And with the neon glow of the GOOD VIBES sign lighting the way, follow the short hallway that shot off in a perpendicular line from the living room and here was the remaining second-floor bedroom. This was Xana Kernodle’s tiny dominion.
Xana, unlike the other girls, had needed to follow a much more complicated path to get to college. Her matriculation, in fact, was a miracle of perseverance.
Twenty years earlier, on the day Xana was born, her mother had just received word that she could remove the court-mandated ankle monitor she had been toting around. Cara Kernodle had been picked up on drug charges, but the system had quickly cut her loose and placed her on probation.
Five months later, though, Cara, the new mother, got nabbed again for drugs, and this time the authorities were not so forgiving. She had to serve time. And this would become the dismal recidivist pattern of her life, a morose story documented in the pages of a long rap sheet. There would be more than forty arrests, mostly for possession of drugs or drug paraphernalia. And there were other victims, too: she had been convicted of injury to a child for exposing her two daughters, Xana and her older sister, Jazzmin, to drug use.
Jeff Kernodle, Xana’s father, had his fair share of problems, too. He admitted in court that he had used meth and he had also served a short sentence on a drug-related charge. Yet just when it seemed Xana and her sister would become de facto orphans, shuttled off to the misery of a state facility, their aunt Kim rushed in to give the two girls a chance at a better life.
Kim’s own children were grown, and her cozy timber home in Post Falls, Idaho, nestled in the towering tree line that climbed up the Coeur d’Alene Mountains, might just as well have come out of a fairytale. Under Kim’s steady, benevolent hand, the two young girls got to be two young girls.
And Xana got to indulge a playful, mischievous streak. As a four-year-old, she’d, for example, come upon a can of Crisco in the kitchen and decided to lather the thick white paste all over her body as if it were a lotion, and then paint the bathroom walls with it, too, for good measure. Or she’d deliberately make a racket in her upstairs bedroom knowing that it would be the signal for Auntie Kim to come pounding up the stairs and order her sternly back to bed. Only once she heard the heavy tread of her aunt’s feet on the wooden stairs, Xana would rush back under the covers and feign a deep sleep. Kim would play along, pretending to be perplexed by what had caused the noise, while Xana, her eyes closed tight in a make-believe slumber, would struggle to suppress her giggles. It was a lighthearted game they’d play night after night, the aunt and her niece each getting a kick out of milking their respective roles.
Then after a happy two years living under Aunt Kim’s protective wing, things got even better for Xana. Her father turned it all around. Jeff got a job in construction, put in backbreaking hours, and soon was able to give the girls a home. And, reunited with their father, they flourished.
Jeff, as if in turn, flourished, too. Now officially divorced from Cara, he started his own firm, Kernodle Construction, and people liked his skilled, often artful work. Clients kept coming with new projects. In time, he was able to move his daughters into a sturdy four-bedroom house with a spacious backyard and a fenced-in front lawn. Shoeshine, their dog, completed this once seemingly unimaginable picture of family happiness.
Xana grew up to be a teenage beauty. She had large, soulful brown eyes, long brunette hair, a soft mocha hue to her skin, and a gymnast’s lithe body. Starting in elementary and then all through junior high, she had spent her afternoons after school at the Flip Flop Gymnastics Academy. Most weekends she’d travel to tournaments around the state, the little girl in the blue-and-white leotards, her pigtails of hair tied with bows, and, time after time, a necklace of medals hanging from her neck by the end of the competition.
At Post Falls High, Xana was one of the cool girls, part of the crowd that always had something to do on a Saturday night, that got asked to all the dances. When there was a party, she’d be the one in the halfshirt and shorts, nails painted red, looking not just good but in control. Emily, her bestie, would share a picture of a serious teenager, one carrying herself with a confidence that many found intimidating. Bring it on! Xana seemed to be taunting, another friend agreed.
And put Xana on the volleyball court, and you’d see this edge, too. She was always the one jumping high to intercept the ball in midair and then, with a wallop, spike it hard over the net. In high school she lettered in track and soccer, as well as volleyball, and no matter what the sport, Xana played to win. “She hated losing,” one of her teammates would remember.
Xana had large ambitions, even if they were still taking shape. One day she’d fantasize with Emily about their dream weddings, the next she’d predict she would always be single. And she wasn’t too embarrassed to post on social media, “I would just like to admit that I have no idea what I’m doing.” Yet when it was time to get serious, Xana would show her mettle. On the mortarboard she wore to her high school graduation in 2020, amid a decorative drawing of flowers and birds, she pledged with an almost palpable determination, For the lives I will change.
When the summer was over, she headed off to the university in Moscow. She had her heart set on being a Pi Phi, and so of course she got in. As for her studies, when it came time to declare a major she’d put down marketing but without any real commitment. She’d repeatedly tell people that you go to college to figure out what you want to do. It was foolishness to have your mind made up at twenty. “Plans fall in the making,” she was fond of saying.
In the meantime, she dutifully went to classes, hung out with her sorority sisters, went to party after party along Greek Row, and, to help make ends meet, worked part-time as a waitress at the Mad Greek restaurant, a laid-back student joint on Main Street whose owner had come to Moscow after some years in Alaska.
By the end of her sophomore year, when three of her sorority sisters approached Xana with the idea of moving into the King Road house, she was immediately game. She had reached the stage of her young life when it seemed the time had come to make a clean break from all the annoying rules and overbearing restrictions that came with living in a sorority house. This desire for a life change had been building up for the past year. For to her complete surprise—as well as the delight of her father and sister, who were beginning to fear that it would never happen—Xana had fallen in love.
