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School started, and with it Leni felt her childhood return.
Leni shot her mother a warning look. Mama knew better than to say anything about anything when he was drunk.
Leni saw a wildness in him, barely contained emotion rising hard and fast. Mama ran after him, reached out. “Don’t touch me,” he snarled, shoving her away.
Leni caught her mother’s gaze, held it. In those wide blue eyes that held on to every nuance of expression, she saw her own anxiety reflected.
Leni knew what did matter. The weather was getting worse. And so was he.
She could say her father drank too much or that he yelled or lost his temper, but not that he sometimes scared her. The disloyalty of such a thing was impossible to contemplate.
She pulled a pistol out of its holster, stuck it in her waistband. Her heart was hammering in her chest as she bent down and picked up the two buckets she’d filled with water. The metal handles bit into her gloved hands.
Why is she the one doing this? This isn’t a chore for a child. Where’s the man of the house? What kind of parents let their kid take on something this strenuous?
Leni was shaking so hard it took two tries for her to unlatch the door. “I’m back,” she said, stepping into the cabin, her whole body shaking. “Shut up, Leni,” Dad snapped.
The lack of concern
“I’m talking to you, Cora,” Dad said. Leni heard anger in his voice, saw her mother flinch.
The sudden wildness in his eyes, the showing of the whites, scared Leni. She took a step backward.
People died for the smallest mistake—car keys dropped in a river, a gas tank gone dry, a snow machine breaking down, a turn taken too fast.
Leni’s life was the smallest it had ever been. On good days, when the bus would start and the weather was bearable, there was school. On bad days, there was only work, accomplished in this driving, demoralizing cold.
There was no room in these shortened days to think about anything beyond the mechanics of survival.
They were all on edge. Arguments erupted between her parents over money, over chores, over the weather. Over nothing.
she saw, too, how closely Mama watched him, how worried she was about his rising anxiety. His struggle for calm was obvious in a dozen tics and in the way he seemed unwilling to look at them sometimes.
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. In a split second, less time than it took to exhale a
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The fear! The hypervigilance. The awareness of his violent unpredictability.
It was exhausting to worry all the time, to study Dad’s every movement and the tone of his voice. It had obviously worn Mama down. Anxiety had pulled the light from her eyes and the glow from her skin.
Mama approached him cautiously, laid a hand on his back. He shoved her aside so hard she cracked into the log wall, cried out. Dad stopped, jerked upright. His nostrils flared. He was flexing and unflexing his right hand. When he saw Mama, everything changed. His shoulders rounded, his head hung in shame. “Jesus, Cora,” he whispered brokenly. “I’m sorry. I … didn’t know where I was.” “I know,” she said, her eyes glistening with tears. He went to her, enfolded her in his arms, held her. They sank to their knees together, foreheads touching.
In a week of rising nightmares and middle-of-the-night screaming, she wasn’t sleeping well.
It was easy to go from predator to prey out here.
It horrified her to realize she had followed Dad blindly onto its slick surface. What if the ice was too thin? One wrong step and someone could have plunged into the icy water and been swept away. Beneath her, she heard a cracking sound. Dad walked confidently forward, seemingly unconcerned about the ice beneath his feet.
This man is so checked out he doesn't give a fuck
She’d killed something. Fed her family for another night. Killed something. Stopped a life. She didn’t know how to feel about it, or maybe she just felt two conflicting emotions at the same time—proud and sad. In truth, she almost wanted to cry. But she was Alaskan now, this was her life.
“You’re the hunter. Eat the heart.” “Ernt, please,” Mama said, “we’re not savages.” “That’s exactly what we are,” he said in a voice as cold as the wind at their back. “Eat it.” Leni’s gaze cut to Mama, who looked as horrified as Leni felt.
He is a savage!
“Are you going to make me ask again?” Dad said. The quiet of his voice was worse than yelling. Leni felt a ridge of fear poke up, spread along her spine. She reached out, took the tiny blue-red organ in her hand. (Was it still beating or was she trembling?) With her father’s narrowed gaze steady on her, she put the heart in her mouth and forced her lips to close.
When obedience becomes survival and submission is safety
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.
Or for the nightmares that ruined all their sleep? Or maybe he was apologizing for something he hadn’t done yet but was afraid he would.
It’s only a matter of time and she knows it.
Dad was edgy, tense; he drank too much and muttered under his breath. The nightmares became more frequent. Three a week, every week.
He was always moving, demanding, pushing. He ate, slept, breathed, and drank survival. He had become a soldier again, or that’s what Mama said, and Leni found herself tongue-tied around him, afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing.
Night after night she lay awake, worrying. Her fear and anxiety about the world had been sharpened to a knifepoint.
“Unacceptable. You’re dead. All of our food is gone. Maybe one of them is thinking of rape.”
He’s not talking to his daughter.
This isn’t fatherly. It’s a man haunted by his own demons, speaking to ghosts not the child standing in front of him.
He was right. She needed to know how to do this or she could be killed.
Learn baby girl. He’s teaching you the skills you'll have to use to survive him.
Geneva and Matthew Walker are missing. They were supposed to arrive at their hunting cabin an hour ago.
Nooooo!!!
Like so many sins, the snow covered it all. The truth wouldn’t be revealed until spring. If ever.
Winter had claimed one of them; one who had been born here, who knew how to survive.
A girl was like a kite; without her mother’s strong, steady hold on the string, she might just float away, be lost somewhere among the clouds.
💔
“You think I’m jealous of Tom?” Dad said. He glanced at Mama. “Should I be?”
He’s been jealous since the moment they drive into his property
But they were nothing compared to watching your mother die. How would that feel? How would you ever get over it?
Leni saw suddenly how hope could break you, how it was a shiny lure for the unwary. What happened to you if you hoped too hard for the best and got the worst? Was it better not to hope at all, to prepare? Wasn’t that what her father’s lesson always was? Prepare for the worst.
She knew what nightmares could do to a person and how bad memories could change who you were.
LENI WAS SO SCARED and surprised and horrified by what she’d just seen, she did nothing. Nothing. She should have thrown herself at Dad, gotten between them, even gone for her gun. She heard the door slam and it knocked her out of her paralysis.
Poor girl
This was an ugliness she’d never imagined. A lost temper, yes. A fist? Blood? No …
Surprised they were able to hide it so well. Proof of how much she trusted her mom. That trust was both her shield and her blindfold.
You were supposed to be safe in your own home, with your parents. They were supposed to protect you from the dangers outside. “He was agitated all day. I shouldn’t have talked to Tom.”
“You’re saying it’s your fault?” “You’re too young to understand. He didn’t mean to do that. He just … loves me too much sometimes.” Was that true? Was that what love was when you grew up?
No it’s not
“He meant to,” Leni said quietly, feeling a cold wave of understanding wash through her. Memories clicked into place like pieces of a puzzle, fitting together. Mama’s bruises, her always saying, I’m clumsy. She had hidden this ugly truth from Leni for years. Her parents had been able to hide it from her with walls and lies, but here in this one-room cabin there was no hiding anymore. “He has hit you before.”
The blindfold is off 💔
Leni tried to put it all together in her head, make it make sense, but she couldn’t. How could this be love? How could it be Mama’s fault?
“We have to understand and forgive,” Mama said. “That’s how you love someone who’s sick. Someone who is struggling. It’s like he has cancer. That’s how you have to think of it. He’ll get better. He will. He loves us so much.”
He is the Cancer in that family
