How My Father Killed My Mother

short story: a child who grows up hearing rumors that his father killed his mother finally confronts him

When I found out my father stabbed my mother to death in a graveyard 25 years ago, leaving her body to bleed out in the moonlight on a below freezing night, the first thing I thought about was how hard he cried at her funeral.

I was five. Old enough to remember details, and young enough to be lied to about what really happened. They told me mom died in an accident. I might have wondered about how it happened, but that pain in my chest, like I was running up a hill as somebody reached inside my stomach and yanked everything out of me, prevented me from digging for answers. I just knew she was gone. I just knew she was in a big wooden box now with figured of Jesus and Mary, also dead, standing next to her in the church. And there was my dad, wailing, screaming that he loved her and asking God why He did this, why oh why did He do this.

That image would periodically pop in my head for no reason. I’d be walking down the street, hanging out with friends on our way to play basketball or go to a party, and it would flash in my head. It became a part of me. Why? I can’t tell you exactly. Maybe it was closure for my mother. Maybe it had something to do with seeing one’s father - the man who makes you - in such a vulnerable state and that being significant because it’s so rare for some, definitely my father. Maybe it was both of those things. But what I can tell you is that I was somehow always comforted by this memory until I started hearing about the rumors.

Over the years I learned about the rumors. South Buffalo can be a small town if you’re there long enough, especially if your family is one of the few that hadn’t bolted to the South.

The first time I heard the rumor was in the 7th grade. I was 12. My buddy Devin invited me over to play Xbox. We sat down in front of the TV and I hear his mother say, “Is that that Cortez boy?”

I look behind me and this big, haggard-looking woman with dust and cigarette tar in between the forest of wrinkles on her face.

She squints at me and says: “You look just like your killer daddy. Get the fuck out of my house!”

Devin tried to intervene, told his mom to relax, maybe have another drink, but I just got up and walked out. A woman who looks like that screaming at you is easy to want to get away from. Plus, I had no idea what she was talking about. Devin’s mom was obviously batshit crazy and I made a mental note to make fun of him for it later.

I was halfway down the block when Devin ran up behind me.

“Hey, I’m sorry, man,” he said. “My mom was friends with your mom and, you know, I guess she doesn’t like that you look like your dad or whatever.”

“What does that got to do with anything?” I said, feeling stupid like I was not in on something I should be in on.

Well, Devin let me in on it. That was the first time I heard that people in my neighborhood thought my dad killed my mom.

I went home with the intention of asking my dad what the hell were all these people talking about. But when I got there, he was sitting alone in front of the TV, watching the local news, but not really watching it, and sipping on a beer. He had just come home from work - a shitty job unloading trucks that he recently got after looking for work for a long time - and he just seemed so fragile, like if I upset him in any way, he’d crumble. I didn’t want to break him. That’s when I realized that he was all I had. I didn’t have any siblings, only two cousins I never saw, no grandparents, and no mother. It was just him and me.

I sat next to him. He put his arm around my shoulder and gave me that hug he does where he put his sharp whiskers on the side of my forehead.

“How you doin,’ kid?”

“Fine, dad.”

I looked at his hands and wondered if those were the ones that stabbed my mother to death. I imagined them covered in blood, grasping the handle of a knife. That night, I dreamed I was running away from him in a graveyard. I woke up thinking it was still real and had an urge to run out of the house, away from him as fast as possible.

But I was too scared to say anything to him. Not only was I afraid I’d break him, but I was afraid he might break me, too.

---

Over time, I’d pick up more details about the murder. A few people thought my dad did it, but most didn’t. Some of my mom’s closest friends were still friends with my dad and stood by him. I came to understand that their insistence on coming around every Christmas, every Thanksgiving, was not so much that they loved my dad, but it was their way of making a point to the ones who believed he did it. And those people made their point by avoiding him, ignoring him when they ran into him at the store or a bar. This made it easier to believe my dad had nothing to do with the murder.

It was a Friday night when I was around 18, and we went down to Freddy’s for a fish fry. We sit down and I notice my dad staring at somebody. He has a cold look in his eye, something I had seen shades of before but never like that. I turn around to see what he’s looking at and it’s Mr. Carrol, my high school sociology teacher.

