فصل 19

NINETEEN

Evening.

The sound of a chain saw whirring, sputtering, going silent.

Leni stood at the window staring out at the yard. It was seven o’clock: the dinner hour, a break in this season’s long workday. Any minute now, Dad would come back into the cabin, bringing tension in with him. The remnants of Leni’s three-person graduation party—carrot cake and strawberry akutaq, a kind of ice cream made from snow and Crisco and fruit—lay on the table.

“I’m sorry,” Mama said, coming up to stand beside her. “I know how badly you wanted to go to the party. I’m sure you considered sneaking out. I would have at your age.”

Leni scooped out a spoonful of akutaq. Usually, she loved it. Not tonight. “I planned a dozen ways to do it.”

“And?”

“They all end the same way: with you alone in a room full of his fists.”

Mama lit a cigarette, exhaled smoke. “This … wall of his. He’s not giving up on it. We’re going to have to be more careful.”

“More careful?” Leni turned to her. “We think about every single thing we say. We disappear in an instant. We pretend we don’t need anything or anyone except him and this place. And none of it is enough, Mama. We can’t be good enough to keep him from losing it.”

Leni saw how difficult this conversation was for her mother; she wished she could do what she’d always done. Pretend it would get better, that he’d get better, pretend it hadn’t been on purpose or it wouldn’t happen again. Pretend.

But things were different now.

“I got into the University of Alaska at Anchorage, Mama.”

“Oh, my God, that’s great!” Mama said. A smile lit up her face and then faded. “But we can’t afford—”

“Tom Walker and Large Marge and Thelma and Ms. Rhodes are paying for it.”

“Money isn’t the only issue.”

“No,” Leni said, not looking away. “It’s not.”

“We will have to plan this carefully,” Mama said. “Your dad can never know Tom is paying. Never.”

“It doesn’t matter. Dad won’t let me go. You know he won’t.”

“Yes, he will,” Mama said in a firmer voice than Leni had heard from her in years. “I’ll make him.”

Leni cast out the dream, let the hook of it sail over blue, blue water and splash down. College. Matthew. A new life.

Yeah. Right. “You’ll make him,” she said dully.

“I can see why you have no faith in me.”

Leni’s hold on resentment lessened. “That’s not it, Mama. How can I leave you here alone with him?”

Mama gave her a sad, tired smile. “There will be no talk of that. None. You’re the chick. I’m the mama bird. Either you take flight on your own or I shove you out of the nest. It’s your choice. Either way, you’re going off to college with your boy.”

“You think it’s possible?” Leni let the amorphous dream turn solid enough that she could hold it in her hands, look at it from different angles.

“When do classes start?”

“Right after Labor Day.”

Mama nodded. “Okay. You’re going to have to be careful. Smart. Don’t risk everything for a kiss. That’s the kind of thing I would have done. Here’s what we’ll do: You stay away from Matthew and the Walkers until September. I will squirrel away enough money to buy you a bus ticket to Anchorage. We’ll fill your bug-out bag with what you need. Then, one day, I’ll arrange for a trip to Homer for all of us. You’ll say you have to use the bathroom and slip away. Later, when Dad calms down, I’ll find a note you left, saying that you’ve gone to college—without saying where—and you’ll promise to be back on the homestead for summer. It will work. You’ll see. If we’re careful, it will work.”

Don’t see Matthew until September.

Yes. That was what she would need to do.

But could she do it, really? Her love for Matthew was elemental, as powerful as the tide. No one could hold back the tide.

It reminded her of that movie she’d watched with Mama a lifetime ago. Splendor in the Grass. In it, Natalie Wood had loved Warren Beatty in that overwhelming way, but she lost him and ended up in a loony bin. When she got out, he was married, with a kid, but you knew neither one of them would love anyone else in that way again.

Mama had cried and cried.

Leni hadn’t understood then. Now she did. She saw how love could be dangerous and beyond control. Ravenous. Leni had it in her to love the way her mother did. She knew that now.

“Seriously, Leni,” Mama said, looking worried. “You will need to be smart.”

IN JUNE, Dad worked on his wall every day. By the end of the month, the skinned log stanchions were all in place; they stuck up from the ground every ten feet along the property line, an elliptical boundary between their land and the main road.

Leni tried to submerge her longing for Matthew, but it was buoyant, prone to bobbing up. Sometimes, when she was supposed to be working, she stopped and pulled the secret necklace out of her hip pocket and held it so tightly the sharp point drew blood. She made lists in her head of things she wanted to say to him, had whole conversations by herself, over and over. At night she read paperback novels that she’d found in the FREE box at the General Store. One after another. Devil’s Desire, The Flame and the Flower, Moonstruck Madness: historical romances about women who had to fight for love and ultimately were saved by it.

