Page 1 of So Far Gone

A prim girl stood still as a fencepost on Rhys Kinnick’s front porch. Next to her, a cowlicked boy shifted his weight from

snow boot to snow boot. Both kids wore backpacks. On the stairs below them, a woman held an umbrella against the pattering

rain.

It was the little girl who’d knocked. Kinnick cracked the door. He rasped through the dirty screen: “Magazines or chocolate

bars?”

The girl, who looked to be about ten, squinted. “What did you say?”

Had he misspoken? How long since Kinnick had talked to anyone? “I said, what are you fine young capitalists selling? Magazines

or chocolate bars?”

“We aren’t selling anything,” said the boy. He appeared to be about six. “We’re your grandchildren.”

A sound came from Kinnick’s throat then—a gasp, he might have written it, back when he wrote for a living.

Of course they were his grandchildren. He hadn’t really looked at their faces.

And this strange woman on the steps had thrown him.

But now that he did look, he saw family there, in the pronounced upper lip, and the deep-set, searching eyes.

No, clearly this was Leah and Asher. Christ!

When had he seen them last? He tried to remember, straining to apply an increasingly muddled concept: time.

His daughter had brought them up here for a short visit one afternoon. When was that, three years ago? Four?

Either way, these were not strangers selling candy for their school. These were his grandkids , flesh and blood of Rhys Kinnick’s flesh and blood, his only child, Bethany. But older than six and ten. More muddled time

work was required to figure out how much.

“Mr. Kinnick?” The woman with the umbrella was speaking now.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m Kinnick.” He addressed the kids again. “Is... is everything... Are you...” The thoughts came

too quickly for his mouth to form around them. He opened the door wider. “Where’s your mother?”

“We’re not sure,” Leah said. “Mom left a couple of days ago. She said she’d be back in a week. Shane left yesterday to find

her.” This was thirteen -year-old Leah. Her father was Bethany’s old boyfriend Sluggish Doug, long out of the picture.

The boy, eight, no nine ! Nine-year-old Asher was Shithead Shane’s kid.

Oh, the riddle of time—and of Bethany’s taste in men.

Kinnick looked at the woman behind his grandchildren. She was Black, with big round glasses, in her thirties, if he had to

guess, roughly his daughter’s age. She climbed the last step onto the porch.

“I’m Anna Gaines,” the woman said. “My husband and I live in the same apartment complex as Bethany and Shane. This morning,

Leah came over with this.” She held out an envelope. On it, written in Sharpie in Bethany’s handwriting: “FOR ANNA.” Below

that: “in case of emergency.”

“Mom left it in the closet,” Leah said, “in one of my snow boots.”

Kinnick opened the front screen, came out, and took the envelope. He removed a single sheet of paper, handwritten on both

sides in Bethany’s neat, backward-leaning script. He patted his shirt pocket for his readers, then squinted to make out the

note:

Dear Anna. If you’re reading this, I had to leave in a hurry. I know this is a lot to ask but can you take the kids to my

father, Rhys Kinnick. He is a recluse...

Kinnick looked up. “I am not a recluse.” He looked down and began reading again.

Dear Anna. If you’re reading this, I had to leave in a hurry. I know this is a lot to ask but can you take the kids to my

father, Rhys Kinnick. He is a recluse who cut off contact with our family...

“I did not ‘cut off contact.’ It was—” Rhys felt his blood rising. “Complicated.” But his grandchildren just stared at him,

apparently as uninterested in nuance and complexity as everyone else in the world. Kinnick grunted again and went back to

reading.

Dear Anna. If you’re reading this, I had to leave in a hurry. I know this is a lot to ask but can you take the kids to my

father, Rhys Kinnick. He is a recluse who cut off contact with our family and now lives in squalor...

“Squalor?” Kinnick looked around his covered front porch. “Squalor?” In one corner, a broken old refrigerator stood next to

a stack of used boat and car batteries and a burned-out inverter generator; in the other corner was his old wringer washing

machine and a single clothesline, from which hung a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. “What is this? In case of emergency, go find my father and make him feel terrible about himself? ”

His grandchildren continued to stare. Kinnick groaned again, then resumed reading, vowing to make it through the whole letter

this time.

Dear Anna. If you’re reading this, I had to leave in a hurry.

I know this is a lot to ask but can you take the kids to my father, Rhys Kinnick.

He is a recluse who cut off contact with our family and now lives in squalor in a cabin north of Spokane, in Stevens County.

