The Great Alone: A Novel (38 page)

The dark edges fell back again, receded until there was only here, only now. A sunlit day, a celebration, a family. Life was like that, full of quicksilver changes. Joy reappeared as unexpectedly as sunlight.

She was happy.

She
was
.

*   *   *

“T
ELL ME ABOUT
A
LASKA
, Mommy,” MJ said that night as he crawled into his bed and pulled up his comforter.

Leni brushed the fine white curls from her son’s forehead, thinking—again—how much he looked like his father. “Shove over,” she said.

Leni climbed in beside him. He rested his head on her shoulder.

The room was mostly dark, illuminated only by a small
Star Wars
bedside lamp. Unlike Leni, her son was growing up as a child of commercial America. After the picnic at the park and all the fun they’d had today, she knew that MJ was exhausted, but he wouldn’t sleep without a story.

“The girl who loved Alaska…”

It was his favorite story. Leni had begun it years ago and expanded it over
time. She’d imagined a society living in the turquoise, glacial-cold waters of an Alaskan fjord, in buildings that had been downed when the mighty Mount Aku erupted. These people—the Raven clan—wanted desperately to rise into the light again, to walk in the sunshine, but a curse made by the eldest son of the Eagle clan had condemned them to remain in the icy water forever—until a whisperer could call them back. Katyaaq was the whisperess. A foreign girl of pure heart and quiet strength.

The story had unfolded week by week, with Leni telling just enough each night to lull her son to sleep. She’d created Katyaaq from the native Alaskan myths she’d read as a girl, and from the harsh, beautiful land itself. Uki, the boy Katyaaq loved—the landwalker—had called to her from the shore.

There was no doubt in Leni’s mind who the lovers were, or why the story felt so tragic to her.

“Katyaaq defied the gods and dared to swim to the shore. She shouldn’t have been able to do it, but her love for Uki gave her a special power. She kicked and kicked and finally broke out of the waves, felt sunlight on her face.

“Uki plunged into the ice-cold water, calling out her name. She saw his eyes—as green as the calm waters of the bay which had once been her people’s home, his hair the color of sunlight. ‘Kat,’ he said, ‘take my hand.’”

Leni saw that MJ had fallen asleep. She leaned over to kiss him and eased out of bed.

The small, single-story house was quiet. Mama was probably in the living room, watching
Dynasty
. Leni walked down the narrow hallway of their rented house, the walls on either side of her decorated with Leni’s photographs and MJ’s artwork. The claustrophobia that had once assailed her in this fake-wood-paneled, dimly lit hallway had disappeared long ago.

She had tamed the wildness within her as determinedly as she’d once tamed the wilderness itself. She’d learned to navigate in crowds, to live with walls, to stop for traffic. She’d learned to watch for robins instead of eagles, to buy her fish at Safeway, and to pay money for new clothes at Frederick & Nelson. She’d learned to blow-dry and condition her layered,
shoulder-length hair and to care that her clothes matched. These days she plucked her eyebrows and shaved her legs and armpits.

Camouflage. She learned to fit in.

She went into her room and flicked on the light. In the years they’d lived here, she’d changed nothing in this room and bought almost nothing to decorate it. She saw no point. It was bare and ordinary, filled with the garage-sale furniture they’d collected over the years. The only real sign of Leni herself was the photography equipment—lenses and cameras and bright yellow rolls of film. Stacks of pictures and collections of photograph albums. A single album was filled with her pictures of Matthew and Alaska. The rest were more current. Tucked into the corner of the vanity mirror was the picture of Matthew’s grandparents.
THIS COULD BE US
. Beside it was the first picture she’d taken of him with her Polaroid.

She opened the door that led out onto the small cedar-planked deck that ran the length of the house. In the backyard, Mama had cultivated a large vegetable garden. Leni stepped out onto the deck and sat in one of the two Adirondack chairs that had been here when they moved in. Overhead, the star-spangled sky looked limitless. A solid cedar fence outlined their small lot. She could smell the distant aroma of the first summer barbecues and hear the jangle of kids’ bikes being put away for the night. Dogs barked. A crow scolded something in a sharp little
caw-caw-caw
.

She leaned back in the chair, stared up, and tried to lose herself in the vastness of the sky.

“Hey,” Mama said from behind her. “You want some company?”

“’Course.”

