Leni dismounted, carefully set the bike on its side in the grass. Feeling more than a little numb, she headed toward the cabin. Mosquitoes buzzed in a cloud around her. At the door she paused, thought, You can do it, and opened the door.
It felt like going back in time, to the first day she’d been in here, with insect carcasses thick on the floor. Everything was as they’d left it, but covered in dust.
Voices and words and images from the past drifted through her mind. The good, the bad, the funny, the horrific. She remembered it all in a blinding, electric flash.
She closed her hand around the heart necklace at her throat, her talisman, felt the sharp bit of bone press into her palm. She drifted through the place, rattled the psychedelic beads that had given her parents the illusion of privacy. In their bedroom, she saw the dusty heap of belongings that revealed who they’d once been. A tangle of furs on the bed. Jackets hanging from hooks. A pair of boots with the toes eaten away.
She found her dad’s old bicentennial bandanna and shoved it in her pocket. Her mother’s suede headband hung from a hook on the wall. She took it, wound it like a bracelet around her wrist.
Up in her loft, she found her books lying scattered, the pages yellowed and chewed through; many had become a home to mice, as had her mattress. She could smell their scent in the air. A decaying, dirty smell.
The smell of a place forgotten.
She climbed back down the loft ladder, dropped onto the dirty, sticky floor, looked around.
So many memories. She wondered how long it would take her to work through them all. Even now, standing here, she didn’t know exactly how she felt about this place, but she knew, she believed, she could find a way to remember the good in it. She would never forget the bad, but she would let it go. She had to. There had been fun, too, Mama had said, and adventure.
Behind her, the door opened. She heard uneven footsteps come up behind her. Matthew stepped in beside her. “Alone is overrated,” he said simply. “Do you want. To fix it up? Live here?”
“Maybe. Or maybe we’ll burn it down and rebuild. Ashes make great soil.”
She didn’t know yet. All she knew was that she was back here at last, after all those years away, back with the crazy, durable fringe-dwellers in a state that was like nowhere else, in this majestic place that had shaped her, defined her. Once, a lifetime ago, she had worried about girls, only a few years older than her, who had gone missing. The stories had given her nightmares at thirteen. Now she knew there were a hundred ways to be lost and even more ways to be found.
*
SUCH A THIN VEIL separated the past from the present; they existed simultaneously in the human heart. Anything could transport you—the smell of the sea at low tide, the screech of a gull, the turquoise of a glacier-fed river. A voice in the wind could be both true and imagined. Especially here.
On this hot summer day, the Kenai Peninsula was vibrant with color. There wasn’t a cloud in sight. The mountains were a magical mixture of lavender and green and ice-blue—valleys and cliffs and peaks; there was still snow above the tree line. The bay was sapphire, almost waveless. Dozens of fishing boats puttered alongside kayaks and canoes. Today was a day to be on the water for Alaskans. Leni knew that Bishop’s Beach, the straight, sandy stretch below the Russian church in Homer, would be one long line of trucks and empty boat trailers, just as she knew that some clueless tourist would be out on the sand, digging for clams and not paying attention, and get caught by the tide.
Some things never changed.
Now Leni stood in her overgrown yard, with Matthew beside her. Together, they walked over to the grassy rise above the beach, met up with Mr. and Mrs. Walker, Alyeska, and MJ, who were already there, waiting. Alyeska gave Leni a warm, welcoming smile, one that said, We’re in this together now. Family. They hadn’t had much time to talk in the past two days, with the whirlwind of Leni’s return to Alaska, but they both knew there would be time for them, time to stitch their lives together. It would be easy; they loved so many people in common.
Leni took her son’s hand.
A crowd waited for her on the beach. Leni felt their eyes on her, noticed how they stopped talking at her approach.
“Look, Mommy, a seal! That fish jumped right outta the water! Whoa. Can we go fishing with Daddy today, can we? Aunt Aly says the pinks are still running.”
Leni stared out at the friends gathered at the water’s edge. Almost everyone from Kaneq was here today, even several of the hermits who were only seen at the saloon and sometimes at the General Store. At her arrival, no one spoke. One by one, they climbed into their boats. She heard the smack of water on hulls, the crunching of shells and pebbles as they pushed off.