After two terrible, freezing nights, Matthew moved for the first time. He didn’t wake up, didn’t open his eyes, but he moaned and made this terrible clicking sound, like he was suffocating.
A trapezoid of blue sky hung above them. It had finally stopped raining. Leni saw the rock face clearly, all the ridges and indentations and footholds. He was burning up with fever. Leni made him swallow more aspirin and poured the last of the Bactine on his wound and rewrapped it in new gauze
and duct tape.
Still, she could feel the life ebbing out of him. There was no him in the broken body beside her. “Don’t leave me, Matthew…”
A distant whirring sound reached down into the darkness, the thwop- thwop-thwop of a helicopter.
She unwound from Matthew and scrambled into the mud. “We’re here!” she shouted, sloshing to the break in the rocks where the sky showed.
She flattened herself to the sheer rock wall, waved her good arm, screaming, “We’re here! Down here!”
She heard dogs barking, the buzz of human voices. A flashlight shone down on her.
“Lenora Allbright,” yelled a man in a brown uniform. “Is that you?”
* * *
“WE’RE TAKING YOU UP FIRST, Lenora,” someone said. She couldn’t see his face in the mix of sunlight and shadow.
“No! Matthew first. He’s … worse.”
The next thing she knew, she was being strapped into a cage and hauled up the sheer wall. The cage banged into rock, clanged. Pain ricocheted in her chest, down her arm.
The cage landed on solid ground with a clatter. Sunlight blinded her. There were men in uniforms all around, dogs barking wildly. Whistles being blown.
She closed her eyes again, felt herself being transported to the grassy patch up the trail, heard the thwop-thwop-thwop of a helicopter. “I want to wait for Matthew,” she yelled.
“You’ll be fine, miss,” someone in a uniform said, his face too close, his nose spread like a mushroom in the middle of his face. “We’re airlifting you to the hospital in Anchorage.”
“Matthew,” she said, clutching his collar with her one good hand, yanking him close.
She saw his face change. “The boy? He’s behind you. We’ve got him.” He didn’t say Matthew would be fine.
* * *
LENI OPENED HER EYES SLOWLY, saw a strip of overhead lighting above her, a line of glowing white against an acoustical tile ceiling. The room smelled cloyingly sweet, full of flower arrangements and balloons. Her ribs were wrapped so tightly it hurt to breathe and her broken arm was in a cast. The window beside her revealed a pale purple sky.
“There’s my baby girl,” Mama said. The left side of her face was swollen and her forehead was black and blue. Wrinkled, dirty clothes told the tale of a mother’s worry. She kissed Leni’s forehead, pushed the hair gently away from her eyes.
“You’re okay,” Leni said, relieved.
“I’m okay, Leni. You’re the one we’ve been worried about.” “How did they find us?”
“We looked everywhere. I was beside myself with worry. Everyone was. Tom finally remembered a place his wife had loved to camp. He went
looking and found the truck. Search and Rescue saw some broken branches on Bear Claw Ridge where you fell. Thank God.”
“Matthew tried to save me.”
“I know. You told the paramedics about a dozen times.” “How is he?”
Mama touched Leni’s bruised cheek. “He’s in bad shape. They don’t know if he’ll make it through the night.”
Leni struggled to sit up. Every breath and movement hurt. There was a needle stuck in the back of her hand, and around it a strip of flesh-colored tape over a purple bruise. She eased the needle out, threw it aside.
“What are you doing?” Mama asked. “You have two broken ribs.” “I need to see Matthew.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“I don’t care.” She swung her bare, bruised, scratched legs over the side of the bed and stood. Mama moved in close, became a stanchion of support. Together, they shuffled away from the bed.
At the door, Mama lifted the curtain and looked through the window, then nodded. They slipped out; Mama closed the door quietly behind them. Leni inched painfully forward on stockinged feet, following her mother down one corridor to the next until they came to the brilliantly lit, coldly efficient-looking area called the intensive care unit.
“Wait here,” Mama said. She went on ahead, checking rooms. At the last one on the right, she turned back, motioned for Leni to follow.
On the door behind her mother, Leni saw WALKER, MATTHEW written on a clipboard in a clear plastic sleeve.
“This may be hard,” Mama said. “He looks bad.” Leni opened the door, went inside.
There were machines everywhere, thunking and humming and whirring, making a sound like human breathing.
