The Great Alone: A Novel (42 page)

“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.

*   *   *

A
LTHOUGH 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.

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.

*   *   *

S
UCH 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.