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“Well.” Asher seemed to think about it for a moment. And then, sheepishly: “I know she didn’t really have any homework.”
The room was silent for a moment and then Joanie sat up. “The laptop!” She ran to the bookshelf and grabbed it, brought it back to the counter and opened it. “She asked to use my computer to check her homework.”
“Look up the history,” Brian said, and Joanie ran her fingers along the pad below the keys, Kinnick flushed with the same insecurity he’d had since coming out of the woods two days ago: everyone in the world seemed to have perfect mastery of this most basic and useful tool—except him.
“Gmail?” Joanie looked up. “I don’t have a Gmail account.”
“Neither does Leah,” said Bethany. “Or, at least, she’s not supposed to.” She explained that Leah had asked recently if she could have a separate email account where she could write David Jr., away from thecollins4:19.familyaddress, the email that Shane and Bethany had access to, where they checked her schoolwork and monitored her exchanges with friends. “She didn’t argue when we said no,” Bethany said. “I probably should’ve known then that she’d just go and do it.”
They tried opening Leah’s email on Joanie’s laptop, but Leah had signed out of the account, and while her username popped up, they didn’t have her password. After a dozen guesses (Asher: “What about velociraptor?”) they gave up.
Bethany’s cheeks filled with air, and she let the breath go out in a deep sigh. For a moment, Kinnick wondered if she was considering going back to Doug’s Incan paradise, perhaps taking a guided trip with Jefe Jeff.
Instead, she said, “Well, we may not knowwhereshe is, but I think I know who she’s with.”
***
Brian said he’d keep looking for Leah around Ford that night, even though Bethany told him that wasn’t necessary. He and Joanie loaned Kinnick their second car, an old Subaru Outback splattered with road mud and Sierra Club bumper stickers, to take Bethany and Asher back to Spokane. Kinnick drove to their apartment on the city’s north side, hopeful that they’d find Leah there. But it was after 11 p.m. when they arrived, and there was no sign of her. No sign of Shane, either. He hadn’t answered Bethany’s last phone call, when she’d left a message saying that Leah was most likely with Pastor Gallen’s son. She’d left a message for the pastor, too, but hadn’t heard back from him, either.
They spent a mostly sleepless night at the Spokane apartment, Kinnick curled up on yet another person’s couch, startled by the sounds of the city at night, the cars and voices and barking dogs, the bright streetlights making it feel like an endless dusk out there. In the morning, he sipped coffee and looked around the apartment while Bethany showered. Chuck was right when he said the place was tidy. Comfortable. Lived-in. Hard to believe she and Shane had only been here a few months. How could the surfaces remain so neat while Bethany’s insides were apparently roiling? Again, he felt this strange sensation: pride alongside confusion, the sense that his daughter was a kind of stranger, unknowable to him. On a bulletin board in the kitchen, home school assignments were carefully pinned up next to Bible verses, Asher’s most recent report on Mount St. Helen’s (complete with a drawing inmideruption), and Leah’s essay on the novels of C. S. Lewis. On the other walls were family photos: of Leah and Asher, of Shane and Bethany and the kids, and one lovely portrait of Celia and Cortland. No pictures of him, of course. There were also a couple of framed political posters, Kinnick reminded of the tamer religious posters and needlepoints (This is the house the Lord has made) on the walls of Bethany’s former home in Grants Pass.
How different this “art” was—in one, a brutalized Jesus had been crucified against an American flag; in another, a cross of red, white, and blue stood beneath the words: “One Nation Under God,” with the next word, “Indivisible,” covered by what looked like a red-stamped: “REPENT!”
Bethany came out of the bathroom, dressed in jeans and a sweater, with a towel wrapped around her head. “My hair was so greasy,” she said. She checked her charging phone, then set it back on the counter, looking up in time to see Kinnick still standing in front of the framed “REPENT” poster.
“Shane keeps putting that up,” she said. “I take it down. He puts it back up.”
Kinnick pretended he’d just noticed the poster. “Oh. Really?”
She held up her phone. “Nothing from Leah, or from Shane. Or Pastor Gallen.” She bit her lip. “I swear, if anything happens to her—”
“I’m sure she’s fine,” Kinnick said. But he couldn’t help wondering how Bethany would’ve finished that sentence: —I’ll never forgive myself.Or—I’ll never forgiveyou.
Kinnick said, “I shouldn’t have left the kids with Joanie. I should’ve stayed with them until you came back.”
“Not your fault,” Bethany said.
“She’s most likely with that boy, David Jr., just like you said.” Kinnick tapped the edge of his coffee cup. “And I’m sure they’re fine. Do you think they’re at the Rampart, with Shane?”
Bethany nodded. “I hope so.”
“You don’t think they’d try to elope or something?”
Bethany shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. And I can’t imagine any church performing a wedding ceremony with a thirteen-year-old bride. Even in Idaho.”
Bethany brought out a hand towel, one of Shane’s flannel shirts, and his deodorant. Without a word, she set them on the counter in front of Kinnick.
“I stink again?” he asked, pinching his arms to his sides. “Have people gotten more sensitive about hygiene in the last few years?”
“I don’t think that’s what’s going on,” Bethany said. She went to get Asher started in the shower, then walked next door to talk to Anna. Kinnick used the hand towel to freshen up at the kitchen sink, put on Shane’s deodorant and his flannel shirt, and walked over to the bookshelves, which were covered mostly with young adult Christian titles. There was a bookmark in one paperback, and he pulled it out and read a few sentences, putting it back when his daughter came inside and said that Anna wasn’t home.
Bethany had a thick stack of mail in her hands, and she stood in the kitchen, going through it, piece by piece, unceremoniously dropping the envelopes into two piles on the little round kitchen table. She sighed and looked out the window.
All night, Kinnick had lain awake, trying to figure out what to say to his distant daughter. Spotting her at the concert, running through the crowd and climbing the fence, he’d had the insane idea that he wasrescuingher, that she needed saving, that all he had to do was reach her, and all would be settled between them. He’d pictured them coming together in a warm, forgiving embrace. But, of course, he’d ended up in a security guard’s arms instead. And, since then, it seemed like Bethany hadn’t wanted to meet his eyes, or to talk about anything except how to find Leah. Other than the thing she’d said about being tired of his disappointment, and the bit about him stinking, they hadn’t really talked at all.
Kinnick recalled her coming to visit four years earlier, during the pandemic, and the icy, six-foot gap she’d insisted they maintain. It felt like that distance was between them still—and maybe would be forever. He had no idea how to breach it.
While thinking about that earlier visit Kinnick wondered if he wasn’t maybe going about this all wrong. If it wasn’t delusional to think he could simply come back into her life and say he was ready to be her father again, to jump back into their tangled relationship without at least trying to untie the original knots.