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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.
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