The Great Alone

“You think that eases my conscience? That he was in pain?”

“You were in pain, too. More than I knew, I guess. You knew you were pregnant?”

She nodded. “How is he?”

“It’s been a rough road.”

Leni felt acutely uncomfortable in the quiet that fell between them. Guilty.

“Come with me,” he said, and took her by the arm, steadying her. They walked past the lodge’s cabins, past where the goat pens used to be, and across a sheared hayfield, into a stand of black spruce.

Mr. Walker stopped. Leni expected to see a truck, but there wasn’t one. “Aren’t we going to Homer?”

Mr. Walker shook his head. He led her deeper into the trees, until they came to a slatted boardwalk, lined with gnarly branch railings on either side. Just below it, on a lip of land surrounded by trees, was a log cabin that overlooked the bay. Geneva’s old cabin. A wide wooden bridge led from the boardwalk to the front door. No, not a bridge. A ramp.

A wheelchair ramp.

Mr. Walker walked on ahead, his boots thudding on the ramplike bridge.

He knocked on the door. Leni heard a muffled voice and Mr. Walker opened the door and led Leni inside. “Go on,” he said gently, pushing her inside a small, cozy cabin with a wall of windows overlooking the bay.

The first thing Leni saw was a series of large paintings. One of them—a huge work-in-progress canvas—was propped on an easel. On it, an explosion of color; drops and splatters and streaks that somehow—impossibly—gave Leni the impression of the northern lights, although she couldn’t say why. There were strange, misshapen letters in all that color; she could almost make them out but not quite. Maybe it said, HER? The painting made her feel something. Pain first, and then a rising sense of hope.

“I’ll leave you two,” Mr. Walker said. He left the cabin and closed the door at the same time Leni saw the man in the wheelchair, sitting with his back to her.

He executed a slow turn, his paint-splattered hands agile on the wheelchair, maneuvering himself around.

Matthew.

He looked up. A network of raised pale pink scars ran across his face, gave him an odd, stitched-together look. His nose was flattened, had the splayed look of an old boxer’s, and his right eye was tugged just the slightest bit downward by a starburst of scar tissue at the top of his cheekbone.

But his eyes. In them, she saw him, her Matthew.

“Matthew? It’s me, Leni.”

He frowned. She waited for him to say something, anything, but there was nothing, just this aching, drawn-out silence where once there had been an endless stream of words.

She felt tears start. “It’s Leni,” she said again, softer. He stared at her, just kept staring, like he was dreaming. “You don’t know me,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I knew you wouldn’t. And you won’t understand about MJ. I knew that. I knew it, it’s just…” She took a step backward. She couldn’t do this now, not yet.

She would try again later. Practice her words. She’d explain it to MJ, prepare him. They had time now, and she wanted to do this right. She turned toward the door.

THIRTY-ONE

“Wait.”

Matthew sat in the wheelchair, clutching a sticky paintbrush, his heart racing.

They had told him she was coming, but then he’d forgotten and remembered and forgotten again. It was like that for him sometimes. Things got lost in the confused circuitry of his brain. Less often these days, but it happened.

Or maybe he hadn’t believed. Or he’d thought he’d imagined it, that they’d said the words to make him smile, hoping he’d forget.

He still had fog days when nothing made it up from the mist, not words or ideas or sentences. Just pain.

But she was here. He had dreamed of her return for years, played and replayed the possibilities. Imagined and massaged ideas. He had practiced words for it, for her, alone in his room, where stress wouldn’t seize control and render him mute, where he could pretend that he was a man worth coming back to.

He tried not to think about his ugly face and his never-quite-right leg. He knew that sometimes he couldn’t think well, and words became impossible creatures that ran at his approach. He heard his once-strong voice tripping up, sending out idiot words and he thought, That can’t be me, but it was.

He dropped the wet paintbrush and clutched the armrests of the wheelchair, forced himself to stand. It hurt so badly he made a grunt of pain, and it shamed him, that noise, but there was nothing he could do. He gritted his teeth, repositioned his leg. He’d been sitting for too long, consumed by his painting, the one he called Her, about a night he remembered on her beach, and he’d forgotten to move.