Mama pulled a life hammer out from under her seat. “The Walker place is closest. It’s probably less than a quarter of a mile from here. Go there. Can you make it?”
“Yeah.”
The bus made a dull, creaking sound, settled a little, moved.
“I love you, baby girl.”
Leni tried not to cry.
“Hold your breath. Go up.”
Mama cracked the hammer against the window, hard, fast.
The glass crackled into a webbed pattern, sagged. For a second it held together, and then with a snap! it broke. Snow dumped into the bus, covering them.
The cold was shocking.
Leni lurched forward, climbing over her mother, trying not to hit her arm, hearing her moan in pain, feeling her mother’s good hand come up through the snow to push her.
Leni shimmied through the window.
A branch smacked her in the face. She kept going, crawling on the side of the bus until she reached the hillside, which had been scraped and scarred by the plunging vehicle; black dirt and broken branches and exposed roots.
She launched herself forward, flailed for a higher foothold, climbed up the hillside.
It seemed to take forever. Clawing, clinging, hauling herself upward, breathing hard, sucking in snow. But finally she made it. She threw herself over the edge and landed facedown in the snow, on the road. Gasping, she climbed onto all fours and got to her feet.
Whiteout. Her headlamp threw out a razor-thin glow. Wind tried to shove her off the road as she started her trek. Trees shuddered all around her, bent and cracked. Branches flew past her, scraping the torn ground. One hit her hard in the side, almost knocked her over.
The light was her lifeline out here. Her chest began to ache from the frigid air she was breathing in, a stitch formed in her side. Sweat slid down her back and turned her hands clammy inside her gloves.
She had no idea how long she’d been trudging forward, trying not to stop or cry or scream, when she saw the silver gate up ahead, and the cow skull on it, wearing a bowler of snow.
Leni dragged the gate open, over the bumpy ground, bulldozing snow aside.
She wanted to run forward, scream Help! but she knew better. Running could be mistake number two. Instead, she trudged through the knee-high snow. The forest on her right blocked some of the wind.
It took at least fifteen minutes to get to the Walker house. As she neared it, saw light in the windows, she felt the sting of tears—tears that froze in the corners of her eyes, hurting, blurring her vision.
All at once the wind died; the world drew in a quiet breath, leaving a near-perfect silence, broken only by her ragged breathing and the distant purr of the waves on a frozen shore.
She stumbled past the snow-covered heaps of junk and old cars and past the beehives. At her approach, cows began lowing, stomping their hooves as they herded together in case she was a predator. Goats bleated.
Leni went up the ice-slick steps and pounded on the front door.
Mr. Walker answered quickly, opened the door. When he saw Leni, his face changed. “Jesus.” He pulled her into the house, through the arctic entry lined with coats and hats and boots, and to the woodstove.
Her teeth were chattering so hard she was afraid she’d bite off her tongue if she tried to talk, but she had to.
“W-w-we cr-crashed th-the b-b-bus. M-Mama’s stuck.”
“Where?”
She couldn’t stop her tears now, or her shaking. “By the b-bend in the road before Large Marge’s p-place.”
Mr. Walker nodded. “Okay.” He left her standing there, shaking and shivering just long enough for him to return in snow gear, carrying a big mesh bag slung over one shoulder.
He went to the ham radio and found an open frequency. Staticky sound crackled through, then a high-pitched squeal. “Large Marge,” he said into a handheld mouthpiece. “Tom Walker here. Car crash near my place on the main road. Need help. On my way. Over.” He lifted his thumb from the button. Static again. Then he repeated the message and hung up the mouthpiece. “Let’s go.”
Could Dad hear that? Was he listening or still passed out?
Leni glanced worriedly outside, half expecting him to materialize.
Mr. Walker grabbed a striped red and yellow and white wool blanket from the back of the sofa and wrapped it around Leni.
“Her arm is broken. She’s bleeding.”
Mr. Walker nodded. Taking Leni’s gloved hand in his own, he pulled her out of the warm house and back out into the frigid cold.
