All the Winters After (29 page)

The song ended, and with it, its spell. Kache blinked and turned away from Marion and saw Nadia, no longer filming, only watching, and all Kache said was, “Damn it.” Unfortunately, he said this into the mic, so the crowd heard him and stopped clapping, waiting for him to finish saying whatever it was he was going to say. “So yeah. That was an oldie. Really old. Let's liven things up a bit. The band's going to play some of their new stuff, and I'll chime in when it feels right.”

So that's what they did, and at the end of the night, when they were all sitting at the bar chatting with Rex, Kache heard Nadia ask Marion, “So you have always lived here in the town Caboose?”

Marion said that she had.

“You did not ever wish to leave?”

“Why would I, when I live in the most beautiful spot on earth? Where else is there?”

It seemed like Nadia wasn't sure how to answer this question. She picked up her camera bag. “Kache?”

Kache took that as his cue. “Yeah, we've gotta get going. Thanks. And guys, I promise it won't be so long. Let's do this again soon.” Everyone hugged both him and Nadia good-bye. The bitter night air startled them when they walked outside, so that they both paused, held their breath for an instant, pulled their coats tighter, and dashed to the truck.

Kache attempted to begin a few conversations, but nothing stuck, like the wispy snow flurries that had started but wouldn't amount to much, needing only the wipers' lowest setting. He knew what was bugging her. He'd be bugged too. He'd blown it, but he didn't know what to say, and starting a conversation about the song seemed like admitting guilt. He'd gotten lost in the moment. Yes, he'd loved Marion once long ago, but it was Nadia he loved now and had even daydreamed of their kids. He knew not to tell her about that particular daydream just yet, because that would freak her out even more than him getting all moony-eyed with Marion.
Marion, you made me moony-eyed.
What an asshole. It was another memory, a good memory of his family, which singing with Marion had brought on. Totally innocent except for that one flashback regarding climbing into her sleeping bag, but that was quick—both the memory and the event itself. He must have smiled at this, because Nadia finally said something.

“So you are very happy and smiling. Tonight made you very happy.”

“No. I mean, yes, but not in the way you're thinking.”

“How do you know what I am thinking?”

“You seem to know what I'm thinking all the time. Maybe I found a journal about
you
.”

The look on his face meant to say that he was only joking, that he loved her beyond anything he'd ever felt for any woman anywhere, but it didn't seem to translate, because her eyes held tears.

“Hell shit,” she said. She wiped her eyes with her mitten and cursed again because a piece of the wool from the mitten had lodged itself in her eye. Kache switched on the overhead light so she could look in the visor mirror. He waited while she ran her finger over and over the surface of her eye. “There,” she said, and he turned the light off.

“Nadia. I'm so sorry. I love you.”

“You love a lot of people, I believe. Your heart, it is getting crowded.”

“No. I don't know how to explain it. I was caught in the memories. My family really liked Marion.”

“This is not helping me. I love your family! I have love for all of you for ten years. But none of them ever know me. Only you. You, who perhaps prefer Marion.” She crossed her arms. “After all, she
sings
.”

“Nadia, I love
you
. And my family would have fallen madly in love with you. Like Lettie and Snag have. Come here.” He reached around, pulled her from her farthest shoulder, and she scooted across the bench seat. He put his arm around her, and she leaned into him. The wipers continued their steady back and forth, and the snow kept on dancing, fluttering in the beam of the headlights.

SIXTY-TWO

Nadia could not stop working on her video. Up late at night while Kache slept upstairs, she thought she was close to finishing. But then she'd started reading about special effects. She wanted to try different techniques, especially slow motion, in a few spots. She loved how it created a heightened view of the action. Looking at what she had now, frame by frame, intrigued her.

She'd been studying some of the videos people posted on the Internet, especially on YouTube, and when she was done, she wanted to figure out how to post hers—which was not as brilliant as some, but better than most. No one would know about it. But how satisfying it would be for her to know it was out there, that she had created it and put it into the world beyond these four walls.

She'd been so busy working, she'd forgotten to carve her mark in the wall earlier that night. She rose to do this now, quickly, in order to get back to her video, looking for a clear space to begin the next grouping of five—she might need to start on a new wall soon. She stuck the knife into the wood and bore down, careful to make the line as straight as possible.

Back in the chair, something snapped outside, and her awareness broadened from the computer screen to the tablecloth with its colorful fruit print to her own reflection in the dark window. Another snap, and Leo scrambled from the floor and twitched his ears up. “Probably just a moose, Leo. Or is it a wolf?” She and Kache had secured the barn and added more chicken wire on the fencing to keep the animals safe. Nadia rubbed her forearms to calm down the risen hairs—she felt them beneath her sweater—then rubbed the top of Leo's head to calm him down too.

