The Great Alone

“Pleeeease,” MJ said.

“Okay. Go get Grandma. Tell her to put out the dang cigarette and come to the table.”

He was off like a shot, scrawny white legs moving like egg beaters, his blond hair streaming back from his pale, pointed face.

Leni watched him drag Mama back to the picnic table, her face flushed with laughter.

Leni glanced sideways, turning her attention away for just a moment. She saw a man standing near the entrance gate to this public park. Blond hair.

It was him.

He’d found her.

No.

Leni sighed. She hadn’t called the rehabilitation center in years. She’d picked up the phone often but never dialed. It didn’t matter that the threat of discovery had lessened; it still existed. Besides, when she had called, all those years ago, his condition had always been the same: No change.

She knew he’d been irreparably damaged by the fall and that the boy she loved lived only in her dreams. Sometimes, at night, he whispered to her in her sleep, not always, not even often, but enough to sustain her. In her dreams, he was still the smiling boy who’d given her a camera and taught her that not all love was scary.

“Come on,” Grandma said, taking Leni by the arm.

“This is great,” Leni said. The words felt wooden at first. Perfunctory. But when MJ shot up and started clapping and yelled, “Yay, Mommy!” in that Mickey Mouse voice of his, she couldn’t help smiling.

The dark edges fell back again, receded until there was only here, only now. A sunlit day, a celebration, a family. Life was like that, full of quicksilver changes. Joy reappeared as unexpectedly as sunlight.

She was happy.

She was.

* * *

“TELL ME ABOUT ALASKA, Mommy,” MJ said that night as he crawled into his bed and pulled up his comforter.

Leni brushed the fine white curls from her son’s forehead, thinking—again—how much he looked like his father. “Shove over,” she said.

Leni climbed in beside him. He rested his head on her shoulder.

The room was mostly dark, illuminated only by a small Star Wars bedside lamp. Unlike Leni, her son was growing up as a child of commercial America. After the picnic at the park and all the fun they’d had today, she knew that MJ was exhausted, but he wouldn’t sleep without a story.

“The girl who loved Alaska…”

It was his favorite story. Leni had begun it years ago and expanded it over time. She’d imagined a society living in the turquoise, glacial-cold waters of an Alaskan fjord, in buildings that had been downed when the mighty Mount Aku erupted. These people—the Raven clan—wanted desperately to rise into the light again, to walk in the sunshine, but a curse made by the eldest son of the Eagle clan had condemned them to remain in the icy water forever—until a whisperer could call them back. Katyaaq was the whisperess. A foreign girl of pure heart and quiet strength.

The story had unfolded week by week, with Leni telling just enough each night to lull her son to sleep. She’d created Katyaaq from the native Alaskan myths she’d read as a girl, and from the harsh, beautiful land itself. Uki, the boy Katyaaq loved—the landwalker—had called to her from the shore.

There was no doubt in Leni’s mind who the lovers were, or why the story felt so tragic to her.

“Katyaaq defied the gods and dared to swim to the shore. She shouldn’t have been able to do it, but her love for Uki gave her a special power. She kicked and kicked and finally broke out of the waves, felt sunlight on her face.

“Uki plunged into the ice-cold water, calling out her name. She saw his eyes—as green as the calm waters of the bay which had once been her people’s home, his hair the color of sunlight. ‘Kat,’ he said, ‘take my hand.’”

Leni saw that MJ had fallen asleep. She leaned over to kiss him and eased out of bed.

The small, single-story house was quiet. Mama was probably in the living room, watching Dynasty. Leni walked down the narrow hallway of their rented house, the walls on either side of her decorated with Leni’s photographs and MJ’s artwork. The claustrophobia that had once assailed her in this fake-wood-paneled, dimly lit hallway had disappeared long ago.

She had tamed the wildness within her as determinedly as she’d once tamed the wilderness itself. She’d learned to navigate in crowds, to live with walls, to stop for traffic. She’d learned to watch for robins instead of eagles, to buy her fish at Safeway, and to pay money for new clothes at Frederick & Nelson. She’d learned to blow-dry and condition her layered, shoulder-length hair and to care that her clothes matched. These days she plucked her eyebrows and shaved her legs and armpits.

Camouflage. She learned to fit in.