Mama sat down in the second chair, positioned close enough that they could hold hands as they sat here. It had become their place over the years, a narrow deck that jutted out into some dimension that was neither past nor present. Sometimes, especially this time of year, the air smelled of roses.

“I’d give anything to see the northern lights,” Leni said.

“Yeah. Me, too.”

Together they stared up at the immense night sky. Neither of them spoke;
they didn’t need to. Leni knew they were both thinking of the loves that had once been theirs.

“But we have MJ,” Mama said.

Leni held her mother’s hand.

MJ. Their joy, their love, their saving grace.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Cora had pneumonia. It was hardly a surprise. For weeks, she’d caught every illness that moved through MJ’s school.

Now she sat in a sterile waiting room; irritated. Impatient to be let go.

Waiting.

She appreciated all of the just-to-be-sure tests her mother’s doctor had insisted upon, done, but Cora just wanted to get an antibiotics prescription and get out of here. MJ would be home from school soon.

Cora flipped through the latest
People
magazine. (“Ted Danson Leers Again on
Cheers
” was the absurd headline.) She tried the crossword puzzle in the back of the magazine, but she didn’t know enough popular culture to make much headway.

More than thirty minutes later, the blue-haired nurse returned to the waiting room and led Cora into a small office, its walls lined with degrees, awards, that sort of thing. Cora was shown to a hard black chair.

She sat down, instinctively crossing her legs at the ankles as she had been taught years ago in her country-club days. It occurred to her suddenly, stupidly, that it was a metaphor for all that had changed for women in her lifetime. No one cared anymore how a woman sat.

“So, Evelyn,” the doctor said. She was a stern-looking woman with steel-wool hair and an obvious affection for mascara. She looked like she survived on black coffee and raw vegetables, but who was Cora to judge a woman for being thin? A series of X-rays hung across a Lite-Brite-like screen behind her desk.

“Where’s the pneumonia?” Cora asked, lifting her chin toward the images. An octopus devouring something; that was what it looked like.

The doctor started to speak, then paused.

“Doctor?”

Dr. Prasher pointed to one of the images. “You see these large white areas? Here. Here. And here? You see this white curve? The shadow along your spine? It is all highly suggestive of lung cancer. We will need more tests to be sure, but…”

Wait. What?

How could this be happening?

Oh, right. She was a smoker. It was lung cancer. For years, Leni had nagged Cora about the habit, warned her of this very scenario. She had laughed and said, “Hell, baby girl, I could die crossing the street.”

“The CT scan shows a mass on your liver, which indicates metastasis,” Dr. Prasher said, and kept talking.

The words became a tangle in Cora’s mind: consonants and vowels, a series of breaths taken and released.

Dr. Prasher went on, using ordinary words in an extraordinary, impossible-to-grasp context.
Bronchoscopy, tumor, aggressive
.

“How long do I have?” Cora asked, realizing belatedly that she’d interrupted the doctor in the middle of something.

“No one can tell you that, Ms. Grant. But your cancer appears to be aggressive. Stage-four lung cancer that has already metastasized. I know that’s a hard thing to hear.”

“How long do I have?”

“You’re a relatively young woman. We will treat it aggressively.”

“Uh-huh.”

“There’s always hope, Ms. Grant.”

“Is there?” Cora said. “There’s also karma.”

“Karma?”

“There was a poison in him,” Cora said to herself, “and I drank it up.”

Dr. Prasher frowned, leaned forward. “Evelyn, this is a disease, not retribution or payback for sin. Those are Dark Ages thoughts.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well.” Dr. Prasher stood, frowning. “I want to schedule a bronchoscopy for this afternoon. It should confirm the diagnosis. Is there someone you’d like to call?”

Cora got to her feet, feeling unsteady enough that she had to grasp the back of the chair. The pain at the base of her spine leaped out again, worse now that she knew what it was.

Cancer.

I have cancer.

She couldn’t imagine saying it out loud.

She closed her eyes, exhaled. Imagined—remembered—a little girl with wild red hair and chubby little hands and freckles like cinnamon flakes, reaching out for her, saying,
Mama, I love you.

Cora had gone through so much. Lived when she could have died. She’d imagined her life a hundred different ways, practiced a thousand ways to atone. She’d imagined growing old, growing senile, laughing when she was supposed to cry, using salt instead of sugar. In her dreams, she’d seen Leni fall in love again and get married and have another baby.

