The House of Frozen Dreams

by Seré Prince Halverson

  “Hi there, Miss Rose.”

  “I just saw your aunt a few weeks ago and she mentioned you were in town. And who’s your lovely friend?”

  “This is my cousin,” Kache said without hesitation. “Gretchen. From Colorado.”

  “Well, hello Gretchen from Colorado. I taught this boy everything he knows about math and science, didn’t I, Kache?”

  “Yes you did.”

  Nadia managed to smile but she didn’t know what to say so she said nothing. Kache and Miss Rose continued to talk while Nadia looked at the various exhibits until she came across an enlarged photograph with a caption that read The Winkel Family on their homestead. A couple and a young boy and girl. She didn’t recognize any of them, until she noticed the way the thick braid ran down the right shoulder of the young woman. Lettie! So the man was A.R. and the boy was Glenn and the girl was Snag. All bundled up and stiff-armed in their layers of clothes, propped up on the front porch of the home where Nadia had lived for the last ten years. The home had expanded since the photo was taken and now had another floor.

  She searched for more photographs of the family, and then noticed a sign at another display that read,

  “Only one thing was certain. We weren’t in Kansas anymore.”—A.R. Winkel, Caboose Homesteader

  “It was hard work, but it was worth every sore muscle. No regrets. I never wanted to live anywhere else.”—Lettie Winkel, Caboose Homesteader

  Nadia tried to imagine what it would be like to never want to live anywhere else, when she constantly obsessed about living somewhere else. She remembered Lettie telling her that she’d moved here from Kansas. Maybe if Lettie had lived in San Francisco she would have never moved here, she would have been so happy to be in the hilly city with all its beautiful architecture and views of the bay and the bridges and museums twenty times the size of this one.

  “Ready?” Kache stood next to her. She pointed to the sign with his grandparents’ words and he nodded. “Yep. That land was always imprinted on her heart.”

  “Was this true for him?”

  Kache shrugged. “He died when I was pretty young.”

  Back in the truck, sitting at a stop sign, Nadia asked Kache to pull the truck over again.

  “You sick?”

  She shook her head and pointed to Salon & Saloon.

  “That’s the women’s version. The guys’ is called Beer & Barber. A wife and husband own them. You can drink while you get your hair done.”

  “I want to.”

  “We can get a drink down at the Spit Tune. Want to go there? Here, it’s more about the haircut.”

  “I want to get that, my hair cut.”

  “I thought you Old Believer women don’t cut your hair.”

  “They do not. That is why I want to cut mine. Plus, it will be less recognizable.”

  “Don’t you want to think about it for a few days first?”

  “I have been thinking about it for many years. Once myself I cut it but I did not do this good so I only now trim the ends. I want it short and how did the magazine say it? Sassy? Like a boy.”

  “You can try all you want, but you will never look like a boy.”

  “No, I want only this short hair like a boy. Not to look like a boy. Like the girls in the magazines. Your mother, she had shorter hair, yes?”

  “Yes, she did. Short with curls.”

  “I like this short hair. I want to have it now.”

  By then Kache had found a parking place and turned off the truck. “Okay then. A haircut it is.”

  But as they approached the shop, Nadia remembered that it would cost money to have her hair cut, and she slowed down.

  “Maybe not. Never mind.” She turned away.

  “You don’t want to cut it?”

  “No, I do it myself. This way, is too much money.”

  “Nadia, I have money. I owe you for taking such good care of the place. Come on.” He stepped toward the door and opened it, waiting for her. She paused, people veering around her, the wind blowing the bells on the door. “Hurry,” he said. “My treat.”

  Kache sat and read a newspaper while a woman about Nadia’s age with pink and orange hair shaved on one side and longer on the other looked at the photographs Nadia pointed out in the magazines. She said Nadia would look awesome with her hair short. “You definitely have the cheekbones for it.” She led Nadia to the back of the salon where there were large brown sinks. Nadia sat in a black chair that leaned back so that her neck rested on the cool rim. The woman ran warm water over her head and commented on how long Nadia’s hair was. She washed her hair with something that smelled like honey and flowers Nadia couldn’t name, rubbing her scalp and her temples, the back of her neck. Her fingers were strong and careful and Nadia felt herself relaxing her head into the woman’s hands. She remembered her mother washing her hair when she was a child but her mother never rubbed her head and neck like this. No one ever had, and the gentleness made Nadia’s throat ache a little.

  The woman walked Nadia back to her chair in front of the mirror and began snipping off long sheaths to Nadia’s shoulders. “You’ve got so much hair I’m going to dry it before I cut anymore.” The hairdryer thrummed warm and loud and the woman, her name was Katy, continued to rub Nadia’s head and run her fingers up through the hair closest to her scalp. She shouted over the hairdryer that she just wanted to get some of the moisture out before she started cutting, then talked loudly of her boyfriend, how they were renting an apartment in Caboose, that she was from Seattle.

  “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 now it was too late.

  Soon Nadia 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 big long 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 wrote 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 blonde hair. Once they stepped foot off the homestead everything cost money. Could she trade eggs for earrings? Now 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 cou
ld 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,” and Nadia wondered, like what? But she hadn’t been paying close attention because all she heard was the voice in her head that said, Yes. This is me.

  She looked at her reflection once more. 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, pulled the spade behind his shoulders to stretch. He’d spent the early morning getting the smoker ready for the salmon and now the wondrous scent of fish and woodsmoke 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 two-thousand-and-fucking-five. 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 Indian style, with the Mac on her lap, her short blonde 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 backpay 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.

  Leo leapt 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 lady who’s a-hundred-and-two

  Makes pottery for something to do

  Has a boyfriend who’s fifty with eyes of blue

  Five husbands behind her,

  What’s she gonna do?

  Sells her pottery, they say, for A-thousand-and-two

  I’m only thirty-eight so whoop-dee-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, ohh.” She kept typing. “Nadia?”

  She looked up, 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 … I don’t know. Did you know my mother 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 journals.”

  He watched her watching him. Outside a few of the goats berated each other. “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 boxes. It was true that Snag had packed them in boxes, 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 felt the loneliness tightening 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 let 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, it 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 almost saying she probably liked Denny better anyway. Jesus. Was he still a teenager? “This is way too weird. You’re a Russian spy, a blonde voyeur who’s been sitting here absorbing everything I’ve been avoiding for the last twenty years.”

  “Perhaps it 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 a 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, and 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 now he was 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 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 than the clear memory 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.