The boy in the bed couldn’t be Matthew.
His head was shaved and covered in bandages; gauze crisscrossed his face, the white fabric tinged pink by blood seepage. One eye was covered by a protective cup; the other was swollen shut. His leg was elevated, suspended about eighteen inches above the bed by a leather sling, and so
swollen it looked more like a tree trunk than a boy’s leg. All she could see of it were his big, purple toes peeking out from the bandages. A tube in his slack mouth connected him to a machine that lifted and fell in breaths, inflated and deflated his chest. Breathing for him.
Leni took hold of his hot, dry hand.
He was here, fighting for his life because of her, because he loved her.
She leaned down, whispered, “Don’t leave me, Matthew. Please. I love you.”
After that, she didn’t know what to say.
She stood there as long as she could, hoping he could feel her touch, hear her breathing, understand her words. It felt like hours had passed when Mama finally pulled her away from the bed, said, “No arguments,” firmly, and led her back to her own room and helped her back into bed.
“Where’s Dad?” Leni said at last.
“He’s in jail, thanks to Marge and Tom.” She tried to smile. “Good,” Leni said, and saw her mother flinch.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, Leni woke slowly. She had a split second of blessed amnesia, then the truth tackled her. She saw Mama slumped in a chair by the door.
“Is he alive?” Leni asked.
“He made it through the night.”
Before Leni could process this, there was a knock at the door.
Mama turned as Mr. Walker entered. He looked exhausted, as haggard and unmoored as Leni felt.
“Hey, Leni.” He pulled the trucker’s cap off his head, crushed it nervously in his big hands. His gaze moved to Mama, barely landing before it returned to Leni. A wordless conversation took place between them, excluded Leni. “Large Marge and Thelma and Tica are here. Clyde is taking care of your animals.”
“Thank you,” Mama said.
“How is Matthew?” Leni asked, struggling to sit up, wheezing at the pain in her chest.
“He’s in a medically induced coma. There’s a problem with his brain, something called shearing, and he might be paralyzed. They are going to try to wake him. See if he can breathe on his own. They don’t think he’ll be able to.”
“They think he’ll die when they unplug him?”
Mr. Walker nodded. “He’d want you there, I think.”
“Oh, Tom,” Mama said. “I don’t know. She’s hurt, and it will be too much for her to see.”
“No looking away, Mama,” Leni said, and climbed out of bed. Mr. Walker took her arm, steadied her.
Leni looked at him. “I’m the reason he’s hurt. He tried to save me. It’s my fault.”
“He couldn’t do anything else, Leni. Not after what happened to his mom. I know my son. Even if he’d known the price, he would have tried to rescue you.”
Leni wished that made her feel better, but it didn’t. “He loves you, Leni. I’m glad he found that.”
He was already talking as if Matthew were gone.
She let Mr. Walker lead her out of the room and down the hall. She felt her mother behind her; every now and then she would reach out, brush her fingertips against the small of Leni’s back.
They entered Matthew’s room. Alyeska was already there, with her back to the wall. “Hey, Len,” Alyeska said.
Len.
Just like her brother.
Alyeska hugged Leni. They didn’t know each other well, but tragedy created a kind of family relationship between them. “He would have tried to save you no matter what. It’s who he is.”
Leni couldn’t answer.
The door opened and three people came into the room, dragging equipment with them. In the lead was a man in a white coat; behind him were two nurses in orange scrubs.
“You’ll need to stand over there,” the doctor said to Leni and Mama. “Except for you, Dad. You come stand by the bed.”
Leni moved to the wall, stood with her back pressed to it. There was barely any distance between her and Alyeska, but it seemed like an ocean; on one shore, the sister who loved him, on the other, the girl who’d been the cause of his fall. Alyeska reached over and held Leni’s hand.
The medical team moved efficiently around Matthew’s bed, nodding and talking to one another, taking notes, checking machines, recording vital signs.
Then the doctor said, “Okay?”
Mr. Walker leaned down and whispered something to Matthew and kissed his bandaged forehead, murmured words Leni couldn’t hear. When he drew back, he was crying. He turned to the doctor and nodded.
Slowly, the tube was pulled out of Matthew’s mouth. An alarm sounded.
Leni heard Alyeska say, “Come on, Mattie. You can do it.” She pulled away from the wall, stepped forward, brought Leni with her.