She knew the difference between fact and fiction, but she couldn’t abandon her love stories. They made her feel as if women could be in control of their destinies. Even in a cruel, dark world that tested women to the very limits of their endurance, the heroines of these novels could prevail and find true love. They gave Leni hope and a way to fill the lonely hours of the night.

During the endless daylight hours, she worked: she tended to the garden, carried trash to the oil drum and burned it to ash, which she used to fertilize the garden and make soap and block pests from the vegetable beds. She hauled water and repaired crab pots and untangled skeins of fishing nets. She fed the animals and gathered eggs and fixed fencing and smoked the fish they caught.

All the while she thought: Matthew. His name became a mantra.

Over and over, she thought: September isn’t that far away.

But as June passed into July, with Leni and Mama trapped on the homestead behind the wall her father was building, Leni started to lose her grasp on common sense. On the Fourth of July, she knew the town was celebrating on Main Street and she longed to be there.

Night after night, week after week, she lay in her bed, missing Matthew. Her love for him—a warrior, hiking mountains, crossing streams—strode into the wild borderlands of obsession.

Near the end of July, she began to have negative fantasies—him finding someone else, falling in love, deciding Leni was too much trouble. She ached for his touch, dreamed of his kiss, talked to herself in his voice. She began to get a vague, discomforting feeling that her endless yearning had combined with fear to taint her, that her breath had killed the tomatoes that never turned red, that tiny beads of her sweat had soured the blueberry jam, and next winter, when they ate all this food she had touched, her parents would wonder what had gone so wrong.

By August, she was a wreck. The wall was almost finished. The entire property line along the main road, from cliff to cliff, was a wall of freshly cut planks. Only a ten-foot-wide opening across the driveway allowed them to go in or out.

But the wall hardly concerned Leni. She had lost five pounds and was barely sleeping. Every night she woke at three or four and went out to stand on the deck, thinking, He’s there …

Twice, she’d put on her boots; once she’d made it as far as the end of their driveway before turning back.

She had Mama’s safety to consider, and Matthew’s.

Labor Day was less than a month away.

She should just wait to see Matthew in Anchorage, when time would be on their side.

That was the smart move. But she wasn’t smart in love.

She had to see him again, make sure he still loved her.

When did it become more than a longing? When did it solidify into a plan?

I need to see him.

Be with him.

Don’t do it, the old Leni said, the girl shaped by Dad’s violence and her mother’s fear.

Just once, came the answer from the Leni reformed by passion.

Just once.

But how?

IN EARLY AUGUST, during the eighteen-hour days, stocking up on food for the winter was paramount. They harvested the garden and canned vegetables; picked berries and made jam; fished in the ocean and the rivers and the bay. They smoked salmon and trout and halibut.

Today they’d woken early and spent all day on the river catching salmon. Fishing was serious business and no one bothered to talk much. Afterward, they hauled their catch home and got started on preserving the meat. Another in a string of long, exhausting days.

They finally took a break for dinner and went into the cabin. At the table, Mama set down a dinner of salmon pot pie and green beans cooked in bacon fat. She smiled at Leni, trying to pretend everything was okay. “Leni, I bet you’re excited for moose season to start.”

“Yeah,” she said. Her voice was shaky. All she could think about anymore was Matthew. Missing him made her physically ill.

Dad poked his fork through the flaky crust, looking for fish. “Cora, we’re going to Sterling on Saturday. There’s a snow machine for sale, and ours is going to shit. And I need some hinges for the gate. Leni, you’ll need to stay here and take care of the critters.”

Leni almost dropped her fork. Did he mean it?

Sterling was at least an hour and a half away by road, and if Dad wanted to bring home a snow machine, he’d need to drive his truck, which meant the ferry, which was a half an hour ride each way. From here to Sterling and back would take all day.

Dad went back to picking through his pot pie. When his fish was all gone, he went through looking for potatoes, then carrots, and finally peas.

Mama looked at Leni. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, Ernt. Let’s all go. I don’t like the idea of Leni home alone.”

Leni felt suspended on the silence while Dad dragged a piece of bread across his plate. “It’s uncomfortable for all three of us to be crammed into the truck for so long. She’s fine.”

SATURDAY FINALLY ARRIVED.

