The Great Alone: A Novel (35 page)

She bent down closer. Her hand closed tightly around his. Tears landed on his cheek and caught on the raised pink scar tissue.

Samwise Gamgee would never leave Frodo like this. No hero would ever do this. But books were only a reflection of real life, not the thing itself. They didn’t tell you about boys who broke their bodies and had their brains sheared down to the stem, who couldn’t talk or move or say your name. Or about mothers and daughters who made terrible, irrevocable choices. Or about babies who deserved better than the messed-up lives into which they were born.

She put her hand on her stomach again. The life in there was as small as a frog’s egg, too small to feel, and yet she swore she could hear the echo of a second heartbeat running alongside her own. All she really knew was this: she had to be a good mother to this baby and she had to take care of her mother. Period.

“I know how much you wanted kids,” Leni said quietly. “And now…”

You stand by the people you love.

Matthew’s eyes opened. One stared straight ahead. The other rolled wildly in the socket. That one staring green eye was the only part of him she recognized. He struggled, made a terrible moaning sound of pain.

He opened his mouth, screamed, “
Bwaaaa
…” He thrashed, bucked up like he was trying to break free. The halo made a clanging sound when it hit the bedrail. Blood started to form at the bolts in his temple. An alarm went off. “
Hermmmm…”

“Don’t,” she said. “Please…”

The door opened behind her. A nurse rushed past Leni and into the room.

Leni stumbled back, shaking, flipped her hood back up. The nurse hadn’t seen her face.

He was bellowing in the bed, making guttural animal sounds, thrashing. The nurse injected something in his IV. “It’s okay, Matthew. Calm down. Your dad will be here soon.”

Leni wanted to say,
I love you
, one last time, out loud, for the world to hear, but she didn’t dare.

She needed to leave, now, before the nurse turned around.

But she stood there, eyes glazed with tears, her hand still pressed to her belly.
I’ll try to be a good mom and I’ll tell the baby about us. About you …

Leni reached down for her pack, grabbed it, and ran.

She left him there, alone with strangers.

A choice she knew he would never have made about her.

*   *   *

H
ER.

She’s here. Is she?
He doesn’t know what’s real anymore.

He has words he knows, words he’s collected as important, but he doesn’t know their meaning. Coma. Brace. Halo. Brain damage. They are there, seen but not seen, like pictures in another room, glimpsed through rippled glass.

Sometimes he knows who he is and where he is. Sometimes, for seconds, he knows he has been in a coma and come out of it; he knows he can’t move because they strap him down. He knows he can’t move his head because they’ve drilled screws into his skull and caged him. He knows he sits like this all day, propped up, a monster in a brace, his leg jutting out in front of him, pain constantly chewing on him. He knows that people cry when they see him.

Sometimes he hears things. Sees shapes. People. Voices. Light. He tries to catch them, concentrate, but it’s all moths and bramble.

Her.

She’s here now, isn’t she? Who is she?

The one he waits for.

“Wecouldhavedoneit, Matthew.”

Matthew.

He is Matthew, right? Is Her talking to him?

“Youdon’tknowwhoIam…”

He tries to turn, to wrench free so he can see Her instead of the ceiling, which seems to roll back and forth above him.

He screams for Her, cries, tries to remember the words he needs, but there’s nothing there to be found. Frustration rises up, makes even the pain go away.

He can’t move. He’s a bread—no, that’s not the right thing—tied down, strapped tight. Bound.

Someone else now. A different voice.

He feels it all slipping away. He stills, unable to remember even a minute ago.

Her.

What does that mean?

He quits fighting, stares up at the woman in the orange outfit, listens to her soothing voice.

His eyes close. His last thought is Her.
Don’t leave,
but he doesn’t even know what it means.

He hears footsteps. Running.

It is like the beating of his heart. There and then gone.

TWENTY-FIVE

Falling snow turned Homer into a blurred landscape of muted colors and washed-out skies. The few people out and about were either seeing the world through dirty windshields or looking up at it with tucked-in chins. No one noticed a girl in a huge parka, hood up, scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face, trudging downhill.