And Mr. Walker: “You’re a tough kid. Fight.” An alarm sounded.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The nurses exchanged a knowing look.
Leni knew she shouldn’t speak, but there was no way to hold back. “Don’t leave us, Matthew … please…”
Mr. Walker gave Leni a terrible, agonized look. Matthew took a great, gulping, gasping breath. The alarm silenced itself.
“He’s breathing on his own,” the doctor said.
He’s back, Leni thought with a staggering relief. He’ll be fine.
“Thank God,” Mr. Walker said on a sigh.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” the doctor said, and the room went quiet. “Matthew may breathe on his own but never wake up. He may remain in a persistent vegetative state. If he does wake, he may have substantial cognitive impairment. Breathing is one thing. Life is another.”
“Don’t say that,” Leni said too softly for anyone to hear. “He might hear you.”
“He will be okay,” Aly murmured. “He’ll wake up and smile and say he’s hungry. He’s always hungry. He’ll want one of his books.”
“He’s a fighter,” Mr. Walker added.
Leni couldn’t say anything. The high she’d felt when he took that first breath had gone. Like getting to the top of a roller coaster: there was a nanosecond of pure exhilaration before the headlong plunge into fear.
* * *
“THEY’RE DISCHARGING YOU TODAY,” Mama said while Leni stared up at the television suspended on the wall in her hospital room. Radar was babbling some story to Hawkeye on M*A*S*H. Leni hit the off button. She’d spent years wishing she could watch TV. Now she couldn’t care less.
Really, she had trouble caring about anything except Matthew. Her emotions were impossible to access. “I don’t want to go.”
“I know,” Mama said, stroking her hair. “But we have to leave.” “Where will we go?”
“Home. But don’t worry. Your dad’s in jail.” Home.
Four days ago, when she’d been in that crevice with Matthew, hoping against hope that they’d be rescued before he died in her arms, she’d told herself they’d be okay. Matthew would be fine, they’d go to college together, and Mama would come to Anchorage with them, get an apartment, maybe serve drinks at Chilkoot Charlie’s and collect big tips. Two days ago, when she’d watched them pull the tube from Matthew’s mouth and seen him breathe on his own, she’d had a split second of hope, and then it had crashed on the rocks of may never wake up.
Now she saw the truth.
There would be no college for her and Matthew, no do-over as a pair of ordinary kids in love.
There was no way to lie to herself anymore, to dream of happy endings.
All she could do was be there for Matthew and keep on loving him.
I think you stand by the people you love. That was what he’d said, and it was what she would do.
“Can I see Matthew before I go?”
“No. He’s got an infection in his leg. They won’t even let Tom get near him. But we’ll come back as soon as we can.”
“Okay.”
Leni felt nothing as she dressed to go home. Nothing.
She shuffled through the hallway beside her mother, the casted arm held in close to her body, nodding at the nurses who told her goodbye.
Did she smile in acknowledgment? She didn’t think so. Even that small a thing was beyond her. This grief was unlike any emotion she’d experienced before, suffocating, weighty. It pulled the color from everything.
They found Mr. Walker in the main waiting area, pacing, drinking black coffee from a Styrofoam cup. Alyeska was seated in a chair beside him, reading a magazine. At their entrance, both tried to smile.
“I’m sorry,” Leni said to them.
Mr. Walker came closer. He touched her chin, forced her to look up. “No more of that,” he said. “We Alaskans are tough, right? Our boy will pull through. He’ll survive. You’ll see.”
But wasn’t it Alaska that had nearly killed him? How could a place be as alive as Alaska, as beautiful and cruel?
No. It wasn’t Alaska’s fault. It was hers. Leni was Matthew’s second mistake.
Alyeska moved in beside her father. “Don’t you give up on him, Leni. He’s a tough kid. He made it through Mom’s death. He’ll get through this, too.”
“How will I know how he’s doing?” Leni asked.
“I’ll give updates on the radio. Peninsula Pipeline. Seven P.M. broadcast. Listen for them,” Mr. Walker said. “We’ll bring him home as soon as we can. He’ll recover better around us.”
Leni nodded numbly.
Mama led her out to the truck and they climbed in.
On the long drive home, Mama chatted nervously. She pointed out the extreme low tide in Turnagain Arm and the cars parked at the Bird House Tavern in the middle of the day and the crowd of people fishing at the Russian River (combat fishing, they called it, people stood so close
together). Usually Leni loved this drive. She’d search the high ridges for specks of white that were Dall sheep and she’d scour the inlet for the sleek, eerie-looking white beluga whales that sometimes appeared.
