No Way Home

by Tyler Wetherall

  “Did they arrest you?” Cait asked, horrified.

  “No, they just asked me some questions about Dad.”

  She was trying to temper our reactions.

  “What did they want to know?” Evan asked.

  “Where he is, when I last saw him, how often we spoke. Mainly they had questions about our shared finances from when we were married. Some bank accounts are still in both our names. Nothing I couldn’t answer.”

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “Well, as far as possible I told them the truth. I said I barely saw him since we separated, and we only spoke when it came to you kids. I said he’d recently moved house, and I didn’t have his new address or number—”

  “That’s not true,” Cait interrupted.

  “Well, he did just move house, so it was only a little lie.”

  “Why didn’t they just look in your phone book or something?” Evan asked.

  “I tore out the page while their backs were turned and flushed it down the toilet,” she said with a hint of pride.

  “Go, Mom!” Evan looked impressed.

  “What if you’d been caught?” I asked, worried.

  “I would have been in deep trouble,” she said.

  “How did they know where to look for him then?” Evan asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m guessing one of his scumbag friends ratted him out. As soon as they released me, I got word to him, and he must have left immediately. All I know is he wasn’t at the house when they turned up later that night, because they called me and were pretty pissed to have missed him.”

  “What happens if they take you away again?” Cait asked, and I realized that her anxieties were vested in the safety of the parent who remained with us, not the one who had gone. She was always practical like that. All this time worrying about Dad and I had never thought to be worried about Mom too.

  Mom paused, serious again. I turned away. I hated the sound of tension.

  “I imagine they will question me again at some point, but I’ll just have to go to the station in my own time, as long as I cooperate.”

  “Are you cooperating?” Cait pressed.

  “I am!” Mom replied, indignant for a moment. “Well, I am now. I don’t know where he is, do I? Listen, nothing is going to happen to me, or any of us, as long as I have anything to do with it, and I’d be having strong words with your father if they so much as try to arrest me.”

  “You’d have to find him first,” Caitlin said under her breath.

  “The important thing,” Mom said, guiding the conversation back to safe territory, “is that we are very careful from now on when talking about Dad. I don’t know for sure, and I don’t mean to scare you, but there is a possibility they bugged the phones and the car, most likely the house too, while I was at the station, so whatever we say about Dad we have to assume they can overhear.”

  “But if we don’t know where he is anyway, what are we not meant to talk about?” Evan asked with a half smile, and Mom rolled her eyes at him. I realized Cait was right: he had always known. I wondered why they’d told him and not us, and how he had managed to keep it a secret all these years.

  “Just don’t talk about him at all, okay? I made out like Dad was a small part of our lives, and that’s what we want them to believe. Don’t talk about the time you’ve spent with him, or holidays you’ve taken together, his friends, or whatever, in case something gives them a reason to want to talk to you kids, and I—”

  “They’re going to question us?” I interrupted.

  “Over my dead body.” She looked at each one of us in turn, and we quieted down. “We just have to be a little cautious. If anyone approaches and asks about Dad in school or anywhere, even if they look like a nice friendly lady or another parent asking you where your dad is, don’t talk to them. They’re a conniving bunch of bastards, and I wouldn’t put it past them to try something like that. And most important, don’t tell anyone!” she said, in an accusatory tone, as if we already had. “Do you all understand? Promise?”

  We nodded in unison.

  “Anything you want to ask? No?”

  We shook our heads and all the questions jangled about uncomfortably.

  “Okay, let’s go get some lunch.”

  4

  Caitlin noticed them first. She said she’d seen them outside her school. I didn’t believe her, and classified it with the other lies she told me, like if I bit on my knuckles and pulled hard enough on my fingers they would grow longer. I wanted to play the saxophone like Lisa Simpson, but the music teacher had told me my fingers were too short and had given me a recorder instead.

  A few days later I saw them too. A black car, polished and clean, with darkened windows, the type of car that might belong to the family of one of the pretty, netball-playing blond girls without toothpaste stains on their sweaters or ladders in their tights.

