“Say something.”
“Leni,” Mama said. “Please.”
Dad shoved back from the table and stormed out of the cabin, slamming the door shut behind him.
Mama sank into her chair. Leni could see how tired her mother was, how her hands trembled. “You have to stop this, Leni. It’s upsetting him.”
“So?”
“Leni … you’ll be gone soon. He’ll let you go to college now. He feels terrible about what happened. We can get him to agree. You can leave. Just like you wanted. All you have to do is—”
“No,” she said more forcefully than she meant to, and she saw the effect her shouting had on Mama, how she instinctively shrank back.
Leni wanted to care that she was frightening her mother, but she couldn’t hold on to that caring. Mama had chosen to dig for treasure through the dirt of Dad’s toxic, porous love, but not Leni. Not anymore.
She knew what her silence was doing to him, how it angered him. Each hour she didn’t speak to him, he became more agitated and irritable. More dangerous. She didn’t care.
“He loves you,” Mama said.
“Ha.”
“You’re lighting a fuse, Leni. You know that.”
Leni couldn’t tell Mama how angry she was, the sharp, tiny teeth that gnawed at her all the time, shredding a little more of her away every time she looked at her father. She pushed back from the table and went to the loft to write to Matthew, trying not to think about her mother sitting down there all alone.
*
Dear Matthew,
I am trying not to lose hope, but you know how hard it has always been for me. Hope, I mean. It’s been four days since I last saw you. It feels like forever.
It’s funny, now that hope has become so slippery and unreliable, I realize that all those years, when I was a kid thinking I didn’t believe in hope, I was actually living on it. Mama fed me a steady diet of he’s trying and I lapped it up like a terrier. Every day I believed her. When he smiled at me or gave me a sweater or asked me how my day was, I thought, See? He cares. Even after I saw him hit her for the first time, I still let her define the world for me.
Now it is all gone.
Maybe he’s sick. Maybe Vietnam broke him. And maybe those are all excuses set at the feet of a man who is just rotting from the inside.
I don’t know anymore and as much as I try, I can’t care.
I have no hope left for him. The only hope I can hold on to is for you. For us.
I’m still here.
TWENTY-THREE
Dear Admissions Director:
University of Alaska, Anchorage.
I am very sorry to say that I will not be able to attend classes at the University this quarter.
I am hopeful—although doubtful—that winter quarter will see a change in my circumstances.
I will be forever grateful for my acceptance and hope that another lucky student can take my spot.
Sincerely,
Lenora Allbright
In September, cold winds roared across the peninsula. Darkness began its slow, relentless march across the land. By October, the moment that was autumn in Alaska had passed. Every night, at seven P.M., Leni sat close to the radio, the volume cranked high, static popping, listening for Mr. Walker’s voice, waiting for news on Matthew. But week after week, there was no improvement.
In November, the precipitation turned to snow, light at first, goose down fluttering from white skies. The muddy ground froze, turned hard as granite, slippery, but soon a layer of white lay over everything, a new beginning of sorts, a camouflage of beauty over whatever lay hidden beneath.
And still Matthew wasn’t Matthew.
On an ice-cold evening that followed the first vicious storm of the season, Leni finished her chores in a sooty darkness and returned to the cabin. Once inside, she ignored her parents and stood in front of the woodstove, her hands outstretched to its warmth. Gingerly she flexed the fingers of her left hand. The arm still felt weak, foreign somehow, but it was a relief to have the cast off.
She turned, saw her own reflection in the window. Pale, thin face with a knifepoint chin. She’d lost weight since the accident, and rarely bothered to bathe. Grief had upset everything—her appetite, her stomach, her sleep. She looked bad. Drained and exhausted. Bags under her eyes.
She went to the radio at exactly 6:55 and turned it on.
Through the speaker, she heard Mr. Walker’s voice, steady as a trawler in calm seas. “To Leni Allbright in Kaneq: We’re moving Matthew to a long-term facility in Homer. You can visit on Tuesday afternoon. It’s called Peninsula Rehabilitation Center.”
“I’m going to see him,” Leni said.
Dad was sharpening his ulu. He stopped. “The hell you are.”
Leni didn’t glance at him or flinch. “Mama. Tell him if he wants to stop me, he’ll have to shoot me.”
Leni heard her mother draw in a sharp breath.
Seconds passed. Leni felt her father’s anger and his uncertainty. She could feel the war waging within him. He wanted to explode, to exert his will, to hit something, but she meant it and he knew it.
He hit the coffeepot, sent it flying, muttered something they couldn’t quite hear. Then he cursed, threw up his hands, and backed away, all in a single jerking movement. “Go,” Dad said. “Go see the boy, but get your chores done first. And you.” He turned to Mama, pointed a finger at her, thumped it on her chest. “She goes alone. You hear me?”
“I hear you,” Mama said.
*
TUESDAY FINALLY CAME.
“Ernt,” Mama said after lunch. “Leni needs a ride to town.”
“Tell her to take the old snow machine, not the new one. And be back by dinner.” He gave Leni a look. “I mean it. Don’t make me come looking for you.” Yanking his iron animal traps from their hooks on the wall, he went outside, banging the door behind him.
Mama moved forward, glancing uncertainly behind her. She pressed two folded-up pieces of paper in Leni’s hand. “Letters. For Thelma and Marge.”
Leni took the letters, nodded.
“Don’t be stupid, Leni. Be back before dinner. That gate could close again anytime. They’re only open because he feels bad for what he did and he’s trying to be good.”
“Like I care.”
“I care. And you should care for me.”
Leni felt the sting of her selfishness. “Yeah.”
Outside, Leni angled into the wind and trudged through the snow.
When she finished feeding the animals, she pulled the starter on the snow machine and climbed aboard.
In town, she pulled up in front of the harbor dock entrance and parked. A water taxi was waiting for Leni. Mama had called for it on the ham radio. The sea was too rough to take the skiff out.
Leni slung her backpack over her shoulder and headed down the slick, icy dock ramp.
The water-taxi captain waved at her. Leni knew he wasn’t going to charge her for the ride. He was in love with Mama’s cranberry relish. Every year she made two dozen jars of it just for him. That was how the locals did it: trading.
Leni handed him a jar and climbed aboard. As she sat on the bench in the back, staring up at the town perched on stilts above the sea, she told herself not to have any hopes for today. She knew Matthew’s condition, had heard the words so often they’d worn a groove in her consciousness. Brain damage.
Even so, at night, after writing her daily letter to Matthew, she often fell asleep dreaming it was a Sleeping Beauty kind of thing, a dark spell that the kiss of true love could undo. She could marry him and hope that her love would waken him.
Forty minutes later, after a bumpy, splashing crossing of Kachemak Bay, the water taxi pulled up to the dock and Leni jumped out.
On this ice-cold winter day, fog coiled along the waterline of the Spit. There were only a few locals out in this weather and no tourists. Most of the businesses were closed for the season.
She left the road and began the uphill climb into Homer proper. She’d been told that if she came to the house with the pink boat in the yard and Fourth of July decorations still up, she’d gone too far on Wardell.