فصل 23

TWENTY-THREE

Dear Admissions Director:

University of Alaska, Anchorage.

I am very sorry to say that I will not be able to attend classes at the University this quarter.

I am hopeful—although doubtful—that winter quarter will see a change in my circumstances.

I will be forever grateful for my acceptance and hope that another lucky student can take my spot.

Sincerely,

Lenora Allbright

In September, cold winds roared across the peninsula. Darkness began its slow, relentless march across the land. By October, the moment that was autumn in Alaska had passed. Every night, at seven P.M., Leni sat close to the radio, the volume cranked high, static popping, listening for Mr. Walker’s voice, waiting for news on Matthew. But week after week, there was no improvement.

In November, the precipitation turned to snow, light at first, goose down fluttering from white skies. The muddy ground froze, turned hard as granite, slippery, but soon a layer of white lay over everything, a new beginning of sorts, a camouflage of beauty over whatever lay hidden beneath.

And still Matthew wasn’t Matthew.

On an ice-cold evening that followed the first vicious storm of the season, Leni finished her chores in a sooty darkness and returned to the cabin. Once inside, she ignored her parents and stood in front of the woodstove, her hands outstretched to its warmth. Gingerly she flexed the fingers of her left hand. The arm still felt weak, foreign somehow, but it was a relief to have the cast off.

She turned, saw her own reflection in the window. Pale, thin face with a knifepoint chin. She’d lost weight since the accident, and rarely bothered to bathe. Grief had upset everything—her appetite, her stomach, her sleep. She looked bad. Drained and exhausted. Bags under her eyes.

She went to the radio at exactly 6:55 and turned it on.

Through the speaker, she heard Mr. Walker’s voice, steady as a trawler in calm seas. “To Leni Allbright in Kaneq: We’re moving Matthew to a long-term facility in Homer. You can visit on Tuesday afternoon. It’s called Peninsula Rehabilitation Center.”

“I’m going to see him,” Leni said.

Dad was sharpening his ulu. He stopped. “The hell you are.”

Leni didn’t glance at him or flinch. “Mama. Tell him if he wants to stop me, he’ll have to shoot me.”

Leni heard her mother draw in a sharp breath.

Seconds passed. Leni felt her father’s anger and his uncertainty. She could feel the war waging within him. He wanted to explode, to exert his will, to hit something, but she meant it and he knew it.

He hit the coffeepot, sent it flying, muttered something they couldn’t quite hear. Then he cursed, threw up his hands, and backed away, all in a single jerking movement. “Go,” Dad said. “Go see the boy, but get your chores done first. And you.” He turned to Mama, pointed a finger at her, thumped it on her chest. “She goes alone. You hear me?”

“I hear you,” Mama said.

TUESDAY FINALLY CAME.

“Ernt,” Mama said after lunch. “Leni needs a ride to town.”

“Tell her to take the old snow machine, not the new one. And be back by dinner.” He gave Leni a look. “I mean it. Don’t make me come looking for you.” Yanking his iron animal traps from their hooks on the wall, he went outside, banging the door behind him.

Mama moved forward, glancing uncertainly behind her. She pressed two folded-up pieces of paper in Leni’s hand. “Letters. For Thelma and Marge.”

Leni took the letters, nodded.

“Don’t be stupid, Leni. Be back before dinner. That gate could close again anytime. They’re only open because he feels bad for what he did and he’s trying to be good.”

“Like I care.”

“I care. And you should care for me.”

Leni felt the sting of her selfishness. “Yeah.”

Outside, Leni angled into the wind and trudged through the snow.

When she finished feeding the animals, she pulled the starter on the snow machine and climbed aboard.

In town, she pulled up in front of the harbor dock entrance and parked. A water taxi was waiting for Leni. Mama had called for it on the ham radio. The sea was too rough to take the skiff out.

Leni slung her backpack over her shoulder and headed down the slick, icy dock ramp.

The water-taxi captain waved at her. Leni knew he wasn’t going to charge her for the ride. He was in love with Mama’s cranberry relish. Every year she made two dozen jars of it just for him. That was how the locals did it: trading.

Leni handed him a jar and climbed aboard. As she sat on the bench in the back, staring up at the town perched on stilts above the sea, she told herself not to have any hopes for today. She knew Matthew’s condition, had heard the words so often they’d worn a groove in her consciousness. Brain damage.

