The Great Alone: A Novel (39 page)

Leni shook her head, too overwhelmed by sadness to say anything more than, “I won’t leave you.”

“Ah, baby girl. How many times have you had to say that in your life?” Mama sighed tiredly, gazed up at Leni through sad, watery eyes. Her breath was wheezing, labored. “But I am going to leave you. It’s the thing we can’t run from anymore. Please,” she whispered. “Do this for me. Be stronger than I ever was.”

*   *   *

T
WO DAYS LATER
, Leni stood just outside of the sunroom, listening to Mama’s wheezing breaths as she talked to Grandma.

Through the open door, Leni heard the word
sorry
in her grandmother’s trembling voice.

A word Leni had come to despise. She knew that in the past few years Mama and Grandma had already said what they needed to say to each other. They’d talked about the past in their bits-and-pieces way. Never all at once, never one big end-up-crying-and-hugging moment, but a constant brushing up of the past, reexamining actions and decisions and beliefs, offering apologies, forgiveness. All of it had brought them closer to who they were, who they’d always been. Mother and daughter. Their essential, immutable bond—fragile enough to snap at a harsh word a long time ago, durable enough to survive death itself.

“Mommy! There you are,” MJ said. “I looked
everywhere
.”

MJ skidded into place, bumping her hard. He was holding his treasured copy of
Where the Wild Things Are
. “Grammy said she’d read to me.”

“I don’t know, baby boy—”

“She promised.” On that, he pushed past her, moving into the sunroom like John Wayne looking for a fight. “Did you miss me, Grammy?”

Leni heard her mama’s quiet laughter. Then she heard the clang and squeak of MJ hitting the oxygen tank.

Moments later, Grandma exited the sunroom, saw Leni, and came to a stop. “She is asking for you,” Grandma said quietly. “Cecil has already been in.”

They both knew what that meant. Yesterday, Mama had been unresponsive for hours.

Grandma reached out, held Leni’s hand tightly, and then let go. With a last, harrowingly sad look, Grandma walked down the hallway and up the stairs to her own bedroom, where Leni imagined she let herself cry for the daughter she was losing. They all tried so hard not to cry in front of Mama.

Through the open sunroom door, Leni heard MJ’s high-pitched, “Read to me, Grammy,” and Mama’s inaudible reply.

Leni glanced down at her watch. Mama couldn’t handle much more than a few minutes with him. MJ was a good boy, but he was a boy, which meant bouncing and chatter and nonstop motion.

Mama’s thready voice floated on the sunlit air, bringing a flood of memories with it. “
The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind or another
…”

Leni was as drawn to her mother’s voice as she’d always been, maybe more so now, when every single moment mattered and every breath was a gift. Leni had learned to submerge fear, push it down to a quiet place and cover it with a smile, but it was there always, the thought,
Is that breath the end? Is that the one?

Here, at the end, it was impossible to believe in a last-minute reprieve. And Mama was in such pain, even hoping for her to survive another day, another hour, felt selfish.

Leni heard her mother say, “The End,” and the words carried a sharp double meaning.

“One more story, Grammy.”

Leni entered the sunroom.

Mama’s hospital bed had been placed to take advantage of the sunlight through the window. It almost looked like a fairy-tale bed in deep woods, lit by the sunlight, surrounded by hothouse flowers.

Mama herself was Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, her lips the only place left to have any color. The rest of her was so small and colorless, she seemed to melt into the white sheets. The clear plastic tubes looped from her nostrils, around her ears, and went on to the tank.

“That’s enough, MJ,” Leni said. “Grammy needs a nap.”

“Aw, crap,” he said, his little shoulders dropping.

Mama laughed. It turned into a cough. “Nice language, MJ.” Her voice was a whispery sound.

“Grammy’s cough is bleeding again,” MJ said.

Leni pulled a tissue from the box by her mother’s bed and leaned close to dab the blood from her mother’s face. “Give Grammy’s hand a kiss and go, MJ. Grandpop has a new model airplane for you guys to put together.”

Mama’s hand fluttered up from the bed. The whole back of her hand was bruised from IVs.

MJ leaned close, banging the bed so hard it jostled her mother, clanging a knee into the oxygen tank. He kissed the bruised hand carefully.

When he was gone, Mama sighed, lay back into the pillows. “The kid is a bull moose. You should get him into ballet or gymnastics.” Her voice was almost too quiet to hear. Leni had to lean close.

“Yeah,” Leni said. “How are you?”

“I’m tired, baby girl.”

“I know.”

