Daddy.
Matthew saw a flat charcoal-gray stone, small as a new beginning, polished by the sea, and picked it up. The weight of it was perfect, the size exactly what he wanted. He held it out to his son, said, “Here. I’ll show you. How to. Skip rocks. It’s cool. I taught your mom. The same thing. A long time ago…”
*
“HE ALWAYS BELIEVED you’d come back,” Mr. Walker said, coming up beside Leni. “Said he’d know if you were dead. That he’d feel it. His first word was ‘her.’ It didn’t take us long to know he meant you.”
“How do I make up for leaving him?”
“Ah, Leni. It’s life. Things don’t always go the way you expect.” He shrugged. “Matthew knows that, better than any of us.”
“How is he, really?”
“He has struggles. Pain sometimes. He has trouble putting his thoughts into words when he gets stressed, but he’s also the best guide on the river and the guests love him. He volunteers at the rehab center. And you’ve seen his paintings. It’s almost like God gave him that gift in compensation. His future isn’t like everyone else’s, maybe, not what you’d imagined when you were both eighteen.”
“I have my struggles, too,” Leni said quietly. “And we were kids then. We’re not now.”
Mr. Walker nodded. “There’s really only one question. Everything else will follow.” He turned to look at her. “Are you staying?”
She did her best to smile. She was pretty sure this was the question he’d come over to ask. As a parent herself, she understood. He didn’t want his son hurt again. “I have no idea what this new life of mine will look like, but I’m staying.”
He laid a hand on her shoulder.
Down on the beach, MJ leaped into the air. “I did it! I made the rock skip. Mommy, did you see that?”
Matthew looked back and gave Leni a crooked smile. He and his son looked so much alike, both of them smiling at her, standing together against the cornflower-blue sky. Peas in a pod. Two of a kind. The beginning of a whole new world of love.
*
ALTHOUGH SHE HAD THOUGHT about it often over the years, mythologized it almost, Leni realized that she had forgotten the true magic of a summer night when the darkness didn’t fall.
Now she was sitting at one of the picnic tables down on the Walker beach. A lingering scent of roasted marshmallows hung in the air, sweetened the briny tang of the sea washing ceaselessly back and forth. MJ stood at the shore, casting his line into the water, reeling it back in. Mr. Walker stood on one side of him, giving him tips, helping him when the line got tangled or when he snagged something. Alyeska was standing on his other side, casting a line of her own. Leni knew that MJ was going to fall asleep where he stood any minute.
As much as she loved sitting here, soaking in this new image of her life, she knew she was avoiding something that mattered. With each minute that passed, she felt the weight of her avoidance; like a hand on her shoulder, a gentle reminder.
She slid off the seat, got to her feet. She no longer knew how to judge time by the color of the sky—a brilliant amethyst, speckled with stars—so she looked at her watch: 9:25.
“Are you okay?” Matthew said. He held on to her hand until she pulled gently away, then he let go.
“I need to go see my old house.”
He rose, winced in pain as he put weight on his bad foot. She knew it had been a long day on his feet for him.
She touched his scarred cheek. “I’ll go. I saw a bike up by the lodge. I just want to stand there. I’ll be right back.”
“But—”
“I can do it alone. I know you’re in pain. Stay with MJ. When I get back, we’ll put him to bed. I’ll show you the stuffed animals he can’t sleep without and tell you his favorite story. It’s about us.”
She knew that Matthew would argue, so she didn’t let him. This was her past, her baggage. She turned away from him and went up the beach stairs and climbed to the grassy land above. There were still several guests sitting on the deck at the lodge, talking loudly, laughing. Probably honing the fish stories they would take home with them.
She took a bike from the rack by the lodge and climbed on, pedaling slowly over the spongy muskeg, crossing the main road, turning to the right, toward the end of the road.
There was the wall. Or what was left of it. The planks had been hacked apart, pulled away from the stanchions; the ruined slats lay in heaps, furred with moss and darkened by years of harsh weather.
Large Marge and Tom. Maybe Thelma. She could imagine them gathering here in their grief, holding axes, splintering the wood.
She turned into the driveway, which was knee-high with weeds and grass. Shade siphoned away the light; the world was quiet here in the way of woodlands and abandoned homes. She had to slow down, pedal hard.
At last she turned into the clearing. The cabin sat off to the left, worn by time and the elements, but still standing. Alongside it, empty, sagging animal pens, gates gone, fences broken by predators, probably home to all kinds of rodents. The tall grass, threaded with bright pink fireweed and prickly devil’s club, had grown up around the junk they’d left behind; here and there she could see mounds of rusting metal and decaying wood. The old truck had collapsed, bowed forward like an old horse. The smokehouse was a pyramid of silvered, moldy boards, collapsed in on itself. Inexplicably, the clothesline remained, clothespins attached, bouncing in the breeze.
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.