Page 5 of So Far Gone

Kinnick could feel his chest tightening, his pulse racing. He was surrounded, smothered, claustrophobic. “Really, I just... need some air. Let me go outside for five minutes and—”

Bethany crossed her arms. “Dad, do not leave this house—”

“I’ll be back. I just—” Rhys tried to edge past his son-in-law.

But Shane grabbed his arm again, leaned forward, and hissed, “Don’t be such a snowflake, Rhys.”

He hadn’t hit another human being in thirty years.

And then, in a flash that would replay over and over in his mind, he had.

It was a streak that ended satisfyingly at first, and then—not so much.

***

Leah stood just inside Kinnick’s front door, looking around her grandfather’s little house in the woods. A fire crackled in the old-fashioned woodstove at the center of the room. A dented tin coffeepot percolated on one of the burners. As she’d heard from her mother, the only electricity in the house came from car and boat batteries that Grandpa Rhys charged with rigged-up solar panels and propane tanks. But it wasn’t neat and futuristic, like she’d imagined. It seemed dirty and half-finished. Decrepit. He had no television or computer. He didn’t even have a phone. This was what it meant to liveoff the grid. There was a bathroom, the tap water and small handheld showerhead coming from a tank hooked to an electric pump powered by one of the marine batteries he had sitting around. But if you had to use the toilet, youwent outside to an outhouse. Like in olden times. Like in the Bible. There were candles and battery-powered lanterns all about the room. A small refrigerator was plugged into a portable generator. There were no pictures or art on the cinder block walls. Instead, the house seemed to be bursting with words, bookshelves covering every wall and blocking two of the windows. Books were double- and triple-stacked next to piles of magazines and spiral notebooks. Books covered every available surface and much of the floor. Leah loved books more than she loved anything in the world, but this... this seemed like a sickness, like an infestation of words.

“Are these all yours?” Leah asked, picking up a hardcover book calledVitruvius: The Ten Books on Architecture.

“Yes.” Kinnick scratched his head, as if the very idea made him uncomfortable. “I mean, as much as we can own books. I get them from libraries and yard sales, but they aren’t technicallymine. They pass through me.” He looked down then. Laughed at himself. “Forgive me. I’m rambling, I’m not used to— My thoughts are—”

He turned to Mrs. Gaines and cleared his throat. “—discordant. Would you like some coffee, Mrs.—”

“Gaines,” she said. “No, thank you.” She was looking around, too, at the ancient coffeepot, at the books, at a corroded battery sitting on the floor next to a 1950s hi-fi, also covered in books. Her hands curled up like she was afraid to touch anything.

The smell was something Leah hadn’t been prepared for—woodsmoke and musty books and what she thought must be Grandpa Rhys himself, some mixture of sweat and dirt and coffee and age.

Kinnick kept looking from Leah to Asher and back, muttering. “Kids don’t drink coffee, right? No, of course not. I have bottled water. You want water? Or dried berries? Beef jerky?” He started clearing space on the two reading chairs, the only real furniture in the room, other than the hi-fi and the library table, which was also covered with piles of reading material.

“Please,” Kinnick said, when he’d carved two hollows in the grove of literature. “Sit down, sit down.” One of the stacks began to list and Kinnick righted it. “Sorry about the— Obviously, I wasn’t expecting— It’s a little—” The stack fell in the other direction, and Kinnick watched it helplessly. “Bestrewn,” he said.

Oh, what words! Leah couldn’t help but smile.Discordant! Bestrewn!This was the mysterious grandfather she’d imagined, back when her only real impression of him was the smart-looking photo on the back of his book,From River to Rimrock, which for years had been filed on their mother’s bookshelf back home in Oregon, in theK’s, as if her father were just any other author. (It was what Leah wanted, as well, to be a writer one day, to create a series of fictional stories about two young Christian heroes living and adventuring and ultimately falling in love in the end-times.)

“What’s Grandpa Rhys’s book about?” Leah had asked her mother once, when she was younger. When Bethany responded that it was a book of essays, Leah had asked, “What are essays?”

“Well,” her mother had said, “essays are stories for readers who care more about ideas than they do people.”

Leah remembered the crisp judgment of that description, and she remembered the last time they had come up here, to see Grandpa Rhys, almost four years ago now, at the beginning of the pandemic. As she recalled, the drive had seemed to take forever, and then, when they got here, they hadn’t even come inside. Instead, they’d walked along a stream, throwing rocks into the water while her mother talked in hushed tones to Grandpa Rhys. She could tell something was wrong. After an hour, they said their goodbyes, and she and Asher and their mom had gotten in the car and driven back to Spokane to see Grandma Celia, her mom stifling tears as she drove.He’s so far gone.This was the report she’d heard her mother give Grandma Celia:so far gone.Still, she’d imagined some hope in that phrase:so far...

But this craggy, bushy-haired, bearded grandfather didn’t lookmuch like the tall, trim, dignified man she recalled from that earlier trip, and certainly not like his square-jawed author photo from twenty years ago. He wore a heavy flannel shirt over what appeared to be a lighter flannel shirt over what appeared to be a once-white T-shirt, now a dirty beige-gray color that Leah might have calledtwice-plowed snow. (It was a hobby of hers, naming new colors. Shane once said she should go to work for the big paint companies.) Kinnick’s face was gaunt and his long, unkempt brown hair was streaked with gray (hash browns and country gravy) while his shaggy beard was dusky white (high winter clouds). Whiskers migrated down his neck nearly to his chest and up his cheeks, nearly to hisregret-to-inform-youblue eyes.

“So, Leah, your grandmother—” Kinnick’s voice cracked. “Was she sick a long time?”

“No, not very long,” Leah said.

“And Cortland, he was with her?”

“Grandpa Cort’s in a nursing home,” Leah said.

“When we visit, he thinks we’re his brother and his sister,” Asher added. “He plays with dolls. It’s called regressing.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Kinnick said.

Leah nodded. “Mom was planning to come up here and tell you when Grandma got sick, but she asked Mom to wait until she was done with her treatment and then—”

“And then she died,” Asher said.

“It happened fast,” Leah agreed. “We moved up here from Oregon so Mom could take care of her and a few months later—”

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