Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Harper 2015

Copyright © Seré Prince Halverson 2015

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover photographs © Irene Lamprakou/Trevillon Images (girl); Plainpicture/Pictorium (window)

Seré Prince Halverson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007438945

Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780007438952

Version: 2014-10-29

Dedication

For Daniel, Michael, Karli and Taylor

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One: Breakup 2005

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Part Two: Land of the Midnight Sun and the Prodigal Son 2005

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Part Three: The Fall 2005

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Part Four: Winter Tracks 2005–2006

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Part Five: Breakup 2006

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Chapter Sixty-Five

Chapter Sixty-Six

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Chapter Seventy

Chapter Seventy-One

Acknowledgements

Q&A with Seré Prince Halverson

About the Author

Also by Author

About the Publisher

PART ONE

ONE

This: her nightly ritual. She took the knife from the shelf to carve a single line in the log-planked stairwell that led from the kitchen to the root cellar. She’d carved them in groups of four one-inch vertical lines bisected with a horizontal line. So many of them now, covering most of the wall. They might be seen as clusters of crosses, but to her they were not reminders of death and sacrifice but evidence of her own existence.

There were other left-behind carvings too, in the doorjamb on the landing at the top of the stairs. These notches marked the heights of growing children, two in the Forties and Fifties, and two in the Seventies and Eighties, one of whom had grown quite tall. She saw the mother standing on a footstool, trying to reach the top of her son’s head to first mark the wood with pencil, while he stood on tiptoes, trying to appear even taller. She almost heard their teasing, their laughing. Almost.

Six stairs down, she dug the tip of the knife into the wall. The nightly ritual was important. While she no longer lived according to endless rules and regulations, with all those objects and gestures and chants, she did not want her days flowing like water with no end or beginning; shapeless, unmarked. So she read every night, book after book, first in the order that they lined the shelves, turning them upside down when she finished reading and then right-side up for the second read and so forth, now returning to her favorites again and again. And during the day she did chores—foraging, launching and checking fishing nets, setting and checking traps, gardening, tending house, feeding chickens and goats, canning and brining and smoking—all in a certain order, varying only according to the needs of the season. Her days always began with a cold-nose nudge from the dog and not one, but two enthusiastic licks of her hand as if to say not just good morning, but Good Morning! Good Morning!

Then, there were the mornings when she ignored the dog and unlatched the kitchen door so he could let himself out while she returned to bed to stay, dark mornings that led to dark days and weeks. During those times, only under piles of blankets did she feel substantial enough not to drift away; they kept her weighted down and a part of the world. But eventually her dog’s persistence and her own strong will would win over and she’d drag herself up from the thick bog and go back to her chores and her books, carving the missing days into the wall so they did not escape entirely.

It was surprising, what a human being could become accustomed to—a lone human being, miles and years from any other human being. She balanced two more logs and a chunk of coal in the woodstove, and with the dog following her, crossed the room in the left-behind slippers, which had, over time, taken on the shape of her own feet. She’d been careful to keep things as she’d found them, but those slippers were another way she’d made her mark, left her footprint, insignificant as it might be.

Now she sat in the worn checkered chair and picked up one of the yellowed magazines from 1985. Across the cover, Cosmetic Surgery, The Quest for New Faces and Bodies—At a Price. “A new face, this would help,” she once again reminded Leo, who thumped his tail. Unlike the people in the article, she said this not because she was wrinkled (she wasn’t) or thought herself homely (she didn’t). “It would give us much freedom, yes? A different life.”

She opened the big photography book of The City by the Bay, and took in her favorite image of the red bridge they called golden, and the city beyond, as white as the mountains across this bay. So similar and yet so different. That white city held people, people, people. Here, the white mountains held snow. “And their bridge,” she told Leo, closing the book. “We could use that bridge.” He cocked his head just as she heard something scrape outside.

A branch. In her mind, she kept labeled buckets in which she let sounds drop: a Branch, a Moose, a Wolf, a Bear, a Chicken, the Wind, Falling Ice, and on and on. Leo’s ears perked, but he didn’t get up. He too was used to the varied scuttlings of the wilderness. She drew the afghan around her shoulders and opened a novel to the page marked with a pressed forget-me-not.

Yes, she knew a certain comfort here—companionship, even. How could she be truly alone when, outside her door, nature kept noisy company and at her feet lay a dog such as Leo? Then there were the books. She’d traveled inside the minds of so many men and women from across the ages. And she had such long, uninterrupted passages of time to think, to ponder every turn her mind took. For instance, there was the word loneliness and the word loveliness. In English, one mere letter apart, and in her handwriting the words looked almost identical, certainly related. This she found consoling, and sometimes even true.

But now, another sound, then many unmistakable sounds; determined footsteps coming toward the house. Leo’s ears flipped back before he plunged into sharp barking and frantic clawing. She froze. All those years practicing what she would do, but she only sat, with the book open in her trembling hands. Where did she leave the gun? In the barn? How had she grown so careless? She remembered the knife on the shelf in the stairwell and finally bolted up to grab it. She flipped off lights, took hold of Leo’s collar, tugging him from the door and up the stairs to the second floor. She pulled the window shade and it snapped up, but she yanked it back down because she couldn’t see anyone, though the moon was full. With all her strength she dragged Leo, pushing and barely wedging him under the bunk bed with her, and clamped his nose with her hand just as the loose kitchen window creaked open below. A male voice, a yelling, though she didn’t hear the words over Leo’s whining and the blood pum-pumming in her ears.

It was him, she was sure of it. Shaking, shaking, she squeezed harder on the handle of the knife and wished for the gun. But she was good with a knife, she was sure of that too.

TWO

There he was, Kachemak Winkel, sitting upright, on a plane of all things, finally headed home of all places. Yes, his fingernails dented the vinyl of the armrests, and the knees of his ridiculously long legs pressed into the seat in front of him, causing the seat to vibrate. A little boy turned and peered at Kache through the crack between B3 and B4. Kache motioned to his legs with a sweep of his hand and said, “Sorry, buddy. No room.” But he knew that didn’t account for the annoying jittering.

“Afraid of flying?” the man next to him asked, peering above his reading glasses and his newspaper. He wore a tweed blazer and a hunting cap, which made him look like a studious Elmer Fudd, but with hair, which poked out around the ear flaps. “Scotch helps.”

Kache nodded thanks. He had every reason to be afraid, it being the twentieth anniversary of the plane crash. But oddly he was not afraid to fly and never had been. If God or the Universe or whoever was in charge wanted to pluck this plane from the sky and fling it into the side of a mountain in some cruel act of irony or symmetry, so be it. All the fear in the world wouldn’t make a difference. No. Kache was not afraid of flying. He was afraid of flying home. And that fear had kept him away for two decades.

He shifted in his seat, elbow now on the armrest next to the window, his finger habitually running up and down over the bump on his nose that he’d had since he was eighteen. The plane window framed the scene below, giving it that familiar, comforting screened-in quality, and through it he watched Austin, Texas become somewhere south, just another part of the Lower 48 to most Alaskans.

He had spent most of those two decades in front of a computer screen, trying to forget what he’d left behind, scrolling column after column of anesthetizing numbers, and getting promotion after promotion. Too many promotions, evidently.

After the company had laid him off six months ago, he replaced the computer screen with a TV screen. Janie encouraged him to keep looking for another job but he discovered the Discovery Channel, evidence of what he’d suspected all along: Even the world beyond the balance sheets was flat. Flat screen, forty-seven inches, plasma. That plasma became his lifeblood. So many channels. A whole network devoted to food alone. He learned how to brine a turkey, bone a turkey, smoke a turkey, high-heat roast a turkey. The same could be said of a pork roast, a leg of lamb, a prime rib of beef.

Branching out, he soon knew how to whisper to a dog, how to de-clutter his bathroom cabinets, how to flip real estate and what not to wear.

Then he came across the Do-it-Yourself network, and there he stayed. “Winkels,” his father had liked to say, long before there was a DIY network, “are Do-it-yourselfers exemplified.” Kache now, finally, knew how to do many things himself. That is, he could do them in his head, because, as Janie often reminded him, head knowledge and actual capability were two different animals. So with that disclaimer, he might say he knew how to restore an old house from the cracked foundation to the fire-hazard shingled roof—wiring, plumbing, plastering, you name it. He knew how to build a wood pergola, how to install a kitchen sink, and how to lay a slate pathway in one easy weekend. He even knew how to raise Alpacas and spin their wool into the most expensive socks on the planet. Hell, he knew how to build the spinning wheel. His father would be proud.

However.

Kache did not know how to rewind his life, how to undo the one thing that had undone him. His world was indeed flat, and he’d fallen off the edge and landed stretched out on a sofa, on pause, while the television pictures moved and the voices instructed him on everything he needed to know about everything—except how to bring his mom and his dad and Denny back from the dead.

The little boy in front of him grew bored and poked action figures through the seat crack, letting them drop to Kache’s feet. Kache retrieved them a dozen times, but then let their plastic bodies lie scattered on the floor beneath him. The boy soon laid his head on the armrest and fell asleep.

On Kache’s first plane ride, his dad had lifted him onto his lap in the pilot’s seat and explained the Cessna 180’s instruments and their functions. “Here we have the vertical speed indicator, the altimeter, the turn coordinator. What’s this one, son?” He pointed to the first numbered circle, and Kache didn’t remember any of the big words his father had just spoken.

