Page 47 of So Far Gone

We all have to live through a dark season now and then. This is what Kinnick told himself, in the coming months, during his long, painful recovery and the difficult time that followed.

Still, he found himself wondering, How do we get back from something like this?

He moved to Spokane for his medical care and to help support Bethany and his grandkids as they struggled with Shane’s death.

Kinnick had forgotten the hardest part of parenting: the realization that you can’t keep your family safe . That no matter how strong you were, or how much money you had, you could never totally shield the people you loved from

the sorrows of life. Or shield yourself, for that matter. For weeks after nearly being killed, Rhys felt like they were all

still in danger. He slept poorly, was always on edge, and, at times, felt totally bereft. Post-traumatic stress, his doctor

said.

Kinnick wasn’t sure if the doctor was diagnosing him or the world.

Pestered by Lucy the day he left the hospital, Rhys had allowed himself to be interviewed by a young reporter named Allison.

When the story ran, Kinnick was deflated.

She’d gotten his quotes right and the details certainly seemed accurate, but reading about the whole thing in the newspaper somehow shrunk Shane’s murder, as if it had been nothing more than a seedy domestic squabble between a flaky wife, her religious husband, and his gun-toting militia friends.

Rhys even started to wonder if that’s all it was.

He had to remind himself of the limits of daily journalism, which was better at posing questions than answering them.

Still, he wondered: Where was the story about how fear had infected so many people, how it had killed his poor son-in-law?

How a sociopath like Dean Burris had burrowed his way into the Church of the Blessed Fire?

How these insane things kept happening, these eruptions of senseless violence, of anger and ignorance and greed and mendacity, like ancient fissures bubbling up under the surface, and what—we were just supposed to go on with our lives?

Wake up the next day like nothing happened, like we hadn’t lost our minds?

Just turn the page, to the baseball scores or the horoscopes or celebrity birthdays? (Nothing to see here, just America.)

The best part of Allison’s story was the description of Brian: “a former air force marksman and environmental activist.”

“Air force marksman?” Kinnick teased him. “You were an electrician!”

“You want to go back and trust your life to an electrician?” Brian asked.

Brian admitted that he, too, was having trouble sleeping, and that he kept replaying that day in his mind, wondering what

would’ve happened if he’d arrived a few seconds later—or a few minutes earlier. If, say, he hadn’t stopped to feed Billy on

the way out the door. Maybe Shane would still be alive. (“Or Burris would’ve shot you, too, and we’d all be dead,” Kinnick countered.) The sheriff’s investigator told Brian that his miraculous shot had hit Burris’s arm just above

the elbow, and had torn through his forearm and wrist just as he raised the gun to fire, but what Brian couldn’t stop thinking

about was how off-target and lucky that shot had been, and how easily two other things could have happened: one, he’d missed

completely, or two, he’d killed the man.

“I wouldn’t want to have killed someone,” Brian said.

“I’ve made it this far in life without killing anyone.

Be a shame to start now.” He told Kinnick that he and Joanie had gone up to the spring barter faire in Tonasket, where they bought some of Jefe Jeff’s soap, and a couple of nice belts, and that he’d filled Jeff in on everything that had happened, and that Jeff had offered them a free guided acid tour.

He said Joanie was game, but that he couldn’t be talked into it.

“Maybe you and I can take a trip sometime,” Kinnick said.

“I think we just did,” said Brian.

The prosecutor told Kinnick that Dean Burris’s trial would probably not begin for at least a year. He’d hired a “constitutional

lawyer” out of Michigan who planned to challenge every aspect of the case, beginning with the long-shot theory that the state

had no standing to prosecute him for using his Second Amendment–guaranteed gun rights, and arguing that Dean had essentially

acted in self-defense against Shane, a man who had asked for Dean’s help in retrieving his wayward wife from a psychedelic

music festival in the woods, and then went into a rage, and started attacking him for it. Dean’s lawyer even wanted to depose

Bethany about Doug and her past drug use.

“But that won’t work, right?” Kinnick asked. “Blaming the victim?”

“Oh, no, I strongly doubt it,” the prosecutor said. He explained that they were holding accessory charges over Bobby’s head,

hoping he’d testify against Dean. “But in these rural communities,” the prosecutor said, “in this atmosphere, you just never

know.”

