what you are. A horny little cottontail.’” He would threaten to cut her more severely if she did not lie still, which, of course, made her tremble more. “His anger, it grew. He liked to hold knife against my throat especially. But he would move it lower to cut me, so the wound it will not be seen. His knife began to pierce my skin; this happens deeply and more frequently, the wounds more severe. He would come back from town with gauze and medical tape and ointment. He pulls them out of bag as if these are gift, in the way some men they bring their wives flowers.” In an attempt to steady her voice, she lowered it back down from where it had climbed higher. “Kache, I was very scared. But not outside our home. Outside our home, he was still good-natured Vladimir, and I do not show this fear. It was crazy time, and I myself felt crazy and ended up doing a crazy thing.”

  “Did you kill him? I hope you killed him.”

  “No.” She turned her head to the side, looking directly at Kache. She said, “I should have. Instead, I kill me.”

  She told Kache how it went on for two years until after a night too brutal to fully recollect, Nadia hobbled, hunched in pain, along the zigzagged path alone to the beach. She climbed into a canoe, and she began to paddle.

  But she realized he would come after her. Of course he would. She had to time this right. She paddled back, walked home, and made Vladimir dinner. “His frustration turned its focus on this fact that we do not conceive, and so torture, it was now long, nightly sessions. I knew I had little time before he lost control of the knife and pressed this too hard into vital organs or my veins. But I was at mercy of the tides.”

  She returned when the tide was low enough for her to run along the beach, but she had to hurry—the tides turned quickly and dramatically. The previous night with Vladimir had been the worst yet. The night he had carved the B. It was the first letter in his name when it was spelled with letters from the Russian alphabet: Владимир.

  Nadia did not pay a last visit to her parents or grandmother, her brothers or sisters, because she felt she would begin to weep and never stop. She brought an extra pair of shoes and left them on the shore, full of wet sand and shells. A jacket, wrapped in kelp and thrown into the water. She left the canoe, tipped over. Her cross, wrapped and tangled around the oar. Her handwoven belt—mandatory attire, along with the cross, for all Old Believers—half buried in sand. And then she ran along in the waves, ran and ran and ran, carrying her extra shoes, wearing her extra coat. She ran until the tide came in, and then she climbed through the woods, angling west but close enough to the shore to avoid Ural.

  As she neared the end of her story, the words tumbled and crashed out of her, rushing toward the finish. “I slept in the woods six nights, eating clams and berries and mushrooms. I was so very, very cold and tired, thinking I might die, when I stumble upon this homestead. I am prepared to beg for mercy of some kind. I think perhaps I can trade work for room. But what I found is this place abandoned as my own life, waiting for me to step inside.” She took a deep breath, looked up at him, at the up and down of his Adam’s apple, the stubbled underside of his chin, the bump on his nose, which she traced with the tip of her finger. “And so, I step inside.”

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-FOUR

  Kache listened. Holding Nadia, he smoothed her bangs back off her forehead. He didn’t reply for some time, watching the story unfold in his mind, turning it over and over. His throat ached, and all he managed to get out at first was “I’m so sorry, Nadia.”

  He saw Vladimir crashing through the woods—a grizzly dressed as a jovial, strong, and devout man—who claimed he saw things their way, believed in the perfect order of their ancient faith as it was and always should be, forever and ever amen.

  Fucking psycho liar.

  With his fucking pervert knife.

  It must have taken an unbelievable amount of courage for Nadia to leave the way she had. Kache brought her closer, trying to hold her more tightly and more gently at the same time. But she wasn’t fragile. Far from it.

  Later, after dinner, after Nadia carved her tally mark in the wall in the stairwell, settling back on the futon on which they’d spent most of the day, he failed to keep down one of the questions he’d been fighting.

  “So your mom? Your dad? Your sisters and brothers? You have never seen them?”

  She shook her head.

  “They think you’re dead?”

  “Yes. I am certain.”

  “I’m pissed that they didn’t see that freak for what he was.” Kache tucked a piece of her short hair behind her ear, even though it did not need to be tucked. “You went through an agonizing, horrific hell, and I’m amazed at how you saved yourself.” He took her hand and held it as he spoke. “But I can’t help thinking, you know, from where I stand, I can’t help wondering what your family would think if they knew you were alive.”

  She had stayed calm while she’d told the story, but her eyes filled again, and she said, “I have thought of this every day. That
thought, and fear of seeing Vladimir and what he would do to me, but mostly to them, is what keeps me here.”

  “What if you went back to see them? It’s been so long. I can find out if Vladimir is gone.”

  She looked up. “Gone? No. Not likely.”

  “People like that, their true colors start to leak through if they stay too long. I bet he’s gone. If he is, I can go back to the village with you.”

  “No. I will never do that. It would cause them such pain. Too much time, it has gone by.” She twisted the gold posts in her ear, as if adjusting the volume in her head. “Kache, you see…they have gotten used to my death. Nado privyknut. This is their motto: one must get used to it.”

  “No, Nadia. There are some things one can never get used to.” Of course, she already knew this, and yes, she even had the scars. Kache held back from saying all that ran through his head: They would be overjoyed, Nadia. They would be so happy. They would be shouting from their domed church rooftop. Trust me on this. I know they would.

  He could see them: Denny, his mom and dad, passing the big window as they walked across the front porch, carrying their gear, waving, Denny wearing their mom’s old straw hat with the orange flowers and her huge sunglasses—the guy would stop at nothing to make Kache laugh. Hey, you’ll never believe this, but… But what? What could they possibly say that Kache would understand? There was nothing. Nothing less than a story that an alien spaceship had abducted their plane in flight and cloned them so that their cloned, smashed bodies would be retrieved on the mountainside, their cloned ashes spread on this very land, and then had taken them for a twenty-year orbit. There was nothing they could say to him that would make sense or erase the pain of their absence, and probably nothing Nadia could say to her family. Still…

  He held her there on the futon while she cried silently and the rain came down noisily, and they sat in a strange, time-warped capsule, the dead and the asleep, the stopped and the stalled, in this house where everything had stayed the same for too long. He pulled his arm out from where it held her and stood.