“I’m so tired, but … I can’t leave you. I … can’t. I don’t know how. You are it for me, you know. The great love of my life.”

“Peas in a pod,” Leni whispered.

“Two of a kind.” Mama coughed. “The thought of you being alone, without me…”

Leni leaned down, kissed her mother’s soft forehead. She knew what she had to say now, what her mother needed. One always knew when to be strong for the other. “I’m okay, Mama. I know you’ll be with me.”

“Always,” Mama whispered, her voice barely heard. She reached up, her hand shaking, and touched Leni’s cheek. Her skin was cold. The effort it took for that single motion was evident.

“You can go,” Leni whispered.

Mama sighed deeply. In the sound, Leni heard how long and how hard her mother had been fighting this moment. Mama’s hand fell from Leni’s face, thumped to the bed. It opened like a flower, revealing a bloody wad of tissue. “Ah, Leni … you’re the love of my life … I worry…”

“I’ll be okay,” Leni lied. Tears slid down her cheeks. “I love you, Mama.”

Don’t go, Mama. I can’t be in the world without you
.

Mama’s eyelids fluttered shut. “Loved … you … my baby girl.”

Leni could barely hear those last, whispered words. She felt her mother’s last breath as deeply as if she’d drawn it herself.

TWENTY-NINE

“She wanted you to have this.”

Grandma stood in the open doorway to Leni’s old bedroom, dressed in all black. She managed to make mourning look elegant. It was the kind of thing that Mama would have made fun of long ago—she would have looked down on a woman concerned with appearances. But Leni knew that sometimes you grabbed hold of whatever you could to stay afloat. And maybe all that black was a shield, a way to say to people:
Don’t talk to me, don’t approach me, don’t ask your ordinary, everyday questions when my world has exploded.

Leni, on the other hand, looked like something washed up by the tide. In the twenty-four hours since her mother’s death, she hadn’t showered or brushed her teeth or changed her clothes. All she did was sit in her room, behind a closed door. She would make an effort at two, when she had to go pick up MJ from school. In his absence, she swam alone in her loss.

She pushed the covers back. Moving slowly, as if her muscles had changed in the absence of her mother, she crossed the room and took the box from her grandmother, said, “Thank you.”

They looked at each other, mirrors of grief. Then, saying nothing more—
what good were words?—Grandma turned and walked down the hall, stiffly upright. If Leni didn’t know her, she’d say Grandma was a rock, a woman in perfect control, but Leni did know her. At the stairs, Grandma paused, missed a step; her hand clutched at the banister. Grandpa came out of his office, appearing when she needed him, to offer an arm.

The two of them, heads bowed together, were a portrait of pain.

Leni hated that there was nothing she could do to help. How could three drowning people save each other?

Leni went back to bed. Climbing in, she pulled the rosewood box into her lap. She’d seen it before, of course. Once, it had held their playing cards.

Whoever had made this box had sanded it until the surface felt more like glass than wood. It was a souvenir, maybe from the road trip they’d taken a lifetime ago, when they’d lived in a trailer and driven all the way to Tijuana. Leni was too young to remember the trip—before Vietnam—but she’d heard her parents talk about it.

Leni took a deep breath and opened the lid. Inside, she saw a tangle of things. A cheap silver charm bracelet, a set of keys on a ring that read
Keep On Truckin’
, a pink scallop shell, a beaded suede coin purse, a set of playing cards, a Native tusk carving of an Eskimo holding a spear.

She picked up the items one by one, trying to put them in the context of what she knew of her mother’s life. The charm bracelet looked like the gift one girl would give another in high school and reminded Leni of all the missing pieces in her mother’s life. Questions Leni had failed to ask; stories Mama hadn’t had time to share. All of it lost now. The keys Leni recognized—they were to the house they’d rented on the cul-de-sac outside Seattle all those years ago. The scallop shell showed her mother’s love for beachcombing, and the suede purse probably came from one of the reservation gift shops.

There was a
SALTY DAWG
shot glass. A piece of driftwood, into which had been carved
Cora and Ernt, 1973
. Three white agates. A photograph of her parents’ wedding day, taken at the courthouse. In it, Mama was smiling brightly, wearing a tea-length white dress with a bell-shaped skirt and
holding a single white rose in white-gloved hands; Dad was holding her close, his smile a little stiff, dressed in a black suit and narrow tie. They looked like a couple of kids playing dress-up.

The next photograph was of the VW bus with their boxes and suitcases lashed on top. The door was open and you could see all of their junk piled inside. It had been taken only a few days before they headed north.

