“I don’t want to talk about all of that again. We’re moving to Alaska.”

Grandma sat down. “Oh, for the love of Pete.”

“Ernt has inherited a house and a piece of land. We’re going to grow our own vegetables and hunt our meat and live by our own rules. We’ll be pure. Pioneers.”

“Stop. I can’t listen to this nonsense. You’re going to follow him to the ends of the earth, where no one will be able to help you. Your father and I tried so hard to protect you from your mistakes, but you refuse to be helped, don’t you? You think that life is some game. You just flit—”

“Don’t,” Mama said sharply. She leaned forward. “Do you know how hard it was for me to come here?”

In the wake of those words, a silence fell, broken only by a bird’s cooing.

It felt as if a cold breeze had just come through. Leni would have sworn the expensive transparent curtains fluttered, but there were no open windows.

Leni tried to imagine her mother in this buttoned-down, closed-up world, but she couldn’t. The chasm between the girl Mama had been raised to be and the woman she had become seemed impossible to cross. Leni wondered if all those protests she and Mama had marched in while Dad was gone—against nuclear energy, the war—and all those EST seminars and the different religions Mama had tried on, were really just Mama’s way of protesting the woman she’d been raised to be.

“Don’t do this crazy, dangerous thing, Coraline. Leave him. Come home. Be safe.”

“I love him, Mother. Can’t you understand that?”

“Cora,” Grandma said softly. “Listen to me, please. You know he’s dangerous—”

“We’re going to Alaska,” Mama said firmly. “I came to say goodbye and…” Her voice trailed off. “Are you going to help us or not?”

For a long moment Grandma said nothing, just crossed and uncrossed her arms. “How much do you need this time?” she finally asked.

*   *   *

ON THE DRIVE HOME, her mother chain-smoked. She kept the radio volume so high that conversation was impossible. It was just as well, really, because although Leni had a string of questions, she didn’t know where to begin. Today she had glimpsed a world that lay beneath the surface of her own. Mama had never said much to Leni about her life before marriage. She and Dad had run off together; theirs was a beautiful, romantic story of love against all odds. Mama had quit high school and “lived on love.” That was how she always put it, the fairy tale. Now Leni was old enough to know that like all fairy tales, theirs was filled with thickets and dark places and broken dreams, and runaway girls.