Now she just sat silently, her one good hand lying in her lap.
In Kaneq, they drove off the ferry, rumbled over the textured metal ramp, and rolled past the old Russian church.
Leni took care not to look at the saloon as they drove past. Even so, she saw the CLOSED sign on its door and the flowers laid in front. Nothing else had changed. They drove to the end of the road and through the open gate onto their property. There, Mama parked in front of the cabin and got out. She came around to Leni’s side, opened the door.
Leni slid sideways, grateful for her mother’s firm grip as they walked through the tall grass. The goats bleated, packed in together, and stood in a clot at the chicken-wire gate.
Inside the cabin, buttery August sunlight streamed through the dirty windows, thickened by motes of dust.
The cabin was spotless. No broken glass, no lanterns fallen on the floor, no overturned chairs. No sign of what had happened here.
And it smelled good, of roasting meat. Almost exactly when Leni noticed the scent, Dad came out of the bedroom.
Mama gasped.
Leni felt nothing, certainly not surprise.
He stood there facing them, his long hair pulled back into a squiggly ponytail. His face was bruised, a little misshapen. One eye was black. He was wearing the same clothes Leni had last seen him in and there were dried flecks of blood on his neck.
“Y-you’re out,” Mama said.
“You didn’t press charges,” he answered. Mama’s face turned red. She didn’t look at Leni.
He moved toward Mama. “Because you love me and you know I didn’t mean any of it. You know how sorry I am. It won’t happen again,” he promised as he reached for her.
Leni didn’t know if it was fear or love or habit or a poisonous combination of all three, but Mama reached out, too. Her pale fingers
threaded through his dirty ones, curled in to take hold.
He pulled her into his arms, held on to her so tightly he must have thought they’d be swept away, one without the other. When they finally pulled apart, he turned to Leni. “I heard he’s going to die. I’m sorry.”
Sorry.
Leni felt something then, a seismic shift in her thinking; like spring breakup, a changing of the landscape, a breaking away that was violent, immediate. She wasn’t afraid of this man anymore. Or if she was, the fear was submerged too deeply to register. All she felt was hatred.
“Leni?” he said, frowning. “I’m sorry. Say something.”
She saw what her silence did to him, how it shredded his confidence, and she decided right then: she would never speak to her father again. Let Mama slink back, let her twine herself back into this toxic knot that was their family. Leni would stay only as long as she had to. As soon as Matthew was better she would leave. If this was the life Mama chose for herself, so be it. Leni was going to leave.
As soon as Matthew was better.
“Leni?” Mama said, her voice uncertain. She, too, was confused and frightened by this change in Leni. She sensed an upheaval in emotion that could move the continents of their past.
Leni walked past them both, climbed awkwardly up the loft ladder, and crawled into bed.
* * *
Dear Matthew,
I never really knew the weight of sorrow before, how it stretches you out like an old, wet sweater. Every minute that passes with no word from you, without hope of word from you, feels like a day, every day feels like a month. I want to believe that you will just sit up one day and say you’re starving, that you’ll swing your legs out of bed and get dressed and come for me, maybe carry me off to your family’s hunting cabin, where we will burrow under the furs and love each other again. That’s the big dream. Strangely, it doesn’t hurt as much as the little dream, which is just that you open your eyes.
I know what happened to us was my fault. Meeting me ruined your life. No one can argue with that. Me, with my screwed-up family, with my dad, who wanted to kill you for loving me and who beat my mother for simply knowing about it.
My hatred of him is a poison burning me from the inside out. Every time I look at him something in me hardens. It scares me how much I hate him. I haven’t spoken to him since I got back.
He doesn’t like that, I can tell.
Honestly, I don’t know what to do with all these emotions. I’m furious, I’m desperate, I’m sad in a way I never knew existed.
There’s no outlet for my feelings, no valve to shut them down. I listen to the radio every night at seven P.M. Last night, your dad broadcast how you’re doing. I know you’re out of the coma and not paralyzed and I try to make that good enough, but it’s not. I know you can’t walk or talk and that your brain is probably irreparably damaged. That’s what the nurses said.
None of it changes how I feel. I love you.
