He strained to find all those words. It was like suddenly being in a dark room. You knew there was a door, but you couldn’t find it.
Breathe, Matthew. Stress made it worse.
He drew in a breath, released it. He limped over to the bedside table, picked up the box full of the letters she’d sent him all those years ago, while he was in the hospital, and the others, the ones she’d sent when he was a grief-stricken kid in Fairbanks. They were how he’d learned to read again. He handed it to her, unable to ask the question that had haunted him: Why did you stop writing to me?
She looked down, saw her letters in the box, and looked up at him. “You kept them? After I left you?”
“Your letters,” he said. He knew the words were elongated; he had to concentrate to create the combinations he wanted. “Were how I. Learned to read again.”
Leni stared up at him.
“I prayed. You’d. Come back,” he said.
“I wanted to,” she whispered.
He gave her a smile, knowing how it pulled down the skin at his eye, made him look even more freakish.
She put her arms around him and he was amazed at how they still fit together. After all the ways he’d been put back together, restrung and bolted up; they still fit together. She touched his scarred face. “You are so beautiful.”
He tightened his hold on her, tried to steady himself, feeling suddenly, inexplicably afraid.
“Are you okay? Are you in pain?”
He didn’t know how to say what he was feeling, or he was afraid that if he said it, she’d think less of him. He’d been drowning for all of these years without her, and she was the shore he’d been flailing to find. But surely she would look into his ravaged, stitched-together face and run away, and then he would drift back into the deep, dark waters alone.
He pulled away, limped back over to his wheelchair, and sat down with an oomph of pain. He shouldn’t have held her, felt her body against his. How would he ever forget the feel of her again? He tried to get back onto an ordinary track, but couldn’t find his way. He was trembling. “Where. Have you been?”
“Seattle.” She moved toward him. “It’s a long story.”
At her touch, the world—his world—had cracked open or broke apart. Something. He wanted to revel in the moment, burrow into it like a pile of furs and let it warm him, but none of it felt real or safe. “Tell me.”
She shook her head.
“I disappoint. You.”
“You aren’t the disappointment, Matthew. I am. I always have been. I was the one who left. And when you needed me most. I would understand if you can’t forgive me. I can’t forgive me. I did it because, well … there’s someone you need to meet. Afterwards, if you still want to, we can talk.”
Matthew frowned. “Someone. Here?”
“Outside with your dad and Atka. Will you come with me to meet him?”
Him.
Disappointment settled deep, all the way to his bolted-together bones. “I don’t need to meet. Your him.”
“You’re mad. I get it. You said we always stand by the people we love, but I didn’t. I ran.”
“Don’t talk. Go,” he said in a harsh voice. “Please. Just go.”
She looked at him, tears in her eyes. She was so beautiful he couldn’t breathe. He wanted to cry, to scream. How would he ever let her go? He had been waiting for this moment, for her, for them, for all the years he could remember, through pain so bad he cried in his sleep, but every day he woke and thought, Her, and he tried again. He’d imagined a million versions of their future, but he’d never imagined this. Her coming back just to say goodbye.
“You have a son, Matthew.”
It happened for him like that sometimes. He heard the wrong words, took in information that wasn’t there. His screwed-up brain. Before he could guard against it, use his learned tools, the pain of those words crashed down on him. He wanted to let her know that he’d misunderstood, but all he could do was howl, a deep, rolling growl of pain. Words abandoned him; all he had left was pure emotion. He lurched out of the chair and stumbled backward, away from her, hitting the kitchen counter hard. It was his damaged brain, telling him what he wanted to hear instead of what was actually said.
Leni moved toward him. He could see how hurt she was, how crazed she thought he was, and shame made him want to turn away. “Go. If you’re leaving. Go.”
“Matthew, please. Stop. I know I’ve hurt you.” She reached out for him. “Matthew, I’m sorry.”
“Go away. Please.”
“You have a son,” she said slowly. “A son. We have a son. Do you understand me?”
