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 na?ve 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.