The Great Alone Read online

  He heard the way his father drew in a sharp breath. Would he stop Matthew, abort this conversation they’d never dared to have?

  There was a moment, a pause that lasted less time than an indrawn breath; then Dad laid a heavy hand on Matthew’s shoulder. “No one could contain your mother,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  Matthew didn’t know how to respond. There was so much to say, but they’d never talked about any of it. How could you even start a conversation like that?

  Dad pulled Matthew into a fierce embrace. “I’m glad as hell you’re back.”

  “Yeah,” Matthew said hoarsely. “Me, too.”

  * * *

  MID-APRIL. Dawn washed across the land well before seven A.M. When Leni first opened her eyes, even though it was to darkness, she felt the buoyancy that came with the changing of the seasons. As an Alaskan, she could feel the nascent light, see it in the lessening of the inky black to a charcoal hue. It carried with it a sense of hope, of daylight coming, of everything would be better now. Of he would be better.

  But none of that was true this spring. Even as sunlight was returning, her dad was getting worse. Angry and intense. More jealous of Tom Walker.

  Leni had a terrible, building feeling that something bad was going to happen.

  All day at school she battled a headache. On her bike ride home, she started getting a stomachache. She tried to tell herself it was her period, but she knew better. It was stress. Worry. She and Mama had gone into alert mode again. They made eye contact constantly, walked carefully, tried to be invisible.

  She rode expertly over the bumpy driveway, taking care to stay on the high ground between the two muddy tire ruts.

  In her yard—a morass of mud and running water—she saw that the red truck was gone, which meant that Dad was either hunting or had gone to see the Harlans.

  She slanted her bike against the cabin and did her chores, feeding the animals, checking their water, bringing in the dry sheets from the line, dropping them into a willow basket. Holding the laundry basket on her hip, she heard the high, rubber-band sound of a boat engine, and stared out at the water, tenting a hand across her eyes. High tide.

  An aluminum skiff turned into their cove. The put-put-put of the engine was the only sound for miles. Leni tossed the laundry basket onto the porch and headed for the beach stairs, which they’d strengthened over the years. Almost all of the boards were new; only here and there could you see the tarnished gray of the original stairs. She descended the zigzag steps in her muddy boots.

  The boat puttered forward, its sharp prow angled up proudly on the waves. A man stood at the console, guided the boat forward, beached it.

  Matthew.

  He killed the engine and stepped out into the ankle-deep water, held on to the boat’s ragged white line.

  She touched her hair in embarrassment. She hadn’t bothered to braid it or brush it this morning. And she was wearing the exact same outfit she’d worn to school today and the day before. Her flannel shirt probably smelled like wood smoke.

  Oh, God.

  He pulled the boat up onto the beach, dropped the rope, and walked toward her. For years she’d imagined this moment; in her musings, she always knew exactly what to say. In the privacy of her imagination, they just started talking, picked up the thread of their friendship as if he’d never been gone.

  But in her mind, he was Matthew, the fourteen-year-old kid who’d showed her frogs’ eggs and baby eagles, the boy who’d written her every week. Dear Leni, it’s hard at this school. I don’t think anyone likes me … And to whom she’d written back. I know a lot about being the new kid in school. It blows. Let me give you a few tips …

  This … man was someone else, someone she didn’t know. Tall, long blond hair, incredibly good-looking. What could she say to this Matthew?

  He reached into his backpack, pulled out the worn, banged-up, yellowed version of The Lord of the Rings that Leni had sent him for his fifteenth birthday. She remembered the inscription she’d written in it. Friends forever, like Sam and Frodo.

  A different girl had written that. One who hadn’t known the ugly truth about her toxic family.

  “Like Sam and Frodo,” he said.

  “Sam and Frodo,” Leni repeated after him.

  Leni knew it was crazy, but it seemed to her as if they were having a conversation without saying anything, talking about books and durable friendships and overcoming insurmountable odds. Maybe they weren’t talking about Sam and Frodo at all, maybe they were talking about themselves and how they had somehow grown up and stayed kids at the same time.

