In front of them, a Formica coffee table was littered with magazines.
Leni was tired of crying, of feeling this grief that kept opening and closing inside of her, but even so, she felt tears sting her eyes.
Mama put her cigarette out in the empty Coke can on the table in front of her. Smoke sizzled up, wafted into nothingness. She leaned back, sighing.
“How was he?” Mama asked.
“The same.” Leni leaned against her mama, needing the solid warmth of her body. She reached into her pocket and felt something sharp.
The present Mr. Walker had given her from Matthew. In all that had happened, she’d forgotten about it. She pulled it out, stared down at the small, thin gift, wrapped in newsprint, upon which Matthew had written: HAPPY BIRTHDAY LENI!
Her eighteenth birthday had gone by almost unnoticed this year, but Matthew had been planning for it. Maybe he’d had an idea about how to celebrate it.
She peeled the newsprint back, folded it carefully into something she would save. (He’d touched it while thinking of her.) Inside, she found a slim white box. Inside of that, a piece of yellowed, ripped-edge newsprint carefully folded.
It was a newspaper article and an old black-and-white photograph of two homesteaders, holding hands. They were surrounded by sled dogs, sitting in mismatched chairs in front of a tiny, mossy-roofed cabin. Junk decorated the yard. A towheaded boy sat in the dirt. Leni recognized the yard and the deck: these were Matthew’s grandparents.
Across the bottom, Matthew had written, THIS COULD BE US.
Leni’s eyes stung. She held the photograph to her heart and looked down at the article.
MY ALASKA by Lily Walker
July 4, 1972
You think you know what wild means. It’s a word you’ve used all your life. You use it to describe an animal, your hair, an undisciplined child. In Alaska, you learn what wild really means.
My husband, Eckhart, and I came to this place separately, which may not seem important, but certainly is. We had each decided on our own, and not when we were young, I might add, that civilization was not for us. It was the middle of the Great Depression. I lived in a shack with my parents and six siblings. There was never enough of anything—not time, not money, not food, not love.
What made me think of Alaska? Even now, I don’t recall. I was thirty-five years old, on the shelf, they called us spinsters then. My youngest sister died—of a broken heart maybe, or of the despair that came with watching her own babies suffer—and I walked away.
Just like that. I had ten dollars in my pocket and no real skills and I headed West. Of course I went West, for the romance of it. In Seattle, I saw a sign for Alaska. They were looking for women to do laundry for men in the gold fields.
I thought, “I can wash clothes,” and I went.
It was hard work, with men catcalling all the time, and my skin hardening until it was like leather. Then I met Eckhart. He was ten years older than me, and not much to look at, if I’m being truthful.
He caught my eye and told me his dream of homesteading the Kenai Peninsula. When he held out his hand, I took it. Did I love him? No. Not then. Not for years, really, although when he died, it was like God had reached in and yanked the heart out of my chest.
Wild. That’s how I describe it all. My love. My life. Alaska. Truthfully, it’s all the same to me. Alaska doesn’t attract many; most are too tame to handle life up here. But when she gets her hooks in you, she digs deep and holds on, and you become hers. Wild. A lover of cruel beauty and splendid isolation. And God help you, you can’t live anywhere else.
“What do you have there?” Mama asked, exhaling smoke.
Leni carefully folded the article into quarters. “An article by Matthew’s grandma. She died a few years before we came to Alaska.” The photograph of Matthew’s grandparents—dated 1940—sat on her lap. “How will I stop loving him, Mama? Will I … forget?”
Mama sighed. “Ah. That. Love doesn’t fade or die, baby girl. People tell you it does, but it doesn’t. If you love him now, you’ll love him in ten years and in forty. Differently, maybe, a faded version, but he’s part of you now. And you are part of him.”
Leni didn’t know if that was comforting or frightening. If she felt like this forever, as if her heart were an open wound, how would she ever be happy again?
“But love doesn’t come just once in your life, either. Not if you’re lucky.”
“I don’t think we Allbrights are lucky,” Leni said.
“I don’t know. You found him once, in the middle of nowhere. What were the chances that you’d meet him, that he’d love you, that you’d love him? I’d say, lucky you.”
“And then we fell down into a crevice, he got brain damaged and you killed Dad to protect me.”
“Yeah. Well. The glass can be half empty or half full.”
Leni knew the glass was broken. “Where are we going?” she asked.
“Do you really care?”
“No.”
“We’re going back to Seattle. It’s all I could think of. Thanks to Large Marge, we’re flying and not hitchhiking.”
The door opened, bringing in a rush of ice-cold air. A woman in a brown parka appeared, a Cowichan tuque pulled low on her forehead. “Plane’s ready for take-off. Flight to Anchorage.”
Mama immediately pulled the scarf up to just beneath her eyes, while Leni flipped up her parka’s hood, pulled the strings so it tightened around her face.
“Are you our passengers?” the woman said, looking down at a sheet of paper in her gloved hands. Before Mama could answer, the phone on the desk rang. The woman moved toward it, answering, “Glass Lake Aviation.”
Mama and Leni hurried out of the small office toward the airfield, where their airplane waited, propeller whirring. At the plane, Leni tossed her backpack into the aft area, where it fell amid boxes to be delivered somewhere, and followed her mother into the shadowy interior.
She took her seat (there were only two of them behind the pilot) and tightened her seat belt.
The small plane rumbled forward, clattered hard, then lifted, swayed, leveled out. The engine sounded like the cards the kids on her old block used to put in their bicycle spokes.
Leni stared out the window, down into the gloom. From this height, everything looked charcoal-gray and white, a blurring of land and sea and sky. Jagged white mountains, angry white-tipped waves on an ash-gray sea. Cabins and homes clinging stubbornly to a wild shoreline.
Homer slowly disappeared from view.
*
SEATTLE AT NIGHT in the falling rain.
A snake of yellow headlights in the dark. Neon signs everywhere, reflections cast on wet streets. Traffic lights changing color. Horns honking out staccato warnings.
Music tumbled out of open doors, assaulting the night, unlike any music Leni had heard before. It had a clanging, angry sound and some of the people standing outside of the bars looked like they’d landed from Mars—with safety pins in their cheeks and stiff blue Mohawks and black clothes that appeared to have been cut to ribbons.
“It’s okay,” Mama said, pulling Leni in close as they walked past a group of homeless-looking people who stood listlessly in a park, passing cigarettes back and forth.
Leni saw the city in bits and pieces through lowered lashes, blurred by the incessant rain. She saw women with babies huddled in doorways and men asleep in sleeping bags beneath the elevated road that looked down on this section of town. Leni couldn’t imagine why people would live this way when they could go to Alaska and live off the land and build themselves a home. She couldn’t help thinking about all those girls who’d been abducted in 1974 and found dead not far from here. Ted Bundy had been arrested, but did that mean the streets were safe now?