“Right after Labor Day.”
Mama nodded. “Okay. You’re going to have to be careful. Smart. Don’t risk everything for a kiss. That’s the kind of thing I would have done. Here’s what we’ll do: You stay away from Matthew and the Walkers until September. I will squirrel away enough money to buy you a bus ticket to Anchorage. We’ll fill your bug-out bag with what you need. Then, one day, I’ll arrange for a trip to Homer for all of us. You’ll say you have to use the bathroom and slip away. Later, when Dad calms down, I’ll find a note you left, saying that you’ve gone to college—without saying where—and you’ll promise to be back on the homestead for summer. It will work. You’ll see. If we’re careful, it will work.”
Don’t see Matthew until September.
Yes. That was what she would need to do.
But could she do it, really? Her love for Matthew was elemental, as powerful as the tide. No one could hold back the tide.
It reminded her of that movie she’d watched with Mama a lifetime ago. Splendor in the Grass. In it, Natalie Wood had loved Warren Beatty in that overwhelming way, but she lost him and ended up in a loony bin. When she got out, he was married, with a kid, but you knew neither one of them would love anyone else in that way again.
Mama had cried and cried.
Leni hadn’t understood then. Now she did. She saw how love could be dangerous and beyond control. Ravenous. Leni had it in her to love the way her mother did. She knew that now.
“Seriously, Leni,” Mama said, looking worried. “You will need to be smart.”
*
IN JUNE, Dad worked on his wall every day. By the end of the month, the skinned log stanchions were all in place; they stuck up from the ground every ten feet along the property line, an elliptical boundary between their land and the main road.
Leni tried to submerge her longing for Matthew, but it was buoyant, prone to bobbing up. Sometimes, when she was supposed to be working, she stopped and pulled the secret necklace out of her hip pocket and held it so tightly the sharp point drew blood. She made lists in her head of things she wanted to say to him, had whole conversations by herself, over and over. At night she read paperback novels that she’d found in the FREE box at the General Store. One after another. Devil’s Desire, The Flame and the Flower, Moonstruck Madness: historical romances about women who had to fight for love and ultimately were saved by it.
She knew the difference between fact and fiction, but she couldn’t abandon her love stories. They made her feel as if women could be in control of their destinies. Even in a cruel, dark world that tested women to the very limits of their endurance, the heroines of these novels could prevail and find true love. They gave Leni hope and a way to fill the lonely hours of the night.
During the endless daylight hours, she worked: she tended to the garden, carried trash to the oil drum and burned it to ash, which she used to fertilize the garden and make soap and block pests from the vegetable beds. She hauled water and repaired crab pots and untangled skeins of fishing nets. She fed the animals and gathered eggs and fixed fencing and smoked the fish they caught.
All the while she thought: Matthew. His name became a mantra.
Over and over, she thought: September isn’t that far away.
But as June passed into July, with Leni and Mama trapped on the homestead behind the wall her father was building, Leni started to lose her grasp on common sense. On the Fourth of July, she knew the town was celebrating on Main Street and she longed to be there.
Night after night, week after week, she lay in her bed, missing Matthew. Her love for him—a warrior, hiking mountains, crossing streams—strode into the wild borderlands of obsession.
Near the end of July, she began to have negative fantasies—him finding someone else, falling in love, deciding Leni was too much trouble. She ached for his touch, dreamed of his kiss, talked to herself in his voice. She began to get a vague, discomforting feeling that her endless yearning had combined with fear to taint her, that her breath had killed the tomatoes that never turned red, that tiny beads of her sweat had soured the blueberry jam, and next winter, when they ate all this food she had touched, her parents would wonder what had gone so wrong.
By August, she was a wreck. The wall was almost finished. The entire property line along the main road, from cliff to cliff, was a wall of freshly cut planks. Only a ten-foot-wide opening across the driveway allowed them to go in or out.
But the wall hardly concerned Leni. She had lost five pounds and was barely sleeping. Every night she woke at three or four and went out to stand on the deck, thinking, He’s there …
Twice, she’d put on her boots; once she’d made it as far as the end of their driveway before turning back.
She had Mama’s safety to consider, and Matthew’s.
Labor Day was less than a month away.
She should just wait to see Matthew in Anchorage, when time would be on their side.
That was the smart move. But she wasn’t smart in love.
She had to see him again, make sure he still loved her.
When did it become more than a longing? When did it solidify into a plan?
I need to see him.
Be with him.
Don’t do it, the old Leni said, the girl shaped by Dad’s violence and her mother’s fear.
Just once, came the answer from the Leni reformed by passion.
Just once.
But how?
*
IN EARLY AUGUST, during the eighteen-hour days, stocking up on food for the winter was paramount. They harvested the garden and canned vegetables; picked berries and made jam; fished in the ocean and the rivers and the bay. They smoked salmon and trout and halibut.
Today they’d woken early and spent all day on the river catching salmon. Fishing was serious business and no one bothered to talk much. Afterward, they hauled their catch home and got started on preserving the meat. Another in a string of long, exhausting days.
They finally took a break for dinner and went into the cabin. At the table, Mama set down a dinner of salmon pot pie and green beans cooked in bacon fat. She smiled at Leni, trying to pretend everything was okay. “Leni, I bet you’re excited for moose season to start.”
“Yeah,” she said. Her voice was shaky. All she could think about anymore was Matthew. Missing him made her physically ill.
Dad poked his fork through the flaky crust, looking for fish. “Cora, we’re going to Sterling on Saturday. There’s a snow machine for sale, and ours is going to shit. And I need some hinges for the gate. Leni, you’ll need to stay here and take care of the critters.”
Leni almost dropped her fork. Did he mean it?
Sterling was at least an hour and a half away by road, and if Dad wanted to bring home a snow machine, he’d need to drive his truck, which meant the ferry, which was a half an hour ride each way. From here to Sterling and back would take all day.
Dad went back to picking through his pot pie. When his fish was all gone, he went through looking for potatoes, then carrots, and finally peas.
Mama looked at Leni. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, Ernt. Let’s all go. I don’t like the idea of Leni home alone.”
Leni felt suspended on the silence while Dad dragged a piece of bread across his plate. “It’s uncomfortable for all three of us to be crammed into the truck for so long. She’s fine.”
*
SATURDAY FINALLY ARRIVED.
“Okay, Leni,” Dad said in his sternest voice. “It’s summer. You know what that means. Black bears. The guns are loaded. Keep the door locked if you’re inside. When you go for water, make lots of noise, take your bear whistle. We should be home by five, but if we’re late, I want you in the cabin with the door locked by eight. I don’t care how light it is outside. No fishing from the shore. Okay?”
“Dad, I’m almost eighteen. I know all that.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Eighteen only sounds old to you. Humor me.”