The House of Frozen Dreams
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by Harper 2015
Copyright © Seré Prince Halverson 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photographs © Irene Lamprakou/Trevillon Images (girl); Plainpicture/Pictorium (window)
Seré Prince Halverson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007438945
Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780007438952
Version: 2014-10-29
Dedication
For Daniel, Michael, Karli and Taylor
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One: Breakup 2005
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Part Two: Land of the Midnight Sun and the Prodigal Son 2005
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Part Three: The Fall 2005
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Part Four: Winter Tracks 2005–2006
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Part Five: Breakup 2006
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Acknowledgements
Q&A with Seré Prince Halverson
About the Author
Also by Author
About the Publisher
ONE
This: her nightly ritual. She took the knife from the shelf to carve a single line in the log-planked stairwell that led from the kitchen to the root cellar. She’d carved them in groups of four one-inch vertical lines bisected with a horizontal line. So many of them now, covering most of the wall. They might be seen as clusters of crosses, but to her they were not reminders of death and sacrifice but evidence of her own existence.
There were other left-behind carvings too, in the doorjamb on the landing at the top of the stairs. These notches marked the heights of growing children, two in the Forties and Fifties, and two in the Seventies and Eighties, one of whom had grown quite tall. She saw the mother standing on a footstool, trying to reach the top of her son’s head to first mark the wood with pencil, while he stood on tiptoes, trying to appear even taller. She almost heard their teasing, their laughing. Almost.
Six stairs down, she dug the tip of the knife into the wall. The nightly ritual was important. While she no longer lived according to endless rules and regulations, with all those objects and gestures and chants, she did not want her days flowing like water with no end or beginning; shapeless, unmarked. So she read every night, book after book, first in the order that they lined the shelves, turning them upside down when she finished reading and then right-side up for the second read and so forth, now returning to her favorites again and again. And during the day she did chores—foraging, launching and checking fishing nets, setting and checking traps, gardening, tending house, feeding chickens and goats, canning and brining and smoking—all in a certain order, varying only according to the needs of the season. Her days always began with a cold-nose nudge from the dog and not one, but two enthusiastic licks of her hand as if to say not just good morning, but Good Morning! Good Morning!
Then, there were the mornings when she ignored the dog and unlatched the kitchen door so he could let himself out while she returned to bed to stay, dark mornings that led to dark days and weeks. During those times, only under piles of blankets did she feel substantial enough not to drift away; they kept her weighted down and a part of the world. But eventually her dog’s persistence and her own strong will would win over and she’d drag herself up from the thick bog and go back to her chores and her books, carving the missing days into the wall so they did not escape entirely.
It was surprising, what a human being could become accustomed to—a lone human being, miles and years from any other human being. She balanced two more logs and a chunk of coal in the woodstove, and with the dog following her, crossed the room in the left-behind slippers, which had, over time, taken on the shape of her own feet. She’d been careful to keep things as she’d found them, but those slippers were another way she’d made her mark, left her footprint, insignificant as it might be.
Now she sat in the worn checkered chair and picked up one of the yellowed magazines from 1985. Across the cover, Cosmetic Surgery, The Quest for New Faces and Bodies—At a Price. “A new face, this would help,” she once again reminded Leo, who thumped his tail. Unlike the people in the article, she said this not because she was wrinkled (she wasn’t) or thought herself homely (she didn’t). “It would give us much freedom, yes? A different life.”
She opened the big photography book of The City by the Bay, and took in her favorite image of the red bridge they called golden, and the city beyond, as white as the mountains across this bay. So similar and yet so different. That white city held people, people, people. Here, the white mountains held snow. “And their bridge,” she told Leo, closing the book. “We could use that bridge.” He cocked his head just as she heard something scrape outside.
A branch. In her mind, she kept labeled buckets in which she let sounds drop: a Branch, a Moose, a Wolf, a Bear, a Chicken, the Wind, Falling Ice, and on and on. Leo’s ears perked, but he didn’t get up. He too was used to the varied scuttlings of the wilderness. She drew the afghan around her shoulders and opened a novel to the page marked with a pressed forget-me-not.
