“I’ll be okay,” Leni lied. Tears slid down her cheeks. “I love you, Mama.”
Don’t go, Mama. I can’t be in the world without you.
Mama’s eyelids fluttered shut. “Loved … you … my baby girl.”
Leni could barely hear those last, whispered words. She felt her mother’s last breath as deeply as if she’d drawn it herself.
TWENTY-NINE
“She wanted you to have this.”
Grandma stood in the open doorway to Leni’s old bedroom, dressed in all black. She managed to make mourning look elegant. It was the kind of thing that Mama would have made fun of long ago—she would have looked down on a woman concerned with appearances. But Leni knew that sometimes you grabbed hold of whatever you could to stay afloat. And maybe all that black was a shield, a way to say to people: Don’t talk to me, don’t approach me, don’t ask your ordinary, everyday questions when my world has exploded.
Leni, on the other hand, looked like something washed up by the tide. In the twenty-four hours since her mother’s death, she hadn’t showered or brushed her teeth or changed her clothes. All she did was sit in her room, behind a closed door. She would make an effort at two, when she had to go pick up MJ from school. In his absence, she swam alone in her loss.
She pushed the covers back. Moving slowly, as if her muscles had changed in the absence of her mother, she crossed the room and took the box from her grandmother, said, “Thank you.”
They looked at each other, mirrors of grief. Then, saying nothing more—what good were words?—Grandma turned and walked down the hall, stiffly upright. If Leni didn’t know her, she’d say Grandma was a rock, a woman in perfect control, but Leni did know her. At the stairs, Grandma paused, missed a step; her hand clutched at the banister. Grandpa came out of his office, appearing when she needed him, to offer an arm.
The two of them, heads bowed together, were a portrait of pain.
Leni hated that there was nothing she could do to help. How could three drowning people save each other?
Leni went back to bed. Climbing in, she pulled the rosewood box into her lap. She’d seen it before, of course. Once, it had held their playing cards.
Whoever had made this box had sanded it until the surface felt more like glass than wood. It was a souvenir, maybe from the road trip they’d taken a lifetime ago, when they’d lived in a trailer and driven all the way to Tijuana. Leni was too young to remember the trip—before Vietnam—but she’d heard her parents talk about it.
Leni took a deep breath and opened the lid. Inside, she saw a tangle of things. A cheap silver charm bracelet, a set of keys on a ring that read Keep On Truckin’, a pink scallop shell, a beaded suede coin purse, a set of playing cards, a Native tusk carving of an Eskimo holding a spear.
She picked up the items one by one, trying to put them in the context of what she knew of her mother’s life. The charm bracelet looked like the gift one girl would give another in high school and reminded Leni of all the missing pieces in her mother’s life. Questions Leni had failed to ask; stories Mama hadn’t had time to share. All of it lost now. The keys Leni recognized—they were to the house they’d rented on the cul-de-sac outside Seattle all those years ago. The scallop shell showed her mother’s love for beachcombing, and the suede purse probably came from one of the reservation gift shops.
There was a SALTY DAWG shot glass. A piece of driftwood, into which had been carved Cora and Ernt, 1973. Three white agates. A photograph of her parents’ wedding day, taken at the courthouse. In it, Mama was smiling brightly, wearing a tea-length white dress with a bell-shaped skirt and holding a single white rose in white-gloved hands; Dad was holding her close, his smile a little stiff, dressed in a black suit and narrow tie. They looked like a couple of kids playing dress-up.
The next photograph was of the VW bus with their boxes and suitcases lashed on top. The door was open and you could see all of their junk piled inside. It had been taken only a few days before they headed north.
The three of them stood beside the bus. Mama was wearing elephant-bell jeans and a midriff-baring top. Her blond hair had been twined into pigtails and a beaded headband encircled her head. Dad wore pale blue polyester pants and a matching shirt with oversized collar points. Leni was in front of her parents, wearing a red dress with a white Peter Pan collar and Keds. Each of her parents had a hand on one of her shoulders.