“A clock, Daddy?” His dad laughed, then gently offered the correct names again and again until Kache got them right. It was the only memory he had of his father being so patient with him. How securely tethered to the world Kache had felt, sitting in the warm safety of his dad’s lap, zooming over land and sea.

Why had it been impossible to hop on a plane and head north, even for a visit? He tried to picture it: Aunt Snag, Grandma Lettie, and him, sitting at one end of the seemingly vast table at the homestead, empty chairs lined up. Listening to each other chew and clear throats, drumming up questions to ask each other, missing Denny’s constant joking and his father’s strong opinions on just about everything. Who would have believed he’d miss those? His mother’s calm voice, her break-open laughter so easy and frequent he could not recall her without thinking of her laugh.

So instead, once he began making decent money he’d flown Gram and Aunt Snag to Austin for visits, which provided plenty of distractions for all of them. As he drove them around, Grandma Lettie kept her eyes shut on the freeway, saying, “Holy Crap!” The woman who’d helped homestead hundreds of acres in the wilderness beyond Caboose, who’d birthed twins—his dad and Aunt Snag—in a hand-hewn cabin with no running water, who’d faced down bears and moose as if they were the size of squirrels and rabbits, couldn’t stand a semi passing them on the road. She loved the wildflowers, though. At a rest stop she walked out into the middle of a field of bluebonnets—undid her braid and fluffed her white hair, which floated like a lone cloud in all that blue—and lay down and sang her old, big, persistent heart out. “Come on, Kache!” she called, “Sing with me, like in the old days.”

Instead, he kept his arms crossed, shook his head. “Do you know that crazy lady?” he asked Snag.

Gram was of sound mind and body at the time, just being herself, the Lettie he had always adored. Every few minutes, Aunt Snag and Kache saw her arm pop out of the sapphire drift, waving a bee away.

But in the past four years Gram’s health had declined and Aunt Snag didn’t want to travel without her. When he’d talked to Snag early that morning, she’d said Lettie was deteriorating fast. “And I’m not getting any younger. You better hurry and get yourself home, or the only people you’ll have left will be in an urn, waiting for you to spread us with the others on the bluff.”

He’d let too much time slip by. Twenty years. He was thirty-eight, with little to show for it except a pissed-off and, as of last night, officially ex-girlfriend, along with a sweet enough severance package for working his loyal ass off for sixteen years, and a hell of a savings account—none of which would impress Aunt Snag or Grandma Lettie in the slightest, or do them any good.

A stop in Seattle, another three-and-a-half hours and countless thickly frosted mountain ranges later, the plane landed in Anchorage, which Snag and Lettie grumpily called North Los Angeles. But of course it was their destination for frequent shopping trips and they didn’t hesitate to get their Costco membership when it first opened there. The in-flight magazine said that just over 600,000 lived in the state, and two-fifths of that population resided in Anchorage. So even though it was Alaska’s biggest city, it had over three million to go before catching up with LA.

He caught the puddle jumper to Caboose. During the short flight he spotted a total of eight moose down through the bare birch and cottonwood trees on the Kenai Peninsula, along with gray-green spruce forests, snow-splotched brown meadows, and turquoise lakes. Soon the plane banked where the Cook Inlet met Kachemak Bay, the bay whose name he bore. Across it the Kenai mountain range, home to nesting glaciers, rose mightily and stretched beyond sight.

From the other side of the Inlet, Mt Illiamna, Mt Redoubt and Mt Augustine loomed solid and strong and steady. But looks deceive; Redoubt or Augustine frequently let off steam and took turns blowing their tops every decade or so, spreading thick volcanic ash as far as Anchorage and beyond, turning the sky dark with soot. His mom used to say Alaska didn’t forgive mistakes. As a boy, Kache wondered if those volcanic eruptions were symptoms of its pent-up rage.

There was the Caboose Spit, lined with fishing boats, a finger of land jutting out into the bay where the old railroad tracks ended, the rusty red caboose still there.

“See that?” his mom had shouted over the Cessna’s engine that first day they’d all flown together, his dad finally realizing his dream of owning a bush plane. “The long finger with the red fingernail pointing to the mountains? I bet the earth is so proud of those mountains. Wants to make sure we don’t miss seeing them.” She tucked one of Kache’s curls under his cap, her smile so big. “As if we could! Aren’t they amazing?”

It had always been a breath-stopping view, the kind that made him inhale and forget to exhale, especially when the clouds took off, as they just had, and left the sea every shade of sparkling blue and green against the purest white of the mountains. He had to admit he’d never seen anything anywhere—even now during the spring breakup, Alaska’s ugliest time of year—that came close to this height or depth of wild beauty.

But now the view did more than take his breath away. Maybe his mom had been wrong. Maybe that strip of land was the world’s middle finger, telling him to fuck off, saying, Who you calling flat? Today that red spot of caboose looked more like a smear of blood on the tip of a knife than a fingernail. Either way, the view stabbed its way into his chest, as if it were trying to finish him off before he even landed.

THREE

Snag hadn’t stopped maneuvering through her small house since Kache’s call. Kache. Finally agreeing to come home. In the wee hours of that morning she’d mistaken the ringing phone for the alarm and kept hitting the snooze button until she sat up in a panic, thinking, It’s about Mom. But no, it was Kache, calling back from Austin. Ever since they’d hung up she’d been bathing every surface with buckets of Zoom cleaner, suctioning up the cat hair and the spilled-over cat food with the vacuum, stuffing the fridge with a ready-to-bake casserole, moose pot roast, and rhubarb crunch, and wrapping the bed in clean sheets.

Snag thought she, herself, resembled a well-made bed. Polishing every last streak off the mirror, she saw her chenille robe creased under her breasts as if it were a bedspread tucked around two down pillows. They rose and fell with her deep breaths. She moved fast despite her size, wiping the counter now, putting away a pepper grinder, a bottle of salad dressing with Paul Newman’s mug on it. She closed the refrigerator door.

There was the memory of Kache, sitting on the kitchen stool, dark curly head bent over his guitar, then opening that same door and standing in front of the assortment of cold food like the refrigerator was some god requiring homage. How many times had she swatted him, told him to close the damn door? “A million? A billion?”

Since the day she had to put her mom into the home, Snag had been talking to herself. Before that, sometimes all Lettie had added to the conversation was, “Is that right, Eleanor,” but it was something.

No one but her mom still called her Eleanor. Around age nine she came home from fishing the river alone for the first time, holding up a decent-sized salmon. “Look, Daddy. I caught a fish all by myself.”

Her daddy laughed and pulled the hook out of the side of the poor fish. “Eleanor,” he said, “what you did was snagged yourself a fish.” Glenn, jealous that he was the same age and had yet to catch or even snag anything, started calling her Snag. The name took hold and never let go. Most of the town’s newcomers thought the name came from the fact that she had a gift for selling. It was true. Whether someone needed Mary Kay or Jafra cosmetics, Amway detergent, or a new house, Snag was the person to call.

Real estate had been particularly good to her. She preferred to live in her simple house, but she waxed poetic about the benefits of a sunk-in tub or a granite countertop. Lately she’d stepped back from showing houses. She’d made enough, and she wanted to give the newbies a shot. The one element in life that had come easily to Snag was money and she didn’t need to be piggy about it. She still sold products for the pyramid businesses, but more as a service to the citizens of Caboose than out of her own need. The only thing she couldn’t sell anyone on was the idea of getting the town mascot, the old Caboose parked at the end of the spit, moving again. But she didn’t have time to dwell on that now.

She climbed into the car and took a deep breath. Kache. “He’s going to want to kill me, and I can’t blame him one bit.” She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her rain jacket, surprised to see a black smear across it. She wore the mascara for the first time in years in honor of Kache’s homecoming. It was the brand she’d demonstrated at kitchen tables, rubbing it on a page of paper, then dropping water on it, holding the paper up so the drop ran down clear as gin. Now she smoothed her fingers under her eyes: more black. She licked her fingers, ran them over and over her face, took the balled-up tissue from under her sleeve and wiped more. She adjusted the rearview mirror to check herself. “Aw, crap,” she said. It looked like someone had struck oil on her face. With all her finesse for cleaning, Snag sometimes felt that her biggest contribution to mankind was making a mess of things.

FOUR

At the small Caboose airport, Kache recognized Snag before she turned around to face him. You couldn’t miss her height, a half inch shy of six feet. Long-limbed like he was, hair cropped short, with much more salt than pepper now. She was his father’s twin and they bore a strong resemblance—the deep dimples, the large gray eyes—maybe that’s why Kache had always thought of her as a handsome woman. Her back expanded, her shoulders hung limp in her hooded jacket. She fidgeted with her sleeves, touched her face. Many times that sad spring before he’d left, Kache had seen her cry with her back to him, as if she might protect him from all the grief.

He sighed, kept standing there, observing her broad back. How was it that you could leave a place for twenty years, stay away for twenty years, and walk right smack into the very center of what you left behind, like it was some bull’s-eye for which you were trained to aim?

“Aunt Snag?” He touched her arm and she jumped.

“Kache! Of course it’s you.” As tall as she was, she still had to stand on her tiptoes to swing her chubby arms around him. “Oh hon, look at you. Your momma and daddy would be so proud.”

He held her soft face, wrinkled a bit more, though not as much as he’d expected, but a little … dirty? Streaked with something. With Snag it was more likely mud than makeup. He smiled. Their eyes stayed on each other for a long minute. There was a lot to say but all he got out was, “Let’s go see Gram.”

