All the Winters After (32 page)

SEVENTY

Nadia stood with her hands in her coat pockets and watched Kache empty the gas tank of Vladimir's motorcycle, wheel it out to the canyon ledge, and push it over.

At first, she felt nothing but relief. Relief that Vladimir was dead. Relief that Kache was alive. In the days that followed, the relief began to give way to dread. She had to reply to the school's offer. Neither she nor Kache had said a word about it since their fight. She wanted the answer that didn't involve pain, but that answer didn't exist. Every direction required a huge sacrifice—hers or Kache's or both.

She and Kache sat on opposite sides of the couch, Nadia reading while Kache checked his emails on the laptop, their legs wrapped around each other and Leo, who snored, his casted leg sticking straight up.

Kache said, “Is there something you want to show me?”

“What is it you mean?”

“Well, there's a strange email here from my old girlfriend Janie. It's forwarded from her friend who wrote ‘This looks like Kache' in the subject line. Then a note from Janie. Do you want me to read it?”

Nadia felt her neck getting hot. “If you want.”

“It says, ‘Wow. You've gone viral. I never imagined you were that good. So glad you're playing again. And look at you. You look like Mr. Happenings himself.' Then she goes on to say how happy she is that I found someone and that she's getting married next month.”

“Who is this Mr. Happenings?”

“Long story.”

“I see.”

“So there's a link here I can click on, but I thought you might have something to tell me before I do.”

“I was going to wait until your birthday, but now it is good time, yes?” She started to lean toward him, but her nerves forced her up, out to the kitchen, where she began washing the breakfast dishes. She washed each one carefully, taking her time, afraid to turn around.

When she turned off the water, she heard the song coming to its end, the last chorus.

“
Na
dia, you unknotted me.

Na
di
a, you undeniably

Nadi
a
, you unarguably

Made me a better man.”

There were Kache's hands on her hips, turning her away from the sink, his arms wrapping her in a hug.

“I had no idea. How did you learn to do that?”

She shrugged, trying not to smile quite so big. “You gave me the camera.”

“It's as if… I don't know. As if I were seeing a sunset reflected in a building for the first time. As if I'd never seen a homeless woman until now. Like I'm seeing not just what you're seeing but
how
you see it. Even those mountains. And those shots of me working. How'd you make me look like I know what I'm doing?”

“Because.” She laughed. “Now you do.”

He went on. “And I love how the chopping wood works in time to the beat, the way you slow it down in spots, and how the visuals reflect the lyrics, but not too overtly.”

She laughed again. She couldn't help it. “So you like it?”

“I'm blown away by it.”

They both fell quiet. She stayed in his arms, his praise filling her.

Kache leaned back and tilted her face up toward his. “Nadia,” he said.

She waited.

“You're right to want this.” He let out a long sigh. There was so much sadness in that sigh. His dark eyes seemed as deep as the canyon. “It was wrong of me to try to keep you here. You have to go. And I have to stay.”

She pressed her ear against the place where she always heard his heart beat, and she nodded.

SEVENTY-ONE

They'd decided that Leo would stay with Kache, so for the first time he could remember, Leo didn't follow him down to the barn when he did the milking that morning. It was as if the dog knew he had limited time with Nadia. Kache understood. He too wanted to sit at her heels while she packed.

“Settle down, Mooze, girl,” he told the cow, but she might as well have said the same thing to him. It was funny how sensitive the animals were, how they picked up on human emotions so easily. Both Mooze and Kache finally did settle down, and the steady stream of milk, the
zip-zip-zip
rhythm, calmed him even more.

In the past few months, Kache had tried to imagine what his life might be like on the homestead once Nadia was gone. He couldn't picture it. But he knew there would be good moments like this one, little surprises here and there, glimpses of grace. Nothing like what they'd had here together, not entire days and even weeks that were downright wondrous. But there would be good moments—and they would not be wasted on him.

A loud squawking and squeaking erupted outside. He gave Mooze a grateful pat on her hide and went out to investigate. The sandhill cranes had returned, and they'd brought friends. There must have been thirty, maybe forty of them, and they were dancing. Flapping their wings, hopping, and twirling. Kache looked back at the house; no one was out.

He watched a while longer, but he couldn't help himself. He set down the pail of milk and, timidly at first, took a few steps toward the birds. They hardly noticed. Admittedly, with his long skinny legs and arms, he probably didn't look all that foreign. He tried flapping his arms and took a few hops. As musical as he was, he had two left feet. But he seemed made for the sandhill crane dance. He spread his arms even wider, picked up his legs, and took high prances, and those birds let him in. They let him in.

