The Great Alone: A Novel (32 page)

“How will I know how he’s doing?” Leni asked.

“I’ll give updates on the radio.
Peninsula Pipeline.
Seven
P.M.
broadcast. Listen for them,” Mr. Walker said. “We’ll bring him home as soon as we can. He’ll recover better around us.”

Leni nodded numbly.

Mama led her out to the truck and they climbed in.

On the long drive home, Mama chatted nervously. She pointed out the extreme low tide in Turnagain Arm and the cars parked at the Bird House Tavern in the middle of the day and the crowd of people fishing at the Russian River (combat fishing, they called it, people stood so close together). Usually Leni loved this drive. She’d search the high ridges for specks of white that were Dall sheep and she’d scour the inlet for the sleek, eerie-looking white beluga whales that sometimes appeared.

Now she just sat silently, her one good hand lying in her lap.

In Kaneq, they drove off the ferry, rumbled over the textured metal ramp, and rolled past the old Russian church.

Leni took care not to look at the saloon as they drove past. Even so, she saw the
CLOSED
sign on its door and the flowers laid in front. Nothing else had changed. They drove to the end of the road and through the open gate onto their property. There, Mama parked in front of the cabin and got out. She came around to Leni’s side, opened the door.

Leni slid sideways, grateful for her mother’s firm grip as they walked through the tall grass. The goats bleated, packed in together, and stood in a clot at the chicken-wire gate.

Inside the cabin, buttery August sunlight streamed through the dirty windows, thickened by motes of dust.

The cabin was spotless. No broken glass, no lanterns fallen on the floor, no overturned chairs. No sign of what had happened here.

And it smelled good, of roasting meat. Almost exactly when Leni noticed the scent, Dad came out of the bedroom.

Mama gasped.

Leni felt nothing, certainly not surprise.

He stood there facing them, his long hair pulled back into a squiggly ponytail. His face was bruised, a little misshapen. One eye was black. He was wearing the same clothes Leni had last seen him in and there were dried flecks of blood on his neck.

“Y-you’re out,” Mama said.

“You didn’t press charges,” he answered.

Mama’s face turned red. She didn’t look at Leni.

He moved toward Mama. “Because you love me and you know I didn’t mean any of it. You know how sorry I am. It won’t happen again,” he promised as he reached for her.

Leni didn’t know if it was fear or love or habit or a poisonous combination of all three, but Mama reached out, too. Her pale fingers threaded through his dirty ones, curled in to take hold.

He pulled her into his arms, held on to her so tightly he must have thought they’d be swept away, one without the other. When they finally pulled apart, he turned to Leni. “I heard he’s going to die. I’m sorry.”

Sorry.

Leni felt something then, a seismic shift in her thinking; like spring breakup, a changing of the landscape, a breaking away that was violent, immediate. She wasn’t afraid of this man anymore. Or if she was, the fear was submerged too deeply to register. All she felt was hatred.

“Leni?” he said, frowning. “I’m sorry. Say something.”

She saw what her silence did to him, how it shredded his confidence, and she decided right then: she would never speak to her father again. Let Mama slink back, let her twine herself back into this toxic knot that was their family. Leni would stay only as long as she had to. As soon as Matthew
was better she would leave. If this was the life Mama chose for herself, so be it. Leni was going to leave.

As soon as Matthew was better.

“Leni?” Mama said, her voice uncertain. She, too, was confused and frightened by this change in Leni. She sensed an upheaval in emotion that could move the continents of their past.

Leni walked past them both, climbed awkwardly up the loft ladder, and crawled into bed.

*   *   *

Dear Matthew,

I never really knew the weight of sorrow before, how it stretches you out like an old, wet sweater. Every minute that passes with no word from you, without hope of word from you, feels like a day, every day feels like a month. I want to believe that you will just sit up one day and say you’re starving, that you’ll swing your legs out of bed and get dressed and come for me, maybe carry me off to your family’s hunting cabin, where we will burrow under the furs and love each other again. That’s the big dream. Strangely, it doesn’t hurt as much as the little dream, which is just that you open your eyes.

I know what happened to us was my fault. Meeting me ruined your life. No one can argue with that. Me, with my screwed-up family, with my dad, who wanted to kill you for loving me and who beat my mother for simply knowing about it.

My hatred of him is a poison burning me from the inside out. Every time I look at him something in me hardens. It scares me how much I hate him. I haven’t spoken to him since I got back.

