MAY
Certain questions require us to think deeply. They give us pedigrees and integrity. They stoke curiosity. I usually appreciate a well-asked question. Nick’s plants a ball of fire between my ribs.
Is my dad the average-height adult, weighing between 165 and 180 pounds, owning a welding helmet and black racing jumpsuit, who stole years from other families and security from twelve boys?
Did my dad kidnap his own nephew?
Or kill Chris Jenkins?
That’s what Nick’s asking.
I dial down every swirling rogue emotion and coat my answer in cool eucalyptus. “Crazy doesn’t make him guilty. Build your case,” I say.
And Nick, knowing me, says, “I’d be angry at me too if I were you, but you’ll be angrier later if you don’t force yourself to do this. You can’t come this far and stop at the hard place.” Then, “It’s smarter for you to build the case.”
Point number one, which I concede as a fact: my father is a liar.
I was almost seventeen listening to “Fifteen,” and summer was Taylor Swift, SweeTart sugar highs, and sticky bleachers at the American Legion Park. Gladys and I googled sex and wished we didn’t. Aulus and Tank devised plans for late-night phone calls that didn’t make our house phones ring. There were trips to Holiday World with Uncle Warren, Griff, and Ruby. And of course, my every-other-Wednesday decision to start a celery-only diet, followed by eating cheap cookie dough from the sleeve before the day was out.
This was me before Castle Delacroix.
The day I found out I owned a castle, summer was being a dutiful Wildwood summer: boring, beautiful, too hot to breathe unless you were sitting in the path of an air conditioner. Gladys said, “Tank and I got kicked out of Walmart last night for playing hide-and-seek,” and I lolled my head toward her and said, “We should try to get kicked out of Walmart every day.”
We were lying side by side on the floor, freshly painted toes propped on the bed’s edge, listening to her iPod with two fans oscillating our direction. Gladys had a Dr Pepper can balanced on her chest and was trying to tip all twenty-three flavors to her lips without spilling liquid on the carpet. “You think Tank likes me?” She rebalanced the can and changed the position of her chin for optimal catching.
“There’s probably some Southern correlation between being kicked out of Walmart together and marriage.” I sounded bored. I was tired of talking about boys—even our boys, whom I loved—and was wishing my way back to our middle school Bigfoot mania. We’d made huge plans to travel somewhere after graduation and shoot a Blair Witch–style mockumentary on Sasquatches.
Gladys gripped the lip of the Dr Pepper can with her teeth and nudged it toward the middle of her breastbone. “What if I get kicked out of Walmart with you every day in June? Is there a Southern correlation for that?”
“You only have me the last two weeks,” I reminded her.
Dad had left for his annual month-long mental health sojourn three days earlier. I was out of school and happy to spend the month with my village of uncles. Except that year, last year, Warren was supposedly off with Dad, so I was all Griff’s. We were planning to visit his parents—Grandma and Grandpa Holtz—in the Outer Banks. And since we were leaving for North Carolina in less than twelve hours, Gladys would clearly take more devious Walmart trips with Tank than me.
She groaned, upsetting the Dr Pepper can. Half the drink sloshed up her nose.
I tossed the closest thing in reach—a pair of folded panties from her clean clothes pile—and asked, “You plan to drink all the Dr Pepper in the fridge through your nose, or shall we get ourselves forcefully removed from the local superstore?”
She threw the Dr Pepper panties toward the laundry and glanced around her room for inspiration. “You still have skates?”
Everyone our age has Rollerblades. When you feel certain you’ve aged out of your bike, you buy skates. Mine were somewhere among the garage cobwebs, so I left Gladys’s on a mission to retrieve them and discovered my father’s truck in our driveway.
Except he was in Canada.
He called yesterday. “It’s raining in Vancouver,” he’d said.
Steadying the key in the back-door lock took three tries. After barreling into the kitchen, I found Uncle Warren and Dad at the kitchen table, Dad shoving eight-by-tens into a manila folder, Uncle Warren folding stacks of butcher paper.
“What are you doing here?” Dad asked, still shoving.
What was I doing here? I wasn’t the one who was supposed to be in Canada. “You flew home without telling me?”
Dad and Warren exchanged a collective stare and then Dad sagged into a chair and used his hands like wiper blades to cover and uncover his eyes. He wasn’t crying, but he was pulling at his temples like he wished he could. I was thinking, When is the last time you slept? He said, “This isn’t how I wanted to tell you.”
I went straight to worst-case scenario. He’s not tired. He’s sick. I walked closer, seeking an embrace, an assurance, and said, “Whatever it is, we’re going to be okay.”
Dad gripped my elbows, worked his thumb gently into the ditch of my arm. “Honey, I’m not dying.”
We took a deep, unified breath and rested our foreheads together. The relief settled in that whatever this was, death was worse. He turned me loose and slid a stack of photos in my direction. There were backhoes, piles of clay and dirt, a concrete foundation. The photos showed serious progression on a structure. Walls. Rebars. A cement mixer. Clearly a worksite, although the significance remained unclear. Dad unfolded the butcher paper. Blueprints covered the kitchen table. His index fingernail tapped a title in the uppermost corner: Delacroix Castle.
“For nearly . . . nine years, give or take . . . I’ve, um, been building a castle.”
I absorbed the photos, registering the time this must have taken. The money. The audacity of the structure itself. I asked, “When?” because my mouth lagged a split second behind my brain. “You don’t go camping, do you?”
