I sat on the carpet near his lazy-boy. He always told me his most personal truths in this position. Either looking down at me as I sat at his feet. Otherwise, he would speak to me as he stared out the windshield of his pickup truck, me sitting in the passenger seat – like I was his priest and the cab of the truck were his confessional.
From my spot on the carpet, the two of us alone in the trailer, he confessed one last time. I never sat at his feet again, or perched next to him as we drove. When he died alone in his hospital room, we hadn’t spoken in years. But that last confession stuck with me.
I’d moved back home, trying my best to help my parents adjust to their unexpected retirement, and with their combined health conditions, the prospect that one or both of them might soon pass away. He might have had the same sense, because those last few months, it was as though he was trying to shock me with his violence.
“My ex told me she had been raped.” The news had just finished a segment on “Me Too” and we were sparing as we usually did. I, the bleeding heart progressive, and he, the practical, no-nonsense conservative. “Turns out, I knew the guy. He was army, so me and a few of my army buddies asked around and found his watering hole.” The way he looked at me – it really felt like he was about to test me. “So when he goes outside for a smoke, we jump him and pull him into the back of the truck. We take him deep into the woods, and we beat the bejesus out of him. Then we tied him to tree, cut him all over with razor blades. We left him there.”
There was no resolution to the story, just that cut at the climax – my father sitting there, looking down at me and daring me to judge him. The silence was long, and I hid my shock, trying to look back at him like someone who understood. I tried my best not to reject him, like he was expecting.
He was always trying to push me away, and it took me a long time to let him. I don’t remember what happened right after that, just that the spirit of the confessional was over, and he was once again an old man, sitting in his lazy boy in his double-wide trailer watching action movies. He didn’t tell me what happened to that man, and I didn’t ask. I didn’t want him to stop telling me things, but he did anyway. I believe now that, in that moment, he had betrayed himself. He told me something he hadn’t intended to tell me, and within weeks he was forcing me onto a plane just as the world began to shut down for COVID. Ever after, I was the villain.
Until he died, that is, and left his trailer to me in his will. The will I was sure I had already been written out of.
It had always been hard to tell with my father, whether his stories of vigilante heroism were pure fictions – just something to bombastically recount at the dinner table for friends and family – or whether there was truth in his violence.
My father was a severe narcissist, there could be no doubt about that. Although I’m sure he would claim that my labelling him as such was just part of my “politically correct” drama, I know that I love my father. I would not think what I think about him unless there was just too much evidence to think otherwise – and there was no way to get around the fact that my father was a sociopath. Whether or not he satisfied himself with psychological manipulation, or went as far as murder was really the only question I had left.
The only question that haunted me after his death was “Was he just a liar, or something more dangerous?”. My father had the psychological profile of a serial killer, of that I had no doubt – but did he act on it? That was the only question left to ask.
That is, until I found something I couldn’t ignore. I had decided to do some renovations to increase the price of the trailer. The town had gone into a serious economic depression in the past 20 years, and my parents had bought their trailer at the height of the economic boom. As it stood, the asking price of the house would barely cover the remainder of the mortgage, but I decided a little sprucing up might yield a little compensation for all the sorting, clearing and preparing I had done. He had put up an extra wall at one end of the trailer, creating a small sewing room for my mother. While he glowed with his own generosity, I knew from our truck talks that he had built the room so he could avoid spending every waking moment in the same room as her. With both of them being retired, he had gotten very annoyed with her habit of “always fucking being around”.
The room was small and awkwardly shaped. It wasn’t up to code anyway, so I figured it was better to remove the wall and open the living room up again. Flipping houses with my family when I was a child, I knew that getting an asking price was more about the house looking pretty than being structurally sound – and a more open concept could help motivate buyers not to low-ball me.
But as I sledged through drywall, I realized that there was two feet of space framed between the sheets of drywall. Even an exterior wall wouldn’t need so much space, even insulating against the bitter northern winter. I didn’t find anything in the middle section of the wall, but as soon as I began to work on the other side of the framing two-by-four, I saw it. It was his old barrack box, the one he would pack and travel with when he went on tour with the Canadian Army. I very quickly sledged a hole in the wall big enough for me to heft the box from out between the wall. The giant blue UN logo sticker still covered the full lid of the box. As I wiped away the white drywall dust with my hand, the familiar dings and scratches in the sticker confirmed it was my father’s box, although the box had gained some new scars since I had seen it last. When that was, I couldn’t say. I just remembered it had been full to the top with loose 6×4 photo prints.
It had definitely been heavy enough to have the same contents, but I sat in front of the dusty box for ten minutes, completely stunned. I couldn’t make it fit. This box was important to him. We had moved dozens of times, often across the country – and this box was always in the possessions we carried with us, even if it was just what we could fit in the back of a pick up truck.
When I was a teenager, and we had fixed up our last house, we’d often written things inside the walls, or left newspapers or other little treasures for people to find in the future before sealing up the walls. Like our little time capsules – proof that yes, we’d been here.
But this was something else. He had made the wall twice as thick as it needed to be. He’d robbed his home of square footage, which was basically a cardinal sin as far as he was concerned. We’d framed hundreds of rooms together, so it definitely wasn’t ignorance or a mistake. He had done it deliberately to put the box in there. A box, as far as I knew, was one of the items my brother had hoped to inherit. At least before he died of an opiate overdose a few years ago.
Maybe that was it. Maybe it was a tribute to Colton. Feeling a little less creeped out, I popped the latches on the front of the solid green box, and opened the lid.
