The Great Alone

The Great Alone Page 43

by Kristin Hannah

  The smell of a place forgotten.

  She climbed back down the loft ladder, dropped onto the dirty, sticky floor, looked around.

  So many memories. She wondered how long it would take her to work through them all. Even now, standing here, she didn’t know exactly how she felt about this place, but she knew, she believed, she could find a way to remember the good in it. She would never forget the bad, but she would let it go. She had to. There had been fun, too, Mama had said, and adventure.

  Behind her, the door opened. She heard uneven footsteps come up behind her. Matthew stepped in beside her. “Alone is overrated,” he said simply. “Do you want. To fix it up? Live here?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe we’ll burn it down and rebuild. Ashes make great soil.”

  She didn’t know yet. All she knew was that she was back here at last, after all those years away, back with the crazy, durable fringe-dwellers in a state that was like nowhere else, in this majestic place that had shaped her, defined her. Once, a lifetime ago, she had worried about girls, only a few years older than her, who had gone missing. The stories had given her nightmares at thirteen. Now she knew there were a hundred ways to be lost and even more ways to be found.

  * * *

  SUCH A THIN VEIL separated the past from the present; they existed simultaneously in the human heart. Anything could transport you—the smell of the sea at low tide, the screech of a gull, the turquoise of a glacier-fed river. A voice in the wind could be both true and imagined. Especially here.

  On this hot summer day, the Kenai Peninsula was vibrant with color. There wasn’t a cloud in sight. The mountains were a magical mixture of lavender and green and ice-blue—valleys and cliffs and peaks; there was still snow above the tree line. The bay was sapphire, almost waveless. Dozens of fishing boats puttered alongside kayaks and canoes. Today was a day to be on the water for Alaskans. Leni knew that Bishop’s Beach, the straight, sandy stretch below the Russian church in Homer, would be one long line of trucks and empty boat trailers, just as she knew that some clueless tourist would be out on the sand, digging for clams and not paying attention, and get caught by the tide.

  Some things never changed.

  Now Leni stood in her overgrown yard, with Matthew beside her. Together, they walked over to the grassy rise above the beach, met up with Mr. and Mrs. Walker, Alyeska, and MJ, who were already there, waiting. Alyeska gave Leni a warm, welcoming smile, one that said, We’re in this together now. Family. They hadn’t had much time to talk in the past two days, with the whirlwind of Leni’s return to Alaska, but they both knew there would be time for them, time to stitch their lives together. It would be easy; they loved so many people in common.

  Leni took her son’s hand.

  A crowd waited for her on the beach. Leni felt their eyes on her, noticed how they stopped talking at her approach.

  “Look, Mommy, a seal! That fish jumped right outta the water! Whoa. Can we go fishing with Daddy today, can we? Aunt Aly says the pinks are still running.”

  Leni stared out at the friends gathered at the water’s edge. Almost everyone from Kaneq was here today, even several of the hermits who were only seen at the saloon and sometimes at the General Store. At her arrival, no one spoke. One by one, they climbed into their boats. She heard the smack of water on hulls, the crunching of shells and pebbles as they pushed off.

  Matthew guided her over to a Walker Cove Adventure Lodge skiff. He put a bright yellow life vest on MJ and then settled him on the bench seat in the bow, facing the stern. Leni climbed aboard. They motored out to where the other boats were.

  The bay was quiet on this sunny, brilliant early evening. The deep V of the fjord looked majestic in this light.

  The boats drifted out into the cove and floated together, banged bows. Leni looked around her. Tom and his new wife, Atka Walker; Alyeska and her husband, Darrow, and their twin three-year-old boys; Large Marge, Natalie Watkins, Tica Rhodes and her husband, Thelma, Moppet, Ted, and all the Harlans. The faces of her childhood. And of her future.

  Leni felt them all looking at her. She thought suddenly, sharply, how much this would have meant to Mama, these people coming out to say goodbye. Had Mama known how much they cared?

  “Thank you,” Leni said. The two inadequate words were lost amid the sound of waves slapping on boat hulls. What should she say? “I don’t know how…”

  “Just talk about her,” Mr. Walker said in a gentle voice.

  Leni nodded, wiped her eyes. Tried again, her voice as loud as she could manage to make it. “I don’t know if any woman ever came to Alaska less prepared for it. She couldn’t cook or bake or make jam. Before Alaska, her idea of a necessary survival skill was putting on false eyelashes and walking in heels. She brought purple hot pants up here, for God’s sake.”