  He pulled a small, wrapped box out of his backpack and handed it to her. “This is for you.”

  “A present? It’s not my birthday.”

  Leni noticed that her hands were shaking as she tore open the paper. Inside, she found a heavy black Canon Canonet camera in a leather case. She looked up at him in surprise.

  “I missed you,” he said.

  “I missed you, too,” she said quietly, knowing even as she said it that things had changed. They weren’t fourteen anymore. More important, her father had changed. Being friends with Tom Walker’s son would cause trouble.

  It worried her that she didn’t care.

  * * *

  AT SCHOOL THE NEXT DAY, Leni could hardly concentrate. She kept glancing sideways at Matthew, as if to assure herself that he was really there. Ms. Rhodes had had to yell at Leni several times to get her attention.

  At the end of class, they walked out of the schoolhouse together, emerged side-by-side into the sunshine, and walked down the wooden steps and into the muddy ground.

  “I’ll come back for my ATV,” he said when she pulled her bike away from its place along the chain-link fence that had been built two years ago after a sow and her cubs walked right up to the school door, looking for food. “I’ll walk you home. If that’s okay.”

  Leni nodded. Her voice seemed inaccessible. She hadn’t said two words to him all day; she was afraid of embarrassing herself. They weren’t children anymore and she had no idea how to talk to a boy her own age, especially one whose opinion of her mattered so much.

  She had a solid hold on her plastic handlebar grips, with her dump-recycled bicycle clanging along the gravel road beside her. She said something about her job at the General Store, just to break the quiet.

  She was aware of him physically in a way she’d never experienced before. His height, the breadth of his shoulders, the sure, easy way he walked. She smelled spearmint gum on his breath and the complex scents of store-bought shampoo and soap on his hair and skin. She was attuned to him, connected in that weird way of predator and prey, a sudden, dangerous circle-of-life type of connection that made no sense to her.

  They turned off Alpine Street and walked into town.

  “Town sure has changed,” Matthew said.

  At the saloon, he stopped, tented his hand over his eyes, read the grafitti spray-painted across the charred wooden front. “Some people don’t want change, I guess.”

  “Guess not.”

  He looked down at her. “My dad said your dad vandalized the saloon.”

  Leni stared up at him, felt shame twist her gut. She wanted to lie to him, but she couldn’t. Neither could she say the disloyal words out loud. People assumed her dad had vandalized the saloon; only she and her mother knew it for sure.

  Matthew started walking again. Relieved to be past the evidence of her father’s anger, she fell into step beside him. When they passed the General Store, Large Marge emerged with a bellow, her big arms outflung. She gave Matthew a hug, then thumped him on the back. When she stepped back, she gazed at the two of them.

  “Be careful, you two. Things aren’t good between your dads.”

  Leni started off. Matthew followed her.

  She wanted to smile, but the vandalized tavern and Large Marge’s warning had taken the shine off the day. Large Marge was right. Leni was playing with fire right now. Her dad could drive up this road at any minute. It would not be good for him to see her walking home with Matthew Walker.

  “Leni?”

  She realized Matthew had run to catch up with her. “Sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  Leni didn’t know how to answer; she was sorry for things he knew nothing about, for a future she was probably dragging him into that would surely sour. Instead, she said some lame thing about the latest book she’d read; for the remainder of the way home they talked about superficial things—the weather, the movies he’d seen in Fairbanks, the latest lures for king salmon.

  It seemed that no time had passed, even though they had walked together for almost an hour, when Leni saw the metal gate with the cow skull on it up ahead. Mr. Walker was standing beside a big yellow excavator that was parked beside the gate that marked the entrance to his land.

  Leni came to a stop. “What’s your dad doing?”

  “He’s clearing some acreage to build cabins. And he’s putting up an arch over the driveway so guests will know how to find us. He’s calling it the Walker Cove Adventure Lodge. Or something like that.”

  “A lodge for tourists? Right here?”

