I put the tray down on the bedside table—an unpacked cardboard box labeled misc. #14—and noticed a pile of property prospectuses, which Mom read even when we weren’t planning to move.
I took my place next to Caitlin at the end.
“Budge up, fatty!” I said.
I shoved and wriggled, attempting to claim more pillow territory, wanting us to be silly, but Mom wasn’t playing. She was just still, waiting, tense. She began once we were settled.
“There is something important we have to talk about,” she said. “Something’s happened, and things might be a bit difficult for a while.”
Her eyes searched the room, while ours remained sealed on her face, on the ever-alert arch of her brow. We could see she was tired. Whatever she was trying to say had been with her through the night and the occasional discomposed dream.
“You’re not going to be able to see Dad for a while,” she began. “He had to leave the country for legal reasons, and I’m not sure how long he’ll be gone before he can resolve this.”
Caitlin and I were confused. “Legal reasons? What legal reasons?”
“I’m sorry, it’s going to be hard for me to explain everything to you right now, but—”
“Where’s Dad gone?” I interrupted.
“I don’t know where,” she said, looking from my face to Caitlin’s, a little tragedy between her eyes in the bracket of a wrinkle that appeared when she worried. She carried on clearly and precisely, as if she had practiced this on imaginary children in her head countless times already. She told us that Dad was in trouble with the police for something he had done back in California when we were both babies. She dismissed it as a “financial issue really, dodgy taxes…” trailing off in a way we recognized. Mom hates lying. She said “dodgy taxes” in the same halfhearted tone she used when trying to sneak us into Rated-12 movies. When the cashier asked if we were over twelve, she would say that we were “nearly twelve” even if we weren’t nearly twelve at all—like an inadequate lie was less unethical than an all-out lie. Nearly twelve didn’t get us into the movie, in just the same way that “dodgy taxes” didn’t cover what crime Dad had committed.
“We decided as a family that the best thing to do was leave the country for a short amount of time,” Mom continued, “maybe two, three years, until it all blew over. The plan was to go back eventually, back to California,” she said, her focus shifting inward, “but it didn’t work out that way.”
“Did he do something really bad?” Caitlin asked, and I shot her a wounded glance on Dad’s behalf.
“No, he never hurt anybody and he never would. But this is for him to explain to you when he’s ready,” she said with finality.
“But he wouldn’t just leave.” I felt my world crack. “He wouldn’t leave without saying something.”
The bracket between Mom’s eyes deepened for a moment, and her face looked set to crumble. “I know he would have wanted to, Ty, but I don’t think there was time,” and she kept talking, but I couldn’t listen anymore. I was stuck on this one thing, which I couldn’t believe was true. I couldn’t believe Dad was no longer in the tall white townhouse on Perrymead Street with the playroom in the attic where we had left him, but somewhere else completely, somewhere none of us knew. I couldn’t believe it, because my dad wouldn’t leave me. I knew he wasn’t just my dad, but that’s how I felt. I had always been closer to Dad than Caitlin or Evan. Mom told me that when Caitlin was born, as Dad’s first infant experience, he had watched from the sidelines as the bond between Mom and Cait grew, unsure how to participate, but by the time I came along, he took a more hands-on approach, cutting the umbilical cord himself, because he wanted to share in that bond. In that way, without it ever being decided, Caitlin was Mom’s baby and I belonged to Dad. Later, when Mom and Dad divorced, I was only four years old, not old enough to see how unhappy Mom had been; all I could see was that she made Dad leave, and now Dad was heartbroken and alone, and I took his side. I chose him. Dad was on my side too. He showed it with new toys and late nights and Coca-Cola and whatever games I wanted to play whenever I wanted to play them. He tied my shoelaces for me longer than he should have and cut the nails on my left hand. When Mom asked how recently I had washed, I answered, “Last time I was at Dad’s,” which was a lie. I hated baths and I hated having my hair brushed, and Dad didn’t make me do either. I thought he was about the coolest man I knew, up there with Freddie Mercury and Salvador Dalí, my two other heroes, whom I loved with unquestioning ferocity. All three of them, incidentally, had dark mustaches. He wasn’t like other girls’ boring old dads; he turned up at the school gates in his leather jacket driving a black BMW called the Batmobile with this renegade attitude. But most of all, I knew Dad loved me, and I couldn’t accept that he had gone without saying goodbye.