Leni’s face hurt like hell, her nose throbbed, but none of it was the worst of her pain. At Airport Road, the snow let up a little. She turned and headed to the airfield. At the door to the airfield office, she paused and pulled her turtleneck up over her torn lip.

The office was small and constructed of wood and corrugated metal with a sharply slanted roof. It looked like an oversized chicken coop. Behind it, she saw a small plane out on the airstrip, revving its engine. The sign for Glass Lake Aviation was missing two letters, so the sign read:
ASS LAKE AVIATION
. It had been that way for as long as Leni could remember. The owner said he’d fixed it once and that was plenty. Supposedly schoolkids stole the letters for fun.

Inside, the place looked unfinished, too: a floor made of mismatched peel-and-stick linoleum tiles, a plywood counter, a small display of brochures
for tourists, a bathroom behind a broken door. A stack of boxes stood by the back door—supplies recently delivered or soon to be shipped.

Mama sat in a white plastic chair, with a scarf coiled around the lower half of her face and a hat covering her blond hair. Leni sat down beside her in a floral overstuffed recliner that some cat had clawed to ribbons.

In front of them, a Formica coffee table was littered with magazines.

Leni was tired of crying, of feeling this grief that kept opening and closing inside of her, but even so, she felt tears sting her eyes.

Mama put her cigarette out in the empty Coke can on the table in front of her. Smoke sizzled up, wafted into nothingness. She leaned back, sighing.

“How was he?” Mama asked.

“The same.” Leni leaned against her mama, needing the solid warmth of her body. She reached into her pocket and felt something sharp.

The present Mr. Walker had given her from Matthew. In all that had happened, she’d forgotten about it. She pulled it out, stared down at the small, thin gift, wrapped in newsprint, upon which Matthew had written:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY LENI!

Her eighteenth birthday had gone by almost unnoticed this year, but Matthew had been planning for it. Maybe he’d had an idea about how to celebrate it.

She peeled the newsprint back, folded it carefully into something she would save. (He’d touched it while thinking of her.) Inside, she found a slim white box. Inside of that, a piece of yellowed, ripped-edge newsprint carefully folded.

It was a newspaper article and an old black-and-white photograph of two homesteaders, holding hands. They were surrounded by sled dogs, sitting in mismatched chairs in front of a tiny, mossy-roofed cabin. Junk decorated the yard. A towheaded boy sat in the dirt. Leni recognized the yard and the deck: these were Matthew’s grandparents.

Across the bottom, Matthew had written,
THIS COULD BE US.

Leni’s eyes stung. She held the photograph to her heart and looked down at the article.

MY ALASKA by Lily Walker

July 4, 1972

You think you know what wild means. It’s a word you’ve used all your life. You use it to describe an animal, your hair, an undisciplined child. In Alaska, you learn what wild really means.

My husband, Eckhart, and I came to this place separately, which may not seem important, but certainly is. We had each decided on our own, and not when we were young, I might add, that civilization was not for us. It was the middle of the Great Depression. I lived in a shack with my parents and six siblings. There was never enough of anything—not time, not money, not food, not love.

What made me think of Alaska? Even now, I don’t recall. I was thirty-five years old, on the shelf, they called us spinsters then. My youngest sister died—of a broken heart maybe, or of the despair that came with watching her own babies suffer—and I walked away.

Just like that. I had ten dollars in my pocket and no real skills and I headed West. Of course I went West, for the romance of it. In Seattle, I saw a sign for Alaska. They were looking for women to do laundry for men in the gold fields.

I thought, “I can wash clothes,” and I went.

It was hard work, with men catcalling all the time, and my skin hardening until it was like leather. Then I met Eckhart. He was ten years older than me, and not much to look at, if I’m being truthful.

He caught my eye and told me his dream of homesteading the Kenai Peninsula. When he held out his hand, I took it. Did I love him? No. Not then. Not for years, really, although when he died, it was like God had reached in and yanked the heart out of my chest.