Snag blew her nose, blew some more. “She’s not herself. And I tried and tried, but I couldn’t keep up. It’s a decent place, though. It is. We can stop on the way home.” She pulled his head down, ruffled his hair, like he was eight years old instead of thirty-eight. “You look so handsome. Kache Winkel, you’re home. Is that your only bag?”

He nodded. He’d packed the few warm clothes he still owned, along with the old holey green T-shirt he would never throw out, the one that said, No, I don’t play basketball. Denny had it printed up for him because at six foot six inches, Kache had gotten tired of being asked. And he’d packed the only item of his mom’s he’d taken, her favorite silk scarf, which had smelled of her perfume for years after she died. Snag asked him where his guitar was but he shrugged, as he had whenever she’d asked him in Austin. She raised her eyebrows, opened her mouth, but let the question go, just as she had before.

Even in the middle of winter Austin didn’t get this cold. In the car he rubbed his hands together and felt the pull and release of resistance and surrender; the place lured him back in, then yanked him hard with long lines of memories: Denny buying him beer at that very liquor store, which still sported the same flashing orange sign; his mom rushing him into that very emergency room when he was nine and had split his knee open. That same hardware and tackle shop his dad got lost in for hours while Kache waited in the truck, writing lyrics on the backs of old envelopes his mom kept in the glove compartment for blotting her lipstick. Kache wrote around the red blooms of her lip prints.

Some things had changed, sure, and yet not enough to keep away a hollow, emanating ache.

But it was breakup. Here, early spring was the depressing time of year, when the snow and ice gave way—cracking, breaking, oozing—as if the earth bawled, spewing mud everywhere, running into the darkest lumpy blue of the Cook Inlet and Kachemak Bay.

“Thought we might get to see Janie. Couldn’t get away from work?” Snag said, glancing at Kache. He shook his head. “You’re awfully quiet. For you.” She smiled and fiddled with the radio while she drove, then turned it off. It was true that Kache’s dad had dubbed him Chatty Kachey, but that was a long, long time ago. “Ah, a break from the rain.”

“We don’t get enough in Austin. I’d like a good watering.”

“In a few weeks you’ll be soaked through to the bone, I’m betting. Fingers crossed we’ll have a decent summer. Since you don’t … you know, have to get back to work … You’re staying a while, aren’t you, hon?”

“I’m thinking a few weeks.” That was the goal, anyway, if he could stick it out. It would get easier in a day or two. He wanted to hang out with Snag and Lettie. Face the things he needed to face, get out to the homestead. Snag had said a nice family was renting it. He’d try to fix whatever out there needed fixing, do whatever needed to be done for Lettie and Snag, hold it together, be strong enough to look it all in the face so he could get on with his life. Janie was right. It was way past time.

Snag pulled the car into the parking lot of the low brick and concrete building. “She’s a lot weaker, Kache. She asks about you still, though. It depends. Some days she’s clearer than most of us, and some days she’s cloudy, and some days she’s plain snowed in.”

He got out and held open the glass door—flowery pink and green wallpaper and paintings of otters, puffins, and bears on the walls of the lobby.

He nodded approval. “Not bad, considering.”

“Believe me, it’s much better than the third world prison camp they call a nursing home down in Spruce.” She smiled wide. “Hello there, Gilly.”

“So this is Kache.” A woman probably a little younger than Snag reached out and shook his hand. “Not a mere figment of Snag and Lettie’s imagination, after all.” She wore a nametag printed in oversized letters pinned on a cheery smock, had blue eyes with nicely placed crow’s feet, the kind that told you she’d spent a lot of time laughing. “If I’d known last month you were coming up, I might have been able to talk my daughter into staying. I told her we have a boatload of single men up here, but she only lasted a couple of weeks. She said, ‘Mom, I’m going back to Colorado where at least the men shave.’ That and the fact that folks regularly get their eyebrows and noses pierced by hooks while combat fishing on the Kenai, fairly crushed her fantasy version of Alaska.”

Snag touched Kache’s face. “Five o’clock shadow.”

Kache said, “Can’t help that. But it’ll be gone by morning.”

“See, Gilly? Your daughter missed out.”

Kache rubbed his chin. “It won’t be long before I start forgetting how to shave, I suppose.”

Even though the place was not-bad-considering, as he followed Snag down the hall it still smelled faintly of urine, medicine and decay, all mixed with boiled root vegetables.

The TV shouted an old black-and-white film he didn’t recognize, wheelchairs facing it like church pews. Grandma Lettie sat off to the side with her head in a book. Literally. The book lay open on her lap, her head drooped to almost touching it. She wore her hair in the same braid she always had, but it was as thin and wispy as a goose feather. In the photos of her as a young woman it had been a thick, dark rope coiling down to her waist.

Kache knelt in front of her. A thin line of drool hung from the center of her top lip down to the page. He wiped it with his sleeve while Snag handed him one of her crumpled tissues. “Gram?”

She looked up, peering, and then her mouth opened in a smile.

“Kachemak Winkel!” The smile slipped down. “Where have you been?

“I’ve been in Texas, Gram.”

She shook her head. “Where’ve you been?”

“Working, Gram.” His answers sounded feeble.

“No.” She started to whimper and turned to Snag, whispering loudly. “Does he know about the crash?”

Snag nodded. “Yes, Mom, he was here. Remember?”

“But he didn’t die.”

“That’s right.”

She whispered again, enunciating slowly, her eyes wide, “He was supposed to go on that plane.”

Kache swallowed hard. Snag held his elbow, moved a lock of white hair from Gram’s vein-mapped forehead. “Mom, Kache has been away. Just away. From here.”

Gram raised her eyebrows, nodding, and rubbed Kache’s long hand between her two boney speckled ones. “Of course you have, dear. Oh, but …” She looked over her shoulder, then back at him. Her voice raised higher, almost a child’s. “It was like all four of you were dead. Now. At least we have you back.” She picked up his hand in hers, moving it up and down to the beat of each word: “And. That. Is a. Very. Good. Thing.”

“Thanks, Gram.” How had he stayed away so long? How had he come back? He was tempted to grab himself a wheelchair and steal the remote from the guy in the Hawaiian shirt and cardigan, flip the channel to the DIY network, and let a few more decades go flickering past.

Instead, he drove with Snag over to her place. He braced himself for the onslaught of mementos but, surprisingly, Snag didn’t have one piece of furniture or even a knick-knack or painting of his mother’s. Sentimental Aunt Snag, who loved her brother and adored her sister-in-law. Where was all their stuff? It didn’t make sense to sell or give away every single thing. And when Kache asked about heading out to the homestead she changed the subject. She wouldn’t have sold it, would she? He knew she’d sold his dad’s fishing boat right away to Don Haley, but all four hundred acres, without saying a word to Kache? It was true that Kache had given her power of attorney, back when he was eighteen and didn’t want to deal. But she wouldn’t have sold it without telling him. No way.

Later that afternoon he went to the Safeway for her and bumped into an old friend of his father’s, Duncan Clemsky. Duncan clapped him on the back, kept shaking his hand while he talked. “Look at you, Mr. City Slicker. I still think of you when I have to drive by the road to your daddy’s land. Only time I get out that far is when I make a delivery to the Russian village.”

“The Old Believers are accepting deliveries these days? Progressive of them.”

“Some of them at Ural even have satellite dishes. Going soft. Won’t be long until they’re wearing pretty, useless boots like those.” He nodded toward Kache’s feet. “Change eventually gets ahold of everyone I suppose.”

“Suppose so,” Kache said, his face heating up. Nothing like a lifelong Alaskan to put you in your place. He wanted to ask Duncan if Snag had sold the land, but he wasn’t about to let on he didn’t know—if it was even true. No need to get a rumor heading through town that would end up like one of the salmon on the conveyor belt down at the cannery, the head and tail of the story cut off and the middle butchered up until it became something unrecognizable.

“You’re gonna need to get some real boots before folks start mistaking you for a tourist from California. Thought you were at least in Texas, my man.” He shook his head and winked. “You tell your aunt and grandma I said hello, will you?”

Kache nodded. “Will do, Duncan. Same goes for Nancy and the kids.”

That opened up another ten minutes of conversation, with Duncan Clemsky filling Kache in on every one of his five kids and sixteen grandchildren, and seven seconds of Kache filling Duncan in on the little that Kache had been up to for the last twenty years. “Yeah, you know … working a lot.”

On the way back to Snag’s, Kache decided that if she didn’t bring up the homestead that evening, he would just come out and ask her if she’d sold it. Part of him hoped she had, the other part hoped to God she hadn’t.

FIVE

Snag filled the sink with the hottest water she could stand while Kache cleared the dinner dishes. She’d decided on Shaklee dishwashing liquid, since she’d used Amway for lunch and breakfast, and now she was trying to decide how on earth to tell Kache about the homestead.

Staring at her reflection in the kitchen window, she saw a chickenshit, and a jealous sister, and there was no hiding it. Looking at it, organizing the story in her mind, lining it up behind her lips: This is how I let it happen. It started this way, with my good intentions but my weaknesses too, and then a day became a week became a year became a decade became another. I hadn’t meant for it to happen like this, I hadn’t meant to.