In the garage, his big truck started right up. The heat came on, blanketing the cab, making Leni shiver harder. She couldn’t stop shaking as they drove down the driveway and turned out onto the main road, where wind beat at the windshield and whistled through every crevice in the metal frame.
Tom eased up on the gas; the truck slowed, grumbled, and whined.
“There!” she said, pointing to where they’d gone off the road. As Mr. Walker pulled over to the side, headlights appeared in front of them.
Leni recognized Large Marge’s truck.
“You stay in the truck,” Mr. Walker said.
“No!”
“Stay here.” He grabbed his mesh bag and left the truck, slamming the door behind him.
In the glow of headlights, Leni saw Mr. Walker meet Large Marge in the middle of the road. He dropped his bag, took out some coiled-up rope.
Leni pressed herself to the window, her breath clouding the view. Impatiently she wiped it away.
Mr. Walker tied one end of the rope around a tree and the other end around his own waist in an old-school belay.
With a wave to Large Marge, he lowered himself over the embankment and disappeared.
Leni wrenched the door open and fought the wind, blinded by snow, to cross the road.
Large Marge stood at the edge of the embankment.
Leni peered over the edge, saw broken trees and the bus’s shadowy bulk. She shined her flashlight down but it wasn’t enough light. She heard metal creaking, a thump, and a woman’s scream.
And then … Mr. Walker reappeared in the feeble beam of light, with Mama bound to his side, tied to him.
Large Marge grabbed the rope in her gloved hands, pulled them up, hand over hand, until Mr. Walker stumbled back up onto the road, Mama slumped at his side, unconscious, held up by Mr. Walker’s grip. “She’s in bad shape,” Mr. Walker yelled into the wind. “I’ll take her by boat to the hospital in Homer.”
“What about me?” Leni screamed. They seemed to have forgotten she was there.
Mr. Walker gave Leni one of those you-poor-kid looks Leni knew so well. “You come with me.”
* * *
THE SMALL HOSPITAL waiting room was quiet.
Tom Walker sat beside Leni, his parka puffed up in his lap. First they had driven to Walker Cove, where Mr. Walker had carried Mama down to the dock and placed her gently on the bench seat in his aluminum boat. They had sped around the craggy shoreline to Homer.
At the hospital, Mr. Walker carried Mama up to the front desk. Leni ran along beside, touching Mama’s ankle, her wrist, whatever she could reach.
A Native woman with two long braids sat at the desk, clacking away on a typewriter.
Within moments, a pair of nurses came to take Mama away.
“Now what?” Leni asked.
“Now we wait.”
They sat there, not talking; each breath Leni took felt difficult, as if her lungs had a mind of their own and might stop working. There was so much to be afraid of: Mama’s injury, losing Mama, Dad coming in (Don’t think about that, how mad he will be … what he’ll do when he realizes they were leaving), and the future. How would they leave now?
“Can I get you something to drink?”
Leni was so deep in the pit of her fear that it took her a second to realize Mr. Walker was talking to her.
She looked up, bleary-eyed. “Will it help?”
“Nope.” He reached over for her hand, held it. She was
surprised enough by the unexpected contact that she almost pulled away, but it felt nice, too, so she held his hand in return. She couldn’t help wondering how different life would be with Tom Walker as her dad.
“How’s Matthew?” she asked.
“He’s getting better, Leni. Genny’s brother is going to teach him to fly. Matthew is seeing a therapist. He loves your letters. Thanks for keeping in touch with him.”
She loved his letters, too. Sometimes it felt like hearing from Matthew was the best part of her life. “I miss him.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
“Will he come back?”
“I don’t know. There’s so much up there. Kids his age, movie theaters, sports teams. And I know Mattie, once he takes control of an airplane for the first time, he will fall in love. He’s a kid who loves adventure.”
“He told me he wanted to be a pilot.”
“Yeah. I wish I’d listened to him a little better,” Mr. Walker said with a sigh. “I just want him to be happy.”