The three of them stood beside the bus. Mama was wearing elephant-bell jeans and a midriff-baring top. Her blond hair had been twined into pigtails and a beaded headband encircled her head. Dad wore pale blue polyester pants and a matching shirt with oversized collar points. Leni was in front of her parents, wearing a red dress with a white Peter Pan collar and Keds. Each of her parents had a hand on one of her shoulders.

She was smiling broadly. Happily.

The photograph turned blurry, danced in Leni’s unsteady hand.

Something red and blue and gold captured Leni’s attention. She put down the picture, wiped her eyes.

A military medal; a red-white-and-blue ribbon with a bronze star affixed to its pointed end. She turned the star over, saw the inscription on the back:
Heroic or meritorious achievement. Ernt A. Allbright
. Beneath it lay a folded-up newspaper article with the headline “Seattle POW Released” and a picture of her dad. He looked like a cadaver, his eyes staring dully ahead. There was almost no similarity to the man in the wedding photo.

I wish you remembered him from before …
How often had her mother said that over the years?

She pressed the picture and the medal to her chest, as if she could imprint them onto her soul. These were the memories Leni wanted to keep: their love, his heroism, the image of them laughing, the idea of her mother beachcombing.

There were two things left in the box. An envelope and a folded piece of notebook paper.

Leni set the medal and photograph aside and picked up the piece of paper, unfolding it slowly. She saw Mama’s fine, private-schoolgirl script.

To my beautiful baby girl,

It’s time to undo what I did. You live under a false name because I killed a man. Me.

You may not see it yet, but you have a home and home means something. You have a chance for a different life. You can give your son all that I couldn’t give you, but it takes courage. And courage is something you have. All you have to do is go back to Alaska and give the police my confession letter. Tell them I’m a murderer and let the crime finally end as it should have, with you excused from its taint. They’ll close the case and you’ll be free. Take your name and your life back.

Go home. Scatter my ashes on our beach.

I’ll be watching out for you. Always.

You have a child, so you know. You are my heart, baby girl. You are everything I did right. And I want you to know I would do it all again, every wonderful terrible second of it. I would do years and years of it again for one minute with you.

Inside the envelope, she found two one-way tickets to Alaska.

*   *   *

A
LL UP AND DOWN
the well-manicured street of Queen Anne Hill, life clattered along on this last Saturday in July. Her grandparents’ neighbors were gathered around Weber barbecues grilling store-bought meat, and making designer margaritas in blenders, their kids playing on swing sets that cost as much as a used car. Had any of them noticed the drawn shades in the Golliher house? Could they somehow sense grief emanating through stone and glass? This sorrow couldn’t be talked about in public. How could they express grief for the loss of a woman—Evelyn Grant—who had never really existed?

Leni climbed out her bedroom window and sat on the roof, the wooden shakes worn smooth by years of people sitting in this spot. Here more than
anywhere else, she felt Mama beside her. Sometimes the feeling was so strong Leni thought she heard her Mama breathing, but it was just the breeze, whispering through the maple leaves on the tree out front.

“I used to catch your mother out here smoking cigarettes when she was thirteen years old,” Grandma said quietly. “She thought a closed window and a breath mint could fool me.”

Leni couldn’t help smiling. Those few words were like an incantation that brought Mama back for a beautiful, exquisite second. A flame of blond hair, a laugh in the wind. Leni glanced behind her, saw her grandmother standing at the upstairs bedroom’s open window. A cool evening breeze plucked at her black blouse, ruffled the trim at her throat. Leni had a fleeting, surprising thought that her grandmother would wear black for the rest of her life; maybe she would put on a green dress and regret and loss would eke from her pores and change the fabric to black.

“May I join you?”

“I’ll come in.” Leni started to back up.

Grandma angled through the open window, her hair crunching on the frame, getting dented. “I know you think that I’m Jurassic, but I can climb out onto a ledge. Jack LaLanne was sixty when he swam from Alcatraz to San Francisco.”

Leni scooted sideways.

Grandmother climbed through the opening and sat down, keeping her straight back flush against the house.

Leni backed up to be even with her, carrying the rosewood box with her. She hadn’t stopped touching its smooth surface since she’d opened it the day before.

“I don’t want you to go.”

“I know.”

“Your grandfather says it’s a bad decision, and he should know.” She paused. “Stay here. Don’t give them that letter.”

“It was her dying wish.”

“She’s gone.”

