“No, Dad.”
She knew how sorry he was. She could see it on his face. When she was younger, she’d sometimes wondered what good all those sorries were if nothing ever changed, but Mama had explained it to her. The war and captivity had snapped something in him. It’s like his back is broken, Mama had said, and you don’t stop loving a person when they’re hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you. He needs me. Us.
Leni sat down beside him. He put an arm around her, pulled her in close. “The world is being run by lunatics. It’s not my America anymore. I want…” He didn’t finish, and Leni didn’t say anything. She was used to her dad’s sadness, his frustration. He stopped sentences halfway through all the time, as if he were afraid of giving voice to scary or depressing thoughts. Leni knew about that reticence and understood it; lots of times it was better to stay silent.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a mostly crushed pack of cigarettes. He lit one up and she drew in the acrid, familiar scent.
She knew how much pain he was in. Sometimes she woke up to her dad crying and her mama trying to soothe him, saying stuff like, Shhh, now, Ernt, it’s over now, you’re home safe.
He shook his head, exhaled a stream of blue-gray smoke. “I just want … more, I guess. Not a job. A life. I want to walk down the street and not have to worry about being called a baby-killer. I want…” He sighed. Smiled. “Don’t worry. It’ll all be okay. We’ll be okay.”
“You’ll get another job, Dad,” she said.
“Sure I will, Red. Tomorrow will be better.”
That was what her parents always said.
*
ON A COLD, BLEAK MORNING in mid-April, Leni got up early and staked out her place on the ratty floral sofa in the living room and turned on the Today show. She adjusted the rabbit ears to get a decent picture. When it popped into focus, Barbara Walters was saying “… Patricia Hearst, now calling herself Tania, seen here in this photograph holding an M1 carbine at the recent bank robbery in San Francisco. Eyewitnesses report that the nineteen-year-old heiress, who was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in February…”
Leni was spellbound. She still couldn’t believe that an army could march in and take a teenager from her apartment. How could anyone be safe anywhere in a world like that? And how did a rich teenager become a revolutionary named Tania?
“Come on, Leni,” Mama said from the kitchen. “Get ready for school.”
The front door banged open.
Dad came into the house, smiling in a way that made it impossible not to smile back. He looked out of scale, larger than life in the low-ceilinged kitchen, vibrant against the water-marked gray walls. Water dripped from his hair.
Mama stood at the stove, frying bacon for breakfast.
Dad swept into the kitchen and cranked up the transistor radio that sat on the Formica counter. A scratchy rock ’n’ roll song came through. Dad laughed and pulled Mama into his arms.
Leni heard his whispered “I’m sorry. Forgive me.”
“Always,” Mama said, holding him as if she were afraid he’d push her away.
Dad kept his arm around Mama’s waist and pulled her over to the kitchen table. He pulled out a chair, said, “Leni, come in here!”
Leni loved it when they included her. She left her spot on the sofa and took a seat beside her mother. Dad smiled down at Leni and handed her a paperback book. The Call of the Wild. “You’ll love this, Red.”
He sat down across from Mama, scooted in close to the table. He was wearing what Leni thought of as his Big Idea smile. She’d seen it before, whenever he had a plan to change their lives. And he’d had a lot of plans: Selling everything and camping for a year as they drove the Big Sur highway. Raising mink (what a horror that had been). Selling American Seed packets in Central California.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a folded-up piece of paper, slapped it triumphantly on the table. “You remember my friend Bo Harlan?”
Mama took a moment to answer. “From ’Nam?”
Dad nodded. To Leni, he said, “Bo Harlan was the crew chief and I was the door gunner. We looked out for each other. We were together when our bird went down and we got captured. We went through hell together.”
Leni noticed how he was shaking. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, so she could see the burn scars that ran from his wrist to his elbow in ridges of puckered, disfigured skin that never tanned. Leni didn’t know what had caused his scars—he never said and she never asked—but his captors had done it. She had figured out that much. The scars covered his back, too, pulled the skin into swirls and puckers.
“They made me watch him die,” he said.
Leni looked worriedly at Mama. Dad had never said this before. To hear the words now unsettled them.
He tapped his foot on the floor, played a beat on the table with fast-moving fingers. He unfolded the letter, smoothed it out, and turned it so they could read the words.
Sergeant Allbright—
You are a hard man to find. I am Earl Harlan.
My son, Bo, wrote many letters home about his friendship with you. I thank you for that.
In his last letter, he told me that if anything happened to him in that piece of shit place, he wanted you to have his land up here in Alaska.
It isn’t much. Forty acres with a cabin that needs fixing. But a hardworking man can live off the land up here, away from the crazies and the hippies and the mess in the Lower Forty-eight.
I don’t have no phone, but you can write me c/o the Homer Post Office. I’ll get the letter sooner or later.
The land is at the end of the road, past the silver gate with a cow skull and just before the burnt tree, at mile marker 13.
Thanks again,
Earl
Mama looked up. She cocked her head, gave a little birdlike tilt as she studied Dad. “This man … Bo, has given us a house? A house?”
“Think of it,” Dad said, lifted out of his seat by enthusiasm. “A house that’s ours. That we own. In a place where we can be self-sufficient, grow our vegetables, hunt our meat, and be free. We’ve dreamed of it for years, Cora. Living a simpler life away from all the bullshit down here. We could be free. Think of it.”
“Wait,” Leni said. Even for Dad, this was big. “Alaska? You want to move again? We just moved here.”
Mama frowned. “But … there’s nothing up there, is there? Just bears and Eskimos.”
He pulled Mama to her feet with an eagerness that made her stumble, fall into him. Leni saw the desperate edge of his enthusiasm. “I need this, Cora. I need a place where I can breathe again. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to crawl out of my skin. Up there, the flashbacks and shit will stop. I know it. We need this. We can go back to the way things were before ’Nam screwed me up.”
Mama lifted her face to Dad’s, her pallor a sharp contrast to his dark hair and tanned skin.
“Come on, baby,” Dad said. “Imagine it…”
Leni saw Mama softening, reshaping her needs to match his, imagining this new personality: Alaskan. Maybe she thought it was like EST or yoga or Buddhism. The answer. Where or when or what didn’t matter to Mama. All she cared about was him. “Our own house,” she said. “But … money … you could apply for that military disability—”
“Not that discussion again,” he said with a sigh. “I’m not doing that. A change is all I need. And I’ll be more careful with money from now on, Cora. I swear. I still have a little of the bread I inherited from the old man. And I’ll cut back on drinking. I’ll go to that veterans’ support-group thing you want me to.”
Leni had seen all of this before. Ultimately, it didn’t matter what she or Mama wanted.
Dad wanted a new beginning. Needed it. And Mama needed him to be happy.
So they would try again in a new place, hoping geography would be the answer. They would go to Alaska in search of this new dream. Leni would do as she was asked and do it with a good attitude. She would be the new girl in school again. Because that was what love was.