He doesn’t like that, I can tell.

Honestly, I don’t know what to do with all these emotions. I’m furious, I’m desperate, I’m sad in a way I never knew existed.

There’s no outlet for my feelings, no valve to shut them down. I listen to the radio every night at seven
P.M.
Last night, your dad broadcast how
you’re doing. I know you’re out of the coma and not paralyzed and I try to make that good enough, but it’s not. I know you can’t walk or talk and that your brain is probably irreparably damaged. That’s what the nurses said.

None of it changes how I feel. I love you.

I’m here. Waiting. I want you to know that. I’ll wait forever.

Leni

*   *   *

L
ENI SAT IN THE BOW
of the fishing skiff, leaned over, fluttering bare fingers through cool water, watching it cascade and pool. The cast on her other arm looked starkly white against her dirty jeans. Her broken ribs made her conscious of every breath.

She could hear her parents talking softly together; her mama was closing the cooler, full now of silvery fish. Dad started up the engine.

The boat motor started; the bow planed up as they sped for home.

At their beach, the boat crunched up onto the pebbles and sand, made a sound like sausage sizzling in a cast-iron pan. Leni jumped into the ankle-deep water, grabbed the frayed line with her one good hand, and pulled the skiff aground. She tied it to a huge, limbless driftwood log that lay angled on the beach and went back for the dripping metal net.

“That was quite a silver Mom landed,” Dad said to Leni. “I guess she’s the day’s big winner.”

Leni ignored him. Slinging the gear bag over her shoulder, she headed up the steps, making her way slowly to dry land.

Once there, she put her gear away and headed to the animal pens to check that their water was okay. She fed the goats and the chickens, stayed to turn the compost in the bin, and then started hauling water from the river. It took longer with only one strong arm. She stayed outside as long as she could, but finally she had to go inside.

Mama was in the kitchen making dinner: pan-fried, fresh-caught salmon, drizzled with homemade herb butter; green beans fried in preserved moose fat; a salad of freshly picked lettuce and tomatoes.

Leni set the table, sat down.

Dad took a seat across from her. She didn’t look up, but she heard the clatter of chair legs on the wood, the squeak of the seat as he sat down. She smelled the familiar combination of perspiration and fish and cigarette smoke. “I was thinking we would head over to Bear Cove tomorrow, pick blueberries. I know how much you love them.”

Leni didn’t look at him.

Mama came up beside Leni, holding a pewter tray of the crispy-skinned fish, with bright green beans tucked in alongside. She paused, then set it down in the middle of the table next to an old soup can full of flowers.

“Your favorite,” she said to Leni.

“Uh-huh,” Leni said.

“G-damn it, Leni,” her father said. “I can’t abide this moping. You ran off. The kid fell. What’s done is done.”

Leni ignored him.

“Say something.”

“Leni,” Mama said. “Please.”

Dad shoved back from the table and stormed out of the cabin, slamming the door shut behind him.

Mama sank into her chair. Leni could see how tired her mother was, how her hands trembled. “You have to stop this, Leni. It’s upsetting him.”

“So?”

“Leni … you’ll be gone soon. He’ll let you go to college now. He feels terrible about what happened. We can get him to agree. You can leave. Just like you wanted. All you have to do is—”

“No,” she said more forcefully than she meant to, and she saw the effect her shouting had on Mama, how she instinctively shrank back.

Leni wanted to care that she was frightening her mother, but she couldn’t hold on to that caring. Mama had chosen to dig for treasure through the dirt of Dad’s toxic, porous love, but not Leni. Not anymore.

She knew what her silence was doing to him, how it angered him. Each hour she didn’t speak to him, he became more agitated and irritable. More dangerous. She didn’t care.

“He loves you,” Mama said.

“Ha.”

“You’re lighting a fuse, Leni. You know that.”

Leni couldn’t tell Mama how angry she was, the sharp, tiny teeth that gnawed at her all the time, shredding a little more of her away every time she looked at her father. She pushed back from the table and went to the loft to write to Matthew, trying not to think about her mother sitting down there all alone.

*   *   *

Dear Matthew,

I am trying not to lose hope, but you know how hard it has always been for me. Hope, I mean. It’s been four days since I last saw you. It feels like forever.