Wild. That’s how I describe it all. My love. My life. Alaska. Truthfully, it’s all the same to me. Alaska doesn’t attract many; most are too tame to handle life up here. But when she gets her hooks in you, she digs deep and holds on, and you become hers. Wild. A lover of cruel beauty and splendid isolation. And God help you, you can’t live anywhere else.

“What do you have there?” Mama asked, exhaling smoke.

Leni carefully folded the article into quarters. “An article by Matthew’s grandma. She died a few years before we came to Alaska.” The photograph of Matthew’s grandparents—dated 1940—sat on her lap. “How will I stop loving him, Mama? Will I … forget?”

Mama sighed. “Ah. That. Love doesn’t fade or die, baby girl. People tell you it does, but it doesn’t. If you love him now, you’ll love him in ten years and in forty. Differently, maybe, a faded version, but he’s part of you now. And you are part of him.”

Leni didn’t know if that was comforting or frightening. If she felt like this forever, as if her heart were an open wound, how would she ever be happy again?

“But love doesn’t come just once in your life, either. Not if you’re lucky.”

“I don’t think we Allbrights are lucky,” Leni said.

“I don’t know. You found him once, in the middle of nowhere. What were the chances that you’d meet him, that he’d love you, that you’d love him? I’d say, lucky you.”

“And then we fell down into a crevice, he got brain damaged and you killed Dad to protect me.”

“Yeah. Well. The glass can be half empty or half full.”

Leni knew the glass was broken. “Where are we going?” she asked.

“Do you really care?”

“No.”

“We’re going back to Seattle. It’s all I could think of. Thanks to Large Marge, we’re flying and not hitchhiking.”

The door opened, bringing in a rush of ice-cold air. A woman in a brown parka appeared, a Cowichan tuque pulled low on her forehead. “Plane’s ready for take-off. Flight to Anchorage.”

Mama immediately pulled the scarf up to just beneath her eyes, while Leni flipped up her parka’s hood, pulled the strings so it tightened around her face.

“Are you our passengers?” the woman said, looking down at a sheet of
paper in her gloved hands. Before Mama could answer, the phone on the desk rang. The woman moved toward it, answering, “Glass Lake Aviation.”

Mama and Leni hurried out of the small office toward the airfield, where their airplane waited, propeller whirring. At the plane, Leni tossed her backpack into the aft area, where it fell amid boxes to be delivered somewhere, and followed her mother into the shadowy interior.

She took her seat (there were only two of them behind the pilot) and tightened her seat belt.

The small plane rumbled forward, clattered hard, then lifted, swayed, leveled out. The engine sounded like the cards the kids on her old block used to put in their bicycle spokes.

Leni stared out the window, down into the gloom. From this height, everything looked charcoal-gray and white, a blurring of land and sea and sky. Jagged white mountains, angry white-tipped waves on an ash-gray sea. Cabins and homes clinging stubbornly to a wild shoreline.

Homer slowly disappeared from view.

*   *   *

S
EATTLE AT NIGHT
in the falling rain.

A snake of yellow headlights in the dark. Neon signs everywhere, reflections cast on wet streets. Traffic lights changing color. Horns honking out staccato warnings.

Music tumbled out of open doors, assaulting the night, unlike any music Leni had heard before. It had a clanging, angry sound and some of the people standing outside of the bars looked like they’d landed from Mars—with safety pins in their cheeks and stiff blue Mohawks and black clothes that appeared to have been cut to ribbons.

“It’s okay,” Mama said, pulling Leni in close as they walked past a group of homeless-looking people who stood listlessly in a park, passing cigarettes back and forth.

Leni saw the city in bits and pieces through lowered lashes, blurred by the incessant rain. She saw women with babies huddled in doorways and
men asleep in sleeping bags beneath the elevated road that looked down on this section of town. Leni couldn’t imagine why people would live this way when they could go to Alaska and live off the land and build themselves a home. She couldn’t help thinking about all those girls who’d been abducted in 1974 and found dead not far from here. Ted Bundy had been arrested, but did that mean the streets were safe now?

Mama found a pay phone and called a taxi. As they stood there waiting for it to arrive, the rain stopped.