Uncle Warren’s chin dipped and he crossed his arms over his chest. They’d clearly argued this point before.
“And you never have?” I said.
Dad’s reaction bordered on bemusement and pride. Another “I told you so” passed between the men. “Thee.” Dad’s rehearsed explanation about the impaired truth-telling practices of adults included listing Santa Claus and my mother as prime examples and concluded with, “These truth twists are normal parts of protective parenting.”
“So . . . ‘I’m going to Canada’ is the same as Santa?”
Guilt crept around his eyes, as did pride, and I thought the pride swelled well beyond the guilt. “This castle’s important. It might even save our lives.”
Uncle Warren offers a nearly undetectable headshake. Whatever his complicity in Castle Delacroix, he didn’t buy Dad’s reasoning.
“First of all, you sound insane.” And I already had one insane parent. “Second, I don’t want a castle. I want a dad who goes camping when he says he’s going camping.” I whirled on Uncle Warren next, the betrayal gathering, the anger unwilling to clot. “And I want an uncle, an officer of the law, whom I can trust to be truthful. You two should be fired from adulthood.”
Dad’s neck and cheeks were the color of beets. “This thing, honey—it’s bigger than me, and at this point”—he tapped the photos, the records of progress—“it’s happening whether you like it or not. I’ve gambled everything, and now that you know, I’d love for you to be part of this. Give it time. You’ll see I’m right.”
All I managed was a quiet jab. “What does that even mean?”
There was no trace of offense on Dad’s features. Using finger and thumb, he orbited his mustache and goatee and gestured to Uncle Warren, who stepped close enough to hug me, but didn’t dare try. Uncle Warren said, “What you’re seeing is passion, and sure, passion is scary, but passion isn’t criminal. And when you see the construction site, you’re gonna be impressed, kid.”
“Dad, people will think we’re off the rails.” I already felt strange that Mom left us. Every kid I knew whose parents were divorced lived with their mom and saw their dad on the weekend.
He looked genuinely sad that I was judging his choices. Like he wasn’t the one to blame here. Like I was being shallow for caring that Wildwood was going to implode over this. “Wait,” he said. “You have your Bigfoot thingie and your . . . canoe quest and what was that game you all used to play all the time? Catan? Yeah, Catan. I don’t think a castle is much different.”
The Bigfoot thing was meant to be funny. I didn’t even remember the canoe quest and I hadn’t played Catan in months. He was behind on my hopscotch obsessions. Probably because he’d been building a castle. Which was admittedly cool, but the coolness existed on a non-intersecting line with how I felt. What does someone do with a nine-year lie?
I shoved my chair at the table and the brief wind ruffled the top photo, revealing another beneath. The subject captured my attention more than the construction. Standing next to my father, crossing two trowels over his chest like a mortar warrior, was Aulus.
There was a shy smirk before Dad explained. “Uhhh, that’s the day we finished brickwork on the keep’s roof.”
My mouth fell open. “What about Gladys and Tank? You recruit them too?”
“No. You know Aul. Volunteered. Couldn’t help himself.” Dad pulled a chair out for me and patted the air.
I turned to Uncle Warren. “So he wasn’t helping you build out the basement?” For weeks Aulus had disappeared for hours at a time, and when I asked where he’d been, he claimed he’d been finishing out Warren’s basement.
Uncle Warren pinks.
Every man in my life sat on a throne of lies. I folded the photo of my cousin into a tiny square, shoved the cardstock into the pocket of my shorts, and nodded curtly before walking into the garage. Dad called after me, “You’re missing the point. We own a castle.” And then another time with joyful oomph. “We own a castle.”
I upended papers on the garage workbench and they fluttered into Aulus’s free weights. Dad bought the set for Aul’s twelfth birthday. The two spent hours out here fighting the good war against eighth-grade scrawniness. He’d been here last night, clanking and heaving.
Aulus’s dad and mine are the brother kind of cousins. The stand-up-at-weddings-and-carry-caskets kind of cousins. So when Scottie tapped out on fatherhood, Dad punched him in the nose and tapped in. They talk every Sunday morning even though Scottie never calls his son. Aul became a fixture, regular as the coffeepot or couch, another brother kind of cousin. Until I saw that picture of him at the castle, I’d mistakenly believed he was more mine than Dad’s. And that I was more Dad’s than Aulus.
They’d hidden a castle from me. A bona fide castle.
My Rollerblades were in a box next to the Christmas tree and I slung them over my shoulder as if I were off to war. Dad and Uncle Warren, unmoved by my return from the garage, examined the blueprint and argued support structures.
I leaned against the fridge. “Is he working with you today?”
Dad knew I meant Aulus. “Nope.” He pitched something through the air. I stepped aside and whatever it was slid along the countertop and stopped at the sugar bowl. “I had a key made for you too,” he said. “So you can come and go as you want, maybe help bring her to life.” There was a twinkle of hope in his eyes.
The camo key was attached to a dangling silver castle. I ignored my welcome favor to grab the portable phone. I dialed. Leo, Aulus’s uncle on his mom’s side, barked hello.
“It’s Thea,” I said. Leo’s box fan purred. The lever on his recliner clunked. He did his heavy mouth-breathing thing as he leaned around the front porch to see if the quattro was parked beneath the carport. “Kid’s out. Want me to give him a message?”
Oh, did I ever.
“When he’s back home, tell him . . . tell him . . . tell him . . . I’m gonna kill him.”
That was June 2nd. Aulus never came home.