“But people get married, people who are injured and can’t talk and are dying. Don’t they?”
“Not to eighteen-year-old girls with their whole lives in front of them. How’s your mom? I hear she took your dad back.”
“She always takes him back. They’re like magnets.”
“We’re all worried about you two.”
“Yeah.” Leni sighed. What good had worry ever done? Only Mama could change their situation, and she refused to do it.
In the silence that followed that unanswerable comment, Mr. Walker reached into his pocket and pulled out a thin package wrapped in newsprint. Written across the top in red marker was: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LENI. “Alyeska found this in Mattie’s room. I guess he got it for you … before.”
“Oh” was all she could say. Her birthday had been forgotten in all the drama this year. She took the gift, stared down at it.
The nurse exited Matthew’s room. Through the open door, Leni heard Matthew screaming. “Waaaa … Na … sher…”
“The brain damage … it’s bad, kiddo. I won’t lie to you. I was sorry to hear you decided not to go to college.”
She shoved the present in her parka pocket. “How could I? It was supposed to be both of us.”
“He’d want you to go. You know he would.”
“We don’t know what he wants anymore, do we?”
She got up, went back into Matthew’s room. He lay rigid, his fingers flexed. The bolts in his head and scars on his face gave him a Frankenstein appearance. His one good eye stared dully ahead, not at her.
She leaned over and picked up his hand. It was a deadweight. She kissed the back of it, saying, “I love you.”
He didn’t respond.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she promised in a thick voice. “I’ll always be here. This is me, Matthew, climbing down to save you. Like you did for me. You did it, you know? You saved me. I’m standing here, by the one I love. I hope you hear that.”
She stayed by him for hours. Every now and then he screamed and struggled. Twice, he cried. Finally, they asked her to leave so they could bathe him.
It wasn’t until later, after she’d flagged down the water taxi and climbed aboard, as she was listening to the boat hull thumping over the whitecaps, with water spraying her in the face, that she realized she hadn’t said goodbye to Mr. Walker. She’d just walked through the care facility and gone outside, past a man standing in front of a shack held together with duct tape and plastic sheeting, past a group of kids playing four-square in the school playground, wearing arctic camo clothes, past an old Native woman walking two huskies and a duck—all on leashes.
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. It could go on and on. The human body was eighty percent water; that meant she was literally made of tears.
In Kaneq, as she walked off the water taxi, it started to snow. The town gave off a slight humming: the sound of the big generator that fueled the new lights. Snow fell like sifting flour in the glow of Mr. Walker’s new streetlamps. She barely noticed the cold as she walked up to the General Store.
The bell rang at her entrance. It was four-thirty, technically still daytime, but night was coming in fast.
Large Marge was dressed in a thigh-length fringed suede jacket over insulated pants. Her hair looked like shavings from an Etch A Sketch that had been glued to her skull. In places she had no hair at all, patches where she’d cut too zealously down to her brown scalp, probably because she didn’t own a mirror. “Leni! What a nice surprise,” she said in a foghorn voice that would have sent birds into the air. “I miss my best-ever employee.”
Leni saw compassion in the woman’s dark eyes. She meant to say, I saw Matthew, but to her horror what she did was burst into tears.
Large Marge led Leni over to the cash register, eased her to a sitting position on the old-fashioned settee and handed her a Tab.
“I just saw Matthew,” Leni said, slumping forward.
Large Marge sat down beside her. The settee creaked angrily. “Yeah. I was in Anchorage last week. It’s hard to see. It’s killing Tom and Aly, too. How much heartache can one family handle?”
“I thought a care facility meant he was better. I thought…” She sighed. “I don’t know what I thought.”
“He’s as good as he’s going to get, from what I hear. Poor kid.”
“He was trying to save me.”