  Leni felt Matthew’s gaze on her face, as strongly as any touch. “You bet. There’s money to be made.”

  Mr. Walker walked toward them, pulling the trucker’s cap off his head, revealing a white strip of skin along his forehead, scratching his damp hair.

  “My dad won’t like that arch,” Leni said as he approached.

  “Your dad doesn’t like much,” Mr. Walker said with a smile, mopping the sweat from his brow with a bunched-up bandanna. “And you being friends with my Mattie is going to be at the top of his hate list. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah,” Leni said.

  “Come on, Leni,” Matthew said. He took her by the elbow and led her away from his father, with the bicycle clattering alongside. When they came to Leni’s driveway, she stopped, stared down the tree-shaded road.

  “You should leave now,” she said, pulling away.

  “I want to walk you home.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Your dad?”

  She wished the world would just open up and swallow her. She nodded. “He would not want me to be friends with you.”

  “Screw him,” Matthew said. “He can’t tell us we can’t be friends. No one can. Dad told me about the stupid feud going on. Who cares? What’s it to us?”

  “But—”

  “Do you like me, Leni? Do you want to be friends?”

  She nodded. The moment felt solemn. Serious. A pact being made.

  “And I like you. So there. It’s done. We’re friends. There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

  Leni knew how naïve he was, how wrong. Matthew knew nothing about angry, irrational parents, about punches that broke noses and the kind of rage that began with vandalism and might go places he couldn’t imagine.

  “My dad is unpredictable,” Leni said. It was the only equivocal word she could come up with.

  “What does that mean?”

  “He might hurt you if he found out we liked each other.”

  “I could take on your dad.”

  Leni felt a little burst of hysterical laughter rise up. The idea of Matthew “taking on” Dad was too terrible to contemplate.

  She should walk away right now, tell Matthew they couldn’t be friends.

  “Leni?”

  The look in his eyes was her undoing. Had anyone ever looked at her like that? She felt a shiver of something, longing maybe, or relief, or even desire. She didn’t know. She just knew she couldn’t turn away from it, not after so many lonely years, even though she felt danger slip silently into the water and swim toward her. “We can’t let my dad know we’re friends. Not at all. Not ever.”

  “Sure,” Matthew said, but she could see that he didn’t understand. Maybe he knew about pain and loss and suffering; that knowledge of darkness was in his eyes. But he didn’t know about fear. He thought her warnings were melodramatic.

  “I mean it, Matthew. He can never know.”

  FIFTEEN

  Leni dreamed it was raining. She stood on a riverbank, getting drenched. Rain slicked her hair, blurred her vision.

  The river rose, made a great, cracking thunderous sound, and suddenly it was breakup. House-sized chunks of ice broke free of the land, careening downstream, taking everything in their path—trees, boats, houses.

  You need to cross.

  Leni didn’t know if she heard the words or if she’d said them. All she knew was that she needed to cross this river before the ice swept her away and the water rushed into her lungs.

  But there was nowhere to cross.

  Ice-cold waves arched up into walls, ground fell away and trees crashed. Someone screamed.

  It was her. The river hit her like a shovel to the head, knocked her sideways.

  She flailed, screamed, felt herself falling, falling.

  Over here, a voice yelled.

  Matthew.

  He could save her. She gasped, tried to claw her way to the surface, but something had a hold of her feet, dragged her down, down until she couldn’t breathe. Everything went dark.

  Leni woke with a gasp and saw that she was safe in her room, with her stacks of books and the notebooks full of her pictures along the wall, and the box full of Matthew’s letters beside her.

  Bad dream.

  Already fading from memory. Something about a river, she thought. Spring breakup. Another way to die in Alaska.

  She dressed for school in denim overalls and a plaid flannel shirt. She pulled the hair back from her face and wove it into a loose French braid. Without any mirrors in the house (Dad had broken them all over the years), she couldn’t assess how she looked. Leni had gotten used to seeing herself in shards of glass. Herself in pieces. She hadn’t cared at all until Matthew’s return.

