The Great Alone

by Kristin Hannah

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.

They were kids, she and Matthew; no one asked their opinion or told them anything. They just had to muddle along and live in the world presented to them, confused a lot of the time because nothing made sense, but certain of their subterranean place on the food chain.

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.

She nodded, wishing she could tell him that she’d begun to worry as much about the dangers inside of her home as outside of it. She could tell Matthew a lot of things, but not that. 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.

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. “I’m trying to make you self-sufficient.” It sounded like an apology, but for what? For being crazy sometimes or teaching her to hunt? Or for making her eat the hare’s beating heart? 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.

Leni had never known anyone who had died before. She had seen death on television and read about it in her beloved books (Johnny’s death in The Outsiders had turned her inside out), but now she saw the truth of it. In literature, death was many things—a message, catharsis, retribution. There were deaths that came from a beating heart that stopped and deaths of another kind, a choice made, like Frodo going to the Grey Havens. 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.

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.

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.

“Of course he will,” Leni said, but she didn’t believe it. She knew what nightmares could do to a person and how bad memories could change who you were.

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? “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.”

Mama wanted Leni to look away as easily as Mama did. To forgive even when the apology tendered was as thin as fishing line and as breakable as a promise to do better. For years, for her whole life, Leni had done just that. She loved her parents, both of them. She had known, without being told, that the darkness in her dad was bad and the things he did were wrong, but she believed her mama’s explanations, too: that Dad was sick and sorry, that if they loved him enough, he would get better and it would be like Before. Only Leni didn’t believe that anymore. The truth was this: Winter had only just begun. The cold and darkness would go on for a long, long time and they were alone up here, trapped in this cabin with Dad.

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.

“Come on, sleepyhead!” Mama called up bright and early the next morning. “Time for school.” It sounded so ordinary, something every mother said to every fourteen-year-old, but Leni heard the words behind the words, the please let’s pretend that formed a dangerous pact. Mama wanted to induct Leni into some terrible, silent club to which Leni didn’t want to belong. She didn’t want to pretend what had happened was normal, but what was she—a kid—supposed to do about it?

Fear and shame she understood. Fear made you run and hide and shame made you stay quiet, but this anger wanted something else. Release. “Don’t,” Mama said. “Please.” “Don’t what?” Leni said. “You’re judging me.” It was true, Leni realized with surprise. She was judging her mother, and it felt disloyal. Cruel, even. She knew that Dad was sick. Leni bent down to replace the paperback book under the table’s rickety leg.

There it was: the sad truth. Mama loved him too much to leave him. Still, even now, with her face bruised and swollen. Maybe what she’d always said was true, maybe she couldn’t breathe without him, maybe she’d wilt like a flower without the sunshine of his adoration.

Leni knew it wasn’t a good thing, not a normal mom-and-dad thing, to compare your love to a drug that could hollow your body and fry your brain and leave you for dead. But they said it to each other all the time. They said it the way Ali McGraw in Love Story said love means never having to say you’re sorry, as if it were gospel true.

She wanted his regret, his shame and sadness to be enough for her. She wanted to follow her mother’s lead as she always had. She wanted to believe that last night had been some terrible anomaly and that it wouldn’t happen again.

Neither she nor Matthew knew quite what to say, how to use something as impersonal as words to create a bridge between their disparate lives, but they kept writing. She didn’t yet know how he felt about himself or the move or the loss of his mother, but she knew that he was thinking about her. That was more than enough to begin with.

They were trapped, by environment and finances, but mostly by the sick, twisted love that bound her parents together. Mama would never leave Dad. It didn’t matter that she’d gone so far as to take a backpack and run to the bus and drive away. She would come back, always, because she loved him. Or she needed him. Or she was afraid of him. Who knew, really? Leni couldn’t begin to understand the hows and whys of her parents’ love. She was old enough to see the turbulent surface, but too young to know what lay beneath.

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.

How was Mama’s unshakable belief in Dad any different than his fear of Armageddon? 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?

Hope. A shiny thing, a lure for the unwary. She knew how seductive it could be, and how dangerous.

In time, his grief had turned to anger and then drifted toward sorrow, and now, finally, it had settled into a lingering sadness that was a part of him, not the whole.

“You know Dad loves you. He’ll be thrilled to have you back.” 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. Maybe grief had been waiting for Matthew to return all this time, waiting, in the dark, in the cold. Maybe in Kaneq he’d undo all this progress and break down again.

You knew Tom Walker in a glance, because he let you in. You knew instantly that this was a man who always told the truth as he saw it, whether it was popular or not, who had a set of rules to guide his life and no other rules mattered. He laughed harder than any man Matthew had ever met, and Matthew had only seen him cry once. On that day out on the ice.

It was such a silly conversation, how could it break her heart? He should know better than to dream so big and to give voice to those dreams. He had lost his mother and she had a dangerous father. Families and the future were fragile.

