The House of Frozen Dreams Read online

  “The caboose,” Snag had reminded them, “will still be here twice a day. But it will have a purpose, just like its namesake. It will be alive again, just like our town. Come on, people. Let’s just get another new caboose to stick out there and use the original as it was intended.”

  She was beginning to realize she made up the entire minority on this issue. Snag, who’d been told by Marv Rosetter she could sell ice to an Inupiaq, had not been successful in convincing the people of Caboose of this one obvious solution. Another reason she should get herself to the meeting.

  But Nicole Hughes didn’t pick up the phone. Neither did Suz Clayton. Melanie Magee’s line was already busy—with one of the others calling her, Snag suspected. They, of course, played on the side of the caboose keepers. And they had caller ID. So Snag could almost see them standing in their kitchens, listening to her ask if they might be able to give her a ride. They may as well have shouted into the receiver, “No, and hell no!”

  She pulled on her coat, stepped into her boots on the porch and started marching toward the Chamber meeting. But as she walked she thought of Kache. Again. Where was he? Had he gone to see Lettie? She didn’t know that the homestead had been abandoned. Every time she said she wanted to go out there, Snag lied. She told her there were renters who didn’t want to be disturbed. She told her the road was too bad and she’d get stuck. She told her maybe next week, maybe next month, maybe in the summer.

  One day, after Lettie could no longer drive, she’d set out walking toward the homestead, but luckily Snag had come across her on the way home from the Christmas festival meeting. Winter, dusk at two in the afternoon, cold. “Mom! What were you thinking?”

  But Lettie hadn’t answered. She just shook her head and turned toward the window.

  Now instead of going left toward the Chamber, Snag turned right onto Willow and hiked up the street to the Old Folks’. She had to get to Lettie before Kache did.

  FIFTEEN

  Lettie closed her eyes again. If only the nurses and Snag would let her be for more than ten minutes so she could enjoy this remembering, which had become so clear, as if the past was happening to her once again.

  This morning, her mind took her all the way back to the time when she first got the idea of Alaska in her head. She’d thought of herself as an adulteress, but of course not in the common sense of the word. It was the land. Damn the land. It called to her, first in a whisper, its name, Alaska, soft down the nape of her neck while she hung out the clothes. Then it was everywhere. It took her over. Alaska, Alaska, the broom said. Alaska? the chickens asked. She carried a picture in her pocket—of some mountain range across an inlet of water—and she took it out so often it began to peel back from the corner. At night, while A.R. slept loud and hard, she lay awake, then dreamt wet, green, mossy dreams spilling one into the other. Thick, abundant dreams that tumbled her back into morning breathless and then with a feeling she guessed was yearning.

  A.R. told her to forget it. “One winter,” he’d said, “will send you back to Kansas kissing the dry cracked dirt, calling it the floor of heaven. Even with this Depression and all.”

  No, Alaska was strictly Lettie’s idea.

  The man who’d bought the farm from them for practically nothing was the one who told them about homesteading up north. Lettie thought it his way of trying to redeem himself for taking their land and knowing there wasn’t a mud puddle in the United States they could buy with what he’d given them for it. He’d said, “In Herring Town you can get land for free. Just like in the West way back when, but there aren’t no Indians in Alaska—well, not the fighting kind.”

  He’d handed her the photograph. “You just stake out the prettiest piece of property you ever seen in your lifetime,” he’d said. “Trees and meadows, lakes and mountains and the sea, too. And the moose and the berry plants, the fish and clams, the coal just waiting for you to pick it off the beach. None of them’s gotten word there’s a Depression going on.”

  A.R. kept moping around after they’d sold the farm and most of their things and moved to town, into the apartment with her Uncle Fred. A.R. moped like a man whose dream had fallen down and died. But the farm wasn’t his dream, after all, she said carefully one morning, while he still lay in bed, smoking one cigarette after the other. “It was your daddy’s dream.” In a rare moment of intensity between them, she grabbed his arm, tight; her fingernails made grooves into his flesh.