I remembered the last time I had seen him. I had gone down to London on my own. Lana was there too. She was twenty-two then and beautiful in an immaculate way, petite and neatly put together, with a whispering Irish accent and a cigarette always in hand. I didn’t think much about her yet; she was just another of Dad’s girlfriends, like Mindy or Masha, except this one didn’t have a daughter that would throw Playmobils in my eye.
Dad had put me to bed, and he and Lana stayed up to watch a movie. I crept out of bed and sat at the top of the stairs, from where I could see down to the living room, the back of his head, balding, and hers, blond, the glow from the TV screen reflected off the glass coffee table. I had crept out of bed because I felt this sudden sadness like I missed Dad even though he was right there, downstairs. As long as I could see him, whatever this feeling was didn’t mean anything. He caught me hovering, and I was crying, and I told him I had something in my eye so he would spend the next few minutes looking, pulling one lid over the other, washing it out with Optrex when I said it was still sore, and then I couldn’t think of any more excuses, so I was put back in bed.
The next morning, when he drove me back to Bradford on Avon, I thought about saying something, saying “Dad, I had this feeling last night like I missed you even though you were right there.” But these weren’t words I could form in my head, just an impression of loss, which stayed with me. I got out of the car, and he said, “Can’t wait till next time,” which meant nothing to me now that he was gone.
* * *
Mom told us other things too on that morning, equally incomprehensible. She told us that Kane was not our real name, and Dad wasn’t called Martin. Just to make matters more complicated, Caitlin and I didn’t have the same surname either. Before we were born, Mom had made a deal with Dad that she would agree to have their son circumcised—if they were to have a son—on the condition that the second child, whatever the sex, would take her surname. She didn’t see why her name should be consigned to history just because she was a woman. They never had a son anyway, but Caitlin was a Glaser like Dad, I was a Wetherall like Mom, and Evan had his papa’s surname.
“I know this is a lot for you to take in,” Mom said. “I also know your father loves you both very much and would never want to be separated from you like this.”
“Have you spoken to him?” I asked, hopeful.
“No, I haven’t,” she said firmly. She was choosing her words carefully. “The police were here looking for him too. They told me that when they turned up at his house last week, he was already gone, and that’s all I know.”
She was lying again. We both knew she was lying, and we also knew that we weren’t to ask why.
“What’s going to happen now?” Caitlin asked. “Are you in trouble too?”
“No, no.” Mom reached over and gave Caitlin’s head a reassuring stroke. “I don’t know how serious the police are about finding your father, and I guess he probably doesn’t know either. I imagine he’ll lay low for a bit until he can come to some sort of arrangement with them to turn himself in.”
If she was angry with Dad, she didn’t show it. This was a conversation she must have spent our entire childhood hoping s
he would never need to have with us. The only edge of resentment we felt from her was in her insistence that she wouldn’t divulge any details of his crimes. We accepted this, and we never asked her again.
Mom ended the conversation by pressing upon us the importance of secrecy. “I don’t want the other parents to find out they have the daughter of America’s Most Wanted at their fancy-schmancy school and have you thrown out,” she said to me.
She climbed out of bed. “I’m going to make some breakfast. Hungry?”
We both looked at her blankly as Caitlin pulled the blanket back down around us.
“Aren’t we going to school?” I asked.
“I think, all things considered, we probably deserve a day off, don’t you?” she said with forced cheerfulness, and then she was gone, present only by the sounds she made in the kitchen downstairs.
Caitlin and I lay for some time in silence, as our tea became tepid. Cookies uneaten. Crumpled bedsheets. A row of clammy calves.