  Downstairs, she dropped the stack of her schoolbooks on the kitchen table and took a seat. Mama set a plate of reindeer sausage, biscuits, and gravy in front of her, alongside a bowl full of blueberries they’d picked from the sandy bluffs above Kachemak Bay last fall.

  While Leni ate her breakfast, Mama stood nearby watching her.

  “You carted water for an hour last night so you could take a bath. And you’ve braided your hair. It looks beautiful, by the way.”

  “It’s called ordinary hygiene, Mama.”

  “I heard Matthew Walker is back in town.”

  Leni should have known Mama would put two and two together. Sometimes, because of Dad and all, Leni forgot how smart Mama was. How perceptive.

  Leni kept eating, careful not to make eye contact. She knew what Mama would say about this, so Leni wasn’t going to tell her. Alaska was a big place; there were plenty of places to hide something as small as a friendship.

  “Too bad your dad hates his dad so much. And too bad your dad has a temper problem.”

  “Is that what we’re calling it?”

  Leni felt Mama eyeing her, like an eagle watching waves for a splash of silver. It was the first time Leni had hidden something from her mother and it felt uncomfortable. “You’re almost eighteen. A young woman. And you and Matthew must have written each other a hundred letters over the years.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Hormones are like afterburners. The right touch and you’re in outer space.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m talking about love, Lenora. Passion.”

  “Love? Jeez Louise. I don’t know why you’d bring that up. There’s nothing to worry about, Mama.”

  “Good. You stay smart, baby girl. Don’t make the same mistake I did.”

  Leni finally looked up. “What mistake? Dad? Or me? Are you—”

  The door opened and in walked her father, who had washed his hair this morning and put on relatively clean brown canvas pants and a T-shirt. He kicked the door shut behind him, said, “Something smells good, Cora. Morning, Red. Did you sleep well?”

  “Sure, Dad,” she said.

  He kissed the top of her head. “You ready for school? I’ll drive you.”

  “I can ride my bike.”

  “Can’t I take my second-best girl out on a sunny day?”

  “Sure,” she said. She picked up her books and lunch box (still the Winnie the Pooh; she loved it now) and got to her feet.

  “You be careful at school,” Mama said.

  Leni didn’t glance back. She followed Dad out to the truck and climbed in.

  He popped an eight-track tape into the stereo and cranked up the sound. “Lyin’ Eyes” blared through the speakers.

  Dad started singing along, going strong, saying, “Sing with me,” as he turned out onto the main road and rumbled toward town.

  Suddenly he slammed on the brakes. “Son of a bitch.”

  Leni was thrown forward.

  “Son of a bitch,” Dad said again.

  Mr. Walker stood beneath the rough-timbered arch he’d erected over his driveway. Hand-carved into the top beam were the words WALKER COVE ADVENTURE LODGE.

  Dad jammed the truck in park and got out, striding across the bumpy road, not even trying to avoid the muddy potholes.

  Mr. Walker saw him coming and stopped work, shoved his hammer through his belt, so that it hung from the leather like a weapon.

  Leni leaned forward, peered intently through the dirt-and-squished-mosquito-filled windshield.

  Dad was screaming at Mr. Walker, who smiled and crossed his arms.

  Leni was put in mind of a Jack Russell terrier straining aggressively at the end of his leash, yapping at a Rottweiler.

  Dad was still yelling when Mr. Walker turned his back and walked to the arch and returned to his work.

  Dad stood there a minute. Finally he stalked back to the truck, climbed in, slammed the door shut. He rammed the truck into gear and hit the gas. “Someone needs to knock that son of a bitch down a peg. I knew guys like him in ’Nam. Shitty, cowardly officers who got better men killed and got medals for it.”

  Leni knew better than to say anything. All the way to school, he muttered under his breath. Son of a bitch, arrogant prick, thinks he’s better … Leni knew he would head straight to the compound from here, to find people to join in his bitching. Or maybe, talk wouldn’t be enough anymore.

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