  Mom arrived to collect us, and I climbed into the backseat of Trevor (all our cars had names too). The black car followed us all the way home, stopping short of turning down the gravel path that led to Barton Orchard. That’s how I knew. That and by Mom’s eyes flicking to the rearview mirror one too many times.

  They must have hoped Dad would pick us up from school.

  Soon after, Mom decided I should take the bus instead. She said it was because I was old enough to get myself to school and why should she spend her days ferrying me back and forth like a bloody chauffeur. She managed the right tone of aggravation, but her eyes were sorry. She didn’t want me in the car if they picked her up.

  I looked out for them, convinced they were there. Convinced they had always been there. Detective Sergeant Andrew Sloane’s business card was pinned to our noticeboard alongside a timetable for after-school art classes. We crossed out Detective Sergeant and wrote Bastard. Bastard Andrew Sloane.

  * * *

  Caitlin was on the phone in her turret, the telltale telephone wire emerging from under her door, talking in near whispers to her first boyfriend. I wanted to know what a girlfriend said to a boyfriend on the phone for literally hours, and Cait wouldn’t tell me anything. And then I wondered if Scotland Yard knew these things. Were they really listening?

  Mom shouted up the stairs, “Grub’s up!” and Caitlin emerged for dinner. A strain had settled into our household like an unwanted family guest. Dinner was meant to be noisy, reaching and smacking and squabbling over the best bite—“Quiz!,” “Ego!,” “Speak now, or forever hold your peace!,” fork duels for the crispy bacon bits in the bottom of the pan, and through all of this a constant chattering. But it had settled into something quieter, something less sure of itself.

  The phone rang, and Mom harrumphed at Caitlin, saying as she walked over to pick it up, “Why does he always call as soon as we sit down to eat?” She answered, glaring across the table at Cait, but her expression fell away as her fingers felt for a pen from the clutter on the counter. Focused and serious, she wrote down a number on a blank page in her planner. “Yes, sure,” she said, and hung up, tearing the page out and putting it in her pocket. She came back to the table.

  “Who was it?” I asked.

  “A work thing,” she answered dismissively, referring to her part-time job at a small real estate agency in Bath. She moved the macaroni and cheese around her plate, lost in thought. We kept our eyes on her as the box of things not-to-be-discussed creaked and bulged.

  Some days later, I heard her go out at night, late, after we had gone to bed. Our house suddenly felt like a vulnerable place. I took a pillow to my window seat where I could see the front path and waited for her to return. I curled up there, the open curtain now allowing a little moonlight to cast the room in blue. My ears were acute to every night sound: bushes rustling, foxes screaming, occasionally a muffled truck passing in the distance.

  Time passed slowly. I didn’t know how late it was or how long I had been at the window waiting.

  It was dawn when I woke, stiff and cold, my nec
k cricked from sleeping against the hard window frame. The darkness had lifted from night but the color had not yet returned. I crept downstairs, and there was Mom, asleep in her never-ending bed. I climbed in and caught my breath to copy hers, rising and falling, until the rhythm of it sent me back to sleep.

  * * *

  Weeks passed with no word from Dad. I missed our weekends together in London when he was all ours. For two days of every fortnight he stopped everything else to spend time with us, saving up ideas over the days apart for things to do when we were together.

  He’d break us into an adventure park, the type with climbing frames and zip lines that are rented out for big groups. I remember his face so clearly from those days, his eyes bright as he held up the wire fence for us to crawl under. He’d set out an assault course, timing Cait, Ev, and me to see who could complete it faster. He would clap when we stood on our heads or catch our feet when we did handstands. We would have free rein of the place, and when we got caught he was never apologetic, laughing as we walked away from an angry security guard.

  One weekend he decided to turn the living room into an impromptu art gallery, clearing the walls of his own art collection to display our drawings. We charged his friends 50p at the door, poured them a glass of juice, and they walked around stopping to admire and comment, playing along. I sold a drawing of a cat stuck together with tape for £1.