It’s funny, now that hope has become so slippery and unreliable, I realize that all those years, when I was a kid thinking I didn’t believe in hope, I was actually living on it. Mama fed me a steady diet of
he’s trying
and I lapped it up like a terrier. Every day I believed her. When he smiled at me or gave me a sweater or asked me how my day was, I thought,
See
?
He cares.
Even after I saw him hit her for the first time, I still let her define the world for me.

Now it is all gone.

Maybe he’s sick. Maybe Vietnam broke him. And maybe those are all excuses set at the feet of a man who is just rotting from the inside.

I don’t know anymore and as much as I try, I can’t care.

I have no hope left for him. The only hope I can hold on to is for you. For us.

I’m still here.

TWENTY-THREE

Dear Admissions Director:

University of Alaska, Anchorage.

I am very sorry to say that I will not be able
to attend classes at the University this quarter.

I am hopeful—although doubtful—that winter quarter
will see a change in my circumstances.

I will be forever grateful for my acceptance and
hope that another lucky student can take my spot.

Sincerely,

Lenora Allbright

In September, cold winds roared across the peninsula. Darkness began its slow, relentless march across the land. By October, the moment that was autumn in Alaska had passed. Every night, at seven
P.M.
, Leni sat close to the radio, the volume cranked high, static popping, listening for
Mr. Walker’s voice, waiting for news on Matthew. But week after week, there was no improvement.

In November, the precipitation turned to snow, light at first, goose down fluttering from white skies. The muddy ground froze, turned hard as granite, slippery, but soon a layer of white lay over everything, a new beginning of sorts, a camouflage of beauty over whatever lay hidden beneath.

And still Matthew wasn’t Matthew.

On an ice-cold evening that followed the first vicious storm of the season, Leni finished her chores in a sooty darkness and returned to the cabin. Once inside, she ignored her parents and stood in front of the woodstove, her hands outstretched to its warmth. Gingerly she flexed the fingers of her left hand. The arm still felt weak, foreign somehow, but it was a relief to have the cast off.

She turned, saw her own reflection in the window. Pale, thin face with a knifepoint chin. She’d lost weight since the accident, and rarely bothered to bathe. Grief had upset everything—her appetite, her stomach, her sleep. She looked bad. Drained and exhausted. Bags under her eyes.

She went to the radio at exactly 6:55 and turned it on.

Through the speaker, she heard Mr. Walker’s voice, steady as a trawler in calm seas. “To Leni Allbright in Kaneq: We’re moving Matthew to a long-term facility in Homer. You can visit on Tuesday afternoon. It’s called Peninsula Rehabilitation Center.”

“I’m going to see him,” Leni said.

Dad was sharpening his
ulu.
He stopped. “The hell you are.”

Leni didn’t glance at him or flinch. “Mama. Tell him if he wants to stop me, he’ll have to shoot me.”

Leni heard her mother draw in a sharp breath.

Seconds passed. Leni felt her father’s anger and his uncertainty. She could feel the war waging within him. He wanted to explode, to exert his will, to hit something, but she meant it and he knew it.

He hit the coffeepot, sent it flying, muttered something they couldn’t quite hear. Then he cursed, threw up his hands, and backed away, all in a single jerking movement. “Go,” Dad said. “Go see the boy, but get your
chores done first. And you.” He turned to Mama, pointed a finger at her, thumped it on her chest. “She goes
alone.
You hear me?”

“I hear you,” Mama said.

*   *   *

T
UESDAY FINALLY CAME
.

“Ernt,” Mama said after lunch. “Leni needs a ride to town.”

“Tell her to take the old snow machine, not the new one. And be back by dinner.” He gave Leni a look. “I mean it. Don’t make me come looking for you.” Yanking his iron animal traps from their hooks on the wall, he went outside, banging the door behind him.

Mama moved forward, glancing uncertainly behind her. She pressed two folded-up pieces of paper in Leni’s hand. “Letters. For Thelma and Marge.”

Leni took the letters, nodded.

“Don’t be stupid, Leni. Be back before dinner. That gate could close again anytime. They’re only open because he feels bad for what he did and he’s trying to be good.”

“Like I care.”

“
I
care. And you should care
for
me.”

Leni felt the sting of her selfishness. “Yeah.”

Outside, Leni angled into the wind and trudged through the snow.

When she finished feeding the animals, she pulled the starter on the snow machine and climbed aboard.

