The Great Alone

“You’re too young to understand. He didn’t mean to do that. He just … loves me too much sometimes.”

Was that true? Was that what love was when you grew up?

“He meant to,” Leni said quietly, feeling a cold wave of understanding wash through her. Memories clicked into place like pieces of a puzzle, fitting together. Mama’s bruises, her always saying, I’m clumsy. She had hidden this ugly truth from Leni for years. Her parents had been able to hide it from her with walls and lies, but here in this one-room cabin there was no hiding anymore. “He has hit you before.”

“No,” Mama said. “Hardly ever.”

Leni tried to put it all together in her head, make it make sense, but she couldn’t. How could this be love? How could it be Mama’s fault?

“We have to understand and forgive,” Mama said. “That’s how you love someone who’s sick. Someone who is struggling. It’s like he has cancer. That’s how you have to think of it. He’ll get better. He will. He loves us so much.”

Leni heard her mother start to cry, and somehow that made it worse, as if her tears watered this ugliness, made it grow. Leni pulled Mama into her arms, held her tightly, stroked her back, just like Mama had done so many times for Leni.

Leni didn’t know how long she sat there, holding her mother, replaying the horrible scene over and over.

Then she heard her father’s return.

She heard his uneven footsteps on the deck, his fumbling with the door latch. Mama must have heard it, too, because she was crawling unsteadily to her feet, pushing Leni aside, saying, “Go upstairs.”

Leni watched her mama rise; she dropped the wet, bloody rag. It fell with a splat to the floor.

The door opened. Cold rushed in.

“You came back,” Mama whispered.

Dad stood in the doorway, his face lined in agony, his eyes full of tears. “Cora, my God,” he said, his voice scratchy and thick. “Of course I came back.”

They moved toward one another.

Dad collapsed to his knees in front of Mama, his knees cracking on the wood so loudly Leni knew there would be bruises tomorrow.

Mama moved closer, put her hands in his hair. He buried his face in her stomach, started to shake and cry. “I’m so sorry. I just love you so much … it makes me crazy. Crazier.” He looked up, crying harder now. “I didn’t mean it.”

“I know, baby.” Mama knelt down, took him in her arms, rocked him back and forth.

Leni felt the sudden fragility of her world, of the world itself. She barely remembered Before. Maybe she didn’t remember it at all, in fact. Maybe the images she did have—Dad lifting her onto his shoulders, pulling petals from a daisy, holding a buttercup to her chin, reading her a bedtime story—maybe these were all images she’d taken from pictures and imbued with an imagined life.

She didn’t know. How could she? Mama wanted Leni to look away as easily as Mama did. To forgive even when the apology tendered was as thin as fishing line and as breakable as a promise to do better.

For years, for her whole life, Leni had done just that. She loved her parents, both of them. She had known, without being told, that the darkness in her dad was bad and the things he did were wrong, but she believed her mama’s explanations, too: that Dad was sick and sorry, that if they loved him enough, he would get better and it would be like Before.

Only Leni didn’t believe that anymore.

The truth was this: Winter had only just begun. The cold and darkness would go on for a long, long time and they were alone up here, trapped in this cabin with Dad.

With no local police and no one to call for help. All this time, Dad had taught Leni how dangerous the outside world was. The truth was that the biggest danger of all was in her own home.

TEN

“Come on, sleepyhead!” Mama called up bright and early the next morning. “Time for school.”

It sounded so ordinary, something every mother said to every fourteen-year-old, but Leni heard the words behind the words, the please let’s pretend that formed a dangerous pact.

Mama wanted to induct Leni into some terrible, silent club to which Leni didn’t want to belong. She didn’t want to pretend what had happened was normal, but what was she—a kid—supposed to do about it?

Leni dressed for school and climbed cautiously down the loft ladder, afraid to see her father.

Mama stood beside the card table, holding a plate of pancakes bracketed by strips of crispy bacon. Her face was swollen on the right side, purple seeping along the temple. Her right eye was black and puffy, barely open.