  I tried to imagine what crime Dad might have committed. I wanted it to be something I could understand, something with consequences that Dad could never have predicted. I wanted him to be one of the good guys, and then what was happening would be okay. Dad had taken Cait, Evan, and me, one by one, for a birthday treat to see Les Misérables, and now I understood. He was preparing us to forgive him. He saw himself as Jean Valjean, fighting to make good on past mistakes, and that’s how he wanted us to see him too.

  I toyed with the possibilities. Could he have robbed a bank? Could he have killed someone? The image of Dad with a gun in his hand was so far removed from the dad I knew. The dad with a sweet tooth who insisted on having a whole box of Poppets to himself in the cinema; the dad I Lindy Hopped with in the front room to old 1950s records as he sang out of tune; the dad who spent hours, years, teaching me how to swim, how to ski, how to ride a bike, how to do front somersaults off a jetty, how to play tennis, how to play poker, how to shuffle a deck of cards in one hand, how to do long division, and how to make French toast for breakfast; and who didn’t give up on us even when we belly-flopped every time or when we kept failing math or when we sat on the ski slope crying because it was too steep. He would coax us up and we would get to the bottom together. How could this dad be a criminal too? And if he was, what did it mean? What did anything mean?

  * * *

  By the time my tenth birthday rolled around, I felt bereft. Not only bereft but set upon. They could hear what we said and see what we did and, as October reached its close, I was sure they knew everything we thought. I don’t know how often they came, but it doesn’t matter because the sensation of being watched didn’t go away. Of there being an imminent threat to our family.

  Mom came up my stairs singing “Happy Birthday” with a beautiful smile, lifting her rosebud cheeks up to her eyes. It said she wanted to make this day happy. And I wanted to be happy, to make her happy in turn.

  “I’ve got a surprise for you tonight,” she said, sitting on the end of my bed with a cautious look I had come to recognize.

  I raised my eyebrows in curiosity, propping myself up on my pillows. “Will I like it?”

  “I hope so,” she said. “Come on then, up you get. I’m making Ftatateeta’s toast.” She gave me an affectionate smack through the blankets and was gone. They used to make Ftatateeta’s toast at Serendipity in New York where Mom had worked as a waitress in the 1970s. She told us about the three queens who ran the place, the Tiffany lampshades, towering ice cream sundaes, and flamboyance—and we added it to our picture of Mom’s mysterious past. Ftatateeta’s toast was French toast with a layer of melted cream cheese sandwiched in the middle and covered in strawberry jam. It was the kind of breakfast you need time to recover from.

  My last birthday seemed a long time ago. We had visited Dad in London and he had taken us to the Blue Elephant in Fulham for Thai food. He made Cait, Evan, and me practice our chopsticks skills on little scrunched-up pieces of napkin, racing each other to collect the most paper balls. After dinner Dad had raised his hand for the check, but instead the waiters emerged carrying an ice cream cake and singing “Happy Birthday,” while I blushed and squirmed in my seat, delighted and mortified in equal measure.

  It was half term and Evan had come home from boarding school. It felt right having him home, like the family was properly balanced. He made me a mixtape for my birthday to start my musical education now that I was in double digits, a major step on the growing-up scale. Nirvana. Metallica. Pink Floyd. 4 Non Blondes. R.E.M. Pearl Jam. I wore his tie-dye Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, oversized on me, and a leopard-print bandanna wrapped round my head.

  We all spent the day together listening to music, while Mom and I played with the new oil paints Grandma had sent from America as a present. Grandma was Dad’s mother, and the first American-born generation of our Jewish ancestors who emigrated from a village near Minsk called Uzywany that no longer exists. She had been a successful interior designer and was listed in the Who’s Who of American Women. Mom said Grandma was a wise woman, which meant a lot coming from Mom. She played poker, had a delicious laugh, and liked a kiss on the cheek in the morning. Her fingers were encrusted in gold and precious stones, and diamanté tigers stalked across her giant cashmere-covered breasts. The rare times she wasn’t smiling, she would suck the red lipstick from her teeth. We were only able to see her once every few years, but she sent an enormous box of gifts every Christmas, as if the size of the box could compensate for the time she was unable to spend with us.