He frowned. “A baby?”
“Yes. I brought him to meet you.”
At first he felt pure, exquisite joy; then the truth hit him hard. A son. A child of his, of theirs. It made him want to cry for what he’d lost.
“Look at me,” he said quietly.
“I’m looking.”
“I look like. Someone rebuilt me with. A bad sewing machine. Sometimes it hurts. So much I can’t speak. It took me two years to stop. Grunting and screaming. And say my first. Real word.”
“And?”
He thought of all the things he’d once imagined he would teach a son, and it collapsed around him. He was too broken to hold anyone else together. “I can’t pick him up. Can’t put him. On my shoulders. He won’t want this. For a dad.” He knew Leni heard the longing in his voice at that; the universe in a three-letter word.
She touched his face, let her fingers trace the scars that put him back together, stared up into his green eyes. “You know what I see? A man who should have died but wouldn’t give up. I see a man who fought to talk and walk and think. Every one of your scars breaks my heart and puts it back together. Your fear is every parent’s fear. I see the man I have loved for my whole life. The father of our son.”
“Don’t. Know how.”
“No one knows how. Believe me. Can you hold his hand? Can you teach him to fish? Can you make him a sandwich?”
“I’ll embarrass him,” he said.
“Kids are durable, and so is their love. Trust me, Matthew, you can do this.”
“Not alone.”
“Not alone. It’s you and me, just like it was always supposed to be. We’ll do it together. Okay?”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
She held his face in her hands and rose up onto her toes to kiss him. With that one kiss, so like another kiss from long ago, a lifetime ago, two kids believing in a happy ending, he felt his world come back into alignment. “Come meet him,” she whispered against his lips. “He snores just like you do. And he bumps into every piece of furniture. And he loves Robert Service poems.”
She took his hand. Together they walked out of the cabin, him limping slowly, holding her hand tightly, leaning on her, letting her steady him. Wordlessly, they made their way out of the trees and past the house that was now a world-class fishing lodge, toward the new beach stairs.
As always, the shoreline was full of guests, dressed in their new Alaska rain gear, fishing at the water’s edge, birds cawing in the air, waiting for scraps.
He held on to Leni with one hand and clutched the handrail with his other and made his slow, halting way down the stairs.
On the beach, off to the right, Large Marge was drinking a beer. Alyeska was out in the bay, giving kayak lessons to guests. Dad and Atka were with a child, a blond boy, who was squatted over a big purple starfish.
Matthew came to a stop.
“Mommy!” the boy said at Leni’s appearance. He jumped up, smiling so big it lit his whole face. “Did you know that starfishes have teeth? I seen ’em!”
Leni looked up at Matthew. “Our son,” she said, and let go of Matthew’s hand.
He limped toward the little boy, stopped. Meaning to bend, he crashed down to one knee, grimaced in pain, groaned.
“You sound like a bear. I like bears, so does my new grandpop. Do you?”
He looked into his son’s face and saw his own past. He suddenly remembered things he’d forgotten—the feel of frogs’ eggs in your hand, the way a good laugh sometimes shook your whole body, stories being read by a campfire, playing pirates on the shore, building a fort in the trees. All of that he could teach. Of all the things he’d dreamed of over the years, tried like hell to believe in when his pain was at its worst, this was something he’d never dared to even hope for.
My son. “I’m Matthew.”
“Really? I’m Matthew Junior. But everyone calls me MJ.”
Matthew felt an emotion unlike anything he’d ever felt before. Matthew Junior. My son, he thought again. He found it difficult to smile; realized he was crying. “I’m your dad.”
MJ looked at Leni. “Mommy?”
Leni came up beside them, laid a hand on Matthew’s shoulder, and nodded. “That’s him, MJ. Your dad. He’s waited a long time to meet you.”
MJ grinned, showed off his two missing front teeth. He threw himself at Matthew, hugged him so ferociously they toppled over. When they came back up, MJ was laughing. “You wanna see a starfish?”
