The Great Alone

“Really?”

“I’ll try harder, Red. I promise. I love your mom like…” His voice dropped to a whisper. “She’s my heroin. You know that.”

Leni knew it wasn’t a good thing, not a normal mom-and-dad thing, to compare your love to a drug that could hollow your body and fry your brain and leave you for dead. But they said it to each other all the time. They said it the way Ali McGraw in Love Story said love means never having to say you’re sorry, as if it were gospel true.

She wanted his regret, his shame and sadness to be enough for her. She wanted to follow her mother’s lead as she always had. She wanted to believe that last night had been some terrible anomaly and that it wouldn’t happen again.

He reached out, touched her cold cheek. “You know how much I love you.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“It won’t happen again.”

She had to believe him, to believe in him. What would her world be without that? She nodded and got out of the bus. She trudged through the snow and climbed the steps and entered the warm school.

Silence greeted her.

No one was talking.

Students were in their seats and Ms. Rhodes was at the chalkboard, writing, WWII. Alaska was the only state invaded by Japanese. The skritch-skritch-skritch of her chalk was the only sound in the room. None of the kids was talking or giggling or shoving each other.

Matthew sat at his desk.

Leni hung her Cowichan sweater on a hook alongside someone’s parka, and stomped the snow from her bunny boots. No one turned to look at her.

She put away her lunch box and headed to her desk, taking her seat next to Matthew. “Hey,” she said.

He gave her a barely-there smile and didn’t make eye contact. “Hey.”

Ms. Rhodes turned to face the students. Her gaze landed on Matthew, softened. She cleared her throat. “Okay. For Axle, Matthew, and Leni, turn to page 172 of your state history books. On the morning of June sixth, 1942, five hundred Japanese soldiers invaded Kiska Island, in the Aleutian chain. It is the only battle of that war fought on American soil. Many people have forgotten it, but…”

Leni wanted to reach under the table and hold Matthew’s hand, to feel the comfort of a friend’s touch, but what if he pulled away? What would she say then?

She couldn’t complain that her family had turned out to be fragile and that she no longer felt safe in her home, not after what he’d been through.

She could have said it before—maybe—when life had felt different for both of them, but not now, when he was so broken he couldn’t even sit up straight.

She almost said, It will get better, to him, but then she saw the tears in his eyes and she closed her mouth. Neither one of them needed platitudes right now.

What they needed was help.

* * *

IN JANUARY, the weather got worse. Cold and darkness isolated the Allbright family even more. Feeding the woodstove became priority number one, a constant round-the-clock chore. They had to chop and carry and stack a huge amount of wood each day, just to survive. And as if all of that weren’t stressful enough, on bad nights—nightmare nights—Dad woke them in the middle of the night to pack and repack their bug-out bags, to test their preparedness, to take their weapons apart and put them back together.

Each day, the sun set before five P.M. and didn’t rise until ten A.M., giving them a grand total of six hours of daylight—and sixteen hours of darkness—a day. Inside the cabin, the Dixie cups showed no new green starts. Dad spent hours hunched over his ham radio, talking to Mad Earl and Clyde, but more and more of the world was cut away. Nothing came easily—not getting water or cutting wood or feeding the animals or going to school.

But worst of all was the rapidly emptying root cellar. They had no vegetables anymore, no potatoes or onions or carrots. They were almost to the end of their fish stores, and a single caribou haunch hung in the cache. Since they ate almost nothing but protein, they knew the meat wouldn’t last long.

Her parents fought constantly about the lack of money and supplies. Dad’s anger—kept barely in check since the funeral—was slowly escalating again. Leni could feel it uncoiling, taking up space. She and Mama moved cautiously, tried never to aggravate him.

Today, Leni woke in the dark, ate breakfast and dressed for school in the dark, and arrived at her classroom in the dark. The bleary-eyed sun didn’t appear until past ten o’clock, but when it did show up, sending streamers of brittle yellow light into the shadowy lantern- and woodstove-lit classroom, everyone perked up.

“It’s a sunny day! The weatherman was right!” Ms. Rhodes said from her place at the front of the classroom. Leni had been in Alaska long enough to know that a sunny, blue-skied January day was noteworthy. “I think we need to get out of this classroom, get a little air in our lungs and some sunshine on our faces. Blow out the winter cobwebs. I’ve planned a field trip!”

Axle groaned. He hated anything and everything that had to do with school. He peered through the rat’s-nest fringe of black hair he never washed. “Aw, come on … can’t we just go home early? I could go ice fishing.”

Ms. Rhodes ignored the scruffy-haired teenager. “The older of you—Matthew, Axle, and Leni—help the littles put on their coats and get their backpacks.”