The House of Frozen Dreams Read online

  The dog poked his nose out, then was yanked back by the collar. A husky mix. Kache bent down, trying to see through the thick darkness. “Mom? That’s not you?”

  The knife retreated and the hand reappeared, unfolded. Not his mother’s hand. It spread, splayed and pressed its fingers on the floor, until a blonde head emerged, and then a face looked up. Not his mother’s face. That was all he saw. It was not his mother’s face, and a new grief slammed him to his knees.

  Mom.

  Minutes went by before he realized the dog was still barking and this other face that was not his mother’s looked up at him for some kind of mercy, and though he hated the face for not belonging to his dead mother, he saw then, that it was a woman’s face, that it was round, that blue eyes begged him, that lips moved, saying words.

  “Kachemak? It is you? You are not dead?”

  EIGHT

  There had only been one visitor, years before.

  Kachemak had caught her so completely unprepared that her heartbeat seemed to be running away, down to the beach, while the rest of her waited.

  He looked older, his face more angled than in the photographs. But he still had the same curly hair, though shorter now, and the same heavy brows. His height—taller than the rest of the family in every photo—also gave him away. He asked her to call the dog off, and so she did, and pulled herself out from under the bed though her arms wobbled like a moon jellyfish. She shoved her trembling hands in her pockets and tried to appear brave and confident.

  And yet she felt grateful it was him. She knew that Kache, as the family called him, was a gentle soul. But she also knew it was possible for a man to appear kind and yet be brutal. She fluctuated between this wariness and wanting to reach out and hold him as a mother would a child—even though he was older by ten years.

  All this time she’d pictured him a boy like Niko, not a man like Vladimir. And all this time she’d thought him dead. She’d figured it out on her own, but then Lettie had confirmed. “You may as well be here. They’re all gone,” she’d said and snapped her fingers. “And Lord knows they’re never coming back.”

  When Nadia asked, “Was it the hunting trip?” because she’d seen a reference to it on the calendar and elsewhere, Lettie nodded and held a finger to her lips while a single tear ran down her worn cheek and Nadia never asked her about it again. They’d had an unspoken mutual agreement not to pry, to leave certain subjects alone.

  But now Kache stood before her, older, a grown man who had called her “Mom.” Was Elizabeth alive too?

  “Who are you?” he asked. She shook her head. She should have not spoken earlier, should have pretended she did not understand English. But already she’d given herself away. “Look—do you know me?” he said. “You called me by name. You thought I was dead? Do I know you?”

  She shook her head again, walked back and forth across the small room, touching chair, lamp, bed as she went. Moving like this, she could turn her head and glimpse him sideways without feeling so exposed face to face. The years had marked him, but he still had a youthful expression, those big dark eyes. Though Lettie had stayed clear of certain topics, Nadia knew so much about the boy: a gifted musician, an awkward teenager who felt out of place on the homestead, who fought bitterly with his father and had been a constant disappointment to him, but whose mother understood him and felt sure he would find his way. Nadia knew when he lost his first tooth (six-and-a-half years old), when he said his first word—moo-moo for moose—(ten months old). How he cried when his mother read him Charlotte’s Web.

  “Can you stop pacing?”

  She stopped. They stood in the lamplight, he staring at her, she staring down at her slippers. His mother’s slippers. He didn’t know anything—not one thing—about her, not even her name. All these years and years and years nameless, unknown. Only Lettie knew her, and Lettie must be dead. Nadia was afraid to ask.

  “What’s your name?” Kache said. “Let’s start with that.”

  Leo let out a long sigh and rested his head on his paws, sensing no more danger. How could a dog get used to having another human around so quickly?

  Squaring her shoulders, taking a deep breath, she said her name. “Nadia.” She wanted to shake him and call out, I AM NADIA! but she kept quiet, still, erect.

  He held out a large hand. “I’m Kache.”

  She kept her hands in her pockets and her eyes to the ground, even though part of her still wanted to hug him, to comfort him. She practiced the words in her head, moved her lips, then put her voice to it without looking up: “Your mother is alive?”

