But now the horses had been put out to pasture and the riders had forsaken their gymkhana dreams.
Our miniature farmyard had become dusty and the animals sticky and apathetic with time, and the zoo set lay abandoned, with zebras and tigers in dangerous proximity. I thought about the material neglect of my toys when I caught a glimpse of their glassy eyes looking out hopefully from the box under my bed and felt guilty.
The only toy that had not been given up on was the dollhouse, which Mom had given me for Christmas the previous year. It was vintage and delicately hand-painted. I kept its rooms impeccably clean, the table always laid. There were no actual dolls in my dollhouse to mess it up. The imaginary family went about their business like ghosts, existing in a place where no one ever had to grow up and nothing was ever broken.
Our games gave way to the silent madness of our secret excursions. Once a week we made our way to isolated phone booths down back alleys and along narrow streets with names like the Shambles and Sandy Leaze. There was an old red phone box outside St. Thomas More church, tucked against the Victorian stonework, and another by the train station, one of the modern British Telecom booths, which smelled less like urine. All places Caitlin and I could walk together, places we might, to any outside observer, feasibly go to make phone calls away from prying parental ears.
As the weeks and then months passed, Dad became the voice on the end of the telephone wire, which seemed a fitting transformation. He had always spent a portion of his day making calls, often stopping off at pay phones while we were out. Sometimes I’d play at being his secretary, holding his wrapper of quarters (he still called them quarters even when they were twenty-pence pieces) and handing them to him one by one as he talked about things I didn’t understand or didn’t bother to listen to. Sometimes we had to wait in the car, but he left the engine running with the Eagles wailing about the Hotel California.
He had the first model of a cell phone, an enormous box, which we all laughed at him for lugging about when it rarely had reception. After that he bought a bulky car phone, which made his driving even more erratic. I held the steering wheel steady as he found a number to dial from the folded-up pieces of yellow legal paper he always had in his pocket or when he got too involved in shouting at the scumbag lawyer.
Dad could give eulogies in praise of the phone, the greatest invention of all time, he would say—at least until Skype came along years later—allowing him to stay in touch with the people he loved. Unlike Mom, Dad grew attached to people and objects, collecting them all around the world and creating an exponential increase in the need for conversation and storage units. Mom said the best thing about divorcing him was no longer having the phone ringing all the time. She banned the TV, the phone, and Dad from her bedroom in one swoop. Her approach to telecommunications was minimal. “Only call home if you’re in trouble,” she would say.
After a lifelong love affair with the telephone, it was as if, in an act of bodily transmutation, Dad had become the phone. He became a disembodied voice inside a piece of plastic to which we related the trivial details of our daily lives. I told him about the other girls at school and the problems I was having making friends, about when Tegan stole my diary and read it aloud to the class or when Zoe and Emma came over for my birthday but didn’t want to play with me. I wasn’t the newest girl anymore, but I was still a weird American with a lopsided family. I was bossy and serious, occasionally self-righteous, and I had warts on my fingers, none of which helped my case. The school cast me as the Star—literally the Star of Bethlehem—in the school nativity, which only made it worse. My singing was crap and I wasn’t Star material; the part should have gone to one of the pretty netball-playing blond girls, and they felt slighted. My last school had been very academic, and the popular kids knew the answers; in this school, the opposite was true, and I was slow to learn that putting my hand up in class was social suicide. Caitlin seemed better at making friends than me. Or maybe she just cared less. She had been to five schools so far and had not once cried at the school gates.
Dad remembered the names of the girls and the details of the tiffs. He would always ask about them or make suggestions on the next call. “Did Tegan apologize yet?” (“Yes, but then I told her that Mom called her a spoiled brat, so we’re still not friends,”) or “Have you thought about joining some after-school clubs? Sometimes school’s just luck of the draw.” He said the friends I made in college would be the ones I kept for life and that what these girls thought mattered only if I let it matter. I knew these conversations helped Dad too, even if I didn’t understand why.
Telephone Dad came from an unknown location. We didn’t ask him how long this would go on for or when we would see him. And we didn’t ask him what he had done wrong that meant he had to go away. The only imperative was to Keep Up, as if without these weekly conversations Dad would cease to exist.
Cait and I didn’t miss a call.
Mom rarely came. She said she had nothing to say to him. Once I heard them arguing as I waited outside the booth wiggling my toes to stave off chilblains. Caitlin hadn’t come this time because she had taken a job mucking out the local stables after school in exchange for free horse rides at the weekends. (I had been usurped by real horses, who were infinitely better at jumping over things.)
Mom was keeping her voice down, but I knew she was angry by the tension in her shoulders. “How can you expect me to do it?” she was saying in almost a hiss. “He may be a friend of yours, but I’ve never met the man … No, I am doing everything in my power to help you, but this is too much to ask.”
