“Your mom and dad share the same blood type,” Large Marge said. “There’s no conclusive test that can identify whose blood this is. At least, I hope there isn’t.”
“I want to say he ran off,” Leni said stubbornly. “I mean it, Mama. Please. Matthew is here.”
“Even in the bush, they’ll investigate a local man who disappears, Leni,” Large Marge said. “Remember how everyone came together to look for Geneva Walker? The first place they’ll look is the cabin. And what will you say about the shot-out window? I know Curt Ward. He’s a by-the-book cop. He might even bring in a dog or call an investigator from Anchorage. No matter how well we clean, there could be evidence here. A human bone fragment. Something to identify your father. If they find it, they’ll arrest you both for murder.”
Mama went to Leni. “I’m sorry, baby girl, but you wanted this. I was willing to take the blame alone, but you wouldn’t let me. We’re in it together now.”
Leni felt as if she were free-falling. In her naïveté, she’d thought they could do this terrible thing and pay no price beyond the shadowing of their souls, the memories and nightmares.
But it would cost Leni everything she loved. Matthew. Kaneq. Alaska.
“Leni, we don’t have a choice now.”
“When have we ever had a choice?” Leni said.
Leni wanted to scream and cry and be the child it felt she’d never been, but if her youth and her family had taught her anything, it was how to survive.
Mama was right. There was no way they could clean up this blood. And dogs and police would sniff out the crime. What if Dad had an appointment tomorrow they didn’t know about and someone called the police to report him missing before they were ready? What if his body slipped free of the shackles and floated to the shore when the water thawed and a hunter found him?
As always, Leni had to think about the people she loved.
Mama had taken every hit to protect Leni, and she’d shot Dad to save Leni. She couldn’t leave Mama alone now, on the run; and Leni couldn’t raise her baby alone, either. She felt an overwhelming sadness, a suffocating sense of having run a marathon only to end up in the same place.
At least they would be together, the two of them, like always. And the baby would have a chance at something better.
“Okay.” She turned to Large Marge. “What do we do?”
The next hour was spent on final details: they parked the truck on the side of the road, with blood smeared across the door handle. They knocked over furniture and left out an empty whiskey bottle and Large Marge shot twice into the log walls. They left the cabin door open for animals to enter and further ruin any evidence.
“Are you ready?” Mama asked at last.
Leni wanted to say, No. I’m not ready. I belong here. But it was too late to salvage Before. She nodded grimly.
Large Marge hugged them both tightly, kissed their wet cheeks, told them to have a good life. “I’ll report you missing,” she whispered in Leni’s ear. “I’ll never tell a living soul about this. You can trust me.”
By the time Leni and Mama walked down their zigzagged beach steps for the last time, in a blinding snowfall, Leni felt like she was a thousand years old.
She followed her mother down onto the snowy, slushy beach. Wind whipped hair across Mama’s eyes, tore the volume from her voice, rattled the pack on her back. Leni could tell Mama was talking to her, but she couldn’t hear the words and didn’t care. She sloshed through icy waves toward the skiff. Tossing her pack into the boat, she climbed aboard and sat down on the wooden bench seat. On the shore, falling snow would soon erase all evidence of their path; it would be as if they’d never been here at all.
Mama jumped aboard. Without lights to guide them, she motored slowly along the shore, gripping the wheel in gloved hands, her hair flying every which way.
They rounded the bend as a new dawn glimmered and showed them the way.
* * *
THEY PULLED UP TO the transient dock in Homer.
“I need to say goodbye to Matthew,” Leni said.
Mama tossed Leni a line. “No way. We need to go. And we can’t be seen today. You know that.”
Leni tied the boat down. “It wasn’t a question.”
Mama reached down for her pack, hefted it up, slipped it onto her back. Taking care, Leni stepped out of the skiff and onto the icy dock. The lines made a creaking sound.
Mama turned off the engine and stepped off the boat. The two of them stood in the softly falling snow.