She was smiling broadly. Happily.
The photograph turned blurry, danced in Leni’s unsteady hand.
Something red and blue and gold captured Leni’s attention. She put down the picture, wiped her eyes.
A military medal; a red-white-and-blue ribbon with a bronze star affixed to its pointed end. She turned the star over, saw the inscription on the back: Heroic or meritorious achievement. Ernt A. Allbright. Beneath it lay a folded-up newspaper article with the headline “Seattle POW Released” and a picture of her dad. He looked like a cadaver, his eyes staring dully ahead. There was almost no similarity to the man in the wedding photo.
I wish you remembered him from before … How often had her mother said that over the years?
She pressed the picture and the medal to her chest, as if she could imprint them onto her soul. These were the memories Leni wanted to keep: their love, his heroism, the image of them laughing, the idea of her mother beachcombing.
There were two things left in the box. An envelope and a folded piece of notebook paper.
Leni set the medal and photograph aside and picked up the piece of paper, unfolding it slowly. She saw Mama’s fine, private-schoolgirl script.
To my beautiful baby girl,
It’s time to undo what I did. You live under a false name because I killed a man. Me.
You may not see it yet, but you have a home and home means something. You have a chance for a different life. You can give your son all that I couldn’t give you, but it takes courage. And courage is something you have. All you have to do is go back to Alaska and give the police my confession letter. Tell them I’m a murderer and let the crime finally end as it should have, with you excused from its taint. They’ll close the case and you’ll be free. Take your name and your life back.
Go home. Scatter my ashes on our beach.
I’ll be watching out for you. Always.
You have a child, so you know. You are my heart, baby girl. You are everything I did right. And I want you to know I would do it all again, every wonderful terrible second of it. I would do years and years of it again for one minute with you.
Inside the envelope, she found two one-way tickets to Alaska.
* * *
ALL UP AND DOWN the well-manicured street of Queen Anne Hill, life clattered along on this last Saturday in July. Her grandparents’ neighbors were gathered around Weber barbecues grilling store-bought meat, and making designer margaritas in blenders, their kids playing on swing sets that cost as much as a used car. Had any of them noticed the drawn shades in the Golliher house? Could they somehow sense grief emanating through stone and glass? This sorrow couldn’t be talked about in public. How could they express grief for the loss of a woman—Evelyn Grant—who had never really existed?
Leni climbed out her bedroom window and sat on the roof, the wooden shakes worn smooth by years of people sitting in this spot. Here more than anywhere else, she felt Mama beside her. Sometimes the feeling was so strong Leni thought she heard her Mama breathing, but it was just the breeze, whispering through the maple leaves on the tree out front.
“I used to catch your mother out here smoking cigarettes when she was thirteen years old,” Grandma said quietly. “She thought a closed window and a breath mint could fool me.”
Leni couldn’t help smiling. Those few words were like an incantation that brought Mama back for a beautiful, exquisite second. A flame of blond hair, a laugh in the wind. Leni glanced behind her, saw her grandmother standing at the upstairs bedroom’s open window. A cool evening breeze plucked at her black blouse, ruffled the trim at her throat
. Leni had a fleeting, surprising thought that her grandmother would wear black for the rest of her life; maybe she would put on a green dress and regret and loss would eke from her pores and change the fabric to black.
“May I join you?”
“I’ll come in.” Leni started to back up.
Grandma angled through the open window, her hair crunching on the frame, getting dented. “I know you think that I’m Jurassic, but I can climb out onto a ledge. Jack LaLanne was sixty when he swam from Alcatraz to San Francisco.”
Leni scooted sideways.
Grandmother climbed through the opening and sat down, keeping her straight back flush against the house.
Leni backed up to be even with her, carrying the rosewood box with her. She hadn’t stopped touching its smooth surface since she’d opened it the day before.
“I don’t want you to go.”
“I know.”
“Your grandfather says it’s a bad decision, and he should know.” She paused. “Stay here. Don’t give them that letter.”