In town, she pulled up in front of the harbor dock entrance and parked. A water taxi was waiting for Leni. Mama had called for it on the ham radio. The sea was too rough to take the skiff out.

Leni slung her backpack over her shoulder and headed down the slick, icy dock ramp.

The water-taxi captain waved at her. Leni knew he wasn’t going to charge her for the ride. He was in love with Mama’s cranberry relish. Every year she made two dozen jars of it just for him. That was how the locals did it: trading.

Leni handed him a jar and climbed aboard. As she sat on the bench in the back, staring up at the town perched on stilts above the sea, she told herself not to have any hopes for today. She knew Matthew’s condition, had heard the words so often they’d worn a groove in her consciousness.
Brain damage
.

Even so, at night, after writing her daily letter to Matthew, she often fell asleep dreaming it was a Sleeping Beauty kind of thing, a dark spell that the kiss of true love could undo. She could marry him and hope that her love would waken him.

Forty minutes later, after a bumpy, splashing crossing of Kachemak Bay, the water taxi pulled up to the dock and Leni jumped out.

On this ice-cold winter day, fog coiled along the waterline of the Spit. There were only a few locals out in this weather and no tourists. Most of the businesses were closed for the season.

She left the road and began the uphill climb into Homer proper. She’d been told that if she came to the house with the pink boat in the yard and Fourth of July decorations still up, she’d gone too far on Wardell.

The care facility sat at the edge of town, on a wildly overgrown lot with a gravel parking lot.

She stopped. A huge bald eagle perched on a telephone pole watching her, its golden eyes bright in the gloom.

Forcing herself to move, she went into the building, spoke to the receptionist, and followed her directions down to the room at the end of the hall.

There, at the closed door, she paused, took a steady breath, and opened the door.

Mr. Walker stood by the bed. At Leni’s entrance, he turned. He didn’t look like himself. The months had whittled him away; his sweater and jeans bagged. He had grown a beard that was half gray. “Hi, Leni.”

“Hey,” she said, her gaze cutting to the bed.

Matthew lay strapped down. There was a cagelike thing around his bald head. It was
bolted
in with screws; they’d drilled into his skull. He looked thin and scrawny and old, like a plucked bird. For the first time she saw his
face, crisscrossed by red zipper scars. A pucker of folded skin pulled one corner of his eye downward. His nose was flattened.

He lay motionless, his eyes open, his mouth slack. A line of drool beaded down from his full lower lip.

Leni went to the bed, stood beside Mr. Walker.

“I thought he was better.”

“He is better. Sometimes I swear he looks right at me.”

Leni leaned down. “H-hey, Matthew.”

Matthew moaned, bellowed. Words that weren’t words, just apelike sounds and grunts. Leni drew back. He sounded angry.

Mr. Walker placed his hand on Matthew’s. “It’s Leni, Matthew. You know Leni.”

Matthew screamed. It was a heartrending sound that reminded her of an animal caught in a trap. His right eye rolled around in the socket. “Waaaaath.”

Leni gaped down at him. This wasn’t
better
. This wasn’t Matthew, not this screaming, moaning husk of a person.

“Blaaaa…” Matthew moaned, his body buckling. A terrible smell followed.

Mr. Walker took Leni by the arm, led her out of the room.

“Susannah,” Tom said to the nurse. “He needs a diaper change.”

Leni would have collapsed if not for Mr. Walker, who held her up. He led her over to a waiting area with vending machines and eased her into a chair.

He sat in the chair beside her. “Don’t worry about the screaming. He does it all the time. The doctors say it’s purely physical, but I think it’s frustration. He’s in there … somewhere. And he is in pain. It’s killing me to see him like this and not to be able to help.”

“I could marry him, take care of him,” Leni said. In her dreams she’d imagined it, being married, her caring for him, her love bringing him back.

“That’s a really nice thing, Leni, and it tells me Matthew loves the right girl, but he may never get out of that bed or be able to say ‘I do.’”

“But people get married, people who are injured and can’t talk and are dying. Don’t they?”

“Not to eighteen-year-old girls with their whole lives in front of them. How’s your mom? I hear she took your dad back.”

“She always takes him back. They’re like magnets.”

“We’re all worried about you two.”

“Yeah.” Leni sighed. What good had worry ever done? Only Mama could change their situation, and she refused to do it.