“Okay, Leni,” Dad said in his sternest voice. “It’s summer. You know what that means. Black bears. The guns are loaded. Keep the door locked if you’re inside. When you go for water, make lots of noise, take your bear whistle. We should be home by five, but if we’re late, I want you in the cabin with the door locked by eight. I don’t care how light it is outside. No fishing from the shore. Okay?”

“Dad, I’m almost eighteen. I know all that.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Eighteen only sounds old to you. Humor me.”

“I won’t leave the property and I’ll lock the door,” Leni promised.

“Good girl.” Dad grabbed a box full of pelts that he would sell to the furrier in Sterling and headed for the door.

When he was gone, Mama said, “Please, Leni. Don’t screw up. You’re so close to leaving for college. Just a few weeks.” She sighed. “You are not listening.”

“I am listening. I won’t do anything stupid,” Leni lied.

Outside, the truck horn honked.

Leni hugged her mother and literally shoved her toward the door.

Leni watched them drive away.

Then she waited, counted down the minutes until the ferry’s departure time.

Precisely forty-seven minutes after they left, she jumped onto her bicycle and pedaled down the bumpy driveway, through the opening in the plank wall and onto the main road. She turned onto the Walker’s road. She came to a thumping stop in front of the two-story log house and stepped off her bike, glancing around. No one would be inside on a day like this, not with so many chores to do. She saw Mr. Walker off to the left, near the trees, driving a bulldozer, moving piles of dirt around.

Leni dropped her bike in the grass and walked over the grassy berm and stared down the wide, weathered gray steps that led to the pebbled beach. Broken mussel shells lay scattered across the kelp and mud and rocks.

Matthew stood in the shallow water at a sloping metal table, filleting big silver and red salmon, pulling sacs of bright orange eggs out, carefully laying them out to dry. Seagulls cawed overhead, swooping and flapping, waiting for scraps. Guts floated in the water, brushed up against his boots.

“Matthew!” she yelled down at him.

He looked up.

“My parents are on the ferry. Going to Sterling. Can you come over? We have all day together.”

He put down his ulu. “Holy shit! I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

Leni went back to her bike and jumped on.

At the homestead, she fed and watered the animals and then ran around like a madwoman, trying to get ready for her first real date. She packed a picnic basket full of food and brushed her teeth—again—and shaved her legs and dressed in a pretty, off-white Gunne Sax dress Mama had given her for her seventeenth birthday. She twined her waist-length hair into a single wrist-thick braid and tied the end with a piece of grosgrain ribbon. Her stretched-out gray wool socks and wafflestompers kind of ruined the romantic effect, but it was the best she could do.

Then she waited. Holding her picnic basket and blanket, she stood on the deck, tapping her foot. Off to her right, the goats and chickens seemed agitated. They were probably sensing her nervousness. Overhead, a sky that should have been cornflower blue darkened. Clouds rolled in, stretched out, dimmed the sun.

They were on the ferry now, pulling into Homer; they had to be. Please don’t let them come back for something.

While she was staring down the shadowy driveway, she heard a distant motor whirring. Fishing boat. The sound was as common here in the summer as the drone of mosquitoes.

She ran to the edge of the property just as an aluminum fishing boat puttered into their cove. Nearing the beach, the motor clicked off and the boat glided soundlessly forward, beaching itself on the pebbled shore. Matthew stood at the console, waving.

She hurried down the stairs to the beach.

Matthew jumped down into the shallow water and came toward Leni, dragging the boat higher on the beach behind him, mesmerizing her with his smile, his confidence, the love in his eyes.

In an instant, a glance, the tension that had held her in its maw for months released. She felt giddy, young. In love.

“We have until five,” she said.

He swept her off her feet and kissed her.

Laughing at the sheer joy she felt, Leni took him by the hand and led him past the caves on the beach to an inland trail that led to a stub of forested land that overlooked the other side of the bay. Cliffs jutted out beneath them, defiant slabs of stone. Here, the ocean crashed against the rocky shore, sprayed up and landed like wet kisses on their skin.

She laid out the blanket she’d brought and set down the picnic basket.

“What did you bring?” Matthew asked, sitting down.

Leni knelt on the blanket. “Easy stuff. Halibut sandwiches, crab salad, some fresh beans, sugar cookies.” She looked up, smiling. “This is my first date.”

“Mine, too.”

“We’ve lived weird lives,” she said.

“Maybe everyone does,” he said, sitting down beside her, and then lying down, pulling her into his arms. For the first time in months, she could breathe.

They kissed so long she lost track of time, of fear, of everything except the softness of his tongue against hers and the taste of him.