No more sounds from outside, but as she worked, Nadia sometimes felt as if she were being watched. Perhaps this happened when you spent so much time behind a video camera. You began to see your own life as a film. The great director, or whomever, calling for another take.

And if her life were a film, where would the next scenes take place? Was she living out a love story? A tragedy? A comedy? That indeed was a mystery. If only life fell into such neat categorizations.

Ever since the night at the Spit Tune, Nadia had been thinking about how her and Kache's lives might or might not fit together. Actually, she'd started even before then, when Lettie told her and Snag about A. R.'s desire to live elsewhere. His sacrifice. It was so much to ask of someone. Too much. When Nadia saw the connection between Marion and Kache, she knew that it went beyond history and music. They were bonded too by this place.

This place! This place had saved her long ago, and she was grateful, but it also became her prison. She knew only this place and the Winkel family. She knew only how they had chosen to live their lives. She had not yet chosen how to live hers. She'd taken on everything they had built and made and even thought. Until this film, she had made nothing lasting of her own. She had filled her mind with the words of others from the bookshelves of another woman, from her diaries too. But Nadia felt that she had not taken in enough of the world firsthand nor given enough, and she wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to.

• • •

She must have fallen asleep with her head on the keyboard, because Kache was touching her arm, his voice pulling her awake. “Nadia. The northern lights.”

Her arms and feet flopped behind him as he led her to the coatrack, buttoned up her jacket, and held her boots for her to slip into. She was fully awake by the time they got to the back of the truck, where he'd lined the bed with sleeping bags and pillows and blankets, and there they lay to watch the sky pull its miraculous long green and rose curtains to and fro. The curtains transformed into running giants, falling ribbons, winding rivers, and huge tidal waves, crashing through the heavens.

Kache said, “The Native legends say they're spirits of those who've passed on.”

“Have you seen them before?” she asked.

He said that he had. “Here's a story you haven't read in my mother's journal.” He told her about the night he and Denny, teenagers and left alone for the weekend, raided the liquor cabinet out of boredom, and then out of even more boredom—drunken boredom—decided it would be a good idea to take down their father's beloved bear head, Anthony, from above the piano and go scare some tourists.

“You did not do this.”

“We did.”

“I have never seen this bear head Anthony.”

Kache told her that's where the northern lights came in. “We take the ATV up the main road. It's almost dark, and Denny decides he'll keep the ATV light on and flag down the cars and I'll stand in the bushes holding up Anthony and, of course, growling, like this,” and Kache growled.

“Not very frightening, Kachemak Winkel.”

“Oh, come on. You're terrified, I can tell. Anyway, the only problem is that I've gotta pee, and if I stop and put Anthony down, that will be the very moment a car finally pulls over, and all the tourists see is some stupid drunk kid peeing in the bushes, and God knows they can see that anytime in the Lower 48. So I'm holding Anthony above my head for a good hour and doing the pee-pee dance and no cars come. Not one.”

Kache stood and demonstrated a little jig while he held up the imaginary bear head, and Nadia laughed. He plopped back down and said that he finally set Anthony in the bushes and relieved himself, and that's when the northern lights made their appearance. “They don't show up much on the peninsula, and we'd never seen them like that. And we were absolutely blown away.” They raced home on the ATV, the green splashing out above and beyond them, and they climbed up on the roof and watched until dawn.

It was then that they realized they'd left the bear head in the bushes on the side of the road. They went back and looked and looked, but the alcohol had dulled their memories. Denny thought someone had spotted it and carted it off. They made up a story about going into town for a movie and returning to find Anthony gone.
Stolen.

“My father was bereft. He filed a report with the police. My mom corralled us into my room the next night and said, ‘Boys. Do not tell me a thing. I don't want to know. I just want to thank you from the bottom of my weary heart.'” Kache laughed—a sharp croak of a laugh.

Nadia hugged him. “You are right. I did not know this story.”

“Good.” He squeezed her. “That's good.” They too watched and talked until dawn, gazing at the incredible mystery of the sky, and Nadia told him she'd seen the northern lights a number of times.

“Were they as beautiful as tonight?”

“No,” she said, resting her head inside his jacket, against his ribs, watching the roses and greens waltz with one another, on and on and on. “Not like this.” She was sure that nothing in her life, in fact, had ever been as beautiful as this.

