The Great Alone: A Novel (30 page)

She turned to Matthew, loving him so much, so desperately, it felt like she was being held underwater and needed oxygen. “I love you.”

“Me, too,” he said.

Up here, in the vastness of Alaska, the words sounded infinitesimal and small. A fist shaken at the gods.

TWENTY-ONE

His job was to keep her safe.

Leni was his North Star. He knew it sounded stupid and girlie and romantic and that people would say he was too young to know these things, only he wasn’t. When your mom died, you grew up.

He hadn’t been able to protect his mom, to save her.

He was stronger now.

He held Leni in his arms all night last night, loved her, felt her twitch at bad dreams, listened to her sobs. He knew how that was, nightmares like that about your mom.

Finally, when the first glimmer of daylight pulsed through the pup tent’s tangerine nylon sides, he eased away from her, smiling at the muffled sound of her snoring. He dressed in yesterday’s clothes, put on his hiking boots, and stepped outside.

Gray clouds muscled across the sky, lowered over the trail. The breeze was more a sigh than anything else, but it was the end of August. The leaves were changing color at night. They both knew what that meant. Change came even faster up here.

Matthew busied himself building a fire on the black remnants of last
night’s blaze. Sitting on a rock, leaning forward, he stared into the wavering flames. The breeze kicked up, taunted the flames.

Now, sitting by the fire alone, he admitted to himself that he was afraid he’d done the wrong thing by bringing Leni here, afraid he’d done the wrong thing by leaving Cora in Kaneq. Afraid he’d turn around and see Ernt barreling up the trail with a rifle in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other.

Mostly he was afraid for Leni, because no matter how this all worked out, no matter if she did everything perfectly and got away and saved her mom, Leni’s heart would always have a broken place. It didn’t matter how you lost a parent or how great or shitty that parent was, a kid grieved forever. Matthew grieved for the mother he’d had. He figured Leni would grieve for the dad she wanted.

He settled a camp coffeepot in the fire, right in the flames.

Behind him, he heard rustling, the zipping sound of nylon being moved. Leni pushed back the flaps and stepped out into the morning. A raindrop splatted into her eye as she braided her hair.

“Hey,” he said, offering her coffee. Another raindrop fell on the metal cup.

She took the cup in both hands, sat beside him, leaned against him. Another raindrop fell, pinged on the coffeepot, sizzled and turned to steam.

“Great timing,” Leni said. “It’s going to dump on us any second.”

“There’s a cave up at Glacier Ridge.”

She looked up at him. “I can’t stay away.”

“But your mom said—”

“I’m scared,” she said in a small voice.

He heard the spike of uncertainty in her voice, recognized that she was asking him something, not simply telling him that she was afraid.

He understood.

She didn’t know what the right answer was and she was afraid to be wrong.

“You think I should go back for her?” she asked.

“I think you stand by the people you love.”

He saw her relief. And her love.

“I might not be able to go to college. You know that, right? I mean, if we have to run, we’ll have to go somewhere he won’t look.”

“I’ll go with you,” he said. “Wherever you go.”

She drew in a breath, looked shaky enough that he thought she might collapse. “You know what I love most about you, Matthew?”

“What?”

She knelt in the wet grass in front of him, took his face in her cold hands, and kissed him. She tasted of coffee. “Everything.”

After that, there didn’t seem to be much to say. Matthew knew Leni was distracted, that she couldn’t think about anything but her mom and that her eyes kept filling with tears as she brushed her teeth and rolled up her sleeping bag. He also knew how relieved she was to be going back.

He would save her.

He
would
. He’d find a way. He’d go to the police or the press or his dad. Hell, maybe he’d go to Ernt himself. Bullies were always cowards who could be made to back down.

It would work.

They’d separate Ernt from Leni and Cora and let them start a new life. Leni
could
go to college with Matthew. Maybe it wouldn’t be in Anchorage. Maybe it wouldn’t even be in Alaska, but who cared? All he wanted was to be with her.

Somewhere in the world they would find a fresh start.

They ate breakfast, packed up camp, and made it about fifty feet back down the trail before the storm hit for real. They were in a place so narrow they had to walk single file.