She squeezed more of the detergent; let the hot water cascade over her puffy hands. She laid her hands flat along the sink’s chipped enamel bottom, where she couldn’t see them beneath the suds. If only she were small enough to climb into the sink and hide her whole self, just lie quietly with the forks and knives and spoons until this moment passed and she no longer had to see herself for what she really was. Sometimes drowning didn’t seem so horrible when she thought of it in those terms. Better than dying the way Glenn and Bets and Denny had. She shivered even though her hands and arms were immersed in the liquid heat.

It would have brought them honor in some small way, if she’d done the simple thing everyone expected of her. Simply take care of the house and Kache. But she’d failed at both.

“Aunt Snag?” Next to her, he held the old Dutch oven with the moose pot roast drippings stuck on the bottom. There were never any leftovers with Kache, even now that he was a grown man. “Are you okay? Want me to finish up, you catch the end of the news?”

“No … Well … Okay.” She dried her hands on the towel and started to walk out, but turned back. “I’ve got to tell you something, hon, and it’s not going to be pretty. You’re going to be real upset with me, and I won’t blame you one bit.”

“You sold the homestead.” It was a statement, not a question.

“What?” she said, though she’d heard him perfectly.

“You sold it. You sold the homestead.”

“No, hon. I didn’t. I didn’t sell it.”

He smiled, sort of, a sad, tight turning up of his mouth, while his shoulders relaxed. “I guess I’ll need to go out. Check up on things. I’ve been meaning to ask. But it’s hard, thinking about driving up, seeing it for the first time, you know? Do you go out there a lot?” Still such youthfulness to his face. He didn’t seem like a grown man who’d seen a lot of life. Snag couldn’t tell what it was, exactly. Trust? Vulnerability?

She said, “Not a lot, no.”

“Just enough to take care of things.” His voice didn’t rise in a question.

“No, not that much even.’ She breathed in deep, searched in her pockets and up her sleeve for a tissue. “I haven’t been out there at all.”

“This spring?”

“No. I mean not once. Not at all.”

“All year?”

“No, Kache. Not all year. Not ever. Not once. I never went out like I told you I did. I planned to a million times, but I never closed it up, never got all your stuff, never put things in storage. I never …”

He stood with his mouth agape for what seemed to Snag like a good five minutes. “Wait a second. You said you’d been renting it out. No one has been out there since I left? Not even the Fosters? Or the Clemskys? Jack? Any of those people? They would have been glad to help. They would have insisted on it.”

Snag leaned against the counter for support, inhaled and exhaled. “Don’t you see? I insisted it was taken care of. I told them I’d hired someone … to scrape the snow off … patch the roof … run water in the pipes.”

“I don’t understand. Why?”

“Embarrassed by then. I hadn’t even been out since you left, to water the houseplants, or—I’d never planned to be so negligent—clean out the pantry.” She fell silent. The water dripped on and on into the sink. “I left it all. I tried, I drove part way dozens of times but then I’d chicken out and turn the car around.”

Kache didn’t scream and holler at her like she’d expected. He hugged her, a big old bear of a hug. In his arms, the sense that she might not be worn down to a nub by shame after all. But grace dragged another weight of its own. He said her name, tenderly, and sighed. “You know it’s the anniversary today, almost to the hour?” She nodded because she did know without thinking about it, the way a person knows they’re breathing. He told her it was okay, that he did understand, more than he wanted to admit, that he’d fought the same problem in trying to come back.

She was glad she didn’t use the line she’d been holding onto in case she needed it, the fact that at first, way back when, she’d waited for him to return so they might go together. And that’s what she’d pictured happening now, the two of them braving the drive out together. But forgiving or not, he’d already let go of her, grabbed the car keys, called out, “I’ll be back in a while. Don’t wait up,” and was tearing out of the driveway when she whispered, “Wait.” But she knew. Even though he’d reacted with kindness, she could see the shock pumping through him and that he needed to put some distance between them. It scared her to have him go off upset. The tires screeched like they did when Kache was still a teenager, as if they’d woken up the morning after the crash and no time had passed at all.

SIX

Kache couldn’t get to the house fast enough now. Now that too much time had passed and the place would most likely have rotted to ruins. The cabin Grandma Lettie and Grandpa A.R. built with their own hands in the early Forties, added onto in the Fifties. The place that his mom and dad added onto again, then transformed into a real house in the Seventies. The house Kache grew up in and loved and the only place he ever called home. Reduced to a pile of moldy logs.

He guessed that when he got out to the homestead it would be dark. The days were already starting to get longer and in less than a month would go on until midnight, though that didn’t help him now. He had no idea if the moon would show up full or a sliver, waxing or waning. Yes, he knew the DIY network lineup by heart but he’d lost track of the night sky long ago. He reached under the seat for the flashlight he figured Snag would have stowed there and set it next to him. Plenty of gas—he’d filled it that afternoon, so he’d make it out and back with some to spare.

Keeping an eye out for moose, he drove the first part of the road, the paved part, fast. Here the houses stood close enough to see each other, all facing south to take advantage of the view—the jagged horizon of mountains marooned across six miles of Kachemak Bay.

Kachemak. A difficult name to have in this town, the kids teasing him in his first years at school, when the teacher let his full name slip out during roll call instead of the shortened version he’d insisted on—pronounced simply catch—the kids adding Bay onto the end of it. Then in high school, the girls blushing and calling him What a Kache, asking him if he would write a song for them. Or the boys throwing balls of any type his way and saying Here, Kache, followed by You can’t! Kache!, which was absolutely correct.

At first his mom told him they named him for the bay because it was the most beautiful bay she’d ever seen and he was the most beautiful baby she’d ever laid eyes on. Whenever Denny protested, she’d laugh and say, “Den, I won’t lie to you. You had the sweetest little squished-up turnip face. Fortunately, you grew into your dashingly handsome self.”

Later, when Kache was sixteen and his father decided he was old enough to be let in on a secret, he told Kache that was all true, but there was more. Kache was conceived, his father said, grinning, in the fishing boat on the bay. The sun had been warm and the fishing slow—both rarities for Alaska. “Proved to be a fruitful combination, heh?” He slapped Kache on the back so hard it about knocked him over. “Denny, of course, was conceived on a camping trip to Denali.” Kache had told his dad that he didn’t need quite that much information, thank you very much.

He hit a pothole and mud splattered on the hood and windshield. Kache knew the house was probably too far out of the way and too well hidden for anyone to stumble upon. Old Believers wouldn’t want anything to do with a house outside their village, and the deepest cut of canyon on the whole peninsula added an uncrossable deterrent. Nobody with a brain would descend that canyon. The one other access besides their five-mile private road was by the beach, and only during the lowest tides. Most likely, the house stood its ground against the snow and rain and wind until the chinking filled like sponges, the roof turned to cheesecloth, the furniture rotted with moss, all his mother’s books … All those books. His mom’s paintings and her quilts and the photographs. The photographs he had never wanted, now he wanted them, even the blurry black-and-white ones he’d taken when he was five, when he’d snapped a whole roll of film with Denny’s new camera, and Denny had threatened to strangle him.

Damn it, Aunt Snag.

Where you been? Where you been?

Damn it yourself, Winkel. He hit the steering wheel, pulled on the lights, leaned forward as if that would make him get there faster.

The road turned to dirt—mud this time of year. A plastic bottle of Advil lodged between the seats rattled on and on. This was the part of the road he knew best, the part his old blue Schwinn had known so well that at one time the bike might have found its way back home without anyone riding it.

No turning around now; the pull grew stronger, magnetic.

He wasn’t the first one to leave and get pulled back. In the mid-Sixties, even his dad couldn’t wait to get away, had gone off to Vietnam in a huff of rebellion mixed with a desperation to see someone other than the all-too-familiar faces in Caboose, Alaska. But he returned with a deep disdain for the World Out There. In a few short, horrific years, he said, he’d learned a lifetime of lessons about human nature and wasn’t interested in learning more.

“I’ll take plain old nature with a minimum of the human element, thank you,” he was fond of saying.

But then he’d met Bets, and she restored his faith in humankind, or at least in womankind, and instead of the life he’d planned as a hermit bachelor, he became a family man. Still, he answered to no one (except, it was a known fact, Bets) and lived off the sea and the land for the most part, earning a decent living as a fisherman. They’d been able to transform the cabin into a real house, with huge windows facing the bay and Kenai Mountains. Bets had eased him into one compromise after the other over the years, first with a generator, and then, once Caboose Electric Association extended their service, real electricity, although they never did have central heating. She’d confided to Kache that it was next on her list, right before the Cessna crashed.

It made sense for homesteaders, like all farmers, to have large families to help with the work. But Lettie and A.R., and later Bets and Glenn, had only had two children. Fortunately, Denny, like his father Glenn before him, was able to do the work of three or four strapping boys. Kache, however, had been a disappointment, and his father had a hard time hiding just how much Kache let him down on a daily basis.

A bull moose plunged through the spruce trees, and Kache slowed to a stop and let it cross in front of him. Its long legs navigated the mud with each step before it disappeared into the alder bushes. Kache drove on and turned down their private road to the homestead. But he quickly pulled over. “Road” was an optimistic term. A churned up pathway of sludge obstructed by downed spruce and birch trunks and overgrown alders was more like it. He grabbed the flashlight, which was also optimistic, the light dim, the battery exhausted. Aunt Snag knew to keep the battery fresh, but Kache should have checked it before he left. He didn’t want to walk in the dark through moose and bear country at the onset of spring when the animals experienced the boldest of hunger pangs.