“Sure,” Matthew said.
Matthew tried to get up, put his hand on the ground. Bits of shell stuck to his palm as he stumbled, his bad ankle giving way. And then Leni was there, taking his arm, helping him stand up again.
MJ raced down to the water, talking all the way.
Matthew couldn’t make his feet move. All he could do was stand there, breathing shallowly, a little afraid that all of this could break like glass at the merest touch. At a breath. The boy who looked like him stood at the shore, blond hair glinting in the sun, the hem of his jeans wet with saltwater. Laughing. In that one image, Matthew saw the whole of his life; past, present, and future. It was one of those moments—an instant of grace in a crazy, sometimes impossibly dangerous world—that changed a man’s life.
“You’d better go, Matthew,” Leni said. “Our son is not very good at waiting for what he wants.”
He looked down at her and thought, God, I love her, but his voice was gone, lost in this new world in which everything had changed. In which he was a father.
They had come so far from their beginnings as two damaged kids, he and Leni. Maybe it had all happened the way it needed to, maybe they’d each crossed their own oceans—hers of damaged love and loss, his of pain—to be here again together, where they belonged. “Good thing I am.”
He saw what those words meant to her.
“I wanted to stand by you. I wanted—”
“You know what I love most about you, Leni Allbright?”
“What?”
“Everything.” He took her in his arms and kissed her with everything that he had and all he hoped to have. When he finally let go, reluctantly, and drew back, they stared at each other, had a whole conversation in breaths taken and expelled. This was a beginning, he thought; a beginning in the middle, something unexpected and beautiful.
“You’d better go,” Leni finally said.
Matthew walked carefully across the pebbled beach toward the boy standing at the waterline.
“Hurry up,” MJ said, waving Matthew over to the big purple starfish. “It’s right here. Look! Look, Daddy.”
Daddy.
Matthew saw a flat charcoal-gray stone, small as a new beginning, polished by the sea, and picked it up. The weight of it was perfect, the size exactly what he wanted. He held it out to his son, said, “Here. I’ll show you. How to. Skip rocks. It’s cool. I taught your mom. The same thing. A long time ago…”
* * *
“HE ALWAYS BELIEVED you’d come back,” Mr. Walker said, coming up beside Leni. “Said he’d know if you were dead. That he’d feel it. His first word was ‘her.’ It didn’t take us long to know he meant you.”
“How do I make up for leaving him?”
“Ah, Leni. It’s life. Things don’t always go the way you expect.” He shrugged. “Matthew knows that, better than any of us.”
“How is he, really?”
“He has struggles. Pain sometimes. He has trouble putting his thoughts into words when he gets stressed, but he’s also the best guide on the river and the guests love him. He volunteers at the rehab center. And you’ve seen his paintings. It’s almost like God gave him that gift in compensation. His future isn’t like everyone else’s, maybe, not what you’d imagined when you were both eighteen.”
“I have my struggles, too,” Leni said quietly. “And we were kids then. We’re not now.”
Mr. Walker nodded. “There’s really only one question. Everything else will follow.” He turned to look at her. “Are you staying?”
She did her best to smile. She was pretty sure this was the question he’d come over to ask. As a parent herself, she understood. He didn’t want his son hurt again. “I have no idea what this new life of mine will look like, but I’m staying.”
He laid a hand on her shoulder.
Down on the beach, MJ leaped into the air. “I did it! I made the rock skip. Mommy, did you see that?”
Matthew looked back and gave Leni a crooked smile. He and his son looked so much alike, both of them smiling at her, standing together against the cornflower-blue sky. Peas in a pod. Two of a kind. The beginning of a whole new world of love.
* * *
ALTHOUGH SHE HAD THOUGHT about it often over the years, mythologized it almost, Leni realized that she had forgotten the true magic of a summer night when the darkness didn’t fall.
