I can’t believe it’s 1979. I called the rehab facility again today and heard the usual. No change.
Unfortunately, my mother overheard my call. She blew her stack and said I was being stupid. Apparently the police can trace the call if they wanted to. So I can’t call anymore. I can’t put us all at risk, but how can I stop? It’s all I have left of you. I know you’re not going to get better, but every time I call, I think, maybe this time. That hope is all I have, useless or not.
But that’s bad news and that’s easy. You want good news. It’s a new year.
I am going to the University of Washington. My grandmother pulled some strings and got Susan Grant registered with no evidence of graduation from high school. Life sure is different in the Outside. How much money you have matters.
College isn’t what I expected. Some of the girls wear these fuzzy Shetland sweaters and plaid skirts and knee socks. I guess they’re sorority girls. They giggle and clump together like sheep and the boys who follow them around are so loud a bear could hear them coming from a mile away.
In class, I pretend you’re beside me. Once I believed it so much I almost wrote a note to pass you under my desk.
I miss you. Every day and even more at night. So does Lily. She’s started to kick me awake sometimes. When she does get all squirrelly, I read her Robert Service poems and tell her about you.
That quiets her right down.
*
Dear Matthew,
Spring here is nothing like breakup. No earth falling away, no house-sized blocks of ice snapping free, no lost things seeping up from the mud.
It’s just color everywhere. I’ve never seen so many flowering trees; pink blossoms float through the campus.
My grandfather says the investigation is still open, but no one is looking for us anymore. They assume we are dead.
In a way, it’s true. The Allbrights vanished into nothing.
At night I talk to you and Lily now. Does that mean I’m crazy or just lonely? I imagine all three of us huddled in bed, with the northern lights putting on a show outside our window while wind taps on the glass. I tell our baby to be smart and brave. Brave like her dad. I try to tell her to protect herself from the terrible choices she might someday face. I worry that we Allbright women are cursed in love and I hope she will be a boy. Then I remember you saying that you wanted to teach your son the things you had learned on the homestead and … well, it makes me so sad I crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head and pretend I’m in Alaska in the winter. My heartbeat turns into wind pounding on the glass.
A boy needs a father and I am all Lily has.
Poor girl.
*
“THOSE LAMAZE CLASSES were bogus,” Leni yelled when the next contraction twisted her insides and made her scream. “I want drugs.”
“You wanted natural childbirth. It’s too late for drugs now,” Mama said.
“I’m eighteen years old. Why would anyone listen to what I want? I know nothing,” Leni said.
The contraction ebbed. Pain receded.
Leni panted. Sweat itched and crawled across her forehead.
Mama picked up an ice chip from the plastic cup on the table by the hospital bed and popped it in Leni’s mouth.
“Put morphine in it, Mama,” Leni begged. “Please. I can’t take this. It was a mistake. I’m not ready to be a mother.”
Mama smiled. “No one is ever ready.”
The pain began building again. Leni gritted her teeth, concentrated on breathing (like that helped), and clutched her mother’s hand.
She squeezed her eyes shut, panting, until the pain crested. When it began—finally—to subside, she sank back into the bed, spent. She thought: Matthew should be here, but she pushed the thought aside.
Another contraction hit seconds later. This time Leni bit her tongue so hard it bled.
“Scream,” Mama said.
The door opened and her doctor came in. She was a thin woman wearing blue scrubs and a surgical cap. Her eyebrows were unevenly plucked, which gave her a slightly askew look. “Ms. Grant, how are we feeling?” the doctor asked.
“Get it out of me. Please.”
The doctor nodded and put on gloves. “Let’s check, shall we?” She opened the stirrups.
Normally Leni would not be relieved when a relative stranger sat between her spread legs, but right now she would have splayed herself at the observation deck of the Space Needle if it would end this pain.
“It looks like we’re having a baby,” the doctor said evenly.
“No shit,” Leni shouted at another contraction.
“Okay, Susan. Push. Hard. Harder.”
Leni did. She pushed, she screamed, she sweated, she swore.
And then, as quickly as her pain had come, it ended.
Leni collapsed into the bed.
“A baby boy,” the doctor said, turning to Mama. “Grandma Eve, do you want to cut the cord?”
As if through mist, Leni watched her mother cut the cord and follow the doctor over to an area where they wrapped the newborn in a pale blue thermal blanket. Leni tried to sit up but she had no strength left.
A boy, Matthew. Your son.
Leni panicked, thought, He needs you, Matthew. I can’t do this …
Mama helped Leni to a sitting position and put the tiny bundle in her arms.
Her son. He was the smallest thing she’d ever seen, with a face like a peach and muddy blue eyes that opened and closed and a little rosebud mouth that made sucking motions. A pink fist burst out of the blue blanket and Leni reached down for it.
The baby’s minuscule fingers closed around hers.
A searing, cleansing, enveloping love blew her heart into a million tiny pieces and reshaped it. “Oh, my God,” she said in awe.
“Yeah,” Mama said. “You’ve been asking what it’s like.”
“Matthew Denali Walker, Junior,” she said quietly. A fourth-generation Alaskan who would never know his father, never feel Matthew’s strong arms around him or hear his steadying voice.
“Hey, you,” she said.
She knew now why she had run away from their crime. She hadn’t known before, hadn’t understood, truly, what she had to lose.
This child. Her son.
She would give up her life to protect him. She would do anything and everything to keep him safe. Even if that meant listening to her mother and cutting the last, tender thread to Alaska and Matthew—the calls to the rehab center. She wouldn’t call again. The very thought tore her heart, but what else could she do? She was a mother now.
She was crying softly. Maybe Mama heard and knew why and knew there was nothing to say; or maybe all mothers cried right now. “Matthew,” she whispered, stroking his velvet cheek. “We’ll call you MJ. They called your Daddy Mattie sometimes, but I never did … and he knew how to fly … he would have loved you so much…”
1986
TWENTY-SEVEN
“I don’t know how to live with what I’ve done to her life,” Cora said.
“It’s been years,” her mother said. “Look at her. She’s happy. Why must we keep having this conversation?”
Cora wanted to agree. It was what she said to herself on a daily basis. Look, she’s happy. Sometimes, she was able to almost wholly believe it. And then there were days like today. She didn’t know what caused the change. Weather, maybe. Old habits. The kind of corrosive fear that once it moved in, pitted your bones and stayed forever.
Seven years had passed since Cora had dragged Leni away from Alaska and brought her here, to this city poised on the water’s edge.
Cora saw how Leni had tried to put down roots into this rich, wet land, tried to flourish. But Seattle was a city of hundreds of thousands; it could never speak the rugged language of Leni’s pioneer soul.