فصل 14

FOURTEEN

April in Fairbanks was an unreliable month. This year, an unseasonable cold gripped the town, snow fell, the birds stayed away, the rivers stayed frozen. Even the old-timers began to complain, and they had spent decades in this town that was called the coldest in America.

Matthew walked away from the ice rink after practice, his hockey stick slung over his shoulders. He knew he looked like an ordinary seventeen-year-old in a sweat-dampened hockey uniform and boots but looks could be deceiving. He knew it, and they knew it, the kids he’d gone to school with for the past few years. Oh, they were friendly enough (no one judged anyone this far from civilization; you could be whoever you wanted to be), but they gave him a wide berth. Rumors of his “breakdown” had spread faster than a wildfire on the Kenai. Before he took his seat in his first class in ninth grade, he’d already had a reputation. High school kids, even in the wilds of Alaska, were still herd animals. They sensed when there was a weak member in their midst.

Ice fog, a gray heavy haze peppered with tiny particles of frozen pollutants, turned Fairbanks into a fun-house version of itself where nothing was quite solid, no line distinct. The place smelled of trapped exhaust, like a racetrack.

The squat, two-story buildings across the street appeared to be holding each other up, forlorn in the fog. Like many of the buildings in town, they looked temporary, hastily built.

Through the gloom, people were charcoal drawings, lines and slashes, the homeless who huddled in doorways, the drunks who sometimes stumbled out of taverns late at night and froze to death. Not all of those Matthew saw now would survive the day or the week, let alone this unexpected cold in a town where winter lasted from September through April, and night lay across the land for eighteen hours. There were casualties every day. People went missing all the time.

As he walked to the pickup truck, night fell. Just like that, in a blink. Streetlamps created the only light there was—dots here and there—aside from the occasional snake of headlights in the glow. He wore a parka; beneath that, his hockey sweater, long underwear, and his hockey pants, and mukluks. It wasn’t that cold, not by Fairbanks standards. Barely below freezing. He didn’t bother with gloves.

It didn’t take long for the truck to start, not this time of year; not like in the deep midwinter, when you left your truck running while you were at the store or running errands, when the thermostat often dropped to twenty-five below.

He climbed into his uncle’s big extended-cab pickup and drove through town slowly, alert, always looking for animals or sliding cars or kids playing where they shouldn’t be playing.

A banged-up Dodge pulled out in front of him. It had a sign in the back window that read WARNING. IN CASE OF RAPTURE, THIS CAR WILL BE UNMANNED.

There were a lot of bumper stickers like that out here, deep in Alaska’s wild interior, far from the tourist destinations of the coast or the majestic beauty of Denali. Alaska was full of fringe-ists. People who believed in weirdo things and prayed to exclusionary Gods and filled their basements with equal measures of guns and Bibles. If you wanted to live in a place where no one told you what to do and didn’t care if you parked a trailer in your yard or had a fridge on your porch, Alaska was the state for you. His aunt said it was the romance of adventure that attracted so many individualists. Matthew didn’t know if he agreed (actually, he didn’t expend much energy thinking about stuff like that), but he did know that the farther away you got from civilization, the stranger things got. Most people spent one dark, bleak, eight-month winter in Fairbanks and left the state screaming. The few who stayed—misfits, adventurers, romantics, loners—rarely left again.

It took him almost fifteen minutes to reach the homestead road, and five more minutes to get to the house he’d called home for the last few years. Two decades ago, when his mother’s family had homesteaded out here, the land had been remote; over the years, town had crept closer, spread out. Fairbanks might be in the middle of nowhere, fewer than 120 miles from the Arctic Circle, but it was the second largest city in the state and growing fast because of the pipeline.

He drove up the long, winding, tree-shrouded driveway and parked in the huge, plank-sided garage/workshop between Uncle Went’s ATV and his snow machine.

