The Great Alone

by Kristin Hannah

That was the thing about her dad: he might be moody and sharp-tempered, even a little scary sometimes, but that was just because he felt things like love and loss and disappointment so keenly. Love most of all.

you don’t stop loving a person when they’re hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you. He needs me. Us.

You know what they say about finding a man in Alaska—the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”

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.

“The Great Alone,” Leni said. That was what Robert Service called Alaska.

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.

“A thing can be true and not the truth, now

It was exhausting to worry all the time, to study Dad’s every movement and the tone of his voice.

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.

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.

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

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.

She was judging her mother, and it felt disloyal. Cruel, even. She knew that Dad was sick.

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 …

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.

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.

Leni knew how naïve he was, how wrong. Matthew knew nothing about angry, irrational parents, about punches that broke noses and the kind of rage that began with vandalism and might go places he couldn’t imagine.

would die before I’d let anything happen to you or your mom. You know that, right? You know how much I love you both.” He tousled her hair. “Don’t worry, Red. I’ll keep you safe.”

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.

But was she supposed to be trapped forever by her mother’s choice and her father’s rage?

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.

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.

Leni hadn’t understood then. Now she did. She saw how love could be dangerous and beyond control. Ravenous. Leni had it in her to love the way her mother did. She knew that now.

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?”

Bullies were always cowards who could be made to back down.

I think you stand by the people you love.

My hatred of him is a poison burning me from the inside out. Every time I look at him something in me hardens. It scares me how much I hate him.

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

“I care. And you should care for me.”

That was how change came, she supposed: in the quiet of things unspoken and truths unacknowledged.

But the world was never kind, especially not to kids.

But books were only a reflection of real life, not the thing itself.

Some choices you didn’t recover from; she was old enough to know that.

All of it had brought them closer to who they were, who they’d always been. Mother and daughter. Their essential, immutable bond—fragile enough to snap at a harsh word a long time ago, durable enough to survive death itself.

her to forget all the pain that had preceded it. Over the years, Leni knew that Mama had more than forgiven her parents; she’d grown to understand them and to regret how harshly she’d treated them. Perhaps it was a road every child ultimately traveled.

He’d fallen a lot, gotten up more.

Now she knew there were a hundred ways to be lost and even more ways to be found.

Love doesn’t fade or die, baby girl.