Falling snow turned Homer into a blurred landscape of muted colors and washed-out skies. The few people out and about were either seeing the world through dirty windshields or looking up at it with tucked-in chins. No one noticed a girl in a huge parka, hood up, scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face, trudging downhill.
Leni’s face hurt like hell, her nose throbbed, but none of it was the worst of her pain. At Airport Road, the snow let up a little. She turned and headed to the airfield. At the door to the airfield office, she paused and pulled her turtleneck up over her torn lip.
The office was small and constructed of wood and corrugated metal with a sharply slanted roof. It looked like an oversized chicken coop. Behind it, she saw a small plane out on the airstrip, revving its engine. The sign for Glass Lake Aviation was missing two letters, so the sign read: ASS LAKE AVIATION. It had been that way for as long as Leni could remember. The owner said he’d fixed it once and that was plenty. Supposedly schoolkids stole the letters for fun.
Inside, the place looked unfinished, too: a floor made of mismatched peel-and-stick linoleum tiles, a plywood counter, a small display of brochures for tourists, a bathroom behind a broken door. A stack of boxes stood by the back door—supplies recently delivered or soon to be shipped.
Mama sat in a white plastic chair, with a scarf coiled around the lower half of her face and a hat covering her blond hair. Leni sat down beside her in a floral overstuffed recliner that some cat had clawed to ribbons.
In front of them, a Formica coffee table was littered with magazines.
Leni was tired of crying, of feeling this grief that kept opening and closing inside of her, but even so, she felt tears sting her eyes.
Mama put her cigarette out in the empty Coke can on the table in front of her. Smoke sizzled up, wafted into nothingness. She leaned back, sighing.
“How was he?” Mama asked.
“The same.” Leni leaned against her mama, needing the solid warmth of her body. She reached into her pocket and felt something sharp.
The present Mr. Walker had given her from Matthew. In all that had happened, she’d forgotten about it. She pulled it out, stared down at the small, thin gift, wrapped in newsprint, upon which Matthew had written: HAPPY BIRTHDAY LENI!
Her eighteenth birthday had gone by almost unnoticed this year, but Matthew had been planning for it. Maybe he’d had an idea about how to celebrate it.
She peeled the newsprint back, folded it carefully into something she would save. (He’d touched it while thinking of her.) Inside, she found a slim white box. Inside of that, a piece of yellowed, ripped-edge newsprint carefully folded.
It was a newspaper article and an old black-and-white photograph of two homesteaders, holding hands. They were surrounded by sled dogs, sitting in mismatched chairs in front of a tiny, mossy-roofed cabin. Junk decorated the yard. A towheaded boy sat in the dirt. Leni recognized the yard and the deck: these were Matthew’s grandparents.
Across the bottom, Matthew had written, THIS COULD BE US.
Leni’s eyes stung. She held the photograph to her heart and looked down at the article.
MY ALASKA by Lily Malker July 4, 1972
You think you know what wild means. It’s a word you’ve used all your life. You use it to describe an animal, your hair, an undisciplined child. In Alaska, you learn what wild really means.
My husband, Eckhart, and I came to this place separately, which may not seem important, but certainly is. We had each decided on our
own, and not when we were young, I might add, that civilization was not for us. It was the middle of the Great Depression. I lived in a shack with my parents and six siblings. There was never enough of anything—not time, not money, not food, not love.
What made me think of Alaska? Even now, I don’t recall. I was thirty-five years old, on the shelf, they called us spinsters then. My youngest sister died—of a broken heart maybe, or of the despair that came with watching her own babies suffer—and I walked away.
Just like that. I had ten dollars in my pocket and no real skills and I headed West. Of course I went West, for the romance of it. In Seattle, I saw a sign for Alaska. They were looking for women to do laundry for men in the gold fields.
I thought, “I can wash clothes,” and I went.
It was hard work, with men catcalling all the time, and my skin hardening until it was like leather. Then I met Eckhart. He was ten years older than me, and not much to look at, if I’m being truthful.
He caught my eye and told me his dream of homesteading the Kenai Peninsula. When he held out his hand, I took it. Did I love him? No. Not then. Not for years, really, although when he died, it was like God had reached in and yanked the heart out of my chest.
Wild. That’s how I describe it all. My love. My life. Alaska. Truthfully, it’s all the same to me. Alaska doesn’t attract many; most are too tame to handle life up here. But when she gets her hooks in you, she digs deep and holds on, and you become hers. Wild. A lover of cruel beauty and splendid isolation. And God help you, you can’t live anywhere else.
“What do you have there?” Mama asked, exhaling smoke.
Leni carefully folded the article into quarters. “An article by Matthew’s grandma. She died a few years before we came to Alaska.” The photograph of Matthew’s grandparents—dated 1940—sat on her lap. “How will I stop loving him, Mama? Will I … forget?”
Mama sighed. “Ah. That. Love doesn’t fade or die, baby girl. People tell you it does, but it doesn’t. If you love him now, you’ll love him in ten years
and in forty. Differently, maybe, a faded version, but he’s part of you now. And you are part of him.”
Leni didn’t know if that was comforting or frightening. If she felt like this forever, as if her heart were an open wound, how would she ever be happy again?
“But love doesn’t come just once in your life, either. Not if you’re lucky.”
“I don’t think we Allbrights are lucky,” Leni said.
“I don’t know. You found him once, in the middle of nowhere. What were the chances that you’d meet him, that he’d love you, that you’d love him? I’d say, lucky you.”
“And then we fell down into a crevice, he got brain damaged and you killed Dad to protect me.”
“Yeah. Well. The glass can be half empty or half full.”
Leni knew the glass was broken. “Where are we going?” she asked. “Do you really care?”
“No.”
“We’re going back to Seattle. It’s all I could think of. Thanks to Large Marge, we’re flying and not hitchhiking.”
The door opened, bringing in a rush of ice-cold air. A woman in a brown parka appeared, a Cowichan tuque pulled low on her forehead. “Plane’s ready for take-off. Flight to Anchorage.”
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 have released information regarding a missing family from Kaneq. On November 13, neighbor Marge Birdsall contacted State Troopers to report the disappearance of Cora Allbright and her daughter, Lenora. “They were supposed to visit me yesterday, but they never showed. I was immediately worried that Ernt had hurt them,” Birdsall stated.
On November 14, Thomas Walker reported discovering an abandoned truck near his property. The vehicle, registered to Ernt Allbright, was found at Mile Marker 12 on the Kaneq road. Authorities noted blood on the seat and steering wheel, as well as the presence of Cora Allbright’s purse. “We are investigating this as both a missing persons case and a potential homicide,” said Officer Curt Ward of Homer. Neighbors have reported that Ernt Allbright has a history of violence, and they fear he may have killed his wife and daughter before fleeing.
No further information is available at this time, as the investigation is ongoing. Anyone with information about the Allbrights is urged to contact 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.”