“It was her dying wish.”
“She’s gone.”
Leni couldn’t help smiling. She loved that her grandmother was a complex mixture of optimism and practicality. The optimism had allowed her to wait almost two decades for her daughter’s return; the practicality had allowed her to forget all the pain that had preceded it. Over the years, Leni knew that Mama had more than forgiven her parents; she’d grown to understand them and to regret how harshly she’d treated them. Perhaps it was a road every child ultimately traveled. “Have I ever told you how grateful I am that you took us in, that you love my son?”
“And you.”
“And me.”
“Make me understand, Leni. I’m afraid.”
Leni had thought about this all night. She knew it was crazy and maybe dangerous, but there was hope, too.
She wanted—needed—to be Leni Allbright again. To live her own life. Whatever the cost. “I know you think of Alaska as cold and inhospitable, a place where we were lost. But the truth is, we were found there, too. It’s in me, Grandma, that place. I belong there. All these years away have cost me something. And there’s MJ. He’s not a baby anymore. He’s a boy and growing up fast. He needs a dad.”
“But his dad is…”
“I know. I’ve spent years telling MJ as much of the truth as I could about his father. He knows about the accident and the rehab center. But its not enough to tell stories. MJ needs to know where he comes from, and it won’t be long before he starts asking real questions. He deserves answers.” Leni paused. “My mom was wrong about a lot of things, but one thing she had right was about the durability of love. It stays. Against all odds, in the face of hate, it stays. I left the boy I loved when he was broken and sick, and I hate myself for that. Matthew is MJ’s dad, whether Matthew can know what that means or not, whether he can hold him or talk to him or not. MJ deserves to know his own family. Tom Walker is his grandfather. Alyeska is his aunt. It is unforgivable that they don’t know about MJ. They would love him as much as you do.”
“They could try to take him from you. Custody is a tricky thing. You couldn’t survive that.”
That was a dark corner Leni couldn’t look around. “It’s not about me,” Leni said quietly. “I have to do the right thing. Finally.”
“It’s a bad idea, Leni. A terrible idea. If you’ve learned anything from your mother and what happened, it should be this: life—and the law—is hard on women. Sometimes doing the right thing is no help at all.”
* * *
SUMMER IN ALASKA.
Leni had never forgotten the exquisite, breathtaking beauty, and now, in a small plane, flying from Anchorage to Homer, she felt a great opening up of her soul. For the first time in years, she felt fully herself.
They flew over the green marshlands outside of Anchorage and the silvery expanse of Turnagain Arm, low tide revealing the gray sand bottom, where so many unwary fishermen went aground and the magical bore tide rolled in on waves big enough to surf.
And then Cook Inlet, a swath of blue, dotted with fishing boats. The plane banked left toward the snow-clad mountains, and flew over the glacial-blue Harding Icefield. Above Kachemak Bay, the land turned richly green again, a series of emerald humps. Hundreds of boats dotted the water, ribbons of white water fluttering out behind them.
In Homer, they bumped down onto the gravel runway and MJ squealed happily, pointed out the window. When the plane came to a stop, the pilot came around and opened the back door and helped Leni with her rolling suitcase (so Outside, that bag—it didn’t even have shoulder straps).
She held on to MJ with one hand and rolled her suitcase along the gravel runway toward the small aviation office. A big clock on the wall told her it was 10:12 A.M.
At the counter, she gained the receptionist’s attention.
“Excuse me. I understand there’s a new police station in town.”
“Well, not that new. It’s up past the post office on Heath Street. You want me to call you a cab?”
If Leni hadn’t been so nervous, she would have laughed at the idea of catching a cab in Homer. “Uh. Yes. Please. That would be great.”
Waiting for the cab, Leni stood in the small aviation office, staring in awe at the entire wall filled with four-color brochures advertising adventures for tourists: the Great Alaska Adventure Lodge in Sterling and Walker Cove Adventure Lodge in Kaneq; fly-out lodges in the Brooks Range, river guides who hired out for the day, hunting trips in Fairbanks. Alaska had apparently become the tourist mecca Tom Walker had imagined it could be. Leni knew that cruise ships pulled into Seward every week in the summer, off-loading thousands of people.
