The Great Alone: A Novel (34 page)

When they finally returned to the cabin, exhausted and cold to the bone, Leni and her mother had to haul in wood to feed the fire. Leni tossed her gloves into the flames. Then she and Mama stood in front of the fire, their trembling hands outstretched to the heat, for how long?

Who knew? Time lost its meaning.

Leni stared numbly down at the floor. There was a bone shard near her foot, another on the coffee table. It would take all night to clean this up and she feared that even if they wiped all his blood away, it would come seeping back, bubbling up from the wood like something out of a horror story. But they had to get started.

“We need to clean up. We’ll say he disappeared,” Leni said.

Mama frowned, chewed worriedly at her lower lip. “Go get Large Marge. Tell her what I did.” Mama looked at Leni. “You hear me? You tell her what
I
did.”

Leni nodded and left Mama alone to start cleaning.

Outside, it was snowing lightly again, the world darker, layered with clouds. Leni trudged to the snow machine and climbed aboard. Airy goose-down flakes fell, changed direction with the wind. At Large Marge’s property, Leni veered right, plunged into a thicket of trees, drove along a winding path of tire tracks on snow.

At last she came to a clearing: small, oval-shaped, ringed by towering white trees. Large Marge’s home was a canvas-and-wood yurt. Like all homesteaders, Large Marge kept everything, so her yard was full of heaps and piles of junk covered in snow.

Leni parked in front of the yurt and got out. She knew she didn’t have to yell out a greeting. The headlight and sound of the snow machine had announced her.

Sure enough, a minute later the door to the yurt opened. Large Marge walked out, wearing a woolen blanket like a huge cape around her body. She tented a hand over her eyes to keep out the falling snow. “Leni? Is that you?”

“It’s me.”

“Come in. Come in,” Large Marge said, making a sweeping gesture with her hand.

Leni hurried up the steps and went inside.

The yurt was bigger inside than it looked from the outside, and immaculately clean. Lanterns gave off a buttery light and the woodstove poured out heat and sent its smoke up through a metal pipe that protruded through a carefully constructed opening at the yurt’s canvas crown.

The walls were constructed of thin wooden strips in an intricate crisscross pattern, with canvas stretched taut behind them like an elaborate hoop skirt. The domed ceiling was buttressed by beams. The kitchen was full-sized and the bedroom was above, in a loft area that looked down over the living area. Now, in the winter, it was cozy and contained, but in the summer
she knew that the canvas windows were unzipped to reveal screens that let in huge blocks of light. Wind thumped on the canvas.

Large Marge took one look at Leni’s bruised face and squashed nose, at the dried blood on her cheeks, and said, “Son of a
bitch
.” She pulled Leni into a fierce hug, held on to her.

“It was bad tonight,” Leni said at last, pulling away. She was shaking. Maybe it was finally sinking in. They’d killed him, broken his bones, dropped him in the water …

“Is Cora—”

“He’s dead,” Leni said quietly.

“Thank God,” Large Marge said.

“Mama—”

“Don’t tell me anything. Where is he?”

“Gone.”

“And Cora?”

“At the cabin. You said you’d help us. I guess we need it now to, you know, clean up. But I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

“Don’t worry about me. Go home. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Large Marge was already changing her clothes when Leni left the yurt.

Back at the cabin, she found Mama standing away from the pool of blood and gore, staring down at it, her face ravaged by tears, chewing on her torn thumbnail.

“Mama?” Leni said, almost afraid to touch her.

“She’ll help us?”

Before Leni could answer, she saw a spear of light flash across the window, tarnishing it, casting Mama in brightness. Leni saw her mother’s sorrow and regret in sharp relief.

Large Marge pushed open the cabin door, walked inside. Dressed in Carhartt insulated coveralls and her wolverine hat and knee-high mukluks, she took a quick look around, saw the blood and gore and bits of bone.

She went to Mama, touched her gently on the shoulder.

“He went after Leni,” Mama said. “I had to shoot him. But … I shot him in the back, Marge. Twice. He was unarmed. You know what that means.”

Large Marge sighed. “Yeah. They don’t give a shit what a man does or how scared you are.”

