All the Winters After (20 page)

FORTY-FIVE

Snag wondered if Lettie's boots were lined with the sharp edges of knives. Somehow she had made it up to the top of the Clammit Dymit trail and was now heading down. With all the precautionary measures about not bringing smelly sandwiches, she was afraid her boots were probably filling with blood anyway, that the bears would smell the raw, ravaged meat of her heels and soles and toes. She thought of them as separate, not as one foot but as five toes, one heel, one sole—seven different points of agonizing pain on the right and seven more on the left. Fourteen different wounds that made her want to scream with each step down the mountain. She almost heard the bears smacking their lips, dripping their bear drool.

“How you doing, Eleanor?” Gilly asked, looking back over her shoulder.

“Fine! Just fine!” Snag shaded her eyes. “Wow, would you look at that view?” She used this as an excuse to stop momentarily. A middle-aged German couple nodded as they passed her. Obviously Germans because they were überprepared and had top-of-the-line shoes and hiking poles. Snag was obviously Not German.

After they were out of sight, Gilly said, “Talk about shooting a mosquito with a bazooka—although, a bazooka wouldn't really
be
overkill for one of our mosquitoes, now, would it?” Gilly had been trying to engage Snag all day in conversation, but all Snag could think about was her feet, and so she knew she was coming across as quite the dullard. That was fine. She would dazzle Gilly with her brilliance tomorrow when she was sitting comfortably in her mom's room wearing her tennies or perhaps her lamb's-wool slippers. Yes, she would wear those slippers for the rest of her life, and she silently promised her feet this, if they would just get her off the mountain and home to her recliner.

And then she was no longer thinking about her feet. It began with the sound of a twig snapping, a crash crashing, and she grabbed the mace canister hanging from her pack and held it out in front of her, her finger poised and ready to activate it while Gilly yelled, “SHOO, BEAR! GO AWAY!” clapping loudly while the crashing continued toward them, through the thicket of alder bushes on the upper side of the trail, until someone yelled, “DO NOT SHOOT!” and jumped out three feet in front of them.

By then, Gilly and Snag were clinging to each other, screaming girly screams. When they saw it was just one man, they both put their hands to their hearts and blew out sighs of relief that were so long, they seemed more likely to come from a pair of belugas than from two women with average lung capacity.

“Please forgive me,” the man said. “I did not mean to scare you.” The man had an accent. “Nothing like having strange-looking man jumping out of bushes,” he said. But he was extremely
good
-looking, Snag thought. His eyes were the bluest—deep, deep violet—that Snag ever remembered having seen shining from the head of a human being. Maybe she'd seen a doll with eyes that shade of blue, or a pair of eyes that blue in a painting, but surely never coming from the real thing.

Gilly said, “I'll take a strange-looking man over a bear any day,” and laughed. Snag heard relief in her voice. Gilly surely didn't think he was really strange-looking? Did she like him? Snag reminded herself once again that it was none of her damn concern if Gilly, her friend, liked someone.

“I did earlier this week come across bear,” the man with the blue eyes said, smiling. The accent was Russian. “It wandered away into bushes, more interested in blueberries than in me.”

Snag thought to warn him that the bears might accidentally pluck his blueberry eyes clean out of their sockets.

The man tipped his hat and continued down the trail. He carried sacks on his back, and Snag guessed he was out checking his traps. He was probably after fox. She wondered if he knew Nadia.

“Hey!” she called after him, but he was already around the bend.

O Handsome One stuck his head back and asked, “Yes?”

But Snag thought better of it. There were lots of Russians on the peninsula, and he was clean-shaven, not an ounce of stubble—obviously not an Old Believer. She didn't want to sound ignorant. “Oh, never mind, nothing. Just be careful.”

He must have thought she was joking, because he laughed and then disappeared for good.

“Okay,” Snag said. “That scared the bejesus out of me. But that was one beautiful man. If you're into men.”

“You know who that was?”

“No. You know him?”

“That was the guy who tried to buy our drinks at the bar that night.”

“It was? Do you think he recognized you?”

“Probably not. It's always dark in there. Which was why he probably tried to pick me up in the first place.”

“I doubt that very much, Gilly. Why'd you say no?” Snag silently congratulated herself for sounding so cool and encouraging. Like a true friend.

Gilly shook her head and grinned. “Rex said he's a weirdo, remember?”

“Since when does anyone believe Rex?”

“Not to mention, the guy's too young. I'm done with youngsters. I'm looking for someone more mature.”

