Brian Kilpatrick could be described in many ways: a family man, a mortgage broker, a graduate of Northwestern University, and the son of a pipe-fitter. But what I remember most about Brian was that he was an “outside dad”. In the end, it came to define him.
The concept of an “outside dad” was first explained to me by Brian’s wife, Dina Kilpatrick, when I was a ten-year-old boy visiting their son Brandon, a school friend of mine. I remember my mother taking me to the Kilpatrick home on a sunny afternoon in 1995 for what was then called a “play date”. The family’s house was a two-story colonial situated about three miles up the main road from us, in a newer, nicer development.
I can still remember getting out of the car and noticing Brandon’s dad – Mr. Kilpatrick – skulking around the shrubs at the periphery of the property, seemingly in his own world. He must have been in his forties back then, although he feels older in my memory. This was my first sighting of Mr. Kilpatrick, and I recall that although my mother and I both waved at him, he did not acknowledge our presence at all. I thought it was a little odd, but my mother was unphased, and all was quickly forgotten when we greeted Brandon and his mom on the front porch.
That first play date with Brandon went well. I recall being fascinated by his family’s house because it had a staircase, a feature my own single-story home lacked. Brandon and I spent the afternoon playing Nintendo, screwing around with squirt guns in the back yard, and getting into the type of general mischief that ten-year-old boys are expected to. After a few hours of fun, we sat down for a lunch prepared by Mrs. Kilpatrick. It was during this meal that I first asked about Brandon’s dad.
I couldn’t help but notice that hours had passed since my arrival, and Mr. Kilpatrick hadn’t come inside or said hello even once. And as we ate the tuna sandwiches Dina had prepared, I could see him outside the kitchen window, standing on the lawn with his eyes closed, sniffing the breeze. It struck me that he’d spent hours out there doing nothing at all.
“How come Brandon’s dad has been outside all day?” I asked Mrs. Kilpatrick. It was an innocent question which any guest would’ve come to eventually, given the circumstances. The man in the yard was hard to ignore.
Mrs. Kilpatrick and Brandon exchanged a glance in the quiet that followed. “Well, Brandon’s dad is, you see…” Mrs. Kilpatrick trailed off. “He’s just kind of an outside dad.”
“An outside dad?”
“Yes, that’s the best way I can put it. Look, you know how some families have inside cats and outside cats? Cats that either curl up on the couch all day, or cats that can’t be kept in, the ones who roam around the neighborhood attending to their private business?”
I was aware of such cats. My own cat Midnight was an outside cat. I nodded that I understood, and Mrs. Kilpatrick smiled warmly and took a sip of her tea. I think she needed a moment to arrange her thoughts.
“Well,” she continued after a moment’s contemplation, “Brandon’s dad is like an outside cat, really. Except he’s not a cat. He’s a dad.”
“Oh,” I said, looking out the window at the man in the yard. “Has he always been an outside dad?”
Mrs. Kilpatrick frowned. “No, I can’t say that he has. I believe he started spending more time outside when Brandon was in second grade. A few hours here and there at first, but eventually it became whole days at a time. Before I knew it, he was sleeping outside three nights a week.”
“My dad loves the outside,” mumbled Brandon through a sandwich bite. “He’s really good at climbing trees.”
“Don’t speak with your mouth full,” said Mrs. Kilpatrick.
I was trying to make sense of the whole thing. My own father worked at an insurance company, and was probably what would be considered an “inside dad”. He took me to school every morning, went to work, and came home for dinner around 6 PM. This was his routine for years, and it never really changed. If my father did spend time outside, it was only to get the mail or take the trash cans to the street. I guess I thought all dads were like that. I never considered that if my father was mostly an inside dad, someone else’s father could be a mostly outside dad. A whole other kind of dad, fundamentally different.
I looked out the kitchen window again. Mr. Kilpatrick was sunning himself in the yard now, laying on the grass with his eyes closed. Unlike my perpetually weary and agitated father, Brandon’s dad didn’t seem to have a care in the world.
“He’s probably dreaming about catching mice,” observed Mrs. Kilpatrick.
