The Great Alone

by Kristin Hannah

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“I got in.” “Congratulations, Leni.” Leni felt numb. She’d been accepted. To college. “Now what?” Leni said. “You go,” Large Marge said. “I’ve talked to Tom. He’s going to pay for it. Tica and I are buying your books and Thelma is giving you spending money. You’re one of us and we have your back. No excuses, kid. You leave this place the second you can. Run like hell, kid, and don’t look back. But Leni—” “Yeah?” “You be careful as hell until the day you leave.”

Leni couldn’t tell Mama how angry she was, the sharp, tiny teeth that gnawed at her all the time, shredding a little more of her away every time she looked at her father.

“It’s time, Leni. You’ve lived my life, baby girl. Time to live your own.”

“Do this for me. Be stronger than I ever was.”

How could three drowning people save each other?