“You know him?” I say.

“Yeah, I know him.”

I look behind me again and Mr. Carrol is staring back, but he doesn’t have that cold look. He looks scared, like he wants to leave. But he keeps his eyes on my dad, like he’s trying. He mumbles something to the woman he’s with. He puts some money on the table. He does all this while keeping eyes locked on my dad.

Then Mr. Carrol starts walking toward us. Not because he wants to. He has to. There’s only one way to the exit. And when he’s about to pass us, he finally looks away from my dad. He gave up. He lost. It’s over. But my dad grabs his forearm. He grabs it hard. Mr. Carrol winces and almost whimpers.

“You alright, Jerry?” my dad says.

I never liked Mr. Carrol. I didn’t like the way he taught his classes, which were always just students taking turns reading passages - nothing new, nothing interesting. I also didn’t like the way he spoke to students. He was haughty, and he favored the haughty kids. I didn’t like the guy. And when my dad grabbed his arm, veins popping out of his thick, tatted-up forearm, squeezing Mr. Carrol’s salmon-colored wool sweater, I saw my least-favorite teacher’s undeserved snobbishness crack like cheap porcelain.

“I-I-I’m good, Carlos,” Mr. Carrol said.

My dad didn’t say anything back. He just nodded and let Mr. Carrol go. And off the dork sociology teacher went, with his woman shooting glances at my dad as she whispered into Mr. Carrol’s ear.

That’s not when I knew my dad did it. But it’s when I knew he could do it. I saw something in him that was terrifying. By then, I knew what happened. I knew everyone who thought he did it and everyone who didn’t. I looked up the news reports online. I read about the 108 stab wounds, her body lying in the graveyard overnight and discovered, half-frozen and fully dead, by the caretaker just after the sun came up.

But I could never imagine my father doing it. Whenever I tried, the image in my head seemed fake, like a bad horror movie. It didn’t help that I didn’t have much of a memory of my mother anymore, and I didn’t want the most vivid image of her in my head to be of her getting murdered by my father. So I stopped thinking about it as much as I could. But I could never stop completely.

---

“Don’t you ever wonder who did it?” Rebecca said.

We had been dating for two months and I thought we were falling in love, so I told her the most twisted, fucked-up thing about me.

“I used to, but I guess I kinda gave up wondering,” I said.

That was a lie. I still wondered all the time. Mostly if my dad really did do it. But she wouldn’t have understood that this was a tiny, permanent thought in the corner of my brain that I knew would never go away, and I had to live as if it wasn’t there if I wanted to live.

“Does your dad suspect anybody?” she said.

I lied again.

“He did, but the police didn’t find anything.”

It was a lie because I still hadn’t had a real discussion about it with my dad. We spoke about it in hushed tones on a few of my mother’s birthdays, mainly him saying how much he missed her and wished he could have protected her. But nothing about the murder. He always got quiet about that. He would look down and squint his eyes, like it hurt. And so I didn’t dig. I didn’t want to hurt him.

All those years, I dug that question mark deeper and deeper into my mind to protect him from…what? Me, I guess. I didn’t want him to think I was one of those who thought he did it.

This was the man who woke up at 5 am to take me to hockey practice when I eight. Who taught me how to throw a punch when I was 10. Showed me how to shave when I was 13. He tied my tie on my prom night when I was 18.

And in every one of those instances, I wondered, silently, barely acknowledging the words in my own head, if he killed my mother. And every time I stifled that thought, my memory of my mother would fade a little bit more. Like I had to erase her to save him.

And now that I could hardly conjure up an image of her face in my head without looking at one of the few photos I had of her, I knew I had to stop pushing that question away.

---

“What happened to mom that night?”

I was over at his house to watch the Bills game. They lost and now a commercial with a smiling blonde talking about dishwasher detergent was on the TV. I had a stupid thought that the woman wouldn’t be smiling if she could hear this conversation, and scolded myself for not staying focused on the task at hand.

Dad turned and looked at me with a smirk and a raised eyebrow.