-
That night at the dinner table, my parents were talking about a family from church who had discovered their father was maintaining a secret family in some other state. He had another wife, other children, the whole deal. Apparently, this other family were as unaware of the situation as the man’s first family, the ones from our town. This dad was splitting his time between all these people, pretending to be exclusive to both parties, and had been keeping up the act for years.
Each family even had a daughter with the same name – Alicia. I’ve since learned that this practice is called “bigamy”, and it seems like a lot to chew on for one man. But as crazy as this story was, I was thinking about a different dad entirely.
“Did you know that Brandon’s dad is an outside dad?” I interrupted my parents. “He spends most of his time outside, like a cat. The whole time I was playing at their house, he never came inside even once.”
My mother and father exchanged a look.
“Mr. Kilpatrick is… an interesting man,” my mother hesitated, looking for reassurance from my dad. “He’s decided to take a unique path in life.”
“They have a big two-story house, though, and he doesn’t even want to be inside of it,” I said.
“He’s not gonna have that house for long if he keeps up the horse shit,” erupted my father, setting down his fork with an irritated clang and picking up a glass of beer. “That irresponsible lout is worse than a drunk, worse than a cheater even. I don’t know how Dina puts up with it.”
My dad was clearly upset thinking about the Kilpatrick family, but my mother disapproved of him speaking so candidly about my friend’s parents in front of me.
“But it’s really none of our business now, is it Phillip?” she said. “Besides, Dina’s a nurse, and they do well for themselves. She’s been supporting the family for this long, I’m sure she knows what she’s doing.”
My father grunted into his beer and took a long drink.
“Does Mr. Kilpatrick have a job?” I asked.
“Brian used to work at Steinman Mortgage,” said my father after swallowing. “But he stopped coming to work about two years ago. He simply left one day and never came back, just like that – poof! After a few weeks they canned his lazy ass. Or that’s my understanding of the situation, anyway.”
“Sometimes adults make funny decisions, Robert.”
My mother could normalize anything.
-
That night in bed, I couldn’t stop thinking about Brandon’s dad. Did he ever come inside to eat? Or did Mrs. Kilpatrick put a dish on the porch for him? And didn’t Mr. Kilpatrick like TV shows, hot meals, and warm baths, all the charms of indoor living? What about sitting by a fireplace, or catching up with his son over dinner? Surely, he must come inside for something. As my sleepless night went on, I continued working over the nitty-gritty questions, the granular details of how life as an outside dad worked.
As I lay pondering this unusual man, a bigger question occurred to me: why did Mr. Kilpatrick want to be outdoors to begin with? Were the sun and wind and rain really that much better than sitting in a house? Or, I wondered, was he trying to get away from something that was indoors?
I realized I had more questions for Brandon and his mother, and I determined to ask them at the first available opportunity.
-
The next weekend I told my mother that I was going to ride my bike around the neighborhood with the kids up the street. She waved me away, busy on the phone with one of her girlfriends. I packed a juice box and some string cheese into my school bag, and shouldered the load as I pushed my Schwinn down the driveway. It had been a full seven days since I had gone over to Brandon’s house, and every day since I’d been electric with curiosity about his father. Mr. Kilpatrick. The Outside Dad.
I’d made a few attempts to question Brandon about his father at school, but he seemed disinterested and eventually even hostile to my inquiries. “Why are you so curious about my dad?!” he finally snapped on Wednesday afternoon. “Just leave me alone!”
It had become obvious that I would have to get my answers the hard way, which is why I found myself pedalling in the direction of the Kilpatrick residence that Saturday afternoon.
The route my mom took to Brandon’s house was along our town’s main road, but I didn’t want to risk being seen by a neighbor or anyone else who might tell my parents I’d gone so far away. That would get me grounded like nobody’s business. Instead, I took residential side streets, and found myself in Brandon’s neighborhood within a half hour.
Because this was an unannounced visit to the Kilpatrick household, I slowed at the end of their block and tried to see if Brandon or his mother were in the front yard. I had no real excuse to be on their street, and was hoping I could somehow speak with Brandon’s father without having the rest of the family know of my presence. But from what I could tell, none of the Kilpatricks were outside – not even Mr. Kilpatrick himself.
