was no longer a road, breathing deep, heart hammering, that the realization jarred him. The familiar scent. The spruce, the soaked loamy earth, the sea; yes, yes, yes. But wood smoke? It was too strong, too distinct now, not merely his imagination. It was definitely the smell of wood burning, and coal too.
He edged around the last corner, saw the house through the boughs of spruce and naked birch and cottonwoods. It stood, not a dejected pile of logs, but tall and proud, glowing with warm light.
What?
Who?
Smoke rose straight up from the chimney, as if the house raised its hand. As if the house knew the answer.
Kache stood, staring, the cold mud oozing into his boots and now through his socks. The house stared back as it always had in his mind, glowing with light and life in the middle of the cleared ten acres.
Who in the hell?
Sweating, watching, allowing for the strangest glimmer of hope. Maybe he really had been dreaming, really had been sleeping, and now that he’d finally awoken, life might resume as it had before? Maybe all and everyone had not been lost? Maybe only he had been lost.
In these last two minutes he felt more alive than he had in two decades. Maybe he’d been under some sort of spell, broken at last on this anniversary. His mom would love the mysticism and synchronicity of that.
He shook his head, boxed his own ears. What he needed was common sense. His dad would have reamed him for not grabbing Aunt Snag’s .22 that hung on the enclosed back porch. As much as Kache hated guns, never got himself to actually shoot one, he knew it was crazy to approach the house without carrying one, especially given the lights and smoke. His dad used to say it didn’t matter if you were far to the left of liberal, if you walked by yourself in the boondocks of Alaska, you should carry a gun.
His feet started moving forward anyway. Forward to his old house, his old room. Who in the hell?
Inside, a dog barked. A shadow passed by one of the windows. The shade went down, snapped up again, quick as a wink, then shut. The other shade went down. The soft light behind them off now, replaced with the dark he’d expected to find in the first place.
He pressed his back against the old storage barn, took deep breaths and tried to line up his thoughts, which kept ricocheting off each other. He should go back, return in daylight with the gun. Call Clemsky, Jack O’Connell, a few of the others. He licked his palm and made a small circle on the mud-covered window beside him. He peered in. It was dark, and he barely made out the outline of his dad’s Ford pickup. Aunt Snag had even left that, probably driven it home that day from where his dad had parked it by the runway. She should have used it. That would have meant something.
The dog was going nuts now, continuously barking. Kache pushed on the storage barn side door; it wasn’t locked, opened easily. Along the wall he felt for the shovel, the hoe, the rake. He decided on the sharp, stiff-bladed rake. Better than nothing.
Hovering behind a warped barrel, then a salmonberry bush, he tried the back door of the house, knowing it would be locked. He crept along to the first kitchen window, remembering. That window never did lock. He slid it open, pulled himself up on one knee, lowered the rake in first, then jumped down inside with a thud.
The barking stopped, became a whine and growl. He pictured a hand muzzled around the dog’s nose. Kache tried to make himself smaller by crouching, then slipping along the wall. The thought came to him: I am not the intruder here. This is my house. He’d forgotten, taken on the attitude of a thief instead of a protector, and now he stood straight with his rake, as if that would shift the perspective of whoever was upstairs, as if the moment was a black-ink silhouette that changed depending on how you looked at it.
The whining, the growling. Kache could smell his own nerves, so of course the dog could. He ran his hand along the blue-tiled kitchen counter, up to the light switch, flicked on the lights. Nothing had changed. As always the woodstove warmed the large living room, which had once held four rooms before his mom and dad remodeled. The same furniture stood in its assigned places. His mother’s paintings still hung heavily on the thick, chinked walls. Photos of the four of them, baby pictures, wedding pictures, Christmas pictures all lined the top of the piano. He ran his finger along the top; free of dust. Games and books crammed the shelves. Kache fingered the masking tape his mother had sealed along the broken seam of the Scrabble box. He fought urges to throw the rake, to vomit, to leave.
Upstairs, another growl. Kache choked out, “Hello?” He listened. Nothing. “Hello?”
Then, rage. He pounded up the stairs. “Answer me! Answer me!” He flung open doors and flipped on lights to bedrooms that stood like shrines to the dead. All as they’d left it. In his room, a yellowed poster of Double Trouble was still stapled to the wall, Stevie Ray Vaughan still alive and well. As if neither his plane nor Kache’s family’s plane had ever gone down. As if Kache still slept in the bottom bunk and dreamed of playing the guitar on stage.
Under the bed, the dog let out barks like automatic ammunition, scrambling his claws on the wood floor. Kache held out the rake. “Who’s there!” An arm shot out, fist clenched around the handle of Denny’s hunting knife. But even more startling than the knife: the arm, clad in the sleeve of his mother’s suede paisley shirt. The shirt Kache and Denny bought in Anchorage for her birthday, and that she referred to as the most stylish, most perfect-fitting shirt on the planet that had somehow forged its way to the backwoods of Alaska. “Mom?” Kache whispered under the barking dog. “Mom?” he said louder, his eyes filling.
The dog poked his nose out, then was yanked back by the collar. A husky mix. Kache bent down, trying to see through the thick darkness. “Mom? That’s not you?”
The knife retreated and the hand reappeared, unfolded. Not his mother’s hand. It spread, splayed and pressed its fingers on the floor, until a blonde head emerged, and then a face looked up. Not his mother’s face. That was all he saw. It was not his mother’s face, and a new grief slammed him to his knees.
Mom.
Minutes went by before he realized the dog was still barking and this other face that was not his mother’s looked up at him for some kind of mercy, and though he hated the face for not belonging to his dead mother, he saw then, that it was a woman’s face, that it was round, that blue eyes begged him, that lips moved, saying words.
“Kachemak? It is you? You are not dead?”
There had only been one visitor, years before.
Kachemak had caught her so completely unprepared that her heartbeat seemed to be running away, down to the beach, while the rest of her waited.
He looked older, his face more angled than in the photographs. But he still had the same curly hair, though shorter now, and the same heavy brows. His height—taller than the rest of the family in every photo—also gave him away. He asked her to call the dog off, and so she did, and pulled herself out from under the bed though her arms wobbled like a moon jellyfish. She shoved her trembling hands in her pockets and tried to appear brave and confident.
And yet she felt grateful it was him. She knew that Kache, as the