  That night we went for dinner at Pizza Express. There were five seats at the table, and Mom joked she had saved one for Dad.

  After we got home, Mom said it was time for my surprise. We followed her out the back door, past the too-tall sunflowers, now bald and half broken, down Barton Orchard to where the cul-de-sac turned into a footpath. This was a route we took on walks but not somewhere we went in the dark.

  The light from the solitary street lamp slowly faded as we disappeared into the woods, and my mouth was suddenly dry from the salty pizza and fear, because I realized that whatever we were doing was dangerous and that’s why we had waited for nightfall.

  The woods cleared ahead at the train tracks, which were brightly lit at the pedestrian crossing. There were no trains in the distance. Not even an electric hum. There were no sounds at all. Just the thump-thump thump-thump in my head of my heart beating.

  We crossed the tracks, one after the other, past the towpath, heading down a dark country lane. On the other side of the road was a red phone box, its panes rusting in the corners, with bushes climbing up around it. Mom opened the door, we stepped in one by one, and then she closed it behind us.

  The air was cold and stale with a waft of old urine. Caitlin held her nose and grimaced.

  We waited.

  We could barely move with so many of us inside. Evan’s face was pressed up against calling cards of women with bulbous orange balloon breasts and spread legs.

  “Mom, look! Nancy wants to get hot and heavy with you!” Evan said.

  We laughed. That was his job in the family. To make us laugh at times we thought we would never be able to.

  We saw a light approaching in the distance, and I felt the muscles of four bodies tense around me. The whole booth constricted. The light came closer, and we could see what we had feared there in front of us: the fluorescent yellow and blue of a police car.

  We all stopped breathing.

  No one moved.

  No one said a word.

  Then the police car slowly reversed and drove away, its lights disappearing into no
thing.

  The breath came out all at once in a burst of laughter.

  Then the phone rang.

  Mom answered and I knew who it was just by his mumble, and already there were tears in my eyes as she passed the receiver to me.

  “It’s for you,” she said as she smiled at my wet teary face.

  “Happy Birthday, Ty,” said a voice from very far away. Just the sound of his warm New York accent was enough. Like a repentant lover, he said everything I wanted him to say, and I cried the whole time he spoke, swallowing great gulps of emotion.

  We each had a few minutes with Dad. Caitlin didn’t say much, her eyes downcast. Evan made a joke about having never been closer to us than right now in this phone booth, and we all jiggled together as we laughed.

  Mom told us to wait outside while she spoke to Dad. I listened to Mom talk. They were making a contingency plan—this was Dad’s forte; he compulsively planned. Mom read out the numbers of two telephone booths and gave him the addresses. They scheduled the next two calls for the following weeks, each at a different pay phone. This was our emergency contact system—and the biggest secret of all. These phone calls were the link between Dad and us, a link no one could know to follow.

  We walked back home, and all the malevolence had drained from the darkness, the trees just trees again. We couldn’t go straight to bed rushing with adrenaline and triumph, so we convened around the kitchen table, the chocolate birthday cake Caitlin had made me in the middle and each of us armed with a spoon. We jousted for the gooey center, our laughter loud in the nighttime quiet.

  5

  Caitlin used to drag me into the garden and make me play Horses. Horses had survived long after other make-believe worlds had crumbled away, their inhabitants dead and their villains unvanquished.

  Horses went like this: I was the horse and she was the trainer. (This was a vast improvement on a former iteration of this game called the Dog Pound.) We had formed our own Riding School and made a very professional Riding School Log with a register of all the pupils and a roster of the horses in the stable. Caitlin was always in charge. I was Lulu the Lipizzaner, dressage horse, as Cait led me around in circles, making encouraging clucking noises. I was Geronimo the Gymkhana Pony, crashing over jumps erected from garden furniture.