In a photo from the arraignment, which Kinnick looked at over and over, on his new iPhone, Burris looked thin and wan, his

suit sleeve pinned to his shoulder where what was left of his right arm had been amputated.

It was one of the hardest adjustments for Kinnick, owning a cell phone again.

It was like a nosy neighbor with a constant supply of scary news, a pocketful of drip-drip dread and festering fear.

He was glad to be able to call and text Bethany, but the thing was a constant delivery system for terrifying developments from all over the country, from around an overheated, overpopulated planet.

Technology, as he saw it, had finally succeeded in shrinking the globe, so much so that every news story felt dangerous and personal, every war a threat to his family, every firestorm, hurricane, and melting ice cap a local disaster, the seas boiling up around them, every cynical political and legal maneuver part of the same rotten fabric—and half the country somehow seeing it exactly the opposite way.

He tried not reading the news on his phone, but after so long away, it was impossible, like he’d spent seven years quitting booze and

then someone had assigned him his own, pocket-size twenty-four-hour bartender. Carrying around this little harbinger of doom,

Kinnick was constantly reminded of the cold epiphany he’d had about the eternal nature of cruelty.

Shane’s funeral was unbearably sad, held near his family’s home in Salem. His parents wanted him buried in the family plot,

next to his brother, who had overdosed after two tours in Afghanistan. Bethany, who didn’t have the money for a proper funeral,

hadn’t argued with this. During the service, Shane’s parents and his two sisters wouldn’t even look at Bethany, and she suspected

they blamed her for his death, for running off like she had. And sometimes, she told her father, she feared that she was to blame. (“You know that’s not true,” he told her.) Bethany was a wreck leading up to the service, but after getting the

cold shoulder from Shane’s family, Kinnick noticed, his daughter’s back stiffened and she concentrated on consoling the children.

Leah cried in short jags, but then would compose herself, pulling away from any arm that settled on her shoulder, including

Sluggish Doug, who surprised everyone by coming to the funeral, and promising to be more involved in Leah’s life. Asher cried

less than his sister and was happy to have his mother’s arms around him. He had a thousand questions for Kinnick— Do they ever dig up the caskets and use them again? Have they ever accidentally buried someone alive? What will they do when

they run out of places to put people?

For months afterward, though, Asher was besieged by nightmares: his ghostly father calling out to him, various monsters and villains chasing him through the woods.

He kept asking Kinnick to tell him “exactly what happened” that day, and he said he would never understand why his dad’s friend would just up and shoot him like that.

And why bad things had to happen to people anyway.

Bethany told him that bad things didn’t have to happen, and that most of the time, Asher would find, they didn’t. But when times got tough, like now ... “Well, that’s

when we need to be strong. And to take care of each other.” Asher said he would try.

Watching this conversation at the house in West Central Spokane that Kinnick had rented for himself, Bethany, and the kids,

Rhys thought his daughter might be the best parent he’d ever seen.

For a while, Leah went into adolescent shutdown mode, just as Bethany had feared, sulking and keeping to herself. She continued

her email correspondence with David Jr., with the blessing of Bethany, who thought that since they’d been through this ordeal

together, writing to Davy might help her process it. She even agreed that Leah could get a phone on her fourteenth birthday.

Things had cooled between Leah and Davy, who talked his parents out of conversion therapy. He and Leah agreed to postpone

their betrothal while Davy took a year off school to “figure out who I am.”

Davy’s dad, Leah said, was greatly disturbed by what had happened but was refusing to completely cut ties with the Army of

the Lord. In fact, the publicity had only increased church attendance, and, it turned out, people were writing from all over

the country to inquire about the Rampart.

Leah refused to go to family therapy with her mom and her brother. “He wasn’t my dad,” she said, adding, “that’s y’all’s grief,”

part of a strange new way she’d begun speaking after only two weeks at her new public middle school. One day, not long after

that, she told Bethany that she would never go to church ever again.

“I don’t know if I believe in God,” she told her mother.

“Well, that’s understandable,” Bethany said. “But if He does exist, I hope you know that He’ll continue to believe in you.”

Leah rolled her eyes, said, “ Ew ,” and went to her bedroom to read.