All the Winters After (16 page)

“I love it here, but there are some things you'd never guess from the postcard version. Like, for instance, the best place for spotting bald eagles? The town dump. Who would have thunk it? Kind of depressing, if you ask me.”

Nadia didn't know what to say when she asked her questions like, “You live here or just up visiting?” So Nadia would nod or just answer yes or no. She didn't want to give away too much information, and then she wondered if Katy knew Miss Rose, and should Nadia be going with the Gretchen-from-Colorado story Kache had concocted? Probably. But it was too late.

Nadia soon forgot all that, and Katy grew quiet as she snipped and combed, snipped and combed. She took out a razor not unlike the one Nadia had shaved Kache's face with and started working on her bangs; the pull of it felt good, the sound of it sawing and chewing through her hair. The hair fell off, first in longer strands, then in chunks, then in smaller and smaller flakes, like the softest snowfall. Except, instead of covering everything up, it was revealing. Revealing Nadia. There were her eyes, huge and blue, staring back at her. Her ears, small. Her bare neck, long. She smiled, and Katy smiled back. “Look at you, girl. You're gorgeous. I wish I had your collarbones. And those cheekbones.”

Nadia wondered why someone would want her bones, but she just smiled back. She looked completely different, like another person altogether. Like a young woman who lived in San Francisco and drove a little convertible, and when the wind blew, it didn't even bother her; her hair never got in her eyes. She could always see where she was going, and she was always going somewhere.

Nadia pointed to Katy's ears, the line of earrings going up them. “I want those too,” she said. Many of the girls in the village had pierced ears, but Nadia's father had prohibited it.

Katy smiled. She had a dimple in one cheek. “You want me to pierce your ears? I can't today, because I have another client coming in. And we're not really set up for it, so my boss would get pissed. But I totally know how to pierce ears. Here's my number”—she started writing on a pink card—“and if you call me, you can come over, or I can come to your house, and I'll pierce your ears. Ten bucks a hole is all I'd charge, but you'll have to buy the earrings.”

Nadia took the card and held it under the smock that was covered with her blond hair. Once they stepped foot off the homestead, everything cost money. Could she trade eggs for earrings? Katy removed the smock and brushed Nadia's neck with a soft brush. She handed her a mirror and turned Nadia's chair so she could see the back. She was facing Kache, who shook his head and smiled, smiled so big, back at her.

“Wow, you two,” Katy said. “You better get out of here and go get a room.”

Kache said, “It's not like that.”
Like what?
But Nadia didn't bother to ask because their talking faded as she focused on the person in the mirror.
Yes, yes, this is me.

She stared at her reflection, tilted her head. Like a woman in a magazine. Like a woman finally stepping off the page.

THIRTY-SIX

The more they worked in the garden, the more the garden—and workload—grew. Kache stood, straightened his back, and pulled the spade behind his shoulders to stretch. He'd spent the early morning getting the smoker ready for the salmon, and the wondrous scent of fish and wood smoke permeated the air. The sun, unleashing itself on the bay, flashed a multitude of lights at him like he was some kind of celebrity. A thin silver band of clouds rested between water and peaks, and on days like this, it seemed he could reach across the water and leave his handprint on one of the pale blue glaciers wedged between those mountains.

Why had he hated this place so much growing up? Why couldn't he wait to leave, even before the accident? But he knew why: it was his father's extremism, the homestead zealot, that turned Kache off. It didn't have to be that way. There could be some kind of compromise, where you gave of yourself and took from the land and sometimes gave your cash and took from the Safeway. You could hook up a computer and even the Internet and live in paradise at the edge of the earth and still have a front-row seat to whatever was going down in New York City.

In order to survive, you didn't have to shoot big, brown-eyed creatures if you didn't want to, and you didn't have to leave the world behind. It was 2005. A good time to be alive.

Maybe that was the bridge for those lyrics he was working on.