BREAKUP

2006

SIXTY-THREE

Kache straddled two shifting plates of dirty snow and ice in the garden while Leo dug at something of interest. Underneath and all around, water gurgled, cutting the hillside loose from its winter acquiescence. Breakup was ugly, but man, was it full of promise. In less than a month, the whole land would burst forth in a showy display of fireweed and Indian paintbrush, forget-me-nots, lupine, five different kinds of berry bushes, not to mention the alders, cottonwoods, and groves of birch trees, leaves filling in with every shade of shimmering green. And that was just the start of it. He'd ordered so many new types of seeds for the garden, he couldn't wait to see the look on Nadia's face when they started arriving. He'd already sketched out plans for a greenhouse.

Night was receding earlier, letting the sun make up for its winter laziness, working overtime now, staying lower to the horizon, casting longer shadows. There was nothing like Alaskan light and all the astonishing subtleties that lay between the midnight sun and the winter darkness. A thousand varieties of light. Every day now, the snow shrank and trickled, and the mud oozed in growing patches, exposing everything from crocus shoots to fossils of frozen dog shit to a rusty oilcan and a trash bag left in the yard last autumn.

It had been almost one year since he'd returned. He had lived more in this one year than he had in the two decades he'd been gone, and that was no exaggeration. Frozen plates had shifted within him as well. He felt closer to his mother here, and Denny. Sometimes he even felt that the memories he had of his father were incomplete, perhaps unfair. That he and his dad had lived their relationship in a sort of endless winter, cold and cut off from each other, shouting through blizzard after blizzard of misunderstanding. He wished there was a way to go back and get to know him better.

Being here was one way to try at least. And he knew that becoming a father himself was another way. Not that
that
was any reason to have kids. But now he wanted them. He wanted Nadia and a couple of kids and a life right here on this land his grandparents had homesteaded and his father had lovingly and tenaciously tended. Wasn't that strange? To want exactly what his father had once had? Sure, Kache wanted to be a different kind of father. Gentler, much less controlling and stubborn. But not entirely different, not 100 percent different. “And that,” he said to Leo, who had given up on the mysterious rodent and now tilted his head, waiting for Kache at the gate, “is damn near a revelation.”

As they walked toward the house, Kache removed his glove and checked inside the pocket of his down vest. Still there. The envelope he'd folded and stuck in there earlier that morning when he'd picked up the mail at the post office. She'd gotten her application in late, after Snag had somehow come up with the necessary papers, practically bursting with pride when she presented them but not offering up any details, at least not in front of him. Snag and Kache still hadn't really spoken other than quick exchanges about Lettie, and he knew it was up to him to change that.

The envelope was addressed to Nadia and had a return address with the words
Academy of Art
and
San Francisco
in it. The envelope was too thick to see through, even when he snuck in and held it up to the high-watt sunlamp Aunt Snag kept under her bathroom sink for when she was experiencing seasonal affective disorder and needed to get her serotonin level up. Kache hoped Nadia wouldn't need the lamp after she read the contents of the envelope.

He loved that she had this dream, that she had already learned so much about film and art and life and the world on her own. He loved that she was so well-read and capable, so talented at whatever she tried. Yes, he was taken aback at times, insecure, especially at first. But he had grown; he could handle it. He felt challenged by her in the best way possible. He knew that a college application was not enough. Not enough to adequately prove all of her astounding qualities to skimming eyes looking for SAT scores and athletics and volunteerism and debate club involvement. And he knew that she liked the
idea
of living in a city but would despise the reality. The crowds, the pollution, the constant noise, the push and pull and hustle. She was a woman of this land. It was woven into her very being, as it was into his. They were relaxing into a life together. He'd even gotten Denny's old Land Cruiser running again, thinking maybe—who knew?—one day Nadia would want to drive again. She'd said her dad had taught her years ago. Now that Vladimir was gone and her family knew she was alive, he could picture her eventually driving to town herself, maybe even with a couple of kids buckled in the back seat.

But he would not say any of this to Nadia right now. He would let her open the letter, and he would hold her and assure her that all would be well, because he knew it would be.

But when she opened the letter, instead of dropping her head into her hands as he had predicted, her eyes widened, and she said, “Holy damn, holy hell, holy SHIT DAMN!” and she grabbed his arms and jumped up and down and then ran to the door, flung it open, and shouted, “HOLY SHIT DAMN!” once more.

He stood in the same spot by the kitchen while she hummingbirded around him until she finally flopped herself over the arm of the futon and lay there, the missing tears making their late entrance, pooling in her eyes.

Kache closed the door and sat at the end of the couch. He lifted her stockinged feet, placed them in his lap, and said, “I take it that means you got in?”

She laughed and nodded, and the nod set the tears free so they slid down the sides of her temples toward her ears.

“Nadia, I'm so proud and happy for you,” he said, and he meant it.

She sat up and threw her arms around his neck. “You are? Really? Thank you.”

“Of course I am. How could I not be?”

