Promises of Forever, page 29
“Anything.”
“Take it home. It will contain all the answers you’ve been asking yourself for a long time.”
I didn’t know if Jersey, like Niles, had tried to research my past. If so, he would have failed. The reporters at the time would not leave Grandfather and me alone, so Grandfather had relocated us to Oshawa and changed my last name. It was the best thing he’d ever done for me. He’d given me anonymity in an unkind world more interested in slandering an eight-year-old’s name than empathizing with what he’d been through.
My story was lost in the void, and only with the right hints and clues could anyone connect me to the horrors of the past. It was the only reason I’d survived this long.
“When you’re done with the box, I want you to destroy it. Burn whatever’s inside. I lived it. I don’t need the reminder. I can’t promise I’ll be able to talk about it, but at least you’ll know the whole ugly truth.”
Jersey’s eyes glistened. Their pale denim color was lost in the dark. His grip on mine was painful, and I wasn’t sure who was holding up who.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said.
“I do.”
I found Grandfather’s keys, and Jersey followed me inside, one hand on my lower back the entire time, never breaking contact.
The too-close walls, the furniture, and the scent all threw me back in time. Memories pressed in from all sides, and I had to push them away as I aimed for the basement. I watched where I was going, but I refused to see. I shut down. I turned off. Numb to the bone, I moved automatically, knowing where to go, needing to get in and out as fast as possible.
Nothing remained of my old life except one box. It contained no mementos, pictures, nostalgic toys, or keepsakes. My parents’ house had been a crime scene for months. By the time the police had released it, my grandfather and I had vanished from the public eye, and he’d hired someone to take care of getting rid of everything that remained. My parents’ life insurance, the money from the house sale, and all remaining financial accumulation had been put into an account, held in trust until my eighteenth birthday. The money had helped me escape Grandfather’s house and establish my own life.
The box contained dated newspapers, magazine articles, police reports, and everything else my grandfather had managed to collect about the incident. Why he thought it was necessary, I might never know. But he’d gathered it all. He’d stored it away. Perhaps he thought I would want it one day. I couldn’t pretend to understand how the man’s mind functioned. We had never been on the same wavelength.
If he grieved for his daughter, my mother, I never saw it.
Regardless, I knew the box existed. It had haunted me growing up. The monster from my dreams, from my past, lived inside the box in the basement under the stairs, always stalking me, never dying. No matter how many times I saw his death behind my eyes, he was always there.
Finally, I could slay the demon. Destroy the evidence. Burn it to the ground.
Would it be enough, or would I see his face in my dreams for the rest of my life?
The box took no time to locate, and I put it directly into Jersey’s arms. Without missing a beat or pausing to look around, I hustled back up the stairs and outside. The crisp fall air hit my lungs, and I drank it up like I’d spent too much time underwater and was finally able to breathe.
Hunched over, hands on my knees, I closed my eyes as the world spun, and my ears rang.
Jersey’s hand landed on my back, and he rubbed gentle circles, never saying a word. The comforting touch was enough.
We drove back to Peterborough in silence—Jersey with likely a hundred and one questions on the tip of his tongue, and me debating if I’d done the right thing.
Niles’s words spun in my brain. It wasn’t too late. I would find a way to break down this wall. I would give Jersey all I could. It had to be enough.
At the house, I encouraged him to put the box in the Gladiator. I didn’t want it anywhere near me.
He hesitated, cradling it in his arms. “Are you sure about this?”
My brain screamed no, but my mouth said, “Yes.”
“I can burn it and never look inside if you’d prefer. You don’t need to share this with me if you don’t want to.”
“But I do. I want us to work. I want to stop feeling trapped in my own head. It’s about trust, Jersey. It’s about learning to be vulnerable.” I stared at the box, unable to touch it. “This is all of me. This is who I am.”
“And you’re giving it to me?”
“Yes.”