She hadn’t known until now how love could erupt into existence like the big bang theory and change everything in you and everything in the world. She believed in Matthew suddenly, in the possibility of him, of them. The way she believed in gravity or that the earth was round. It was crazy. Crazy. When he kissed her, she glimpsed a whole new world, a new Leni.

The depth of this new feeling was terrifying. Real love grew slowly, didn’t it? It couldn’t be this fast, like a crashing together of planets. Yearning. She knew what it felt like now. Yearning. An old word, from Jane Eyre’s world, and as new to Leni as this second.

She learned things no book had ever taught her—how falling in love felt like an adventure, how her body seemed to change at his touch, the way her armpits ached after an hour of holding him tightly, how her lips puffed and chapped from his kisses, and how his rough beard-growth could burn her skin.

he said nothing, which should have been better than yelling, but it wasn’t. Yelling was like a bomb in the corner: you saw it, watched the fuse burn, and you knew when it would explode and you needed to run for cover. Not speaking was a killer somewhere in your house with a gun when you were sleeping.

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. 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.

“You know what walls do?” Large Marge said. “They hide what happens behind them. They trap people inside.”

“She left him,” Mama said quietly. For once, she didn’t look away. “That’s what got her killed. Men like that … they don’t stop looking for you until they find you.”

Leni tried to see past his anger to the man Mama claimed he used to be, before Vietnam had changed him and Alaska’s winters had revealed his own darkness. She tried to remember being Red, his girl, the one who’d ridden his shoulders on The Strand in Hermosa Beach. “Please, Dad. Please. I want to celebrate graduating from high school in my town. The town you brought me to.” When Dad looked at her, Leni saw what she saw so rarely in his eyes: love. Tattered, tired, shaved small by bad choices, but love just the same. And regret. “Sorry, Red. I can’t do it. Not even for you.”

“More careful?” Leni turned to her. “We think about every single thing we say. We disappear in an instant. We pretend we don’t need anything or anyone except him and this place. And none of it is enough, Mama. We can’t be good enough to keep him from losing

She knew the difference between fact and fiction, but she couldn’t abandon her love stories. They made her feel as if women could be in control of their destinies. Even in a cruel, dark world that tested women to the very limits of their endurance, the heroines of these novels could prevail and find true love. They gave Leni hope and a way to fill the lonely hours of the night.

Leni stared at him, realizing now, all at once in a sweep of goose bumps, how she loved him. Not in the toxic, needy, desperate way her mother loved her father. She needed Matthew, but not to save her or complete her or reinvent her. Her love for him was the clearest, cleanest, strongest emotion she’d ever felt. It was like opening your eyes or growing up, realizing that you had it in you to love like this. Forever. For all time. Or for all the time you had.

“If he loved you guys, he wouldn’t hurt you.” He made it sound so simple, as if it were a mathematical equation. But the connection between pain and love wasn’t linear. It was a web. “What’s it like?” she asked. “To feel safe?” He touched her hair. “Do you feel it now?” She did. Maybe for the first time, but that was crazy. The last place Leni was safe was here, in the arms of a boy her dad hated.

FEAR, LENI LEARNED, was not the small, dark closet she’d always imagined: walls pressed in close, a ceiling you bumped your head on, a floor cold to the touch. No. Fear was a mansion, one room after another, connected by endless hallways.

The fear she battled during daylight besieged her at night. She dreamed of her death in a hundred ways—drowning, falling through ice, plummeting down a mountainside, being shot in the head. Metaphors, all of them. The death of every dream she’d ever had and those she’d yet to dream.

Leni couldn’t help stopping, turning back just for a second to stare at the cabin’s warm, cozy interior. For all the pain and heartache and fear, this was the only real home she’d ever known. She hoped she would never see it again. How sad that her hope felt like loss.

Love and fear. The most destructive forces on earth. Fear had turned her inside out, love had made her stupid.

ground trembled at each wave’s impact, or maybe Leni just thought it did because life felt so unstable now. Even the ground felt unreliable.

“You don’t have to be the only one protecting her, you know,” he said. “We’ll all take care of you. It’s always been that way in Kaneq.” Leni wanted that to be true. She wanted to believe there was a safe place for her and Mama, a do-over of their lives, a beginning that didn’t rise from the ashes of a violent, terrible ending. Mostly, she didn’t want to feel solely responsible for her mama’s safety anymore.

Now, sitting by the fire alone, he admitted to himself that he was afraid he’d done the wrong thing by bringing Leni here, afraid he’d done the wrong thing by leaving Cora in Kaneq. Afraid he’d turn around and see Ernt barreling up the trail with a rifle in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. Mostly he was afraid for Leni, because no matter how this all worked out, no matter if she did everything perfectly and got away and saved her mom, Leni’s heart would always have a broken place. It didn’t matter how you lost a parent or how great or shitty that parent was, a kid grieved forever. Matthew grieved for the mother he’d had. He figured Leni would grieve for the dad she wanted.

She thought she had grieved for Matthew, cried all the tears she had, but now she saw the desert of grief that lay before her.

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. “How’s