Dear Logan,
This is called a letter. It’s like an email but written on paper and sent through the regular mail (like bills). Your mom gave me this paper. Isn’t it pretty? It’s called stationery, and she said that I should use it to write to you since my dad says we have to leave.
He doesn’t ever talk about why we have to leave. But we’re going just the same. Maybe it’s because ever since he got out of the hospital our phone keeps ringing. I don’t think he likes being a celebrity or whatever. The Man Who Saved the First Lady!
Now he just wants to be the Man Who Doesn’t Have a Telephone because we’re not going to have one. Or a cell phone. Or Internet. Dad says he thinks it’s going to be good for me.
I think it’s going to be lonely.
But you can write me back, he says! We can write all the time.
So … will you write me back?
Your (best) friend,
Maddie
Turns out, the key to throwing a hatchet isn’t in the wrist, like everyone always says. Sure, it’s a little bit in the wrist. But it’s also in the shoulders. And the hips. But, most of all, it’s in the head, Madeleine Rose Manchester thought as she dug her second-favorite hatchet from the base of the big tree nearest to their cabin.
She no longer practiced with her favorite hatchet. No. The grip on that one hadn’t been good for throwing ever since she’d bedazzled the handle last winter.
Her dad might have been angry at her if he had even noticed that she’d done it. Which he hadn’t. For a man whose very survival had once depended upon noticing everything, he’d developed a nasty habit of not noticing anything in the past six years.
Or maybe, Maddie thought, he just no longer noticed her.
She dug the hatchet from the tree and moved back ten paces.
Twenty.
Thirty.
She took a deep breath, filling her lungs with cool, damp air. The shadows were long and the forest was still and Maddie knew that winter was coming fast.
She had wood to haul.
A chain saw to sharpen.
Someone needed to crawl on the roof and replace a couple of shingles, then reposition the solar panels that had been blown around by that big storm last week.
She also had a mountain of schoolwork she’d have to send with her father the next time he took the plane to Juneau.
Maybe she could get him to bring her thirty or forty more library books. They hadn’t gotten much snow for the past year or two, but the sun was going to go behind a cloud soon, and it wouldn’t come out again until Easter. When that happened, Maddie wanted to be ready.
Maddie was always ready.
She took a few more steps back, flipped the hatchet in her hand, drew back her arm.
And threw.
When the hatchet hit the tree, its blade sunk so deep into the wood that most girls couldn’t have even pulled it free. But Maddie was never going to be most girls, she remembered as she jerked the hatchet from the tree and thought about maybe trying it from farther away. Maybe with her left hand.
But that was when she heard it—a hum in the distance, a mechanical whirling sound that broke through the stillness. Maddie turned and watched as the small red dot in the big blue sky grew larger and larger.
When the dot touched down in the middle of the lake and floated toward the cabin, Maddie couldn’t help but remember another day. Another landing.
Another world.
“Dad’s home,” she said, but there was nothing but the wilderness to hear her.
“Mad Dog!” Michael Manchester shouted from the plane as soon as he killed the engine.
He was still a big man. Still strong. Even leaner somehow. In DC, Maddie’s father had spent hours boxing and running and lifting weights. He’d taught courses on self-defense and used to spar with the president himself, who had once been an Olympic athlete.
But Maddie watched the man who leaped to the dock from the plane that sat on top of the water, bobbing on the rippling waves. He didn’t move like that man used to move.
It could have had something to do with her father’s bad leg. Many would have credited the shoulder injury or the three surgeries that had followed it.
But Maddie knew it was Alaska that had changed her father. In Maddie’s not-so-uneducated opinion, Alaska could change anyone.
“Hey, kiddo! Did it rain while I was gone?”
“Yes, it rained,” she told him. “It always rains.”
“Good.” He put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her tight against him. “I stink.”
“I can tell.” Maddie tried to pull away, but her father laughed and pulled her tighter.
“If the barrels are full, I’ll heat some water and take a bath. How are you, kiddo?”
When they reached the porch of the small cabin, they both paused and pulled off their boots. It was a luxury, being able to do this outside. Soon it would be too cold, and Maddie wanted to keep the mud out of the house for as long as possible.
Even though house wasn’t really the right word.
She followed her father into a room that held a wood-burning stove and a rickety table with four chairs. There was a shower rod over an open doorway that led to the kitchen, heavy curtains that could make the room private whenever one of them wanted to pull the tub in from the back porch and heat some water on the stove.
In DC, Maddie’s bathroom had been entirely hers, with a pink shower curtain and towels so soft that Maddie would never, ever use them for something like drying her hands. Here, she had a tub and a curtain and, if she was lucky, four barrels full of rain and not ice. It was like that other bathroom—that other life—was just a dream.
The main room held a recliner and a couch and three electric lights that worked as long as the sun was shining in summer or the wind was blowing in winter. And Maddie was grateful for the light. Light meant reading. It used to mean writing. But that was a long time ago. Back when Maddie had someone to write to. But Maddie didn’t let herself think about that.
“So how are you, kiddo?” her father asked again. He was unloading his backpack, pulling out a few of the supplies he’d promised to bring back.
“Fine,” she said.
It took a moment, but her father laughed.
“What is it?” she asked, and he shook his head.
“Nothing. It’s just … I guess it finally happened,” he said.
“What?”
When her father looked at her again, she couldn’t tell if he was happy or sad. “You ran out of words.” He started unloading library books, stacking them on their only table. “I knew you’d use them all up eventually, as fast as you went through them when you were a kid.”
Maddie didn’t know why exactly, but something in that sentiment stung. “I’m still a kid.”
“What was that, sweetheart?” he asked, turning to her.
Maddie shook her head. “Nothing.”
He looked like a man who knew better than to argue.
He pulled a half dozen newspapers from his backpack and those landed on top of the pile of books. On the cover of one, she saw a headline about the president, some trip he was taking overseas. She wondered briefly if her father was jealous of the men and women who’d be going with him. But, no; if her father had wanted that life, he could have had it.
Maddie was the only one who’d never been given a choice.
In the beginning, she used to ask her father why they’d left DC, when they’d return. At first the answers didn’t make any sense. (For example, Maddie seriously doubted that they had to leave because Miss America had fallen in love with her father and wasn’t going to rest until she became Maddie’s stepmother.)
But then the answers stopped being crazy and started not coming at all, so Maddie didn’t bother asking anymore. This was their home. This was their life. And any life that came before was nothing more than a very elaborate dream.
“Do you have any letters for me to take on my next run?” he asked. It was like he could read her mind sometimes, and when that happened Maddie was glad she lived in a small house in a huge forest. If the bears could read her mind, at least they had to keep their thoughts to themselves.
“Do you bring me any letters?” she asked.
Her father shook his head.
“Then that’s your answer.”