The Great Alone

by Kristin Hannah

  “That’s not as easy as it sounds, Leni,” Mama said.

  “This is Alaska. Nothing is easy, but we’re tough, and if you go to prison, I’ll be alone. With a baby to raise. I can’t do it without you. I need you, Mama.”

  It was a moment before Mama said, “We’d need to hide the body, make sure it never gets found. The ground is too frozen to bury him.”

  “Right.”

  “But Leni,” she said evenly. “You’re talking about another crime.”

  “Letting you be called a murderer? That would be a crime. You think I’m going to trust the law with your life? The law? You told me the law didn’t protect abused women, and you were right. He got out of jail in a few days. When did the law ever protect you from him? No. No.”

  “Are you sure, Leni? It means you’ll have to live with it.”

  “I can live with it. I’m sure.”

  Mama took a while to consider, then extracted herself from Dad’s limp, bloody body, and stood. She went into her bedroom and came out a few moments later dressed in insulated pants and a turtleneck. She dumped her bloody clothes in a heap by Dad’s body. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Don’t open the door to anyone except me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Step one is to dispose of the body.”

  “And you think I’m going to sit here while you do it?”

  “I killed him. I’ll do this.”

  “And I’m helping you cover it up.”

  “We don’t have time to argue.”

  “Exactly.” Leni stripped out of her bloody clothes. Within moments she was in her insulated pants and parka and bunny boots, ready to go.

  “Get his traps,” Mama said, and left the cabin.

  Leni gathered the heavy traps from their hooks on the cabin wall and carried them outside. Mama had already hooked the big red plastic sled to the snow machine. It was the one Dad had used for hauling wood. It could hold two large coolers, a lot of chopped wood, and a moose carcass.

  “Lay the traps in the sled. Then go get the chain saw and the auger.”

  When Leni returned with the tools, Mama said, “You ready for the next part?”

  Leni nodded.

  “Let’s go get him.”

  It took them thirty minutes to drag Dad’s lifeless body from the cabin and across the snowy deck, and then another ten minutes to get him settled on the sled. A bloody trail in the snow revealed their path, but within the hour, with snow falling this heavily, it would be gone. Come spring, the rains would wash it away. Mama covered Dad with a tarp and lashed him and it down with bungee cords.

  “Okay, then.”

  Leni and her mother exchanged a look. In it was the truth that this act, this decision, would change them forever. Without words, Mama gave Leni the chance to change her mind.

  Leni stood firm. She was in this. They would dispose of the body, clean the cabin, and tell everyone he left them, say he must have fallen through the ice while hunting or lost his way in the snow. No one would question or care. Everyone knew there were a thousand ways to disappear up here.

  Leni and her mama would finally—finally—be unafraid.

  “Okay, then.”

  Mama pulled the cord to start the snow machine, then took her place on the two-person seat and grasped the throttle. She fitted a neoprene face mask over her bruised, swelling face, and gingerly pulled on her helmet. Leni did the same. “This is going to be cold as hell,” Mama yelled over the roar of the engine. “We’re going up the mountain.”

  Leni climbed aboard, put her arms around her mother’s waist.

  Mama revved the engine and they were off, driving through the virgin snow, through the open gate. They turned right on the main road and left onto the road that led up to the old chromium mine. By then it was deep night and blowing snow and cold. The thread of yellow from the snow machine’s headlight led the way.

  In weather like this, they didn’t need to worry much about being seen. For more than two hours, Mama drove high up the mountain. Where the snow was deep, her touch on the throttle was light. They rode up hills, down valleys, across frozen rivers, and around cliffs of soaring rock. Mama kept the snow machine’s speed so low it was barely faster than walking; speed wasn’t their objective now. Invisibility was. And the sled needed to stay steady.

  They came at last to a small lake high on the mountain, ringed by tall trees and cliffs. Sometime in the last hour the snow had stopped falling and the clouds had departed to reveal a velvety blue night sky awash in swirls of starlight. The moon came out, as if to watch two women in the midst of all this snow and ice or to mourn their choices. Full and bright, it shone down on them, its light reflected across the snow, seeming to lift skyward, a radiant glow illuminating the snowy landscape.

