Chapter 4: The Steam

Axel's POV

Every winter since I was fourteen, the sleep came for me in the first week of December.

It runs in my family.

My father slept, and his father slept.

I slept in the root cellar of the Nenana house with the door barred from the inside, until the last week of March.

This year I drove four hundred miles south with the Solstice birch.

The first week of December came and went, and the sleep did not come.

I told myself it was the drive.

Then I stood in the lot behind the Cache House for the third winter in a row.

I watched a small woman in her dead grandmother's cord read women at a fire, and I knew it was not the drive.

I had spent three winters wanting to hear what her voice sounded like.

I had heard it now.

She sounded like someone who had been told her whole life to keep quiet and had just stopped.

I stoked the sauna stove and added a ladle of water to the rocks, and the steam came up thick and white.

The shed sat behind the cabin on the lake side, cedar walls and a plank floor.

My grandfather built it in 1971.

She had put her phone in my stove at dawn and watched it melt.

Then she had turned around naked and said, "Is there coffee?"

I had said yes, and my hands had been shaking when I made it.

She had eaten four eggs and half a loaf of bread.

She had asked where the shower was, and I had said there was a sauna out back, and she had said, "Show me."

I heard the door.

I did not turn around, because if I turned around I would not do anything else for an hour.

"It's hot in here," she said.

"That's the idea."

"Don't get up."

I was sitting on the top bench in nothing but a towel.

I heard the thin sound of her towel hitting the floor, and then bare feet on the cedar.

She came and stood in front of me.

Her skin was flushed from the steam and her hair was loose to her waist, dark and wet at the ends.

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