When Jersey brushed the backs of his fingers over my cheek, I realized I was crying. When was the last time tears had found my eyes?
I couldn’t remember. My insides shook, and I wrapped my cardigan around me tighter. Jersey threaded his fingers through my hair and drew me in for a long kiss.
“You are more than a box of horrors. I hope you know that.”
“It’s my foundation. It’s what made me into the man I am today.”
“I love that man,” he said, his voice a whisper against my mouth. “I love him heart and soul. Whether you share this or not, that won’t change.”
But it had to help. I thought maybe, maybe, I could close this gap. I could erase the distance. I held Jersey’s face, digging my fingers into his soft beard, clinging for dear life like I’d unfairly done as a child.
The words came out thick when I spoke. “A long time ago, a scared, traumatized boy dared to dream about happiness. He dared to love his best and only friend in the world. It didn’t work out. The boy was a hopeless case back then.”
“He wasn’t.”
“He was. He still is most days. His best friend left without a word, and the boy spent years lost and unsure of how to fit into a cruel world that didn’t want him. The boy and his best friend grew up apart, but the friend returned after many years, telling the boy he was wrong to leave. Telling the boy he loved him. I want to be happy, Jersey, but I’m not sure I know how.”
“I’ll teach you.”
“First, take this box home and read its contents. You might decide I truly am a hopeless case.”
“I won’t.”
“You might.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
“Careful. Promises are for forever.”
Jersey smiled against my mouth. “I know.”
And he kissed me again. I squeezed my eyes closed against the burn of more tears. This would either destroy me completely or set me free.
32
Jersey
I got home late Sunday evening and set the sealed box on the round kitchen table. The apartment wasn’t big, so the box’s presence seemed to swallow up every inch of free space. Whatever was in it was bigger than me, more enormous, more strenuous than all my life experiences combined. My life had its fair share of messiness, but my hockey accident, subsequent addiction, Christine taking Derby and leaving me high and dry, and then losing my parents in a tragic car crash somehow felt minor compared to what I knew I would find in Koa’s past.
On the drive home, I’d told myself a hundred times to throw it away sealed. I didn’t need to know what kind of trauma had the power to destroy a person so thoroughly.
But Koa had given me a piece of him. The most private piece imaginable. The one he had coveted and protected his entire life. The one he had given to no one. It was the key to the door he’d locked years ago.
And he wanted me to open it. He was inviting me inside.
Why? Because he knew there was no other way of tearing down the walls he’d built. Koa was telling me he loved me in the only way he knew how. The darkness and distance might prevail, there may be no getting away from it, but Koa wanted me to know he trusted me.
I opened a beer and sat, staring at the box, imagining the worst. It was unmarked, plain brown cardboard. For all I knew, he might have grabbed the wrong one, and it would contain his grandfather’s stamp collection.
No. Koa hadn’t hesitated. In the basement, he’d known exactly where to go. Whatever was inside had likely haunted him for years.
I drank the beer and found another cold one in the fridge. The pale ale went down easy, and I waited for it to dampen my nerves. I needed a cushion before taking this path.
What would I find? How badly would it hurt?
Whatever Koa’s secret, it would ruin my night’s sleep. I would suffer at work in the morning. Koa had asked me not to talk about it. He’d made me promise to destroy the contents when I was done. Would I be able to keep that promise?
Nausea filled my belly.
“Fuck me.” I set the beer down and drew the box forward. “Am I doing this?”
The empty apartment didn’t answer, but my heart responded with a kick and a punch.
“Fine.” I pulled the edge of the packing tape, breaking the seal. It was old and disintegrated under my careful ministration. I had to remove it in pieces.
The box’s flaps fell open, and I stalled.
It took another beer and a half before I could peek inside.
It was mostly empty. A few old newspapers. A handful of torn, glossy pages from a magazine or two. A thick brown folder labeled with block letters, Yates, October 1986. The word COPY was stamped on the front. In the opposite corner was a single word and a name. Homicide-Det. Hanover. Timeworn pages stuck out of the folder at odd angles. The frayed seam suggested it had been opened and closed a thousand times.