A doctor walked into the waiting room, approached them. He was a heavyset man with a barrel chest that strained to be freed from the confines of his blue scrubs. He had the rugged, hard-drinking look of a lot of the men who lived in the bush, but his hair was closely cropped and, except for a bushy gray mustache, he was clean-shaven. “I’m Dr. Irving. You must be Leni,” he said, pulling off his surgical cap.
Leni nodded, got to her feet. “How is she?”
“She’s going to be fine. Her arm is set in a cast now, so she’ll need to slow down for six weeks or so, but there should be no lasting damage.” He looked at Leni. “You saved her, young lady. She wanted to make sure I told you that.”
“Can we see her?” Leni asked.
“Of course. Follow me.”
Leni and Mr. Walker followed Dr. Irving down the white hallway and into a room with a sign that read RECOVERY on the door. He pushed open the door.
Mama was in a fabric-curtained cubicle. She was sitting upright in a narrow bed, wearing a hospital gown; a warming blanket lay across her lap. Her left arm was bent at a ninety-degree angle and was encased in a cast of white plaster. Something wasn’t quite right with her nose and both eyes showed signs of bruising.
“Leni,” she said, her head lolling a little to the right on the stack of pillows behind her. She had the lazy, unfocused look of someone who’d been drugged. “I told you I was tough,” she said. Her voice was a little misshapen. “Ah, baby girl, don’t cry.”
Leni couldn’t help herself. Seeing her mother like this, living through the crash, all she could think about was how fragile Mama was and how easily she could be lost. It made her think sharply, keenly, of Matthew and how quickly and unexpectedly death could sweep in.
She heard the doctor say goodbye and leave the room.
Mr. Walker went to Mama’s bedside. “You were leaving him, weren’t you? What other reason would there be to be out in this weather?”
“No.” Mama shook her head.
“I could help you,” he said. “We could help you. All of us. Large Marge used to be a prosecutor. I could call the police, tell them he hurt you. He does, doesn’t he? You didn’t break your nose in the accident, did you?”
“The police can’t help,” Mama said. “I know the system. My dad’s a lawyer.”
“They’d put him in jail.”
“For what? A day? Two? He’d come back for me. Or you. Or Leni. Do you think I could live with putting other people at risk? And … well…”
Leni heard Mama’s unspoken words: I love him.
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.
“I love you more. And … I’m afraid,” Leni said.
“This time was bad, I’ll admit, but it scared him. Really. It won’t happen again. He’s promised me.”
Leni sighed. How was Mama’s unshakable belief in Dad any different than his fear of Armageddon? Did adults just look at the world and see what they wanted to see, think what they wanted to think? Did evidence and experience mean nothing?
Mama managed a smile. “You want to play crazy eights?”
So that was how they would do it, merge back into the driving lane after a blown tire. They would say ordinary things and pretend none of it had happened. Until the next time.
Leni nodded. She retrieved the cards from the rosewood box that held her mother’s favorite things and sat down on the floor beside the mattress.
“I’m so lucky to have you, Leni,” Mama said, trying to organize her cards with one hand.
“We’re a team,” Leni said.
“Peas in a pod.”
“Two of a kind.”
Words they said all the time to each other; words that felt a little hollow now. Maybe even sad.
They were halfway through the first game when Leni heard a vehicle drive up. She tossed the cards on the bed and ran to the window. “It’s Large Marge,” she yelled back to Mama. “And Mr. Walker.”
“Shit,” Mama said. “Help me get dressed.”
Leni ran back to Mama’s bedroom and helped her take off her flannel pajamas and get into a pair of faded jeans and an oversized hooded sweatshirt with sleeves big enough to accommodate the cast. Leni brushed Mama’s hair and then helped her out to the living room, got her situated on the ragged sofa.
The cabin door opened. Snow fluttered inside on a wave of icy air, brushed across the plywood floor.
Large Marge looked like a grizzly in her huge fur parka and mukluks, with a wolverine hat that looked to have been handmade. Earrings made of antler bone hung from her sagging earlobes. She stomped the snow from her boots and started to say something. Then she saw Mama’s bruised face and muttered, “Son of a freaking bitch. I should kick his beef-jerky ass.”