The Great Alone: A Novel (15 page)

“Don’t,” Matthew said to his sister. “Please.”

Aly’s smile wavered. Leni didn’t know this girl at all, but her struggle for composure and her love for her brother were obvious. It made Leni feel strangely connected to her, as if they had this one important thing in common.

“I’m glad he has you. He’s … struggling now, aren’t you, Mattie?” Aly’s voice broke. “But he’ll be fine. I hope.”

Leni saw suddenly how hope could break you, how it was a shiny lure for the unwary. What happened to you if you hoped too hard for the best and got the worst? Was it better not to hope at all, to prepare? Wasn’t that what her father’s lesson always was? Prepare for the worst.

“Of course he will,” Leni said, but she didn’t believe it. She knew what
nightmares could do to a person and how bad memories could change who you were.

*   *   *

O
N THE DRIVE HOME
, no one spoke. Leni felt the loss of every second of light as night fell, felt it as sharply as a mallet striking bone. She imagined her father could hear them, the lost seconds, like stones clattering down a rock wall, plunking somewhere into black, murky water.

Mama huddled in her seat, hunched over. She kept glancing at Dad.

He was drunk and angry. He bounced in his seat, thumped his hand on the steering wheel.

Mama reached out, touched his arm.

He yanked away from her, said, “You’re good at that, aren’t you? Touching men. You think I didn’t see. You think I’m stupid.”

Mama looked at him wide-eyed, fear etched onto her delicate features. “I don’t think that.”

“I saw how you looked at him. I saw it.” He muttered something and pulled away from her. Leni thought he said,
Breathe,
under his breath, but she couldn’t be sure. All she knew was that they were in trouble. “I saw you touch his hand.”

This was bad.

He’d always been jealous of Tom Walker’s money … this was something else.

All the way home, as he muttered under his breath,
whore
,
bitch
,
lied
, his fingers played piano keys on the steering wheel. At the homestead, he stumbled out of the bus and stood there swaying, looking at the cabin. Mama went up to him. They stared at each other, both breathing unsteadily.

“Make a fool of me again … will you?”

Mama touched his arm. “You don’t really think I want Tom—”

He grabbed Mama by the arm and dragged her into the cabin. She tried to pull free, stumbled forward, put her hand over his in a feeble attempt to make him ease his grip. “Ernt, please.”

Leni ran after them, followed them into the cabin, saying, “Dad, please, let her go.”

“Leni, go—” Mama started to say.

Dad hit Mama so hard she flew sideways, cracked her head into the log wall, and crumpled to the floor.

Leni screamed. “Mama!”

Mama crawled to her knees, got unsteadily to her feet. Her lip was ripped, bleeding.

Dad hit her again, harder. When she hit the wall, he looked down, saw the blood on his knuckles, and stared at it.

A high, keening howl of pain burst out of him, ringing off the log walls. He stumbled back, putting distance between them. He gave Mama a long, desperate look of sorrow and hatred, then ran out of the cabin, slamming the door behind him.

*   *   *

L
ENI WAS SO SCARED
and surprised and horrified by what she’d just seen, she did nothing.

Nothing.

She should have thrown herself at Dad, gotten between them, even gone for her gun.

She heard the door slam and it knocked her out of her paralysis.

Mama was sitting on the floor in front of the woodstove, her hands in her lap and her head forward, her face hidden by her hair.

“Mama?”

Mama slowly looked up, tucked the hair behind her ear. A red splotch marred her temple. Her lower lip was split open, dripping blood onto her pants.

Do something
.

Leni ran into the kitchen, soaked a washcloth with water from the bucket, and went to Mama, kneeling beside her. With a tired smile, Mama took the rag, pressed it to her bleeding lip.

“Sorry, baby girl,” she said through the cloth.

“He hit you,” Leni said, stunned.

This was an ugliness she’d never imagined. A lost temper, yes. A fist? Blood? No …

You were supposed to be safe in your own home, with your parents. They were supposed to protect you from the dangers outside.