“Well, you've got lots of
very
mature men to choose from at work.” They both laughed. It was good to talk like this despite the initial twinge of jealousy. She'd been successful at squashing the feelings before they'd taken root. Gilly was a good friend, and that's exactly what Snag needed from her.

Gilly resumed walking on her own comfortable feet in their perfectly fitted hiking boots while Snag hobbled behind.

• • •

Snag leaned her back against the inside of her front door. She'd begged off dinner with Gilly, saying she would just pop something in the microwave. Inside her boots, her feet lay decimated, dying. “I'm so sorry. Let's get these torture chambers off you,” she said and trudged the six excruciating steps over to the couch, where she eased the boots off, peeling off her socks to assess the damage.

Forget the knives. Someone had set off an atomic bomb inside her mother's boots, and her feet were the victims of the nuclear fallout. She grimaced. “You silly woman.” The cat came out to inspect her feet and even licked her little toe once before Snag shooed her away.

That's when she heard a car pull up on the gravel and then a knock on the door.

“Kache?” she called.

“No, it's Gilly.”

Crap. Snag thought about trying to cover her feet, but she couldn't bear it. She sighed resignation and yelled, “There's a key under the pot of pansies.”

Gilly let herself in. She took one look at Snag's feet and asked, “Why didn't you say something?”

“Pride.”

Gilly silently went to get a Tupperware tub, filled it with warm water, got a towel, sat down, and pulled Snag's feet into her lap, where she took a good look at them. She bent Snag's legs and put her feet in the tub. “They're going to be okay.” She went into the bathroom, came out with the Neosporin, and turned into Snag's bedroom.

“Ah?” Snag said, starting to get up but surrendering back into the comfort of the warm water and the couch.

“If I remember correctly, you keep your foot balm in your bedside table drawer so you can apply it every night, right? That's what you said when you sold me the stuff.” She came back out holding the still-sealed balm. If she'd seen the photo of Bets, she said nothing.

Snag said, “My feet haven't hurt this much since the earthquake of '64.”

“What happened to your feet then?”

“It was just one foot, actually. I was at the bowling alley when the quake hit. A bowling ball fell on my foot. Holy mother of mackerel, did that hurt! I limped outside, and all hell and earth were breaking loose. We lost a good portion of the spit that day. Houses floated away. Cars too.”

“I remember. I lived in West Seattle, and we felt it, but not like you. The dry cleaners' windows busted out. We rushed home, and the only thing that was broken in the whole house was one saucer in the cupboard. My mother cried relief.”

Snag closed her eyes and let Gilly have her way with her feet. Gilly's hands had some kind of miraculous gift. “It was crazy here. I thought the world might end. My friends helped me limp over to the drugstore, who knows why. A Band-Aid? I remember the whole town outside smelling like liquor and inside the drugstore smelling like a hundred perfumes.” Snag stopped to take in the memory of that day while Gilly began applying the Neosporin. “Everything toppling onto everything else. I've never been suicidal or anything, but I remember that day, feeling like I might die and being okay with that. Knowing it might just be easier than continuing on as the confused wreck I was at twenty-four.”

Gilly looked up from her work on Snag's feet. “Oh, Eleanor. I can't say I haven't felt that way myself a time or two. Now, your feet can't take this peppermint oil, but it will feel like heaven on your calves.”

Snag started to protest, but she didn't have the energy. For the first time since she was a baby, she let someone baby her. After Gilly finished treating Snag's blisters and sores, she massaged her calves with the Jafra peppermint balm until Snag oohed and aahed and then, before she could stop herself, let out a moan.

“Damn you, Gilly,” she finally said.

“Is it my fault that you wore boots from the last century?”

“No, but you know… You know I spent too much of my life in love with a straight woman.”

Gilly stopped her massaging. “Who says I'm straight?”

Snag opened one eye. “Who says I'm in love with you?”

“Who says I didn't feel the ground below me shake and shudder the first time I heard that laugh of yours coming from Lettie's room? Or those sweet lullabies? Not to mention that first time I laid eyes on you and your dimples and every time I've seen you since?”

“But…but you're divorced. I met your daughter.”

“So? You're not really that naive, are you, Eleanor?” And with that, Gilly set Snag's feet on the towel, scooted along the couch on her knees up to where Snag rested with her hands behind her head, leaned over, and kissed her so deeply, so completely, so at once urgently and gently, that Snag felt the tingle all the way down her pepperminted calves, to her tender, bleeding Neosporined toes, and lots of other places too.