He loosened one pearl button on her dress, just enough to slip his hand inside. She felt his rough, work-callused fingers glide across her skin; goose bumps changed the feel of her flesh. She felt him touch her breasts, slip beneath the worn cotton of her bra to touch her nipple.

A crack of thunder.

For a second she was so sluggish with desire, she thought she’d imagined it.

Then the rain hit. Hard, fast, pelting.

They scrambled to their feet, laughing. Leni grabbed the picnic basket and together they ran along the winding beach trail, and emerged on the bluff by the outhouse.

They didn’t stop until they were in the cabin, standing face-to-face, staring at each other. Leni felt raindrops sliding down her cheeks, dripping from her hair.

“Alaska in the summer,” Matthew said.

Leni stared at him, realizing now, all at once in a sweep of goose bumps, how she loved him.

Not in the toxic, needy, desperate way her mother loved her father.

She needed Matthew, but not to save her or complete her or reinvent her.

Her love for him was the clearest, cleanest, strongest emotion she’d ever felt. It was like opening your eyes or growing up, realizing that you had it in you to love like this. Forever. For all time. Or for all the time you had.

She started to unbutton her wet dress. The lacy collar fell down her shoulder, exposed her bra strap.

“Leni, are you sure—”

She silenced him with a kiss. She had never been more sure of anything. She finished unbuttoning her dress, which fell down her body, landed like a parachute of lace at her booted feet. She stepped out of it, kicked it aside.

She unlaced her boots, pulled them off, threw them aside. One hit the cabin wall with a thunk. Down to her bra and cotton panties, she said, “Come on,” and led him up the loft ladder to her bedroom, where Matthew hurriedly undressed and pulled her down onto the fur-covered mattress.

He undressed her slowly. His hands and mouth explored her body until every nerve in her tightened. When he touched her: music.

She lost herself in him. Her body was autonomous, moving in some instinctive, primal rhythm it must have known all along, edging into a pleasure so intense it was almost pain.

She was a star, burning so brightly it broke apart, pieces flying, light spraying. Afterward, she fell back to earth a different girl, or a different version of herself. It scared her even as it exhilarated her. Would anything else in her life ever change her so profoundly? And now that she had had this, had him, how was she supposed to leave him? Ever?

“I love you,” he said quietly.

“I love you, too.”

The word felt too small, too ordinary to contain all of this emotion.

She lay against him staring up at the skylight, watching rain boil across the glass. She knew she would remember this day all of her life.

“What do you think college will be like?” she asked.

“Like you and me. Like this all the time. Are you ready to go?”

Truthfully, she was afraid that when it was time to actually go, she wouldn’t be able to leave her mother. But if Leni stayed, if she gave up this dream, she would never recover. She couldn’t look that harsh future in the eyes.

Here, in his arms, with the magical possibility of time between them, she didn’t want to say anything at all. She didn’t want words to turn into walls that separated them.

“Do you want to talk about your dad?” he asked.

Leni instinctively wanted to say no, to do what she’d always done: keep the secret. But what kind of love was that? “The war screwed him up, I guess.”

“And now he hits you?”

“Not me. My mom.”

“You and your mom need to get out of here, Len. I’ve heard my dad and Large Marge talking about it. They want to help you guys but your mom won’t let them.”

“It’s not as easy as people think,” Leni said.

“If he loved you guys, he wouldn’t hurt you.”

He made it sound so simple, as if it were a mathematical equation. But the connection between pain and love wasn’t linear. It was a web. “What’s it like?” she asked. “To feel safe?”

He touched her hair. “Do you feel it now?”

She did. Maybe for the first time, but that was crazy. The last place Leni was safe was here, in the arms of a boy her dad hated. “He hates you, Matthew, and he doesn’t even know you.”

“I won’t let him hurt you.”

“Let’s talk about something else.”

“Like … how I think about you all of the time? It makes me feel crazy, how much I think about you.” He pulled her in for a kiss. They made out forever, time slowing down just for them; tasting each other, taking each other in. Sometimes they talked, whispered secrets or made jokes, or stopped talking altogether and just kissed. Leni learned the magic of knowing someone else through touch.

Her body wakened again in his arms, but lovemaking was different the second time. Words had changed it somehow, real life had pushed its way in.

She was scared that this was all they would ever have. Just this day. Scared that she’d never get to go to college or that Dad would kill Mama in her absence. Scared even that this love she felt for Matthew wasn’t real, or that it was real and flawed, that maybe she’d been so damaged by her parents that she couldn’t know what love really was.

“No,” she said to herself, to him, to the universe. “I love you, Matthew.”

It was the only thing she knew for sure.