And Xana, who had been in many ways looking for love since her childhood when both her parents had been taken from her, now loved the only way she knew how: totally.
WHILE XANA’S PARENTS WERE THE sort who, at least in her early childhood, had been separated from their daughters, Ethan Chapin’s mother and father had been cut from a different mold entirely. Jim and Stacy Chapin had been set on building a sturdy and affectionate life for their family, and, with a surprising easiness, they had done precisely that, and even a bit more.
The Chapins had an owner’s interest in Pacific Belting Supply in Mount Vernon, Washington. The town was in the northwestern corner of Washington State, plunked down on the snaking banks of the Skagit River and hemmed in by snowcapped mountains and thick evergreen forests. Famously, it was tulip country, carefully planted and tended fields stretching for miles and miles.
The Chapins had a big house in town on a well-kept acre of land. And they also had a getaway home hewn from rough timber logs in northern Idaho just thirty miles from the Canadian border on pristine Priest Lake. This, the locals would swear with deep conviction, was God’s country, and by that they meant it was still pretty much as God made it.
Yet best of all, the Chapins had a nearly instant family ready to fill the many rooms of their homes with laughter, horseplay, and, for years, the discordant sounds of novices making their way through the twelve major clarinet scales. The Chapins had three children, and each was born nearly precisely one minute after the other. Ethan came first, followed by his brother, Hunter, and sister, Maizie.
Since Ethan was the oldest of the triplets, even if by only minutes, perhaps it was only natural that he was their leader. They all played sports, lived for sports to hear their mom talk about it, but Ethan was always the star no matter what the game. That was true in soccer, where all three, the two boys and their sister, played on the same Conway Middle School team in Mount Vernon. And at Mount Vernon High School, the two boys played basketball. Both were forwards, but Ethan, who as a sophomore was already a towering six four (his brother an inch shorter), had been a Skagit County all-star year after year.
Yet broad-shouldered, hulking Ethan was, his friends would tease, a “Gentle Giant.” He didn’t so much stride as shuffle about, never, it seemed, in a hurry. And nothing could upset him; he’d always shrug setbacks off with an easy, affable grin. And so when Covid pretty much shut down his high school for both his junior and senior year and classes were online (not that he ever had too much truck with academics), he adjusted in his usual, compliant way. Instead of going to school, he worked long hours furrowing and seeding in the tulip fields. Or he’d head up to Priest Lake and bus tables at Hill’s Resort.
Still, he didn’t let Covid put too much of a damper on his socializing. He found time to be the slightly goofy, often tipsy clown, dancing in a women’s bikini top, or playing beer pong dressed up as a hot dog. He was always the first on the dance floor, cutting his moves with an exaggerated playfulness. Ethan was the life of every party, and that was just how he wanted it to be.
But by the time Ethan (along with his brother and sister) had arrived at the University of Idaho in August 2021 for his freshman year, the Gentle Giant had grown up into a handsome young man, with a mop of thick dark hair; a wide, thoughtful forehead; sleepy brown eyes; and a sly hipster’s mustache. Ethan projected a calm, unflurried assurance, a steady contentment.
In his happy-go-lucky, ready-to-party way, Ethan was a fraternity guy before he had ever signed on. But once at the university, he rushed (along with his brother, Hunter) Sigma Chi. His sister, Maizie, had joined the stately, rather decorous Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. But Sigma Chi, a blue ranch house perched on a bluff along Nez Perce Drive, was Ethan’s kind of place—a big, disheveled man cave. The bunk beds were squeezed together in closet-sized rooms nearly side by side, and if you were unfortunate enough to get stuck with the upper level and fail to remember to duck when you pulled yourself out of bed to rush to class, you could do serious damage to your head. The bathrooms, seemingly last cleaned during the Clinton administration, were as inviting, if not as toxic, as a nuclear waste dump. The living room was dark, dingy, and reeked of stale beer. And the insouciant brothers were constantly forgetting to feed their house dog, a husky named Bolt.
But the frat had a reputation for throwing bustling parties on a Saturday night. And Ethan, true to his convivial nature, was always the lighthearted giant holding center stage on the dance floor.
It was at one of these frat house gatherings that, toward the end of their freshman year, Xana and Ethan met. Like many romances, it started first as a friendship. They were two young good-looking kids, and they were cautiously taking their time to know one another. Nevertheless, by their sophomore year, they had become, without much drama, a couple.
On a warm spring day they’d go out golfing with friends on the university course and Ethan would open his bag to reveal he’d left his clubs back at the frat house and had instead stocked up on six-packs of Bud Light Lime, his drink of choice. Or Xana, now pretty much part of the family, would come up to the Chapins’ summer home in Priest Lake, and there she’d be at the dinner table talking away with Stacy Chapin as Jim carried in the grilled burgers and hot dogs.
Photo after photo, no matter where they were taken, caught the identical pose: Xana nestled under the protective crook of Ethan’s arm, her head resting blissfully on his broad shoulder.
There was one photograph, however, that was Xana’s favorite. She kept it in a drawer in her room in the house on King Road. It was a shot of Ethan standing tall in a bright field of tulips at a farm not far from his family’s Skagit Valley home. She cherished it because Ethan had told her that tulips, according to Turkish tradition, were considered “a symbol of enduring love.”
And she had happily taken that knowledge to heart. But if Xana had done a bit more probing, she would have discovered that the Dutch had a different view. For them, tulips symbolized the briefness of life.