“He was agitated all day. I shouldn’t have talked to Tom.” Mama sighed. “And now I suppose he’s gone to the compound to drink whiskey and eat hate with Mad Earl.”

Leni looked at her mother’s beaten, bruised face, the rag turning red with her blood. “You’re saying it’s your fault?”

“You’re too young to understand. He didn’t mean to do that. He just … loves me too much sometimes.”

Was that true? Was that what love was when you grew up?

“He meant to,” Leni said quietly, feeling a cold wave of understanding wash through her. Memories clicked into place like pieces of a puzzle, fitting together. Mama’s bruises, her always saying,
I’m clumsy
. She had hidden this ugly truth from Leni for years. Her parents had been able to hide it from her with walls and lies, but here in this one-room cabin there was no hiding anymore. “He has hit you before.”

“No,” Mama said. “Hardly ever.”

Leni tried to put it all together in her head, make it make sense, but she couldn’t. How could this be love? How could it be Mama’s fault?

“We have to understand and forgive,” Mama said. “That’s how you love someone who’s sick. Someone who is struggling. It’s like he has cancer. That’s how you have to think of it. He’ll get better. He will. He loves us so much.”

Leni heard her mother start to cry, and somehow that made it worse, as if her tears watered this ugliness, made it grow. Leni pulled Mama into her arms, held her tightly, stroked her back, just like Mama had done so many times for Leni.

Leni didn’t know how long she sat there, holding her mother, replaying the horrible scene over and over.

Then she heard her father’s return.

She heard his uneven footsteps on the deck, his fumbling with the door latch. Mama must have heard it, too, because she was crawling unsteadily to her feet, pushing Leni aside, saying, “Go upstairs.”

Leni watched her mama rise; she dropped the wet, bloody rag. It fell with a splat to the floor.

The door opened. Cold rushed in.

“You came back,” Mama whispered.

Dad stood in the doorway, his face lined in agony, his eyes full of tears. “Cora, my God,” he said, his voice scratchy and thick. “Of course I came back.”

They moved toward one another.

Dad collapsed to his knees in front of Mama, his knees cracking on the wood so loudly Leni knew there would be bruises tomorrow.

Mama moved closer, put her hands in his hair. He buried his face in her stomach, started to shake and cry. “I’m so sorry. I just love you so much … it makes me crazy. Crazier.” He looked up, crying harder now. “I didn’t mean it.”

“I know, baby.” Mama knelt down, took him in her arms, rocked him back and forth.

Leni felt the sudden fragility of her world, of the world itself. She barely remembered Before. Maybe she didn’t remember it at all, in fact. Maybe the images she did have—Dad lifting her onto his shoulders, pulling petals from a daisy, holding a buttercup to her chin, reading her a bedtime story—maybe these were all images she’d taken from pictures and imbued with an imagined life.

She didn’t know. How could she? Mama wanted Leni to look away as easily as Mama did. To forgive even when the apology tendered was as thin as fishing line and as breakable as a promise to do better.

For years, for her whole life, Leni had done just that. She loved her parents, both of them. She had known, without being told, that the darkness in her dad was bad and the things he did were wrong, but she believed her mama’s explanations, too: that Dad was sick and sorry, that if they loved him enough, he would get better and it would be like Before.

Only Leni didn’t believe that anymore.

The truth was this: Winter had only just begun. The cold and darkness would go on for a long, long time and they were alone up here, trapped in this cabin with Dad.

With no local police and no one to call for help. All this time, Dad had taught Leni how dangerous the outside world was. The truth was that the biggest danger of all was in her own home.

TEN

“Come on, sleepyhead!” Mama called up bright and early the next morning. “Time for school.”

It sounded so ordinary, something every mother said to every fourteen-year-old, but Leni heard the words behind the words, the
please let’s pretend
that formed a dangerous pact.

Mama wanted to induct Leni into some terrible, silent club to which Leni didn’t want to belong. She didn’t want to pretend what had happened was normal, but what was she—a kid—supposed to do about it?

