The Great Alone Read online

  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.

  * * *

  SEATTLE 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.”

  “You won’t run off in the middle of the night again?” he said to Mama. “Your mother … barely survived it.”

  In those few words, carefully chosen, Leni heard sorrow. There was hurt between these people and her mother, hurt and regret and mistrust, but something softer, too.

  “No, sir. We won’t.”

  At last, Grandpa smiled. “Welcome home, Coraline. Lenora. Let’s get some ice on those bruises. You both should see a doctor.”

  Leni saw Mama’s reluctance to step into the house. She took Mama by the arm, steadied her.

  “Don’t let go,” Mama whispered.

  Inside, Leni noticed the smell of flowers. There were several large floral arrangements positioned artfully on gleaming wooden tables and gilt-edged mirrors on the walls.

  Leni glanced into rooms and down hallways as they walked. She saw a dining room with a table that accommodated twelve, a library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a living room in which there were two of everything, sofas, chairs, windows, lamps. A staircase with carpet so plush it felt like walking on muskeg in the summer led to an upstairs hallway that was paneled in mahogany and decorated with brass sconces and paintings of dogs and horses in ornate golden frames.

  “Here,” Grandma said, finally stopping. Grandpa hung back, as if maybe doling out rooms was women’s work. “Lenora, you will sleep in Coraline’s old room. Cora, come this way.”

  Leni stepped into her new room.

  At first all she saw was lace. Not the cheap eyelet she was used to seeing at Goodwill; this was fine, almost like cobwebs strung together. Ivory lace curtains framed the windows. There was more ivory lace on the bedding and lampshades. On the floor, pale oatmeal-colored carpeting. Furniture that was ivory with gilt edges. A small kidney-shaped desk had an ivory-colored cushioned stool tucked up underneath.

  The air felt stifling, unnatural, bathed in a false lavender scent.

  She went to the window, lifted the heavy sash, and leaned out. The sweet night welcomed her, calmed her. The rain had stopped, leaving a glittering black night in its wake. Lights were on in all the houses up and down the street.

  There was a small patch of wet roof in front of her. Below that, the well-tended yard, with an old maple tree tucked in close, its branches mostly bare, only a few red-gold leaves still hanging on.

  Trees. Night air. Quiet.

  Leni climbed out onto the shake-covered roof below her room. Although there were lights on in the house, and houses with lights on across the street, she felt safer out here. She smelled trees and greenery and even a distant tang of the sea.

  The sky was unfamiliar. Black. In Alaska the night sky in winter was a deep velvet blue and when snow covered the ground and cloaked the trees, ambient light created a magical glow. And then, sometimes, the northern lights danced overhead. Still, she recognized the stars; they weren’t in the same place, but they were the same stars. The Big Dipper. Orion’s Belt. Constellations Matthew had shown her that night when they’d lain on the beach.

  Her fingers closed around the heart necklace at her throat. She could wear it openly now and not worry about her father asking where she’d gotten it. She would never take it off again.

  “You want some company?”

  “Sure,” Leni said, scooting sideways.

  Mama climbed through the open window and made her way onto the roof, then sat beside Leni, drawing her knees up to her chest. “I used to climb down that tree and sneak out on Saturday nights in high school to hang out with boys at Dick’s Drive-In on Aurora. Everything was about boys.” She sighed, dropped her chin into the valley between her knees.

  Leni leaned against her mama, stared out at the house across the street. A blaze of wasteful lights. Through the windows, she saw at least three televisions flashing color.

  “I’m sorry, Leni. I’ve made such a mess of your life.”

  “We did it,” Leni said. “Together. Now we have to live with it.”

  “There’s something wrong with me,” Mama said after a pause.

  “No,” Leni said firmly. “There was something wrong with him.”

  * * *

  “IT’S THERE, believe me. Right there,” Mama said five days later, when their bruises had healed enough to be covered with makeup. They had spent almost a week huddled in the house, never venturing outside. They were both going a little stir-crazy.

  Now, with Mama’s hair cut in a pixie and dyed brown, they finally left the house and took a bus into busy downtown Seattle, where they merged into the eclectic crowd of tourists, shoppers, and punk rockers.

  Mama pointed up into the cloudless blue sky.

  Leni didn’t care about The Mountain (that was what they called Rainier down here—The Mountain—as if it were the only one that mattered in the world) or the other landmarks Mama had pointed out with such pride, as if Leni had never seen them before. The bright neon PUBLIC MARKET sign that looked down on the fish market booth; the Space Needle, which looked like an alien spacecraft placed on pick-up sticks; the new aquarium that jutted defiantly out into the cold waters of Elliott Bay.

  Seattle was beautiful on this sunny, warm November day; that was true. As green as she remembered, and bordered by water and covered in asphalt and concrete.

