Page 51 of So Far Gone

For the last few years, Bethany told her therapist, Shane had gotten into conspiracy theories. And, the deeper he went, the more Bethany felt that old urge to leave. It never rose to the level of a plan, though. More like a daydream. Sometimes, in this dream, she took the kids with her, throwing them into the car and simply driving off. (“Where to?” Peggy asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “We never arrive.”) Other times, it was more like a fantasy, a handsome stranger pulls up on a motorcycle and she runs out and jumps on back, no helmet, leaving Asher and Leah behind with Shane, who, despite his radical religious bent, was a caring, thoughtful father, a reliable builder of tree forts and thrower of snowballs; shoot, he was even a decent cook, at least of things that could be grilled. He would do just fine (her fantasy-self justified) raising the kids alone.

“It’s not like I’m really going to do it,” she said to Peggy. “It’s more like a reaction to this feeling I get, this claustrophobia.”

But she’d never connected it to her father before.

“So, you’re suggesting this all has something to do with... my dad?”

Oh, that patient smile on Peggy’s face as she stared with unblinking eyes through those big fishbowl glasses. This was the other frustration of therapy, alongside the repetition, and thehow-did-it-make-you-feel, Bethany sensing that Peggy was always trying to inch her toward some obvious realization. It reminded her of an old geology teacher in high school, who would slowly try to get students to say the word he was thinking of. (“Pre-? Come on folks. The age of early life? Describes most of Earth’s history? Precam- Surely someone did the readings. Precambri-? Anyone?”)

Bethany looked at the clock in the kitchen. Four minutes to four. “Can you just tell me, Peggy? We only have a few minutes left, the kids are going to come inside at any minute, and this seems important. I don’t have time to guess.”

Peggy laughed, one of her shoulders briefly disappearing into the blurred Zoom background. “Yes. Sorry. I just think it’s interesting: you describe years of this same feeling, of wanting to escape, to run away, to disappear. And it seems like this might be connected to you pullingback from your father when you saw him in your house with a woman before your parents divorced. This father who you say is more like you than anyone. You saw something that day that wounded you, and for years, you kept it secret. You kepthissecret. Meanwhile, when life gets difficult for your dad, what does he do? Disappears. Escapes. Like he did from you and your mother. Like he’s done now, going to live off the grid in a farmhouse in the woods. Like you’ve always wanted to do. Maybe this behavior was modeled for you. Maybe the urge to run comes when these men remind you of your father. And maybe you and he have been running away from each other for twenty years.”

Here was the final frustration of therapy. That when the answer came, it was so stupidly apparent. So easy to see. Right in front of her. She suspected that being a therapist was ultimately kind of boring—a bunch of transparent people showing up every day, like walking aquariums, sloshing around, complaining that they couldn’t quite figure it out, but it felt like something was swimming around inside them.

And how does that make you feel?

It made Bethany feel like a small bomb had gone off in her head. She’d always assumed the fissure with her father had opened on Thanksgiving 2016, with the punch heard round the dinner table. But what if it had started years before that, the day she almost lost her virginity and saw her father with another woman.

Bethany had the craziest urge—to pack up the kids, nine-year-old Leah and five-year-old Asher, and drive ten hours north, in the middle of a global pandemic, to go see her father in the woods. To ask him if he saw her drive by with her drug-dealing wannabe boyfriend that day when she was fifteen. To ask who that woman was on the porch with him. To ask why he was so disappointed in her all the time. To ask how it felt to disappear from the lives of everyone who cared about you. Suddenly, she found herself wondering if her elusive, vexing, stubborn old man might be the key to her own restless heart.

On the screen of her laptop, the therapist Peggy leaned forward. “Can I ask what you’re thinking right now, Bethany?”

“Oh, I guess I was thinking—” Bethany laughed. “Precambrian.”

“Well,” said Peggy, glancing down at her watch, “why don’t we start there next time.”