Leni dressed for school and climbed cautiously down the loft ladder, afraid to see her father.

Mama stood beside the card table, holding a plate of pancakes bracketed by strips of crispy bacon. Her face was swollen on the right side, purple seeping along the temple. Her right eye was black and puffy, barely open.

Leni felt a rise of anger; it unsettled and confused her.

Fear and shame she understood. Fear made you run and hide and shame made you stay quiet, but this anger wanted something else. Release.

“Don’t,” Mama said. “Please.”

“Don’t what?” Leni said.

“You’re judging me.”

It was true, Leni realized with surprise. She
was
judging her mother, and it felt disloyal. Cruel, even. She knew that Dad was sick. Leni bent down to replace the paperback book under the table’s rickety leg.

“It’s more complicated than you think. He doesn’t mean to do it. Honestly. And sometimes I provoke him. I don’t mean to. I know better.”

Leni sighed at that, hung her head. Slowly, she got back to her feet and turned to face her mother. “But we’re in Alaska now, Mama. It’s not like we can get help if we need it. Maybe we should leave.” She hadn’t known it was even in her head until she heard herself say the terrible words. “There’s a lot more winter to come.”

“I love him. You love him.”

It was true, but was it the right answer?

“Besides, we don’t have anywhere to go and no money to go with. Even if I wanted to run home with my tail between my legs, how would I do it? We’d have to leave everything we own here and hike to town and get a ride to Homer and then have my parents wire us enough money for a plane ticket.”

“Would they help us?”

“Maybe. But at what price? And…” Mama paused, drew in a breath. “He would never take me back. Not if I did that. It would break his heart. And no one will ever love me like he does. He’s trying so hard. You saw how sorry he was.”

There it was: the sad truth. Mama loved him too much to leave him. Still, even now, with her face bruised and swollen. Maybe what she’d always said was true, maybe she couldn’t breathe without him, maybe she’d wilt like a flower without the sunshine of his adoration.

Before Leni could say,
Is that what love is?
the cabin door opened, bringing a rush of icy air with it, a swirl of snow.

Dad entered the cabin and shut the door behind him. Removing his gloves, blowing into the chapel of his bare hands, he stomped the snow from his mukluks. It gathered at his feet, white for a heartbeat before it melted
into puddles. His woolen tuque was white with snow, as were his bushy mustache and beard. He looked like a mountain man. His jeans appeared almost frozen. “There’s my little librarian,” he said, giving her a sad, almost desperate smile. “I did your chores this morning, fed the chickens and goats. Mom said you needed your sleep.”

Leni
saw
his love for her, shining through his regret. It eroded her anger, made her question everything again. He didn’t want to hurt Mama, didn’t mean to. He was sick …

“You’re going to be late for school,” Mama said quietly. “Here, take your breakfast with you.”

Leni gathered up her books and her Winnie the Pooh lunch box and layered up in outerwear—boots,
qiviut
yarn tuque, Cowichan sweater, gloves. She ate a rolled-up jam-smeared pancake as she headed for the door and walked out into a white world.

Her breath clouded in front of her; she saw nothing but falling snow and the man breathing beside her. The VW bus slowly sketched itself into existence, already running.

She reached out with her gloved hand and opened the passenger door. It took a couple of tries in the cold, but the old metal door finally creaked open and Leni tossed her backpack and lunch box on the floor and climbed up onto the torn vinyl seat.

Dad climbed into the driver’s seat and started the wipers. The radio came on, blastingly loud. It was the
Peninsula Pipeline
morning broadcast. Messages for people living in the bush without telephones or mail service. “… and to Maurice Lavoux in McCarthy, your mom says to call your brother, he’s feeling poorly…”

All the way to school, Dad said nothing. Leni was so deep in her own thoughts, she was surprised when he said, “We’re here.”

She looked up, saw the school in front of her. The wipers made the building appear in a foggy fan and then disappear.

“Lenora?”

