My 8-year-old son was standing on a chair at the stove, cooking dinner for another man’s children, with duct tape wrapped around his injured forearm. The moment he saw me, he froze and whispered, “Please don’t be mad, Dad. Dwight says if dinner’s late, I sleep in the shed.” I stared at my terrified little boy, and suddenly, I knew something was terribly wrong in my own home.
PART 1
Twenty-eight days on. Twenty-eight days off.
That’s the life of an offshore rig worker.
It pays well. It paid for our house outside Lafayette, Louisiana. It paid for my wife’s SUV and my son’s speech therapy and the swing set I built in the backyard with my own hands.
My son, Finn, is eight.
He’s small for his age and shy with strangers, but with me he never stops talking. Every night I’m offshore, we FaceTime at seven. He tells me about school, about his lizard, about the fort he’s building under the porch.
For the last month, the calls kept getting shorter.
“He’s tired,” my wife, Brandi, would say, holding the phone. “He’s already in bed.”
At 7 p.m.?
“Kids grow, Wade. He’s fine. Stop worrying.”
Then a hurricane warning shut down the platform. They flew us out by helicopter two weeks early.
I didn’t call ahead.
I wanted to surprise my boy.
I pulled into the driveway at 9:58 p.m. There was a pickup truck I didn’t recognize parked in my spot. Lifted. Mud on the tires.
The front door was unlocked.
The TV was blaring a football game. Two boys I’d never seen before, maybe ten and twelve, were sprawled on my couch eating chips.
A grown man was asleep in my recliner. Boots on. Beer in his hand.
And in the kitchen, standing on a chair so he could reach the stove, was my son.
He was stirring a pot of boxed macaroni. His school uniform was stained. His hair hadn’t been cut in weeks.
His left forearm was wrapped in silver duct tape from wrist to elbow.
“Finn.”
He spun around so fast he almost fell off the chair.
For one second his face lit up.
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