The care facility sat at the edge of town, on a wildly overgrown lot with a gravel parking lot.
She stopped. A huge bald eagle perched on a telephone pole watching her, its golden eyes bright in the gloom.
Forcing herself to move, she went into the building, spoke to the receptionist, and followed her directions down to the room at the end of the hall.
There, at the closed door, she paused, took a steady breath, and opened the door.
Mr. Walker stood by the bed. At Leni’s entrance, he turned. He didn’t look like himself. The months had whittled him away; his sweater and jeans bagged. He had grown a beard that was half gray. “Hi, Leni.”
“Hey,” she said, her gaze cutting to the bed.
Matthew lay strapped down. There was a cagelike thing around his bald head. It was bolted in with screws; they’d drilled into his skull. He looked thin and scrawny and old, like a plucked bird. For the first time she saw his face, crisscrossed by red zipper scars. A pucker of folded skin pulled one corner of his eye downward. His nose was flattened.
He lay motionless, his eyes open, his mouth slack. A line of drool beaded down from his full lower lip.
Leni went to the bed, stood beside Mr. Walker.
“I thought he was better.”
“He is better. Sometimes I swear he looks right at me.”
Leni leaned down. “H-hey, Matthew.”
Matthew moaned, bellowed. Words that weren’t words, just apelike sounds and grunts. Leni drew back. He sounded angry.
Mr. Walker placed his hand on Matthew’s. “It’s Leni, Matthew. You know Leni.”
Matthew screamed. It was a heartrending sound that reminded her of an animal caught in a trap. His right eye rolled around in the socket. “Waaaaath.”
Leni gaped down at him. This wasn’t better. This wasn’t Matthew, not this screaming, moaning husk of a person.
“Blaaaa…” Matthew moaned, his body buckling. A terrible smell followed.
Mr. Walker took Leni by the arm, led her out of the room.
“Susannah,” Tom said to the nurse. “He needs a diaper change.”
Leni would have collapsed if not for Mr. Walker, who held her up. He led her over to a waiting area with vending machines and eased her into a chair.
He sat in the chair beside her. “Don’t worry about the screaming. He does it all the time. The doctors say it’s purely physical, but I think it’s frustration. He’s in there … somewhere. And he is in pain. It’s killing me to see him like this and not to be able to help.”
“I could marry him, take care of him,” Leni said. In her dreams she’d imagined it, being married, her caring for him, her love bringing him back.
“That’s a really nice thing, Leni, and it tells me Matthew loves the right girl, but he may never get out of that bed or be able to say ‘I do.’”
“But people get married, people who are injured and can’t talk and are dying. Don’t they?”
“Not to eighteen-year-old girls with their whole lives in front of them. How’s your mom? I hear she took your dad back.”
“She always takes him back. They’re like magnets.”
“We’re all worried about you two.”
“Yeah.” Leni sighed. What good had worry ever done? Only Mama could change their situation, and she refused to do it.
In the silence that followed that unanswerable comment, Mr. Walker reached into his pocket and pulled out a thin package wrapped in newsprint. Written across the top in red marker was: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LENI. “Alyeska found this in Mattie’s room. I guess he got it for you … before.”
“Oh” was all she could say. Her birthday had been forgotten in all the drama this year. She took the gift, stared down at it.
The nurse exited Matthew’s room. Through the open door, Leni heard Matthew screaming. “Waaaa … Na … sher…”
“The brain damage … it’s bad, kiddo. I won’t lie to you. I was sorry to hear you decided not to go to college.”
She shoved the present in her parka pocket. “How could I? It was supposed to be both of us.”
“He’d want you to go. You know he would.”
“We don’t know what he wants anymore, do we?”
She got up, went back into Matthew’s room. He lay rigid, his fingers flexed. The bolts in his head and scars on his face gave him a Frankenstein appearance. His one good eye stared dully ahead, not at her.
She leaned over and picked up his hand. It was a deadweight. She kissed the back of it, saying, “I love you.”
He didn’t respond.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she promised in a thick voice. “I’ll always be here. This is me, Matthew, climbing down to save you. Like you did for me. You did it, you know? You saved me. I’m standing here, by the one I love. I hope you hear that.”
She stayed by him for hours. Every now and then he screamed and struggled. Twice, he cried. Finally, they asked her to leave so they could bathe him.
It wasn’t until later, after she’d flagged down the water taxi and climbed aboard, as she was listening to the boat hull thumping over the whitecaps, with water spraying her in the face, that she realized she hadn’t said goodbye to Mr. Walker. She’d just walked through the care facility and gone outside, past a man standing in front of a shack held together with duct tape and plastic sheeting, past a group of kids playing four-square in the school playground, wearing arctic camo clothes, past an old Native woman walking two huskies and a duck—all on leashes.
She thought she had grieved for Matthew, cried all the tears she had, but now she saw the desert of grief that lay before her. It could go on and on. The human body was eighty percent water; that meant she was literally made of tears.
In Kaneq, as she walked off the water taxi, it started to snow. The town gave off a slight humming: the sound of the big generator that fueled the new lights. Snow fell like sifting flour in the glow of Mr. Walker’s new streetlamps. She barely noticed the cold as she walked up to the General Store.
The bell rang at her entrance. It was four-thirty, technically still daytime, but night was coming in fast.
Large Marge was dressed in a thigh-length fringed suede jacket over insulated pants. Her hair looked like shavings from an Etch A Sketch that had been glued to her skull. In places she had no hair at all, patches where she’d cut too zealously down to her brown scalp, probably because she didn’t own a mirror. “Leni! What a nice surprise,” she said in a foghorn voice that would have sent birds into the air. “I miss my best-ever employee.”
Leni saw compassion in the woman’s dark eyes. She meant to say, I saw Matthew, but to her horror what she did was burst into tears.
Large Marge led Leni over to the cash register, eased her to a sitting position on the old-fashioned settee and handed her a Tab.
“I just saw Matthew,” Leni said, slumping forward.
Large Marge sat down beside her. The settee creaked angrily. “Yeah. I was in Anchorage last week. It’s hard to see. It’s killing Tom and Aly, too. How much heartache can one family handle?”
“I thought a care facility meant he was better. I thought…” She sighed. “I don’t know what I thought.”
“He’s as good as he’s going to get, from what I hear. Poor kid.”
“He was trying to save me.”
Large Marge was quiet for a moment. In the silence, Leni wondered if one person could ever really save another, or if it was the kind of thing you had to do for yourself.
“How’s your mom? I still can’t believe she let Ernt come back.”
“Yeah. The cops can’t do anything if she won’t.” Leni didn’t know what else to say. She knew it was impossible for someone like Large Marge to understand why a woman like Cora stayed with a man like Ernt. It should have been as easy as an elementary math equation: he hits you x broken bones = leave him.
“Tom and I begged your mama to press charges. I guess she’s too afraid.”