Yes, she knew a certain comfort here—companionship, even. How could she be truly alone when, outside her door, nature kept noisy company and at her feet lay a dog such as Leo? Then there were the books. She’d traveled inside the minds of so many men and women from across the ages. And she had such long, uninterrupted passages of time to think, to ponder every turn her mind took. For instance, there was the word loneliness and the word loveliness. In English, one mere letter apart, and in her handwriting the words looked almost identical, certainly related. This she found consoling, and sometimes even true.
But now, another sound, then many unmistakable sounds; determined footsteps coming toward the house. Leo’s ears flipped back before he plunged into sharp barking and frantic clawing. She froze. All those years practicing what she would do, but she only sat, with the book open in her trembling hands. Where did she leave the gun? In the barn? How had she grown so careless? She remembered the knife on the shelf in the stairwell and finally bolted up to grab it. She flipped off lights, took hold of Leo’s collar, tugging him from the door and up the stairs to the second floor. She pulled the window shade and it snapped up, but she yanked it back down because she couldn’t see anyone, though the moon was full. With all her strength she dragged Leo, pushing and barely wedging him under the bunk bed with her, and clamped his nose with her hand just as the loose kitchen window creaked open below. A male voice, a yelling, though she didn’t hear the words over Leo’s whining and the blood pum-pumming in her ears.
It was him, she was sure of it. Shaking, shaking, she squeezed harder on the handle of the knife and wished for the gun. But she was good with a knife, she was sure of that too.
TWO
There he was, Kachemak Winkel, sitting upright, on a plane of all things, finally headed home of all places. Yes, his fingernails dented the vinyl of the armrests, and the knees of his ridiculously long legs pressed into the seat in front of him, causing the seat to vibrate. A little boy turned and peered at Kache through the crack between B3 and B4. Kache motioned to his legs with a sweep of his hand and said, “Sorry, buddy. No room.” But he knew that didn’t account for the annoying jittering.
“Afraid of flying?” the man next to him asked, peering above his reading glasses and his newspaper. He wore a tweed blazer and a hunting cap, which made him look like a studious Elmer Fudd, but with hair, which poked out around the ear flaps. “Scotch helps.”
Kache nodded thanks. He had every reason to be afraid, it being the twentieth anniversary of the plane crash. But oddly he was not afraid to fly and never had been. If God or the Universe or whoever was in charge wanted to pluck this plane from the sky and fling it into the side of a mountain in some cruel act of irony or symmetry, so be it. All the fear in the world wouldn’t make a difference. No. Kache was not afraid of flying. He was afraid of flying home. And that fear had kept him away for two decades.
He shifted in his seat, elbow now on the armrest next to the window, his finger habitually running up and down over the bump on his nose that he’d had since he was eighteen. The plane window framed the scene below, giving it that familiar, comforting screened-in quality, and through it he watched Austin, Texas become somewhere south, just another part of the Lower 48 to most Alaskans.
He had spent most of those two decades in front of a computer screen, trying to forget what he’d left behind, scrolling column after column of anesthetizing numbers, and getting promotion after promotion. Too many promotions, evidently.
After the company had laid him off six months ago, he replaced the computer screen with a TV screen. Janie encouraged him to keep looking for another job but he discovered the Discovery Channel, evidence of what he’d suspected all along: Even the world beyond the balance sheets was flat. Flat screen, forty-seven inches, plasma. That plasma became his lifeblood. So many channels. A whole network devoted to food alone. He learned how to brine a turkey, bone a turkey, smoke a turkey, high-heat roast a turkey. The same could be said of a pork roast, a leg of lamb, a prime rib of beef.
Branching out, he soon knew how to whisper to a dog, how to de-clutter his bathroom cabinets, how to flip real estate and what not to wear.
Then he came across the Do-it-Yourself network, and there he stayed. “Winkels,” his father had liked to say, long before there was a DIY network, “are Do-it-yourselfers exemplified.” Kache now, finally, knew how to do many things himself. That is, he could do them in his head, because, as Janie often reminded him, head knowledge and actual capability were two different animals. So with that disclaimer, he might say he knew how to restore an old house from the cracked foundation to the fire-hazard shingled roof—wiring, plumbing, plastering, you name it. He knew how to build a wood pergola, how to install a kitchen sink, and how to lay a slate pathway in one easy weekend. He even knew how to raise Alpacas and spin their wool into the most expensive socks on the planet. Hell, he knew how to build the spinning wheel. His father would be proud.
