One Arctic Summer

by Dani Haviland

  “Mama, are you going to be okay?” Krista asked again, her hand now on her mother’s face.

  “I used to live here,” she said. “As a matter of fact, you were conceived in that room right there,” pointing to the window of the bedroom.

  “Ew! Too much information, Mama…”

  “PG-13, maybe. I’ll never share the rest. At least, with anyone but him.”

  Clomp! Clomp! Clomp!

  “There you are! It’s about time. Why didn’t you write? I didn’t know where to find you,” Grandma said, her arms open, her cane clutched in one hand, as she waited for a hug.

  “Grandma? You don’t look a day older than when I…um…left,” she stuttered, then got lost in the hug.

  Grandma held her tight, not wanting to let her go lest Alexandra leave her world again. “I may not look older,” she whispered, “but now I really do need the cane.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t write. I didn’t know your address…”

  X knew how lame her answer was, and Grandma called her out on it. “All you had to do was write Krista Rachmaninoff, Barrow, Alaska on the envelope and it would have come right to me.”

  “Honestly, if I hadn’t been so hurt, I might have written…”

  “Wait, just a second,” young Krista said, her hand on both women’s shoulders. “Excuse me for interrupting, but you’re Krista, too?”

  “Yup! Just like you. We’re both Krista Rachmaninoffs. You were named after me!”

  “Mo-om?”

  “Yes, you were. At least, on your first birth certificate. When your daddy adopted you, we changed your name. Legally you’re Krista Swenson, but you were brought into this world as Krista Alexandra Rachmaninoff.”

  “Wow! That’s so cool! I’m going to change it as soon as we get back home.”

  “Nope!” Grandma declared.

  “Huh? Why not?” Krista asked.

  “Change it today. Just claim it right now, in front of witnesses. The paperwork can come later. That’s just the white man’s busy work. You’re half Inupiaq. We do things differently around here. At least we do every chance we get. This is a good opportunity.”

  “Okay, before everyone in this room, I declare that the name I want to be known by is the name I was born with: Krista Alexandra Rachmaninoff!”

  “Here! Here!” Grandma and X cheered, then all three shared hugs and tears.

  “Now, as I was saying,” Grandma continued, wiping her eyes with one sleeve of her kuspuk, using the cuff of the other one to wipe under her nose. “I have a whole box of letters for you I was supposed to forward as soon as I had your address.” She pointed to the pile in the corner, three sealed boxes, bulging at the sides, the tape on the bottom ones yellowed with age. “About twenty years worth. You can read them later. Right now, I just remembered that I forgot to tell you thank you for giving me a granddaughter. I thought you were his red raven, even when he called you ‘not his girlfriend.’”

  X put her hand up to pause Grandma when she heard her son’s voice.

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t go to the hospital?” Lars asked, his voice coming from outside.

  She frowned as she looked to the doorway, the screen door shut, the brightness outside making everyone inside hard to see for anyone coming into the house. There’s no way Lars knew his mother and sister were here.

  “I keep a spare medical kit here. It’s closer. Besides, I don’t charge when I fix you up away from the clinic. Let me clean up the scrape and put a bandage on it. I’m pretty sure you don’t need stitches, but infections are my main concern.”

  X took two steps back and melded into the wall. After all these years, his voice had the same warmth and confidence, deep but not basso, the clipped rhythm of a Native Alaskan, the earthy tone that made her loins tingle, her stomach clench.

  The door opened and Lars came in. “Have a seat at the kitchen table,” Rocky said, then followed him in. “Hi, Grandma,” he said. “Hi, guest,” he added when he saw she wasn’t alone, nodded to the young red-haired woman, and proceeded to the kitchen and his new patient.

  Grandma’s mouth was open, ready to speak, but X caught her eye, shook her head, and put finger to lip, asking her wordlessly to be silent. Grandma nodded and complied, then toddled to her rocker and picked up her bag of crochet work.