Leni pulled a scarf out of her pack and coiled it around her neck, covering the lower half of her face. “No one will see me, Mama, but I’m going.”
“Be at the Glass Lake counter in forty minutes,” Mama answered. “Not one minute late. Okay?”
“We’re going to fly? How?”
“Just be there.”
Leni nodded. Honestly, she didn’t care about details. All she could think about was Matthew. She hefted her backpack and took off, walking as fast as she dared on the icy dock. This early on a cold and snowy November morning, there was no one out here to see her.
She reached the care facility and slowed. Here was where she needed to be careful. She couldn’t let anyone see her.
The glass doors whooshed open in front of her.
Inside, she smelled disinfectant and something else, metallic, astringent. At the front desk, a woman was on the phone. She didn’t even look up when the doors opened. Leni slipped inside, thinking, Be invisible … The corridors were quiet this early in the morning, the patients’ doors were closed. At Matthew’s room she paused, steadied herself, and opened the door.
His room was quiet. Dark. No machines whooshed or thunked. Nothing was keeping him alive except his own huge heart.
They had positioned him so that he was asleep sitting up, his head trapped in the halo thing that was attached to a vest so he couldn’t move. His pink-scarred face looked like it had been stitched together with a sewing machine. How could he live this way, stitched up, bolted together, unable to speak or think or touch or be touched? And how could she leave him to do it without her?
She dropped her backpack to the floor, approached the bed, and reached for his hand. His skin, once rough from gutting fish and fixing farm equipment, was now as soft as a girl’s. She couldn’t help thinking about their school days, holding hands under the desk, passing notes back and forth, thinking the world could be theirs.
“We could have done it, Matthew. We could have gotten married and had a kid too soon and stayed in love.” She closed her eyes, imagining it, imagining them. They could have stuck it out to the gray years, been a couple of white-haired old people in out-of-date clothes, sitting on a porch under the midnight sun.
Could have.
Useless words. Too late.
“I can’t let my mom be alone. And you have your dad and your family and Alaska.” Her voice broke on that. “You don’t know who I am anyway, do you?”
She bent down closer. Her hand closed tightly around his. Tears landed on his cheek and caught on the raised pink scar tissue.
Samwise Gamgee would never leave Frodo like this. No hero would ever do this. But books were only a reflection of real life, not the thing itself. They didn’t tell you about boys who broke their bodies and had their brains sheared down to the stem, who couldn’t talk or move or say your name. Or about mothers and daughters who made terrible, irrevocable choices. Or about babies who deserved better than the messed-up lives into which they were born.
She put her hand on her stomach again. The life in there was as small as a frog’s egg, too small to feel, and yet she swore she could hear the echo of a second heartbeat running alongside her own. All she really knew was this: she had to be a good mother to this baby and she had to take care of her mother. Period.
“I know how much you wanted kids,” Leni said quietly. “And now…”
You stand by the people you love.
Matthew’s eyes opened. One stared straight ahead. The
He opened his mouth, screamed, “Bwaaaa…” He thrashed, bucked up like he was trying to break free. The halo made a clanging sound when it hit the bedrail. Blood started to form at the bolts in his temple. An alarm went off. “Hermmmm…”
“Don’t,” she said. “Please…”
The door opened behind her. A nurse rushed past Leni and into the room.
Leni stumbled back, shaking, flipped her hood back up. The nurse hadn’t seen her face.
He was bellowing in the bed, making guttural animal sounds, thrashing. The nurse injected something in his IV. “It’s okay, Matthew. Calm down. Your dad will be here soon.”
Leni wanted to say, I love you, one last time, out loud, for the world to hear, but she didn’t dare.
She needed to leave, now, before the nurse turned around.
But she stood there, eyes glazed with tears, her hand still pressed to her belly. I’ll try to be a good mom and I’ll tell the baby about us. About you …
Leni reached down for her pack, grabbed it, and ran.
She left him there, alone with strangers.
