“I want to finish the school year in Kaneq,” he said into the silence. He heard the question she didn’t ask and answered it. “I can’t hide out forever,” he said.
Aly looked frightened. She’d seen him through the worst of times, and he knew that she was terrified of him sliding back into depression. “But you love hockey and you’re good at it.”
“The season ends in two weeks. And I start college in September.”
“Leni.”
Matthew wasn’t surprised that she understood. He and Aly had talked about everything, including Leni and how much her letters meant to Matthew. “What if she goes off to college somewhere? I want to see her. I might not get another chance.”
“Are you sure you’re ready? Everywhere you look, you’ll see Mom.”
And there it was. The big question. The truth was, he didn’t know if he could handle any of it—going back to Kaneq, seeing the river that swallowed his mother, seeing his father’s grief in Technicolor, up close—but he knew one thing. Leni’s letters had mattered to him. Maybe they’d saved him as much as Aly had. For all their separate miles, and their different lives, Leni’s letters and the photographs she sent reminded him of who he’d been.
“I see her everywhere here. Don’t you?”
Aly nodded slowly. “I swear I see her out of the corner of my eye all of the time. I talk to her at night.”
He nodded. Sometimes in the morning when he woke up, he had a split second where he thought the world was upright, that he was an ordinary kid in an ordinary house and that his mom would soon be calling him down for breakfast. The silence on mornings like that was awful.
“You want me to come with you?”
He did. He wanted her beside him, holding his hand, keeping him steady. “No. You don’t get out of school until June,” he said, hearing the unsteadiness in his voice, knowing she heard it, too. “Besides, I think I have to do this by myself.”
“You know Dad loves you. He’ll be thrilled to have you back.”
He did know that. He also knew that love could freeze over, become a kind of thin ice all its own. He and Dad had had a tough time talking in the past few years. Grief and guilt had bent them out of shape.
Aly reached out for him, took his hand in hers.
He waited for her to speak, but she didn’t say anything. They both knew why: there was nothing to say. Sometimes you had to go backward in order to go forward. This truth they knew, even as young as they were. But there was another truth, one they shied away from, one they tried to protect each other from. Sometimes it was painful to go back.
Maybe grief had been waiting for Matthew to return all this time, waiting, in the dark, in the cold. Maybe in Kaneq he’d undo all this progress and break down again.
“You’re stronger now,” Aly said.
“I guess we’ll find out.”
*
TWO WEEKS LATER, Matthew flew his uncle’s float plane over Otter Point and banked right, lowered, touched down on the flat blue water below. He killed the engine and floated toward the big silvered-wood arch that read WALKER COVE.
His father stood at the end of the dock, his arms at his sides.
Matthew jumped off the pontoon and onto the dock and tied the float plane down. He remained that way, bent over, his back to his father, for a moment longer than necessary, gathering the strength he needed to really be here.
At last he straightened, turned.
His father was close now; he pulled Matthew into a bone-jarring hug that went on so long Matthew had to gasp for breath. Dad drew back finally, looked at him, and love took shape in the air around them, a regret-and memory-filled version, maybe, sad around the edges, but love.
It had been only a few months since they’d seen each other. （Dad made it a point to come to several of Matthew’s hockey games and visit in Fairbanks as often as the harsh weather and homesteading chores allowed, but they had never really talked about anything that mattered.）
Dad seemed older, his skin more lined and creased. He smiled in that way of his, the way he did everything in life, full tilt, no explanations, no regrets, no safety nets. You knew Tom Walker in a glance, because he let you in. You knew instantly that this was a man who always told the truth as he saw it, whether it was popular or not, who had a set of rules to guide his life and no other rules mattered. He laughed harder than any man Matthew had ever met, and Matthew had only seen him cry once. On that day out on the ice.
“You’re even taller than the last time I saw you.”