PART 1: The Boy at the Stove
Twenty-eight days on, twenty-eight days off. That was the deal I made when I signed on with a drilling crew out of Port Fourchon, three hours south of our house in Lafayette. Twenty-eight days of steel decks, salt air, and twelve-hour shifts. Then twenty-eight days at home, trying to remember how to be a regular dad.
The money was the reason. After my father died, Shannon and I took on a bigger mortgage than we should have, and the rig paid almost double what I could earn onshore. Every month I sent the mortgage, the truck note, the light bill, and grocery money straight into our joint account. I never missed one payment. Not one. I was proud of that.
Every night at eight o’clock, I called home on FaceTime from the bunkhouse. And every night, Shannon answered from the kitchen or the couch with the same easy smile. "He’s fine, he’s asleep. He had a big day." Sometimes I asked her to turn the camera so I could see him. She always said she didn’t want to wake him. I told myself that was what a good mother would say.
Eli was eight. He had my brown hair that never stayed flat, his grandmother’s blue eyes, and a lizard named Spike that he talked to more than he talked to most people. Before I left in September, I gave him my old cell phone so he could play games and take pictures of Spike. No SIM card. No plan. Just an old phone in a cracked case. I showed him how to type a message to the contact that said DAD, just for fun.
This rotation, a tropical storm rolled through the Gulf on day twenty-six, and the company flew half our crew off two days early. I didn’t call ahead. I wanted to see Eli’s face when I walked through the door. I drove three hours with the radio off, picturing him running down the hall in his socks and crashing into my legs the way he always did.
I pulled into our driveway at 11:40 at night. Every light in the house was on. A lifted black pickup I’d never seen before was parked on my lawn, right on top of Shannon’s flower bed. Through the front window I could hear a TV turned all the way up.
The second I opened the door, the smell hit me. Burnt cheese. Spilled beer. Cigarette smoke soaked into my own walls.
In the living room, Troy Gaines was stretched out in my recliner with his shirt off, his belly rising and falling, a can of beer balanced on the armrest. Troy was a friend of Shannon’s from high school, a guy who was always between jobs and always hunting for a couch to land on. His two teenage boys, Brody and Mason, were sprawled across my sofa with a bag of chips, eyes locked on a video game. None of them looked up.
Then I looked into the kitchen. My son was standing barefoot on a wooden kitchen chair pushed up against the stove, stirring a pot of boiling macaroni with a spoon almost as long as his arm. His blue shirt was smeared with grease and dirt. His shorts were filthy. And his left forearm was wrapped, wrist to elbow, in thick silver duct tape.
He turned around and saw me in the doorway. His whole face crumpled. Tears were running down his cheeks before he could even get the word out. "Dad?"
I was still holding my hard hat under my arm. I didn’t even remember bringing it inside. For a second I couldn’t move. It felt like the deck dropping out from under me in a heavy swell.
"Cole, man." Troy finally raised his head and squinted at me over his belly. "Thought you weren’t back till the fifteenth."
"Where’s my wife?" I asked. "Girls’ night," he said, and yawned. "Lake Charles. She’ll be back late. I’m helping out, watching the kid. Somebody’s gotta, right?"
I crossed the kitchen in three steps, shut off the burner, and lifted Eli down from the chair. He weighed less than I remembered. He weighed less than he should have. He wrapped his arms around my neck so tight I could feel him shaking. "What happened to your arm, buddy?" His eyes slid past my shoulder toward the recliner. Toward Troy. "I bumped it," he whispered.
On the couch, one of Troy’s boys snorted. The other said, "Bumped it," in a high, mocking voice, and they both laughed and went back to their game.
"When’s the last time you ate?" I asked him. "Lunch at school," Eli said. "I was making dinner. Brody ate the chicken. Mom says if I’m hungry, I can make noodles myself." It was nearly midnight. He was eight years old.
I scooped what was left of the macaroni into a bowl and carried him down the hall to his room. I sat on the edge of his bed with him in my lap, holding him like he might vanish if I let go. He ate every bite, fast, the way a stray dog eats. I didn’t want to tear off that tape in front of strangers. I didn’t want to scare him. I told myself I’d look the moment we were alone and the house went quiet. He buried his face in my shirt and breathed in, slow and deep, the way he used to when he was a toddler.
Then he pulled back and looked at me with red, swollen eyes. "Dad," he said, "did you read them?" "Read what, buddy?" "My messages," he said. "I wrote you every single night. I told you everything."
My stomach went cold. In twenty-six days, I hadn’t gotten a single message from my son.
