“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.
* * *
ALL 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 complex 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.”
* * *
Summer in Alaska.
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.”
“Why?”
“It’s about a … killing.” “Of a human?”
Only in Alaska would that question ever be asked. “I have information on a crime.”
“Follow me.”
The uniformed woman led Leni past an empty jail cell to a closed door with a placard that read: CHIEF CURT WARD.
The woman knocked hard. Twice. At a muffled, “Come in,” she opened the door. “Chief, this young woman says she has information on a crime.”
The chief of police stood slowly. Leni remembered him from the search for Geneva Walker. His hair was trimmed into a tall crew cut. A bushy red mustache stood out against the auburn stubble that had obviously grown since he shaved this morning. He looked like a once-gung-ho high school hockey player turned small-town cop.
“Lenora Allbright,” Leni said in introduction. “My dad was Ernt Allbright. We used to live in Kaneq.”
“Holy shit. We thought you were dead. Search and Rescue went out for days looking for you and your mom. What was it, six, seven, years ago? Why didn’t you contact the police?”
Leni settled MJ in a comfortable chair and opened a book for him. Her grandfather’s advice came back to her: It’s a bad idea, Leni, but if you’re going to do it, you have to be careful, smarter than your mother ever was. Say nothing. Just give them the letter. Tell them you didn’t even know your dad was dead until your mother gave you this letter. Tell them you were running from his abuse, hiding so that he wouldn’t find you. Everything you’ve done—the changed identities, the new town, the silence—it all fits in with a family hiding from a dangerous man.
“I wanna go, Mommy,” MJ said, bouncing on the seat. “I want to see my daddy.”
“Soon, kiddo.” She kissed his forehead and then went back to the chief’s desk. Between them was a wide swath of gray metal decorated with family photographs, studded with sloppy stacks of pink while-you-were-out messages, and cluttered with fishing magazines. A fishing reel with impossibly tangled line was being used as a paperweight.
She pulled the letter out of her purse. Her hand was shaking as she handed over her mother’s confession.
Chief Ward read through the letter. Sat down. Looked up. “You know what this says?”
Leni dragged a chair over and sat down facing him. She was afraid her legs would stop supporting her. “I do.”
“So your mother shot your dad and disposed of his body and you two ran away.”
“You have the letter.”
“And where is your mother?”
“She died last week. She gave the letter to me on her deathbed and asked me to deliver it to the police. It was the first I’d heard of it. The … killing, I mean. I thought we were running from my father’s abuse. He … was violent. Sometimes. He beat her really badly one night and we ran away while he slept.”
“I’m sorry about her death.”
Chief Ward stared at Leni for a long time, his eyes narrowed. The intensity of his gaze was unsettling. She fought the urge to fidget. Finally he got up, went to a file cabinet in the back of the room, riffled through a drawer, and pulled out a folder. He dropped it on his desk, sat down, and opened it. “So. Your mother, Cora Allbright, was five-foot-six. People described her as slight, fragile, thin. And your dad was nearly six feet tall.”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“But she shot your father, dragged his body out of the house, and, what
—strapped him onto a snow machine—and drove up to Glass Lake in the winter and cut a hole in the ice, loaded him with iron traps, and dropped him. Alone. Where were you?”
Leni sat very still, her hands clasped in her lap. “I don’t know. I don’t know when it happened.” She felt the need to add on, layer words to solidify the lie, but Grandpa had told her to say as little as possible.
Chief Ward set his elbows on the desk and steepled his blunt-tipped fingers. “You could have mailed this letter.”
“I could have.”
“But that’s not who you are, is it, Lenora? You’re a good girl. An honest person. I have glowing reports about you in this file.” He leaned forward. “What happened on the night you ran away? What set him off?”
“I … found out I was pregnant,” she said.
“Matthew Walker,” he said, glancing down at the file. “People said you two kids were in love.”
“Uh-huh,” Leni said.
“Sad as hell about what happened to him. To both of you. But you got better, and he…” Chief Ward let it hang there; Leni felt her shame hang on the hook of the unspoken. “I hear your dad hated the Walkers.”
“More than hated them.”
“And when your father found out you were pregnant?”
“He went crazy. Started beating me with his fists, with his belt…” The memories she’d spent years submerging broke free.
“He was a mean son of a bitch, from what I hear.”
“Sometimes.” Leni looked away. Out of the corner of her eye she saw MJ reading his book, his mouth moving as he worked to sound out the words. She hoped these spoken words didn’t find purchase in some dark corner of his subconscious, able to rise one day.
Chief Ward pushed some papers toward her. Leni saw Allbright, Coraline in the corner. “I have sworn statements from Marge Birdsall, Natalie Watkins, Tica Rhodes, Thelma Schill, and Tom Walker. All of them testified to seeing bruises on your mother over the years. There were a lot of tears when I took these statements, I can tell you that, a lot of folks wishing they’d done things different. Thelma said she wished she’d shot your dad herself.”