He hauled the basket of potatoes and carrots and onions along with the smoked salmon into the kitchen and set it on the counter next to the sink, still full of lettuce and a cabbage the size of a basketball. He tore off a couple of pieces of the salmon and offered one to Nadia. Man, it was almost as good as his dad's.

“Delicious.” Nadia sat on the couch with her legs crossed under her, the Mac on her lap, her short blond hair sticking up in the back like a beautiful Russian version of Dennis the Menace. Her lips were oily from the salmon, and a tiny track of four gold dots ran up her right ear, with just one gold dot in her left. He'd insisted on paying for the earrings as a gift, but he also wanted to pay her a salary and back pay for all her years of caretaking. She'd said no, but she might feel differently if she ever spent more time out in the world.

It was getting more and more difficult for him not to reach out and touch her hair. Could it possibly be as soft as it looked?

But he couldn't. He wouldn't. She was still skittish sometimes and reluctant to talk about her fears. She'd lived alone all of her adult life. He'd hardly lived at all most of his. They would mess each other up worse than they already were.

Still, he wondered if the span of his large hands would reach all the way around her waist. He wondered how it was that he felt so completely known when he was with her. Maybe all the solitude made her especially intuitive and sensitive to other people. Or maybe it was just that he knew so little about her in comparison.

Leo leaped from his nap to snap at a fly but missed. Kache picked up his guitar and started playing with a ditty going through his head that he was calling “Young at Heart.”

“I read about a fellah who's a hundred and two.

Makes pottery for something to do.

Has a girlfriend who's fifty with eyes of blue.

Five wives behind him,

What's he gonna do?

“Sells his pottery, they say, for a thousand and two.

I'm only thirty-eight, so whoop-de-do.

Man, I think I'm coming down with the flu.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure

I'm coming down with the flu.”

He kept playing while he watched Nadia at the computer, her earrings catching the light. He sang, “If you look closer, it's easy to trace, the track on Nadia's ears, whoa, oh.” She kept typing. “Nadia?”

She looked up but kept her fingers on the keys. She had taught herself to type on his mother's old typewriter. Of course she had. “Yes?”

“You know that story I told you about our dog Walter and the cliff?”

She nodded.

“You insisted my father might have gone down there after him. Why do you think that?”

She tilted her head. “Why do you ask?”

“I keep thinking about it…and some other things. You're either psychic or… Did you know my mom somehow? Or did Lettie tell you? And, if so, what can you tell me about Walter?”

She studied the keys in front of her, dropped her hands to her sides, scrunched her fingers under her thighs.

She took a deep breath and said, “Your mother's diaries.”

He watched her watching him. Outside, a few of the goats berated one another. “But Aunt Snag told me years ago, right after the accident, that she burned them. And I saw her take them out of the trunk.”

“No, you must come with me.” She set the computer down on the couch next to her, and Kache followed her upstairs, up to his parents' room, to her hiding place in the closet, to the cardboard box. It was true that Snag had packed them in a box, but it was also true that she had not followed through and burned them.

“So you've read some of these? She said they weren't that kind of journal—she never wanted anyone to read them. Snag had explicit instructions to burn them.”

“I think we know by now that your aunt Snag, she does not keep promises about these things.”

“Did you read some of them?”

“Kache, I am sorry. I was alone, and the loneliness tightens my bones. Like a friend, your mother felt to me.”

“So how many have you read?”

She bowed her head, her hair still sticking up in the back. “I have read them all. Many, many times.”

He sucked in air. “Were you planning on telling me? Or just letting me think you had all this intuition and wise insight? That you just instinctively knew when to hand me my guitar? Or how to make my favorite casserole? Or weird shit, like the way you organize the pantry by colors? None of that's you, right? It's just you mimicking my mother, because you've had no life of your own.” He stood and walked the length of the bedroom, still gripping the neck of his guitar. “Why don't you just change your name to Bets? Or better yet, why don't you tell me why you didn't learn things from your own mother? Since you know every goddamn thing about me since I was born—from when I said my first word and when I took my first shit to the night I screamed at my father to go fucking kill something—why don't you tell me
one goddamn thing
about you?”