A bright yellow cab pulled up to the dirty curb, splashing water on them. Leni followed her mama into the backseat, which smelled aggressively of pine. From here on, Leni saw the lights of the city through a window. With water everywhere, in drips and puddles, but no rain falling, the place had a jumbled, multicolored, carnival look.

They angled uphill. The old brick and low-rise part of the city—Pioneer Square—was apparently the pit people climbed out of when they got money. Downtown was a canyon of office buildings, skyscrapers, and stores, set on busy streets, with windows that looked like movie sets, inhabited by mannequins dressed in glitzy suits with exaggerated shoulder pads and cinched-in waists. At the top of the hill, the city gave way to a neighborhood of stately homes.

“There it is,” Mama said to the cabbie, giving him the last of their borrowed cash.

The house was bigger than Leni remembered. In the dark, it looked vaguely sinister, with its peaked roof pointing high into a black night sky and glowing diamond-paned windows. All of it was surrounded by an iron fence topped with heart-piercing spires.

“You sure?” Leni asked quietly.

Leni knew what this had cost her mother, coming home for help. She saw the impact of it in her mother’s eyes, in the slump of her shoulders, in the way her hands curled into fists. Mama felt like a failure coming back here. “It just proves they were right about him all along.”

“We could disappear from here, too. Start over by ourselves.”

“I might do that for myself, baby girl, but not for you. I was a crappy
mother. I am going to be a good grandmother. Please. Don’t give me a way out.” She took a deep breath. “Let’s go.”

Leni took hold of Mama’s hand; they walked up the stone path together, where spotlights shone on bushes sculpted to look like animals and spiky rosebushes cut back for winter. At the ornate front door they paused. Waited. Then Mama knocked.

Moments later, the door opened and Grandma appeared.

The years had changed her, imprinted and pulled at her face. Her hair had gone gray. Or maybe it had always been gray and she’d stopped dyeing it. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, clamping a thin hand to her mouth.

“Hey, Mom,” Mama said, her voice unsteady.

Leni heard footsteps.

Grandma stepped aside; Grandpa moved in beside her. He was a big man—fat stomach straining at a blue cashmere sweater, big floppy jowls, white hair that was combed across his shiny head, the strands carefully tended. Baggy black polyester pants, cinched tight with a belt, suggested bird-thin legs underneath. He looked older than his seventy years.

“Hey,” Mama said.

Her grandparents stared at them, eyes narrowed, seeing the bruises on Leni’s and Mama’s faces, the swollen cheeks, the black eyes. “Son of a bitch,” Grandpa said.

“We need help,” Mama said, squeezing Leni’s hand.

“Where is he?” Grandpa wanted to know.

“We’ve left him,” Mama said.

“Thank God,” Grandma said.

“Do we need to worry about him coming to look for you, breaking down my door?” Grandpa asked.

Mama shook her head. “No. Never.”

Grandpa’s eyes narrowed. Did he understand what that meant? What they’d done? “What do you—”

“I’m pregnant,” Leni said. They had talked about this, she and Mama, and decided to say nothing about the pregnancy yet, but now that they
were here, asking for help—begging—Leni couldn’t do it. She had kept enough secrets in her life. She didn’t want to live in the shadows of them anymore.

“Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Mama said, trying to smile.

“We’ve been here before,” Grandpa said. “I seem to recall my advice to you.”

“You wanted me to give her up and come home and pretend I could be the girl I was before,” Mama said. “And I wanted you to say it was okay, that you loved me anyway.”

“What we said,” Grandma said softly, “was that there were women in our church who were unable to have children and would have given your baby a good home.”

“I’m keeping my baby,” Leni said. “If you don’t want to help us, it’s fine, but I’m keeping the baby.”

Mama squeezed her hand.

Silence followed Leni’s declaration. In it, Leni glimpsed the largeness of the world for her and Mama now, the ocean of troubles they faced on their own, and it frightened her, but not as much as the idea of the world she would inhabit if she gave up this baby. Some choices you didn’t recover from; she was old enough to know that.

Finally, after what felt like forever, Grandma turned to her husband. “Cecil, how many times have we talked about a second chance? This is it.”