***

It was eerie, three days later, in that strange spring of 2020, to be driving on the highway with the kids, and see so few cars on the road. For weeks, she and Shane had talked about how odd it was to see no traffic in front of their house, and to have the sky free of airplanes and contrails. But to be totally alone on the highway? This was the strangest experience yet. Long-haul trucks were parked on the shoulders, as if their drivers had been snatched away by aliens. A lone sheriff’s deputy stood on an overpass, hands in his pockets, watching her drive underneath. When she did see a car, every five miles or so, it felt almost like they were fellow survivors of some Apocalyptic disaster, Bethany thinking to herself,Where couldyoube going?just as the other driver must be asking themselves, Where couldyoube going?

Asher mostly slept in the back, in his booster seat. In the passenger seat, Leah stared out the window as they hurtled through the stark terrain of Central Oregon and Eastern Washington: dry canyons, craters, buttes, and the sudden sharp ledges of rocky foothills; abandoned gas stations, tumbledown barns and lonesome farms, miles and miles of wheat fields and soybean and onions, giant metallic windmills slowly turning in the breeze. It was all so desolate, so far removed from the lush, windward side of the Cascades. And then, suddenly, they came upon the Columbia, the massive dark river seeming to have pulled every drop of water from the surrounding plateaus, as it carved its way through all of this rock to the sea.

When Bethany had told Shane that she wanted to go to Spokane to see her mom and then drive up to see her dad—without him—he forbade it at first. As she always did when he tried to play his recently acquiredsubmit-yourself-to-your-husband-as-you-would-to-the-Lordcard, she laughed in his face. Then he gave her the pouty lip that signaled that his endlessly hurt feelings were once again hurt. “Is it because of what I said to your mom about the Wuhan flu?”

“No,” she’d answered, but she thought,Yes. Celia loved Shane and wasn’t put off by his loud opinions oneverything; she knew that, beneath his born-again bluster, Shane Collins was a good man with a good heart. And a very good father. But, as a retired nurse, Bethany’s mom had no patience for the way his weird conspiracy theories had spread to the coronavirus. (“Does he think three million doctors and nurses got together and just... made up a worldwide pandemic? For fun? Does he not know thousands and thousands of people aredying? That we’re all just doing our best?”)

She and the kids would be staying in the apartment above Cortland’s garage, and only seeing her mom and her stepfather outside, staying six feet apart, and possibly even wearing masks in the yard. And since Shane had mocked the idea of masks and quarantine bubbles, and had continued hanging out with his buddies, making deliveries at work, going to church and to the gun range, she didn’t feel comfortable having him around her frail, almost sixty-year-old mother and her seventy-five-year-old stepfather, even outside and six feet apart.

But it wasn’t just that.

Bethany was also planning to go see her dad on this trip, and there was no way she was going to let Shane and Rhys near each other again. Especially in front of the kids.

It was windy and cool when they arrived at her mother’s place. Instantly, it was harder than she’d thought it would be, staying this far apart. She ached to hug her rail-thin mom. It was almost easier to meet on-line than to have sweet Celia stand right in front of her and not beable to get any closer than this. They stood awkwardly in the backyard, the slate patio table between them, her mother asking the kids the kinds of questions you’d ask strangers’ children. “Do you miss school? Do you miss your friends?”

“I wouldn’t miss my friends if Mom would let me have a phone,” Leah said.

“Not till you’re fourteen,” Bethany said.

“Right. When I will literally be the last person in my school with a phone.”

“What about Saylor and Skye?” Asher asked. His sister spun around and glared at him, Asher’s explanation to Grandma Celia wilting under Leah’s glare: “They’re twins and their parents are even more strict than... ours.”

Cortland kept inviting them to come inside, and Celia kept putting a hand on his arm and reminding him: “Darling, people can’t come in the house right now, remember? There’s a new disease.”

“Oh, yes. I saw that on the news. Have you heard about this, Bethany?”

“I have, Cort.” Bethany made eye contact with her mother. “It’s very scary.” Poor old Cort. Poor old Celia.

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