He lives off the grid and doesn’t have email or phone.

Go north out of Spokane on Highway 395 for thirty-five miles.

At Loon Lake, turn onto Highway 292. Drive five miles, and at the T, go right, in the opposite direction of the Spokane Indian Reservation.

Go through the little town of Springdale, then turn left onto Hunters Road, and drive ten miles.

You’ll come to another dirt road on the left that crosses a small bridge, drive another quarter mile until you see a culvert and two tire tracks cutting through a stand of birch trees on your left.

This is Dad’s driveway. It is unmarked. Drive up a small rise and you’ll see his gray, cinder block house at the base of a hill above a stream.

A warning, my father can be rather acerbic—

“Acerbic?” He let the letter fall to his side. “Seriously, who asks for help this way?” Still, in a flash of pride, he admired

the rich language— recluse , squalor , acerbic —Bethany still had a way with words. At one time, he had thought maybe she’d become a writer, like he used to be, but she

lacked the patience, he supposed. Or maybe the confidence.

Then something else occurred to him, and he looked down at the girl. “What about your grandmother?” But, as soon as he said

it—

“Grandma Celia died,” Leah said.

Asher nodded.

“Oh, no,” Kinnick said. “When?”

“A month ago,” Leah said.

“Oh, Celia.” She’d always exuded a sort of frailty, as if she didn’t belong on this plane of existence. Kinnick fell against

the doorframe, his side cramping. No wonder Bethany had run off. Her mother had been the closest thing she’d had to a compass.

“Grandma got lymphoma,” Asher said. So strange, such a big word coming from such a small mouth. Reminded him of Bethany when

she was little.

“Oh, Celia,” Kinnick said again, and his eyes got bleary.

He pictured her as she’d been when they’d first met, at the University of Oregon library, forty years ago, her long hair swishing side to side like a show-horse’s tail.

He was studying botany and natural sciences; she wanted to be a nurse.

He remembered her asleep, turned away from him, the high curve of her cheekbone.

Had anyone ever slept so peacefully? He used to put a hand in front of her mouth, just to feel her breath, make sure she was still there.

They married a year after meeting, then finished grad school, welcomed Bethany into the world, and started their life together—until that life, like everything else decent and worthwhile, began to crack.

“I’ll bet she was a wonderful grandmother,” Kinnick said.

“Yes,” said Leah, her brother nodding at her side.

Oh, poor Celia , Kinnick thought. And poor Bethany. He didn’t picture her as she was now, lost mother to these two kids, but as his big-eyed

baby girl, lying awake in bed every night, waiting for a story from her dad. And now, that girl, that woman, that mother,

was without a mother. Oh, poor Bethany. And these poor kids, grandchildren he hasn’t seen in years, that he hadn’t even recognized

on his front porch.

Rhys Kinnick nearly doubled over with a previously undiagnosed condition: regret. And this single, overwhelming thought: What have I done?

He cleared his throat. “Come in,” he said to his grandkids. He opened the door wider. “Please, come in.”

***

The dam burst seven and a half years earlier, in Grants Pass, Oregon, 2016, forty minutes before Thanksgiving dinner, when Rhys Kinnick realized there was no place left for him in this risible world.

It happened during a televised football game, of all things, Kinnick’s son-in-law, Shane, running the remote, along with his mouth.

Celia’s new (old) husband, Cortland, snoring away in a recliner.

Rhys sat helplessly between the dim husbands of daughter and ex-wife, quietly nursing his fourth beer.

He was a terrible nurse. This patient wasn’t likely to make it, either.

Kinnick had agreed to drive ten hours from Spokane to Grants Pass for one more attempt at a calm, blended family holiday.

“No politics,” Bethany had proposed, or maybe pleaded, Kinnick quickly agreeing to terms. He was the first to admit that he

could get worked up talking with Shane about the recently decided dumpster fire of an election, and that, in Shane’s words,

he was still “butt hurt.”

“I told Shane the same thing,” Bethany said. “No religion. No politics. Let’s just try to be a normal family.”

Normal. Sure. Family. Right. And the first two hours were fine. Leah colored, Asher toddled, small-talking adults small-talked.

So far so—

Then Asher went down for a nap, Leah went off to play dolls, Celia and Bethany drifted into the kitchen to cook dinner, and

Shane immediately launched into his nutty Christian nationalism rap: “It might make you feel better, Rhys, to know that this

was all prophesied in the Book of Daniel—”

—it did not make Rhys feel better—