The Great Alone

by Kristin Hannah

In Alaska you can make one mistake. One. The second one will kill you.”

Her first mistake was following her husband.

Long and untamed and red. And there was the milky skin that was standard issue with the hair, and freckles like red-pepper flakes across her nose. The best of her features—her blue-green eyes—were not enhanced by cinnamon-colored lashes.

She sounds beautiful

dashed hopes were worse than no hopes at all.

This isn’t just about school. It’s her entire life. Every time she starts to believe in something good, it’s taken from her. The instability of her parent’s relationship has taught her that happiness is temporary and hope is just inevitable disappointment.

“Certainly you’ll be the prettiest,” Mama said, tucking the hair behind Leni’s ear with a gentleness that reminded Leni that whatever happened, she wasn’t ever really alone. She had her mama.

💔The purest form of love is the love of your child. When they’re still innocent, when you’re still the most important person in their life. Their love is forgiving and unconditional. Cora loves Leni, I don’t doubt that but her blindness and her denial is harmful. Leni doesn’t see that. In her eyes “her mama” is her protector; her safety net, but that’s far from the truth. It doesn’t matter what Cora does to turn things around, one truth will always remain: she could’ve avoided all of this. She will forever carry the weight of that guilt.

Mama came forward with a metal Winnie the Pooh lunch box. “Thelma thought you’d like this.” And with that, Leni’s social fate was sealed, but there was nothing she could do about it.

She's too pure and sweet.

She was too nervous to smooth his ruffled feelings.

“Where are you from?” he asked. Leni never knew how to answer that question. It implied a permanence, a Before that had never existed for her. She’d never thought of any place as home.

‘Fear is the mind-killer.’ It’s so true, man.” “And Stranger in a Strange Land. That’s kinda how I feel here.”

Leni hadn’t heard anything after “pretty.” She tried to tell herself it meant nothing. But when Matthew looked at her, she felt a flutter of possibility. She thought: We could be friends.

“Yeah,” Mama said, smiling. “I told you it would be different here.”

Leni heard something in Dad’s “Thanks” that put her on alert. He sounded irritated all of a sudden. Offended. Mama heard it, too; she glanced worriedly at him.

And so it begins...

Leni wondered if Mama knew how beautiful she looked, standing there in her form-fitting pants, with her blond hair blowing in the sea breeze. Her beauty was as clear as a perfectly sung note and as out of place up here as an orchid.

Mama drifted along beside Mr. Walker. Her hips took up the beat of the music, swaying. She touched his forearm, and Mr. Walker looked down at her and smiled.

For a wife thats constantly walking on eggshells around her husband this is such a contradicting way of carrying herself. There’s obviously a toxic dynamic between both of them.

(Never tell the truth, never that Dad had trouble keeping a job and staying in one place, and never that he drank too much and liked to yell.)

“Wow. I can’t even imagine living in one place my whole life.”

Just like all the other times. And Alaska was supposed to be different.

"Dashed hopes were worse than no hopes at all"

Leni shook her head, feeling a familiar sadness creep in. She could never tell him how it felt to live with a dad who scared you sometimes and a mother who loved him too much and made him prove how much he loved her in dangerous ways. Like flirting.

These were Leni’s secrets. Her burdens. She couldn’t share them. All this time, all these years, she’d dreamed of having a real friend, one who would tell her everything. How had she missed the obvious? Leni couldn’t have a real friend because she couldn’t be one.

After the party, back at the cabin, Leni’s parents were all over each other, making out like teenagers, banging into walls, pressing their bodies together. The combination of alcohol and music (and maybe Tom Walker’s attention) had made them crazy for each other.

As if the toxicity wasn’t already obvious. Their love is turbulent, their affection always follows conflict and Leni is caught in the middle. She’s learning that love is loud, unstable, and dangerous. She’s witnessing dysfunction disguised as passion.

“Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane.”

Leni felt a jab of worry. Lack of sleep wasn’t good for Dad; it made him anxious. So far, he’d been sleeping great in Alaska.

It’s a man’s world, baby girl.

He looked bad. Like he’d been drunk for days and was sick from it. (Like he used to look, when he had nightmares and lost his temper.)

“Your mama seemed to like Tom Walker.” Leni tensed. “Did you see the way he shoved our noses in his money? I can loan you my tractor, Ernt, or Do you need a ride to town? He looked down at me, Red.”

“He said to me he thought you were a hero and it was a dang shame what happened to you boys over there,” Leni lied.

This is emotional damage control; a coping mechanism learned from her mother. She’s learned that truth is dangerous in her family. That it provokes, it angers, it breaks things open. So she lies to protect and maintain the ilusión of peace. She’s learned that honesty is often harmful and deciet is the only way to survive.