Inside the house, the walls were roughly hewn planks that looked messy in the combination of light and shadow. His aunt and uncle had always intended to drywall them but never had. The kitchen was delineated by L-shaped polished wood counters set atop green cabinets that had come from an abandoned house in Anchorage, one of those “dream” homes built by lowlanders who couldn’t last through their first winter. A bar with three barstools separated it from the dining area. Beyond that was the living room; a big plaid sectional (complete with movable footrests) and two well-worn La-Z-Boy chairs faced a window that overlooked the river. There were bookcases everywhere, overflowing with books; lanterns and flashlights decorated almost every surface for when the power went out, and it went out often, with so many big trees and bad weather. The house had electricity and running water and even a television, but no flush toilets. Truthfully, no Walker ever cared. They’d all been raised with outhouses and were happy to live that way. People down south had no idea how clean an outhouse could be if you took care of it.

“Hey, you,” Aly said, looking up from the sofa. She was doing homework, by the looks of it.

Matthew dropped his gear bag by the door and propped his hockey stick in the arctic entry—a corridor full of coats and boots that separated the outside from the inside. He hung up his coat on a hook and kicked off his boots. He was so tall now—six-foot-two—that he had to duck to enter the house.

“Hey.” He plopped down beside her.

“You smell like a goat,” she said, closing her textbook.

“A goat who scored two goals.” He leaned back, laid his head on the sofa back, stared up at the big wood crossbeams that traversed the ceiling. He didn’t know why, but he felt nervous, a little raw. He tapped his foot, played an arpeggio on the worn armrest with his fingers.

Aly stared at him. As usual, she had applied her makeup sporadically, as if she’d lost interest halfway through the process. Her blond hair was drawn back into a messy ponytail that hung a little to the left. He had no idea if that was intentional. She was beautiful in the natural, rough-hewn way of Alaskan girls, who were more likely to hunt on the weekends than go to a shopping mall or movie theater.

“You’re doing it again,” he said.

“What?”

“Watching me. Like you think I’m going to explode or something.”

“No,” she said, trying to smile. “It’s just … you know. Are you having a bad day?”

Matthew closed his eyes, sighed. His older sister had been his salvation; there was no doubt about that. Back when he’d first moved here, when he’d been unable to deal with his grief and been beset by terrible nightmares, Aly had been his steadying hand, the voice that could get through to him. Although it had taken time. For the first three months, he pretty much hadn’t talked at all. The therapist they sent him to was no help. He’d known from the first session that it wouldn’t be a stranger’s hand he’d reach out to, especially not one who talked to him as if he were a kid.

It was Aly who had saved him. She never gave up, never stopped asking how he felt. When he finally found the words to express himself, his grief had shown itself to be bottomless, terrifying.

He still cringed at the way he’d cried.

His sister had held him when he cried, rocked him as their mother would have done. Over the years, the two of them had fashioned a vocabulary for grief, learned how to talk about their loss. He and Aly had talked about their pain until there were no words left to say. They’d also spent hours in silence, standing side by side on the river, fly-fishing, and hiking rough trails in the Alaska Range. In time, his grief had turned to anger and then drifted toward sorrow, and now, finally, it had settled into a lingering sadness that was a part of him, not the whole. Lately, they’d begun to talk about the future instead of the past.

It was big, that change, and they knew it. Aly had been hiding out in school, using the classroom as a shield against the hard realities of life as a motherless girl, and she’d stayed here, in Fairbanks, to be at Matthew’s side. Before Mom’s death, Aly had dreamed big, of moving to New York or Chicago, someplace that had bus service and live theater and opera halls. But, as with Matthew, loss had rearranged her from the inside out. Now she knew how much family mattered and how important it was to hang on to the people you loved. Lately she’d begun to talk about moving back onto the homestead with Dad, and maybe working with him. Matthew knew that his presence here was holding his sister back. It could go on this way forever if he let it, and a part of him wanted to do just that. But he was almost eighteen years old. If he didn’t push his way out of the nest, she’d stay next to him forever.

