The Great Alone

by Kristin Hannah

dashed hopes were worse than no hopes at all.

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.

didn’t want to be a soldier’s wife, but he wanted to go. So I packed my tears with his clothes and let him go.

Alyeska,

but in the best of her books, there was peace, too, satisfaction, a sense of the story ending as it should.

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.

They were trapped, by environment and finances, but mostly by the sick, twisted love that bound her parents together.

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?

Water filled tree wells and ran along roadsides and pooled everywhere, reminding everyone that this part of Alaska was technically a rain forest. You could stand anywhere and hear ice cracking up and water sluicing from tree limbs and eaves, along the sides of the road, running in rivulets along every indentation in the oversaturated ground.

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.

For years she’d imagined this moment; in her musings, she always knew exactly what to say. In the privacy of her imagination, they just started talking, picked up the thread of their friendship as if he’d never been gone.

She began to get a vague, discomforting feeling that her endless yearning had combined with fear to taint her, that her breath had killed the tomatoes that never turned red, that tiny beads of her sweat had soured the blueberry jam, and next winter, when they ate all this food she had touched, her parents would wonder what had gone so wrong.

Did I love him? No. Not then. Not for years, really, although when he died, it was like God had reached in and yanked the heart out of my chest.

“Ah. That. Love doesn’t fade or die, baby girl. People tell you it does, but it doesn’t. If you love him now, you’ll love him in ten years and in forty. Differently, maybe, a faded version, but he’s part of you now. And you are part of him.”

“But love doesn’t come just once in your life, either. Not if you’re lucky.”

The Stand by Stephen King. In the past week, she’d read three books by him and discovered a new passion. Goodbye science fiction and fantasy, hello horror. She figured it was a reflection of her inner life. She’d rather have nightmares about Randall Flagg or Carrie or Jack Torrance than about her own past.

Does the song of my broken heart play for her?

I imagine all three of us huddled in bed, with the northern lights putting on a show outside our window while wind taps on the glass.