The House of Frozen Dreams

“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.