“I want to finish the school year in Kaneq,” he said into the silence. He heard the question she didn’t ask and answered it. “I can’t hide out forever,” he said.

Aly looked frightened. She’d seen him through the worst of times, and he knew that she was terrified of him sliding back into depression. “But you love hockey and you’re good at it.”

“The season ends in two weeks. And I start college in September.”

“Leni.”

Matthew wasn’t surprised that she understood. He and Aly had talked about everything, including Leni and how much her letters meant to Matthew. “What if she goes off to college somewhere? I want to see her. I might not get another chance.”

“Are you sure you’re ready? Everywhere you look, you’ll see Mom.”

And there it was. The big question. The truth was, he didn’t know if he could handle any of it—going back to Kaneq, seeing the river that swallowed his mother, seeing his father’s grief in Technicolor, up close—but he knew one thing. Leni’s letters had mattered to him. Maybe they’d saved him as much as Aly had. For all their separate miles, and their different lives, Leni’s letters and the photographs she sent reminded him of who he’d been.

“I see her everywhere here. Don’t you?”

Aly nodded slowly. “I swear I see her out of the corner of my eye all of the time. I talk to her at night.”

He nodded. Sometimes in the morning when he woke up, he had a split second where he thought the world was upright, that he was an ordinary kid in an ordinary house and that his mom would soon be calling him down for breakfast. The silence on mornings like that was awful.

“You want me to come with you?”

He did. He wanted her beside him, holding his hand, keeping him steady. “No. You don’t get out of school until June,” he said, hearing the unsteadiness in his voice, knowing she heard it, too. “Besides, I think I have to do this by myself.”

“You know Dad loves you. He’ll be thrilled to have you back.”

He did know that. He also knew that love could freeze over, become a kind of thin ice all its own. He and Dad had had a tough time talking in the past few years. Grief and guilt had bent them out of shape.

Aly reached out for him, took his hand in hers.

He waited for her to speak, but she didn’t say anything. They both knew why: there was nothing to say. Sometimes you had to go backward in order to go forward. This truth they knew, even as young as they were. But there was another truth, one they shied away from, one they tried to protect each other from. Sometimes it was painful to go back.

Maybe grief had been waiting for Matthew to return all this time, waiting, in the dark, in the cold. Maybe in Kaneq he’d undo all this progress and break down again.

“You’re stronger now,” Aly said.

“I guess we’ll find out.”

TWO WEEKS LATER, Matthew flew his uncle’s float plane over Otter Point and banked right, lowered, touched down on the flat blue water below. He killed the engine and floated toward the big silvered-wood arch that read WALKER COVE.

His father stood at the end of the dock, his arms at his sides.

Matthew jumped off the pontoon and onto the dock and tied the float plane down. He remained that way, bent over, his back to his father, for a moment longer than necessary, gathering the strength he needed to really be here.

At last he straightened, turned.

His father was close now; he pulled Matthew into a bone-jarring hug that went on so long Matthew had to gasp for breath. Dad drew back finally, looked at him, and love took shape in the air around them, a regret- and memory-filled version, maybe, sad around the edges, but love.

It had been only a few months since they’d seen each other. (Dad made it a point to come to several of Matthew’s hockey games and visit in Fairbanks as often as the harsh weather and homesteading chores allowed, but they had never really talked about anything that mattered.)

Dad seemed older, his skin more lined and creased. He smiled in that way of his, the way he did everything in life, full tilt, no explanations, no regrets, no safety nets. You knew Tom Walker in a glance, because he let you in. You knew instantly that this was a man who always told the truth as he saw it, whether it was popular or not, who had a set of rules to guide his life and no other rules mattered. He laughed harder than any man Matthew had ever met, and Matthew had only seen him cry once. On that day out on the ice.

“You’re even taller than the last time I saw you.”

“I’m like the Hulk. I keep tearing through my clothes.”