“I like this place, Dad,” Leni said, realizing suddenly the truth of her words. She already felt more at home in Alaska than she ever had in Seattle. “We’re happy here. I see how happy you are. Maybe … maybe drinking isn’t so good for you.”

There was a tense moment of silence; by tacit agreement, Leni and Mama didn’t mention his drinking or his temper.

“This is Alaska. We live and let live. I don’t care if your dad hates my dad. You’re the one who matters, Leni.”

Awww the start of a puppy love

“So we’re friends, right?” Matthew said. “No matter what?” Leni nodded. “No matter what.”

❤️‍🩹 I love this! He’s offering her the consistency she’s never known, a friendship without conditions or judgement.

Did you know that baneberries will make you have a heart attack if you eat them? And arrowgrass will cause respiratory failure?”

👀

“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.” Leni had noticed her dad saying more and more things like this since meeting Mad Earl.

Dejándose influenciar de un viejo lagañoso

“We have to learn how. Large Marge and Thelma both said so,” Leni said. Mama nodded.

🙄 Exactly woman! Por lo menos la nena sabe coger consejos

“Uh. Mama? You noticed that Dad is sorta … prickly about Mr. Walker, right?” Mama turned. Their eyes met. “Is he?” she said coolly. “You know he is.

Just when I thought I couldn’t dislike Cora anymore.

Leni knew her mama wouldn’t respond anyway; that was another facet of their family weirdness. Dad blew his temper and Mama somehow encouraged it. Like maybe she needed to know how much he loved her all the time.

I hate this 😤

It hurt even more that he didn’t care about how much it hurt. She couldn’t help feeling sorry for herself. She would bet Tom Walker never treated Matthew this way.

“Stop it, Lenora,” Dad said, giving her shoulder a little shake. “You said you liked Alaska and wanted to belong here.” “Ernt, please, she’s not a soldier,” Mama said.

“You want to be a victim or a survivor, Lenora?”

I need to know you can protect your mom and save yourself.” Leni sniffled hard, struggled for control. He was right. She needed to be strong. “I know.”

I hate this mindset. LENI needs protection. Defending herself is one thing but she shouldn't carry the responsibility of protecting others. Especially the people that are supposed to be protecting her.

Winter is one big night up here. People go batshit in the dark, run screaming, open fire on their pets and friends.”

“It’s scary that people can just stop loving you, you know?”

“I’m not sure Mad Earl is good for Dad,” Leni said.

At sixteen, I thought I knew everything, and I told them so. They sent me away to a Catholic girls’ school, where rebellion meant rolling up the waistband of your skirt to shorten the hem and show an inch of skin above your knees. We were taught to kneel and pray and marry well.

“Your dad came into my life like a rogue wave, knocking me over. Everything he said upended my conventional world and changed who I was. I stopped knowing how to breathe without him. He told me I didn’t need school. I believed everything he said.

We shut out the world and lived on love, but the world came roaring back.”

I ran out of money and moved back home with my parents, but I couldn’t stand it there. All we did was fight. They kept telling me to divorce your father and think about you, and finally I left again.

Then your dad’s helicopter got shot down and he was captured. I got one letter from him in six years.”

“You know it’s dark up here for six months in the winter. And snowy and freezing cold and stormy.” “I know.” “You always said bad weather made him worse.” Leni felt her mother pull away from her. This was a fact she didn’t want to confront. They both knew why. “It won’t be like that here,” Mama said,

This is hope disguised as denial. A denial that can potentially kill them both. She isn’t unaware of his triggers; she’s willingly ignoring every dangerous pattern she’s already witnessed. she’s choosing blindness because facing how unsafe her situation really is would shatter the illusion she’s trying to believe and expose a truth she’s not ready to face.

Summer in Alaska was pure magic. The Land of the Midnight Sun. Rivers of light; eighteen-hour days with only a breath of dusk to separate one from the next.

She and her parents woke at five A.M. and mumbled through breakfast and then set out to do their chores. They rebuilt the goat pen, chopped wood, tended the garden, made soap, caught and smoked salmon, tanned hides, canned fish and vegetables, darned socks, duct-taped everything together. They moved, hauled, nailed, built, scraped. Large Marge sold them three goats and Leni learned how to care for them. She also learned to pick berries and make jam and shuck clams and cure salmon eggs into the best bait in the world.

I’m torn. I’m proud of her. But It breaks my heart that Leni has to trade her childhood for survival. Yes, she’s learning resilience, discipline, and strength but all of that at the cost of her innocence. Alaska is shaping her into someone capable and wise beyond her years, but also robbing her of the chance of simply being a kid. Though with parents like hers being just a kid was never a possibility.

Leni became an adult that summer; that was how it felt to her.