  Leni took a breath. “But she came to love it here. We both did. The last thing she said to me before she died was, Go home. I knew what she meant. If she saw you guys here for her, she would give one of her bright smiles and ask you why you all were here instead of drinking and dancing. Tom, she’d hand you a guitar, and Thelma, she’d ask you what the hell you’ve been up to, and Large Marge, she’d hug you till you couldn’t breathe.” Leni’s voice broke. She looked around, remembering. “It would fill her heart to see you all here, to know you’d given up time, with all you have to do, to remember her. To say goodbye. She said to me once that she felt like she’d been nothing, a reflection of other people. She never quite understood her own worth. I hope she’s looking down now and knows … finally … how loved she was.”

  A murmur of agreement, a few words, and then: quiet. Grief this deep was a silent, lonely thing. From now on, the only time Leni would hear her mother’s voice would be in her own mind, thoughts channeled through another woman’s consciousness, a continual quest for connection, for meaning. Like all motherless girls, Leni would become an emotional explorer, trying to uncover the lost part of her, the mother who had carried and nurtured and loved her. Leni would become both mother and child; through her, Mama would still grow and age. She would never be gone, not as long as Leni remembered her.

  Large Marge threw a bouquet of flowers into the water.

  “We’ll miss you, Cora,” Large Marge said.

  Mr. Walker threw a bouquet of fireweed into the water. It floated past Leni, a bright pink splash on the waves.

  Matthew met Leni’s gaze. He was holding a bouquet of fireweed and lupine that he’d picked this morning with MJ.

  Leni reached into a box and pulled out the mason jar full of ashes. For a lovely moment the world blurred and Mama came to her, smiled her bright smile and gave her a hip bump and said, Dance, baby girl.

  When Leni looked again, the boats were splashes of color against the blue-green world.

  She opened the jar, poured the contents slowly into the water. “I love you, Mama,” Leni said, feeling loss settle deep, as much a part of her now as love. They’d been more than best friends; they’d been allies. Mama had called Leni the great love of her life and Leni thought maybe that was always true for parents and their children. She remembered something Mama had said to her once. Love doesn’t fade or die, baby girl. She’d been talking about Matthew and sadness, but it was equally true for mothers and their children.

  This love she felt for her mother and her son and Matthew and the people around her was a durable thing, as vast as this landscape, as immutable as the sea. Stronger than time itself.

  She leaned over and dropped some bright pink fireweed on a gently rolling wave and watched it float toward the shore. She knew that from now on, she would feel her mother’s touch in the breeze, hear her voice on the sound of the rising tide. Sometimes, berry-picking or making bread, or even the smell of coffee would make her cry. For the rest of her life, she would look up into the vast Alaskan sky and say, “Hey, Mama,” and remember.

  “I will always love you,” she whispered to the wind. “Always.”

  MY ALASKA

  July 4, 2009

  by Lenora Allbright Walker

  If you had told me when I was a kid that someday a newspaper would come to me to talk about Alaska on the fiftieth anniversary of its statehood, I would have laughed. Who would have thought my photographs would mean so much to so many? Or that I would take a picture of the Valdez oil spill that would change my life and make it onto the cover of a magazine?

  Really, my husband is the one you should speak to. He’s overcome every challenge this state has to offer and is still standing. He’s like one of those trees that grow on a sheer granite cliff. In the wind and snow and icy cold, they should fall, but they don’t. Stubbornly, they remain. Thrive.

  I am just an ordinary Alaskan wife and mother who prides herself primarily on the children she has raised and the life she has managed, somehow, to wrest from this harsh landscape. But like all women’s stories, mine has more to it than sometimes appears on the surface.

  My husband’s family is practically Alaskan royalty. His grandparents carved a life out of the remote wilderness with a hatchet and a dream. The quintessential American pioneers, they homesteaded hundreds of acres and started a town and settled in. My children, MJ, Kenai, and Cora, are the fourth generation to grow up on that land.

  My family was different. We came to Alaska in the seventies. It was a turbulent time, full of protests and marches and bombings and kidnappings. Young women were being abducted from college campuses. The Vietnam War had divided the country.

  We came to Alaska to run away from that world. Like so many cheechakos before and since, we planned poorly. We didn’t have enough food or supplies or money. We had almost no skills. We moved into a cabin in a remote part of the Kenai Peninsula and learned fast that we didn’t know enough. Even our car—a VW bus—was a poor choice.

  Someone said to me once that Alaska didn’t create character; it revealed it.

  The sad truth is that the darkness in Alaska revealed the darkness in my father.