“Mama never let anyone help her,” Leni said. “I still don’t know why.” “Did she ever tell anyone he beat her?”
“Not that I know of.”
“You have to tell the truth if you want real help,” Chief Ward said. Leni stared at him.
“Come on, Leni. You and I both know what happened that night. Your mom didn’t do this alone. You were a kid. It wasn’t your fault. You did what your mom asked of you, and who wouldn’t? There’s no one on the planet who wouldn’t understand. He was beating her, for God’s sake. The law will understand.”
He was right. She had been a kid. A scared, pregnant eighteen-year-old. “Let me help you,” he said. “You can get rid of this terrible burden.”
She knew what her mother and grandparents wanted her to do now: to keep lying, to say Leni hadn’t witnessed the murder or the drive to Glass Lake or her father sinking into the icy water.
To say: not me.
She could blame it all on Mama and stick to that story.
And forever be a woman with this dark, terrible secret. A liar.
Mama had wanted Leni to come home, but home was not just a cabin in a deep woods that overlooked a placid cove. Home was a state of mind, the peace that came from being who you were and living an honest life. There was no going halfway home. She couldn’t build a new life on the creaky foundation of a lie. Not again. Not for home.
“The truth will set you free, Leni. Isn’t that what you want? Why you’re here? Tell me what really happened that night.”
“He hit me when he found out about the baby, hard enough to fracture my cheek and break my nose. I … I don’t remember all of it, just him hitting me. Then I heard Mama say, Not my Leni, and a gunshot. I … saw blood seep across his shirt. She shot him twice in the back. To stop him from killing me.”
“And you helped her get rid of his body.”
Leni hesitated. The compassion in his eyes made her say quietly, “And I helped her get rid of the body.”
Chief Ward sat there a moment, looking down at the records in front of him. He appeared ready to say something, then changed his mind. He
opened his desk drawer (it made a scratchy, creaking sound) and pulled out a piece of paper and a pen. “Can you write it all down?”
“I’ve told you everything.”
“I need it on paper. Then we’ll be done. Don’t lose steam now, Leni.
You’re so close to the end. You want all of this behind you, right?”
Leni reached for the pen and pulled the paper toward her. At first she just stared down at the blank page. “Maybe I should ask for a lawyer? My grandfather would recommend that. He’s a lawyer.”
“You can do that,” he said. “It’s what guilty people do.” He reached for the phone. “Shall I call for one?”
“You believe me, right? I didn’t kill him and Mama didn’t want to. The law knows about battered women now.”
“Of course. And besides, you’ve already told me the truth.”
“So I just have to write it down and I’ll be done? I can go to Kaneq?” He nodded.
What difference did it make to write the words? She began slowly, word by word, rebuilding the scene of that terrible night. The fists, the belt, the blood, the gore. The frozen trek to the lake. The last image of her father’s face, ivory in the moonlight, sinking into water. The sound of ice slushing over the rim of the hole.
The only omission was about Large Marge’s help. She mentioned nothing about her at all. She didn’t mention her grandparents, either, or where she and Mama had gone when they left Alaska.
She ended with: We flew from Homer to Anchorage and then left Alaska.
She pushed the paper across the desk. Chief Ward looked down at her confession.
“I’m done reading, Mommy,” MJ said. She waved him over.
He slapped the book shut and half charged across the room. He climbed up onto her lap like a monkey. Even though he was too big, she held him, let him stay, his skinny legs hanging as he kicked the metal desk with his sneaker toe. Bang. Bang. Bang.
Chief Ward looked at her. “You’re under arrest,” he said.
Leni felt the world literally drop out from under her. “But … you said we’d be done if I wrote it down.”
“You and I are done. Now it’s up to someone else.” He shoved a hand through his hair. “I wish you hadn’t come in here.”
All the warnings over the years. How had she forgotten? She’d let her need for forgiveness and redemption trump common sense. “What do you mean?”
“This is out of my hands, Leni. It’s up to the court now. I am going to have to lock you up, at least until your arraignment. If you can’t afford an attorney—”
“Mommy?” MJ said, frowning.
The chief read Leni her Miranda rights from a sheet of paper, then finished up with: “Unless you know someone who can take your son, he’s going to have to go to Social Services. They’ll take good care of him. I promise.”
Leni couldn’t believe she’d been so stupid and naïve. How could she not have seen this coming? She’d been warned. And still she’d believed the police. She knew how unforgiving the law could be to women.
She wanted to rail and scream and cry and throw furniture, but it was too late for that. She’d made a terrible mistake. There couldn’t be another. “Tom Walker,” she said.
“Tom?” Chief Ward frowned. “Why would I call him?” “Just call him. Tell him I need help. He’ll come for me.” “What you need is a lawyer.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Tell him that, too.”
