The Great Alone

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.