I wondered who this friend was. She never liked Dad’s friends and said none of them could be trusted—that one of his greatest mistakes had been placing too much trust in the wrong people. The only one she ever approved of was Crazy Uncle Rick, and everyone loved Rick. He was Dad’s best friend from college, with puppy-dog eyes like a baby Dustin Hoffman and the ability to make anyone laugh. We’d met Rick when he came to stay with Dad from Hawaii, where he lived. He taught us yoga in the front room and told us wild stories about when he lived with Mom and Dad in New York in the 1960s, and they had been young and in love. Dad was working on Wall Street at that time, and he would come home from work, swap his suit and tie for a cape and crocodile-skin cowboy boots, and they would ride around the city on matching choppers. “You should have seen your mother; she was the most beautiful woman and smarter than us all put together,” Rick would say, and our eyes would light up with this picture from the past.
But Mom wasn’t talking about Crazy Uncle Rick.
I felt a little knot of resentment, which I turned away from, unsure whom I was resenting and for what.
Mom was angry on the walk home, so we didn’t link arms or talk, just strode purposefully as gusts of air crept through our clothes like an old man’s icy fingers. When Mom was angry with Caitlin or Evan, I found it so uncomfortable that I would hide in the cupboard under the stairs until it was over. I could tell if Mom was in a bad mood by the way she got out of bed in the morning. It wasn’t that Mom ever shouted at us. But when she was angry it was conveyed with such effective force that we never forgot, and we never did it again, whatever it might have been that set her off. Like the Great Spinach Incident of ’87, which she says has turned into a family myth and didn’t happen the way we tell it. But whether or not she actually threw the dish of spinach at the wall is irrelevant; we never complained about our dinner again.
Mom told us to use the same tactic at school. The trick was, she explained, to react with such disproportionate fury that whoever witnessed it would be terrified.
I tried it for the first time on the boys at King Edwards. The bus dropped me off at the boys’ school, and I had to walk through their yard to change buses up to the girls’ school. They would kick a ball around as they waited for the bell. Every time I passed I felt my body as an awkward assembly of limbs, each step a study in composure.
Like dogs, they sensed my fear and began to kick th
eir ball at me. At first I tried to ignore them, but sometimes I made a pathetic gasp at a near miss. One day the ball hit the wall behind me with a deafening whack, making me duck and grimace. The ball bounced at my feet and I caught it. I looked at the offensive item in my hands and thought of Mom. While the boys heckled me to kick it back, I took out my key ring with the miniature Swiss Army knife Dad had given me, and—rallied by my friends from the bus—I stabbed the ball. I didn’t use it often, so it was sharp and immediately punctured the surface. The boys fell silent. So I did it again. They started to shout at me. I tore the plastic from one hole to the other, giving it a saggy smile. Their jaws dropped and their arms hung about their sides like chimps. I tossed it back and it landed at their feet. A menacing deflated grin. I walked away, triumphant.
They told the teacher, who contacted my form tutor, who called me into her office after lunch. She had fixed her usually beaming powdered face into a stern mask of displeasure. As she spoke the skin about her cheeks waggled in indignation, sending powder puffs into the air around her. This was not the behavior of the Tyler she knew. This was certainly not the behavior of a Bath High girl. What could possibly have provoked such an act?
I didn’t think she would understand Mom’s theory. I also thought she was overdoing it, considering it was only a small penknife.
I apologized.
She was disappointed in me.
I felt delighted.
Mom was right: the boys never kicked their ball at me again.
I was allocated the detention duty of organizing the lost property. After lunch, I retreated down to the cavernous depths of the building. I pocketed anything of interest—the first time I learned that lost property was a great source of free school uniform items—and I thought about what sort of girl Tyler Wetherall might be.
* * *
We were sitting around the dinner table in our ski suits. I had tucked a hot-water bottle inside mine, tied to my waist with the cord of a bathrobe, and I wore a pair of fingerless gloves. Caitlin had found a fake fur hat in the costume box, which she had started to sleep in, and Evan huddled in his Lakers jacket.
“You’re all feeble, mollycoddled by central heating. You wouldn’t survive a day in the wild.”
“That’s why we live in houses,” Evan stated dryly.
Mom huffed at him. “If you want the heating on, you can pay the gas bills.”
It was nearly Christmas and the house was ungodly cold, like a deep freeze had set in over the family. When Evan came home, he complained about the temperature, and Mom told him to go stand outside and then it would feel nice and toasty when he came back in. He tried it and said it was actually warmer outside, so in the solidarity of protest, we all went and stood with him. Mom still didn’t turn on the heating, and eventually we all came back inside when we got cold and hungry. She always won.
Our ghost was most active in the winter. We’d always had a ghost, and it had become an accepted member of the family. We heard it moving things around in the spare bedroom and the sounds of our old toys being turned on and off, a haunting electronic melody, which only added to the atmosphere in the house. We also had a make-believe maid whom we shouted at when things didn’t get done.
Mom put down her knife and fork as she looked up to talk to us. “You girls are going to go stay with your granny after Christmas,” she announced.
Caitlin and I looked at each other, then at Evan, whose eyebrows were cautiously raised, and back at her. This had all the signs of something that fell in the not-to-be-discussed box, and we had no idea why.
“Are you coming too?” I asked.
Mom looked up as if it was an absurd question and then sighed.
“No, there’s some work that needs to be done on the upstairs bathroom, which means we’ll have no water or heat for a few days, and it’ll just be easier if you lot are out of the way. Evan, you’ll be with your papa anyway.”