His cellphone was useless; no service. He should turn back. Get in the car and head into town and return tomorrow. But his dad, his mom, Denny—they seemed so close: a slap on his back, an arm around his shoulders, as certain as the cold on his feet, and he shivered from both. He smelled the fire from their woodstove, as if they kept it burning all these years. All around him they said his name in all its variations and tones, so achingly clear: “Kache, honey?” “Oh, Kaa-achemak, there’s my Widdle Brodder …” “Did you hear me, Son? Pay attention.” He heard their snow machines, though there wasn’t any snow, though there wasn’t any them. He didn’t believe in heaven, exactly, but this place was thick with recollections and maybe something more. If their spirits watched him, somehow, from somewhere, didn’t he want to prove he had become capable of more than any of them thought possible? But had he? No. A city boy number-cruncher-turned-couch-potato who wore pretty boots and forgot a decent flashlight would hardly invoke awe. Still. If they were waiting, they’d been waiting twenty years and he didn’t want to make them wait another day.

He made his way through the mud, tripping, sinking, until the full moon rose from behind the mountains. Like a helpful neighbor in the nick of time, it shined its generous gold light through the cobalt sky. A wolf howled, holding a single lonely note in the distance. The scent of spruce and mud and sea kept dredging up the imagined hint of smoke. All those scents had always come together here. Even in the summers, a fire burned in the woodstove.

Now Kache spotted the downed trees clearly without the flashlight, and he walked as quickly as his mud-soaked city boy boots would allow—until the last bend, where he stopped and readied himself for what lay ahead.

It was then, as he stood on the road that was no longer a road, breathing deep, heart hammering, that the realization jarred him. The familiar scent. The spruce, the soaked loamy earth, the sea; yes, yes, yes. But wood smoke? It was too strong, too distinct now, not merely his imagination. It was definitely the smell of wood burning, and coal too.

He edged around the last corner, saw the house through the boughs of spruce and naked birch and cottonwoods. It stood, not a dejected pile of logs, but tall and proud, glowing with warm light.

What?

Who?

Smoke rose straight up from the chimney, as if the house raised its hand. As if the house knew the answer.

SEVEN

Kache stood, staring, the cold mud oozing into his boots and now through his socks. The house stared back as it always had in his mind, glowing with light and life in the middle of the cleared ten acres.

Who in the hell?

Sweating, watching, allowing for the strangest glimmer of hope. Maybe he really had been dreaming, really had been sleeping, and now that he’d finally awoken, life might resume as it had before? Maybe all and everyone had not been lost? Maybe only he had been lost.

In these last two minutes he felt more alive than he had in two decades. Maybe he’d been under some sort of spell, broken at last on this anniversary. His mom would love the mysticism and synchronicity of that.

He shook his head, boxed his own ears. What he needed was common sense. His dad would have reamed him for not grabbing Aunt Snag’s .22 that hung on the enclosed back porch. As much as Kache hated guns, never got himself to actually shoot one, he knew it was crazy to approach the house without carrying one, especially given the lights and smoke. His dad used to say it didn’t matter if you were far to the left of liberal, if you walked by yourself in the boondocks of Alaska, you should carry a gun.

His feet started moving forward anyway. Forward to his old house, his old room. Who in the hell?

Inside, a dog barked. A shadow passed by one of the windows. The shade went down, snapped up again, quick as a wink, then shut. The other shade went down. The soft light behind them off now, replaced with the dark he’d expected to find in the first place.

He pressed his back against the old storage barn, took deep breaths and tried to line up his thoughts, which kept ricocheting off each other. He should go back, return in daylight with the gun. Call Clemsky, Jack O’Connell, a few of the others. He licked his palm and made a small circle on the mud-covered window beside him. He peered in. It was dark, and he barely made out the outline of his dad’s Ford pickup. Aunt Snag had even left that, probably driven it home that day from where his dad had parked it by the runway. She should have used it. That would have meant something.

The dog was going nuts now, continuously barking. Kache pushed on the storage barn side door; it wasn’t locked, opened easily. Along the wall he felt for the shovel, the hoe, the rake. He decided on the sharp, stiff-bladed rake. Better than nothing.

Hovering behind a warped barrel, then a salmonberry bush, he tried the back door of the house, knowing it would be locked. He crept along to the first kitchen window, remembering. That window never did lock. He slid it open, pulled himself up on one knee, lowered the rake in first, then jumped down inside with a thud.

The barking stopped, became a whine and growl. He pictured a hand muzzled around the dog’s nose. Kache tried to make himself smaller by crouching, then slipping along the wall. The thought came to him: I am not the intruder here. This is my house. He’d forgotten, taken on the attitude of a thief instead of a protector, and now he stood straight with his rake, as if that would shift the perspective of whoever was upstairs, as if the moment was a black-ink silhouette that changed depending on how you looked at it.

The whining, the growling. Kache could smell his own nerves, so of course the dog could. He ran his hand along the blue-tiled kitchen counter, up to the light switch, flicked on the lights. Nothing had changed. As always the woodstove warmed the large living room, which had once held four rooms before his mom and dad remodeled. The same furniture stood in its assigned places. His mother’s paintings still hung heavily on the thick, chinked walls. Photos of the four of them, baby pictures, wedding pictures, Christmas pictures all lined the top of the piano. He ran his finger along the top; free of dust. Games and books crammed the shelves. Kache fingered the masking tape his mother had sealed along the broken seam of the Scrabble box. He fought urges to throw the rake, to vomit, to leave.

Upstairs, another growl. Kache choked out, “Hello?” He listened. Nothing. “Hello?”

Then, rage. He pounded up the stairs. “Answer me! Answer me!” He flung open doors and flipped on lights to bedrooms that stood like shrines to the dead. All as they’d left it. In his room, a yellowed poster of Double Trouble was still stapled to the wall, Stevie Ray Vaughan still alive and well. As if neither his plane nor Kache’s family’s plane had ever gone down. As if Kache still slept in the bottom bunk and dreamed of playing the guitar on stage.

Under the bed, the dog let out barks like automatic ammunition, scrambling his claws on the wood floor. Kache held out the rake. “Who’s there!” An arm shot out, fist clenched around the handle of Denny’s hunting knife. But even more startling than the knife: the arm, clad in the sleeve of his mother’s suede paisley shirt. The shirt Kache and Denny bought in Anchorage for her birthday, and that she referred to as the most stylish, most perfect-fitting shirt on the planet that had somehow forged its way to the backwoods of Alaska. “Mom?” Kache whispered under the barking dog. “Mom?” he said louder, his eyes filling.

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 her 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 afghan, 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.

“How long have you been here?”

She studied her hands as though she’d just discovered them, let a moment pass before she held them out, fingers splayed.

“Ten days?”

She shook her head.

“Ten months?”

Again, no.

“Ten years?”

A nod.

“How old are you?”

“I am twenty-eight years old.” With this, her eyes filled again and she quickly wiped her face.

“Do you know my Aunt Snag?”

She shook her head.

“You came with your folks? Where’s your family?”

“I have none.”

“Who lives with you here?”

She shook her head, kept shaking it.

“But you haven’t been here by yourself. Tell me who else has been living in my house.”

Her hands went over her ears now.

Kache took a deep breath and lowered his voice. “I’m not angry. I’m confused.” She finally looked up, but not directly at him. “I don’t know who you are and who else might come barging through the door with a gun.”

“I am alone.”

“I’m wondering if you’re an Old Believer?”

She nodded again, one slow dip of her head.

“With an entire village? Big family? Ton of kids? But you’re not wearing a long dress.”

With this she stood, and the dog rose and followed her to the stairs.

“Wait. Nadia, please. I need some answers here.”

She turned, whispered, “I cannot.” She was tall, sturdy. She’d rolled up his jeans and cinched them with a belt. Her back faced him again, her gold drape of hair, which had been tied up the night before, reached past her waist. The Old Believer women he’d seen shopping in town always covered their hair with scarves.

He let her and the dog go upstairs. The door to his old room clicked shut.

No signs of anyone else other than his own family—and those signs flashed loudly everywhere he turned. He went through the house, amazed again and again by how much remained exactly the same. Most of his mother’s books filled the walls, as neat and full as rows of corn, although some books were upside down and others stood in small stacks here and there throughout the rooms. The photographs along the top of the piano, on the bureaus and hanging on the stairwell, each one dusted clean and placed as he remembered them. In the bathroom there were even Amway and Shaklee products. His mom had been such a supporter of Snag, his dad would complain that the products were taking over the household; stacked five rows deep in the barn, the pantry, the cupboards. Enough, apparently, to last at least twenty years.

He turned on the faucet. Pipes seemed to be in working order. In the pantry, garden vegetables—rhubarb and berry jams, dried mushrooms, canned salmon and meats. Tomato sauces, soups, sauerkraut, relishes. Potted herbs along the windowsill next to the old kitchen table. He went down into the root cellar, stocked with boxes of potatoes and onions, hanging red cabbages and some dried fish and meat. Carved tally marks all over the wall. He didn’t count them, but it looked like it could be enough to account for ten years. Or a lot of dead buried bodies. The family’s old refrigerator held frozen fish and meats. Dried herbs hung from the ceiling.

Undoubtedly someone helped her with all of this. And who paid the electricity bill?

He climbed back up to the main floor, hesitated before heading up to the second floor. This was his house. He had every right to look around. But he paused again before he entered his mother and father’s room. The pauses came with a sense of reverence, as if he were entering a church or a museum. Everything—every single thing—in the entire house had been so well tended, so obviously respected by this Nadia.