We talked about it later. She told me how when she last went through her own box of precious things—there were fewer things in her box; she was less attached to things—she had found a certificate from our time in France awarding her and Evan a ski school prize. Only, on the certificate he wasn’t called Evan. He was called Daniel. Daniel Kane. She had asked Evan back then why, and he had shrugged it off. “Do you think he always knew?” she asked me. I didn’t know. I didn’t remember him being Daniel.
“God, do you remember,” Cait continued, “Dad used to travel separately to us whenever we flew? I guess it was in case he got in trouble. He used to go first … no, no, we went on the plane first, and we would all meet on the other side.” She spoke as if this was all a great revelation. “That must have been why Mom came on holiday with us even after they’d broken up. Remember she came to Club Med that time? So she would be there to take us through security.” Cait gave a snort of surprise, like she couldn’t quite believe she hadn’t worked this all out before.
She always had to make sense of everything. Like it was the unknown that scared her most. But the unknown didn’t bother me. I didn’t need to fit the pieces together. I just wanted everything to go back to how it was before.
3
The next day we went back to school as if nothing had happened. Mom woke me up at 7 am with a cup of tea and a kiss on the head. We didn’t usually get head kisses. Normally, she opened the curtains and said “Don’t go back to sleep” as she continued on to Caitlin’s turret, followed by “Drink your tea before it gets cold,” shouted up the stairs, and later still, “Oi, get out of bed, you lazy sluts!” which usually had the desired effect.
That’s just how Mom does affection. When she was five years old, she was sent to a Jesuit boarding school from Calcutta, where she was born, her parents having remained there after the war—her father worked for the East India Trading Company. A chubby, blond, wide-eyed mushroom with a pudding-bowl haircut, she remained in one boarding school or another until she eloped (except for a brief spell at day school in London once her parents had returned from India). She spent a lot of time being punished by the nuns for talking too much, or for using the Urdu words her ayah had taught her, or for just being a non-Jesuit in a school full of Jesuits. They would drag her bed into the drafty long corridor where she would sleep alone and terrified, the Virgin Mary illuminated with a candle above the vaulted doorway. The nuns weren’t big on idle chitchat or hugs. Mom isn’t big on idle chitchat or hugs either. She never felt the need to coo or fuss over us like other mothers. We’re generally given affectionate smacks, much like you give a dog, a series of little slaps on our thigh. I’ve seen Granny do the same to Mom, and now my siblings and I have inherited it too. It’s an aggressive form of loving. Head kisses, however, are reserved for marked moments of affection or contrition, like now. That kiss on the head told me she felt bad, and I was glad of it. It wasn’t clear whom I should be angry at for letting this happen, but I was angry, and Mom would suffer by fault of proximity.
I was dropped off at school, and I disappeared in the throng of two hundred identically dressed girls, a swarm of blue sweaters. I felt dislocated from them and from myself.
The teacher called my name at registration.
“Tyler Kane?”
“Present.”
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
TYLER E. KANE was sewn in bright red capitals on the nametag of each item of my uniform. It was on the front of the exercise books I opened at the beginning of every class. It was called out by teachers multiple times a day, and every time I answered “Present,” I felt a pang; a pang almost impossible to dismantle, but something close to guilt or complicity.
I had never met another girl called Tyler. Mom gave me Elizabeth as a middle name, in case I didn’t grow into the sort of girl for whom a boy’s name like Tyler made sense. But I felt like a Tyler, and I was proud of my name: Tyler Elizabeth Kane.
But suddenly I wasn’t that girl anymore. She didn’t really exist. We’d made her up along with the rest of the Kane family, but we had pretended to be them for so long now that none of us could remember who we were before, least of all me. We had to carry on as if we were still the Kane family, telling the same stories we had always told—only now I knew they were untrue.