  “No. She died a long time ago.”

  At once the new hope vanished. “Then why do you ask this, if I was your mother?”

  “My brother and I gave her that shirt.” She felt her face flush. “I lost my head for a minute. You scared the hell out of me. And I still have no idea who you are.” She looked up to see him cross his arms and take an authoritative stance, then she turned her eyes back to the floor.

  It was her turn now to speak. This, a conversation. She was conversing with the boy she thought had died, whose bed she slept in, whose jeans she wore, always belted and rolled up at the cuffs. She had talked to herself, to Leo, to the chickens and the goats and the gulls and the sandhill cranes, to the feral cats, to any alive being, driven by the fear that she might forget how to talk. She hadn’t spoken to another human except for Lettie, four years ago. But here she was, speaking with someone, in English, no less, which is what felt natural to her now after reading nothing but English all this time.

  “Nadia.” He nodded as he said it, as if he liked the name.

  Her name. It twisted through her, and she hung her head as tears leaked down her cheeks. Soon a sob escaped, and then another. She did not cry often. What was the point? But here she was, crying for every day she hadn’t.

  “What’s wrong? I won’t hurt you, don’t cry …” but she could not stop. She had been so alone, so utterly alone for too many years, more than were possible and now, all changed. Here was someone she knew, someone who now knew her name, knew she was alive, someone who might help her or might turn on her. He touched her arm and she jumped. He stepped back and said again, “It’s okay, I won’t hurt you.”

  Through the stuttering gasps, more words erupted, but they came in Russian, too loud, almost screams: I am Nadia! I am Nadia! I died when I was 18.

  NINE

  Snag lay in bed, waiting to hear the gravel popping under her truck’s tires, trying not to worry but worrying anyway. Maybe Kache wouldn’t come back. Maybe he’d just drive straight to the airport and take the next flight out. She hoped not. It was so good to have him home, even though he’d brought all their ghosts with him, and now those ghosts plunked down in her room, shaking their heads at her, whispering about how disappointed they were that she hadn’t once gone back to the homestead, at least for the photo albums.

  She did have the one photo. Opening the drawer to her rickety nightstand, she pushed aside the Jafra peppermint foot balm. She told her customers how she kept it in that drawer. “Just rub some on every night and those calluses will feel smooth as a baby’s butt.” She never actually said she rubbed the stuff on herself. No one had ever felt the bottoms of her feet, and she reckoned no one ever would. Under the still-sealed Jafra foot balm was an old schedule of the tides, and under that lay a photograph wrapped in tissue with faded pink roses. This was what she was after. She carefully unwrapped it and switched on the lamp, though she almost saw the image well enough in the moonlight.

  Bets at the river: tall and slender, wearing those slim, cropped pants Audrey Hepburn wore, a sleeveless white cotton blouse and white Keds. Her hair swept back from her face in a black crown of soft curls. She had red lips and pierced ears, which until then Snag had thought of as slightly scandalous but on Bets looked pretty; she wore the silver drop earrings her Mexican grandmother had given her that matched the silver bangles on her delicate wrist.

  Snag remembered handing h
er the Avon Skin So Soft spray everyone used because mosquitoes hated it. Snag had broken some company record selling bottles of the stuff to tourists. Bets sprayed it on her arms and rubbed it in. Her skin glistened and looked oh so soft.

  Bets didn’t look like anyone Snag had ever come across in Caboose, or even Anchorage. Half Swedish and half Mexican, and from Snag’s perspective, the best halves of both nations had collided in Bets Jorgenson. She’d grown tired of her job as an editor in New York City, jumped on a train, then a ferry, and come to visit her Aunt Pat and Uncle Karl, who at the time lived in Caboose. Pat and Karl had asked Snag to take their niece fishing along the river.

  That day Bets, clearly mesmerized, seemed content to watch Snag, so Snag was showing off something fierce. Everyone agreed: Snag was one of the best fly fishermen on the peninsula.