However.
Kache did not know how to rewind his life, how to undo the one thing that had undone him. His world was indeed flat, and he’d fallen off the edge and landed stretched out on a sofa, on pause, while the television pictures moved and the voices instructed him on everything he needed to know about everything—except how to bring his mom and his dad and Denny back from the dead.
The little boy in front of him grew bored and poked action figures through the seat crack, letting them drop to Kache’s feet. Kache retrieved them a dozen times, but then let their plastic bodies lie scattered on the floor beneath him. The boy soon laid his head on the armrest and fell asleep.
On Kache’s first plane ride, his dad had lifted him onto his lap in the pilot’s seat and explained the Cessna 180’s instruments and their functions. “Here we have the vertical speed indicator, the altimeter, the turn coordinator. What’s this one, son?” He pointed to the first numbered circle, and Kache didn’t remember any of the big words his father had just spoken.
“A clock, Daddy?” His dad laughed, then gently offered the correct names again and again until Kache got them right. It was the only memory he had of his father being so patient with him. How securely tethered to the world Kache had felt, sitting in the warm safety of his dad’s lap, zooming over land and sea.
Why had it been impossible to hop on a plane and head north, even for a visit? He tried to picture it: Aunt Snag, Grandma Lettie, and him, sitting at one end of the seemingly vast table at the homestead, empty chairs lined up. Listening to each other chew and clear throats, drumming up questions to ask each other, missing Denny’s constant joking and his father’s strong opinions on just about everything. Who would have believed he’d miss those? His mother’s calm voice, her break-open laughter so easy and frequent he could not recall her without thinking of her laugh.
So instead, once he began making decent money he’d flown Gram and Aunt Snag to Austin for visits, which provided plenty of distractions for all of them. As he drove them around, Grandma Lettie kept her eyes shut on the freeway, saying, “Holy Crap!” The woman who’d helped homestead hundreds of acres in the wilderness beyond Caboose, who’d birthed twins—his dad and Aunt Snag—in a hand-hewn cabin with no running water, who’d faced down bears and moose as if they were the size of squirrels and rabbits, couldn’t stand a semi passing them on the road. She loved the wildflowers, though. At a rest stop she walked out into the middle of a field of bluebonnets—undid her braid and fluffed her white hair, which floated like a lone cloud in all that blue—and lay down and sang her old, big, persistent heart out. “Come on, Kache!” she called, “Sing with me, like in the old days.”
Instead, he kept his arms crossed, shook his head. “Do you know that crazy lady?” he asked Snag.
Gram was of sound mind and body at the time, just being herself, the Lettie he had always adored. Every few minutes, Aunt Snag and Kache saw her arm pop out of the sapphire drift, waving a bee away.
But in the past four years Gram’s health had declined and Aunt Snag didn’t want to travel without her. When he’d talked to Snag early that morning, she’d said Lettie was deteriorating fast. “And I’m not getting any younger. You better hurry and get yourself home, or the only people you’ll have left will be in an urn, waiting for you to spread us with the others on the bluff.”
He’d let too much time slip by. Twenty years. He was thirty-eight, with little to show for it except a pissed-off and, as of last night, officially ex-girlfriend, along with a sweet enough severance package for working his loyal ass off for sixteen years, and a hell of a savings account—none of which would impress Aunt Snag or Grandma Lettie in the slightest, or do them any good.
A stop in Seattle, another three-and-a-half hours and countless thickly frosted mountain ranges later, the plane landed in Anchorage, which Snag and Lettie grumpily called North Los Angeles. But of course it was their destination for frequent shopping trips and they didn’t hesitate to get their Costco membership when it first opened there. The in-flight magazine said that just over 600,000 lived in the state, and two-fifths of that population resided in Anchorage. So even though it was Alaska’s biggest city, it had over three million to go before catching up with LA.
He caught the puddle jumper to Caboose. During the short flight he spotted a total of eight moose down through the bare birch and cottonwood trees on the Kenai Peninsula, along with gray-green spruce forests, snow-splotched brown meadows, and turquoise lakes. Soon the plane banked where the Cook Inlet met Kachemak Bay, the bay whose name he bore. Across it the Kenai mountain range, home to nesting glaciers, rose mightily and stretched beyond sight.
