“Just be there.”
Leni nodded. Honestly, she didn’t care about details. All she could think about was Matthew. She hefted her backpack and took off, walking as fast as she dared on the icy dock. This early on a cold and snowy November morning, there was no one out here to see her.
She reached the care facility and slowed. Here was where she needed to be careful. She couldn’t let anyone see her.
The glass doors whooshed open in front of her.
Inside, she smelled disinfectant and something else, metallic, astringent. At the front desk, a woman was on the phone. She didn’t even look up when the doors opened. Leni slipped inside, thinking, Be invisible … The corridors were quiet this early in the morning, the patients’ doors were closed. At Matthew’s room she paused, steadied herself, and opened the door.
His room was quiet. Dark. No machines whooshed or thunked. Nothing was keeping him alive except his own huge heart.
They had positioned him so that he was asleep sitting up, his head trapped in the halo thing that was attached to a vest so he couldn’t move. His pink-scarred face looked like it had been stitched together with a sewing machine. How could he live this way, stitched up, bolted together, unable to speak or think or touch or be touched? And how could she leave him to do it without her?
She dropped her backpack to the floor, approached the bed, and reached for his hand. His skin, once rough from gutting fish and fixing farm equipment, was now as soft as a girl’s. She couldn’t help thinking about their school days, holding hands under the desk, passing notes back and forth, thinking the world could be theirs.
“We could have done it, Matthew. We could have gotten married and had a kid too soon and stayed in love.” She closed her eyes, imagining it, imagining them. They could have stuck it out to the gray years, been a couple of white-haired old people in out-of-date clothes, sitting on a porch under the midnight sun.
Could have.
Useless words. Too late.
“I can’t let my mom be alone. And you have your dad and your family and Alaska.” Her voice broke on that. “You don’t know who I am anyway, do you?”
She bent down closer. Her hand closed tightly around his. Tears landed on his cheek and caught on the raised pink scar tissue.
Samwise Gamgee would never leave Frodo like this. No hero would ever do this. But books were only a reflection of real life, not the thing itself. They didn’t tell you about boys who broke their bodies and had their brains sheared down to the stem, who couldn’t talk or move or say your name. Or about mothers and daughters who made terrible, irrevocable choices. Or about babies who deserved better than the messed-up lives into which they were born.
She put her hand on her stomach again. The life in there was as small as a frog’s egg, too small to feel, and yet she swore she could hear the echo of a second heartbeat running alongside her own. All she really knew was this: she had to be a good mother to this baby and she had to take care of her mother. Period.
“I know how much you wanted kids,” Leni said quietly. “And now…”
You stand by the people you love.
Matthew’s eyes opened. One stared straight ahead. The other rolled wildly in the socket. That one staring green eye was the only part of him she recognized. He struggled, made a terrible moaning sound of pain.
He opened his mouth, screamed, “Bwaaaa…” He thrashed, bucked up like he was trying to break free. The halo made a clanging sound when it hit the bedrail. Blood started to form at the bolts in his temple. An alarm went off. “Hermmmm…”
“Don’t,” she said. “Please…”
The door opened behind her. A nurse rushed past Leni and into the room.
Leni stumbled back, shaking, flipped her hood back up. The nurse hadn’t seen her face.
He was bellowing in the bed, making guttural animal sounds, thrashing. The nurse injected something in his IV. “It’s okay, Matthew. Calm down. Your dad will be here soon.”
Leni wanted to say, I love you, one last time, out loud, for the world to hear, but she didn’t dare.
She needed to leave, now, before the nurse turned around.
But she stood there, eyes glazed with tears, her hand still pressed to her belly. I’ll try to be a good mom and I’ll tell the baby about us. About you …
Leni reached down for her pack, grabbed it, and ran.
She left him there, alone with strangers.
A choice she knew he would never have made about her.
*
HER.
She’s here. Is she? He doesn’t know what’s real anymore.
He has words he knows, words he’s collected as important, but he doesn’t know their meaning. Coma. Brace. Halo. Brain damage. They are there, seen but not seen, like pictures in another room, glimpsed through rippled glass.
Sometimes he knows who he is and where he is. Sometimes, for seconds, he knows he has been in a coma and come out of it; he knows he can’t move because they strap him down. He knows he can’t move his head because they’ve drilled screws into his skull and caged him. He knows he sits like this all day, propped up, a monster in a brace, his leg jutting out in front of him, pain constantly chewing on him. He knows that people cry when they see him.
Sometimes he hears things. Sees shapes. People. Voices. Light. He tries to catch them, concentrate, but it’s all moths and bramble.
Her.
She’s here now, isn’t she? Who is she?
The one he waits for.
“Wecouldhavedoneit, Matthew.”
Matthew.
He is Matthew, right? Is Her talking to him?
“Youdon’tknowwhoIam…”
He tries to turn, to wrench free so he can see Her instead of the ceiling, which seems to roll back and forth above him.
He screams for Her, cries, tries to remember the words he needs, but there’s nothing there to be found. Frustration rises up, makes even the pain go away.
He can’t move. He’s a bread—no, that’s not the right thing—tied down, strapped tight. Bound.
Someone else now. A different voice.
He feels it all slipping away. He stills, unable to remember even a minute ago.
Her.
What does that mean?
He quits fighting, stares up at the woman in the orange outfit, listens to her soothing voice.
His eyes close. His last thought is Her. Don’t leave, but he doesn’t even know what it means.
He hears footsteps. Running.
It is like the beating of his heart. There and then gone.
TWENTY-FIVE
Falling snow turned Homer into a blurred landscape of muted colors and washed-out skies. The few people out and about were either seeing the world through dirty windshields or looking up at it with tucked-in chins. No one noticed a girl in a huge parka, hood up, scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face, trudging downhill.
Leni’s face hurt like hell, her nose throbbed, but none of it was the worst of her pain. At Airport Road, the snow let up a little. She turned and headed to the airfield. At the door to the airfield office, she paused and pulled her turtleneck up over her torn lip.
The office was small and constructed of wood and corrugated metal with a sharply slanted roof. It looked like an oversized chicken coop. Behind it, she saw a small plane out on the airstrip, revving its engine. The sign for Glass Lake Aviation was missing two letters, so the sign read: ASS LAKE AVIATION. It had been that way for as long as Leni could remember. The owner said he’d fixed it once and that was plenty. Supposedly schoolkids stole the letters for fun.
Inside, the place looked unfinished, too: a floor made of mismatched peel-and-stick linoleum tiles, a plywood counter, a small display of brochures for tourists, a bathroom behind a broken door. A stack of boxes stood by the back door—supplies recently delivered or soon to be shipped.
Mama sat in a white plastic chair, with a scarf coiled around the lower half of her face and a hat covering her blond hair. Leni sat down beside her in a floral overstuffed recliner that some cat had clawed to ribbons.