All the Winters After (4 page)

SIX

Kache couldn't get to the house fast enough. 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 on to in the fifties. The place his mom and dad added on to again before transforming it into a real house in the seventies. The house Kache grew up in and loved, the only place he ever called home—reduced to a pile of moldy logs.

He guessed that it would be dark when he got out to the homestead. 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 one another, all facing south to take advantage of the view—the jagged horizon of mountains marooned across twenty-four miles of Kachemak Bay.

Kachemak. A difficult name to have in this town, the kids teasing him in his first years at school by adding Bay when the teacher let his full name slip out during roll call instead of the shortened version he'd insisted on—pronounced simply
catch
. 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 had slapped Kache on the back so hard it had 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 that he'd 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, and 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 midsixties, 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 the 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, had been able to do the work of three or four strapping boys. Kache, however, had been a disappointment, and his father had had a hard time hiding just how much Kache had 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 cell phone 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 had 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, Ka-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 shone its generous golden 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.

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

He edged around the last corner and 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 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 quick as a wink, and shut again.

He pressed his back against the old storage barn, took deep breaths, and tried to line up his thoughts, which kept ricocheting off one another. 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, continuously barking. Kache pushed on the storage barn side door; it wasn't locked and 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 and 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, 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 and 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 he stood straight with his rake, as if that would shift the perspective of whoever was upstairs, as if the moment were 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, and 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, wedding, 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 helicopter 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 wooden 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 was 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, a fashion statement that had 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 before being 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 blond 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.

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 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?”