I crept closer, alive with anxiety that someone would spot me and ask what I was doing there, ten-years-old and acting suspicious in a neighborhood I did not live in. How would I explain if Brandon caught me on his street? He would know, I was convinced, that I was there looking for his dad. I could not allow that to happen.
But neither Brandon or his dad were anywhere to be seen, not in the yard, not on the street, nowhere at all. Was it possible that Mr. Kilpatrick had gone inside his house? It stood to reason that he probably went inside to use the bathroom once in a while, or make a phone call. I had assumed that much. Yet I somehow expected he would be right where I left him the previous weekend, sunning himself in the yard.
I tried to maintain a low profile and keep an eye on the Kilpatrick house for about 20 minutes, to see if anyone came or left. But when no one appeared, I got bored and set off for home. My brain ached at the idea of having to go a whole other week without answers to the questions swirling in my head.
Blessedly, I did not have to endure such a fate, because as I was leaving Brandon’s neighborhood, I caught sight of his father slinking along a fence by the bank of a concrete wash. His gait was languid and carefree, as though he didn’t intend to be on this particular street at this particular time, but his feet had just sort of taken him here.
“Mr. Kilpatrick!” I called to him. Brandon's dad perked up, and turned around to look at me. He was dressed in soiled khakis and a tucked-in collared shirt that had seen better days. “Mr. Kilpatrick, I’m Brandon’s friend from school! Can I talk to you for a minute?”
Mr. Kilpatrick looked at me with curious, almond-shaped eyes. Then, with the sudden grace and fluidity of an acrobat, he swung himself up into a tree, and lay his body longways on a limb. He remained there, regarding me with an impish grin, but said nothing.
Having inadvertently treed Brandon’s father, I found myself tripping over what to say. I walked up underneath the limb he was laying on, and cleared my throat.
“Um, hi Mr. Kilpatrick, I’m sorry to bother you,” I started. “I… heard that you like to be outside.”
An awkward silence ensued during which Mr. Kilpatrick simply stared at me. The pressure of his gaze proved too much, and I was forced to continue.
“But more than that, I, um, heard that you pretty much live outside now? Like all the time? I want to know: do you ever go inside anymore? Like to take a bath or eat dinner?”
His only answer was that opaque smile. I noticed he had bits of leaves his hair, and a scruffy, half-grown beard that made him appear somewhat lupine. Looking at him in that tree, it suddenly struck me that no one had ever mentioned whether Mr. Kilpatrick spoke at all anymore. Maybe he had given up speech along with living indoors?
“Why are you doing this, Mr. Kilpatrick?” I tried. “Why are you out in the neighborhood all day? Don’t you wanna be Brandon’s dad anymore?”
Mr. Kilpatrick’s face slackened into a mask of consternation. He had something on his mind. When he finally spoke, it was like a hiss – the high-pressure flow of thoughts escaping a narrow exit.
“Did you know that birds have names for themselves and for one another? Names that man has never heard, and no human tongue could ever speak, because they are whispered in the language of the outdoors and of nature and of the world that mankind has left behind?”
Mr. Kilpatrick’s eyes searched mine, looking for understanding, almost pleading. I was dumbfounded, as any ten-year-old would be, and tried to fathom what a response to this bizarre statement would even begin to look like. Perhaps realizing that I was mentally paralyzed, Mr. Kilpatrick swung down from the tree and landed effortlessly on the sidewalk. He said no more, and moseyed away as I stood stupefied.
-
Two weeks passed, and I began to regret ever seeking out Brandon’s dad. I’d been so obsessed with finding him and learning about his lifestyle that I had neglected to consider my friendship with Brandon. The last time we spoke was when he snapped at me for asking too many questions about his dad, and things hadn’t been the same between us since. We didn’t socialize at school anymore, and he gave me a wide berth whenever we crossed paths. I could sense, even at ten, that a social boundary had been crossed, and I was the transgressor.