Leni couldn’t help smiling. She loved that her grandmother was a com
plex mixture of optimism and practicality. The optimism had allowed her to wait almost two decades for her daughter’s return; the practicality had allowed her to forget all the pain that had preceded it. Over the years, Leni knew that Mama had more than forgiven her parents; she’d grown to understand them and to regret how harshly she’d treated them. Perhaps it was a road every child ultimately traveled. “Have I ever told you how grateful I am that you took us in, that you love my son?”

“And you.”

“And me.”

“Make me understand, Leni. I’m afraid.”

Leni had thought about this all night. She knew it was crazy and maybe dangerous, but there was hope, too.

She wanted—needed—to be Leni Allbright again. To live her own life. Whatever the cost. “I know you think of Alaska as cold and inhospitable, a place where we were lost. But the truth is, we were found there, too. It’s in me, Grandma, that place. I belong there. All these years away have cost me something. And there’s MJ. He’s not a baby anymore. He’s a boy and growing up fast. He needs a dad.”

“But his dad is…”

“I know. I’ve spent years telling MJ as much of the truth as I could about his father. He knows about the accident and the rehab center. But its not enough to tell stories. MJ needs to know where he comes from, and it won’t be long before he starts asking real questions. He deserves answers.” Leni paused. “My mom was wrong about a lot of things, but one thing she had right was about the durability of love. It stays. Against all odds, in the face of hate, it stays. I left the boy I loved when he was broken and sick, and I hate myself for that. Matthew is MJ’s dad, whether Matthew can know what that means or not, whether he can hold him or talk to him or not. MJ deserves to know his own family. Tom Walker is his grandfather. Alyeska is his aunt. It is unforgivable that they don’t know about MJ. They would love him as much as you do.”

“They could try to take him from you. Custody is a tricky thing. You couldn’t survive that.”

That was a dark corner Leni couldn’t look around. “It’s not about me,” Leni said quietly. “I have to do the right thing. Finally.”

“It’s a bad idea, Leni. A terrible idea. If you’ve learned anything from your mother and what happened, it should be this: life—and the law—is hard on women. Sometimes doing the right thing is no help at all.”

*   *   *

S
UMMER IN
A
LASKA.

Leni had never forgotten the exquisite, breathtaking beauty, and now, in a small plane, flying from Anchorage to Homer, she felt a great opening up of her soul. For the first time in years, she felt fully herself.

They flew over the green marshlands outside of Anchorage and the silvery expanse of Turnagain Arm, low tide revealing the gray sand bottom, where so many unwary fishermen went aground and the magical bore tide rolled in on waves big enough to surf.

And then Cook Inlet, a swath of blue, dotted with fishing boats. The plane banked left toward the snow-clad mountains, and flew over the glacial-blue Harding Icefield. Above Kachemak Bay, the land turned richly green again, a series of emerald humps. Hundreds of boats dotted the water, ribbons of white water fluttering out behind them.

In Homer, they bumped down onto the gravel runway and MJ squealed happily, pointed out the window. When the plane came to a stop, the pilot came around and opened the back door and helped Leni with her rolling suitcase (so Outside, that bag—it didn’t even have shoulder straps).

She held on to MJ with one hand and rolled her suitcase along the gravel runway toward the small aviation office. A big clock on the wall told her it was 10:12
A.M.

At the counter, she gained the receptionist’s attention.

“Excuse me. I understand there’s a new police station in town.”

“Well, not that new. It’s up past the post office on Heath Street. You want me to call you a cab?”

If Leni hadn’t been so nervous, she would have laughed at the idea of catching a cab in Homer. “Uh. Yes. Please. That would be great.”

Waiting for the cab, Leni stood in the small aviation office, staring in awe at the entire wall filled with four-color brochures advertising adventures for tourists: the Great Alaska Adventure Lodge in Sterling and Walker Cove Adventure Lodge in Kaneq; fly-out lodges in the Brooks Range, river guides who hired out for the day, hunting trips in Fairbanks. Alaska had apparently become the tourist mecca Tom Walker had imagined it could be. Leni knew that cruise ships pulled into Seward every week in the summer, off-loading thousands of people.

Moments after the cab arrived, she and MJ were at the police station, a long, low-slung, flat-roofed building set on a corner.

Inside, the station was brightly lit, freshly painted. Leni fought with her rolling suitcase, muscling it up over the doorsill. The only person in the place was a uniformed woman sitting at a desk. Leni moved resolutely forward, clutching MJ’s hand so tightly he squirmed and whined, tried to wrench free.

“Hello,” she said to the woman at the desk. “I’d like to speak to the police chief.”