Then Nadia was beside him, dressed in her city-girl leather jacket, her slim jeans, her pretty riding boots. She flapped her arms and stretched her long neck, stepping up, twirling, hopping. They ran, skipped, jumped, flapping, fluttering, squawking. They danced and they danced. He opened his arms, and she twirled to him, and they held each other, her soft golden feathers of hair on his chin. The birds lost interest and flew away, but Kache and Nadia stayed like that while they laughed and cried and caught their breath, hearts pounding.

He wanted to remind her that sandhill cranes mated for life. But then she would have to remind him that the two of them were not sandhill cranes.

• • •

At the airport, Kache took the silk scarf he'd kept with him all those years in Austin—gold, black, cobalt, sage, and rose—out of his pocket. “This was my mom's,” he told Nadia. “It was the only thing I took with me when I left here. I want you to take it with you.” She hesitated but then nodded, and he wrapped it loosely around her neck. “I know you won't ever be needing it for your head, but this looks really fashionable. It's from New York. You look like a real city woman. Oh, and this.” He handed her a leather-bound notebook. “Your own journal.”

She tiptoed and wrapped her arms around his neck. He pulled her to him, and they stayed like this, breathing in each other, not talking until her flight was called.

“You have your earplugs and your wristbands? Someone from the school will meet you, right?” She nodded. “And your cell phone is charged?”

She nodded again, tears streaming down her beautiful, beautiful face. “I know! I remember to charge. A miracle!” She told him to take good care of Leo. She told Kache how much she loved him, and he told her how much he loved her. Still, she turned and left and flew away, and he stayed. He waved to her, watching her from the ground until the plane flew above the clouds and he could see her no more.

• • •

Lettie, Snag, and Gilly had come out for a good-bye dinner and were staying for a few days. That evening, Lettie asked Kache to wheel her out on the property. He sat on a log next to her. They looked out at the sky. It was the kind of sky that might make a devout atheist reconsider the possibility of heaven. Some clouds ran themselves in silver layers upon layers, and some formed golden vertical towers. Still others billowed in a bouquet of pinks and oranges. And the light—it seemed to emanate from all different sources, bordering around and spotlighting from above and below and exploding through. It was a sky for everyone, everywhere.

They sat, taking it in. When Kache stood to begin pushing her back up the hill, Lettie reached behind her and said, “Here you are,” but when he went to take whatever it was she was offering, her hand was empty. She gripped his fingers and said it again. “
Here
you
are
. This place—it means something to you, Kache.”

He said, “More than I wish it did, Gram.”

“You got that gene from me.”

He squeezed back. “Yeah, I guess I did. Whaddya know? Here I am.”

• • •

Lettie died in her sleep two days later, in the cabin that she and A. R. had built, exactly how she always said she would go. The next week, the town of Caboose came out to the homestead. It was an honest to God summer day, breezy but shirtsleeves-warm, Kache's garden overflowing, the bay sparkling. Snag and Kache spread the ashes on the land where they had once spread Denny, Bets, and Glenn, and before them, A. R.

Kache sang Lettie's favorite song.

“The water is wide,

I can't cross over,

And neither have

I wings to fly.

Build me a boat

That can carry two,

And both shall row,

My love and I.”

His voice caught, and the crowd waited patiently while he took a deep breath and then another. He'd always thought of
my love
as the physical person, sitting there in the boat rowing with you, but he saw how in the end, maybe it wasn't the actual person who helped you across whatever you needed to cross over. Maybe it was simply your love for that person.

“And both shall row,

My love and I.”

When Snag—Eleanor, she was officially going by Eleanor now—heard Kache's voice break out into her mom's favorite song, she started to cry, and Gilly took her hand. Eleanor squeezed Gilly's fingers, held on. Then she rested her head on Gilly's lovely shoulder and kept it there for the whole town of Caboose to see.

• • •

Sixteen hundred miles away, Nadia walked across the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time. With her camera in hand, she filmed up the big reddish steel trusses and back down to the wide, cobalt water reflecting the sun, the ivory city—her city!—risen against clear blue sky. People were passing her in cars, buses, taxis, trucks, on bikes, walking hand in hand, running in packs. Noise and movement and mayhem. She let the camera come down from her face, taking it all in. The rumbling of traffic came up through her feet in what seemed like a gesture of connection.

A couple walking toward her stopped, and the smiling young woman offered to film Nadia for a moment. Nadia stood against the railing and waved at the couple. A wind gust picked up the silk scarf she'd worn around her neck, but she caught it and held on.

The woman handed the camera back to her, still smiling. She said, “For a second there, it looked like you had grown wings.”

Later that evening, in her tiny rented room, Nadia ate her carton of Chinese takeout and wrote in her journal while lonely violin music arched its way up through the window. When she finished writing, she closed the notebook. She sat, listening to the aching notes, the impatient horns, and frantic sirens, the single long screech of a bus coming to its stop.