Moments after the cab arrived, she and MJ were at the police station, a long, low-slung, flat-roofed building set on a corner.
Inside, the station was brightly lit, freshly painted. Leni fought with her rolling suitcase, muscling it up over the doorsill. The only person in the place was a uniformed woman sitting at a desk. Leni moved resolutely forward, clutching MJ’s hand so tightly he squirmed and whined, tried to wrench free.
“Hello,” she said to the woman at the desk. “I’d like to speak to the police chief.”
“Why?”
“It’s about a … killing.”
“Of a human?”
Only in Alaska would that question ever be asked. “I have information on a crime.”
“Follow me.”
The uniformed woman led Leni past an empty jail cell to a closed door with a placard that read: CHIEF CURT WARD.
The woman knocked hard. Twice. At a muffled, “Come in,” she opened the door. “Chief, this young woman says she has information on a crime.”
The chief of police stood slowly. Leni remembered him from the search for Geneva Walker. His hair was trimmed into a tall crew cut. A bushy red mustache stood out against the auburn stubble that had obviously grown since he shaved this morning. He looked like a once-gung-ho high school hockey player turned small-town cop.
“Lenora Allbright,” Leni said in introduction. “My dad was Ernt Allbright. We used to live in Kaneq.”
“Holy shit. We thought you were dead. Search and Rescue went out for days looking for you and your mom. What was it, six, seven, years ago? Why didn’t you contact the police?”
Leni settled MJ in a comfortable chair and opened a book for him. Her grandfather’s advice came back to her: It’s a bad idea, Leni, but if you’re going to do it, you have to be careful, smarter than your mother ever was. Say nothing. Just give them the letter. Tell them you didn’t even know your dad was dead until your mother gave you this letter. Tell them you were running from his abuse, hiding so that he wouldn’t find you. Everything you’ve done—the changed identities, the new town, the silence—it all fits in with a family hiding from a dangerous man.
“I wanna go, Mommy,” MJ said, bouncing on the seat. “I want to see my daddy.”
“Soon, kiddo.” She kissed his forehead and then went back to
the chief’s desk. Between them was a wide swath of gray metal decorated with family photographs, studded with sloppy stacks of pink while-you-were-out messages, and cluttered with fishing magazines. A fishing reel with impossibly tangled line was being used as a paperweight.
She pulled the letter out of her purse. Her hand was shaking as she handed over her mother’s confession.
Chief Ward read through the letter. Sat down. Looked up. “You know what this says?”
Leni dragged a chair over and sat down facing him. She was afraid her legs would stop supporting her. “I do.”
“So your mother shot your dad and disposed of his body and you two ran away.”
“You have the letter.”
“And where is your mother?”
“She died last week. She gave the letter to me on her deathbed and asked me to deliver it to the police. It was the first I’d heard of it. The … killing, I mean. I thought we were running from my father’s abuse. He … was violent. Sometimes. He beat her really badly one night and we ran away while he slept.”
“I’m sorry about her death.”
Chief Ward stared at Leni for a long time, his eyes narrowed. The intensity of his gaze was unsettling. She fought the urge to fidget. Finally he got up, went to a file cabinet in the back of the room, riffled through a drawer, and pulled out a folder. He dropped it on his desk, sat down, and opened it. “So. Your mother, Cora Allbright, was five-foot-six. People described her as slight, fragile, thin. And your dad was nearly six feet tall.”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“But she shot your father, dragged his body out of the house, and, what—strapped him onto a snow machine—and drove up to Glass Lake in the winter and cut a hole in the ice, loaded him with iron traps, and dropped him. Alone. Where were you?”
Leni sat very still, her hands clasped in her lap. “I don’t know. I don’t know when it happened.” She felt the need to add on, layer words to solidify the lie, but Grandpa had told her to say as little as possible.