  X slumped to the floor and watched as Rocky tended to her son’s scraped knee, his manner as gentle on a teenage boy as it was on a cut and scared young woman twenty-two years ago. “Now, this is going to feel cold. Watch my ears, not my hands, okay?”

  “Yes, Doc,” Lars said, then bit his lip in anticipation. Tired of watching his mender’s ears, Lars looked around the room, then realized who the woman Doc had greeted was.

  “Hey, Krista! What are you doing here?”

  Krista grinned, not wanting to spoil her mother’s surprise. “Oh, I was just in the neighborhood and heard this nice lady play the piano. Her name’s Krista, like mine.”

  “Nope!” Grandma said. “Your name is Krista like mine. I’m older and had the name first.”

  “True,” young Krista said, her grin widening as she tried to control the rest of her comments.

  “What’s wrong?” Lars asked. “You’re hiding something. I know you are. I’ve known you all my life and that smirk means you want to say something…”

  “There. You’re done, Lars. Keep it clean and no scrubbing floors or crawling on the ground for two weeks or until the scabs have fallen off, whichever comes first. And no picking at it!”

  “Yes, Doc,” Lars said, then stood up and looked toward where his sister had been sneaking sideways glances. “Krista, what’s Mom doing, sitting on the floor?”

  Rocky walked toward where Lars was looking, the slight creak of his metal ankle drawing her eye. X stared, glad she had been at least a little forewarned about the awesome basketball player with only one foot. She looked up at him and smiled nervously. “More than a couple pieces of broken glass, I take it?”

  “X? Wha…What are you doing here?” he asked, reaching out to help her stand.

  “Visiting with Grandma, watching you fix my son…”

  Visions of family raced through Rocky’s head, then he realized that X must have adopted a son, maybe even married. He smiled weakly. “Oh.”

  “You forgot to tell him we were witnessing the renaming of your daughter, too,” Grandma said, nodding to Krista. “Tell him your name, sweetheart.”

  Krista bowed her head and blushed crimson, then took a deep breath, looked at him and declared, “I’m Krista Alexandra Rachmaninoff. Dad.”

  X and Lars rushed to Rocky, one on either side, supporting him as his knees buckled beneath him.

  “Mom, he passed out. I mean, totally ‘grab the smelling salts’ passed out!” Lars said. “Cool! I thought that only happened in the movies.”

  “I guess it was too much of a shock to his system, huh?” Krista said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have called him Dad.”

  Back from the kitchen, damp washcloth in hand, X lifted Rocky’s head and placed the rag behind his neck. “Nah. He probably was already on his way down when you said your last name.”

  Rocky inhaled deeply, awake at the coolness on his skin and the sound of X’s voice. “You’re not messing with me, are you?” he asked, looking into X’s face for signs of bedevilment. “She really is mine?”

  “Ours,” X answered. “One day of unrestrained passion was enough.”

  “Mo-om,” Lars and Krista chorused.

  “That’s my grandson!” Grandma sang out. “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.”

  ***

  “So, what happened?” X asked, sipping her tea with him at the kitchen table. “The last I recall, you went to the store for milk and then, boom! You were gone forever.”

  “I didn’t have the nerve to tell you that I had signed up for deferred enlistment into the army. The recruiter got me a plane ticket to Anchorage. I goofed up on the date, thinking we had another day before I had to leave.
I was going to tell you that night, but I…um…kinda got sidetracked…” He glanced up at Krista, then lowered his eyes again.

  “And…” X prompted.

  “I had to leave or get thrown in jail. At least that’s the lie the recruiter told me. By the time I found out what a fraud he was, it was too late. I’d already signed the final enlistment papers and was on my way to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. I’d never felt such heat, but plugged away, basic training all day, write a letter to you each night and post it to Grandma’s, then more training. I guess you never got the letters or reached out to see if Grandma knew where I was or what was going on.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s as much my fault as yours. Or maybe more so. I had to deal with Dr. Jackass, then my mother, then I reconnected with my grandmother and found out I was pregnant…”

  “And all alone?”