I’m here. Waiting. I want you to know that. I’ll wait forever. Leni
* * *
LENI SAT IN THE BOW of the fishing skiff, leaned over, fluttering bare fingers through cool water, watching it cascade and pool. The cast on her other arm looked starkly white against her dirty jeans. Her broken ribs made her conscious of every breath.
She could hear her parents talking softly together; her mama was closing the cooler, full now of silvery fish. Dad started up the engine.
The boat motor started; the bow planed up as they sped for home.
At their beach, the boat crunched up onto the pebbles and sand, made a sound like sausage sizzling in a cast-iron pan. Leni jumped into the ankle- deep water, grabbed the frayed line with her one good hand, and pulled the skiff aground. She tied it to a huge, limbless driftwood log that lay angled on the beach and went back for the dripping metal net.
“That was quite a silver Mom landed,” Dad said to Leni. “I guess she’s the day’s big winner.”
Leni ignored him. Slinging the gear bag over her shoulder, she headed up the steps, making her way slowly to dry land.
Once there, she put her gear away and headed to the animal pens to check that their water was okay. She fed the goats and the chickens, stayed to turn the compost in the bin, and then started hauling water from the river. It took longer with only one strong arm. She stayed outside as long as she could, but finally she had to go inside.
Mama was in the kitchen making dinner: pan-fried, fresh-caught salmon, drizzled with homemade herb butter; green beans fried in preserved moose fat; a salad of freshly picked lettuce and tomatoes.
Leni set the table, sat down.
Dad took a seat across from her. She didn’t look up, but she heard the clatter of chair legs on the wood, the squeak of the seat as he sat down. She smelled the familiar combination of perspiration and fish and cigarette smoke. “I was thinking we would head over to Bear Cove tomorrow, pick blueberries. I know how much you love them.”
Leni didn’t look at him.
Mama came up beside Leni, holding a pewter tray of the crispy-skinned fish, with bright green beans tucked in alongside. She paused, then set it down in the middle of the table next to an old soup can full of flowers.
“Your favorite,” she said to Leni. “Uh-huh,” Leni said.
“G-damn it, Leni,” her father said. “I can’t abide this moping. You ran off. The kid fell. What’s done is done.”
Leni ignored him. “Say something.”
“Leni,” Mama said. “Please.”
Dad shoved back from the table and stormed out of the cabin, slamming the door shut behind him.
Mama sank into her chair. Leni could see how tired her mother was, how her hands trembled. “You have to stop this, Leni. It’s upsetting him.”
“So?”
“Leni … you’ll be gone soon. He’ll let you go to college now. He feels terrible about what happened. We can get him to agree. You can leave. Just like you wanted. All you have to do is—”
“No,” she said more forcefully than she meant to, and she saw the effect her shouting had on Mama, how she instinctively shrank back.
Leni wanted to care that she was frightening her mother, but she couldn’t hold on to that caring. Mama had chosen to dig for treasure through the dirt of Dad’s toxic, porous love, but not Leni. Not anymore.
She knew what her silence was doing to him, how it angered him. Each hour she didn’t speak to him, he became more agitated and irritable. More dangerous. She didn’t care.
“He loves you,” Mama said. “Ha.”
“You’re lighting a fuse, Leni. You know that.”
Leni couldn’t tell Mama how angry she was, the sharp, tiny teeth that gnawed at her all the time, shredding a little more of her away every time she looked at her father. She pushed back from the table and went to the loft to write to Matthew, trying not to think about her mother sitting down there all alone.
* * *
Dear Matthew,
I am trying not to lose hope, but you know how hard it has always been for me. Hope, I mean. It’s been four days since I last saw you. It feels like forever.
It’s funny, now that hope has become so slippery and unreliable, I realize that all those years, when I was a kid thinking I didn’t believe in hope, I was actually living on it. Mama fed me a steady diet of he’s trying and I lapped it up like a terrier. Every day I believed her. When he smiled at me or gave me a sweater or asked me how my day was, I thought, See? He cares. Even after I saw him hit her for the first time, I still let her define the world for me.
Now it is all gone.
Maybe he’s sick. Maybe Vietnam broke him. And maybe those are all excuses set at the feet of a man who is just rotting from the inside.
I don’t know anymore and as much as I try, I can’t care.
I have no hope left for him. The only hope I can hold on to is for you. For us.
I’m still here.