  In the sudden clarity of the night, they were visible now, two women on a snow machine in a glowing, silver-white world with a dead body on a sled.

  At the frozen lakeshore, Mama eased off of the gas, came to a trembling stop. The insect drone of the engine was the loudest noise out here. It drowned out the harsh sound of Leni’s breathing through the neoprene face mask and helmet.

  Was the lake fully frozen? There was no way to know for sure. It should be, at this high elevation, but it was early, too. Not midwinter. The snow radiated with moonlight across the flat, frozen lake.

  Leni tightened her hold.

  Mama barely turned the throttle, then inched forward. In this dark, they were like astronauts, moving through a strange, impossibly illuminated world, like deepest space, the sound of cracking ice all around them. In the center of the lake, Mama killed the engine. The snow machine slid to a stop. Mama dismounted. The cracking sound was loud, insistent, but not the kind of sound that mattered. It was just the ice breathing, stretching; not breaking.

  Mama took off her helmet, hung it on the throttle, and removed her face mask. Her breath shot out in humid plumes. Leni set her helmet on the duct-taped vinyl seat.

  In the silver-blue-white light of the moon, ice crystals sparkled across the surface of the snow, glittered like gemstones.

  Quiet.

  Only their breathing.

  Together they pulled Dad’s body off the sled. Leni used the emergency shovel to clear a divot in the snow. When she came to the glassy silver ice, she put her shovel away and retrieved the auger and the chain saw. Mama used the auger to drill an eight-inch hole in the ice. Slushy water seeped up, bounced the round disc of ice.

  Leni pulled off her face mask and shoved it in her pocket, then started up the chain saw, the wa-na-na-na excruciatingly loud out here.

  She pointed the blade downward, stuck it in the hole, and began the long, arduous process of turning the hole into a big square opening in the ice.

  When Leni finished, she was sweating hard. Mama dropped the animal traps beside the hole. They landed with a clank.

  Then Mama went back for Dad. Grabbing hold of his cold white hands, she dragged him over to the hole, tucked him up close to it.

  Dad’s body was stiff and still, his face as white and hard as a tusk carving.

  For the first time, Leni really thought about what they were doing. The bad thing they’d done. From now on, they would have to live with the knowledge that they were capable of this, all of it. The shooting, the carrying of a dead man, the covering up of a crime. Although they’d had a lifetime of covering up for him, looking away, pretending, this was different. Now they were the criminals and the secret Leni had to protect was her own.

  A good person would feel ashamed. Instead she was angry. Howlingly so.

  If only they had walked away years ago, or called the police, asked for help. Any small course correction on Mama’s part might have led to a future where there wasn’t a dead man on the ice between them.

  Mama dragged the traps apart, forced the black jaws open. She pushed Dad’s forearm into the maw. The trap closed with a snap of breaking bone. Mama paled, looking sick. Traps broke both of Dad’s legs—sn-ap—became weigh

ts.

  The northern lights appeared overhead, cascading in swirls of yellow, green, red, and purple. Impossible, magical color; lights fell like silken scarves across the sky, skeins of yellow, neon-green, shocking pink. The electric-bright moon seemed to watch it all.

  Leni stared down at her father. She saw the man who had used his fists when he was angry, saw the blood on his hands and the mean set to his jaw. But she saw the other man, too, the one she’d crafted from photographs and her own need, the one who’d loved them as much as he could, his capacity for love destroyed by war. Leni thought maybe that he would haunt her. Not just him, but the idea of him, the sad and scary truth that you could love and hate the same person at the same time, that you could feel a deep and abiding loss and shame for your own weakness and still be glad that this awful thing had been done.

  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.

  Large Marge took one look at Leni’s bruised face and squashed nose, at the dried blood on her cheeks, and said, “Son of a bitch.” She pulled Leni into a fierce hug, held on to her.