  People crawled like ants over all of it. All noise and movement: honking horns, people crossing streets, buses puffing smoke and grinding gears on the hills that propped the city up. How could she ever be at home here, among all these people?

  There was no silence in this place. For the last few nights, she’d lain in her new bed (which smelled of fabric softener and store-bought laundry soap), trying to get comfortable. Once an ambulance or police siren had blared all of a sudden, red light snapping on and off through the window, painting the lace bloodred.

  Now she and Mama were north of the city. They had taken a cross-town bus, found seats among the sad-looking travelers out this early, and walked through the busy “Ave” and uphill to the sprawling University of Washington.

  They stood at the edge of something called Red Square. For as far as Leni could see, the ground had been layered in red brick. A large red obelisk pointed up at the blue sky. More brick buildings created a perimeter.

  There were literally hundreds of students moving through the square; they came and went in laughing, chattering waves. Off to her left, a group dressed all in black was holding up protest signs about nuclear power and weapons. Several demanded a shutdown of something called Hanford.

  She was reminded of the college kids she’d seen in Homer every summer, clots of young adults in REI rain gear looking up at the jagged, snowcapped peaks as though they heard God calling their names. She would hear whispered conversations about how they were going to chuck it all and move off the grid and live more authentic lives. Back to the land, they’d said, as if it were biblical verse. Like the famous John Muir quote—The mountains are calling and I must go. People heard those kinds of voices in Alaska, dreamed new dreams. Most would never go, and of the few who did, the vast majority would leave before the end of their first winter, but Leni had always known they would be changed simply by the magnitude of the dream and the possibility they glimpsed in the distance.

  Leni drifted through the crowd alongside her mother, clutching the small backpack she’d had since she was twelve years old. Her Alaska backpack. It felt totemic, the last durable remnant of a discarded life. She wished she’d been able to bring her Winnie the Pooh lunch box.

  They arrived at their destination: a sugary pink Gothic building with sweeping arches and delicate spires and intricately scrolled windows.

  Inside was a library unlike any Leni had ever seen. Row upon row of wooden desks, decorated with green banker’s lamps, were positioned beneath an arched ceiling. Gothic chandeliers hung above the desks. And the books! She’d never seen so many. They whispered to her of unexplored worlds and unmet friends and she realized that she wasn’t alone in this new world. Her friends were here, spine out, waiting for her as they always had. If only Matthew could see this …

  She walked in step with her mother, their clunky boot heels clattering on the floor. Leni kept expecting people to look up, to point them out as intruders, but the students in the Graduate Reading Room didn’t care about strangers in their midst.

  Even the librarian didn’t seem to make any judgments about them as she listened to their questions and gave them directions to another desk, where another librarian listened to their request.

  “Here you go,” the second librarian said, handing them a collection of bound newspapers.

  Mama said, “Thank you,” and sat down. Leni doubted the librarian heard the tremble in Mama’s voice, but Leni did.

  She sat down on the wooden bench next to Mama, scooted close.

  It didn’t take much time to find what they were looking for.

  KANEQ FAMILY MISSING

  FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED

  State authorities released information about a missing Kaneq family. Neighbor Marge Birdsall called State Troopers on November 13 to report her neighbor, Cora Allbright, and her daughter, Lenora, missing. “They were supposed to visit me yesterday. They never showed. I worried right off that Ernt had hurt them,” said Birdsall.

  On November 14, Thomas Walker reported finding an abandoned truck not far from his homestead. The vehicle—registered to Ernt Allbright—was found at Mile Marker 12 on the Kaneq road. Authorities reported finding blood on the seat and steering wheel, as well as Cora Allbright’s purse.

  “We are investigating this as both a missing persons and as a potential homicide,” said Officer Curt Ward of Homer. Neighbors reported that Ernt Allbright had a history of violence and they fear he killed his wife and daughter and ran off.

  No additional information is available for release at this time, as the investigation is ongoing.

  Anyone with information on any of the Allbrights is asked to call Officer Ward.

  Mama leaned back, sighing quietly.

  Leni saw the pain Mama carried and would now always carry—for all of it, for staying when she should have left, for loving him, for killing him. What came of pain like that? Did it slowly dissipate or did it congeal and turn poisonous?

  “Dad says they’ll declare us dead at some point—but it might take seven years.”

  “Seven years?”

  “We have to go forward, learn to be happy, or what was it all for?”

  Happy.

  The word had no buoyancy for Leni, no lift. To be honest, she couldn’t imagine ever being happy again, not really.

  “Yeah,” Leni said, trying to smile. “We’ll be happy now.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  That evening, after dinner, Leni sat on her twin bed, reading. The Stand by Stephen King. In the past week, she’d read three books by him and discovered a new passion. Goodbye science fiction and fantasy, hello horror.

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