The Great Alone

Mr. Walker stared down at Mama, who was so bruised and bandaged she barely looked like herself. “All you have to do is ask for help,” he said quietly. “I want to help you, Cora. Surely you know I—”

“You don’t know me, Tom. If you did…”

Leni saw tears gather in her mother’s eyes. “There’s something wrong with me,” she said slowly. “Sometimes it feels like a strength and sometimes like a weakness, but I don’t know how to stop loving him.”

“Cora!” Leni heard her father’s voice and saw how Mama shrank into the pillows behind her.

Mr. Walker lurched away from her bedside.

Dad ignored Mr. Walker completely, shoved past him. “Oh, my God, Cora? Are you okay?”

Mama seemed to melt in front of him. “We crashed the bus.”

“What were you doing out in that weather?” he said, but he knew. Leni saw it in his eyes. There was a deep scratch on his cheek.

Mr. Walker backed toward the door, a big man trying to disappear. He gave Leni a sad, knowing look and left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.

“We needed food,” Mama said. “I wanted to make you a special d-dinner.”

Dad laid his work-callused hand against her bruised, swollen cheek, as if his touch could heal her. “Forgive me, baby. I’ll kill myself if you don’t.”

“Don’t say that,” Mama said. “Don’t ever say that. You know I love you. Only you.”

“Forgive me,” he said. He turned. “And you, too, Red. Forgive a stupid man who can’t get his shit together sometimes, but who loves you. And who will do better.”

“I love you,” Mama said, and she was crying now, too, and suddenly Leni understood the reality of her world, the truth that Alaska, in all its beautiful harshness, had revealed. They were trapped, by environment and finances, but mostly by the sick, twisted love that bound her parents together.

Mama would never leave Dad. It didn’t matter that she’d gone so far as to take a backpack and run to the bus and drive away. She would come back, always, because she loved him. Or she needed him. Or she was afraid of him. Who knew, really?

Leni couldn’t begin to understand the hows and whys of her parents’ love. She was old enough to see the turbulent surface, but too young to know what lay beneath.

Mama could never leave Dad, and Leni would never leave Mama. And Dad could never let them go. In this toxic knot that was their family, there was no escape for any of them.

* * *

THAT NIGHT, they took Mama home from the hospital.

Dad held Mama as if she were made of glass. So careful, so concerned for her well-being. It filled Leni with an impotent rage.

And then she’d get a glimpse of him with tears in his eyes and the rage would turn soft and slide into something like forgiveness. She didn’t know how to corral or change either of these emotions; her love for him was all tangled up in hate. Right now she felt both emotions crowding in on her, each jostling for the lead.

He got Mama settled in bed and immediately went out to chop wood. There was never enough on the pile and Leni knew that physical exertion helped him somehow. Leni sat by her mother’s bedside for as long as she could, holding her mother’s cold hand. She had so many questions she wanted to ask, but she knew the ugly words would only make her mother cry, so Leni said nothing.

The next morning, Leni was climbing down the ladder when she heard Mama crying.

Leni went into Mama’s bedroom and found her sitting up in bed (just a mattress on the floor), leaning back against the skinned log wall, her face swollen, both eyes black and blue, her nose just slightly to the left of where it belonged.

“Don’t cry,” Leni said.

“You must think the worst of me,” Mama said, gingerly touching the split in her lip. “I baited him, didn’t I? Said the wrong thing. I must have?”

Leni didn’t know what to say to that. Did Mama mean that it was her fault, that if Mama was quieter or more supportive or more agreeable, Dad wouldn’t explode? It didn’t seem true to Leni, not at all. Sometimes he snapped and sometimes he didn’t, that was all there was. Mama taking the blame seemed wrong. Dangerous, even.

“I love him,” Mama said, staring down at her cast-encased arm. “I don’t know how to stop. But I have you to think about, too. Oh, my God … I don’t know why I’m like this. Why I let him treat me this way. I just can’t forget who he was before the war. I keep thinking he’ll come back, the man I married.”

“You won’t ever leave him,” Leni said quietly. She tried not to make it sound like an indictment.

“Would you really want that? I thought you loved Alaska,” Mama said.