Mama dropped to her knees beside him, bent close. “We loved you.”
She looked up at Leni, wanting—maybe needing—Leni to say the same thing, to do what Leni had always done. Peas in a pod.
It was between them now, years of yelling and hitting, of being afraid … and smiles and laughter, Dad saying, Heya, Red, and begging for forgiveness.
“’Bye, Dad” was all Leni could summon. Maybe, in time, this wouldn’t be her last memory of him; maybe, in time, she would remember how it felt when he held her hand or put her on his shoulders as he walked along The Strand.
Mama pushed him across the ice, traps clanking, into the open hole. His body plunged down, snapping his head back.
His face peered up at them, a cameo in cold black water, skin white in the moonlight, beard and mustache frozen. Slowly, slowly he sank into the water and disappeared.
There would be no trace of him tomorrow. The ice would close up long before anyone else came out here. His body would be dragged by the heavy traps to the lake floor. In time, he would be worn down by the water and become only bones, and bones could wash ashore, but the predators would likely find them before the authorities would. By then no one would be looking, anyway. Five out of every thousand people went missing in Alaska every year, were lost. That was a known fact. They fell down crevasses, lost their way on trails, drowned in a rising tide.
Alaska. The Great Alone.
“You know what this makes us,” Mama said.
Leni stood beside her, imagining the sight of her dad’s pale, stiff body being dragged down into the dark. The thing he hated most. “Survivors,” Leni said. The irony was not lost on her. It was what her dad had wanted them to be.
Survivors.
*
LENI KEPT REPLAYING IT in her mind, seeing the last glimpse of her dad’s face before the black water pulled him under. The image would haunt her for the rest of her life.
When they finally returned to the cabin, exhausted and cold to the bone, Leni and her mother had to haul in wood to feed the fire. Leni tossed her gloves into the flames. Then she and Mama stood in front of the fire, their trembling hands outstretched to the heat, for how long?
Who knew? Time lost its meaning.
Leni stared numbly down at the floor. There was a bone shard near her foot, another on the coffee table. It would take all night to clean this up and she feared that even if they wiped all his blood away, it would come seeping back, bubbling up from the wood like something out of a horror story. But they had to get started.
“We need to clean up. We’ll say he disappeared,” Leni said.
Mama frowned, chewed worriedly at her lower lip. “Go get Large Marge. Tell her what I did.” Mama looked at Leni. “You hear me? You tell her what I did.”
Leni nodded and left Mama alone to start cleaning.
Outside, it was snowing lightly again, the world darker, layered with clouds. Leni trudged to the snow machine and climbed aboard. Airy goose-down flakes fell, changed direction with the wind. At Large Marge’s property, Leni veered right, plunged into a thicket of trees, drove along a winding path of tire tracks on snow.
At last she came to a clearing: small, oval-shaped, ringed by towering white trees. Large Marge’s home was a canvas-and-wood yurt. Like all homesteaders, Large Marge kept everything, so her yard was full of heaps and piles of junk covered in snow.
Leni parked in front of the yurt and got out. She knew she didn’t have to yell out a greeting. The headlight and sound of the snow machine had announced her.
Sure enough, a minute later the door to the yurt opened. Large Marge walked out, wearing a woolen blanket like a huge cape around her body. She tented a hand over her eyes to keep out the falling snow. “Leni? Is that you?”
“It’s me.”
“Come in. Come in,” Large Marge said, making a sweeping gesture with her hand.
Leni hurried up the steps and went inside.
The yurt was bigger inside than it looked from the outside, and immaculately clean. Lanterns gave off a buttery light and the woodstove poured out heat and sent its smoke up through a metal pipe that protruded through a carefully constructed opening at the yurt’s canvas crown.
The walls were constructed of thin wooden strips in an intricate crisscross pattern, with canvas stretched taut behind them like an elaborate hoop skirt. The domed ceiling was buttressed by beams. The kitchen was full-sized and the bedroom was above, in a loft area that looked down over the living area. Now, in the winter, it was cozy and contained, but in the summer she knew that the canvas windows were unzipped to reveal screens that let in huge blocks of light. Wind thumped on the canvas.