Even so, at night, after writing her daily letter to Matthew, she often fell asleep dreaming it was a Sleeping Beauty kind of thing, a dark spell that the kiss of true love could undo. She could marry him and hope that her love would waken him.

Forty minutes later, after a bumpy, splashing crossing of Kachemak Bay, the water taxi pulled up to the dock and Leni jumped out.

On this ice-cold winter day, fog coiled along the waterline of the Spit. There were only a few locals out in this weather and no tourists. Most of the businesses were closed for the season.

She left the road and began the uphill climb into Homer proper. She’d been told that if she came to the house with the pink boat in the yard and Fourth of July decorations still up, she’d gone too far on Wardell.

The care facility sat at the edge of town, on a wildly overgrown lot with a gravel parking lot.

She stopped. A huge bald eagle perched on a telephone pole watching her, its golden eyes bright in the gloom.

Forcing herself to move, she went into the building, spoke to the receptionist, and followed her directions down to the room at the end of the hall.

There, at the closed door, she paused, took a steady breath, and opened the door.

Mr. Walker stood by the bed. At Leni’s entrance, he turned. He didn’t look like himself. The months had whittled him away; his sweater and jeans bagged. He had grown a beard that was half gray. “Hi, Leni.”

“Hey,” she said, her gaze cutting to the bed.

Matthew lay strapped down. There was a cagelike thing around his bald head. It was bolted in with screws; they’d drilled into his skull. He looked thin and scrawny and old, like a plucked bird. For the first time she saw his face, crisscrossed by red zipper scars. A pucker of folded skin pulled one corner of his eye downward. His nose was flattened.

He lay motionless, his eyes open, his mouth slack. A line of drool beaded down from his full lower lip.

Leni went to the bed, stood beside Mr. Walker.

“I thought he was better.”

“He is better. Sometimes I swear he looks right at me.”

Leni leaned down. “H-hey, Matthew.”

Matthew moaned, bellowed. Words that weren’t words, just apelike sounds and grunts. Leni drew back. He sounded angry.

Mr. Walker placed his hand on Matthew’s. “It’s Leni, Matthew. You know Leni.”

Matthew screamed. It was a heartrending sound that reminded her of an animal caught in a trap. His right eye rolled around in the socket. “Waaaaath.”

Leni gaped down at him. This wasn’t better. This wasn’t Matthew, not this screaming, moaning husk of a person.

“Blaaaa…” Matthew moaned, his body buckling. A terrible smell followed.

Mr. Walker took Leni by the arm, led her out of the room.

“Susannah,” Tom said to the nurse. “He needs a diaper change.”

Leni would have collapsed if not for Mr. Walker, who held her up. He led her over to a waiting area with vending machines and eased her into a chair.

He sat in the chair beside her. “Don’t worry about the screaming. He does it all the time. The doctors say it’s purely physical, but I think it’s frustration. He’s in there … somewhere. And he is in pain. It’s killing me to see him like this and not to be able to help.”

“I could marry him, take care of him,” Leni said. In her dreams she’d imagined it, being married, her caring for him, her love bringing him back.

“That’s a really nice thing, Leni, and it tells me Matthew loves the right girl, but he may never get out of that bed or be able to say ‘I do.’”

“But people get married, people who are injured and can’t talk and are dying. Don’t they?”

“Not to eighteen-year-old girls with their whole lives in front of them. How’s your mom? I hear she took your dad back.”

“She always takes him back. They’re like magnets.”

“We’re all worried about you two.”

“Yeah.” Leni sighed. What good had worry ever done? Only Mama could change their situation, and she refused to do it.

In the silence that followed that unanswerable comment, Mr. Walker reached into his pocket and pulled out a thin package wrapped in newsprint. Written across the top in red marker was: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LENI. “Alyeska found this in Mattie’s room. I guess he got it for you … before.”

“Oh” was all she could say. Her birthday had been forgotten in all the drama this year. She took the gift, stared down at it.

The nurse exited Matthew’s room. Through the open door, Leni heard Matthew screaming. “Waaaa … Na … sher…”

“The brain damage … it’s bad, kiddo. I won’t lie to you. I was sorry to hear you decided not to go to college.”

She shoved the present in her parka pocket. “How could I? It was supposed to be both of us.”

“He’d want you to go. You know he would.”

“We don’t know what he wants anymore, do we?”