“Stay close,” Matthew shouted above the driving rain and screeching wind. His jacket made a sound like cards being shuffled. Rain plastered his hair to his face, blinded him. He reached back, took Leni’s hand. It slipped free.

Rain ran in rivulets over the trail, turned the rocks slippery. To their left, fireweed quivered and lay flattened, broken by wind and rain.

The trail darkened; mist rolled in, obscured everything. Matthew blinked, tried to see.

Rain hammered his nylon hood. His face was wet, rain running down his cheeks, burrowing beneath his collar, beading his eyelashes.

He heard something.

A scream.

He spun around. Leni wasn’t behind him. He started back, shouting her name. A tree limb smacked him in the face. Hard. Then he saw her. She was about twenty feet away, off the trail, too far to the right. He saw her make a mistake. She slipped, started to fall.

She screamed, fought for balance, tried to right herself, reaching for something—anything.

There was nothing.

“Le—ni!” he yelled.

She fell.

*   *   *

P
AIN.

Leni woke in a stinking darkness, sprawled in the mud, unable to move without pain. She heard the
drip-drip-drip
of water. Rain falling on rock. The air smelled fetid, of dead things and decay.

Something in her chest was broken, a rib, maybe; she was pretty sure. And maybe her left arm. It was either broken or her shoulder was dislocated.

She was on her backpack, splayed above it. Maybe it had saved her life.

Ironic.

She peeled the bug-out bag’s straps away from her shoulders, ignoring the seizing, scalding pain that came with the smallest movement. It took forever to free herself; when she did it, she lay there, arms and legs sprawled out, panting, sick to her stomach.

Move, Leni.

She gritted her teeth and rolled sideways, plopped into a deep and slimy mud.

Breathing hard, hurting, trying not to cry, she lifted her head, looked around.

Darkness.

It smelled bad down here, of rot and mold. The ground was deep mud and the walls were slick wet rock. How long had she been unconscious?

She crawled slowly forward, holding her broken arm close to her body. She made her slow, agonizing way to a slice of light that illuminated a slab of stone carved by time and water into a saucer shape.

It hurt so much she puked, but kept going.

She heard her name being yelled.

She crawled onto the concave stone slab, looked up. Rain blinded her.

Way up above her, she saw the blurry red of Matthew’s jacket. “Le … nn … ii!”

“I’m here!” She tried to scream the words, but the pain in her chest made it impossible. She waved her good arm but knew he couldn’t see her. The opening in the crevice above her head was slim, no wider than a bathtub. Through it, rain fell hard, its percussive sound a roar of noise in the dark cave. “Go for help,” she yelled as best she could.

Matthew leaned over the sheer edge, trying to reach down for a tree that grew stubbornly from the rock.

He was going to come for her.

“
No!
” she shouted.

He eased one leg over the rock ledge, inched downward, looking for someplace to put his foot. He paused, maybe reassessing.

That’s right. Stop. It’s too dangerous
. Leni wiped her eyes, trying to focus in the downpour.

He found a foothold and climbed over the ledge and hung there, suspended on the rock wall.

He stayed there a long time, a red and blue
X
on the gray stone wall. Finally he reached to his left for the tree, tugged on it, testing it. Holding it, he moved to another foothold a little lower.

Leni heard a clatter of stones and knew what was happening, saw it in a kind of stunned, horrified slow motion.

The tree pulled out of the rock side.

Matthew was still holding on to it when he fell.

Rock, shale, mud, rain, and Matthew crashed down, his scream lost in the avalanche of falling rock. He tumbled downward, his body cracking branches, thudding into stone, ricocheting.

She threw an arm across her face and turned her head as the debris landed on her, stones hit her; one cut her cheek. “Matthew.
Matthew!
”

She saw the final falling rock too late to duck.

*   *   *

L
ENI IS OUT
in Tutka Bay with Mama, in the canoe Dad salvaged. Mama is talking about her favorite movie,
Splendor in the Grass.
The story of young love gone wrong. “Warren loves Natalie, you can tell, but it isn’t enough.”

Leni is hardly listening. The words aren’t what matter. It is the moment. She and Mama are playing hooky, living another life, ignoring the list of chores that awaits them at the cabin.