Dad grabbed Matthew’s suitcase and led him up the dock, past the fishing boat straining at its lines; seabirds cawed overhead, waves slapped the pilings. The smell of kelp baking in the sun and eelgrass beaten down by waves greeted him.

At the top of the stairs, Matthew got his first glimpse of the big log home with the soaring bowed front and wraparound deck. A welcoming light illuminated the pots hanging from the eaves, still full of last year’s dead geraniums.

Mom’s pots.

He paused, caught his breath.

He hadn’t realized how time could unspool the years of your life until for a second you were fourteen again, crying from a place so deep it seemed to predate you, desperate to be whole again.

Dad went on ahead.

Matthew forced himself to move. He passed by the weather-grayed picnic table and climbed the wooden steps to the purple-painted front door. Beside it hung a metal cutout of an orca that read WHALECOME! (That had been a gift from Matthew; it always cracked his mother up.)

It brought tears to his eyes. He wiped them away, embarrassed by the display in front of his stoic father, and went inside.

The house looked the same as it always had. A cluster of reclaimed and antique furniture in the living room, an old picnic table draped in bright yellow fabric with a vase of blue flowers placed in its center. A collection of candles stood like a medieval village around the flowers. His mother’s touch was everywhere. He could almost hear her.

The interior of the house, bark-darkened log walls, windows large enough to capture the view, a pair of brown leather couches, a piano Grandma had had shipped in from the Outside. He walked over to the window, stared out, saw the cove and the dock through a watery image of his own face.

He felt his father come up behind him. “Welcome home.”

Home. The word had layers of meaning. A place. An emotion. Memories. “She was out ahead of me,” he said, hearing the unsteadiness of his voice.

He heard the way his father drew in a sharp breath. Would he stop Matthew, abort this conversation they’d never dared to have?

There was a moment, a pause that lasted less time than an indrawn breath; then Dad laid a heavy hand on Matthew’s shoulder. “No one could contain your mother,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Matthew didn’t know how to respond. There was so much to say, but they’d never talked about any of it. How could you even start a conversation like that?

Dad pulled Matthew into a fierce embrace. “I’m glad as hell you’re back.”

“Yeah,” Matthew said hoarsely. “Me, too.”

MID-APRIL. Dawn washed across the land well before seven A.M. When Leni first opened her eyes, even though it was to darkness, she felt the buoyancy that came with the changing of the seasons. As an Alaskan, she could feel the nascent light, see it in the lessening of the inky black to a charcoal hue. It carried with it a sense of hope, of daylight coming, of everything would be better now. Of he would be better.

But none of that was true this spring. Even as sunlight was returning, her dad was getting worse. Angry and intense. More jealous of Tom Walker.

Leni had a terrible, building feeling that something bad was going to happen.

All day at school she battled a headache. On her bike ride home, she started getting a stomachache. She tried to tell herself it was her period, but she knew better. It was stress. Worry. She and Mama had gone into alert mode again. They made eye contact constantly, walked carefully, tried to be invisible.

She rode expertly over the bumpy driveway, taking care to stay on the high ground between the two muddy tire ruts.

In her yard—a morass of mud and running water—she saw that the red truck was gone, which meant that Dad was either hunting or had gone to see the Harlans.

She slanted her bike against the cabin and did her chores, feeding the animals, checking their water, bringing in the dry sheets from the line, dropping them into a willow basket. Holding the laundry basket on her hip, she heard the high, rubber-band sound of a boat engine, and stared out at the water, tenting a hand across her eyes. High tide.

An aluminum skiff turned into their cove. The put-put-put of the engine was the only sound for miles. Leni tossed the laundry basket onto the porch and headed for the beach stairs, which they’d strengthened over the years. Almost all of the boards were new; only here and there could you see the tarnished gray of the original stairs. She descended the zigzag steps in her muddy boots.

The boat puttered forward, its sharp prow angled up proudly on the waves. A man stood at the console, guided the boat forward, beached it.

Matthew.