  “I think,” she said, her eyes filling with tears, “I think you gotta have your own dreams.” He looked at her, blank, apparently as puzzled by her tears as she was. She stood. Staring into the corner of the tiny, crowded bedroom, she tried to explain if only to herself. “It must be like what they say about religion. You can’t inherit your religion. I imagine the same’s true for your dreams.”

  A.R. was a man resigned. Had he known, Lettie thought, he’d have been a man torn by jealousy. Because that place—that place she’d only heard about, only seen in a single photograph—had taken her over so completely she thought of little else. One night she woke from a dream that should have been a nightmare. But strangely, it wasn’t. Instead of feeling frightened, she felt a freedom that did frighten her more than a nightmare ever had. In the dream, A.R. passed on. Lettie cried. But she left the funeral before it was over, threw her bags in a car of a northbound train and jumped aboard with ease. Free.

  The next morning she ripped up the photograph. The pieces scattered from her hand like snow. “Enough,” she said aloud. She hummed familiar tunes and tried to enjoy the sun on her arms while she hung laundry on the line, as she had before this whole nonsense got started.

  But the nonsense refused to let go of her. In a pitiful desperation she pleaded with A.R., afraid of that dream of his death and afraid of her own … was it passion?

  When he finally said yes, he didn’t let go gradually, he just let go. “Well, okay. We’ll go to Alaska.” And she did what anyone who’d grown accustomed to pulling with all her might would do. She fell flat on her keister.

  “Well, what on—?” he said, reaching a hand over to help her up.

  She couldn’t answer. Laughing, crying, laughing.

  “Where did you come from, woman?” he asked, dusting her off. “And what on earth did you do with my Lettie?”

  When she found her voice she said, “Thank you thank you thank you!” while she kissed him all over his face, feeling a tenderness toward him she hadn’t felt for a long time.

  So many times over the next year anyone else might have shaken a fist at her, damned her for getting them there in the first place. But A.R. never did. Not even one I told you so.

  There was the treacherous boat trip once they ventured outside the Inside Passage, where she clung to both the fear that they might die and the fear that they might not die, that death might not come and save them from the slamming, slamming, slamming of the sea.

  But they survived somehow, and they arrived somewhere. It was called Herring Town. They trudged through icy waves, carrying their bags over their heads while waves leapt at them like children begging for a present. There were people on the shore, too. A man, a woman and—she counted them—ten children. Ten! The Newberrys. All of them round-faced and round-eyed, but their bodies were lean and muscled. All except for the baby, who was delightfully fat, and the toddler, who, later when the sun broke through and slapped color all over the place, ran along the beach wearing nothing but a dirty orange life preserver and a cow bell, his legs chubby and creased, his feet padding on the wet sand.

  Frank Newberry had gotten word from the Rosses in Anchor Point, who’d gotten word from Uncle Fred’s next-door neighbor’s cousin, Beck Patten, that Lettie and A.R. were due to come in to Herring Town on the Salty Sally. For three days, the Newberrys watched down the inlet for the promise of Lettie and A.R.

  Margaret Newberry clung to Lettie as if she were a long-lost sister. She stroked Lettie’s hair, most of it fallen loose from the bun she’d pinned it up in days before. A lif
etime before. Lettie held her breath while Margaret stared into her face, inches away. Lettie knew she reeked of vomit and worse, but Margaret didn’t seem to mind.

  Margaret reassured her, reassured her again. There would someday be a train connecting them to Anchorage, and a school. More talk of a store. A post office. And soon, a church.

  What Margaret didn’t seem to know was Lettie didn’t need reassuring. A church? Why anyone wanted to worship God in a dark log hovel when a mere glimpse of the water, which went from green to red to pink to blue, depending on what the sun and moon were up to—not as it had been earlier with the torment of waves, but now white with the sun’s reflections, a thousand spots of light leaping and dancing—seemed a declaration to her, Let there be Light!

  If she could, Lettie would have stripped off her vomit-crusted clothes, pitched them into the fire and worn nothing but a cowbell while she splashed in the icy waves.

