She was crying softly. Maybe Mama heard and knew why and knew there was nothing to say; or maybe all mothers cried right now. “Matthew,” she whispered, stroking his velvet cheek. “We’ll call you MJ. They called your Daddy Mattie sometimes, but I never did … and he knew how to fly … he would have loved you so much…”
1986
TWENTY-SEVEN
“I don’t know how to live with what I’ve done to her life,” Cora said.
“It’s been years,” her mother said. “Look at her. She’s happy. Why must we keep having this conversation?”
Cora wanted to agree. It was what she said to herself on a daily basis. Look, she’s happy. Sometimes, she was able to almost wholly believe it. And then there were days like today. She didn’t know what caused the change. Weather, maybe. Old habits. The kind of corrosive fear that once it moved in, pitted your bones and stayed forever.
Seven years had passed since Cora had dragged Leni away from Alaska and brought her here, to this city poised on the water’s edge.
Cora saw how Leni had tried to put down roots into this rich, wet land, tried to flourish. But Seattle was a city of hundreds of thousands; it could never speak the rugged language of Leni’s pioneer soul.
Cora lit a cigarette, drew the smoke into her lungs, and let it linger there; instantly she was calmed by the familiar act. She exhaled and lifted her chin, trying to get comfortable on the camp chair. Her lower back ached from a night spent in the pseudo-wilderness sleeping in a tent; her breathing was ragged from a persistent cold.
Not far away, Leni stood at the river’s edge with a little boy on one side of her and an old man on the other. She cast her line out in a graceful, practiced arc, the line snapping and dancing in the air before it cascaded into the calm water. Late spring sunlight painted all of it gold; the water, the three mismatched figures, the nearby trees. Even as the sun shone down on them it began to rain, tiny droplets drawn from the damp air.
They were in the Hoh Rain Forest, one of the last refuges of pure wilderness in the populated western half of Washington State. They came here as often as they could and pitched their tents on campsites that offered both electricity and water. Here, away from the crowds, they could be who they really were. They didn’t have to worry about being seen together or making up stories or telling lies. It had been years since anyone had mentioned the Allbright family in Alaska or gone looking for any of them, but still, they were always on guard.
Leni said she could breathe in this wilderness, where the trees were as big around as Volkswagens and grew high enough to block out the recalcitrant sun. She said she had things to teach her son that were part of his heritage, lessons that couldn’t be taught where the world was paved and lit by streetlamps. Things his father would have taught him.
In the past few years, Cora’s father had become an avid fisherman—or maybe he was just an avid grandfather who did anything and everything to make Leni and MJ smile. He’d quit practicing law and had become a putterer around the house.
So they came camping out here as often as they could, regardless of the rain that greeted them ten times out of twelve, even in midsummer. They caught fish for dinner and fried it in cast-iron skillets over an open flame. At night, while they all sat around the campfire, Leni recited poems and told stories set in the wilderness of Alaska.
It wasn’t fun for Leni. It was something different. Vital. A way to release the pressure that built up all week as she walked among the hordes at the sprawling University of Washington campus, as she sold books to patrons at her part-time job at the giant Shorey’s Bookstore on First Avenue and took photography classes at night.
Leni came out here to re-find herself in nature, to recover whatever small piece of her Alaskan soul she could find, to connect her son to the father he didn’t know and the life that was his by birthright but not in fact. Alaska, the last frontier, the land that would always and forever be home to Leni. The place where she belonged.
“You can hear him laughing,” her mother said.
Cora nodded. It was true; even with the percussive drumbeat of the increasing rain, drops landing on nylon tents and plastic hoods and plate-sized leaves, she could hear her grandson’s laughter.
MJ was the happiest of kids—a boy who made friends easily and followed the rules and still held your hand when you walked down the sidewalk toward school. He cared about the usual things for a boy his age—action figures and cartoons and Popsicles in the summer. He was still young enough that he didn’t ask a lot of questions about his father, but that would come. They all knew it. Cora knew, too, that when MJ looked at his mother’s smile, he saw none of the shadows crouched behind it.