Before we learned that Dad was a criminal, I had lied without thinking about it. When perceptive parents questioned some aspect of our childhood that didn’t make sense, I made something up—it was second nature. Sometimes I worry I made this all up, that my childhood wasn’t the way I remember it being, and when that happens, I go back to that box of precious things, now a wooden trunk that was once my mother’s boarding-school tuck box, and I look at the name tag in my old school shirt to remind me—TYLER E. KANE sewn in bright red block capitals.
* * *
At 3:30 pm Mom picked me up around the corner from school as usual. She didn’t like to do battle with the other mothers in their big shiny cars. I had an assisted place, which meant we paid reduced school fees, and even though I hadn’t told the other girls, they knew from my secondhand uniform and packed school lunches. Mom liked to call the other mothers Hairdos, the type of women who got up at 5 am to do their makeup before Mr. Hairdo was out of bed, in preparation for five minutes of standing at the school gates when they could waft and sneer at the other Hairdos and scratch away at their place in the pecking order with a high-heeled claw. Mom refused to be part of it. I had begged her to let me change schools again, to go to the same school as Caitlin, where they didn’t wear uniforms and there were boys, but she told me I’d be grateful for the education one day, an education we couldn’t afford without the assisted place. I didn’t see why I couldn’t get an education without being judged on the type of school shoes I wore and whether I’d ever kissed a boy, which I hadn’t and I suspected might never happen.
In the car driving home, it was just Mom and me, and I let all the questions I had about Dad come out at once, until suddenly—and I don’t know what incited it—Mom lifted her hands off the wheel in an expression of shock and turned the radio up to full blast, silencing me with painful static ribbons of conversation crackling through white noise. She pulled over and looked at me so I could read her lips.
“Don’t talk about Dad,” she whispered, the radio still blasting.
Don’t talk about Dad, she mouthed again, just in case I hadn’t got it.
I nodded, my hands over my ears, grimacing.
She sank a little in her seat, turned down the radio, and tuned in to BBC Radio 4 News Hour.
Evan was home for the weekend from boarding school. He called out from the living room as we arrived. I stood in the doorway looking at him slouched in front of the TV as if nothing had changed at all. He was sixteen now, and from being a chubby kid with a mullet and a pierced ear, he had grown thinner and taller all of a sudden, his hair and piercing tidied up for strict school masters. He was an almost grown-up. I wanted to talk to him too, to ask if he had always known and what e
xactly it was he did know, and if Dad was a criminal, did that mean we were all criminals—but Mom’s warning stayed with me.
He looked up. “You okay?”
I nodded numbly.
He seemed about to say something but turned back to the screen instead.
“Star Trek’s on; take a pew.”
He lifted his feet to make room for me on the sofa. I sat uncomfortably in my school coat, because I felt too tired to take it off, staring blankly at the TV. Evan farted, trapping me to the sofa with his feet so I couldn’t move away, and I whacked him and told him he was gross, and then life felt a little more normal.
* * *
That weekend we all went for a walk together. Down to the end of Barton Orchard where the cul-de-sac turned into a footpath and wound its way through a small wood, over the railway track and out into the open green fields. Slowly the sound of traffic gave way to the River Avon beside us, our feet squelching in mud as we tried not to complain.
“This is nice, isn’t it,” Evan said sarcastically, struggling to sidestep puddles without getting his sneakers muddy, but Mom had stopped. We turned back to her. She was resting by a gate looking pensive.
We gathered around, Caitlin and I perching on the gate, while Evan tried to unbalance us, swinging it back and forth, until Mom got our attention: “Kids.” She looked around at the empty fields, her eyes flicking cautiously about us. “I know we haven’t talked much about what’s going on, and I know this isn’t easy—Dad going off like he has—but there are a few more things you should know. When I said I was at Granny’s a few weeks ago, that wasn’t exactly true. Those two people you saw in the front room were from Scotland Yard.”
“Scotland Yard?” Caitlin asked.
“Who’s Scotland Yard?”
“They’re like the FBI, but English,” Evan explained.
“Well, not quite, but yes. They’re working with the FBI to investigate your father’s case.”
“The FBI?” This I understood from movies. This was definitely bad.
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