  Later, while the young women of Herring Town plotted their civilities, crowded around the Sears Catalog, and tended to their children, the men helped Lettie and A.R. stake out their land. She giggled at the kissing puffins with their strange hooked orange beaks and matching feet, cried when she first heard the lonely cry of a loon. Her heart jumped with the salmon in the river; when she saw their silver streaks through the clear water, she saw for the first time the invisible currents of her own life.

  One night she pulled A.R. close to her, unlatched his trousers, snugged them down before he’d even stopped snoring. She was not that type of woman, really. She had always been a lady, though a rather plain one. But Alaska was no place for a lady; the men in Kansas said that to A.R. Even the men on the boat said it. She kissed A.R. on the mouth and he stopped snoring with a snort. And then he said her name—as he’d been saying it for the past few months—with a question mark. “Lettie? Lettie?” but then “Lettie …”

  She wanted to give him some of this … what was it? Abundance. It spilled up and out and over her. Let him see it, experience it.

  “Now … now … now,” she said, arching her back, thinking that if A.R. went deep enough he might touch this something inside her, take part of it for himself.

  The scent of the land got inside her too. A damp, sprucey, smoky, salty scent that she fancied. She smelled it in her own hair, in her clothes and on the tips of her fingers.

  She worked harder than she’d ever worked on the farm, right alongside A.R. and the other men. There was a difference between Lettie and the other women—they all soon recognized this. Instead of dissention and jealousy, the difference bore a mutual respect. Lettie had no children. And Lettie did not come to Alaska as a generous submission to her husband’s quest. Alaska was Lettie’s quest.

  Quest. Was that the right word? Yes, she decided. Quest and question, too. Alaska was her question. The one she’d had to ask. She’d been a woman who had asked few questions. Her life had been a series of neatly laid out stepping stones, provided for her convenience. She had taken them one at a time, never skipping one or turning over another, never prying one loose to see what might lie underneath. She’d never gotten her feet muddy, so to speak. And then the next expected step was gone; simply not there. She and A.R. had not conceived. There were no children. She hadn’t questioned that, really, either. Tried not to think about it, mostly. Just stayed perched on and busy with the farm and A.R.

  Until the photograph.

  “Mom? Are you awake?” Snag again. Snag, always trying to reel her back in to the hospital when Lettie just wanted to stay on the land.

  Oh, the land. The dream she and A.R. once had to hand it down to their children and grandchildren. She must talk to Kache, tell him what she’d done, get him to go out and see if Nadia was still there. For all she knew, the poor girl was gone now, or worse, dead. As dead and gone as A.R. himself.

  Except there he’d been, as close as her own hand, there in her remembering.

  SIXTEEN

  As he drove, Kache tried to get a grip. He hadn’t slept at all. Forget dandelion root tea, he needed an Americano with an extra shot. He needed answers. He needed some kind of plan. A plan would be good.

  The weather could go one of many ways—big gray clouds hung around the mountain peaks, trying to decide if they wanted to get ugly, but the sun was up and shining as if to say, Hey, calm down, I’ve got this one.

  Kache didn’t want to turn Nadia in. So she’d been squatting on their property for the last ten years. She’d also saved it from going to ruin. But that meant it had stood empty for the decade prior to her arrival. Ten winters with no one running water in the pipes or knocking the snow off the roof or keeping the shrews and voles and mice from taking over. No way. So she was lying or Snag was lying or another strange person had holed up in the house too and might still be around, which circled back to Nadia lying.

  Still, he wouldn’t turn her in. He’d just ask her to find a different place. He’d help her find something suitable. If she really didn’t want to go back to her village, there were people in town who’d probably trade childcare or property maintenance for a room. Then, before he went back to Austin, he’d work on the homestead—she had kept up on it the best she could but he knew it must still need some maintenance—and get it ready to rent out to a cattle rancher or someone who needed a large chunk of the land. He and Snag could deal with it together. It would feel right for them to finally step up, keep a few meaningful things, sell the rest. It would be good. Like the therapist Janie had dragged him to that one time had said, “There’s healing in turning homeward, a wholeness that results from facing your history, an ability to move forward.” Kache hadn’t wanted to hear it and called it a bunch of poetic psychobabble. But, hell, maybe there was something to it.

