The Great Alone

by Kristin Hannah

When she was younger, she’d sometimes wondered what good all those sorries were if nothing ever changed, but Mama had explained it to her. The war and captivity had snapped something in him. It’s like his back is broken, Mama had said, and you don’t stop loving a person when they’re hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you. He needs me.

She was used to her dad’s sadness, his frustration. He stopped sentences halfway through all the time, as if he were afraid of giving voice to scary or depressing thoughts.

“The rich, riding the backs of better men. It’s the history of civilization itself. It’s what’s destroying America. Men who take, take, take.”

Dad’s intentions were good, but even so, it was like living with a wild animal. Like those crazy hippies the Alaskans talked about who lived with wolves and bears and invariably ended up getting killed. The natural-born predator could seem domesticated, even friendly, could lick your throat affectionately or rub up against you to get a back scratch. But you knew, or should know, that it was a wild thing you lived with, that a collar and leash and a bowl of food might tame the actions of the beast, but couldn’t change its essential nature.

Her father looked up, just enough to make eye contact. He looked ruined, tired, but present; in his eyes, she saw more love and sadness than should be able to exist in one human being. Something was tearing him up inside, even now. It was the other man, the bad man, who lived inside of him and tried to break out in the darkness.

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.

They were trapped, by environment and finances, but mostly by the sick, twisted love that bound her parents together.

Sometimes he snapped and sometimes he didn’t, that was all there was. Mama taking the blame seemed wrong. Dangerous, even.

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?

In the naïveté of youth, her parents had seemed like towering presences, omnipotent and all-knowing. But they weren’t that; they were just two broken people.

But the connection between pain and love wasn’t linear. It was a web.

Scared even that this love she felt for Matthew wasn’t real, or that it was real and flawed, that maybe she’d been so damaged by her parents that she couldn’t know what love really was.

Mama had chosen to dig for treasure through the dirt of Dad’s toxic, porous love, but not Leni. Not anymore.

In the silence, Leni wondered if one person could ever really save another, or if it was the kind of thing you had to do for yourself.

Leni wanted to scream and cry and be the child it felt she’d never been, but if her youth and her family had taught her anything, it was how to survive.

“There’s something wrong with me,” Mama said after a pause. “No,” Leni said firmly. “There was something wrong with him.”

Voices and words and images from the past drifted through her mind. The good, the bad, the funny, the horrific. She remembered it all in a blinding, electric flash.