  Bets sighed, dropped her chin onto her fists and said, “It’s like watching the ballet. Only better.” She drew a long cigarette out of a red leather case, lit it with a matching red lighter, and said she’d never seen a girl—or a boy, for that matter—make a fly dance like that. “It seems the fish have forgotten their hunger and are rising just to join in on the dancing.” She studied Snag late into the day, kept studying her, even after Snag fastened her favorite fly back onto her vest, flipped the last Dolly Varden into the pail, then pulled the camera from her backpack and took the very picture of Bets she now held in her hand. Bets sat on a big rock, legs crossed at the ankles, pushing her dark sunglasses back on her head, biggest, clearest smile Snag had ever seen. That picture had been taken a week and two days before Glenn returned home from Fairbanks and fell elbows over asshole in love with Bets too.

  TEN

  The woman threw back her head and screamed in a foreign language, then, dragging the dog, ran into the bathroom. She locked the door. Kache pressed his ear against it and asked her to come out but she didn’t answer.

  Downstairs on the hall tree hung his old green down parka with the Mt Alyeska ski badge his mother had sewn on the collar. He yanked it on over his lighter jacket.

  Outside. Fresh air. Breathe. The moonlight now reflected in a wide lane across the glassy bay, like some yellow brick road beckoning him to follow it. Instead he headed through the stale snow and fresh mud of the meadow toward the trail. He walked fast, puffs of steam marking his breaths like the puffs that sometimes rose from the volcanoes down across Cook Inlet.

  He could erupt any moment.

  He could do his own screaming.

  Who the hell do you think you are? This is MY house. MY clothes. MY mother’s shirt.

  How long had she been here, eating, bathing, sleeping, breathing in his memories? And who else? How many others had made his home their own?

  At the biggest bend the trail opened to the left, and there, five paces away, the plunge of the canyon. He didn’t go another step. He shivered—partly from the cold, partly from childhood fears.

  In the quiet, a hawk owl called its ki ki ki and the canyon answered Kache’s ranting with questions of its own.

  YOUR home?

  Have you given a rat’s ass about one inch of this land or one log of that house?

  Has it occurred to you? That strange woman may be the only reason YOUR home is still standing?

  Kache shook his head hard enough to shake his thoughts loose. The canyon obviously didn’t speak to him like that. To prove it, he did what they’d all done a thousand times, whenever they’d arrived at that spot on the trail:

  Across the dark, vast crevice he yelled, “HELLO?”

  And the canyon answered as it always had, “Hello …? Hello …? Hello …?”

  ELEVEN

  The front door closing, his footsteps clunk clunking down the porch stairs. She peeled back the curtain to see him cross the meadow. Where was he going? She turned on the bathroom light and stared at her reflection in the medicine cabinet. Her hair was disheveled from climbing under the bed, so she pulled out the elastic band and brushed. Leo lay down at her feet.

  Nadia touched her fingertips to her lips. “Hello,” she said to the mirror. Her voice shook. All of her shook. Her throat seared from the screaming. But she did not scream now. She imagined her reflection was Kachemak and she kept her eyes from looking away. It was one thing to talk to plants and animals and quite another thing to have a conversation with a human—with a man.

  “I am frightened.” No. “I am fine. Fine. I go now.”

  She raised her chin, put her hand to her hair.

  “Thank you for letting me stay.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Stay away from me or I kill you.” She placed her fists on her hips. “Son of bitch. Damn you to hell, son of bitch.”

  But Kachemak’s mother was Elizabeth. Kind, smart Elizabeth. And this was her Kache. “I apologize. Your mother is not bitch. Your mother is very good. Your grandmother is very good.” She touched her throat. “Kache? Please? You are still good person also?”

  TWELVE

  The sun pulled itself up over the mountains to the east, casting salmon-tinged light on the range and all across the bay, even reaching through the large living-room windows. Kache sat sipping dandelion root tea with the woman Nadia, she in his mother’s red-and-white-checked chair, he on the old futon. Neither had slept. Only the fire crackling in the woodstove broke the silence between them. She burned coal and wood, which filled the tarnished and dented copper bins next to the stove. She must have collected the coal on the beach the way his family had done. It smelled like home.