She sat back and looked at him directly, wiping her eyes and nose with her sleeve. “Wait, let me get Kleenex,” she said before hopping up and then returning to rest her gaze on him. A particle of Kleenex stayed trapped in one of her eyebrows. “Kache, you know this means many changes for us.”

He chuckled, though he didn't mean to. “You're thinking of accepting? Of actually going?”

“No, I am not thinking. I have already thought, for many years. I am going.”

“And how are you going to manage that?”

“Read this letter. There is scholarship. And work studies. They say I can get loan for remaining. And to assist me to adjust to this city living, there are people. I am part of their ‘unique circumstances' program.”

A scholarship?
“I'm not talking about the money. I'm talking about conducting yourself in a city of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people. I'm talking about a million different stimuli bombarding your senses twenty-four hours a day.”

“You need to stop this talk. Now.”

“Nadia, do you need me to point out to you that you were afraid to step foot off this property because of one man who probably left Alaska a decade ago?” Kache could not believe what was pouring out of his mouth. He
did
need to stop. He took a deep breath and took another.

“You are mocking me?”

“No, of course not. Forget all that. Look, Nadia, I'm sorry. That's not what I meant. You'll go, and of course I'll go with you. I'm really happy for you. I'm being an asshole. As cities go, San Francisco is one of the best. It will be an adventure. We can go for what? A couple of years? How long is art school?”

Nadia stood. She crossed her arms, uncrossed them, let them down at her sides. “Kache…you know I love you, yes? You know how grateful to you I am? I hope you can understand this thing that is very hard to understand. Even for me it is hard. This is something I am afraid to ask of you. Here is where you should be. Here you are happy.”

He held both her hands, even went down on one knee, and it all came out. “It's because of you I'm finally at home here. I love you, Nadia.” He said it. But that wasn't all, and there was no more holding back; the words had a will all their own. “I want to marry you. I want us to have kids if you want that too. Marry me, marry me, Nadia. Please?”

“Kache.” She knelt too, held his face to hers, her breath a little stale, but he wanted to gulp it in anyway. “I love you. So very much. But I—I am not right for you. There is this thing I must do. This thing I must, to go and do alone. Please try to understand.”

He stood. “Oh, that's great.” He laughed again. His voice trembled. He was fucking out of control. “Yeah, you haven't had enough ME time, right? Ten goddamn years was not enough. We finally found this, what we have, each other, this place, all the good goddamn stuff that
everybody
wants, and you're going to throw it away so you can learn how to make better videos to post on YouTube? That is perfect.”

“Your mother was right about your sarcastic streak, I see.”

“Would you please stop doing that? I hate that shit. You're such a voyeur.”

Nadia winced, still kneeling on the floor where Kache had left her. “I know you hate it. That is another reason—it can never be right between us. All I know is
you
and
your
family. I have no me to know.”

“That's such classic bullshit. What, did you get that from one of my mother's self-help books? And now we're talking
never
? To think I wanted us to have kids, to be a family. What an idiot I am. We went from
for always
to
never
because of one typed letter with an impressive letterhead? Wow,
you're loyal
. I get it. You're only loyal when you have to be. When there's nowhere else to go.” He got off the couch and threw the pillow they'd bought together in town. It hit the lamp they'd ordered online, which crashed to the floor. “Well,
I
do have somewhere to go. See ya.” He grabbed his coat and stopped to pull on his boots.

Nadia finally rose from her knees. “Is that why you push me to see my family? Knowing they will not accept me? Knowing I will only have you,
your
family,
your
house,
your
history?”

“Nadia, is that what you think?”

“I do not know what
I
think! What is me, and what is—”

“I've gotta get out of here.”

She grabbed his arm. “No,
I
go. This is your home.”

“
How
will you go?”

“What about the Spit Tune? You are supposed to play there again tonight, yes?”

“I'll still do it. You're worried you won't be able to film it, is that it? You can drive the Land Cruiser. Drive yourself there.” He pulled away from her.

“I have enough footage.”

“That's what I thought. You've gotten everything you need.”

“Kache, this you do not understand. I do not mean to hurt you. I do not want you to feel like your grandfather.”

“My grandfather? What, did you find a journal of his too?”

Nadia wept so hard that Leo started whining, pressing his nose against her legs and hands. The Kleenex was now useless, and Kache watched her try to stop the deluge on her face with both sleeves of her sweater. He grabbed his scarf off the coatrack and handed it to her.

He wanted to hold her, to tell her again how much he loved her and wanted her to stay, but instead, he stepped over the ice and mud to his truck, started it, and turned the radio up so loud he heard nothing else, not the engine roaring, or Nadia crying, or Leo whining, or the voice in his head telling him he was quite the asshole after all.