Her.

She’s here now, isn’t she? Who is she?

The one he waits for.

“Wecouldhavedoneit, Matthew.”

Matthew.

He is Matthew, right? Is Her talking to him?

“Youdon’tknowwhoIam…”

He tries to turn, to wrench free so he can see Her instead of the ceiling, which seems to roll back and forth above him.

He screams for Her, cries, tries to remember the words he needs, but there’s nothing there to be found. Frustration rises up, makes even the pain go away.

He can’t move. He’s a bread—no, that’s not the right thing—tied down, strapped tight. Bound.

Someone else now. A different voice.

He feels it all slipping away. He stills, unable to remember even a minute ago.

Her.

What does that mean?

He quits fighting, stares up at the woman in the orange outfit, listens to her soothing voice.

His eyes close. His last thought is Her. Don’t leave, but he doesn’t even know what it means.

He hears footsteps. Running.

It is like the beating of his heart. There and then gone.

TWENTY-FIVE

Falling snow turned Homer into a blurred landscape of muted colors and washed-out skies. The few people out and about were either seeing the world through dirty windshields or looking up at it with tucked-in chins. No one noticed a girl in a huge parka, hood up, scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face, trudging downhill.

Leni’s face hurt like hell, her nose throbbed, but none of it was the worst of her pain. At Airport Road, the snow let up a little. She turned and headed to the airfield. At the door to the airfield office, she paused and pulled her turtleneck up over her torn lip.

The office was small and constructed of wood and corrugated metal with a sharply slanted roof. It looked like an oversized chicken coop. Behind it, she saw a small plane out on the airstrip, revving its engine. The sign for Glass Lake Aviation was missing two letters, so the sign read: ASS LAKE AVIATION. It had been that way for as long as Leni could remember. The owner said he’d fixed it once and that was plenty. Supposedly schoolkids stole the letters for fun.

Inside, the place looked unfinished, too: a floor made of mismatched peel-and-stick linoleum tiles, a plywood counter, a small display of brochures for tourists, a bathroom behind a broken door. A stack of boxes stood by the back door—supplies recently delivered or soon to be shipped.

Mama sat in a white plastic chair, with a scarf coiled around the lower half of her face and a hat covering her blond hair. Leni sat down beside her in a floral overstuffed recliner that some cat had clawed to ribbons.

In front of them, a Formica coffee table was littered with magazines.

Leni was tired of crying, of feeling this grief that kept opening and closing inside of her, but even so, she felt tears sting her eyes.

Mama put her cigarette out in the empty Coke can on the table in front of her. Smoke sizzled up, wafted into nothingness. She leaned back, sighing.

“How was he?” Mama asked.

“The same.” Leni leaned against her mama, needing the solid warmth of her body. She reached into her pocket and felt something sharp.

The present Mr. Walker had given her from Matthew. In all that had happened, she’d forgotten about it. She pulled it out, stared down at the small, thin gift, wrapped in newsprint, upon which Matthew had written: HAPPY BIRTHDAY LENI!

Her eighteenth birthday had gone by almost unnoticed this year, but Matthew had been planning for it. Maybe he’d had an idea about how to celebrate it.

She peeled the newsprint back, folded it carefully into something she would save. (He’d touched it while thinking of her.) Inside, she found a slim white box. Inside of that, a piece of yellowed, ripped-edge newsprint carefully folded.

It was a newspaper article and an old black-and-white photograph of two homesteaders, holding hands. They were surrounded by sled dogs, sitting in mismatched chairs in front of a tiny, mossy-roofed cabin. Junk decorated the yard. A towheaded boy sat in the dirt. Leni recognized the yard and the deck: these were Matthew’s grandparents.

Across the bottom, Matthew had written, THIS COULD BE US.

Leni’s eyes stung. She held the photograph to her heart and looked down at the article.

MY ALASKA by Lily Walker

July 4, 1972

You think you know what wild means. It’s a word you’ve used all your life. You use it to describe an animal, your hair, an undisciplined child. In Alaska, you learn what wild really means.

My husband, Eckhart, and I came to this place separately, which may not seem important, but certainly is. We had each decided on our own, and not when we were young, I might add, that civilization was not for us. It was the middle of the Great Depression. I lived in a shack with my parents and six siblings. There was never enough of anything—not time, not money, not food, not love.

What made me think of Alaska? Even now, I don’t recall. I was thirty-five years old, on the shelf, they called us spinsters then. My youngest sister died—of a broken heart maybe, or of the despair that came with watching her own babies suffer—and I walked away.

Just like that. I had ten dollars in my pocket and no real skills and I headed West. Of course I went West, for the romance of it. In Seattle, I saw a sign for Alaska. They were looking for women to do laundry for men in the gold fields.

I thought, “I can wash clothes,” and I went.

It was hard work, with men catcalling all the time, and my skin hardening until it was like leather. Then I met Eckhart. He was ten years older than me, and not much to look at, if I’m being truthful.

He caught my eye and told me his dream of homesteading the Kenai Peninsula. When he held out his hand, I took it. Did I love him? No. Not then. Not for years, really, although when he died, it was like God had reached in and yanked the heart out of my chest.

Wild. That’s how I describe it all. My love. My life. Alaska. Truthfully, it’s all the same to me. Alaska doesn’t attract many; most are too tame to handle life up here. But when she gets her hooks in you, she digs deep and holds on, and you become hers. Wild. A lover of cruel beauty and splendid isolation. And God help you, you can’t live anywhere else.

“What do you have there?” Mama asked, exhaling smoke.

Leni carefully folded the article into quarters. “An article by Matthew’s grandma. She died a few years before we came to Alaska.” The photograph of Matthew’s grandparents—dated 1940—sat on her lap. “How will I stop loving him, Mama? Will I … forget?”