The Great Alone

Leni heard footsteps.

Grandma stepped aside; Grandpa moved in beside her. He was a big man—fat stomach straining at a blue cashmere sweater, big floppy jowls, white hair that was combed across his shiny head, the strands carefully tended. Baggy black polyester pants, cinched tight with a belt, suggested bird-thin legs underneath. He looked older than his seventy years.

“Hey,” Mama said.

Her grandparents stared at them, eyes narrowed, seeing the bruises on Leni’s and Mama’s faces, the swollen cheeks, the black eyes. “Son of a bitch,” Grandpa said.

“We need help,” Mama said, squeezing Leni’s hand.

“Where is he?” Grandpa wanted to know.

“We’ve left him,” Mama said.

“Thank God,” Grandma said.

“Do we need to worry about him coming to look for you, breaking down my door?” Grandpa asked.

Mama shook her head. “No. Never.”

Grandpa’s eyes narrowed. Did he understand what that meant? What they’d done? “What do you—”

“I’m pregnant,” Leni said. They had talked about this, she and Mama, and decided to say nothing about the pregnancy yet, but now that they were here, asking for help—begging—Leni couldn’t do it. She had kept enough secrets in her life. She didn’t want to live in the shadows of them anymore.

“Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Mama said, trying to smile.

“We’ve been here before,” Grandpa said. “I seem to recall my advice to you.”

“You wanted me to give her up and come home and pretend I could be the girl I was before,” Mama said. “And I wanted you to say it was okay, that you loved me anyway.”

“What we said,” Grandma said softly, “was that there were women in our church who were unable to have children and would have given your baby a good home.”

“I’m keeping my baby,” Leni said. “If you don’t want to help us, it’s fine, but I’m keeping the baby.”

Mama squeezed her hand.

Silence followed Leni’s declaration. In it, Leni glimpsed the largeness of the world for her and Mama now, the ocean of troubles they faced on their own, and it frightened her, but not as much as the idea of the world she would inhabit if she gave up this baby. Some choices you didn’t recover from; she was old enough to know that.

Finally, after what felt like forever, Grandma turned to her husband. “Cecil, how many times have we talked about a second chance? This is it.”

“You won’t run off in the middle of the night again?” he said to Mama. “Your mother … barely survived it.”

In those few words, carefully chosen, Leni heard sorrow. There was hurt between these people and her mother, hurt and regret and mistrust, but something softer, too.

“No, sir. We won’t.”

At last, Grandpa smiled. “Welcome home, Coraline. Lenora. Let’s get some ice on those bruises. You both should see a doctor.”

Leni saw Mama’s reluctance to step into the house. She took Mama by the arm, steadied her.

“Don’t let go,” Mama whispered.

Inside, Leni noticed the smell of flowers. There were several large floral arrangements positioned artfully on gleaming wooden tables and gilt-edged mirrors on the walls.

Leni glanced into rooms and down hallways as they walked. She saw a dining room with a table that accommodated twelve, a library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a living room in which there were two of everything, sofas, chairs, windows, lamps. A staircase with carpet so plush it felt like walking on muskeg in the summer led to an upstairs hallway that was paneled in mahogany and decorated with brass sconces and paintings of dogs and horses in ornate golden frames.

“Here,” Grandma said, finally stopping. Grandpa hung back, as if maybe doling out rooms was women’s work. “Lenora, you will sleep in Coraline’s old room. Cora, come this way.”

Leni stepped into her new room.