On the twenty-first day of our falling out, I found Brandon crying in the boys’ room during recess. I’d never seen him in this state before, and felt obligated, given recent events, to come to his aide.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Why are you crying?”
Brandon gave me a look that let me know I was the last person he wanted to see. “It’s nothing,” he said, turning his face from mine.
“Come on, Brandon, I know you’re mad at me, but I’m not the bad guy. I just want to help. Tell me what's bothering you.”
Brandon wiped a sleeve across his reddened face and looked at me with wet eyes. “It’s my dad,” he said. "He's missing."
-
What Brandon told me was that his father hadn't come home in two weeks, roughly the same amount of time since I'd encountered him in the tree. Brandon obviously didn’t know that I had seen his dad and spoken with him, and when I told him about our conversation, he got even more upset. But through his starts and stops, I learned what had happened.
Apparently, Dina Kilpatrick became concerned when Brian failed to return home for three nights in a row. She and Brandon drove around for hours looking for him, but to no avail. They took to stapling up “Lost Dad” posters in the neighborhood, hoping somebody might call in a sighting of Mr. Kilpatrick. They contacted hospitals, the police, and local shelters, asking if an unknown dad had come in, perhaps hit by a car or mauled by coyotes. But there was nothing - no one had seen Mr. Kilpatrick. Days passed in this fashion, the family living in a quiet, answerless hell, until Brandon finally broke down in the restroom at school, telling me his story.
I walked my friend to his mother’s car at the end of the day, and noticed that Dina looked thin and rather fraught in the driver’s seat of her minivan. She smiled at me, but there was no happiness in her. It was the nervous, unconvincing smile of a person falling apart at the seams. And as I watched them drive away, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was somehow responsible for their misery. Was it my talk with Mr. Kilpatrick that prompted his disappearance? Perhaps there was some cryptic message hidden in his words that could give a clue as to his whereabouts?
“Did you know that birds have names for themselves and for one another? Names that man has never heard, and no human tongue could ever speak, because they are whispered in the language of the outdoors and of nature and of the world that mankind has left behind?”
I couldn’t make sense of this statement except for what it appeared to mean literally: that birds don’t speak English and mankind has lost touch with nature. But so what?
-
Even though Brandon had confided his troubles in me, it didn’t reignite our friendship in the way I had hoped. My hunch that he laid some of the blame for his father’s disappearance at my feet seemed to be correct – although I still for the life of me couldn’t figure out my role in it. I only knew that I had the same niggling feeling Brandon did, that this was all somehow my fault. This led to guilt, and I resolved that, if indeed my conversation had driven Mr. Kilpatrick further into the wilds, it was up to me to bring him back.
The school year was over by the time I could put my plan into action. The freedom of summer vacation allowed me to pursue the reunion of the Kilpatrick family as a full-time job, especially since my parents would be at work every day. I was free to roam the town on my bike, unimpeded by their concerns about where I was going and what I was doing.
Every day of summer became much the same for me. I would wait for my parents to leave the house at 8:30 AM, and then pack my supplies for the day. A water bottle, some Capri Suns, a few energy bars, and a couple dollars in coins pilfered from my mother’s purse or my father’s coin tray, in case I needed to make a phone call or use a vending machine. And because I was ten-years-old, I also packed a six-shot Nerf revolver, for use against any pedophile or vicious dog that got in my way.
I spent these days systematically combing the neighborhoods of my town, starting with Brandon’s street and moving outward in concentric circles. This took a long time, because the suburban sprawl went for many miles in every direction, and Mr. Kilpatrick could have gone in any one of them. But after two weeks, I found an encouraging clue: about five miles east of my neighborhood (in the opposite direction of the Kilpatrick home), I found one of Mr. Kilpatrick’s shoes in a culvert, partially sunk into mud. I knew it belonged to him because I had never seen another like it – a blue and grey New Balance tennis shoe with two Velcro straps instead of laces.
Of course, it was possible that this was another man’s shoe. But I knew in my heart that it wasn’t, in the way that you just know when a coincidence isn’t really a coincidence. And while the shoe alone wasn’t much to go on, it did indicate that I was searching in the right area of town. I was surprised to learn Mr. Kilpatrick had wandered this far without being noticed, but then again, he was sly and elusive, like some kind of suburban cryptid.