From the other side of the Inlet, Mt Illiamna, Mt Redoubt and Mt Augustine loomed solid and strong and steady. But looks deceive; Redoubt or Augustine frequently let off steam and took turns blowing their tops every decade or so, spreading thick volcanic ash as far as Anchorage and beyond, turning the sky dark with soot. His mom used to say Alaska didn’t forgive mistakes. As a boy, Kache wondered if those volcanic eruptions were symptoms of its pent-up rage.
There was the Caboose Spit, lined with fishing boats, a finger of land jutting out into the bay where the old railroad tracks ended, the rusty red caboose still there.
“See that?” his mom had shouted over the Cessna’s engine that first day they’d all flown together, his dad finally realizing his dream of owning a bush plane. “The long finger with the red fingernail pointing to the mountains? I bet the earth is so proud of those mountains. Wants to make sure we don’t miss seeing them.” She tucked one of Kache’s curls under his cap, her smile so big. “As if we could! Aren’t they amazing?”
It had always been a breath-stopping view, the kind that made him inhale and forget to exhale, especially when the clouds took off, as they just had, and left the sea every shade of sparkling blue and green against the purest white of the mountains. He had to admit he’d never seen anything anywhere—even now during the spring breakup, Alaska’s ugliest time of year—that came close to this height or depth of wild beauty.
But now the view did more than take his breath away. Maybe his mom had been wrong. Maybe that strip of land was the world’s middle finger, telling him to fuck off, saying, Who you calling flat? Today that red spot of caboose looked more like a smear of blood on the tip of a knife than a fingernail. Either way, the view stabbed its way into his chest, as if it were trying to finish him off before he even landed.
THREE
Snag hadn’t stopped maneuvering through her small house since Kache’s call. Kache. Finally agreeing to come home. In the wee hours of that morning she’d mistaken the ringing phone for the alarm and kept hitting the snooze button until she sat up in a panic, thinking, It’s about Mom. But no, it was Kache, calling back from Austin. Ever since they’d hung up she’d been bathing every surface with buckets of Zoom cleaner, suctioning up the cat hair and the spilled-over cat food with the vacuum, stuffing the fridge with a ready-to-bake casserole, moose pot roast, and rhubarb crunch, and wrapping the bed in clean sheets.
Snag thought she, herself, resembled a well-made bed. Polishing every last streak off the mirror, she saw her chenille robe creased under her breasts as if it were a bedspread tucked around two down pillows. They rose and fell with her deep breaths. She moved fast despite her size, wiping the counter now, putting away a pepper grinder, a bottle of salad dressing with Paul Newman’s mug on it. She closed the refrigerator door.
There was the memory of Kache, sitting on the kitchen stool, dark curly head bent over his guitar, then opening that same door and standing in front of the assortment of cold food like the refrigerator was some god requiring homage. How many times had she swatted him, told him to close the damn door? “A million? A billion?”
Since the day she had to put her mom into the home, Snag had been talking to herself. Before that, sometimes all Lettie had added to the conversation was, “Is that right, Eleanor,” but it was something.
No one but her mom still called her Eleanor. Around age nine she came home from fishing the river alone for the first time, holding up a decent-sized salmon. “Look, Daddy. I caught a fish all by myself.”
Her daddy laughed and pulled the hook out of the side of the poor fish. “Eleanor,” he said, “what you did was snagged yourself a fish.” Glenn, jealous that he was the same age and had yet to catch or even snag anything, started calling her Snag. The name took hold and never let go. Most of the town’s newcomers thought the name came from the fact that she had a gift for selling. It was true. Whether someone needed Mary Kay or Jafra cosmetics, Amway detergent, or a new house, Snag was the person to call.
Real estate had been particularly good to her. She preferred to live in her simple house, but she waxed poetic about the benefits of a sunk-in tub or a granite countertop. Lately she’d stepped back from showing houses. She’d made enough, and she wanted to give the newbies a shot. The one element in life that had come easily to Snag was money and she didn’t need to be piggy about it. She still sold products for the pyramid businesses, but more as a service to the citizens of Caboose than out of her own need. The only thing she couldn’t sell anyone on was the idea of getting the town mascot, the old Caboose parked at the end of the spit, moving again. But she didn’t have time to dwell on that now.