Now she was sitting at one of the picnic tables down on the Walker beach. A lingering scent of roasted marshmallows hung in the air, sweetened the briny tang of the sea washing ceaselessly back and forth. MJ stood at the shore, casting his line into the water, reeling it back in. Mr. Walker stood on one side of him, giving him tips, helping him when the line got tangled or when he snagged something. Alyeska was standing on his other side, casting a line of her own. Leni knew that MJ was going to fall asleep where he stood any minute.
As much as she loved sitting here, soaking in this new image of her life, she knew she was avoiding something that mattered. With each minute that passed, she felt the weight of her avoidance; like a hand on her shoulder, a gentle reminder.
She slid off the seat, got to her feet. She no longer knew how to judge time by the color of the sky—a brilliant amethyst, speckled with stars—so she looked at her watch: 9:25.
“Are you okay?” Matthew said. He held on to her hand until she pulled gently away, then he let go.
“I need to go see my old house.”
He rose, winced in pain as he put weight on his bad foot. She knew it had been a long day on his feet for him.
She touched his scarred cheek. “I’ll go. I saw a bike up by the lodge. I just want to stand there. I’ll be right back.”
“But—”
“I can do it alone. I know you’re in pain. Stay with MJ. When I get back, we’ll put him to bed. I’ll show you the stuffed animals he can’t sleep without and tell you his favorite story. It’s about us.”
She knew that Matthew would argue, so she didn’t let him. This was her past, her baggage. She turned away from him and went up the beach stairs and climbed to the grassy land above. There were still several guests sitting on the deck at the lodge, talking loudly, laughing. Probably honing the fish stories they would take home with them.
She took a bike from the rack by the lodge and climbed on, pedaling slowly over the spongy muskeg, crossing the main road, turning to the right, toward the end of the road.
There was the wall. Or what was left of it. The planks had been hacked apart, pulled away from the stanchions; the ruined slats lay in heaps, furred with moss and darkened by years of harsh weather.
Large Marge and Tom. Maybe Thelma. She could imagine them gathering here in their grief, holding axes, splintering the wood.
She turned into the driveway, which was knee-high with weeds and grass. Shade siphoned away the light; the world was quiet here in the way of woodlands and abandoned homes. She had to slow down, pedal hard.
At last she turned into the clearing. The cabin sat off to the left, worn by time and the elements, but still standing. Alongside it, empty, sagging animal pens, gates gone, fences broken by predators, probably home to all kinds of rodents. The tall grass, threaded with bright pink fireweed and prickly devil’s club, had grown up around the junk they’d left behind; here and there she could see mounds of rusting metal and decaying wood. The old truck had collapsed, bowed forward like an old horse. The smokehouse was a pyramid of silvered, moldy boards, collapsed in on itself. Inexplicably, the clothesline remained, clothespins attached, bouncing in the breeze.
Leni dismounted, carefully set the bike on its side in the grass. Feeling more than a little numb, she headed toward the cabin. Mosquitoes buzzed in a cloud around her. At the door she paused, thought, You can do it, and opened the door.
It felt like going back in time, to the first day she’d been in here, with insect carcasses thick on the floor. Everything was as they’d left it, but covered in dust.
Voices and words and images from the past drifted through her mind. The good, the bad, the funny, the horrific. She remembered it all in a blinding, electric flash.
She closed her hand around the heart necklace at her throat, her talisman, felt the sharp bit of bone press into her palm. She drifted through the place, rattled the psychedelic beads that had given her parents the illusion of privacy. In their bedroom, she saw the dusty heap of belongings that revealed who they’d once been. A tangle of furs on the bed. Jackets hanging from hooks. A pair of boots with the toes eaten away.
She found her dad’s old bicentennial bandanna and shoved it in her pocket. Her mother’s suede headband hung from a hook on the wall. She took it, wound it like a bracelet around her wrist.
Up in her loft, she found her books lying scattered, the pages yellowed and chewed through; many had become a home to mice, as had her mattress. She could smell their scent in the air. A decaying, dirty smell.
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