He killed the engine and stepped out into the ankle-deep water, held on to the boat’s ragged white line.

She touched her hair in embarrassment. She hadn’t bothered to braid it or brush it this morning. And she was wearing the exact same outfit she’d worn to school today and the day before. Her flannel shirt probably smelled like wood smoke.

Oh, God.

He pulled the boat up onto the beach, dropped the rope, and walked toward her. For years she’d imagined this moment; in her musings, she always knew exactly what to say. In the privacy of her imagination, they just started talking, picked up the thread of their friendship as if he’d never been gone.

But in her mind, he was Matthew, the fourteen-year-old kid who’d showed her frogs’ eggs and baby eagles, the boy who’d written her every week. Dear Leni, it’s hard at this school. I don’t think anyone likes me … And to whom she’d written back. I know a lot about being the new kid in school. It blows. Let me give you a few tips …

This … man was someone else, someone she didn’t know. Tall, long blond hair, incredibly good-looking. What could she say to this Matthew?

He reached into his backpack, pulled out the worn, banged-up, yellowed version of The Lord of the Rings that Leni had sent him for his fifteenth birthday. She remembered the inscription she’d written in it. Friends forever, like Sam and Frodo.

A different girl had written that. One who hadn’t known the ugly truth about her toxic family.

“Like Sam and Frodo,” he said.

“Sam and Frodo,” Leni repeated after him.

Leni knew it was crazy, but it seemed to her as if they were having a conversation without saying anything, talking about books and durable friendships and overcoming insurmountable odds. Maybe they weren’t talking about Sam and Frodo at all, maybe they were talking about themselves and how they had somehow grown up and stayed kids at the same time.

He pulled a small, wrapped box out of his backpack and handed it to her. “This is for you.”

“A present? It’s not my birthday.”

Leni noticed that her hands were shaking as she tore open the paper. Inside, she found a heavy black Canon Canonet camera in a leather case. She looked up at him in surprise.

“I missed you,” he said.

“I missed you, too,” she said quietly, knowing even as she said it that things had changed. They weren’t fourteen anymore. More important, her father had changed. Being friends with Tom Walker’s son would cause trouble.

It worried her that she didn’t care.

AT SCHOOL THE NEXT DAY, Leni could hardly concentrate. She kept glancing sideways at Matthew, as if to assure herself that he was really there. Ms. Rhodes had had to yell at Leni several times to get her attention.

At the end of class, they walked out of the schoolhouse together, emerged side-by-side into the sunshine, and walked down the wooden steps and into the muddy ground.

“I’ll come back for my ATV,” he said when she pulled her bike away from its place along the chain-link fence that had been built two years ago after a sow and her cubs walked right up to the school door, looking for food. “I’ll walk you home. If that’s okay.”

Leni nodded. Her voice seemed inaccessible. She hadn’t said two words to him all day; she was afraid of embarrassing herself. They weren’t children anymore and she had no idea how to talk to a boy her own age, especially one whose opinion of her mattered so much.

She had a solid hold on her plastic handlebar grips, with her dump-recycled bicycle clanging along the gravel road beside her. She said something about her job at the General Store, just to break the quiet.

She was aware of him physically in a way she’d never experienced before. His height, the breadth of his shoulders, the sure, easy way he walked. She smelled spearmint gum on his breath and the complex scents of store-bought shampoo and soap on his hair and skin. She was attuned to him, connected in that weird way of predator and prey, a sudden, dangerous circle-of-life type of connection that made no sense to her.

They turned off Alpine Street and walked into town.

“Town sure has changed,” Matthew said.

At the saloon, he stopped, tented his hand over his eyes, read the grafitti spray-painted across the charred wooden front. “Some people don’t want change, I guess.”

“Guess not.”

He looked down at her. “My dad said your dad vandalized the saloon.”

Leni stared up at him, felt shame twist her gut. She wanted to lie to him, but she couldn’t. Neither could she say the disloyal words out loud. People assumed her dad had vandalized the saloon; only she and her mother knew it for sure.