The quilt his mother made still covered the bed. As a small boy, he would race his matchbox cars along the quilt’s patterns—roadways, as he saw them. Until a wheel caught on a stitch, pulling a piece of fabric loose, and his mother put an end to that game. He sat on the bed, running his hand along it until he found the spot where the missing piece exposed strands of batting. Even this room was not cloaked in dust as he’d expected. He opened the closet and saw their clothes hanging, his father’s heavy jackets and creased boots, his mother’s red down jacket. Everyone commented on how his mother managed to look fashionable in whatever she wore, no matter how functional. He never knew much about fashion, but he knew his mom always stood out in a crowd.

“Mom,” he whispered. “Mom. Mom. Mom.” He stuck his nose in her sweater and inhaled, but it no longer smelled of her. On the dresser, though, was a bottle of her perfume, White Linen. He opened it and there it was. Once when he was Christmas shopping with Janie, he saw the perfume on display and picked up the tester and smelled it and wished he hadn’t. The saleswoman took the bottle from him, sprayed it on a piece of white textured card stock, like a bookmark to hold his place, and handed it to him. He had set the paper reminder of his mom back on the glass counter and walked away. But now he pressed the gold cylinder top on the dispenser and shot the scent of his mother across the room.

Goddamn it. There is no getting around grief.

Even if you turned your back on it, diligently refused to answer its call, it would badger you, forever demanding payment. And oh, could it wait; it would not move on. Grief was a fucking collections company, and it was never fully satisfied. It would always keep showing up out of the blue, tacking on more interest.

His mom’s books lined the walls in the bedroom too. He’d known she loved to read, but he hadn’t realized that they’d lived in what other people might classify as a library. She’d worked in the book business in New York before she’d met his father. She moved here willingly, even enthusiastically, carrying her designer clothes and hundreds of books to this far edge of the world.

And there was the big old steamer trunk at the end of the bed. The one she’d kept locked, with her journals inside, the one no longer locked, the brass tongues sticking out at him. He lifted the creaky top. Empty, as he expected. He remembered Snag emptying it a few days after they’d gotten the news. Kache had sat swollen-eyed in his room and watched her blurred image go back and forth from his parents’ room to a cardboard box in the hallway. She’d carried the notebooks in armfuls from the trunk to the box, and her knitted cardigan got caught on one of the wire rings so that after she released them, a single notebook hung from her sweater. It had an orangey red cover, and it made Kache think of a king crab clinging to her. She didn’t even notice until he pointed it out. Snag’s own eyes were so teary that when she tried to remove it, she kept tangling the sweater and wire even more so, until Kache helped release her from the journal. He handed it to her, then gently closed his door, leaving Snag to carry out his mom’s one commandment that if anything ever happened to her, the journals would be burned. Snag did that much.

In the bathroom, Kache blew his nose and splashed cold water on his eyes, pressed a towel against his face, holding it there for a good long minute. His great-grandfather’s white enamel shaving mug, soap brush, and straight-edge razor still sat on the shelf. His mom always did love family heirlooms. Little did she know the whole house would one day be a museum full of them.

He knocked on his bedroom door. “I’m going to take off. Not sure when I’ll be back but maybe you’ll be ready to talk by then?”

The dog let out a whine but Nadia said nothing.

THIRTEEN

The front door closed again and Nadia released a sigh so long and shaky she wondered how long she’d been holding her breath. From the bedroom window, she watched him taking long strides up the road. He looked more teenager than man, still gangly and long-limbed, still moving with the slightest uncertainty.

She collapsed into the desk chair, more tired than if she’d chopped and hauled wood all day, a fatigue that started in her chest and wrapped itself around her head. She tried to think logically. Although she felt as if she knew him through the stories, he was not the same person who’d been brought up in that house. Unlike Nadia, he had lived a life. He had gone somewhere, done some things. Most likely he had a wife, children, an occupation. He was a musician, or perhaps a teacher of music.

He seemed … upset, but mostly gentle. She wanted to trust her instinct; she was older now, knew more. It was clear he had not decided what to do about her and she imagined him changing his mind again and again with each turn of the road. Would he bring back the police, have her arrested? Would he head out to the village to ask questions? Would he return with supplies? Or with Lettie, if she was still alive? But he hadn’t mentioned her, and Nadia had long feared Lettie dead, had mourned her ever since her last visit, when she brought not one, but two truckloads of supplies and Leo, who was just a puppy then.

Perhaps Kache would bring his wife to talk with her. If he did go to the village … what if Vladimir charmed Kache into coming back with him, the way he had so easily charmed her father and the others?

She should leave. She forced herself to stand, and Leo stood next to her, wagging his tail, waiting for her next move.

She’d tried to leave several times in the past years after Lettie stopped coming. Nadia had hiked down to the beach, loaded the Winkels’ faded orange canoe. Leo climbed in and sat perfectly still, although his anticipation was palpable as she climbed in, paddled. Always at some point her nerve turned to nervousness—to where was she paddling? And then what? And so she turned around and paddled back, Leo’s ears down, as if he’d been reprimanded. “For this, I am very sorry. I am such the coward, Leo.”

Other times she hiked up to the road with a plan to walk into town and ask to trade animals for a new car battery and starter. She would offer chickens, a goat, whatever they wanted. But the downshift of a distant truck would send her into the bushes for cover. In her mind, Vladimir sat behind the wheel and that was enough to put another end to her plans. By the time she retraced her steps, his face had faded and she saw instead her father’s kind face, heading to buy parts for his truck; and then her mother’s, her sisters’, her brother’s faces—all so much younger than they were now. But she had no way of knowing what the years had done to their faces … and the guilt pushed her back into the Winkel house, back into bed until hunger would force her out of her self-pity, out to work the garden or to set the fishing nets and traps.

She walked down the stairs into the empty living room. Even with Leo at her heels, the emptiness had spread since Kache left. She took the dog’s face in her hands. “I should not have shut him out like that, you say?” She tugged his ear. “But wasn’t it so difficult? His asking these questions we do not know how to answer?”

Leo harrumphed and lay down next to the wood stove. “You want him to come back? Like Lettie?”

Like Lettie.

All those years ago Nadia had stayed in the house through the first spring without a sign of anyone. She’d lived off fish and clams and mussels, and the plants she’d foraged—sea lettuce and nori from the bay, lovage, the long narrow goose tongue and yellow monkey flower greens from the land. She snared plenty of rabbits. One day, she hunted for chanterelles after a week of rain, her mouth watering as she thought of sautéing them in some of the wine she’d found in the cellar, along with wild garlic and a bit of fat from the spruce hen she’d shot the day before.

But she sensed, as she walked toward the house with her basket of mushrooms, that someone was there, and she slipped behind the old outhouse to hide. Her heart seemed to beat through her back, thumping the wood siding she leaned against.

A woman’s voice called out from the front porch. “Well, whoever you are, you’re trespassing on my property but I’m not gonna shoot you. You might as well show your face.”

Nadia pressed harder against the building. It must be the owner. Nadia had thought it possible they would never come back. When she’d first found the house, she saw that no one had been there for months. Strangest were the signs that no one had actually lived there for more than a decade. The calendars, the newspapers, the magazines—everything stopped after May, 1985.

“Come on now. Contrary to what you might think, I’m glad you’re here,” the voice called. “You seem to be taking good care of the place. I’m going to fix us something to eat. I hope you’ll join me in the kitchen.”

Eventually Nadia did get hungry and cold. She smelled something meaty and sweet and delicious, along with smoke from the woodstove. Because she could not afford to pause to consider the consequences, she traversed the yard and climbed the steps to the front door without hesitation. She knocked on the door, which felt odd, and when an old woman with a white braid answered, Nadia held out the basket of chanterelles like the neighbors attending a holy day feast back in the village. The woman smiled, her wrinkles a map of her long life. Repositioning her braid so it lay behind her shoulder, she thanked Nadia and took the basket.

She said, “You poor sweet girl. I hope you like homemade beef vegetable soup and bread and chocolate chip cookies.”

Nadia had nodded, pushing the heels of her palms against her eyes.

“Don’t you worry now, you hear me? I’ll tell you what. No one’s going to badger you or make you go anywhere.”

And Lettie had stuck to her word.

If only Kachemak took after his grandmother. It seemed evident that “my non-meddling gene,” as Lettie had called it, had not traveled down through the generations.

Already Kachemak had asked more questions than Lettie. And already Nadia had decided she needed to find someway to leave, and somewhere to leave to. Somehow.

FOURTEEN

Snag needed to call Claire Hughes to get a ride to the Caboose Chamber meeting. Kache hadn’t returned the previous night, which meant Snag hadn’t slept even one quarter of a wink. But he called from his cellphone that morning and told her he was fine, not to worry. When she tried to ask him about the homestead, he’d only said they’d talk later, then hung up.

Snag cleaned all morning, cleaned over what she’d already cleaned in preparation for his arrival, because cleaning calmed her nerves. Not this time. Everything veered off course, as if the earth had freed itself from its steadfast journey around the sun and decided to skedaddle over to Jupiter with a side trip around Mars on the way.

She should go out to the homestead. Obviously. But she didn’t have her truck, which meant she’d need a ride out there, which meant whoever drove her might detect her own unbelievable capacity for negligence, which meant, in Caboose, perhaps forty-five minutes, tops, would pass before the town and its outlying communities would hear the whole humiliating story.