In the silence that followed that unanswerable comment, Mr. Walker reached into his pocket and pulled out a thin package wrapped in newsprint. Written across the top in red marker was:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LENI.
“Alyeska found this in Mattie’s room. I guess he got it for you … before.”

“Oh” was all she could say. Her birthday had been forgotten in all the drama this year. She took the gift, stared down at it.

The nurse exited Matthew’s room. Through the open door, Leni heard Matthew screaming. “Waaaa … Na … sher…”

“The brain damage … it’s bad, kiddo. I won’t lie to you. I was sorry to hear you decided not to go to college.”

She shoved the present in her parka pocket. “How could I? It was supposed to be both of us.”

“He’d want you to go. You know he would.”

“We don’t know what he wants anymore, do we?”

She got up, went back into Matthew’s room. He lay rigid, his fingers flexed. The bolts in his head and scars on his face gave him a Frankenstein appearance. His one good eye stared dully ahead, not at her.

She leaned over and picked up his hand. It was a deadweight. She kissed the back of it, saying, “I love you.”

He didn’t respond.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she promised in a thick voice. “I’ll always be here. This is me, Matthew, climbing down to save you. Like you did for me. You did it, you know? You saved me. I’m standing here, by the one I love. I hope you hear that.”

She stayed by him for hours. Every now and then he screamed and struggled. Twice, he cried. Finally, they asked her to leave so they could bathe him.

It wasn’t until later, after she’d flagged down the water taxi and climbed aboard, as she was listening to the boat hull thumping over the whitecaps, with water spraying her in the face, that she realized she hadn’t said goodbye to Mr. Walker. She’d just walked through the care facility and gone outside, past a man standing in front of a shack held together with duct tape and plastic sheeting, past a group of kids playing four-square in the school playground, wearing arctic camo clothes, past an old Native woman walking two huskies and a duck—all on leashes.

She thought she had grieved for Matthew, cried all the tears she had, but now she saw the desert of grief that lay before her. It could go on and on. The human body was eighty percent water; that meant she was literally made of tears.

In Kaneq, as she walked off the water taxi, it started to snow. The town gave off a slight humming: the sound of the big generator that fueled the new lights. Snow fell like sifting flour in the glow of Mr. Walker’s new streetlamps. She barely noticed the cold as she walked up to the General Store.

The bell rang at her entrance. It was four-thirty, technically still daytime, but night was coming in fast.

Large Marge was dressed in a thigh-length fringed suede jacket over insulated pants. Her hair looked like shavings from an Etch A Sketch that had been glued to her skull. In places she had no hair at all, patches where she’d cut too zealously down to her brown scalp, probably because she didn’t own a mirror. “Leni! What a nice surprise,” she said in a foghorn voice that would have sent birds into the air. “I miss my best-ever employee.”

Leni saw compassion in the woman’s dark eyes. She meant to say,
I saw Matthew
, but to her horror what she did was burst into tears.

Large Marge led Leni over to the cash register, eased her to a sitting position on the old-fashioned settee and handed her a Tab.

“I just saw Matthew,” Leni said, slumping forward.

Large Marge sat down beside her. The settee creaked angrily. “Yeah. I
was in Anchorage last week. It’s hard to see. It’s killing Tom and Aly, too. How much heartache can one family handle?”

“I thought a care facility meant he was better. I thought…” She sighed. “I don’t know what I thought.”

“He’s as good as he’s going to get, from what I hear. Poor kid.”

“He was trying to save me.”

Large Marge was quiet for a moment. In the silence, Leni wondered if one person could ever really save another, or if it was the kind of thing you had to do for yourself.

“How’s your mom? I still can’t believe she let Ernt come back.”

“Yeah. The cops can’t do anything if she won’t.” Leni didn’t know what else to say. She knew it was impossible for someone like Large Marge to understand why a woman like Cora stayed with a man like Ernt. It should have been as easy as an elementary math equation: he hits you
x
broken bones = leave him.

“Tom and I begged your mama to press charges. I guess she’s too afraid.”

“It’s about more than fear.” Leni was about to say more when her stomach seized. She thought she might throw up. “Sorry,” she said when the nausea passed. “I feel terrible lately. Worry is making me physically sick, I guess.

Large Marge sat there a long time, then pushed to her feet. “Wait here.” She left Leni sitting on the settee, breathing carefully. She walked back toward the store’s shelving, bumping into one of the steel animal traps hanging on the wall.