Читать книгу The House of Frozen Dreams - Seré Prince Halverson - Страница 22

As he drove, Kache tried to get a grip. He hadn’t slept at all. Forget dandelion root tea, he needed an Americano with an extra shot. He needed answers. He needed some kind of plan. A plan would be good.

The weather could go one of many ways—big gray clouds hung around the mountain peaks, trying to decide if they wanted to get ugly, but the sun was up and shining as if to say, Hey, calm down, I’ve got this one.

Kache didn’t want to turn Nadia in. So she’d been squatting on their property for the last ten years. She’d also saved it from going to ruin. But that meant it had stood empty for the decade prior to her arrival. Ten winters with no one running water in the pipes or knocking the snow off the roof or keeping the shrews and voles and mice from taking over. No way. So she was lying or Snag was lying or another strange person had holed up in the house too and might still be around, which circled back to Nadia lying.

Still, he wouldn’t turn her in. He’d just ask her to find a different place. He’d help her find something suitable. If she really didn’t want to go back to her village, there were people in town who’d probably trade childcare or property maintenance for a room. Then, before he went back to Austin, he’d work on the homestead—she had kept up on it the best she could but he knew it must still need some maintenance—and get it ready to rent out to a cattle rancher or someone who needed a large chunk of the land. He and Snag could deal with it together. It would feel right for them to finally step up, keep a few meaningful things, sell the rest. It would be good. Like the therapist Janie had dragged him to that one time had said, “There’s healing in turning homeward, a wholeness that results from facing your history, an ability to move forward.” Kache hadn’t wanted to hear it and called it a bunch of poetic psychobabble. But, hell, maybe there was something to it.

He pulled up to a drive-thru orange and blue coffee truck called The Caboose Cuppabrews. The brittle air blasted through his open window while a dark-haired boy of about eleven took his order.

“Aren’t you a little young to be a coffee barristo?”

The boy shrugged. “A bar—what?”

A woman laughed from somewhere behind the boy. “We start them working young up here, sir. He’s my son, so we skirt around those pesky labor laws.”

“Marion?”

“Yes?” She bent down and he took in her face. She had the same dark eyes and high cheekbones, and still wore her hair parted in the middle and straight. She had hardly changed. “Kache! No way!” She leaned out farther, spilling the coffee on her wrist. “Ouch! Shit. Sorry. Wait, don’t move.” And she disappeared back through the window, leaving the boy to sponge up the coffee, shaking his head with a small, somewhat parental smile.

Marion had pulled on a parka, sprinted out from the backside of the truck, reached in through the window and wrapped her arms around Kache’s neck before he could open his door. “I thought they were holding you hostage until we agreed to say Texas was the bigger state after all. Lettie didn’t take another turn?”

He teeter-tottered his hand. “My aunt thinks she’s at death’s door. Gram’s confused, but for someone who’s ninety-eight years old …”

“You’ll have to say hi to my grandpa. Remember Leroy? He’s happy as long as they let him fish the hallways. My ex says Leroy’s got the best fishing spot on the peninsula, right there in his head. Lettie’s been so sharp until recently. How long are you here?”

He shrugged. “Not sure.”

“You got someone special?” She smiled that old Marion smile.

“Not as of two days ago. You?”

She teeter-tottered her hand. “Still singing?”

He shook his head. “You?”

“Of course. Playing?”

He shook his head again.

“You’re shittin’ me. You need to come down to The Spit Tune. We still play a few nights a week. Bring your guitar and that voice of yours. Rex will do cartwheels down the bar when he sees you.” She turned toward her son. “Ian, this is Kache. He’s a helluva guitar player and he’s got a voice some hotshot reporter called ‘both wound and wonder.’”

Kache laughed. “Is there such thing as a hotshot reporter in Alaska?”

Several cars had pulled up behind him. “Ha ha. Gotta get back to work, but do not leave town without us catching up. I’m here every morning except Christmas, New Year’s and Easter. Seriously. No excuses, okay?”

He smiled. “Scout’s honor.”

“You dropped out of the Scouts!” she shouted as he pulled away.

Wow. Marion had a kid. Marion was still singing. The band was still together.

His old house, a museum of his seventeen-year-old life. And his old girlfriend, still playing with their band. He might as well make this trip back in time complete. He turned toward the Spit and headed out to see Rex. Since Kache had arrived, he’d already done more socializing than he had in years. Janie would be shocked.