Yates.
Koa Yates? Or was it the last name of the person who’d done the killing?
Only one way to find out.
I removed the folder and set it aside. The newspapers had been bundled and rolled, secured with a thick elastic band. I removed them from the box as well and tugged the elastic free, flattening the stack the best I could, which was next to impossible, considering they had probably been stuck like that for more than three decades.
The collection of newspapers came from various cities. St. Catharine’s, Hamilton, and London primarily. The top three were dated October 4th, 1986. The headlines were the same, but the wording varied.
St. Catharine’s Teen (14) Goes on Killing Rampage.
Mother and Father Shot to Death by Teenage Son.
Troubled Teen Murders Family.
Numb, I chose the London Free Press and read the article.
Early yesterday morning, a fourteen-year-old St. Catharine’s teen went on a killing rampage, murdering his mother and father before going after his eight-year-old brother. The teen was said to have used a hunting rifle that was supposedly kept in a locked cabinet in the family’s garage. How he acquired the key is unknown.
The police claim to have found evidence of a struggle in the attached two-car garage where forty-four-year-old Lawry Yates was found dead beside the family’s Camry with a single gunshot wound to the head. It is believed Lawry might have seen what was happening and tried to intervene before it was too late. Forty-two-year-old Elise Yates, the teen’s mother, was found dead in the Yates’s kitchen, shot once in the stomach and a second time in the head.
It is assumed that the teenager immediately went after his younger brother, who the police believe tried to hide on the second floor of the house during the chaos, knowing he was in danger. Evidence of gunfire was found in the ceiling and walls on the second floor, indicating the teen might have tried to scare the brother out of hiding or shot after him as he ran.
No one knows for sure what transpired inside the house yesterday morning. The traumatized eight-year-old isn’t speaking to the police or medical professionals at this time, but it is speculated that he might have surprised his older brother at one point, attacking him in an effort to get away and save himself. It is believed the two struggled at the top of the stairs, where the teen gunman fell or was pushed. The older boy was knocked unconscious, and the younger child was able to find a phone and call for help.
The teenage gunman died later that evening in hospital of severe head trauma.
It’s unknown at this time what caused the St. Catharine’s teen to embark on this heartbreaking act of brutality. Friends and neighbors alike are shocked and grief-stricken, wondering at the tragedy that has touched their small town…
The words blurred, and I had to grip the side of the table so I wouldn’t slide off the chair. I went back to the top of the page, reading it again, seeing the words yet not absorbing them. How was this real? I’d heard and read about outrageous acts of violence over the years: school shootings, a man who drove down a sidewalk in downtown Toronto mowing people down, knifings, brutal assaults that left multiple casualties. But they had always felt like fiction. They had never touched me or my family. This was different. This involved the man I loved.
When he was nothing more than an eight-year-old boy.
Jesus, Koa. How?
My blood ran cold. I read the article in the Hamilton paper and the one in the St. Catharine’s paper. They all told the same story. More papers had been bundled in the pile, covering the weeks that followed. The teenager was eventually named. I guess dead murderers lost their rights to privacy, or someone had leaked it to the press, and the papers didn’t care about lawsuits.
Augustus (Gus) Yates.
If one boy’s name was leaked, I knew the other would have been too. Maybe Koa’s name never showed up in the newspapers, but that meant shit when it came to the media. In a small town, people talked. Everyone knew everyone. A person couldn’t remain anonymous.
And Koa had likely suffered—as a victim and as the one who’d killed his brother. Would he have been hailed a hero? Knowing the way people were, there would always be someone who would slander his name. Accuse him of being no better than his murdering brother.
I pulled the brown folder toward me. The police report. Interviews. Extensive details. Photographs I didn’t need to see. Why had Koa’s grandfather requested this? To what purpose?