“What do you mean?”

“We never really talked about it,” I said. “And I guess I’ve just been wondering about it lately.”

He stiffened up. Right fist clenched. Smirk replaced with tight lips and enflamed nostrils.

“Who’s been talking to you? What did they say?”

He stood up.

“Tell me who the hell you’ve been talking to.”

I wanted a do-over. Instead of asking him about mom, I’d ask him about if the Bills need a coaching change. He was 60, smaller than me, and had wonky hips. But I had no doubt he could kick my ass because he could kick most people’s asses. He had the ability to punish me because he was angrier than me, naturally angry, a curse and a gift, but probably mostly a curse, though I wished I had some of it.

“I wasn’t talking to anybody,” I said. “I was just thinking about it, that’s all. Sometimes I think about it.”

He crossed his arms and nodded his head.

“You think about it, huh? What do you know about it that you can even think about it? You don’t know shit about it.”

He was fighting me with words. He was trying to get me into a trap where he would accuse me of being disloyal and ungrateful, for being a fool easily influenced by others who hated him because they were jealous or stupid or both. If I told him I heard all the rumors, read the newspaper articles, read the police report and the autopsy report, he would blow up on me or within himself or both at the same time.

But I had waited long enough. If we blow up, we blow up.

I started telling him everything I heard and read. But he stopped me.

“Sounds like you already have your answer,” he said. “You think I did it.”

I stared at him for a moment that felt like my heart froze and was being excavated from my chest.

“I do,” I said. “Did you?”

He sat down and sighed. He looked toward the TV. A sitcom was on now and the bright lighting grinning actors mocking us. I wanted to have that fake life, but I was here and always would be. I turned the TV off.

“Doesn’t matter what I say, does it? You made your decision,” he said.

“Just tell me yes or no,” I said. “Whatever you say, I’ll accept it as the truth.”

He stared at the black TV screen and started to cry - slow, patient, tears that took their time to come out, accepting their situation.

“Yeah, I did,” he said. “I did it. I killed her.”

His voice sounded different. His face looked different. This wasn’t my father. I replayed the words in my head, feeling each one to make sure they were there. But the words stopped making sense. I did it, I killed her. They didn’t have any meaning for me. I didn’t know what they meant. I didn’t recognize the person saying them.

“I killed her.”

He put his face in his hands and bawled. Fast, impatient tears fleeing in a panic. The cry came from deep in his gut, pushed out. The sound triggered my memory of him at the funeral, crying over my mother’s casket. Was he faking it then? Was he faking it now?

“Why?” I said.

He put his hands down and took a deep breath. Red eyes, real tears. But angry.

“You’re too goddamned soft and would never understand,” he said.

He stood up over me again.

“She fucking deserved it,” he said. “You don’t know what that means because you didn’t know her. I did what I had to do, goddammit. And that’s all you need to know. Trust me. Things would have been a lot worse around here if I didn’t do what I did.”

He walked out of the living room and stomped up the stairs to his bedroom.

I thought about my mom. I thought about her making me breakfast before hockey practice when I was eight, consoling me when I lost that fight when I was 10, smiling proudly when she watched me shave at 13, and giving me a kiss before I went on my prom date when I was 18. My mother’s image became stronger in my mind - I saw what she looked like, saw how she aged, saw her now.

None of these things happened, but I imagined them as vividly as if they happened that morning. They became more vivid than the real memories of my father because I didn’t know if the man in those memories wasn’t my father.

I left the house and got into my car. I drove to the graveyard. It was a cold, snowy night, just like the one he killed her on. I got out of my car and sat on the hood, looking at the tombstones. I saw my dad on top of my mother, pummeling a knife int her neck, chest, arms when she tried to make him stop, face when she was already dead and stopped defending herself. I heard her scream and cry. I heard him grunt and swear. I saw the blood spurting up and then falling down onto the snow, melting it, forming cold, red pools of various sizes. I heard her last breaths, tired and no longer willing. I saw him leave and I heard his footsteps crunching the snow as he walked across her blood.

Now I knew what happened. Now I knew my father. And now I no longer knew him.