She got up, went back into Matthew’s room. He lay rigid, his fingers flexed. The bolts in his head and scars on his face gave him a Frankenstein appearance. His one good eye stared dully ahead, not at her.

She leaned over and picked up his hand. It was a deadweight. She kissed the back of it, saying, “I love you.”

He didn’t respond.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she promised in a thick voice. “I’ll always be here. This is me, Matthew, climbing down to save you. Like you did for me. You did it, you know? You saved me. I’m standing here, by the one I love. I hope you hear that.”

She stayed by him for hours. Every now and then he screamed and struggled. Twice, he cried. Finally, they asked her to leave so they could bathe him.

It wasn’t until later, after she’d flagged down the water taxi and climbed aboard, as she was listening to the boat hull thumping over the whitecaps, with water spraying her in the face, that she realized she hadn’t said goodbye to Mr. Walker. She’d just walked through the care facility and gone outside, past a man standing in front of a shack held together with duct tape and plastic sheeting, past a group of kids playing four-square in the school playground, wearing arctic camo clothes, past an old Native woman walking two huskies and a duck—all on leashes.

She thought she had grieved for Matthew, cried all the tears she had, but now she saw the desert of grief that lay before her. It could go on and on. The human body was eighty percent water; that meant she was literally made of tears.

In Kaneq, as she walked off the water taxi, it started to snow. The town gave off a slight humming: the sound of the big generator that fueled the new lights. Snow fell like sifting flour in the glow of Mr. Walker’s new streetlamps. She barely noticed the cold as she walked up to the General Store.

The bell rang at her entrance. It was four-thirty, technically still daytime, but night was coming in fast.

Large Marge was dressed in a thigh-length fringed suede jacket over insulated pants. Her hair looked like shavings from an Etch A Sketch that had been glued to her skull. In places she had no hair at all, patches where she’d cut too zealously down to her brown scalp, probably because she didn’t own a mirror. “Leni! What a nice surprise,” she said in a foghorn voice that would have sent birds into the air. “I miss my best-ever employee.”

Leni saw compassion in the woman’s dark eyes. She meant to say, I saw Matthew, but to her horror what she did was burst into tears.

Large Marge led Leni over to the cash register, eased her to a sitting position on the old-fashioned settee and handed her a Tab.

“I just saw Matthew,” Leni said, slumping forward.

Large Marge sat down beside her. The settee creaked angrily. “Yeah. I was in Anchorage last week. It’s hard to see. It’s killing Tom and Aly, too. How much heartache can one family handle?”

“I thought a care facility meant he was better. I thought…” She sighed. “I don’t know what I thought.”

“He’s as good as he’s going to get, from what I hear. Poor kid.”

“He was trying to save me.”

Large Marge was quiet for a moment. In the silence, Leni wondered if one person could ever really save another, or if it was the kind of thing you had to do for yourself.

“How’s your mom? I still can’t believe she let Ernt come back.”

“Yeah. The cops can’t do anything if she won’t.” Leni didn’t know what else to say. She knew it was impossible for someone like Large Marge to understand why a woman like Cora stayed with a man like Ernt. It should have been as easy as an elementary math equation: he hits you x broken bones = leave him.

“Tom and I begged your mama to press charges. I guess she’s too afraid.”

“It’s about more than fear.” Leni was about to say more when her stomach seized. She thought she might throw up. “Sorry,” she said when the nausea passed. “I feel terrible lately. Worry is making me physically sick, I guess.

Large Marge sat there a long time, then pushed to her feet. “Wait here.” She left Leni sitting on the settee, breathing carefully. She walked back toward the store’s shelving, bumping into one of the steel animal traps hanging on the wall.

Leni kept reliving the scene with Matthew, hearing his screams, seeing his eye roll around in the socket. He needs a diaper change.

Her fault. All of it.

Large Marge returned, her rubber boots squeaking on the sawdust floor. “You might need this, I’m afraid. I always keep one in stock.”

Leni looked down, saw the slim box in Large Marge’s palm.

And just like that, Leni’s life got even worse.

IN THE DARK of an early-fallen night, Leni made her way from the outhouse to the cabin beneath a starlit velvet blue sky. It was one of those vibrant, clear-skied Alaskan nights that were otherworldly. Moonlight reflected on snow and set the world aglow.

Once inside the cabin, she latched the door behind her and stood by the row of parkas and Cowichan sweaters and rain jackets, the box of mittens and gloves and hats at her feet. Unable to move, to think, to feel.