FORTY-SIX

At first, time seemed to stop its forward trek. Instead, it looped around and around this beginning of Kache and Nadia. Nadia would be untangling the fishing net with her hands, but her mind stayed tangled in the sheets with Kache. She would be out in the garden alone, talking to the vegetables as she watered them—out of habit now rather than loneliness—but her mind was going over all she had told Kache. She didn't regret telling him. But the hollowness left behind felt unnerving. The hauntings giving way, making room for this…this new and vibrant good thing.

It was a good thing. But she walked around in a type of trance, forgetting the order of her chores or even if she had done some of them at all.

“Who am I?” she asked aloud one day to Kache as they sat eating breakfast.

“It depends. Is this an existential question? Or a rhetorical one?”

“Everything is changed. I am changing.”

He placed his fingers over hers, which were gripping the table, gently loosened them, and took her hand. “I know. Me too.”

“I am so happy. But I am sad also. Does that make sense? I think not!”

“No. But I feel that way too. We can both make nonsense together.” He took a sip of his coffee. “It does make sense though. You've been through a lot. I don't want to rush you, Nadia, if you feel like it's moving too fast. Or that we shouldn't be this close, you know, physically?”

She shook her head. “It's not the problem. I do want this closeness with you. It is just, I don't know. The old sad things—it is as if they make more noise now that they are saying good-bye? Ack! See? I make no sense.”

“We've both been
not
changing for so long. Now, it's like Mother May I finally said, ‘Nadia, Kache, you can take five giant leaps.'”

“Your mother said this?”

“Yeah. Didn't you read it in her journal?”

Nadia shook her head.

“I'm kidding. It's a kids' game, Mother May I. You didn't have it in the village?”

“No. We had lots of games, but not this one about mothers. We have
Klushki
,
Lapta
,
Pognali
,
Zaets
,
Shalachkee
,
Sharovki
,
Knaz
,
Jaunza
—”

Kache laughed. “Okay, okay, you had a lot of games. Any chance I'll ever get to play
Shalachkee
with you?”

“Yes. But I warn you that I am really very good.” This made Kache laugh again. She always felt his laugh turn into a smile inside her.

• • •

So time circled for days and then weeks, drawing Kache and Nadia closer and closer, and then when they had caught up with this new love and were again able to take care of the chores and all the rest, time expanded. There seemed to be so much more. More time, more life, more everything.

Nadia grew up following the Julian calendar, thirteen days and several centuries behind most of the world. Her sense of the days and months passing was tightly interwoven with religious observations and rituals. Fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays. More than forty holy days, when school and work were forbidden. Holy days of solemn fasting followed by holy days of feasting and celebration, full of laughter and delicious foods and
braga
to drink. Even her birthday she never celebrated on the actual date of her birth but on her designated saint's day. The days that weren't designated as holy were days of preparation leading up to the next holy day. Every hour was steeped in faith; even the clock seemed to tick off prayers.

But when she lived alone at the Winkels' house, she paid closer attention—it became an obsession, really—to the constant changes in nature that marked the hours and the days and the months and the seasons. Route of the sun, cycle of the moon, position of the stars. The life cycles of the flowers, their subtle routines from dawn until dusk, their journey to full bloom peak, their decline until they withered, hung, and spread over the land, creating a new generation. She felt joy when the cow moose and calves appeared in the spring and a sense of loss when the geese honked their good-byes, heading south in the fall. With nothing but Elizabeth's old 1985 calendar and the notches in the root cellar wall, nature provided the only milestones in Nadia's life.

Yet since Kache had arrived, every day was full of milestones, natural and otherwise. The computer with the bitten apple on its cover, the Internet, Kache's never-ending bags of products and supplies, their trips to Caboose and Halibut Cove.

And now, all the changing in the space between her and Kache, and the spaces inside them. So much had happened in such little time, Nadia simply could not keep up with it all. The plants and the animals, the weather and the soil moisture, all blended into one big blur somewhere out there; she didn't feel such an integral part of it, and that was okay. She focused on what was directly in front of her, usually Kache or the computer screen. So much to know about both of them. He would stomp on the front porch, slip his boots off, and burst in, smelling of spruce or fish, carrying eggs or a pail of milk. He had stronger muscles. He smiled more. When he wasn't working, he played his guitar and sang. His voice, his lyrics, his guitar playing—she marked the passing of time in how he got better and better each time he picked up his guitar, so good now, as if he had been playing all the years he was gone instead of only keeping track of numbers. She'd heard people in Caboose ask when he would play at the Spit Tune again. They asked him why he hadn't gone off to become a famous rock and roller. Kache would just shrug, smile, and say, “Well, you know how it is.”

