I Think My Dad is a Hitman

I think my dad is a hitman. Maybe this isn’t a thought that most people would have about their parents, but it’s one I’ve been sitting with since my mom made me watch the Bourne series for the first time. I hated those movies.

My dad used to like Bourne a lot too, even though he could hardly keep up with the dialogue and instead maintained his focus on all of the hitting and punching and shooting. And maybe the women. He liked John Wick as well—watched them all in theatres and animatedly retold the fight scenes to me on the rare occasion that I saw him. Hitmen live pretty insane lives, after all, so I can’t blame him for finding those aspects intriguing.

Of course, I don’t think he’s a hitman because he likes hitman movies. In fact, most hitmen likely don’t like hitmen movies because of how inaccurate they are. Not that I would know, because I’m not a hitman. I think he’s a hitman because it’s the only explanation I can give to the wilderness of my childhood.

Hitmen tend to have shitty relationships, or good ones that die—my parents split up when I was five. Again at six. At ten, they might have gotten back together on a night when I was meant to be sleeping, but I try not to think about that when I can.

When they weren’t together, which happened to be most of my life, my dad spent time with other women I would see in passing. One crazy one who got mad at me for stealing his attention when I was eight—they didn’t last much longer than that. One nice one who used to comb my hair in the shower, and went on to become the mother of my younger brother, who looks like my father on a good day and acts like him on a bad day, all of the fire and fury and the softness of the eyes, wrapped up neat in the gangly body of a middle schooler. I don’t talk to my brother. What does a twelve-year-old who simultaneously hates and idolizes his father want with a twenty-one-year-old who hates that they can’t hate their father?

After those two women came a handful of others. My older half-sister’s birth mother, who remarried after seventeen years so she could be brought to Canada, and a Romanian woman whom my father took to Paris instead of calling me on my birthday. The Paris thing, while particularly sour, feels better when I rationalize it with the knowledge that he was probably off on a secret mission he couldn’t tell me about, and the lack of birthday wishes was because he couldn’t lose focus on his mark. The Romanian was probably his handler.

This paper trail of housewives isn’t enough to have led me to believe that my father is a hitman. Hitmen are normally cool, calm, and collected, none of which are qualities my father possesses. He, who is seen more often than not stumbling drunk and loud and not at all stealthy, has the grace of a newborn foal. I’ve seen him spew chunks into some poor bastard’s front garden and later demand my mother pull the car over just so he could kiss her. But he’s a good dancer. And maybe that’s a bad comparison, but dancing is not unlike fighting. Quick, agile steps across the floor, a flourish of the hands becomes a jab with a knife. The slick one-two morphs into a sidestep from an uppercut, a Neo-Matrix dodge of a bullet. Naturally, if he’s a good dancer, I figure he could probably throw a few punches. I’d like to say I wouldn’t know, but I do. The slipper-to-dagger pipeline is a lot more linear than it seems on a surface level. Moreover, his violence has always been pinpointed and unexpected.

Somewhere between the ages of three and five, I used a stepstool to get up to the top drawer and used the kitchen scissors to cut off a sizable portion of my hair. Dad didn’t like that very much. He proved so by making me watch as he used the same scissors to disembowel my teddy the same way I imagine he’s done to countless Big Bads all across the globe. Such skilled precision was only acquired by those who knew the proper and vulgar means of evisceration, and I can’t seem to remember, but part of me thinks he delighted in it.

Of course, hitmen usually have motives—a dead girlfriend or dog, a butchered family, growing up in an orphanage and being adopted into a super secret faction of the best of the best to drop bodies for crypto. Something impactful needs to happen to someone for that switch to flip in them, for the sadness to turn into bloodlust and the alcoholism to take full(er) effect. But he doesn’t have any of those, or at least, I don’t know him to. Then again, his dad died when I was young. It might have been natural causes, but I figure it was probably that his liver had rotted right out of his body. I remember how my dad came to my house crying and snotting all over himself and that I didn’t know then how to comfort him, even as his tears stained my nightgown and the replacement Teddy I’d gotten back from the toy doctor. I’d ruined it again that night, when he put me on his shoulders for some semblance of comfort, and I’d whined because I was scared of being so high.

So, maybe my dad really is a hitman. The missions would explain the lack of attendance at my fifteen years of dance recitals and two graduations. The cold indifference I feel whenever he calls me crying to tell me he misses me and that it’s my job to show up is a side effect of the hardening I can only imagine happens when you kill people for a living. The alcoholism is a coping mechanism for the horrors my shriveled, pedestrian brain couldn’t begin to handle. The women are a cure for a wounded heart. And I’m just his daughter.

Maybe one day I’ll become a hitman too.