The Great Alone

Leni was tired of crying, of feeling this grief that kept opening and closing inside of her, but even so, she felt tears sting her eyes.

Mama put her cigarette out in the empty Coke can on the table in front of her. Smoke sizzled up, wafted into nothingness. She leaned back, sighing.

“How was he?” Mama asked.

“The same.” Leni leaned against her mama, needing the solid warmth of her body. She reached into her pocket and felt something sharp.

The present Mr. Walker had given her from Matthew. In all that had happened, she’d forgotten about it. She pulled it out, stared down at the small, thin gift, wrapped in newsprint, upon which Matthew had written: HAPPY BIRTHDAY LENI!

Her eighteenth birthday had gone by almost unnoticed this year, but Matthew had been planning for it. Maybe he’d had an idea about how to celebrate it.

She peeled the newsprint back, folded it carefully into something she would save. (He’d touched it while thinking of her.) Inside, she found a slim white box. Inside of that, a piece of yellowed, ripped-edge newsprint carefully folded.

It was a newspaper article and an old black-and-white photograph of two homesteaders, holding hands. They were surrounded by sled dogs, sitting in mismatched chairs in front of a tiny, mossy-roofed cabin. Junk decorated the yard. A towheaded boy sat in the dirt. Leni recognized the yard and the deck: these were Matthew’s grandparents.

Across the bottom, Matthew had written, THIS COULD BE US.

Leni’s eyes stung. She held the photograph to her heart and looked down at the article.

MY ALASKA by Lily Walker

July 4, 1972

You think you know what wild means. It’s a word you’ve used all your life. You use it to describe an animal, your hair, an undisciplined child. In Alaska, you learn what wild really means.

My husband, Eckhart, and I came to this place separately, which may not seem important, but certainly is. We had each decided on our own, and not when we were young, I might add, that civilization was not for us. It was the middle of the Great Depression. I lived in a shack with my parents and six siblings. There was never enough of anything—not time, not money, not food, not love.

What made me think of Alaska? Even now, I don’t recall. I was thirty-five years old, on the shelf, they called us spinsters then. My youngest sister died—of a broken heart maybe, or of the despair that came with watching her own babies suffer—and I walked away.

Just like that. I had ten dollars in my pocket and no real skills and I headed West. Of course I went West, for the romance of it. In Seattle, I saw a sign for Alaska. They were looking for women to do laundry for men in the gold fields.

I thought, “I can wash clothes,” and I went.

It was hard work, with men catcalling all the time, and my skin hardening until it was like leather. Then I met Eckhart. He was ten years older than me, and not much to look at, if I’m being truthful.

He caught my eye and told me his dream of homesteading the Kenai Peninsula. When he held out his hand, I took it. Did I love him? No. Not then. Not for years, really, although when he died, it was like God had reached in and yanked the heart out of my chest.

Wild. That’s how I describe it all. My love. My life. Alaska. Truthfully, it’s all the same to me. Alaska doesn’t attract many; most are too tame to handle life up here. But when she gets her hooks in you, she digs deep and holds on, and you become hers. Wild. A lover of cruel beauty and splendid isolation. And God help you, you can’t live anywhere else.

“What do you have there?” Mama asked, exhaling smoke.

Leni carefully folded the article into quarters. “An article by Matthew’s grandma. She died a few years before we came to Alaska.” The photograph of Matthew’s grandparents—dated 1940—sat on her lap. “How will I stop loving him, Mama? Will I … forget?”

Mama sighed. “Ah. That. Love doesn’t fade or die, baby girl. People tell you it does, but it doesn’t. If you love him now, you’ll love him in ten years and in forty. Differently, maybe, a faded version, but he’s part of you now. And you are part of him.”

Leni didn’t know if that was comforting or frightening. If she felt like this forever, as if her heart were an open wound, how would she ever be happy again?

“But love doesn’t come just once in your life, either. Not if you’re lucky.”

“I don’t think we Allbrights are lucky,” Leni said.

“I don’t know. You found him once, in the middle of nowhere. What were the chances that you’d meet him, that he’d love you, that you’d love him? I’d say, lucky you.”

“And then we fell down into a crevice, he got brain damaged and you killed Dad to protect me.”

“Yeah. Well. The glass can be half empty or half full.”

Leni knew the glass was broken. “Where are we going?” she asked.