When Leni finished, she was sweating hard. Mama dropped the animal traps beside the hole. They landed with a clank.
Then Mama went back for Dad. Grabbing hold of his cold white hands, she dragged him over to the hole, tucked him up close to it.
Dad’s body was stiff and still, his face as white and hard as a tusk carving.
For the first time, Leni really thought about what they were doing. The bad thing they’d done. From now on, they would have to live with the knowledge that they were capable of this, all of it. The shooting, the carrying of a dead man, the covering up of a crime. Although they’d had a lifetime of covering up for him, looking away, pretending, this was different. Now they were the criminals and the secret Leni had to protect was her own.
A good person would feel ashamed. Instead she was angry. Howlingly so.
If only they had walked away years ago, or called the police, asked for help. Any small course correction on Mama’s part might have led to a future where there wasn’t a dead man on the ice between them.
Mama dragged the traps apart, forced the black jaws open. She pushed Dad’s forearm into the maw. The trap closed with a snap of breaking bone. Mama paled, looking sick. Traps broke both of Dad’s legs—sn-ap—became weights.
The northern lights appeared overhead, cascading in swirls of yellow, green, red, and purple. Impossible, magical color; lights fell like silken scarves across the sky, skeins of yellow, neon-green, shocking pink. The electric-bright moon seemed to watch it all.
Leni stared down at her father. She saw the man who had used his fists when he was angry, saw the blood on his hands and the mean set to his jaw. But she saw the other man, too, the one she’d crafted from photographs and her own need, the one who’d loved them as much as he could, his capacity for love destroyed by war. Leni thought maybe that he would haunt her. Not just him, but the idea of him, the sad and scary truth that you could love and hate the same person at the same time, that you could feel a deep and abiding loss and shame for your own weakness and still be glad that this awful thing had been done.
Mama dropped to her knees beside him, bent close. “We loved you.”
She looked up at Leni, wanting—maybe needing—Leni to say the same thing, to do what Leni had always done. Peas in a pod.
It was between them now, years of yelling and hitting, of being afraid … and smiles and laughter, Dad saying, Heya, Red, and begging for forgiveness.
“’Bye, Dad” was all Leni could summon. Maybe, in time, this wouldn’t be her last memory of him; maybe, in time, she would remember how it felt when he held her hand or put her on his shoulders as he walked along The Strand.
Mama pushed him across the ice, traps clanking, into the open hole. His body plunged down, snapping his head back.
His face peered up at them, a cameo in cold black water, skin white in the moonlight, beard and mustache frozen. Slowly, slowly he sank into the water and disappeared.
There would be no trace of him tomorrow. The ice would close up long before anyone else came out here. His body would be dragged by the heavy traps to the lake floor. In time, he would be worn down by the water and become only bones, and bones could wash ashore, but the predators would likely find them before the authorities would. By then no one would be looking, anyway. Five out of every thousand people went missing in Alaska every year, were lost. That was a known fact. They fell down crevasses, lost their way on trails, drowned in a rising tide.
Alaska. The Great Alone.
“You know what this makes us,” Mama said.
Leni stood beside her, imagining the sight of her dad’s pale, stiff body being dragged down into the dark. The thing he hated most. “Survivors,” Leni said. The irony was not lost on her. It was what her dad had wanted them to be.
Survivors.
*
LENI KEPT REPLAYING IT in her mind, seeing the last glimpse of her dad’s face before the black water pulled him under. The image would haunt her for the rest of her life.
When they finally returned to the cabin, exhausted and cold to the bone, Leni and her mother had to haul in wood to feed the fire. Leni tossed her gloves into the flames. Then she and Mama stood in front of the fire, their trembling hands outstretched to the heat, for how long?
Who knew? Time lost its meaning.
Leni stared numbly down at the floor. There was a bone shard near her foot, another on the coffee table. It would take all night to clean this up and she feared that even if they wiped all his blood away, it would come seeping back, bubbling up from the wood like something out of a horror story. But they had to get started.
“We need to clean up. We’ll say he disappeared,” Leni said.
Mama frowned, chewed worriedly at her lower lip. “Go get Large Marge. Tell her what I did.” Mama looked at Leni. “You hear me? You tell her what I did.”
Leni nodded and left Mama alone to start cleaning.
Outside, it was snowing lightly again, the world darker, layered with clouds. Leni trudged to the snow machine and climbed aboard. Airy goose-down flakes fell, changed direction with the wind. At Large Marge’s property, Leni veered right, plunged into a thicket of trees, drove along a winding path of tire tracks on snow.
At last she came to a clearing: small, oval-shaped, ringed by towering white trees. Large Marge’s home was a canvas-and-wood yurt. Like all homesteaders, Large Marge kept everything, so her yard was full of heaps and piles of junk covered in snow.
Leni parked in front of the yurt and got out. She knew she didn’t have to yell out a greeting. The headlight and sound of the snow machine had announced her.
Sure enough, a minute later the door to the yurt opened. Large Marge walked out, wearing a woolen blanket like a huge cape around her body. She tented a hand over her eyes to keep out the falling snow. “Leni? Is that you?”
“It’s me.”
“Come in. Come in,” Large Marge said, making a sweeping gesture with her hand.
Leni hurried up the steps and went inside.
The yurt was bigger inside than it looked from the outside, and immaculately clean. Lanterns gave off a buttery light and the woodstove poured out heat and sent its smoke up through a metal pipe that protruded through a carefully constructed opening at the yurt’s canvas crown.
The walls were constructed of thin wooden strips in an intricate crisscross pattern, with canvas stretched taut behind them like an elaborate hoop skirt. The domed ceiling was buttressed by beams. The kitchen was full-sized and the bedroom was above, in a loft area that looked down over the living area. Now, in the winter, it was cozy and contained, but in the summer she knew that the canvas windows were unzipped to reveal screens that let in huge blocks of light. Wind thumped on the canvas.
Large Marge took one look at Leni’s bruised face and squashed nose, at the dried blood on her cheeks, and said, “Son of a bitch.” She pulled Leni into a fierce hug, held on to her.
“It was bad tonight,” Leni said at last, pulling away. She was shaking. Maybe it was finally sinking in. They’d killed him, broken his bones, dropped him in the water …
“Is Cora—”
“He’s dead,” Leni said quietly.
“Thank God,” Large Marge said.
“Mama—”
“Don’t tell me anything. Where is he?”
“Gone.”
“And Cora?”
“At the cabin. You said you’d help us. I guess we need it now to, you know, clean up. But I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“Don’t worry about me. Go home. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Large Marge was already changing her clothes when Leni left the yurt.
Back at the cabin, she found Mama standing away from the pool of blood and gore, staring down at it, her face ravaged by tears, chewing on her torn thumbnail.
“Mama?” Leni said, almost afraid to touch her.
“She’ll help us?”