  “No, I never felt ‘all’ alone. I had my grandmother and I had our child. I gave her your name, worked on my career in the health care industry…” X winked at Rocky and continued. “And then Karl came into our lives. He fell for Krista, then me, and then we were married. Six years and thousands of dollars of fertility specialists and procedures later, we had Lars. Karl died last year. So, here we are. When did you come back?”

  “I thought you were going to ask about the foot first…”

  X shrugged and said, “I figured it’d come up eventually. Whatever you want to tell me first is good with me. I didn’t realize how much I missed your voice.”

  Low, guttural groans came from both Krista and Lars. X fixed them with a glare, then turned to Rocky and said, “You were saying…”

  “I wound up in Afghanistan. Rough and cold in the winter and supposed to be absolute hell in the summer, but we didn’t make it that long. I was an infantryman, a foot soldier, nothing special. We were on a scouting mission when the guy ahead of me stepped on an IED—improvised explosive device. Those hill people could make a bomb out of anything, even hand lotion…or so I’ve heard,” he said, adding a wink.

  X blushed at his silent ‘kiss’ and the fact he remembered she had complained that her lotion had been seized by airport security during the first conversation they had ever had in 1994.

  “It killed the guy and didn’t do me any good,” Rocky pulled his pant leg up, showing his prothesis that started six inches below his knee. “I grabbed a tie down, wrapped it above the mess so I didn’t bleed out, then crawled to help the others. I carried them on my back as I scooted across the rocks toward protection. You see,” he turned to Lars, “the bad guys knew we were in their backyard and they were shooting at us.”

  “And with all the crawling in the dirt, you got an infection, huh?” Lars asked.

  “Boy, howdy!” Rocky said, “but that came later. One of the guys radioed in for support while I shuttled in the last two.”

  “What about the others?” Krista asked. “Wasn’t anyone else helping you?”

  Rocky sighed and shook his head, holding back the tears as he relived the terror. “They tried, but they could stand up and run, so they did. They couldn’t outrun a bullet, though. The explosion had separated us. We were two teams now. I saw the first men get taken down along with their buddies they were trying to help to safety. ‘Get low!’ I screamed, but it was too late for them. Or so I thought. I heard one of them moan. A few of the others had made it to a protected area and hollered they were going to wait for air support. ‘Any minute,’ they had told them, meaning the air support was on the way.

  “Well, to me that meant it was even more important to get the man on the ground out of there. Long story short, I got him to safety, performed some first aid, and got him stabilized before the attack helos came in—the next day—and neutralized the area, chasing the bad guys back further into the hills. They brought us in, shipped us to whichever specialty hospitals were deemed necessary, and that was that. Or so I thought.

  “I knew I would be discharged early because of the injury. That was fine with me. I didn’t know if you were finally getting my letters by this point or not. I wanted to come home. While I was in rehab, I found out that the letters were still accumulating,” he nodded to the corner, “so I decided to change my focus. The last guy on the ground that I had pulled in had a rich family. He knew me by name and found me just before I was out of the system. His father wanted to thank me in person. We met up, he told me how special I was, that without my skills his son would have died, so he felt he owed me a debt. I think he wanted to buy me a car or something. I told him not to worry. I’d been mending folks since I was yay high,” and held out his hand. ‘Just in a day’s work for me,’ I said.

  “Then let’s do it with some letters after that long Russian name of yours. So, he paid my way through medical school. I’m now an M.D., believe it or not.”

  “And you work at the clinic?” X asked.

  “As needed. I’ve sorta developed my own community outreach program.”

  “Basketball and bingo therapy?”

  He answered her with a smile and a chuckle. Even after twenty-two years, they were thinking alike.

  “Mom, can we move up here?” Lars asked, glad Doc and his mother had finally finished talking, even if it meant they were making googly eyes at each other.

