Chapter 1
The half empty beer still fizzed as John poured it’s remnants down the drain. He had taken out the recycling every Wednesday morning for two years, so he got it piled up by the door that Tuesday night. Two six-packs of empty beer bottles, one bag of soda cans, and a blue box filled with cardboard were taken to the end of the driveway for the next morning.
The living room rug needed a vacuum. Always vacuum from the window moving in, that way the rug didn’t get covered in stripes of opposite pointing threads. John didn’t really care about the perfect state of the rug, but his dad was very precise about how he did it.
John’s father, Hugh Dalton, was in an accident at work two years prior. Hugh lost his left leg when a support cable carrying a stack of roof panels on a construction site broke. The three ton stack of long, thin panels slipped sideways and came falling down like guillotines. People used to say he was lucky to be alive but Hugh didn’t like being called lucky. Losing your leg was very unlucky and he left it at that. Although he was given an early retirement pension which would be deposited directly into his bank account each month for the rest of his life.
The monthly check that was deposited into his father’s bank account came in that night. He spent the next thirty minutes at the desk in the dining room area determining that $630 could be added that month to the stash of bills under the floorboards in the bathroom. Afterwards, he finally had free time and didn’t have to worry about everything his father used to tell him to do. If he missed just one thing and someone noticed that his father wasn’t around, he would be forced to live with foster parents and, even worse, he'd have more than one voice telling him what to do.
After losing his leg, Hugh stopped going out to football games, he stopped going grocery shopping, and he started drinking much more heavily than ever before. John was forced to do all the chores around the house himself. He even paid the bills online when his dad wanted to sleep for most of the day. Worst of all, he had to do everything in the same obsessive ways that his father would have just to keep him happy. Even since the accident, the anger didn’t outweigh the love, but love seemed much harder to express in an all-male household. John's mother would have made all of that different.
A year after Hugh lost his leg, depressed and out of shape, John found him alone in a filled bath tub after school. The shower curtain was open half way so Hugh’s head and shoulders could be seen sticking out. The light was left on and the door was left open for the entirety of Hugh’s world to see. John was so used to his routine at that point that he already had an opened beer in his hand ready to greet his father in the living room. The television was left on and a jingle from a fabric softener commercial was playing as John dropped to his knees in horror at the red silence that filled the bathtub. He was once told that his mother had beautiful red hair. Something he wished he never knew.
John didn't know what he saw or what it meant. He sat on his knees for a few seconds breathing heavily through his nose. Then his breathing stopped and his dry eyes hesitated to react. He could feel the spilled beer pool under his knees and reality hit struck him like a bullet to the head. John was sitting in the bathroom and his father was dead in the bath tub.
Closing the door behind him, John ran upstairs to his room and lied face-down in silence for hours. His eyes felt overused and shameful because of what they saw. They were surreal windows into the misery of the life that was John Dalton. The world moved around him and everything seemed to be mocking his emotions simultaneously. He didn’t make a sound but he couldn’t stop the flow of tears from dampening his pillow. Keeping away the moaning just made the tears come faster. Trying not to cry just made him think about his father. Only his mother could have provided a shoulder for him in that moment. Rolling around on his bed and smashing his fists and head into his pillow caused his bed to shift and his baseboard to creak. He silently convulsed for a minute until he dropped back onto his tear soaked pillow. Suddenly love seemed much easier than pain. Easier to deal with. Even easier to express. Tragically, this epiphany came much too late for the Dalton household.
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Quite some time had passed before he opened his eyes again. Tear-soaked and painfully strained, he managed to look towards his window. It was pitch black inside and out. The light in the bathroom downstairs was still on though and it lit up John's terrible world. That had to change. All the lights in the house had to be turned off including the television. The radio in the living room had a red light over the power button while it was off. He turned it on and dropped the volume to a dead silence then turned his head towards the bathroom amid the darkness. A faint twilight seemed to come from within the house itself lighting up the floor just enough for John to see the entrances to the adjacent rooms like a fog at the top of a mountain.
What to do? He had an idea. The floor tiles in the kitchen were ice cold sending a chill all the way up his body as he made his way through the darkness. The skin on his arms felt like it was peeling back, mimicking his father’s self-inflicted wounds. His entire body seemed to wave in opposite directions leaving him stretched out and disoriented. Cringing doesn’t come close to this feeling.
He thought about foster families and strange social workers controlling his life. Years of awkward Thanksgiving dinners; Pseudo-family members watching hour after hour of horrible reality TV shows; Tuna sandwiches for lunch every god damn day and unnecessary counseling were all in his future. He was only fifteen at the time but he had already been taking care of himself and his father for a year. Why should his life have to change at all just because his father wanted out of it? The retirement cheques were added automatically into his father's bank account which he knew all the passwords to. He already did everything himself. There was no reason why anything had to change.
They had a shovel in the shed; He knew the gist of driving; No one was ever at the camp site on the south side of the town on a weekday. A plan had come together in his head, but he didn’t think about it as a whole, only as a series of steps that he would assess and carry out one by one. The plan as a whole seemed less crazy if it was broken down by steps and never addressed all at once. John was trying it's hardest to make it through this line of thinking without giving up or becoming overwhelmed. Seeing his father dead forced John to increase the threshold of what he considered overwhelming. If he hadn't, he'd still be lying in his bed.
Slowly making his way into the bathroom, he turned the fan on before stepping up to the bath tub and digging for the chain attached to the plug to drain it. It's a good thing the lights were off because John's arm was stained red by the bath tub water. The clunking sound of the draining water changed slightly as Hugh’s foot moved and blocked half of the exit. John shook his head but couldn’t stop himself from the nausea. In the pitch black of the bathroom, John pointed himself to his best guessed position of the sink and vomited. Acid splashed down the side of the bathroom counter and dripped onto the floor. He was going to have to clean that up, along with the beer, later. For now, he spat in the sink and thought about the next step in his plan: Garbage bags.
Step two was going to be a strain for his back once the bathtub finished draining. A little light was needed for step two. This was accomplished by turning the T.V. back on in the living sending it's light directly across into the bathroom. The fog of twilight on the floor was taken over by the flashing lights of modern commercials with rapid camera changes.
John saw in a documentary that people who commit suicide often go about their day in a regular fashion up until they kill themselves. They'll go to work, clean their apartment, charge their phone, and lock their door when they leave. It seems pointless but human routine is a more powerful driving force than life itself. This case was no exception. Hugh smelled like soap and shampoo. He must have been actually bathing before doing the deed. You get in the bath to kill yourself and all you can do while you bring up the courage is start taking an actual bath.
John paused for a second after he was finished day-dreaming and turned his head away from his father's body then lifted him over the side of the bathtub and lowered him into a garbage bag. His body was stiff, slippery, and awkward. It was very difficult and one bag was not enough. Three bags were not enough. He kept filling the previous bag into another, only partially covering his body. Each time, he had to specifically turn and roll the sack, within lights reach, into the next bag. He must have used twenty layers. Hugh was still in the same general position in the bags, but at least he was wrapped up.
Step three changed when he rethought about it; leaving at all would be too much of a risk but keeping Hugh for any longer than necessary was not an option in John’s mind. The backyard and more specifically, under the shed, would be the final resting place of Hugh Dalton. It was a calm, quiet night, but John heard thunder. Thunder that would later be remembered with lightning. However it wasn’t stormy that night, neither was there rain. But burying the dead under a beautiful, calm, starry sky didn't create the right mood for a memory so haunting. At the time, John had no idea just how haunting this night would be for him. As far as he was concerned, he would continue his life exactly how it was two days earlier and no one would know the difference.