Besides, she really did have to get herself to the Chamber meeting. She’d been heading up a project, trying to get the train running all the way to Caboose again. A long haul, so to speak, but they’d finally gotten approval from the railroad company and the Department of Transportation, which had already begun renovation on the tracks. Now the town squabbled about one major detail.

Way back, when Caboose used to be called Herring Town with the perfectly clever slogan The End of the Line, the herring boom brought the train, the train brought the people, the herring were loaded on the train by the people—everyone was happy, and everyone got down on their knees at night and thanked the good Lord for the train and the herring in all its abundance. But then, as too much of a good thing is bound to do, the herring industry dried up from overfishing as fast as it came and the town all but dried up and the railroad company crowned Wilbur, Alaska, as its new End of the Line, about seventy-five miles up the tracks. For some reason no one quite knew, a caboose was left abandoned at the end of the Herring Town Spit, that jut of land four-and-a-half miles long, that long finger pointing to the mountains across the bay.

About fifty years after the herring left, someone came up with the idea of changing the town name because calling it Herring Town was a bit like calling the Mojave Desert “Seaside.” A vote made it officially Caboose. They needed to change the slogan too because it was no longer the end of the line, so some idiot, as far as Snag was concerned, came up with the zinger: See the Moose in Caboose. Wow. That was interesting. Moose appeared around every other bend in the state of Alaska, and most of Canada. Not exactly bragging material.

So Snag had devised a plan to get the railroad to consider bringing the train back for the tourists and thus, reestablishing the old slogan, which would once again make sense. Caboose was one of the prettiest towns in Alaska. Although, she had to admit, Alaskans used the term “pretty” rather loosely when describing towns. Caboose itself was a typical frontier town where mostly ugly buildings had cropped up as needed without much of a plan, but everyone said the setting on the mountain-bordered bay wasn’t just one of the prettiest in Alaska. It was one of the prettiest in the world. The tourists flocked like locusts every summer; the road backed up with motor homes all the way to Anchorage. A major cluster. Bad for the environment, and hard on everyone’s nerves—locals and tourists alike. So she got the railroad to agree to bring the train back. Hallelujah, right?

Wrong. Now that they’d started refurbishing the track, everyone was pissed over the fate of the caboose, the town mascot that sat at the end of the Spit and currently housed a mini-museum with photos and artifacts of the early Alaskan pioneers.

Snag wanted to have the original caboose refurbished and let it run as intended, at the back end of the train, with the pioneer memorabilia on display along with sou-venirs for sale. A great story, extra publicity—just like the town that had once been abandoned, the old caboose had been reborn and had a new lease on life. Stuck for all these years, and then, finally, on the move. She could practically write the publicity materials in her sleep.

But a big chunk of the town had their Carhartts in a bunch over the idea.

“We can’t move the caboose! It’s what our town was named after.”

“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 lifetime 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.

Her footsteps clicked down the stairs and stopped in the kitchen behind him.

“Sure you don’t want to join us?” she asked again.

Gently he lifted Charlotte off his chest and propped up on his elbow so he could see Janie in the shadows, the jutted hip and crossed-arms stance of late. Charlotte leapt down and began winding herself through and around Janie’s ankles. “No thanks.”

He sat up and twisted around to face her in the kitchen, his back sore with stiffness, his arm now slung along the top of the sofa in order to show her he was making an effort, paying attention. She flicked on the light. She had her hair up loose the way he liked it best and she wore a dress he hadn’t seen before. “You look nice,” he said. “Really pretty.”

Without a smile she shifted her weight, unfolded her arms so they hung by her sides, her pale palms facing him. “You might surprise yourself and have fun.”

How to explain the impossibility? “Not really up to it tonight.”

She kept her eyes on him. She was gracious enough not to ask: Did you apply for any jobs today? Did you make any follow-up calls? Did you even return your aunt’s call? It’s ironic, you know. Watching the Do-it-Yourself Network all day long and never doing a damn thing.

She spun away, the air barely lifting the edge of her dress, said, “I’ll be home late,” and closed the door with force, but not quite a slam. They didn’t slam doors. They didn’t shout. They’d been together over three years and never had more than a low-heated discussion, where nothing ever boiled over, just simmered on and on until they had reached this state of bone-dry evaporation.

Kache got up to find something to eat. He stretched, muscles tight from lying down so long, his vertebrae a series of hooks and sinkers.

Janie blamed this funk he’d been in for the last six months on the fact that he’d been let go from his job. A buyout. He’d received a generous enough severance package. They called it the Golden Parachute, but he was too young for that. Maybe the silver? Not even. Brass. The Brass-Can’t-Save-Your-Ass Parachute.

It wasn’t that he needed the money. He’d invested well, lived far below his means. There was just nothing he could bring himself to do. In the quiet of their kitchen he spread peanut butter on wheat bread. He could do that much.

The job had provided a masquerade that kept Janie from seeing the obvious: He’d been asleep for the last two decades. A relentless fog descended upon him that god-awful day and it remained, through his college education (with the help of a fair amount of weed) and then through his job in accounting at a small hi-tech company. He’d quit the weed by then but hid in the numbers for years without anyone realizing that he wasn’t quite … there. They shrugged it off, thinking, he supposed, that he was merely distant, quiet. They, including Janie, chalked it off as personality traits of a numbers geek.

But no one in Austin had known him before the plane crash. Way back when he wrote songs and played the guitar, when he talked too much and argued with passion and was “too touchy feely for his own good.” While at work, he’d lost himself in the black and white of the numbers; their rigid columns and graphs had held him in a tight cocoon of space. Math became his new music, but without the emotions, which was a welcome relief. He had not turned out to be a “lazy-no-good rock and roller,” after all. Unlike Kache’s father, Rex would find that disappointing.

SEVENTEEN

The Spit Tune was one of the oldest buildings on the Spit. It had survived the fire in 1918 and the Good Friday earthquake of 1964. Peanut shells and sawdust covered the floor. Signed dollar bills from every corner of the world hung from the ceiling and walls, and when Kache was a high school kid, he figured there was enough money there to fund their first album. Now he knew just how naïve that had been. First of all, there wasn’t nearly that much money, even twenty years later. And secondly, Rex, who’d owned the place forever, was fond of saying he’d shoot anyone who even tried to take one dollar down. “I won’t hurt you real bad,” he’d say. “Maybe just take off a finger or two to remind you to follow the rules.”

Rex, himself, wasn’t one to follow many rules. Kache and Marion, Chris, Dan, and Mike were all well underage when they started playing at the bar. Sometimes Rex even let them drink a few beers if they promised not to tell.

But Rex wasn’t around. Kache didn’t recognize the bartender, a young bearded guy who told him Rex was vacationing in Phoenix. Kache sat down anyway and nursed his coffee.

“Can I get you something stronger?”

“Not yet. Mind if I change the channel?”

The bartender handed him the remote. “A friend of Rex’s can do anything he wants.” Kache found the DIY network. His favorite show was about to start: it was the father and son show called The House that Jack and Jack Jr. Built. The hosts wore their tool belts low on their hips just like Kache’s father and Denny once had, sharing a similar comradeship, and when the hosts patiently began showing Kache How to Build a Fire Pit, he felt the smallest hint of a burning in the pit between his heart and his stomach.

The hosts acted like they believed in Kache, even the father, Jack Sr. From the screen, they spoke with reassuring confidence, as if Kachemak Winkel could, in fact, do it himself; he could do any goddamn thing, if he ever decided he wanted to. He could prove his father wrong again and again. He wanted his father to be wrong. That his father had been dead since 1985 didn’t matter. Kache had never wanted him to be dead, just dead wrong.

It was crazy, he knew, to desperately need approval and understanding from a dead man. But he did.

“Pussy Hollywood boys think they can tell us Alaskans how to build shit ourselves? I’d like to see them build a fox trap or skin a bear, am I right my friend?”

A large, strong-looking man sat a few stools down. Kache hadn’t even heard the guy come in. “You sound like my father,” Kache said. “And my brother, for that matter.”

“Is that right? There’s a couple of fine men I’d like to meet.” He smiled warmly, eyes teasing.

“Can’t. They’re dead.”

“Sorry to hear that. My papa too. And my mama.”

Kache nodded. “Yep. Same.”

“How?” The man motioned for the bartender to get Kache a beer.

“Plane crash.”

“That is harsh.”

“And yours?”

“Bear.”

“As in a bear attack? That’s harsh.” Kache took a swig of the beer. “Were you there?”

The man said he was, but that he hadn’t been hurt. “No scars you can see. You know what I mean, my friend.” Kache did know what he meant, even if he didn’t think quite think of him as his ‘friend’ just yet—he did already feel an odd kinship with him, knowing what they shared. The man had a Russian accent but was clean-shaven and sitting at a bar drinking a beer. Clearly not an Old Believer. Kache had grown up with a lot of Russians, and he wondered if they knew any of the same people. But when Kache asked him, he replied that he’d just moved here from the north slope after another failed marriage, lived in an old hunter’s cabin. “Only place in town I go to is here for booze and music. The rest I do myself. Not pretend, like bozos.” He motioned his beer toward the TV. “Don’t need anybody. Tired of thinking marriage might change me. It won’t. Can’t. What about you? You with beautiful woman?”

That required a complicated explanation so Kache just shook his head and turned his attention to the television, but soon his mind looped back on Janie.