I read it all, detaching from the worst of it, slapping the photographs face down on the table’s surface when I couldn’t bear to see their horrors. It would have been easier to pack everything away in the box and dump it in the lake, but if Koa had lived through this and wanted me to know all there was to know, I had to walk this path, if only so I could understand his nightmare.
Koa had witnessed or at least been in the house when his older brother had shot and killed his parents. He had listened to his mother’s screaming and pleading to god to save her. He’d heard the gunshots. The silence that would have followed.
Worse.
Koa had been hunted by his brother, knowing his fate would be the same if he was found. Whatever had transpired on the landing of the second floor, the story was never made clear—interviewing a traumatized eight-year-old boy had proven to be difficult. Whatever had happened, Koa, in a state of fear, shock, rage, or merely in self-defense, had pushed his brother down the stairs and killed him.
He’d killed his brother. It was only then sinking in.
“Jesus,” I breathed. “Holy fucking Christ.”
I stared at the spread of articles over the kitchen table. It wasn’t a movie. It was real life. Koa’s life. How had he ever moved forward? How had he survived?
Everything I’d witnessed at camp made sense. His strong dislike for archery. His repulsion for blood and refusal to play hunting games in the woods. The cap gun and Koa’s attack on the boy who’d shot it. Even throwing Lord of the Flies into the lake.
The endless nightmares and bed-wetting.
The blank fits that took hold and wouldn’t let him go.
His ongoing need for an imaginary friend. Someone he could control. Someone who would listen. Someone who made him feel safe.
It all made sense.
Even today, Koa’s obsession with death was understandable. His separation from the world. His inability to connect with people. The morose poetry and music. No god. No meaning to life. It was all a waste of time in his eyes. Nothing mattered.
He might have grown into a functioning adult with a respectable career, but he’d never truly healed. How could he? How could anyone?
I needed another beer.
I sat up all night with the articles and police report, reading them, thinking, with my stomach in a knot. Twice, I almost got in my car and drove to Peterborough, but out of respect, knowing Koa needed his space, I didn’t.
At long past three in the morning, I sent Koa a text.
Jersey: I love you, Tom Sawyer. That won’t ever change.
I wasn’t surprised when he texted back right away. Knowing I possessed his innermost secrets must have made it impossible to sleep.
Koa: I love you, Huck.
And I had no doubt.
None. At. All.
It was a long week. Every day dragged, and all I wanted was to drive to Peterborough and see Koa. I wanted to hold him in my arms and never let go. The shooting was decades ago, but to me, it was fresh, and the fear it caused was inescapable. I had turned forty-five over the summer, a middle-aged man, and I was terrified by what I’d read.
How had an eight-year-old boy survived it?
Since I didn’t have a fireplace or a backyard pit in my city apartment, I had to get creative when it came to destroying the box and its contents. Shredding it wasn’t good enough. On Thursday, after a miserable day at work—I hadn’t been sleeping well—I drove an hour to a provincial park, paid for a day pass, and then found a deserted campsite. I sat on a rotted picnic bench under a canopy of trees with leaves that had yet to change color and burned every single page from the box, and then I burned the box itself.
I snapped a picture with my phone and sent it to Koa, so he knew it was gone.
I didn’t get a response, but that was okay. I hadn’t expected one.
Long after the evidence was ash, I sat. At one point, I buried my face in my palms and cried. For a boy who had never had a chance to be a child. For a family shattered. For my son, who hated me and wouldn’t take my calls. For my parents, whose house I couldn’t seem to let go of.
For the man I’d loved all my life.
Grief hurt, but it also cleansed the soul. Hours later, when I left the campground, I felt lighter. Life would go on, and maybe Koa was right. Maybe there was nothing more out there. Maybe we were algae in an ocean. But I firmly believed we could make the best of the time we’d been given. We could make our own happiness.
