Mama and Leni hurried out of the small office toward the airfield, where their airplane waited, propeller whirring. At the plane, Leni tossed her backpack into the aft area, where it fell amid boxes to be delivered somewhere, and followed her mother into the shadowy interior.
She took her seat （there were only two of them behind the pilot） and tightened her seat belt.
The small plane rumbled forward, clattered hard, then lifted, swayed, leveled out. The engine sounded like the cards the kids on her old block used to put in their bicycle spokes.
Leni stared out the window, down into the gloom. From this height, everything looked charcoal-gray and white, a blurring of land and sea and sky. Jagged white mountains, angry white-tipped waves on an ash-gray sea. Cabins and homes clinging stubbornly to a wild shoreline.
Homer slowly disappeared from view.
*
SEATTLE AT NIGHT in the falling rain.
A snake of yellow headlights in the dark. Neon signs everywhere, reflections cast on wet streets. Traffic lights changing color. Horns honking out staccato warnings.
Music tumbled out of open doors, assaulting the night, unlike any music Leni had heard before. It had a clanging, angry sound and some of the people standing outside of the bars looked like they’d landed from Mars—with safety pins in their cheeks and stiff blue Mohawks and black clothes that appeared to have been cut to ribbons.
“It’s okay,” Mama said, pulling Leni in close as they walked past a group of homeless-looking people who stood listlessly in a park, passing cigarettes back and forth.
Leni saw the city in bits and pieces through lowered lashes, blurred by the incessant rain. She saw women with babies huddled in doorways and men asleep in sleeping bags beneath the elevated road that looked down on this section of town. Leni couldn’t imagine why people would live this way when they could go to Alaska and live off the land and build themselves a home. She couldn’t help thinking about all those girls who’d been abducted in 1974 and found dead not far from here. Ted Bundy had been arrested, but did that mean the streets were safe now?
Mama found a pay phone and called a taxi. As they stood there waiting for it to arrive, the rain stopped.
A bright yellow cab pulled up to the dirty curb, splashing water on them. Leni followed her mama into the backseat, which smelled aggressively of pine. From here on, Leni saw the lights of the city through a window. With water everywhere, in drips and puddles, but no rain falling, the place had a jumbled, multicolored, carnival look.
They angled uphill. The old brick and low-rise part of the city—Pioneer Square—was apparently the pit people climbed out of when they got money. Downtown was a canyon of office buildings, skyscrapers, and stores, set on busy streets, with windows that looked like movie sets, inhabited by mannequins dressed in glitzy suits with exaggerated shoulder pads and cinched-in waists. At the top of the hill, the city gave way to a neighborhood of stately homes.
“There it is,” Mama said to the cabbie, giving him the last of their borrowed cash.
The house was bigger than Leni remembered. In the dark, it looked vaguely sinister, with its peaked roof pointing high into a black night sky and glowing diamond-paned windows. All of it was surrounded by an iron fence topped with heart-piercing spires.
“You sure?” Leni asked quietly.
Leni knew what this had cost her mother, coming home for help. She saw the impact of it in her mother’s eyes, in the slump of her shoulders, in the way her hands curled into fists. Mama felt like a failure coming back here. “It just proves they were right about him all along.”
“We could disappear from here, too. Start over by ourselves.”
“I might do that for myself, baby girl, but not for you. I was a crappy mother. I am going to be a good grandmother. Please. Don’t give me a way out.” She took a deep breath. “Let’s go.”
Leni took hold of Mama’s hand; they walked up the stone path together, where spotlights shone on bushes sculpted to look like animals and spiky rosebushes cut back for winter. At the ornate front door they paused. Waited. Then Mama knocked.
Moments later, the door opened and Grandma appeared.
The years had changed her, imprinted and pulled at her face. Her hair had gone gray. Or maybe it had always been gray and she’d stopped dyeing it. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, clamping a thin hand to her mouth.
“Hey, Mom,” Mama said, her voice unsteady.
Leni heard footsteps.
Grandma stepped aside; Grandpa moved in beside her. He was a big man—fat stomach straining at a blue cashmere sweater, big floppy jowls, white hair that was combed across his shiny head, the strands carefully tended. Baggy black polyester pants, cinched tight with a belt, suggested bird-thin legs underneath. He looked older than his seventy years.