Five minutes later, Dad slammed on the brakes. Two hundred feet farther and they would have careened over a cliff.
“Jesus,” Mama said. The road was gone; in its place, scrub brush and a ledge. Land’s End. Literally.
“We’re here!” Dad jumped out of the bus, slammed the door shut.
Mama looked at Leni. They were both thinking the same thing: there was nothing here but trees and mud and a cliff that could have killed them in the fog. They got out of the bus and huddled together. Not far away—presumably below the cliff in front of them—the waves crashed and roared.
“Will ya look at it?” Dad threw his arms wide, as if he wanted to embrace it all. He seemed to be growing before their eyes, like a tree, spreading branches wide, becoming strong. He liked the nothingness he saw, the vast emptiness. It was what he’d come for.
The entrance to their property was a narrow neck of land bordered on either side by cliffs, the bases of which were battered by the ocean. Leni thought that a bolt of lightning or an earthquake could shear this land away from the mainland and set it adrift, a floating fortress of an island.
“That’s our driveway,” Dad said.
“Driveway?” Mama said, staring at the trail through the trees. It looked like it hadn’t been used in years. Thin-trunked alder trees grew in the path.
“Bo’s been gone a long time. We’ll have to clear the road of new growth, but for now we’ll hike in,” Dad said.
“Hike?” Mama said.
He set about unpacking the bus. While Leni and Mama stood staring into the trees, Dad divided their necessities into three backpacks and said, “Okay. Here we go.”
Leni stared at the packs in disbelief.
“Here, Red,” he said, lifting a pack that seemed as big as a Buick.
“You want me to wear that?” she asked.
“I do if you want food and a sleeping bag at the cabin.” He grinned. “Come on, Red. You can do this.”
She let him fit the backpack on her. She felt like a turtle with an oversized shell. If she fell over, she would never right herself. She moved sideways with exaggerated care as Dad helped Mama put on her pack.
“Okay, Allbrights,” Dad said, hefting his own pack on. “Let’s go home!”
He took off walking, his arms swinging in time to his steps. Leni could hear his old army boots crunching and squishing in the muddy dirt. He whistled along, like Johnny Appleseed.
Mama glanced longingly back at the bus. Then she turned to Leni and smiled, but it struck Leni as an expression of terror rather than joy. “Okay, then,” she said. “Come on.”
Leni reached out for Mama’s hand.
They walked through a shadow land of trees, following a narrow, winding trail. They could hear the sea crashing all around them. As they continued, the sound of the surf diminished. The land expanded. More trees, more land, more shadow.
“Sweet simple Christ,” Mama said after a while. “How much farther is it?” She tripped on a rock, fell, went down hard.
“Mama!” Leni reached for her without thinking and her pack threw her to the ground. Mud filled Leni’s mouth, made her sputter.
Dad was beside them in an instant, helping Leni and Mama to stand. “Here, girls, lean on me,” he said. And they were off again.
Trees crowded into one another, jostled for space, turned the trail gloomy and dark. Sunlight poked through, changing color and clarity as they walked. The lichen-carpeted ground was springy, like walking on marshmallows. In no time, Leni noticed that she was ankle-deep in shadow. The darkness seemed to be rising rather than the sun falling. As if darkness were the natural order around here.
They got hooked in the face by branches, stumbled atop the spongy ground, until finally they emerged into the light again, into a meadow of knee-high grass and wildflowers. It turned out that their forty acres was a peninsula: a huge thumbprint of grassy land perched above the water on three sides, with a small C-shaped beach in the middle. There, the water was calm, serene.
Leni staggered into the clearing, unhooked her pack, let it crash to the ground. Mama did the same.
And there it was: the home they’d come to claim. A small cabin built of age-blackened logs, with a slanted, moss-furred roof that was studded with dozens of bleached-white animal skulls. A rotting deck jutted out from the front, cluttered with mildewed chairs. Off to the left, between the cabin and the trees, were decrepit animal pens and a dilapidated chicken coop.
There was junk everywhere, lying in the tall grass: a big pile of spokes, oil drums, coils of reddish wire, an old-fashioned wooden washing machine with a hand-cranked wringer.