The other thing that surprised me was that Mr. Kilpatrick had journeyed into a rougher area of town, a world away from his two-story colonial and its tree-lined street. Here the houses were two-bedroom bungalows and dilapidated trailers, places where blue-collar workers beat their wives and let their children run barefoot in the street. Why would Mr. Kilpatrick want to be here?
I began stalking this strange neighborhood every day. If my parents knew what I was up to they would have killed me, but this was long before cell phones or GPS, and I was able to keep my activities a secret. Many days passed as I pedaled my bike up and down the pot-hole ridden roads and dirt alleys that constituted that awful part of town. I wasn’t sure what clue I was looking for, but I felt within myself that Mr. Kilpatrick was here, somewhere, hidden from my view. I just needed to pick up his trail.
And then one day, as I sat drinking a Capri Sun on a bus stop during a break from my patrolling, I saw him.
Across the street from where I sat, a woman came out of a double-wide mobile home and set a sandwich down on her porch. She went back inside, and five minutes later, Mr. Kilpatrick appeared from the woods that abutted her trailer park. He looked absolutely feral, even more so than the first time we spoke. Sticks and leaves were still in his hair, and he was indeed missing one of his shoes. His pants were torn at the knees and his button-up shirt was open, exposing a thin and malnourished frame underneath.
I didn’t move – I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Mr. Kilpatrick paused about five meters from the tree line, sniffing the air and looking over his shoulder. He seemed hesitant, alert, perhaps trying to detect any predators who might be nearby. After a few moments of this caution he appeared satisfied, and continued his lazy strut towards the mobile home with the sandwich on the porch, where he proceeded to sit and eat.
It was clear to me now: another family was feeding Mr. Kilpatrick. He'd left Brandon and Dina and found new people, here in the poor part of town. He wasn’t eaten by coyotes or hit by a car – he’d simply found a new life with a family who let him live outside full-time. I was outraged; how could a man simply abandon his wife and son to live like a wretch in the woods? Didn’t Mr. Kilpatrick know the misery he was causing his family on the other side of town? The tears, the anxiety, the hours driving around searching shelters and police stations, the sleepless nights and the pain of not knowing what had happened to him?
If this man had any shred of decency to him, he would return home apologize for all the hurt he was causing the people who loved him most. I decided that I would be the one to tell him this - but by the time I came to this conclusion, Brian Kilpatrick – the Outside Dad – had slunk back into the woods, licking his lips and leaving behind an empty plate of bread crumbs. I knew it was too late to catch him that day, but I realized what I had to do.
I returned the next morning with a shovel, and dug a hole just inside the woods Mr. Kilpatrick had emerged from, far enough into the trees that no one in the mobile home park would see me, but close enough that Mr. Kilpatrick would be likely to come that way at some point.
I came back again, day after day, making the hole deeper and deeper. I repeated this process for a week and a half until I had produced a hole about eight feet deep and six feet wide, large enough for a man to fall into and have trouble getting out again. Each night I would cover the hole with a tarp I brought from home, and scatter leaves across the top so no one would find it.
On the tenth day, I asked my mother to make me a turkey sandwich before she left for work. I tucked this sandwich away in my backpack and rode the five miles to the hole in the woods, where I carefully placed it on a paper plate and used a stick to push it to the middle of the leaf-covered tarp. Then I left.
I returned as soon as I could the following morning, and sure enough, there was Mr. Kilpatrick, sprawled at the bottom of my cleverly laid trap. He stared up at me, blinking, covered in leaves and filth. He must have slept the night in that hole, since the sandwich was gone and desperate markings on the dirt walls evidenced multiple failed escape attempts. Looking at him now, defeated and caught, I almost felt bad for the man. But then I remembered Brandon and Dina.
“Mr. Kilpatrick, do you know how worried your family has been these past months?” I asked him. “They think you’re dead, you know. They’ve been grieving for you.”