Dreams.

In a breathtaking instant, Cora’s life crashed into focus, became small. All of her fears and regrets and disappointments fell away. There was just one thing that mattered; how could she not have known it from the beginning? Why had she spent so much time searching for who she was? She should have known. Always. From the very beginning.

She was a mother. A
mother.
And now …

My Leni.

How would she ever say goodbye?

*   *   *

L
ENI STOOD OUTSIDE
the closed door to her mother’s hospital room, trying to calm her breathing. She heard noises all around her, up and down the hall, people hurrying on rubber-soled shoes, carts being rolled from room to room, announcements coming over the loudspeakers.

Leni reached for the silver metal door handle, gave it a twist.

She walked into a large room, separated into two smaller spaces by curtains that hung from metal runners on the ceiling.

Mama was sitting up in bed, leaning back into a pile of white pillows. She looked like an antique doll, with eggshell skin stretched too tightly across her delicately crafted face. Her collarbone peered out above the neckline of her oversized hospital gown, the skin on either side hollowed out.

“Hey,” Leni said. She leaned down, kissed her mother’s soft cheek. “You could have told me you were going to the doctor’s. I would have come with you.” She pushed the feathery gray-blond hair out of her mother’s eyes. “Do you have pneumonia?”

“I have stage-four lung cancer. Only it’s a sneaky little shit and has invaded my spine and liver, too. It’s in my blood.”

Leni literally took a step back. She almost lifted her hands to block her face. “What?”

“I’m sorry, baby girl. It’s not good. The doctor was not particularly hopeful.”

Leni wanted to scream,
STOP!

She couldn’t breathe.

Cancer.

“A-are you in pain?”

No. That wasn’t what she wanted to say. What did she want to say?

“Ah,” Mama said with a wave of her veiny hand. “I’m Alaska-tough.” She reached past Leni for her cigarettes.

“I’m not sure they allow that in here.”

“I’m pretty sure they don’t,” Mama said, her hand trembling as she lit up. “But soon I’ll start chemotherapy.” She tried to smile. “So I can look forward to baldness and nausea. I’m sure it will be a good look for me.”

Leni moved closer. “You’ll fight it, right?” she said, blinking back tears she didn’t want her mother to see.

“Of course. I’ll kick this bitch’s ass.”

Leni nodded, wiped her eyes.

“You’ll get better. Grandpa will get you the best care in the city. He’s got that friend who’s on the board at Fred Hutch. You’ll be—”

“I’ll be fine, Leni.”

Mama touched Leni’s hand. Leni stood there, connected to her mother by breath and touch and a lifetime of love. She wanted to say just the right thing, but what would that be, and how could a few flimsy words matter in a cancer sea? “I can’t lose you,” Leni whispered.

“Yeah,” Mama said. “I know, baby girl. I know.”

*   *   *

Dear Matthew,

It’s only been a few days since I wrote to you. Funny how much life can change in a week.

Not funny ha-ha. That’s for sure.

Last night, as I lay in my comfy bed, in my store-bought pajamas, I found myself with a lot of things I didn’t want to think about. And so I found my way to you.

I don’t think we talked enough about your mother’s death. Maybe that was because we were kids, or maybe it was because you were so traumatized. But we should have talked about it later, when we were older. I should have told you I would listen to your pain forever. I should have asked you for memories.

I see now how grief becomes thin ice. I haven’t lost my mom yet, but a single word has pushed her away from me, created a barrier between
us that never existed before. For the first time ever, we are lying to each other. I can feel it. Lying to protect each other.

But there’s no protection, is there?

She has lung cancer.

God. I wish you were here.

Leni put down her pen. This time, the act of writing to Matthew was no comfort at all.

It made her feel worse, in fact. More alone.

How pathetic, that she had no one to talk to about this. That her best friend had no idea who she was.

She folded the letter up and put it in the shoe box with all the others she’d written over the years and never sent.

*   *   *

T
HAT SUMMER
, Leni watched cancer erase her mother. First to go was her hair, then her eyebrows. Next was the firm line of her shoulders; they began to droop. Then she lost her posture and her stride. Finally, cancer took away movement altogether.

By late July, after cancer had erased so much, the truth was revealed by her latest CT scan. Nothing they had done had helped.