Nadia didn't really understand. She didn't quite know how it was, but she strove to learn. Every morning, she felt compelled to look up something new.

One morning, she drummed up the courage to look up something old.

“Did you know,” she asked Kache, who had just walked in with an armful of firewood, “that there is actually information on the Old Believers? For anyone to read? Listen:

“The schism, or
Raskol
, occurred in the mid-1600s when Patriarch Nikon of the Russian Orthodox Church decided to implement relatively minor reforms in rituals of worship, such as using three fingers instead of two to make the sign of the cross. Many were deeply offended, but the reforms were adopted, and those who refused to adapt broke off from the church and were persecuted, with persecution intensifying during the Bolshevik Revolution. These Old Believers fled to China, then Brazil, and eventually different parts of the United States, including Alaska. While beliefs and practices do vary between villages, each Old Believer village considers themselves the keepers of the true faith, requiring followers to keep rigorous religious practices and rituals. There is a general tendency to live separately from ‘outsiders' and eschew modern culture. This is becoming more difficult as the Internet and satellite television encroach on even the most remote locations.”

Nadia stared at Kache with her mouth hanging open.

He said, “Things are changing fast. I wouldn't be shocked if they themselves posted that information for all to see. If you look long enough, you'll probably find an Old Believer's blog.”

“Never.”

“The irony in all this? You have been living isolated from the media, and some of them have satellite dishes on their homes.”

“Never,” she said. “Not in Altai.” Kache didn't seem to understand that if the Old Believers had not changed during the revolution or the
Raskol
, or anytime in the four hundred years since, they certainly weren't going to change during some little technology revolution. No matter how many people used the Internet, her village would stay outside of it; they would not be like salmon swooped up in the net. They would not.

But she would. Oh yes, she would.

For so long, she had no options. But now! She could do anything if she was brave enough. She could apply to college far away and learn how to make films. She could live in an apartment in a big city and find a job working in a tall glass building. She could become a teacher or a golf pro or a biologist or a doctor. Or she could stay exactly where she was and love Kache, as she had for the last decade, but differently, of course, because the boy in her head had materialized, grown into a man who was sitting on that chair, singing his sweet heart out to her, and that was the best change of all.

So many ways to live one life!

Her favorite poem of Elizabeth's went like this:

DEVOURED

Oh, to be young and beautiful.

I was young once

But never quite beautiful enough.

Though I felt it on a few occasions.

Usually the color black was involved.

The night of the black opera gloves

And the strapless black evening gown, the black diamond earrings.

The night a black man whispered “beautiful” in my unadorned ear.

The night you and I swam beneath a black sky in icy black water, hot on my skin.

The night I met a black bear on the path to the cabin.

How it lumbered away, but then turned and stood to watch me

With hunger in its eyes.

If Nadia were to write a similar poem, it might be in reverse, beginning with the woods and the bear. And perhaps, maybe, the last lines would include an evening gown?

Not that Nadia hadn't explored the back of Elizabeth's closet and tried on the same black strapless gown and long black gloves she'd written about. Ten years came with a lot of evenings to fill. It turned out that Nadia filled the dress perfectly. But no one had ever seen her wearing an evening gown, besides Leo. She had never had an occasion to wear one. A long dress, yes—she'd grown up wearing a
sarafan
every day. It was interesting how the same length of fabric might be used to thwart as easily as it might be used to seduce.

Apparently, she didn't need an evening gown to seduce Kache. Because it was then, while she wore his rolled-up jeans and old T-shirt, that he closed the top of the computer so that the upside down apple with the bite out of it stared up at her. He took the computer from her lap and rested his dark, curly head there so it was Kache staring up at her. She leaned down and kissed him and kept kissing him until they squirmed out of their jeans, shirts, socks, and underwear, and her naked lap was on top of his naked lap—a whole different version of a laptop, she told him, and he laughed. He touched her with a knowing ease and intensity, as if she were the guitar in his hands. His fingers kept making new songs inside her. He pulled on the condom and slid into her, and she was amazed once again how good this sex felt, that what she and Vladimir did was also called sex, but that it felt nothing like this; it felt the opposite of this. Sex, long dresses. A
sarafan
was nothing like an evening gown. She needed to learn more words, or create them, as Shakespeare had. Kache ran his tongue around her nipple. There weren't enough words.