She remembered the film clip and downloaded it onto her computer. There she was on the bridge: laughing, waving, with her city in the background. And when the scarf Kache had given her—Elizabeth's scarf—rose behind her in the wind and ballooned out for an instant on each side, Nadia saw that what the woman had said was true.

1. Discuss the title of the novel and how you feel it connects with the story.

2. Discuss the role of the homestead and the role of the setting in Kache's and Nadia's lives, both individually and together.

3. How did you feel about Snag and her actions? How did time and place affect her, and how might her story be different today?

4. Discuss the nature of choice and loss for Kache and Nadia.

5. How do you think the seasons reflect Nadia's and Kache's emotional journeys?

6. Nadia's family chose their religion above continuing a relationship with Nadia. How do you perceive this choice? Have you ever faced such a life-altering choice in your own life, and if so, what was it?

7. Kache and his father appear to have a fractured relationship, but Kache is gradually able to see his father's actions from a grown perspective, and it changes how he sees their relationship—and ultimately saves his life. Discuss the importance of parental relationships and the differences in this perception as children and as adults.

8. Nadia falls in love with Kache as a young man through reading his mother's journals, and although this enables her to fall in love with him as an adult, it causes friction in their relationship. Do you think she should have read the journals? What could she have done differently with the knowledge?

9. At the end of the novel, Kache and Nadia are unable to find a way to continue their relationship. How did you feel about this? Do you believe they did the right thing?

10. What do you believe happens to Kache and Nadia after the end of the story?

What was your inspiration for
All the Winters After
?

When I made my first trip to Homer, Alaska, I immediately fell under its spell. The
mountains
. The
bay
. The
wildlife
. The
people
. Circumstances prevented me from hopping on a boat and moving there like Lettie did. But because I'm a writer, my mind, at least, can move anywhere it pleases. And my mind was already packing. At the Homer Bookstore, I came upon a book of autobiographical accounts from the area's homesteaders. I saw Old Believer women shopping at the Safeway, wearing long colorful skirts and head scarves. Intrigued by the place, the homesteaders, and the Old Believers, I had an idea for a novel. I wrote about fifty pages. But life got complicated, and my mind was needed elsewhere. So I put that novel away. For about, oh, twenty years. I wrote two other books before I finally picked those fifty pages back up.

Can you share how the actual Old Believers' villages became Ural and Altai and how Homer became Caboose?

By the time I returned to this story, there was a lot more information available on the Old Believers than there had been all those years before, both in print and on the Internet. There are several Old Believer villages on the outskirts of Homer. Altai and Ural are fictionalized versions of two of those villages; I created them from what I've read and imagined, but they are not meant to be factual representations. They were seeds of inspiration mixed with my imagination. That is also true for Homer in its transformation to Caboose. I borrowed heavily from the town, especially its location, but I also had fun making things up and altering them. I combined real history and locations with creative license.

One more inspiration: One of my favorite books as a child was
Island of the Blue Dolphins
, about a woman stranded on an island, completely independent and cut off from civilization for years. Although Nadia's situation is different, I think the seed for her isolation probably sprung from my early fascination with that kind of ongoing solitude.

All the Winters After
has a stunning setting in Alaska, and as a reader, I felt your love and enthusiasm for it as a remote and exhilarating destination. What type of research did you do?

I have a lot of ties to Alaska. My first husband grew up on the Kenai Peninsula, and my oldest son went to college in Anchorage. In addition to family trips, I traveled there for my work as a creative director. For a long time, I wanted to live in Alaska, and I subscribed to
Alaska
magazine and read everything I could on the subject. A few years ago, while working on the book, I stayed in a log cabin on the Kilcher Family Homestead on the outskirts of Homer, right about where I'd envisioned the Winkel homestead to be and where they have a living museum in the old homesteaders' cabin. I also lost myself in the Pratt Museum in Homer for hours and hours, where I loaded up on more books and visited the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center and the beautiful Museum of the North at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks. I have a pile of field guides, but if I couldn't find the answer I needed, I'd call my son, Daniel. He earned a degree in biology in Anchorage and spent five summers working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the Alaskan wilderness. He was my go-to guy.

A lot of the characters in this book have unique names. How did you come up with them, and what is their significance, if any?

With the exception of the family name of Winkel, which I changed after many drafts and which was an intentional nod to Rip Van Winkle and his long nap, most of the names just came to me early on, and I'll admit that I didn't see their significance until later. Kache was always Kache, after the Kachemak Bay—but it's pronounced
catch
, and he is clearly caught, unable to move forward, as are Snag and Nadia. Aunt Snag stepped onto the page already christened, along with the story of how Glenn gave her the nickname, long before I knew what her problems were. And Nadia? I wanted something that sounded Russian, so I grabbed that one from the air. It wasn't until years later, when I was trying to write the song lyrics, that I realized Nadia sounds a lot like
knotted
. I must have known at some subconscious level, but I'm a bit baffled that I didn't notice that their names reflected their conditions.