  “It was bad tonight,” Leni said at last, pulling away. She was shaking. Maybe it was finally sinking in. They’d killed him, broken his bones, dropped him in the water …

  “Is Cora—”

  “He’s dead,” Leni said quietly.

  “Thank God,” Large Marge said.

  “Mama—”

  “Don’t tell me anything. Where is he?”

  “Gone.”

  “And Cora?”

  “At the cabin. You said you’d help us. I guess we need it now to, you know, clean up. But I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

  “Don’t worry about me. Go home. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  Large Marge was already changing her clothes when Leni left the yurt.

  Back at the cabin, she found Mama standing away from the pool of blood and gore, staring down at it, her face ravaged by tears, chewing on her torn thumbnail.

  “Mama?” Leni said, almost afraid to touch her.

  “She’ll help us?”

  Before Leni could answer, she saw a spear of light flash across the window, tarnishing it, casting Mama in brightness. Leni saw her mother’s sorrow and regret in sharp relief.

  Large Marge pushed open the cabin door, walked inside. Dressed in Carhartt insulated coveralls and her wolverine hat and knee-high mukluks, she took a quick look around, saw the blood and gore and bits of bone.

  She went to Mama, touched her gently on the shoulder.

  “He went after Leni,” Mama said. “I had to shoot him. But … I shot him in the back, Marge. Twice. He was unarmed. You know what that means.”

  Large Marge sighed. “Yeah. They don’t give a shit what a man does or how scared you are.”

  “We weighed him down and dropped him in the lake, but … you know how things get found in Alaska. All kinds of things bubble up from the ground during breakup.”

  Large Marge nodded.

  “They’ll never find him,” Leni said. “We’ll say he ran away.”

  Large Marge said, “Leni, go upstairs and pack a small bag. Just enough for overnight.”

  “I can help with cleaning,” Leni said.

  “Go,” Large Marge said sternly.

  Leni climbed up into the loft. Behind her, she heard Mama and Large Marge talking quietly.

  Leni chose the book of Robert Service poetry to take with her for tonight. She also took the photograph album Matthew had given her, full now of her favorite pictures.

  She pushed them deep into her pack, alongside her beloved camera, and covered it all with a few clothes and then went downstairs.

  Mama was wearing Dad’s snow boots, as she walked through the pool of blood, making tracks to the door. At the windowsill, she pressed a bloody hand to the glass.

  “What are you doing?” Leni asked.

  “Making sure the authorities know your mom and dad were here,” Large Marge answered.

  Mama took off Dad’s boots and changed into her own and made more tracks in the blood. Then Mama took one of her shirts and ripped it and dropped it onto the floor.

  “Oh,” Leni said.

  “This way they’ll know it’s a crime scene,” Large Marge said.

  “But we’re going to clean it all up,” Leni said.

  “No, baby girl. We have to disappear,” Mama said. “Now. Tonight.”

  “Wait,” Leni said. “What? We’re going to say he left us. People will believe it.”

  Large Marge and Mama exchanged a sad look.

  “People go missing in Alaska all the time,” Leni said, her voice spiking up.

  “I thought you understood,” Mama said. “We can’t stay in Alaska after this.”

  “What?”

  “We can’t stay,” Mama said. Gently but firmly. “Large Marge agrees. Even if we could have argued self-defense, we can’t now. We covered up the crime.”

  “Evidence of intent,” Large Marge said. “There is no defense for battered women who kill their husbands. There sure as hell should be. You could assert defense of others, and it might fly. You might be acquitted—if the jury thinks deadly force was reasonable—but do you really want to take that chance? The law isn’t good to victims of domestic abuse.”

  Mama nodded. “Marge will leave the truck parked somewhere, with blood smeared across the cab. In a few days, she will report us missing and lead the police to the cabin. They’ll conclude—hopefully—that he killed us both and went into hiding. Marge and Tom will tell the police that he was abusive.”

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