  He pulled up to a drive-thru orange and blue coffee truck called The Caboose Cuppabrews. The brittle air blasted through his open window while a dark-haired boy of about eleven took his order.

  “Aren’t you a little young to be a coffee barristo?”

  The boy shrugged. “A bar—what?”

  A woman laughed from somewhere behind the boy. “We start them working young up here, sir. He’s my son, so we skirt around those pesky labor laws.”

  “Marion?”

  “Yes?” She bent down and he took in her face. She had the same dark eyes and high cheekbones, and still wore her hair parted in the middle and straight. She had hardly changed. “Kache! No way!” She leaned out farther, spilling the coffee on her wrist. “Ouch! Shit. Sorry. Wait, don’t move.” And she disappeared back through the window, leaving the boy to sponge up the coffee, shaking his head with a small, somewhat parental smile.

  Marion had pulled on a parka, sprinted out from the backside of the truck, reached in through the window and wrapped her arms around Kache’s neck before he could open his door. “I thought they were holding you hostage until we agreed to say Texas was the bigger state after all. Lettie didn’t take another turn?”

  He teeter-tottered his hand. “My aunt thinks she’s at death’s door. Gram’s confused, but for someone who’s ninety-eight years old …”

  “You’ll have to say hi to my grandpa. Remember Leroy? He’s happy as long as they let him fish the hallways. My ex says Leroy’s got the best fishing spot on the peninsula, right there in his head. Lettie’s been so sharp until recently. How long are you here?”

  He shrugged. “Not sure.”

  “You got someone special?” She smiled that old Marion smile.

  “Not as of two days ago. You?”

  She teeter-tottered her hand. “Still singing?”

  He shook his head. “You?”

  “Of course. Playing?”

  He shook his head again.

  “You’re shittin’ me. You need to come down to The Spit Tune. We still play a few nights a week. Bring your guitar and that voice of yours. Rex will do cartwheels down the bar when he sees you.” She turned toward her son. “Ian, this is Kache. He’s a helluva guitar player and he’s got a voice some hotshot reporter called
‘both wound and wonder.’”

  Kache laughed. “Is there such thing as a hotshot reporter in Alaska?”

  Several cars had pulled up behind him. “Ha ha. Gotta get back to work, but do not leave town without us catching up. I’m here every morning except Christmas, New Year’s and Easter. Seriously. No excuses, okay?”

  He smiled. “Scout’s honor.”

  “You dropped out of the Scouts!” she shouted as he pulled away.

  Wow. Marion had a kid. Marion was still singing. The band was still together.

  His old house, a museum of his seventeen-year-old life. And his old girlfriend, still playing with their band. He might as well make this trip back in time complete. He turned toward the Spit and headed out to see Rex. Since Kache had arrived, he’d already done more socializing than he had in years. Janie would be shocked.

  Only two days before, he’d lain wedged in the permanent indent he’d caused in his and Janie’s sofa, the TV cradling him in its familiar steel-colored light. On his chest the cat Charlotte had purred and slept. He’d turned down the volume for the commercial, the warm Austin air carrying aching guitar riffs in D minor along with aromas of barbeque from the restaurant across the street. Another Do-it-Yourself show was about to start. He should get up—Arise! Go forth!—and turn off the TV, but he didn’t. He let Charlotte sleep.

  Each step of each project, vivid in his mind’s eye: A version of his own hands performing every task, but calloused, surer, moving with the certainty of the experienced. Not the boy’s hands his father had made fun of. “Explain to me, son,” he’d said, “how the same fingers that spin gold on that silly guitar of yours turn into flippers when you pick up a hammer?”

  But some of what his father tried to teach him was at long last finding its way in, if only from a type of televised-osmosis.

  Janie was upstairs in the loft of their apartment, spreading on lotion, dusting on makeup, curling her hair. He must have once felt something more for her than he did now, which if he had to classify, fell in the vicinity of a fond affection. They had traveled some, had good sex. He’d moved into her place. They’d cooked, laughed, watched movies, shared a few secrets. And yet he experienced those times as if they’d occurred in a hazy, disjointed dream.