“We weighed him down and dropped him in the lake, but … you know how things get found in Alaska. All kinds of things bubble up from the ground during breakup.”

Large Marge nodded.

“They’ll never find him,” Leni said. “We’ll say he ran away.”

Large Marge said, “Leni, go upstairs and pack a small bag. Just enough for overnight.”

“I can help with cleaning,” Leni said.

“Go,” Large Marge said sternly.

Leni climbed up into the loft. Behind her, she heard Mama and Large Marge talking quietly.

Leni chose the book of Robert Service poetry to take with her for tonight. She also took the photograph album Matthew had given her, full now of her favorite pictures.

She pushed them deep into her pack, alongside her beloved camera, and covered it all with a few clothes and then went downstairs.

Mama was wearing Dad’s snow boots, as she walked through the pool of blood, making tracks to the door. At the windowsill, she pressed a bloody hand to the glass.

“What are you doing?” Leni asked.

“Making sure the authorities know your mom and dad were here,” Large Marge answered.

Mama took off Dad’s boots and changed into her own and made more tracks in the blood. Then Mama took one of her shirts and ripped it and dropped it onto the floor.

“Oh,” Leni said.

“This way they’ll know it’s a crime scene,” Large Marge said.

“But we’re going to clean it all up,” Leni said.

“No, baby girl. We have to disappear,” Mama said. “Now. Tonight.”

“Wait,” Leni said. “What? We’re going to say he left us. People will believe it.”

Large Marge and Mama exchanged a sad look.

“People go missing in Alaska all the time,” Leni said, her voice spiking up.

“I thought you understood,” Mama said. “We can’t stay in Alaska after this.”

“What?”

“We can’t stay,” Mama said. Gently but firmly. “Large Marge agrees. Even if we could have argued self-defense, we can’t now. We covered up the crime.”

“Evidence of intent,” Large Marge said. “There is no defense for battered women who kill their husbands. There sure as hell should be. You could assert defense of others, and it might fly. You might be acquitted—if the jury thinks deadly force was reasonable—but do you really want to take that chance? The law isn’t good to victims of domestic abuse.”

Mama nodded. “Marge will leave the truck parked somewhere, with blood smeared across the cab. In a few days, she will report us missing and lead the police to the cabin. They’ll conclude—hopefully—that he killed us both and went into hiding. Marge and Tom will tell the police that he was abusive.”

“Your mom and dad share the same blood type,” Large Marge said. “There’s no conclusive test that can identify whose blood this is. At least, I hope there isn’t.”

“I want to say he ran off,” Leni said stubbornly. “I mean it, Mama.
Please
. Matthew is here.”

“Even in the bush, they’ll investigate a local man who disappears, Leni,” Large Marge said. “Remember how everyone came together to look for Geneva Walker? The first place they’ll look is the cabin. And what will you say about the shot-out window? I know Curt Ward. He’s a by-the-book cop. He might even bring in a dog or call an investigator from Anchorage. No matter how well we clean, there could be evidence here. A human bone fragment. Something to identify your father. If they find it, they’ll arrest you both for murder.”

Mama went to Leni. “I’m sorry, baby girl, but you wanted this. I was
willing to take the blame alone, but you wouldn’t let me. We’re in it together now.”

Leni felt as if she were free-falling. In her naïveté, she’d thought they could do this terrible thing and pay no price beyond the shadowing of their souls, the memories and nightmares.

But it would cost Leni everything she loved. Matthew. Kaneq. Alaska.

“Leni, we don’t have a choice now.”

“When have we ever had a choice?” Leni said.

Leni wanted to scream and cry and be the child it felt she’d never been, but if her youth and her family had taught her anything, it was how to survive.

Mama was right. There was no way they could clean up this blood. And dogs and police would sniff out the crime. What if Dad had an appointment tomorrow they didn’t know about and someone called the police to report him missing before they were ready? What if his body slipped free of the shackles and floated to the shore when the water thawed and a hunter found him?

As always, Leni had to think about the people she loved.

Mama had taken every hit to protect Leni, and she’d shot Dad to save Leni. She couldn’t leave Mama alone now, on the run; and Leni couldn’t raise her baby alone, either. She felt an overwhelming sadness, a suffocating sense of having run a marathon only to end up in the same place.

