“Fatal mistakes often look ordinary. Come,” Mama said, leading her into the cabin. “Sit by the fire. I’ll comb your hair. It’s a mess. You’re lucky he’s not one to notice a thing like that.”
Leni grabbed a three-legged stool and dragged it over to the woodstove. She sat down on it, hooking her bare feet on the bottom rung, unbraiding her hair as she waited.
Mama pulled a wide-toothed comb from the blue coffee can on her makeshift vanity and slowly began combing the tangles out of Leni’s waist-length hair. Then she massaged Leni’s scalp with oil and smoothed some of the fragrant balm-of-Gilead rub they made from the buds onto Leni’s rough hands. “You think you got away with it this time and so you want to see Matthew again. That’s what you were really thinking, right?”
Of course Mama knew.
“I’ll be smarter next time,” Leni said.
“There won’t be a next time, Leni.” Mama took Leni by the shoulders, turned her around on the stool. “You will wait until college, like we talked about. We will do as we planned. In September, you’ll see Matthew in Anchorage and start your life.”
“I’ll die if I don’t see him.”
“No. You won’t. Please, Leni, think about me instead of yourself.”
Leni was ashamed of herself, embarrassed by her selfishness. “I’m sorry, Mama. You’re right. I don’t know what came over me.”
“Sex changes everything,” Mama said quietly.
*
A WEEK LATER, while Mama and Leni were eating oatmeal for breakfast, the cabin door opened. Dad strode inside, his dark hair and flannel shirt dusted with wood chips. “Come with me. Both of you. Hurry!”
Leni followed her parents out of the cabin and toward the driveway. Dad was walking fast, really covering ground. Mama stumbled along beside him, struggling to keep up on the spongy ground.
Leni heard her mother say, “Oh, my God,” in a whisper, and Leni looked up.
The wall her dad had been building all summer was in front of them. Finished. Plank after plank of newly milled wood ran in a straight line, topped in coiled razor wire. It looked like something out of the Gulag.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Now there was a gate across the driveway; a length of heavy metal chain kept the gate closed. A metal lock hung from loops in the chain. Leni saw the key hanging from a chain around her father’s throat.
Dad pulled Mama in close. He was smiling now. He leaned in, whispered something in Mama’s ear, and kissed the small purple bruise at the base of her throat.
“Now it’s just us, in here, cut off from the whole damn backstabbing world,” he said. “We’ll be safe now.”
*
FEAR, LENI LEARNED, was not the small, dark closet she’d always imagined: walls pressed in close, a ceiling you bumped your head on, a floor cold to the touch.
No.
Fear was a mansion, one room after another, connected by endless hallways.
In the days following the closing of the gate, with its rattling chain, Leni learned the feel of those rooms. At night, in her bed, she lay in the loft and tried not to sleep, because sleep brought on nightmares. The fear she battled during daylight besieged her at night. She dreamed of her death in a hundred ways—drowning, falling through ice, plummeting down a mountainside, being shot in the head.
Metaphors, all of them. The death of every dream she’d ever had and those she’d yet to dream.
Dad hovered beside them all the time, talking as if nothing were wrong, in a good humor for the first time since his banishment from the Harlan place. He teased, he laughed, he worked alongside them. At night Leni lay listening to the sound of her parents’ voices, of their lovemaking. Mama was good at pretending everything was normal. Leni had lost that childhood ability.
What she thought, over and over and over again, was: We need to run.
*
“WE HAVE TO LEAVE HIM,” Leni said on Saturday morning, a week to the day since he’d locked the gate shut. It was the first time Dad had left them alone together.
Mama paused, her hands softening on the pile of dough she was kneading. “He’ll kill me,” she whispered.
“Don’t you get it, Mama? He’s going to kill you in here. Sooner or later. Think about winter coming. The dark. The cold. And us in here, locked behind that wall. He’s not going to work the pipeline this winter. It’ll be just him and us in the dark. Who will stop him or help us?”
Mama glanced nervously at the door. “Where would we go?”
“Large Marge offered to help. So did the Walkers.”
“Not Tom. That would make it worse.”
“College starts in three and a half weeks, Mama. I have to leave as soon as I can. Will you go with me?”
“Maybe you should go without me.”
Leni had known this was coming. She had wrestled with it and finally come to an answer. “I have to go, Mama. I can’t live this way, but I need you. I’m afraid … I won’t be able to leave you.”
“Peas in a pod,” Mama said, sounding sad. But she understood. They had always been together. “You need to go. I want you to go. I couldn’t forgive myself if you didn’t, so what’s your plan?”
“The first chance we get, we run. Maybe he goes hunting and we take the boat. Whatever the opportunity is, we take it. If we’re still here when the first leaf falls, it’s all over.”
“So we just run. With nothing.”
“We run with our lives.”
Mama glanced away. It was a long, long time before she nodded and said, “I’ll try.”
It was not the answer Leni wanted, but it was the best she was going to get. She only prayed that when the opportunity for escape arose, Mama would go with her.
*
THE WEATHER BEGAN to change. Here and there, bright green leaves turned golden, tangerine, scarlet. Birch trees that had been invisible all year, lost amid the other trees, appeared boldly in the forefront, their bark white as the wings of a dove, their leaves like a million candle flames.
With every leaf that changed color, Leni’s tension increased. It was nearing the end of August now—early for autumn to arrive, but Alaska was capricious that way.
Although she and Mama had never spoken of their escape plan again, it lived in the air between sentences. Every time Dad left the cabin they looked at each other, and in that look, a question. Is this the time?
Today Leni and her mother were making blueberry syrup when Dad came in from outside. He was dirty and sweaty, with a fine layer of black dust on his damp face. For the first time, Leni noticed gray strands in his beard. He wore his hair in a low, haphazard ponytail and had tied a bicentennial bandanna across his forehead. He came forward, his rubber boots clomping on the plywood floor. He went into the kitchen, saw what Mama was making for dinner. “Again?” he said, peering down at the salmon croquettes. “No vegetables?”
“I’m conserving. We’re out of flour and low on rice. I’ve told you that,” Mama said wearily. “If you’d let me go to town…”
“You should go to Homer, Dad. Stock up for winter,” Leni said, hoping she sounded casual.
“I don’t think it’s safe to leave you two here alone.”
“The wall keeps us safe,” Leni said.
“Not completely. At high tide someone could come in by boat,” Dad said. “Who knows what could happen when I’m gone? Maybe we all should go. Get what we need from that bitch in town.”
Mama looked at Leni.
This is it, Leni’s gaze said.
Mama shook her head. Her eyes widened. Leni understood her mother’s fear; they had talked about the both of them sneaking away while he was gone, not running away while he was with them. But the weather was changing; the nights were growing cold, which meant that winter was approaching. Classes at U of A started in less than a week. This was their chance to run. If they planned it right—
“Let’s go,” Dad said. “Right now.” He clapped his hands. At the sharp sound, Mama flinched.
Leni glanced longingly at her bug-out bag, full—always—of everything she needed to survive in the wild. She couldn’t bring it without arousing suspicion.
They would have to make their escape with nothing except the clothes they were wearing.
Dad grabbed a shotgun from the rack by the door and held it over his shoulder.
Was it a warning?