It is what Mama calls a bluebird day, except the bird Leni sees in the crystal-blue sky is a bald eagle with a six-foot wingspan gliding overhead. Not far away on a jagged outcropping of black rock, seals lie together, barking at the eagle. Shorebirds caw but keep away. A small pink dog collar glitters in the uppermost branches of a tree, near a huge eagle’s nest.

A boat chugs past the canoe, upsetting the calm water.

Tourists wave, cameras raised.

“You’d think they’d never seen a canoe before,” Mama says, then picks up her paddle. “Well, we’d best get home.”

“I don’t want this to end,” Leni whines.

Mama’s smile is unfamiliar. Something isn’t quite right. “You need to help him, baby girl. Help yourself.”

Suddenly the canoe tilts sideways so hard everything tumbles into the water—bottles, thermoses, a day pack.

Mama somersaults past Leni, screaming, and splashes into the water, disappears.

The canoe rights itself.

Leni scrambles to the side, peers over, yells, “Mama!”

A black fin, sharp as a knife blade, comes up from the water, rising, rising, until it is almost as tall as Leni. Killer whale.

The fin blots out the sun, darkens the sky all at once; everything goes black.

Leni hears the gliding of the orca, the splash as it emerges, the snort of air through its blowhole. She smells the decaying fish on its breath.

Leni opened her eyes, breathing hard. A headache pounded in her skull and the taste of blood filled her mouth.

The world
was
dark and fetid-smelling. Putrid.

She looked up. Matthew hung in the crevice above her, caught between the two rock walls, suspended, his feet hanging above her head, stuck in place by his backpack.

“Matthew? Matthew?”

He didn’t answer.

(Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he was dead.)

Something dripped onto her face. She wiped it away, tasted blood.

She struggled to sit up. The pain was so violent, she vomited all over herself and passed out. When she came to, she almost puked again at the smell of her own vomit splattered across her chest.

Think. Help him.
She was Alaskan. She could survive, damn it. It was the one thing she knew how to do. The one thing her father had taught her.

“It’s a crevice, Matthew. Not a bear cave. So that’s good.” No brown bear would be ambling in, looking for a place to sleep. She moved inch by inch around the entire interior, her hands feeling the slick rock walls. No exit.

She crawled back onto the saucer rock and looked up at Matthew. “So. The only way out is up.”

Blood dripped down his leg, plopped onto the rock beside her.

She stood up.

“You’re blocking the only way out. So I need to get you unstuck. The pack is the problem.” The added width had him pinned. “If I can get the pack off you, you’ll fall.”

Fall. That didn’t sound like a great plan, but she couldn’t think of anything better.

Okay.

How?

She moved gingerly, wedged her numb hand into the waistband of her pants. She slid/fell off the saucer-shaped rock, splashed into the squishy mud. A sharp pain jabbed her in the chest, made her gasp. She dug through her bug-out bag and found her knife. Biting down on it, she crawled to a place directly below Matthew’s feet.

Now all she had to do was get to him and cut him free.

How? She couldn’t reach his feet.

Climb
. How? She had one good arm and the stone wall was slick and wet.

On rocks.

She found some large flat rocks and dragged them to the wall and stacked them as best she could. It took forever; she was pretty sure that twice she passed out and awoke and started again.

When she had built a stack that was about a foot and a half high, she took a deep breath and stepped on top of it.

At her weight, one of the rocks slid out from under her.

She fell hard, cracked her bad arm on something, and screamed.

She tried four more times, falling each time. It wasn’t going to work. The rocks were too slippery and they were unstable when stacked.

“Okay.” So she couldn’t climb layered rocks. Maybe that should have been obvious.

She slogged to the wall, reached out to touch its cold, clammy surface. She used her good hand to trace the wet stone, feeling for every bump and ridge and indentation. A little light bled down on either side of Matthew. She burrowed through her pack, found a headlamp, put it on. With light, she saw differences in the slab—ledges, holes, footholds.

She felt upward, sideways, out, found a small lip of stone for her foot, and stepped up onto it. She steadied herself, then felt for another.