  The fire popped and they both jumped. “Bozhe moi!” Her hand went to her mouth, her eyes still downward. “Sorry.”

  Wait—that language, her accent—Russian?

  An Old Believer?

  In junior high Kache wrote a Social Studies report on the Old Believer villages. The religious sect had descended from a band of immigrants who’d broken off from the Russian Orthodox church during the Great Schism of the seventeenth century, and later, during the revolution, fled Russian persecution, immigrated to China, then Brazil, then Oregon, before this particular group feared society encroaching, influencing their children. They moved to the Kenai Peninsula in the early nineteen-sixties, beyond the end of the railroad line, past Caboose, then still called Herring Town, and staked their claim to hundreds of acres beyond the Winkels’ own vast acreage.

  At first everyone pitied the Old Believers. A child died in a fire and a woman was badly scarred trying to save her daughter. “They’ll never make it through another winter,” locals predicted about the small group of long-bearded men and scarf-headed women. But then a baby girl was born, and the Believers saw the tiny new life as an encouragement from God. In the spring they began to fish and cut timber. They built wood houses, painted them bright colors—blue and green and orange, and more Believers came from Oregon. They built a domed church. Eventually they too divided over religious differences and the strictest of the group ventured deeper into the woods. But both groups lived separated from the rest of the world, exempt from laws other than their own rituals, unchanged since the seventeenth century, which they believed were from God. Back in the Seventies, Kache’s dad said they ignored a lot of the fishing laws, and when the fishermen had a slow year, they often blamed the Old Believers.

  “They’re lowly.” Kache recalled Freida—his mom’s bridge partner—spitting the words across the kitchen table one night. His parents adamantly objected.

  But his mom had her own concerns. “I just worry that they’re so steeped in religious tradition that they have no awareness of equal rights. I’ve heard they marry those poor little girls off when they’re thirteen.”

  Freida’s husband, Roy, said, “I’ll tell you where I want equal rights. Out on that water, that’s where.”

  His mom said, “I wonder if those young girls even have a prayer.”

  “Bets,” Roy answered, “they pray all damn day.”

  No way would an Old Believer woman step outside her village except to run an errand in town. Look at Gram’s afgha
n, those photographs, the magazines, back from 1985 and before. Even the Ranier Beer coasters. Nothing has changed. It’s like sitting in 1985 with a woman from 1685—if she even is an Old Believer. What if there’s poison in the tea? (He set down his cup.) If the tea doesn’t kill me, her husband is going to come in and shoot me.

  Kache wanted to ask her many questions but the despair rose from his spinning mind, settled in his throat, and he was afraid that if he spoke too soon he too might succumb to tears. He’d fallen smack dab into that day when he’d sat in this living room, a little high, playing his guitar, tired from having done his chores and Denny’s as a way of apologizing, waiting for the three of them to drive up and pile in the door with stories of their weekend. His dad would be gruff at first. But once he’d seen that Kache had not only finished the chores, but cleaned the awful mess from the fight, repaired his bedroom door, even gone down to the beach and emptied the fishing net, all would be forgiven.

  Jesus.

  The dog stayed at her feet, watching Kache. A husky and something else, maybe a malamute … it didn’t have a husky’s icy blue eyes, but big brown loyal eyes.

  “What’s your dog’s name?”

  A long silence before she whispered, “Leo.” Leo’s ear went up and rotated toward her.

  “Are you into astrology or literature?” he asked, mostly as a joke to himself.

  But she surprised him and said. “Tolstoy. Almost I name him Anton.”

  His mom would be proud. “You have good taste. So …” He smiled. “I guess we’ve established the fact that we’re not going to kill each other.” He picked up the tea and sniffed. “Although I’m not sure I trust your tea.”

  She lowered her chin. “I would not poison.”

  He tried a smile again that still went unmet. “Fair enough. I do have some questions.”

  “Yes.” She placed her hands on the knees of her jeans—his old jeans, actually. He recognized the patch his mother had sewn on the right knee. Denny and he used to tease her because sometimes she sewed patches on their patches.