  She looked at Lars and said, “Just a sec. Rocky, let me see your watch.”

  He set his hand on the table and pulled off the band, the inside of his wrist to the table. She took his hand and turned it over, revealing the small tattoo M4L where the watch band had been. She took off her own watch, flipped her hand over, and showed him her tattoo, identical to his. “I traced over your ink for months, then finally went and had it made permanent. Looks like you did the same thing,” she said, running her fingers over his pulse spot.

  “Hurt like hell,” Rocky said, “but it was pain for a moment, marking my devotion to my red raven, mated for life.”

  “Mom?” Lars asked. “You didn’t answer me.”

  “Yes, Lars, we can finally move home.”

  “My years of hardships have passed, and my gray hairs have arrived,” Rocky said, her hand in his.

  “Your red raven is here, but she brought along a couple of chicks…”

  “I’m not a chick, Mom,” Lars said.

  “And neither am I,” Krista added.

  “Bonuses,” Rocky said.

  X looked around the room. “It’s gonna be a little snug in here, don’t you think?”

  “Nope.” Rocky waited for all of them to get the identical puzzled looks on their faces. “The bedroom belongs to Joe and Grandma. Yes, they’re still together. The living room is for the piano, courtesy of my saved wages from the U.S. Army, but I don’t live here.”

  “Yeah… Are you going to show us or tell us?”

  Rocky stood up, then put his arm around X to bring her to the front door. “See that two-story house over there on the rise? It’s small but efficient.”

  “Three bedrooms?” Lars asked.

  “Two,” Rocky said, then turned to X and winked. “You get the couch, Lars. Builds character.”

  Chapter 11

  The next day

  “So, you’re forty-three years old now, right?” Rocky asked, tracing her midline up from her navel to her throat, eager to ask but still as timid as a twelve-year-old asking for his first dance.

  “Yes, but I don’t think that’s what you want to ask me, is it?” She brought his finger to her mouth and nibbled the end of it, teasing it with her tongue before placing it back at his side.

  “No, not really…”

  “My boobs got bigger when I nursed Krista and then stayed big—at least, up to average size—after I dried up. They got bigger still with Lars, but that might have been because it took so danged long to wean him.”

  “That’s not what I was going to ask. And you know what you’re doing to me, talking about nursing babies…”

  X looked down, certain that he meant he was getting aroused again. “Well, I’ll be…” then bent to his ch
est and decided to do a little suckling of her own.

  Rocky arched his back. “What…what are you doing?”

  Gently grasping his nipple between her front teeth, X mumbled, “Holding you hostage until you tell me what you really want to ask me.”

  “Well, if this is torture, you may never find out,” he chuckled, squirming beneath her.

  She let loose suddenly. “Okay, then. I won’t do it again until you ask.”

  “Are you still fertile?” he blurted out.

  She giggled in response. “What? You want more babies?”

  He shifted to his side, his embarrassment gone now that the big question had been brought out. “Short answer, yes. Long answer, I missed so much watching Krista grow up. I mean, she was the miracle that I never got to see. Shoot! I didn’t even know about her until a day ago. I guess what I’m asking is, you wouldn’t do anything…drastic…if you found out you were forty-three and pregnant, would you?”

  “Uh? No! But whether it’s in us to have another child or not, it doesn’t mean we can’t keep trying. Seems to keep Grandma and Joe happy.”

  “Do you think Krista will want to stay around here?” Rocky asked, his fingers tracing the old scars on her belly, watching to see how high her goose bumps would rise.

  “If you’re asking do you think she’d want to stick around and find a husband, then we could watch our grandchildren grow up in case we didn’t have any more—well, only time will tell. When Oscar and Lisa showed up with their three to see if it was true that Red Raven had returned, I could swear Krista blushed when she saw Ivan. I doubt it was love at first sight, but I’m sure she had some immediate infatuation with the boy.”