Mr. Kilpatrick licked the back of his hand and pushed long, tangled hair out of his face. “I was dead. Now I'm alive.”
I thought about this for a moment.
“But what kind of life is this? You look sick, your clothes are falling apart, and I can smell you from up here. Don’t you want to go home and get a hot meal and a bath? See your wife and son?”
Mr. Kilpatrick looked down and seemed to be concentrating on something. After a moment, his eyes returned to mine.“No.”
“Well, I don’t think you have a choice. I’ve trapped you, haven’t I? And now I’m going to go get your family and bring them here, so they can see what’s happened to you and take you back home.”
Mr. Kilpatrick scratched his face with long, yellowed nails. “I guess you can try. But you’re only going to break their hearts again. Brian Kilpatrick is dead, like I told you. He’s been dead for years. He was dead when he worked at the mortgage company. He was dead when he went to school plays. He was dead at the dinner table and dead at the dentist and dead making love to his wife. What you want to bring home is only a ghost. And ghosts don’t raise families - they haunt them. Please, just let me go. Let them go.”
I didn’t know what to say. My first instinct was to yell at Mr. Kilpatrick, to jump down into the hole and slap him across the face. But instead, as I stood there thinking, I found that my anger was dissipating. I had been so focused on making things right with Brandon, on fixing what I had perceived as being my part in Mr. Kilpatrick’s disappearance, that I had lost sight of the idea that maybe I didn’t have anything to do with it at all. Maybe our conversation from months ago was simply a coincidence.
It dawned on me that Mr. Kilpatrick’s actions might have nothing to do with Brandon or Dina, either. Although they were the obvious victims of his vanishing, it was possible that Mr. Kilpatrick had disappeared from their lives long before he became an Outside Dad. Maybe he had a point – what was it that I was trying to return to them? A man who lived in their yard and occasionally came to the porch for food? Was Mr. Kilpatrick’s contempt for his life something worth bringing back into theirs?
I opened my backpack. Inside was a long rope with fist-sized knots tied along its length at regular intervals. It was what I had used to climb in and out of the hole while I was digging it. I tied one end around the trunk of a nearby tree and returned to the precipice of the hole.
“If I let you go, what will you do?” I asked Mr. Kilpatrick.
Mr. Kilpatrick thought for a moment, and a wry smile twisted the corner of his mouth.
“I suppose I'll live.”
I tossed the coiled rope into the hole, my months-long crusade to return Brian Kilpatrick to his family disintegrating in an instant. As the skeletal, bearded creature climbed out of my trap, I stepped back and sat on a nearby rock. I didn’t know how to feel. There was relief, confusion, anger that I couldn’t make things right. But most of all I just felt a sense of finality. This was it. Brian would never return to the Kilpatricks. I would never be friends with Brandon again. And Dina would be left alone to sort through the wreckage of her life.
My part in the saga of this broken family ended in that moment... but there are two more incidents that I think are worth mentioning.
The first occurred a few weeks after I released Mr. Kilpatrick. I was riding my bike to the park when I noticed a sign stapled to a telephone pole. It read:
HELP: MISSING DAD
ANSWERS TO “TERRY”, LAST SEEN NEAR RANCHO CASITAS MOBILE HOME PARK. LIKES SANDWICHES, LAST SEEN 4/12/1996
IF FOUND PLEASE CALL MARTHA – 428-298-4387
The sign had a black and white photo of a disheveled man. It was Mr. Kilpatrick.
To my knowledge, this new family - the folks from the mobile home park - never found Brian Kilpatrick, or "Terry". But this time, I knew his vanishing had nothing to do with me, or our final encounter. If there was any small feeling of doubt as to what happened to him, I had a strange sort of answer two months later, when my father and I took a drive out of town to go fishing.
As our car came to a stoplight at the edge of civilization, the point where our community turned into wild marshlands and woods, I looked out the window and saw it: one blue and grey New Balance sneaker with two Velcro straps, torn and muddy, laying where the road turned into dirt, and the dirt turned into forest. The last of Brian Kilpatrick was here, soiled and torn, discarded at the edge of town. And out there, somewhere, was the Outside Dad.
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