A choice she knew he would never have made about her.
* * *
HER.
She’s here. Is she? He doesn’t know what’s real anymore.
He has words he knows, words he’s collected as important, but he doesn’t know their meaning. Coma. Brace. Halo. Brain damage. They are there, seen but not seen, like pictures in another room, glimpsed through rippled glass.
Sometimes he knows who he is and where he is. Sometimes, for seconds, he knows he has been in a coma and come out of it; he knows he can’t move because they strap him down. He knows he can’t move his head because they’ve drilled screws into his skull and caged him. He knows he sits like this all day, propped up, a monster in a brace, his leg jutting out in front of him, pain constantly chewing on him. He knows that people cry when they see him.
Sometimes he hears things. Sees shapes. People. Voices. Light. He tries to catch them, concentrate, but it’s all moths and bramble.
Her.
She’s here now, isn’t she? Who is she?
The one he waits for.
“Wecouldhavedoneit, Matthew.”
Matthew.
He is Matthew, right? Is Her talking to him?
“Youdon’tknowwhoIam…”
He tries to turn, to wrench free so he can see Her instead of the ceiling, which seems to roll back and forth above him.
He screams for Her, cries, tries to remember the words he needs, but there’s nothing there to be found. Frustration rises up, makes even the pain go away.
He can’t move. He’s a bread—no, that’s not the right thing—tied down, strapped tight. Bound.
Someone else now. A different voice.
He feels it all slipping away. He stills, unable to remember even a minute ago.
Her.
What does that mean?
He quits fighting, stares up at the woman in the orange outfit, listens to her soothing voice.
His eyes close. His last thought is Her. Don’t leave, but he doesn’t even know what it means.
He hears footsteps. Running.
It is like the beating of his heart. There and then gone.
TWENTY-FIVE
Falling snow turned Homer into a blurred landscape of muted colors and washed-out skies. The few people out and about were either seeing the world through dirty windshields or looking up at it with tucked-in chins. No one noticed a girl in a huge parka, hood up, scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face, trudging downhill.
Leni’s face hurt like hell, her nose throbbed, but none of it was the worst of her pain. At Airport Road, the snow let up a little. She turned and headed to the airfield. At the door to the airfield office, she paused and pulled her turtleneck up over her torn lip.
The office was small and constructed of wood and corrugated metal with a sharply slanted roof. It looked like an oversized chicken coop. Behind it, she saw a small plane out on the airstrip, revving its engine. The sign for Glass Lake Aviation was missing two letters, so the sign read: ASS LAKE AVIATION. It had been that way for as long as Leni could remember. The owner said he’d fixed it once and that was plenty. Supposedly schoolkids stole the letters for fun.
Inside, the place looked unfinished, too: a floor made of mismatched peel-and-stick linoleum tiles, a plywood counter, a small display of brochures for tourists, a bathroom behind a broken door. A stack of boxes stood by the back door—supplies recently delivered or soon to be shipped.
Mama sat in a white plastic chair, with a scarf coiled around the lower half of her face and a hat covering her blond hair. Leni sat down beside her in a floral overstuffed recliner that some cat had clawed to ribbons.
In front of them, a Formica coffee table was littered with magazines.
Leni was tired of crying, of feeling this grief that kept opening and closing inside of her, but even so, she felt tears sting her eyes.
Mama put her cigarette out in the empty Coke can on the table in front of her. Smoke sizzled up, wafted into nothingness. She leaned back, sighing.
“How was he?” Mama asked.
“The same.” Leni leaned against her mama, needing the solid warmth of her body. She reached into her pocket and felt something sharp.
The present Mr. Walker had given her from Matthew. In all that had happened, she’d forgotten about it. She pulled it out, stared down at the small, thin gift, wrapped in newsprint, upon which Matthew had written: HAPPY BIRTHDAY LENI!
Her eighteenth birthday had gone by almost unnoticed this year, but Matthew had been planning for it. Maybe he’d had an idea about how to celebrate it.