At least they would be together, the two of them, like always. And the baby would have a chance at something better.

“Okay.” She turned to Large Marge. “What do we do?”

The next hour was spent on final details: they parked the truck on the side of the road, with blood smeared across the door handle. They knocked over furniture and left out an empty whiskey bottle and Large Marge shot twice into the log walls. They left the cabin door open for animals to enter and further ruin any evidence.

“Are you ready?” Mama asked at last.

Leni wanted to say,
No. I’m not ready. I belong here.
But it was too late to salvage Before. She nodded grimly.

Large Marge hugged them both tightly, kissed their wet cheeks, told them to have a good life. “I’ll report you missing,” she whispered in Leni’s ear. “I’ll never tell a living soul about this. You can trust me.”

By the time Leni and Mama walked down their zigzagged beach steps for the last time, in a blinding snowfall, Leni felt like she was a thousand years old.

She followed her mother down onto the snowy, slushy beach. Wind whipped hair across Mama’s eyes, tore the volume from her voice, rattled the pack on her back. Leni could tell Mama was talking to her, but she couldn’t hear the words and didn’t care. She sloshed through icy waves toward the skiff. Tossing her pack into the boat, she climbed aboard and sat down on the wooden bench seat. On the shore, falling snow would soon erase all evidence of their path; it would be as if they’d never been here at all.

Mama jumped aboard. Without lights to guide them, she motored slowly along the shore, gripping the wheel in gloved hands, her hair flying every which way.

They rounded the bend as a new dawn glimmered and showed them the way.

*   *   *

T
HEY PULLED UP TO
the transient dock in Homer.

“I need to say goodbye to Matthew,” Leni said.

Mama tossed Leni a line. “No way. We need to go. And we can’t be seen today. You know that.”

Leni tied the boat down. “It wasn’t a question.”

Mama reached down for her pack, hefted it up, slipped it onto her back. Taking care, Leni stepped out of the skiff and onto the icy dock. The lines made a creaking sound.

Mama turned off the engine and stepped off the boat. The two of them stood in the softly falling snow.

Leni pulled a scarf out of her pack and coiled it around her neck, covering the lower half of her face. “No one will see me, Mama, but I’m going.”

“Be at the Glass Lake counter in forty minutes,” Mama answered. “Not one minute late. Okay?”

“We’re going to
fly
? How?”

“Just be there.”

Leni nodded. Honestly, she didn’t care about details. All she could think about was Matthew. She hefted her backpack and took off, walking as fast as she dared on the icy dock. This early on a cold and snowy November morning, there was no one out here to see her.

She reached the care facility and slowed. Here was where she needed to be careful. She couldn’t let anyone see her.

The glass doors whooshed open in front of her.

Inside, she smelled disinfectant and something else, metallic, astringent. At the front desk, a woman was on the phone. She didn’t even look up when the doors opened. Leni slipped inside, thinking,
Be invisible …
The corridors were quiet this early in the morning, the patients’ doors were closed. At Matthew’s room she paused, steadied herself, and opened the door.

His room was quiet. Dark. No machines whooshed or thunked. Nothing was keeping him alive except his own huge heart.

They had positioned him so that he was asleep sitting up, his head trapped in the halo thing that was attached to a vest so he couldn’t move. His pink-scarred face looked like it had been stitched together with a sewing machine. How could he live this way, stitched up, bolted together, unable to speak or think or touch or be touched? And how could she leave him to do it without her?

She dropped her backpack to the floor, approached the bed, and reached for his hand. His skin, once rough from gutting fish and fixing farm equipment, was now as soft as a girl’s. She couldn’t help thinking about their school days, holding hands under the desk, passing notes back and forth, thinking the world could be theirs.

“We could have done it, Matthew. We could have gotten married and had a kid too soon and stayed in love.” She closed her eyes, imagining it, imagining
them
. They could have stuck it out to the gray years, been a couple of
white-haired old people in out-of-date clothes, sitting on a porch under the midnight sun.

Could have.

Useless words. Too late.

“I can’t let my mom be alone. And you have your dad and your family and Alaska.” Her voice broke on that. “You don’t know who I am anyway, do you?”