Ill-Gotten Gains

The day after the funeral was an interesting one. I was excused from school that day, as well as the entire week before. Life's little blessings.

I was a senior in high school, and I was rounding out my secondary scholastic career with a resounding squish. It wasn't that I was a poor learner, or that I just didn't like school, it was moreso that for those 7 hours a day I could have been doing something much more constructive, like sleeping or banging Batman action figures together and providing my own sound effects. My grades were always "disappointing" because I myself considered a life spent leaning over a geometry book to be "disappointing." All I cared about was to pass, graduate, and never get myself associated with a group, club, or activity that would at all insinuate to an observer that I cared about anything. I remember one girl in my class who joined and chaired every club she could squeeze her name into, thinking it would be good for college. She went to a state school and cried every night because she wasn't in an Ivy League school, then she finally transferred to an Ivy League school and now makes a disgusting amount of money; almost as much money as her therapist makes, the one she sees three hours a day twice a week now. Perhaps most startling here is how on Earth I know all this, but if I had to choose one hobby of mine as my favorite, it would have to be finding out which people who were insufferable as teenagers are now living hallow and insipid lives that will spiral down into manic dementia in coming years. Current tally: all of them.

Anyway, the day after the funeral my mom was scheduled to meet with a lawyer (ours, hers, or theirs, I gathered) to go over the will. His office called early that morning to request that I be there too, which was kind of weird and was a gigantic imposition to my already-planned day of staring out my bedroom window and reconsidering everything I ever knew about anything. Lawyer's offices and A1 paper is no way to spend any amount of time.

"It says what?" my mother asked.
The lawyer registered her shock, "It is a bit… unconventional, but -- yes. A year and a half ago your husband increased his life insurance payout from $250,000 to $750,000 and altered his will specifically stating that, upon his death, $500,000 of it should go to Christopher regardless of his age."

I was entirely speechless. I'd heard of families receiving a nice payout for a death like this, but that was always for crazy-ritch people. Wasn't a life insurance policy meant to make up for how much money the person would have made if he were alive and working? We definitely aren't a $750,000 household. More importantly, how did I just go from having $112 dollars to my name to having $500,112 in seven seconds?

Mom seemed to be dealing with that and a few hundred other little bombshells. Increasing his life insurance by half a million dollars was odd, not telling her was odd, requesting that most of it was odd, and doing so regardless of my age was really odd.

"Isn't it illegal to give inheritance to someone under 18?" she asked.
"Not illegal, just rather stupid. Different states may treat it differently, but it's certainly possible. Usually in situations like this we'd put the money in a trust until the child turns 18, especially since Chris turns 18 in only four months, but the will is specific," the lawyer said.

"Maybe for college?" I said, finally able to speak.
They both looked at me, the lawyer glanced back at my now speechless mom and back at me. "A decent university is about $40,000 a year," he paused, uncomfortable; "Were that the case, he probably would have wanted the money left in escrow or at least just given to your mother."

And just like that, I entered lower upper class and my mom entered upper middle class. The weight of this never seemed to soak in. It, along with the death of my father just seemed to swarm around right above me, out of my grasp. I spent the next few days trying to figure out what had happened, but the mysteries just kept stacking up no matter what way I shuffled them.

The weirdest thing of all, as if any of it could be sorted, is that when my mom checked my dad's account histories she found that he was spending almost all of his pay on the new insurance premiums in the months since he increased his policy. It's almost like he knew he was going to die.

Don't Ask Questions

A lone gunshot cut through the silence of the darkened corridor. Ok, no it didn't -- but that'd be a heck of a way to start a story, wouldn't it?

Truth is, I never know how to start telling a story, especially this one; but seeing as this will probably be the most important story I'll ever tell, I guess I'll start at the beginning.

My name is Christopher Daniel Baker, the Daniel comes from my father (his first name), who I should tell you (since this is supposed to be the beginning of the story) is dead.

Chipper way to kick off a tale, I know, but it's pretty integral to the story and by the end you'll know what I mean more than you do now. I was seventeen when he died, and that's pretty much when my life got interesting. I was watching a crappy movie on the Crappy Movie Station when the call came in; the movie was called Python and Wil Wheaton had just been eaten by the titular snakie when our phone rang, my mom screamed. The coming weeks were weighed down by funerals, family visits, will readings, and the crushing and belated realization that my dad was dead.

It was an accident. Daniel Baker, my father, was a research scientist at the Marine Corps University Research Center in Quantico, Virginia. If you didn't just gasp at the word "Quantico" you must not know what it is, so I'll elaborate. Quantico is a city in Virginia that sits right on the Potomac River and is, more interestingly, the home of the largest Marine Corps base in the world. The city itself is just a small town, population 561, to house officers and their families and is guarded at one end by the actual Marine base and on the other by the mighty Potomac. Access to Quantico is understandably tight, and although it is the home of the FBI Academy, a DEA Academy, the "University", a cemetery, a full golf course, and a Marine base from which an assault upon half of Eastern Europe could be mounted - if you can't justify setting the corner of one toe onto Quantico territory, you're legally obligated to accept four or five bullets in the chest. Quaint little ‘burb.

Google Maps doesn't even have satellite photo coverage of Quantico. They have pictures of the White House, Area 51, mysterious hovering cars, and Egyptian Army bases, but not Quantico.

As I said, he worked in the M.C. University (which is mostly about instilling patriotism and all that into Marine officers and to hold a 9-week seminar explaining why Corps uniforms include a useless little sword) in the research center, which uses the University's government and "educational" qualifications to perform all manors of medical, training, and warfare experimentation (their educational status lets them write off most of their expenses, and their government status lets them keep most of their expenses off the books entirely - a double threat for the bookkeepers). All I was allowed to know was that my dad worked there, and that sometimes he would wear a white lab coat when he'd get off late and not want to change "at the office". I wasn't allowed to tell people where he worked, but in northern Virginia, nobody asks.

I grew up in Fredericksburg, Virginia - 30 minutes from Quantico, 60 minutes from Washington D.C., and 120 minutes from Langley. In school, we never had any "Who is your daddy and what does he do?" games. Half of the kids wouldn't be told where their parents worked until they were old enough to keep a secret, if ever. Some of us wouldn't be afforded the decency of being told exactly how our fathers died.

And that's how it was. A man in a uniform with an insincere brow explained there had been an accident of undisclosable circumstance, that Daniel Baker had done great works for his country, and that his death had been unfortunate. They offered to bury him in the Quantico cemetery, otherwise known as the "Don't Ask Questions" cemetery, but it turned out that there was a plot reserved for him and the family by my grandfather (his father) in the cemetery where he and my grandmother were buried. There was a nice little ceremony, it was snowing on that January afternoon, my knees were shaking - but I don't think it was the cold. The whole thing was closed-casket, and for all I knew the thing could have been empty.

It's a destructive notion, not knowing how your dad died or even that he had died. His death was only on paper - conceptual. He was there in the morning, and then in the afternoon a phone rang to say that he wasn't anywhere anymore. It's an idea you just want to fight, like being trapped in a paper bag that's only there because someone tells you it's there. You want to tear at it and beat it with your fists, but you can't even be sure it's there. That night I lay in my bed and stared at the ceiling with my eyes dry and bulging trying to understand what made my father dead. Was it the casket under six feet of dirt? Was it the blue and pink Death Certificate signed without regard by the State Registrar? Or was it simply the fact that we all acknowledged it?

Don't ask questions.