The other night after she’d left to hang out with friends, Kache had noticed a light glowing from the guestroom and went to investigate. Janie had left her computer on. Janie never left her computer on. She worked for the electric company and always not only turned off, but unplugged every appliance, light, and electronic gadget they owned. She’d been spending a lot of time on the computer, and Kache sometimes wondered if she’d found someone to love on the Internet. He understood why she might.

He should just turn the thing off. But the fact that he was even curious at all gave him a rare surge of energy, so he clicked the mouse and the screen filled with tan and cream and that teal color Janie always liked.

A banner across the top said, Happenings from our Happy Home—Welcome to My Blog.

His mom had kept journals with the commitment of keeping a religious commandment, but why anyone wanted to display a personal diary on the Internet confounded him. Below the banner, a living room basked in natural light flowing through huge windows flanked with curtains, which resembled the ones his mother had made of burlap. Now they were in style? She would have gotten a kick out of that.

Hello Bloggers!

This weekend, Mr. Happenings has big plans to build a used-brick patio for the Luau we’re having in a few weeks. (Can you say pig roast? Leis? Even Poi?) I have no idea where he gets his energy. It’s not like his job isn’t grueling enough!

Was Janie having an affair with a married man? Mr. Happenings?

But he insists he can Do-it-Himself, so who am I to argue?

Anyhoo, we’re off to a dinner party tonight with our dear friends.

It had to be an affair. Janie was in love with this woman’s husband. Why else would she read this? This was exactly the kind of perkiness she made fun of.

Hope y’all have happy happenings this weekend. Be sure to check in on Monday for photos of our new patio project. Knowing Mr. Happenings, it will be completely finished. (And I’ll be giving him one of my Swedish massages!)

Toodleloo,

Janie

Janie? Janie Who? He had never heard Janie once say toodleloo, or anyhoo, for that matter, not to mention the fact none of this had anything to do with their life.

Along the right side of the screen, a cartoon caricature with Janie’s dark long hair and brown eyes grinned at him.

Click here to read About Me:

Hi, I’m Janie. I’m an Alternative Energy Specialist.

Well, he supposed that was one way to say she worked in Collections for the Electric Company. She had studied modern dance and wanted to be a dancer just as he had wanted to be a musician; they shared a haunting sense of failure. Though they each bore it quietly, it was always there, as constant as the indented couch.

I’m married to Mr. Happenings, an accomplished musician and CFO who is my Renaissance man. Seriously. What can’t he do? We have two darling kids, who I call The Pumpkin and The Petunia, and, honestly? Most of the happenings at our home really are happy! We work hard and we play hard. Check back regularly to see our do-it-yourself projects, recipes, parenting tips, decorating, crafts, and hints on how to keep your marriage and family positively happy!

He needed to stop reading, to turn it off if he could find—

“Kache. What the—?” Janie stood in the doorway, clasping her high heels in each hand.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to,” he told her, swiping the cursor toward the X, still trying to shut it down.

“Oh, it’s some work thing. I came back to turn it—Here, let me …”

“Janie.” He stood and reached out, took her shoe and held her hand, so tiny inside his mammoth one. “I’m sorry. But what is this? Some kind of alternate personality?”

Her face flushed and the pink splotch made its appearance, spreading down her neck. He felt bad, wished he had turned off the computer before she discovered what he’d discovered. “No, it’s not what you think, I’m no—I was just playing around.”

“Who’s Mr. Happenings? Is he supposed to be me? Or I guess the anti-me? My evil twin. Or I’d be the evil twin in this scenario, I guess.”

“No, no. It’s silly. I’m so embarrassed. It started out, I was … bored, you know?”

“Jesus. You had to make up an entire life? It’s that bad?”

She looked toward her toes, as if they might have an answer. “We could change that, Kache, if you’d try.”

Her shoulders slumped and a few tears hit her pearl polished toenails. He pulled her to him in a hug, Janie so short without her heels, and him so tall he had to practically fold himself in half to hold her. “I will. I’ll try harder.”

Her muffled voice, breathy against his arm, said, “You always say that but nothing changes. It’s such a lazy-ass cliché.”

He pulled back and looked at her. “Wait. You really give Swedish massages?” She didn’t smile. She didn’t even respond. He sighed. “I am a lazy ass.”

“You didn’t get all those promotions by being a lazy ass.”

“I got fired.”

“Laid off. Bought out. Restructuring. It’s different. You ran that place.”

“Hardly. I got lucky is all, but the gig’s up. No, Janie. When it comes to getting things done, I’m as competent as a clam. Hence, Mr. Happenings. My dad would love the guy.”

She stepped back. With her small tight fist, she punched him once firmly, squarely in his chest. “Your father has been dead twenty years. They all have been. Anniversaries are hard, I get that. But this has been going on forever. Kache, you didn’t die.”

She grabbed her shoe from him, pulled her heels back on. Balancing on one dancer’s leg then the other, she kept her eyes locked on his while he stood, hands in his pockets, the slight sensation of her punch already fading. Her bottom lip trembled.

Her words came loud and fast. “No. You know what? Forget it. We’re done. I hate that I wrote that creepy blog. Jesus, I need an actual life. Get the hell out and don’t come back.” She turned and slammed the door so loud the floor quaked. Her final shout came from the other side: “And WAKE THE FUCK UP!”

“You hear anything I say, my friend? Taking nap after one beer? You need me to drive you home?” Kache wasn’t sure what he’d told the man. Had he been speaking out loud? He hoped not. But the man was smiling at him again. Something about him reminded Kache of Denny. That warm familiarity. The ability to chat with anyone. Kache was so tired after staying up all night with the squatter woman, he wouldn’t mind having someone drive him home. But he needed to get over to the Old Folks’ and fill in Snag, see Lettie. He thanked the man for the beer and said he hoped to see him around.

The man called after him, “Next time I see you, your life will be better. You find beautiful woman! Not like me, you live happily ever after!”

EIGHTEEN

Instead of packing up a few things to leave as she’d planned, Nadia followed her morning routine. The chickens and goats shared in her jittery nervousness, calling their questions while she fed them. Feeding and tending to them usually cleared her head, but not this morning. She stopped before she began the milking and carried the eggs up to the house.

In the empty living room the imprint of Kache remained. She could still see him running his index finger over the bump on his nose, staring at objects around the room, lost somewhere deep in his mind. She picked up one of the photos of him on the piano and, no, just as she thought, there was no bump.

She boiled thistle and drank it to soothe. She ran a hot bath and retrieved one of the wooden chairs from the kitchen, then locked the bathroom door and jammed the doorknob with the chair. Her shirt came off first, then her jeans, until she stood in the cold room naked and gently swatted herself with the birch broom—the same calming remedy her mother had used when Nadia was young and awoke from a nightmare. Lying in the bathtub with her ears under the water, she bathed in the echoes of her mother’s soothing voice, the laughter of her sisters and brothers, her father’s chanting of the old scriptures, voice rich and dark as braga.

Her family had once belonged to the small village of Ural, about a thirty-minute drive from the road that turned off toward the Winkel homestead. She grew up with a loving if strictly religious family, a close, secluded community of equally religious friends, and a boy named Nikolaus, whom she had loved since she was eight. Everyone knew she and Niko would marry as soon as she turned thirteen.

But right before her birthday, an unforeseen rift tore the village in two. Some of the Old Believers wanted to appoint a bishop to act as a leader in the church. Not allowed, not in a church committed to no hierarchy. Instead, a Nastoyatel had always been enough, just a man in the village who volunteered to help out with church duties. Nadia’s parents were strongly against a bishop. For them and nineteen other couples, this deviated from the truest interpretation of Christianity. Many before them had died in Russia trying to protect the purity of their religion. Compromise meant contamination. So thought her parents and some of the others, though they were in the minority. They devised a plan to break off from the group and settle even deeper into the wilderness in a new village they called Altai.

Niko’s family stayed, and so did Niko. Nadia didn’t blame them. If only the division had taken place two months later she and Niko would have been married and she too could have stayed. But she still fell under her father’s rule, and he insisted she go with them. He had once treated Niko as his son but now treated him with disdain.

“I want my daughter and my future grandchildren to be of the purest faith. Otherwise your mama and I, we would have stayed in Oregon, where the world weaves in and out of one’s soul. You understand this, Nadi?”

No, she did not.

Whether or not they appointed a bishop did not concern her in the least. The truth—the truth that she’d shared with no one, not even with Niko—was that she didn’t know if she believed any of it. She did not even know if she believed in heaven or hell. She certainly did not believe that it mattered whether you crossed yourself with three fingers or two, or crossed yourself at all. She did not believe women needed to wear long skirts or scarves, or men long beards. In town she’d seen the other women in their pants with their uncovered hair and the men with their shaven faces. Lightning did not break out from the sky and strike any of them dead. It was obvious to Nadia that the world was an interesting place but the adults spoke of it with acid on their tongues.

She believed in the mountains and the water and the trees and the animals. She believed in Niko.

When all this was happening, Niko pulled her aside from picking blueberries with her sister. They ducked into the woods. He said, “We will find a way to be together.” He kissed her urgently, his green eyes held tears. “We will. I promise you, Nadi.”

The day came when the group departed, peacefully, lovingly saying goodbye despite their differences. Except for Nadia, the once-complacent child, who had to be physically dragged away by her father and brothers. She did not scream or cry or even speak as she scratched and kicked against them, her father breaking the silence, saying, “Nadi, Nadi. Nado privyknut

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