She stood up and scraped her dinner into the compost bin, the knife against her plate like nails down a chalkboard.
It wasn’t strange to go stay with Granny. Granny was Mom’s mother, who lived nearby and was the complete opposite of Grandma. As a nurse in the war, she traveled the world cutting off men’s legs and using maggots to clean wounds without flinching. She was formidable and razor sharp, and nothing scared her except, perhaps, for snakes. She believed that wartime rations remained a sensible way to eat, living on toast and marmalade and dry egg. She’d had malaria three times, and I was pretty sure she was invincible. She knew the Latin names for birds and flowers and could recite whole poems, or wittily spar with anyone who dared. She wore neat floral dresses or slacks with Marks & Spencer’s cardigans. We loved going to visit, even if we had to be on our best behavior; we would be let loose in her garden to pick raspberries and collect snails or sit around the table playing an old card game called Happy Families.
Something about Mom’s tone just didn’t feel right, or maybe it was the timing, but I didn’t dare ask. We could usually ask Mom whatever we wanted, but things were more complicated now. Some topics were off limits, and we weren’t entirely sure which ones.
It felt like we were being dispatched, whether we liked it or not, as Evan had been. He hadn’t wanted to go to boarding school and we didn’t want him to go either, and yet somehow it had happened. He was meant to go back to the States to live with his papa in Beverly Hills and go to high school like a real American boy. He had kept hold of his accent, collecting baseball cards and American words from a past we had left behind. But every year he didn’t go back, the distance between this daydream and reality grew greater, until he found himself at sixteen years old in a British boarding school with a now-fading accent, so he traded the Dodgers for Wimbledon FC. His papa had a new wife and baby, and I was coming to think having two fathers only made life doubly hard.
When Mom came back from dropping him off at boarding school for the first time, she avoided his bedroom for weeks. I saw her once, standing by his door, vacuum cleaner in hand, weeping. She cried so much she had to abandon the vacuum cleaner in the hallway and go to bed. She wasn’t able to clean his room until he was due home again, dust accumulating along with self-censure. She hated herself for sending him away.
I wondered if she would stand weeping by our bedroom doors too.
I wanted to know why we were really being sent away or, worse still, what we were being sent away from. I knew if Scotland Yard came for her again, she wouldn’t want us there.
Caitlin and I acknowledged that a bad thing was happening in our one sisterly mind.
When it came time for us to leave, Mom told us to pack a bag each. I took my favorite clothes. A black minidress, my burgundy Dr. Martens, and my velveteen hat with the red rose just like Blossom wore on TV. My diary, a pencil case, a pair of scissors. I left my favorite toy behind: Mary the Rabbit. If I never came back, I would rather she stay with the rest of the toys for the children who followed behind me, a small step in becoming less attached to things.
I stopped my thoughts from going beyond the present, because every time I thought about saying goodbye to Mom I felt a lump in my throat, and I refused to cry.
The night before we left, Mom let us eat our dinner on our laps in front of the TV, though only if we watched her choice of film. We kids had instigated two movie rules: no foreign languages and no naked people. Her rules were no violence and no horror. She’d also banned us from watching The Fugitive. She didn’t want us to get the wrong impression.
The following morning, Mom woke us up early. We drove out of Bradford on Avon, its winding lanes and wonky old stone buildings opening out to grander houses with driveways and names rather than numbers, and then just green hills and farms, dotted with gray cloudy sheep. Her eyes kept flicking back and forth to the rearview mirror as she took sharp corners down small back roads until it felt like we were driving in circles.
I had grown into the habit of building my daydreams around our new life, which seemed to only inch towar
d normality before it changed again, each change more unsettling than the last.
I imagined Dad coming home because he missed me, but the Two Strangers turning up and arresting him just as we’re reunited, and it would all be my fault. I imagined never seeing him again. That one day it would be too dangerous and too troublesome to keep in touch, and there would be no more telephone Dad or any Dad at all. He would decide the only way he could be free was by cutting all contact, and he and Lana would start a new life with new children somewhere far away.
I had a theory that if I thought about all the things I least wanted to happen, then somehow, by some law of probability, they were less likely to occur. I made terrible things happen in my head night after night like a prophylactic indulgence in the macabre. In fact, I still do this; it’s only the subject matter that’s changed.
Eventually Caitlin and I fell asleep curled up in the backseat, my head on her hip. Cait must have been worried too; otherwise she would have told me to get back onto my side of the car.
When Mom woke us up we were parked outside of Granny’s bungalow. I sat up. My mouth felt dry and tasted of acid tooth scum. Mom was looking out the window, her hands in her lap, limp and sorrowful like dead flowers. After a moment, she got out, pulling the front seat forward to let us climb stiffly out. We stretched our backs, still sleepy but a little on edge.
We let ourselves into Granny’s house. Granny wasn’t there. Mom put on the kettle and leaned up against the kitchen counter, her coat still on.
“You guessed where you’re going yet?” she said.
We shook our heads.
The kettle started to hiss.
She smiled an unhappy smile. “You’re going to see your father.”
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