The Great Alone

by Kristin Hannah

She would give anything for a real friend right now. It was all she really wanted: someone to talk to.

Sure, Dad lost his temper sometimes and he yelled and they never had enough money and they moved all the time to distance themselves from creditors, but that was their way, and they loved each other. But sometimes, especially on days like today, Leni was afraid. It felt to her as if her family stood poised on the edge of a great precipice that could collapse at any second, crumble away like the houses that crashed down Seattle’s unstable, waterlogged hillsides.

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. Us. Leni

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. Leni knew about that reticence and understood it; lots of times it was better to stay silent.

Mama had quit high school and “lived on love.” That was how she always put it, the fairy tale. Now Leni was old enough to know that like all fairy tales, theirs was filled with thickets and dark places and broken dreams, and runaway girls.

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.

His smile reawakened her in a way, reminded her that there was more to life than work. He taught her something new about friendship: it picked right back up where you’d left off, as if you hadn’t been apart at all.

“The Great Alone,” Leni said. That was what Robert Service called Alaska. “You’ll make it,” Matthew said earnestly.

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 breath, that wolf could claim its nature and turn, fangs bared. It was exhausting to worry all the time, to study Dad’s every movement and the tone of his voice.

She saw how death impacted people, saw the glazed look in their eyes, the way they shook their heads, the way their sentences broke in half as if they couldn’t decide if silence or words would release them from sorrow.

In literature, death was many things—a message, catharsis, retribution.

Death made you cry, filled you with sadness, but in the best of her books, there was peace, too, satisfaction, a sense of the story ending as it should. In real life, she saw, it wasn’t like that. It was sadness opening up inside of you, changing how you saw the world.

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.

You were supposed to be safe in your own home, with your parents. They were supposed to protect you from the dangers outside.

Leni looked at her mother’s beaten, bruised face, the rag turning red with her blood. “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?

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.”

With no local police and no one to call for help. 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.

Leni saw his love for her, shining through his regret. It eroded her anger, made her question everything again. He didn’t want to hurt Mama, didn’t mean to. He was sick …

But up here, lots of people had been one thing on the Outside and became another in Alaska. Large Marge used to be a big-city prosecutor and now took showers at the Laundromat and sold gum, and Natalie had gone from teaching economics at a university to captaining her own fishing boat. Alaska was full of unexpected people

Leni got to her feet, stared at him. I didn’t mean to do that. The same

“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 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.

she had seen how the townspeople divided themselves into teams, one that believed in change and growth and another that didn’t. When the party had finally ended, everyone had gone their separate ways. Separate.

In a town that used to be about being together.

It was Aly who had saved him. She never gave up, never stopped asking how he felt. When he finally found the words to express himself, his grief had shown itself to be bottomless, terrifying.

Before Mom’s death, Aly had dreamed big, of moving to New York or Chicago, someplace that had bus service and live theater and opera halls. But, as with Matthew, loss had rearranged her from the inside out. Now she knew how much family mattered and how important it was to hang on to the people you loved.

He nodded. Sometimes in the morning when he woke up, he had a split second where he thought the world was upright, that he was an ordinary kid in an ordinary house and that his mom would soon be calling him down for breakfast. The silence on mornings like that was awful.

He did know that. He also knew that love could freeze over, become a kind of thin ice all its own. He and Dad had had a tough time talking in the past few years. Grief and guilt had bent them out of shape.

Sometimes you had to go backward in order to go forward. This truth they knew, even as young as they were. But there was another truth, one they shied away from, one they tried to protect each other from. Sometimes it was painful to go back.

He hadn’t realized how time could unspool the years of your life until for a second you were fourteen again, crying from a place so deep it seemed to predate you, desperate to be whole again.

Leni knew it was crazy, but it seemed to her as if they were having a conversation without saying anything, talking about books and durable friendships and overcoming insurmountable odds. Maybe they weren’t talking about Sam and Frodo at all, maybe they were talking about themselves and how they had somehow grown up and stayed kids at the same time.

FOR THE FIRST TIME, Leni understood all the books she’d read about broken hearts and unrequited love. It was physical, this pain of hers. The way she missed Matthew was like a sickness.

Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I’ve got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place. I read about places I can barely imagine and lose myself in journeys to foreign lands to save girls who didn’t know they were really princesses.

She could leave them. She could break free and go her own way. It would be frightening, but it couldn’t be worse than staying, watching this toxic dance of theirs, letting their world become her world until there was nothing left of her at all, until she was as small as a comma.