She didn’t want to look at him. She wanted to be Alaska-pioneer-woman-survivor-of-Armageddon strong, to let him know that she was
angry, let it be a sword she could wield, but then he said her name again, steeped in contrition.

She turned her head.

He was twisted around so that his back was pressed to the door. With the snow and fog outside, he looked vibrant, his black hair, his dark eyes, his thick black mustache and beard. “I’m sick, Red. You know that. The shrinks call it gross stress reaction. That’s just a bunch of bullshit words, but the flashbacks and nightmares are real. I can’t get some really bad shit out of my head and it makes me crazy. Especially now, with money so tight.”

“Drinking doesn’t help,” Leni said, crossing her arms.

“No, it doesn’t. Neither does this weather. And I’m sorry. I’m so damn sorry. I’ll stop drinking. It will never happen again. I swear it by how much I love you both.”

“Really?”

“I’ll try harder, Red. I promise. I love your mom like…” His voice dropped to a whisper. “She’s my heroin. You know that.”

Leni knew it wasn’t a good thing, not a
normal
mom-and-dad thing, to compare your love to a drug that could hollow your body and fry your brain and leave you for dead. But they said it to each other all the time. They said it the way Ali McGraw in
Love Story
said love means never having to say you’re sorry, as if it were gospel true.

She wanted his regret, his shame and sadness to be enough for her. She wanted to follow her mother’s lead as she always had. She wanted to believe that last night had been some terrible anomaly and that it wouldn’t happen again.

He reached out, touched her cold cheek. “You know how much I love you.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“It won’t happen again.”

She had to believe him, to believe in him. What would her world be without that? She nodded and got out of the bus. She trudged through the snow and climbed the steps and entered the warm school.

Silence greeted her.

No one was talking.

Students were in their seats and Ms. Rhodes was at the chalkboard, writing,
WWII. Alaska was the only state invaded by Japanese.
The
skritch-skritch-skritch
of her chalk was the only sound in the room. None of the kids was talking or giggling or shoving each other.

Matthew sat at his desk.

Leni hung her Cowichan sweater on a hook alongside someone’s parka, and stomped the snow from her bunny boots. No one turned to look at her.

She put away her lunch box and headed to her desk, taking her seat next to Matthew. “Hey,” she said.

He gave her a barely-there smile and didn’t make eye contact. “Hey.”

Ms. Rhodes turned to face the students. Her gaze landed on Matthew, softened. She cleared her throat. “Okay. For Axle, Matthew, and Leni, turn to page 172 of your state history books. On the morning of June sixth, 1942, five hundred Japanese soldiers invaded Kiska Island, in the Aleutian chain. It is the only battle of that war fought on American soil. Many people have forgotten it, but…”

Leni wanted to reach under the table and hold Matthew’s hand, to feel the comfort of a friend’s touch, but what if he pulled away? What would she say then?

She couldn’t complain that her family had turned out to be fragile and that she no longer felt safe in her home, not after what he’d been through.

She could have said it before—maybe—when life had felt different for both of them, but not now, when he was so broken he couldn’t even sit up straight.

She almost said,
It will get better
, to him, but then she saw the tears in his eyes and she closed her mouth. Neither one of them needed platitudes right now.

What they needed was help.

*   *   *

I
N
J
ANUARY
, the weather got worse. Cold and darkness isolated the Allbright family even more. Feeding the woodstove became priority number
one, a constant round-the-clock chore. They had to chop and carry and stack a huge amount of wood each day, just to survive. And as if all of that weren’t stressful enough, on bad nights—nightmare nights—Dad woke them in the middle of the night to pack and repack their bug-out bags, to test their preparedness, to take their weapons apart and put them back together.

Each day, the sun set before five
P.M.
and didn’t rise until ten
A.M.
, giving them a grand total of six hours of daylight—and sixteen hours of darkness—a day. Inside the cabin, the Dixie cups showed no new green starts. Dad spent hours hunched over his ham radio, talking to Mad Earl and Clyde, but more and more of the world was cut away. Nothing came easily—not getting water or cutting wood or feeding the animals or going to school.