She peeled the newsprint back, folded it carefully into something she would save. (He’d touched it while thinking of her.) Inside, she found a slim white box. Inside of that, a piece of yellowed, ripped-edge newsprint carefully folded.
It was a newspaper article and an old black-and-white photograph of two homesteaders, holding hands. They were surrounded by sled dogs, sitting in mismatched chairs in front of a tiny, mossy-roofed cabin. Junk decorated the yard. A towheaded boy sat in the dirt. Leni recognized the yard and the deck: these were Matthew’s grandparents.
Across the bottom, Matthew had written, THIS COULD BE US.
Leni’s eyes stung. She held the photograph to her heart and looked down at the article.
MY ALASKA by Lily Walker
July 4, 1972
You think you know what wild means. It’s a word you’ve used all your life. You use it to describe an animal, your hair, an undisciplined child. In Alaska, you learn what wild really means.
My husband, Eckhart, and I came to this place separately, which may not seem important, but certainly is. We had each decided on our own, and not when we were young, I might add, that civilization was not for us. It was the middle of the Great Depression. I lived in a shack with my parents and six siblings. There was never enough of anything—not time, not money, not food, not love.
What made me think of Alaska? Even now, I don’t recall. I was thirty-five years old, on the shelf, they called us spinsters then. My youngest sister died—of a broken heart maybe, or of the despair that came with watching her own babies suffer—and I walked away.
Just like that. I had ten dollars in my pocket and no real skills and I headed West. Of course I went West, for the romance of it. In Seattle, I saw a sign for Alaska. They were looking for women to do laundry for men in the gold fields.
I thought, “I can wash clothes,” and I went.
It was hard work, with men catcalling all the time, and my skin hardening until it was like leather. Then I met Eckhart. He was ten years older than me, and not much to look at, if I’m being truthful.
He caught my eye and told me his dream of homesteading the Kenai Peninsula. When he held out his hand, I took it. Did I love him? No. Not then. Not for years, really, although when he died, it was like God had reached in and yanked the heart out of my chest.
Wild. That’s how I describe it all. My love. My life. Alaska. Truthfully, it’s all the same to me. Alaska doesn’t attract many; most are too tame to handle life up here. But when she gets her hooks in you, she digs deep and holds on, and you become hers. Wild. A lover of cruel beauty and splendid isolation. And God help you, you can’t live anywhere else.
“What do you have there?” Mama asked, exhaling smoke.
Leni carefully folded the article into quarters. “An article by Matthew’s grandma. She died a few years before we came to Alaska.” The photograph of Matthew’s grandparents—dated 1940—sat on her lap. “How will I stop loving him, Mama? Will I … forget?”
Mama sighed. “Ah. That. Love doesn’t fade or die, baby girl. People tell you it does, but it doesn’t. If you love him now, you’ll love him in ten years and in forty. Differently, maybe, a faded version, but he’s part of you now. And you are part of him.”
Leni didn’t know if that was comforting or frightening. If she felt like this forever, as if her heart were an open wound, how would she ever be happy again?
“But love doesn’t come just once in your life, either. Not if you’re lucky.”
“I don’t think we Allbrights are lucky,” Leni said.
“I don’t know. You found him once, in the middle of nowhere. What were the chances that you’d meet him, that he’d love you, that you’d love him? I’d say, lucky you.”
“And then we fell down into a crevice, he got brain damaged and you killed Dad to protect me.”
“Yeah. Well. The glass can be half empty or half full.”
Leni knew the glass was broken. “Where are we going?” she asked.
“Do you really care?”
“No.”
“We’re going back to Seattle. It’s all I could think of. Thanks to Large Marge, we’re flying and not hitchhiking.”
The door opened, bringing in a rush of ice-cold air. A woman in a brown parka appeared, a Cowichan tuque pulled low on her forehead. “Plane’s ready for take-off. Flight to Anchorage.”
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