Only two days before, he’d lain wedged in the permanent indent he’d caused in his and Janie’s sofa, the TV cradling him in its familiar steel-colored light. On his chest the cat Charlotte had purred and slept. He’d turned down the volume for the commercial, the warm Austin air carrying aching guitar riffs in D minor along with aromas of barbeque from the restaurant across the street. Another Do-it-Yourself show was about to start. He should get up—Arise! Go forth!—and turn off the TV, but he didn’t. He let Charlotte sleep.

Each step of each project, vivid in his mind’s eye: A version of his own hands performing every task, but calloused, surer, moving with the certainty of the experienced. Not the boy’s hands his father had made fun of. “Explain to me, son,” he’d said, “how the same fingers that spin gold on that silly guitar of yours turn into flippers when you pick up a hammer?”

But some of what his father tried to teach him was at long last finding its way in, if only from a type of televised-osmosis.

Janie was upstairs in the loft of their apartment, spreading on lotion, dusting on makeup, curling her hair. He must have once felt something more for her than he did now, which if he had to classify, fell in the vicinity of a fond affection. They had traveled some, had good sex. He’d moved into her place. They’d cooked, laughed, watched movies, shared a few secrets. And yet he experienced those times as if they’d occurred in a hazy, disjointed dream.

Her footsteps clicked down the stairs and stopped in the kitchen behind him.

“Sure you don’t want to join us?” she asked again.

Gently he lifted Charlotte off his chest and propped up on his elbow so he could see Janie in the shadows, the jutted hip and crossed-arms stance of late. Charlotte leapt down and began winding herself through and around Janie’s ankles. “No thanks.”

He sat up and twisted around to face her in the kitchen, his back sore with stiffness, his arm now slung along the top of the sofa in order to show her he was making an effort, paying attention. She flicked on the light. She had her hair up loose the way he liked it best and she wore a dress he hadn’t seen before. “You look nice,” he said. “Really pretty.”

Without a smile she shifted her weight, unfolded her arms so they hung by her sides, her pale palms facing him. “You might surprise yourself and have fun.”

How to explain the impossibility? “Not really up to it tonight.”

She kept her eyes on him. She was gracious enough not to ask: Did you apply for any jobs today? Did you make any follow-up calls? Did you even return your aunt’s call? It’s ironic, you know. Watching the Do-it-Yourself Network all day long and never doing a damn thing.

She spun away, the air barely lifting the edge of her dress, said, “I’ll be home late,” and closed the door with force, but not quite a slam. They didn’t slam doors. They didn’t shout. They’d been together over three years and never had more than a low-heated discussion, where nothing ever boiled over, just simmered on and on until they had reached this state of bone-dry evaporation.

Kache got up to find something to eat. He stretched, muscles tight from lying down so long, his vertebrae a series of hooks and sinkers.

Janie blamed this funk he’d been in for the last six months on the fact that he’d been let go from his job. A buyout. He’d received a generous enough severance package. They called it the Golden Parachute, but he was too young for that. Maybe the silver? Not even. Brass. The Brass-Can’t-Save-Your-Ass Parachute.

It wasn’t that he needed the money. He’d invested well, lived far below his means. There was just nothing he could bring himself to do. In the quiet of their kitchen he spread peanut butter on wheat bread. He could do that much.

The job had provided a masquerade that kept Janie from seeing the obvious: He’d been asleep for the last two decades. A relentless fog descended upon him that god-awful day and it remained, through his college education (with the help of a fair amount of weed) and then through his job in accounting at a small hi-tech company. He’d quit the weed by then but hid in the numbers for years without anyone realizing that he wasn’t quite … there. They shrugged it off, thinking, he supposed, that he was merely distant, quiet. They, including Janie, chalked it off as personality traits of a numbers geek.

But no one in Austin had known him before the plane crash. Way back when he wrote songs and played the guitar, when he talked too much and argued with passion and was “too touchy feely for his own good.” While at work, he’d lost himself in the black and white of the numbers; their rigid columns and graphs had held him in a tight cocoon of space. Math became his new music, but without the emotions, which was a welcome relief. He had not turned out to be a “lazy-no-good rock and roller,” after all. Unlike Kache’s father, Rex would find that disappointing.