Seré Halverson - The House of Frozen Dreams

Goddamn it. There is no getting around grief.

Even if you turned your back on it, diligently refused to answer its call, it would badger you, forever demanding payment. And oh, could it wait; it would not move on. Grief was a fucking collections company, and it was never fully satisfied. It would always keep showing up out of the blue, tacking on more interest.

His mom’s books lined the walls in the bedroom too. He’d known she loved to read, but he hadn’t realized that they’d lived in what other people might classify as a library. She’d worked in the book business in New York before she’d met his father. She moved here willingly, even enthusiastically, carrying her designer clothes and hundreds of books to this far edge of the world.

And there was the big old steamer trunk at the end of the bed. The one she’d kept locked, with her journals inside, the one no longer locked, the brass tongues sticking out at him. He lifted the creaky top. Empty, as he expected. He remembered Snag emptying it a few days after they’d gotten the news. Kache had sat swollen-eyed in his room and watched her blurred image go back and forth from his parents’ room to a cardboard box in the hallway. She’d carried the notebooks in armfuls from the trunk to the box, and her knitted cardigan got caught on one of the wire rings so that after she released them, a single notebook hung from her sweater. It had an orangey red cover, and it made Kache think of a king crab clinging to her. She didn’t even notice until he pointed it out. Snag’s own eyes were so teary that when she tried to remove it, she kept tangling the sweater and wire even more so, until Kache helped release her from the journal. He handed it to her, then gently closed his door, leaving Snag to carry out his mom’s one commandment that if anything ever happened to her, the journals would be burned. Snag did that much.

In the bathroom, Kache blew his nose and splashed cold water on his eyes, pressed a towel against his face, holding it there for a good long minute. His great-grandfather’s white enamel shaving mug, soap brush, and straight-edge razor still sat on the shelf. His mom always did love family heirlooms. Little did she know the whole house would one day be a museum full of them.

He knocked on his bedroom door. “I’m going to take off. Not sure when I’ll be back but maybe you’ll be ready to talk by then?”

The dog let out a whine but Nadia said nothing.

The front door closed again and Nadia released a sigh so long and shaky she wondered how long she’d been holding her breath. From the bedroom window, she watched him taking long strides up the road. He looked more teenager than man, still gangly and long-limbed, still moving with the slightest uncertainty.

She collapsed into the desk chair, more tired than if she’d chopped and hauled wood all day, a fatigue that started in her chest and wrapped itself around her head. She tried to think logically. Although she felt as if she knew him through the stories, he was not the same person who’d been brought up in that house. Unlike Nadia, he had lived a life. He had gone somewhere, done some things. Most likely he had a wife, children, an occupation. He was a musician, or perhaps a teacher of music.

He seemed … upset, but mostly gentle. She wanted to trust her instinct; she was older now, knew more. It was clear he had not decided what to do about her and she imagined him changing his mind again and again with each turn of the road. Would he bring back the police, have her arrested? Would he head out to the village to ask questions? Would he return with supplies? Or with Lettie, if she was still alive? But he hadn’t mentioned her, and Nadia had long feared Lettie dead, had mourned her ever since her last visit, when she brought not one, but two truckloads of supplies and Leo, who was just a puppy then.

Perhaps Kache would bring his wife to talk with her. If he did go to the village … what if Vladimir charmed Kache into coming back with him, the way he had so easily charmed her father and the others?

She should leave. She forced herself to stand, and Leo stood next to her, wagging his tail, waiting for her next move.

She’d tried to leave several times in the past years after Lettie stopped coming. Nadia had hiked down to the beach, loaded the Winkels’ faded orange canoe. Leo climbed in and sat perfectly still, although his anticipation was palpable as she climbed in, paddled. Always at some point her nerve turned to nervousness—to where was she paddling? And then what? And so she turned around and paddled back, Leo’s ears down, as if he’d been reprimanded. “For this, I am very sorry. I am such the coward, Leo.”

Other times she hiked up to the road with a plan to walk into town and ask to trade animals for a new car battery and starter. She would offer chickens, a goat, whatever they wanted. But the downshift of a distant truck would send her into the bushes for cover. In her mind, Vladimir sat behind the wheel and that was enough to put another end to her plans. By the time she retraced her steps, his face had faded and she saw instead her father’s kind face, heading to buy parts for his truck; and then her mother’s, her sisters’, her brother’s faces—all so much younger than they were now. But she had no way of knowing what the years had done to their faces … and the guilt pushed her back into the Winkel house, back into bed until hunger would force her out of her self-pity, out to work the garden or to set the fishing nets and traps.

She walked down the stairs into the empty living room. Even with Leo at her heels, the emptiness had spread since Kache left. She took the dog’s face in her hands. “I should not have shut him out like that, you say?” She tugged his ear. “But wasn’t it so difficult? His asking these questions we do not know how to answer?”

Leo harrumphed and lay down next to the wood stove. “You want him to come back? Like Lettie?”

Like Lettie.

All those years ago Nadia had stayed in the house through the first spring without a sign of anyone. She’d lived off fish and clams and mussels, and the plants she’d foraged—sea lettuce and nori from the bay, lovage, the long narrow goose tongue and yellow monkey flower greens from the land. She snared plenty of rabbits. One day, she hunted for chanterelles after a week of rain, her mouth watering as she thought of sautéing them in some of the wine she’d found in the cellar, along with wild garlic and a bit of fat from the spruce hen she’d shot the day before.

But she sensed, as she walked toward the house with her basket of mushrooms, that someone was there, and she slipped behind the old outhouse to hide. Her heart seemed to beat through her back, thumping the wood siding she leaned against.

A woman’s voice called out from the front porch. “Well, whoever you are, you’re trespassing on my property but I’m not gonna shoot you. You might as well show your face.”

Nadia pressed harder against the building. It must be the owner. Nadia had thought it possible they would never come back. When she’d first found the house, she saw that no one had been there for months. Strangest were the signs that no one had actually lived there for more than a decade. The calendars, the newspapers, the magazines—everything stopped after May, 1985.

“Come on now. Contrary to what you might think, I’m glad you’re here,” the voice called. “You seem to be taking good care of the place. I’m going to fix us something to eat. I hope you’ll join me in the kitchen.”

Eventually Nadia did get hungry and cold. She smelled something meaty and sweet and delicious, along with smoke from the woodstove. Because she could not afford to pause to consider the consequences, she traversed the yard and climbed the steps to the front door without hesitation. She knocked on the door, which felt odd, and when an old woman with a white braid answered, Nadia held out the basket of chanterelles like the neighbors attending a holy day feast back in the village. The woman smiled, her wrinkles a map of her long life. Repositioning her braid so it lay behind her shoulder, she thanked Nadia and took the basket.