Until now, this second, she would have said blue was her favorite color. (A stupid thought, but there it was.) Blue. The color of morning, of twilight, of glaciers and rivers, of Kachemak Bay, of her mother’s eyes.

Now blue was the color of a ruined life.

She didn’t know what to do. There was no good answer. She was smart enough to know that.

And dumb enough to be in this situation.

“Leni?”

She heard her mother’s voice, recognized the concerned tone, but it didn’t matter. Leni felt distance spreading between them. That was how change came, she supposed: in the quiet of things unspoken and truths unacknowledged.

“How was Matthew?” Mama asked. She walked over to Leni, peeled off her parka, hung it up, and led her to the sofa, but neither of them sat down.

“He’s not even him,” Leni said. “He can’t think or talk or walk. He didn’t look at me, just screamed.”

“He’s not paralyzed, though. That’s good, right?”

That was what Leni had thought, too. Before. But what good was being able to move if you couldn’t think or see or talk? It might have been better if he’d died down there. Kinder.

But the world was never kind, especially not to kids.

“I know you think it’s the end of the world, but you’re young. You’ll fall in love again and … What’s that in your hand?”

Leni held out her fist, uncurled her fingers to reveal the thin vial in her hand.

Mama took it, studied it. “What is this?”

“It’s a pregnancy test,” Leni said. “Blue means positive.”

She thought about the chain of choices that had led her here. A ten-degree shift anywhere along the way and everything would be different. “It must have happened the night we ran away. Or before? How do you know a thing like that?”

“Oh, Leni,” Mama said.

What Leni needed now was Matthew. She needed him to be him, whole. Then they would be in this together. If Matthew were Matthew, they’d get married and have a baby. It was 1978, for God’s sake; maybe they didn’t even have to get married. The point was, they could make it. They’d be too young and college would have to wait, but it wouldn’t be the tragedy it was now.

How was she supposed to do this without him?

Mama said, “It’s not like in my day when they sent you away in shame and nuns took your baby. You have choices now. It’s legal to—”

“I’m having Matthew’s baby,” Leni said. She didn’t even know until then that all of this had already gone through her brain and she’d decided.

“You can’t raise a baby alone. Here.”

“You mean with Dad,” Leni said, and there it was: the thing that made this even worse. Leni was carrying a Walker baby. Her father would blow a gasket when he found out.

“I don’t want him anywhere near this baby,” Leni said.

Mama pulled Leni into her arms, held her tightly.

“We will figure this out,” Mama said, stroking her hair. Leni could tell that her mother was crying, and that made her feel even worse.

“What’s this?” Dad said, his voice booming loud.

Mama sprang back, looking guilty. Her cheeks shone with tears, her smile was unsteady. “Ernt!” Mama said. “You’re back.”

Leni shoved the vial into her pocket.

Dad stood by the door, unzipped his insulated coveralls. “How is the kid? Still a vegetable?”

Leni had never felt such hatred. She pushed Mama aside and went to him, saw his surprise as she neared him and said, “I’m pregnant.”

She never saw the hit coming. One minute she was standing there, staring at her father, and the next minute his fist hit her chin so hard she tasted blood. Her head snapped back, she stumbled, lost her balance, crashed into an end table, and fell to the floor. As she landed, she thought, oddly, He’s so fast.

“Ernt, no!” Mama screamed.

Dad unbuckled his belt, pulled it loose, came at Leni.

She tried to get up, but her head was ringing and she was dizzy. Her vision was off.

The first crack of his belt buckle hit her across the cheek, breaking the skin. Leni cried out, tried to scuttle away.

He hit her again.

Mama threw herself at Dad, clawing at his face. He shoved her away and went after Leni again.

He yanked her to her feet, backhanded her across the face. She heard the cartilage crack, pop. Blood gushed from her nose. She staggered back, instinctively protecting her stomach as she fell to her knees.

A gun fired.

Leni heard the loud craaaack and smelled the shot. Glass shattered.

Dad stood there, his legs braced wide, his right hand still curled into a fist. For a second nothing happened; no one moved. Then Dad stumbled forward, toward Leni. Blood pulsed from a wound in his chest, stained his shirt. He looked confused, surprised. “Cora?”

Mama stood behind him, the gun still pointed at him. “Not Leni,” she said, her voice steady. “Not my Leni.”

She shot him again.