Mr. Walker stopped. Leni expected to see a truck, but there wasn’t one. “Aren’t we going to Homer?”
Mr. Walker shook his head. He led her deeper into the trees, until they came to a slatted boardwalk, lined with gnarly branch railings on either side. Just below it, on a lip of land surrounded by trees, was a log cabin that overlooked the bay. Geneva’s old cabin. A wide wooden bridge led from the boardwalk to the front door. No, not a bridge. A ramp.
A wheelchair ramp.
Mr. Walker walked on ahead, his boots thudding on the ramplike bridge.
He knocked on the door. Leni heard a muffled voice and Mr. Walker opened the door and led Leni inside. “Go on,” he said gently, pushing her inside a small, cozy cabin with a wall of windows overlooking the bay.
The first thing Leni saw was a series of large paintings. One of them—a huge work-in-progress canvas—was propped on an easel. On it, an explosion of color; drops and splatters and streaks that somehow—impossibly—gave Leni the impression of the northern lights, although she couldn’t say why. There were strange, misshapen letters in all that color; she could almost make them out but not quite. Maybe it said, HER? The painting made her feel something. Pain first, and then a rising sense of hope.
“I’ll leave you two,” Mr. Walker said. He left the cabin and closed the door at the same time Leni saw the man in the wheelchair, sitting with his back to her.
He executed a slow turn, his paint-splattered hands agile on the wheelchair, maneuvering himself around.
Matthew.
He looked up. A network of raised pale pink scars ran across his face, gave him an odd, stitched-together look. His nose was flattened, had the splayed look of an old boxer’s, and his right eye was tugged just the slightest bit downward by a starburst of scar tissue at the top of his cheekbone.
But his eyes. In them, she saw him, her Matthew.
“Matthew? It’s me, Leni.”
He frowned. She waited for him to say something, anything, but there was nothing, just this aching, drawn-out silence where once there had been an endless stream of words.
She felt tears start. “It’s Leni,” she said again, softer. He stared at her, just kept staring, like he was dreaming. “You don’t know me,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I knew you wouldn’t. And you won’t understand about MJ. I knew that. I knew it, it’s just…” She took a step backward. She couldn’t do this now, not yet.
She would try again later. Practice her words. She’d explain it to MJ, prepare him. They had time now, and she wanted to do this right. She turned toward the door.
THIRTY-ONE
“Wait.”
Matthew sat in the wheelchair, clutching a sticky paintbrush, his heart racing.
They had told him she was coming, but then he’d forgotten and remembered and forgotten again. It was like that for him sometimes. Things got lost in the confused circuitry of his brain. Less often these days, but it happened.
Or maybe he hadn’t believed. Or he’d thought he’d imagined it, that they’d said the words to make him smile, hoping he’d forget.
He still had fog days when nothing made it up from the mist, not words or ideas or sentences. Just pain.
But she was here. He had dreamed of her return for years, played and replayed the possibilities. Imagined and massaged ideas. He had practiced words for it, for her, alone in his room, where stress wouldn’t seize control and render him mute, where he could pretend that he was a man worth coming back to.
He tried not to think about his ugly face and his never-quite-right leg. He knew that sometimes he couldn’t think well, and words became impos sible creatures that ran at his approach. He heard his once-strong voice tripping up, sending out idiot words and he thought, That can’t be me, but it was.
He dropped the wet paintbrush and clutched the armrests of the wheelchair, forced himself to stand. It hurt so badly he made a grunt of pain, and it shamed him, that noise, but there was nothing he could do. He gritted his teeth, repositioned his leg. He’d been sitting for too long, consumed by his painting, the one he called Her, about a night he remembered on her beach, and he’d forgotten to move.
He shambled forward in a lurching, unsteady gait that probably made her think he could fall at any moment. He’d fallen a lot, gotten up more.
“Matthew?” She moved toward him, her face tilted up.
Her beauty made him want to cry. He wanted to tell her that when he painted, he felt her, remembered her, that it had started in rehab as occupational therapy and now it was his passion. Sometimes when he was painting he could forget all of it, the pain, the memories, the loss, and imagine a future with Leni, their love like sunshine and warm water. He imagined them having kids, growing old together. All of it.
He strained to find all those words. It was like suddenly being in a dark room. You knew there was a door, but you couldn’t find it.
Breathe, Matthew. Stress made it worse.
He drew in a breath, released it. He limped over to the bedside table, picked up the box full of the letters she’d sent him all those years ago, while he was in the hospital, and the others, the ones she’d sent when he was a grief-stricken kid in Fairbanks. They were how he’d learned to read again. He handed it to her, unable to ask the question that had haunted him: Why did you stop writing to me?
She looked down, saw her letters in the box, and looked up at him. “You kept them? After I left you?”
“Your letters,” he said. He knew the words were elongated; he had to concentrate to create the combinations he wanted. “Were how I. Learned to read again.”
Leni stared up at him.
“I prayed. You’d. Come back,” he said.
“I wanted to,” she whispered.
He gave her a smile, knowing how it pulled down the skin at his eye, made him look even more freakish.
She put her arms around him and he was amazed at how they still fit together. After all the ways he’d been put back together, restrung and bolted up; they still fit together. She touched his scarred face. “You are so beautiful.”
He tightened his hold on her, tried to steady himself, feeling suddenly, inexplicably afraid.
“Are you okay? Are you in pain?”
He didn’t know how to say what he was feeling, or he was afraid that if he said it, she’d think less of him. He’d been drowning for all of these years without her, and she was the shore he’d been flailing to find. But surely she would look into his ravaged, stitched-together face and run away, and then he would drift back into the deep, dark waters alone.
He pulled away, limped back over to his wheelchair, and sat down with an oomph of pain. He shouldn’t have held her, felt her body against his. How would he ever forget the feel of her again? He tried to get back onto an ordinary track, but couldn’t find his way. He was trembling. “Where. Have you been?”
“Seattle.” She moved toward him. “It’s a long story.”
At her touch, the world—his world—had cracked open or broke apart. Something. He wanted to revel in the moment, burrow into it like a pile of furs and let it warm him, but none of it felt real or safe. “Tell me.”
She shook her head.
“I disappoint. You.”
“You aren’t the disappointment, Matthew. I am. I always have been. I was the one who left. And when you needed me most. I would understand if you can’t forgive me. I can’t forgive me. I did it because, well … there’s someone you need to meet. Afterwards, if you still want to, we can talk.”
Matthew frowned. “Someone. Here?”
“Outside with your dad and Atka. Will you come with me to meet him?”
Him.
Disappointment settled deep, all the way to his bolted-together bones. “I don’t need to meet. Your him.”
“You’re mad. I get it. You said we always stand by the people we love, but I didn’t. I ran.”