I really yearned for Kache and Nadia to find some way to make things work between them. Do you know what happens to them next, and if so, will you share that? Or would you rather leave it to the imagination of the reader?

I don't know what happens to them next. (However, I do know what my mother would like to happen!) I would need to write another book about them in order to find out. I will say that Kache and Nadia freed each other, but, in choosing to be true to that hard-earned freedom, they had to lose each other too. And yet not entirely. The kind of change they brought into each other's lives leaves a significant and lasting impression, whether or not they reunite.

This is also a very sad story in a lot of ways—the death of Kache's family and the subsequent fracturing of relationships for those left behind, Nadia's self-imposed isolation, Nadia's family's rejection of her. As an author, how do you leave that emotion behind when you're not writing?

Most of my angst comes beforehand, circling around a tough scene before I delve in. I know what it's going to require, so there's this pondering and buildup, but the actual writing of it can be cathartic. I'll admit to a transitional period after, a reentry from the world in my head that I'm trying to get onto the page, back to the world on which I try to plant my feet. I can be a bit distracted and foggy-headed when I first step out of my writing room. It's good that I'm not a surgeon. I do have a very understanding spouse. That helps.

Lettie is irresistibly drawn to Alaska and changes her whole life, possibly sacrificing an element of her relationship with her husband, to achieve her goal. Have you ever felt drawn to anywhere in this way?

Oh yes. I've already hinted at this, but I guess I'll come out and call it what it was—my obsession. My first husband and I had planned to move to Alaska, where he was from, but we ended up in San Diego instead—practically the polar opposite, so to speak. I remained obsessed with Alaska for years, and Lettie's story grew from that. Unlike me, she made it happen.

These days, I no longer obsess about moving north, but I do live in a house in the woods, a remodeled and expanded cabin, not far from a bay where we kayak and my husband goes crabbing and salmon fishing. I joke that it's the closest I can get to living in Alaska and still get to live in California. My son has plans to finish his doctorate and return to Alaska, so I'll probably get to spend a lot more time there in the future.

Are your characters based on anyone in particular?

No. I wrote a lot of material in my twenties and thirties that was never published, and much to my family's relief, most likely never will be. After excavating my childhood, my writing process changed and became more imaginative. Now I excavate my obsessions, my fears, my observations, certainly my sense of place and, yes, my characters. But they're not thinly disguised people from my real life. I definitely borrow from stories friends tell me, as well as lines of dialogue, and I'm sure there are traces of me and people I've known in characters, but that's as far as it goes. I enjoy making stuff up.

The story of Kache's dog and the butterfly that led to his end was a story that really stayed with me. What inspired this incident?

Here's an example of one of the stories mentioned above that inspired a story in the book. While I was staying at the homestead, the host pointed to the cliff and told me about her childhood dog chasing a butterfly right over it. As a dog lover, that vision haunted me. As a writer, I had to include a fictionalized version of it in the book. In fact, at one time, the title was
The Dog and the Butterfly
.

The homestead is filled with books that likely save Nadia's life. What books would be on your shelves if you had to live in a homestead for a decade?

Well, first of all, every how-to book and field guide ever written! After that, I would include my favorites—the complete collections of Annie Dillard, Barbara Kingsolver, Ann Patchett, Anne Tyler, Geraldine Brooks, Jane Hamilton, Alice Munro, Elizabeth Strout… I could go on all day. More novels I love, sitting on this shelf next to me:
Middlesex
,
The History of Love
,
The Sandalwood Tree
,
Never Let Me Go
,
Cold Mountain
,
Let the Great World Spin
,
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
,
The Handmaid's Tale
,
A Prayer for Owen Meany
,
The Snow Child
,
Beautiful Ruins
,
Room
,
The Signature of All Things
,
Life After Life
,
The Hours
,
Wuthering Heights
,
The Awakening
. I would need volumes and volumes of poetry—Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson, Ted Kooser, Walt Whitman, for starters. Books on travel to help any wanderlust I'd likely experience. This list is obviously off the top of my head and nowhere near complete. But I would also want all those books I've been meaning to read and haven't. And lots of big, thick classics. A decade isn't nearly long enough, but I could make a serious dent.

What would you like the reader to take away from your novel?

I'd like the reader to experience a deep sense of place and of time well spent—of escape and connection, longing and fulfillment, recognition and discovery. The feeling of having walked in these characters' boots. And maybe a cramp or two from sitting and reading too long. That's a lot to ask, but I can hope.