But worst of all was the rapidly emptying root cellar. They had no vegetables anymore, no potatoes or onions or carrots. They were almost to the end of their fish stores, and a single caribou haunch hung in the cache. Since they ate almost nothing but protein, they knew the meat wouldn’t last long.

Her parents fought constantly about the lack of money and supplies. Dad’s anger—kept barely in check since the funeral—was slowly escalating again. Leni could feel it uncoiling, taking up space. She and Mama moved cautiously, tried never to aggravate him.

Today, Leni woke in the dark, ate breakfast and dressed for school in the dark, and arrived at her classroom in the dark. The bleary-eyed sun didn’t appear until past ten o’clock, but when it did show up, sending streamers of brittle yellow light into the shadowy lantern- and woodstove-lit classroom, everyone perked up.

“It’s a sunny day! The weatherman was right!” Ms. Rhodes said from her place at the front of the classroom. Leni had been in Alaska long enough to know that a sunny, blue-skied January day was noteworthy. “I think we need to get out of this classroom, get a little air in our lungs and some sunshine on our faces. Blow out the winter cobwebs. I’ve planned a field trip!”

Axle groaned. He hated anything and everything that had to do with school. He peered through the rat’s-nest fringe of black hair he never washed. “Aw, come on … can’t we just go home early? I could go ice fishing.”

Ms. Rhodes ignored the scruffy-haired teenager. “The older of you—
Matthew, Axle, and Leni—help the littles put on their coats and get their backpacks.”

“I’m not helping,” Axle said flatly. “Let the lovebirds do everything.”

Leni’s face flamed at the comment. She didn’t look at Matthew.

“Fine. Whatever,” Ms. Rhodes said. “You can go home.”

Axle didn’t need more encouragement. He grabbed his parka and left the school in a rush.

Leni got up from her seat and went to help Marthe and Agnes with their parkas. No one else had shown up for school today; the trip from Bear Cove must have proven too harsh.

She turned back, saw Matthew standing by his desk, shoulders slumped, dirty hair fallen across his eyes. She went to him, reached out, touched his flannel sleeve. “You want me to get you your coat?”

He tried to smile. “Yeah. Thanks.”

She got Matthew’s camo parka and handed it to him.

“Okay, everyone, let’s go,” Ms. Rhodes said. She led the students out of the classroom and into the bright, sunlit day. They marched through town and down to the harbor, where a Beaver float plane was docked.

The plane was dented up and in need of paint. It rolled and creaked and pulled at its lines with every slap of the incoming tide. At their approach, the plane’s door opened and a wiry man with a bushy white beard jumped down onto the dock. He wore a battered trucker’s cap and mismatched boots. The smile he gave them was so big it bunched up his cheeks and turned his eyes into slits.

“Kids, this is Dieter Manse, from Homer. He used to be a Pan Am pilot. Climb aboard,” Ms. Rhodes said. To Dieter, she said, “Thanks, man. I appreciate this.” She glanced worriedly back at Matthew. “We needed to clear our heads a bit.”

The old man nodded. “My pleasure, Tica.”

In her previous life, Leni wouldn’t have believed this man had been a captain at Pan Am. But up here, lots of people had been one thing on the Outside and became another in Alaska. Large Marge used to be a big-city prosecutor and now took showers at the Laundromat and sold gum, and Natalie
had gone from teaching economics at a university to captaining her own fishing boat. Alaska was full of unexpected people—like the woman who lived in a broken-down school bus at Anchor Point and read palms. Rumor had it that she used to be a cop in New York City. Now she walked around with a parrot on her shoulder. Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you. No one cared if you had an old car on your deck, let alone a rusted fridge. Any life that could be imagined could be lived up here.

Leni stepped up into the plane, ducking her head, bending in half. Once inside, she took a seat in the middle row and snapped her seat belt in place. Ms. Rhodes sat down beside her. Matthew lumbered past them, head down, not making eye contact.

“Tom says he’s not talking much,” Ms. Rhodes said to Leni, leaning close.