He waited for her to bolt, to take Leo and run into her room—his old room—and lock the door, but she didn't. She stood there, taking it.

“It was wrong of me. I knew when I was reading that her writing, this was not intended for anyone but herself. Yet I could not stop. It was so much a comfort. I believe her words; they keep me
alive
. The books, yes. And your mother's words also. Do you understand what I say? Alone, it would be okay to slip out of this life. But I was having a mom and a best friend and a sister all at once that kept me here. And you and Denny, you were brothers to me.”

“Great.” Kache stopped himself from saying she probably liked Denny better anyway. Jesus. Was he still a teenager? “This is way too weird. You're a Russian spy, a blond voyeur who's been sitting here absorbing everything I've been avoiding for the last twenty years.”

“Perhaps this is time for you to read some of your mother's words.”

“And go against her wishes? No. See, I
respect
her.”

She picked one up. It had a blue tattered cover. “Start with this one.”

“I guess I should pay heed to your recommendation, since you're the head librarian of my mother's soul.”

“This is dramatic thing you say. To read them all is not necessary. But read this one at the least. And this one.” She handed him another notebook with a red cover.

He took them only so she wouldn't have them, threw them in the box, took that too, and headed downstairs. He wanted to get into the truck and drive away, but he stood in the living room instead, holding his mother in his arms. Her journals had not been burned. She was there, in the box, and Nadia knew her better than he did.

Dust motes danced in the sunlight, the only things in the house that weren't stagnant. The same photos, the same afghan draped over the back of the couch. The same doodads and trinkets, the same three throw pillows, the same yellowed magazines, the same carpets, the same mismatched lamps.
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.
He would chop some wood. That would be better than a drive, better than standing here, and it might help clear his head. Nadia had taught him a trick or two about chopping wood, and he had become much better at it than he had been as a teenager.
That
was something new.

He carried the box outside and set it down next to him. He almost saw his dad, walking in front of him, that apelike gait, hunched over, determined, not just walking the land but taking it on. Swinging the ax with equal parts ease and force. The crack through the logs might have been his voice. Then a flash of movement in the peripheral. He turned his head but saw nothing. This was different from the clear memories of his dad—and it had happened a few times. He was sure it was a wild animal minding its own business, but sometimes he felt like maybe his dad or Denny really were watching him, assessing his new skills. Crazy.

As Kache split and stacked the wood, he wished he could split his thoughts that cleanly and pull them apart. Throw his love for this place in this pile, the haunting sadness of it and the strange tricks his mind insisted on playing in that one. His desire to hold Nadia's jewel of a face up to his? In the first pile. The weird fact that she knew more about his early life than he did would go in the other pile. And so on, sorting it out, splitting the darkness and the light until he had enough to build a bonfire of the darkness and build a life with all the rest.

Enough to build a bonfire. Would he burn the journals?

He had said mean things to Nadia, things he already regretted. But…like a
brother
? Add the fact that she kept doing things that reminded him of his mother. There was Freud again, fingers on chin, nodding. But if you took all that away, which would happen in time, once they knew each other, the real person would emerge and not just these glimpses through the ghosts. He needed to know more about her—
her
,
Nadia
. He didn't even know her last name. Why exactly was she here? A fair question. A start. She had listened to his rage and hadn't run for cover. She was getting stronger day by day, just as he was. She could handle some gentle interrogation now without running to hide under the bed. But then her answers would move into the house too, along with all the ghosts and all the relics.

Shit, the place was already way past crowded.

Even so, he wouldn't burn those journals. He couldn't. Nadia still needed them. Maybe he did too.

He stuck the ax into the stump and started stacking the wood.