  He was a Vietnam veteran, a POW. We didn’t know then what all that meant. Now, we know. In our enlightened world, we know how to help men like my father. We understand the ways in which war can break the strongest mind. Then, there was no help. Nor was there much help for a woman who was his victim.

  Alaska—the darkness and the cold and the isolation—got inside of my father in a terrible way, turned him into one of the many wild animals who populate the state.

  But we didn’t know that in the beginning; how could we? We dreamed, like so many others, and planned our course and duct-taped our Alaska or Bust banner on our bus and headed north, unprepared.

  This state, this place, is like no other. It is beauty and horror; savior and destroyer. Here, where survival is a choice that must be made over and over, in the wildest place in America, on the edge of civilization, where water in all its forms can kill you, you learn who you are. Not who you dream of being, not who you imagined you were, not who you were raised to be. All of that will be torn away in the months of icy darkness, when frost on the windows blurs your view and the world gets very small and you stumble into the truth of your existence. You learn what you will do to survive.

  That lesson, that revelation, as my mother once told me about love, is Alaska’s great and terrible gift. Those who come for beauty alone, or for some imaginary life, or those who seek safety, will fail.

  In the vast expanse of this unpredictable wilderness, you will either become your best self and flourish, or you will run away, screaming, from the dark and the cold and the hardship. There is no middle ground, no safe place; not here, in the Great Alone.

  For we few, the sturdy, the strong, the dreamers, Alaska is home, always and forever, the song you hear when the world is still and quiet. You either belong here, wild and untamed yourself, or you don’t.

  I belong.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I come from a long line of adventurers. My grandfather left Wales at fourteen to become a cowboy in Canada. My father has spent his life in search of the extraordinary, the remote, the unusual. He goes where most people only imagine going.

  In 1968, my father thought that California was becoming too crowded. He and my mother decided to do something about it. They loaded all of us (three young kids—and two of our friends—and the family dog) into a VW bus. In the heat of the summer, off we went. We drove around America, through more than a dozen states, looking for a place to belong. We found it in the green and blue beauty of the Pacific Northwest.

  Years later, my dad went in search of adventure again. He found it in Alaska, on the shores of the magnificent Kenai River. There, my parents met homesteaders Laura and Kathy Pedersen, a mother and daughter, who had operated a resort on that incomparable stretch of riverfront for years. In the early eighties, these two pioneering families came together and began a company that would come to be known as the Great Alaska Adventure Lodge. Three generations of my family have worked at the lodge. All of us have fallen in love with the Last Frontier.

  I’d like to thank the Johns—Laurence, Sharon, Debbie, Kent, and Julie—and Kathy Pedersen Haley, for their boundless enthusiasm and vision in creating such a magical place.

  I’d also like to thank Kathy Pedersen Haley and Anita Merkes for their expertise and editorial help in re-creating the homesteading world of Alaska and Kachemak Bay in the seventies and eighties. Your insight and support for this project meant so much to me. Any remaining mistakes are, of course, mine.

  Also, to my brother, Kent—another adventurer—who answered an endless stream of bizarre questions about Alaska for me. You are, as always, a rock star.

  Thanks to Carl and Kirsten Dixon and the fabulous team at the Tutka Bay Lodge on Kachemak Bay for welcoming me to their lovely corner of the world.

  I’d also like to thank a few very special people who helped immeasurably on this novel, especially in the hardest of times, when I felt ready to give up. My brilliant editor, Jennifer Enderlin, who waited patiently, gave advice when asked, and then waited patiently some more. I am so grateful for the extra time and your support. Thanks to Jill Marie Landis and Jill Barnett, who encouraged me when I needed it most; to Ann Patty, who taught me to trust myself; to Andrea Cirillo and Megan Chance, who are always there for me; and to Kim Fisk, who believed in this story and the Alaskan setting from the get-go and was never afraid to say so.

  Thanks to Tucker, Sara, Kaylee, and Braden. You have expanded the boundaries of love for me and given me a new world in the middle of my life.

  And finally, to my husband of thirty years, Benjamin. We have been partners in this writing thing from the beginning, and none of it would be possible without your love and support. Falling in love with you was the best thing I ever did.

  ALSO BY KRISTIN HANNAH

  The Nightingale

  Fly Away

  Home Front

  Night Road

  Winter Garden

  True Colors

  Firefly Lane

  Magic Hour

  Comfort & Joy

  The Things We Do for Love

  Between Sisters

  Distant Shores

  Summer Island

  Angel Falls

  On Mystic Lake

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  KRISTIN HANNAH is a New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty novels. A former lawyer turned writer, she is the mother of one son and lives with her husband in the Pacific Northwest. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1974

  Chapter One