Leni sat quietly beside her mother, holding her hand when they learned that the treatment had failed. The cancer was everywhere, an enemy on the move, hacking through bones, destroying organs. There was no discussion about trying again or fighting it.

Instead, they moved back into the Golliher house, set up a hospital bed in the sunroom, where light flowed through the windows, and contacted hospice care.

Mama had fought for her life, fought harder than she had fought for anything, but cancer did not care about effort.

Now Mama slowly, slowly angled up in the bed to a slouchy sitting
position. An unlit cigarette trembled in her veiny hand. She could no longer smoke, of course, but she liked to hold them. There were a few strands of hair on the pillow, running like gold veins on white cotton. An oxygen tank stood by the bed; clear tubes inserted into Mama’s nostrils helped her breathe.

Leni got up from her place beside the bed and put down the book she’d been reading aloud. She poured Mama a drink of water and offered it. Mama reached for the plastic cup. Her hands were shaking so badly Leni placed her own hands over her mother’s, helped her hold on to the cup. Mama took a hummingbird sip and coughed. Her bird-thin shoulders shook so hard Leni swore she heard the bones rattling beneath the thin skin.

“I dreamed of Alaska last night,” Mama said, slumping back into the pillows. She looked up at Leni. “It wasn’t all bad, was it?”

Leni felt a shock at hearing the word mentioned so casually. By tacit agreement, they hadn’t spoken about Alaska—or Dad or Matthew—in years, but perhaps it was inevitable that they would circle back to the beginning as the end neared.

“A lot of it was great,” Leni said. “I loved Alaska. I loved Matthew. I loved you. I even loved Dad,” she admitted quietly.

“There was fun. I want you to remember that. And adventure. When you remember, I know it’s easy to pull the bad up. Your dad’s violence. The excuses I made. My sad love for him. But there was good love, too. Remember that. Your dad loved you.”

This hurt more than Leni could bear, but she saw how much her mama needed to say these words. “I know,” Leni said.

“You’ll tell MJ all about me, okay? You tell him how I never sang the words to any song right and how I wore hot pants and sandals and I looked good in that shit. You tell him how I learned to be Alaska-tough even though I didn’t want to, and how I never let the bad stuff kill me, how I kept going. You tell him I loved his mother from the moment I saw her and that I’m proud of her.”

“I love you, too, Mama,” Leni said, but it wasn’t enough. Not nearly
enough, but all they had now was words—too many of them—and too little time.

“You’re a good mother, Leni, even as young as you are. I was never as good a mom as you are.”

“Mama—”

“No lies, baby girl. I don’t have time.”

Leni leaned down to smooth the few hairs back from Mama’s forehead. They were fine as goose down, wispy. This whittling down of her was unbearable. With every exhalation, it seemed, Mama lost a little more of her life force.

Mama reached slowly for the nightstand. The top drawer glided open with the soundlessness of expensive crafting. With a shaking hand, she pulled out a letter, folded crisply into thirds. “Here.”

Leni didn’t want to take it.

“Please.”

Leni took the letter, unfolded it carefully, and saw what was written on the page, in a scrawling, barely legible handwriting. It read:

I, Coraline Margaret Golliher Allbright, shot my husband, Ernt Allbright, when he was beating me.

I weighed his dead body down with animal traps and sank it in Glass Lake. I ran away because I feared going to prison, even though I believed then—and now—that I saved my life that night. My husband had been abusive for years. Many Kaneq residents suspected the abuse and tried to help. I didn’t allow it.

His death is on my hands and on my conscience. Guilt has turned itself into cancer and is killing me. God’s justice.

I killed him and hid the body. I did it all alone. My daughter had nothing to do with it.

Sincerely, Coraline Allbright

Beneath her mother’s shaky signature was her grandfather’s signature both as an attorney and as a witness, and a notary seal.

Mama coughed into a ball of tissue. She drew in a phlegmy breath and looked up at Leni. For a terrible, exquisite moment, time stopped between them, the world caught its breath. “It’s time, Leni. You’ve lived my life, baby girl. Time to live your own.”

“By calling you a murderer and pretending I’m an innocent? That’s how you want me to start a life?”

“By going home. My dad says you can pin it all on me. Say you knew nothing about it. You were a kid. They’ll believe you. Tom and Marge will back you up.”