Matthew started walking again. Relieved to be past the evidence of her father’s anger, she fell into step beside him. When they passed the General Store, Large Marge emerged with a bellow, her big arms outflung. She gave Matthew a hug, then thumped him on the back. When she stepped back, she gazed at the two of them.

“Be careful, you two. Things aren’t good between your dads.”

Leni started off. Matthew followed her.

She wanted to smile, but the vandalized tavern and Large Marge’s warning had taken the shine off the day. Large Marge was right. Leni was playing with fire right now. Her dad could drive up this road at any minute. It would not be good for him to see her walking home with Matthew Walker.

“Leni?”

She realized Matthew had run to catch up with her. “Sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

Leni didn’t know how to answer; she was sorry for things he knew nothing about, for a future she was probably dragging him into that would surely sour. Instead, she said some lame thing about the latest book she’d read; for the remainder of the way home they talked about superficial things—the weather, the movies he’d seen in Fairbanks, the latest lures for king salmon.

It seemed that no time had passed, even though they had walked together for almost an hour, when Leni saw the metal gate with the cow skull on it up ahead. Mr. Walker was standing beside a big yellow excavator that was parked beside the gate that marked the entrance to his land.

Leni came to a stop. “What’s your dad doing?”

“He’s clearing some acreage to build cabins. And he’s putting up an arch over the driveway so guests will know how to find us. He’s calling it the Walker Cove Adventure Lodge. Or something like that.”

“A lodge for tourists? Right here?”

Leni felt Matthew’s gaze on her face, as strongly as any touch. “You bet. There’s money to be made.”

Mr. Walker walked toward them, pulling the trucker’s cap off his head, revealing a white strip of skin along his forehead, scratching his damp hair.

“My dad won’t like that arch,” Leni said as he approached.

“Your dad doesn’t like much,” Mr. Walker said with a smile, mopping the sweat from his brow with a bunched-up bandanna. “And you being friends with my Mattie is going to be at the top of his hate list. You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” Leni said.

“Come on, Leni,” Matthew said. He took her by the elbow and led her away from his father, with the bicycle clattering alongside. When they came to Leni’s driveway, she stopped, stared down the tree-shaded road.

“You should leave now,” she said, pulling away.

“I want to walk you home.”

“No,” she said.

“Your dad?”

She wished the world would just open up and swallow her. She nodded. “He would not want me to be friends with you.”

“Screw him,” Matthew said. “He can’t tell us we can’t be friends. No one can. Dad told me about the stupid feud going on. Who cares? What’s it to us?”

“But—”

“Do you like me, Leni? Do you want to be friends?”

She nodded. The moment felt solemn. Serious. A pact being made.

“And I like you. So there. It’s done. We’re friends. There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

Leni knew how naïve he was, how wrong. Matthew knew nothing about angry, irrational parents, about punches that broke noses and the kind of rage that began with vandalism and might go places he couldn’t imagine.

“My dad is unpredictable,” Leni said. It was the only equivocal word she could come up with.

“What does that mean?”

“He might hurt you if he found out we liked each other.”

“I could take on your dad.”

Leni felt a little burst of hysterical laughter rise up. The idea of Matthew “taking on” Dad was too terrible to contemplate.

She should walk away right now, tell Matthew they couldn’t be friends.

“Leni?”

The look in his eyes was her undoing. Had anyone ever looked at her like that? She felt a shiver of something, longing maybe, or relief, or even desire. She didn’t know. She just knew she couldn’t turn away from it, not after so many lonely years, even though she felt danger slip silently into the water and swim toward her. “We can’t let my dad know we’re friends. Not at all. Not ever.”

“Sure,” Matthew said, but she could see that he didn’t understand. Maybe he knew about pain and loss and suffering; that knowledge of darkness was in his eyes. But he didn’t know about fear. He thought her warnings were melodramatic.

“I mean it, Matthew. He can never know.”