No Way Home

by Tyler Wetherall

  She turned around to pour the tea, steam escaping on either side of her, as my stomach fell to the floor.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before,” she said, handing us each a cup, “but it was very important that we kept it secret, and I thought it best you didn’t know just in case you found yourself talking about it.”

  “Is he here?” I asked, still in shock, looking around at the crowded florals of the living room.

  She shook her head. “No, he’s in France,” she said casually, as if we had always known this, and maybe we had. “A good friend of his has offered to drive you there. His neighbor. He said you two have met him, though maybe you don’t remember.” She looked at us both, assessing our expressions. “How do you feel about this? You don’t have to go if you don’t want to. We could get back in the car and go home right now. Nothing would make me happier.”

  “No, I do,” I said quickly, instinctively, like someone had offered a gift and if I didn’t show substantial gratitude, it might be taken away.

  She nodded.

  “Caitlin?”

  “Okay.” Caitlin looked more conflicted.

  “I know he really wants to see you both.”

  We drank our tea and then gathered our belongings and left via the back door, from where we could pick up a path that led to a country pub. I felt unbalanced, like the world had just shifted tectonically once more, and I was still finding my feet.

  Mom stopped outside the pub and looked back at us. “You ready?”

  But I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about seeing Dad. I had to remind my eyebrows to come back down toward my eyes as I followed her through the heavy wooden doors.

  6

  It was a generic British pub. The carpet was a well-trodden swirl of reds and oranges, and the velveteen seats had become threadbare and sagged in buttock-shaped dips.

  I automatically looked around for an out-of-place American man in an overcoat and baseball cap, even though I knew he wasn’t there. There were two fat bald men eating sausages and chips dripping in gravy, staring over each other’s shoulders at the two TV screens on either side of the room. The football commentary was on silent. Instead, the drone of pop music whined out from behind a glum-looking barmaid. It was tinny and irritating. She was biting her chipped nails as she slumped, dejected, over the bar.

  Suddenly the door crashed open behind us with a shriek, and we all jumped. Two little boys tore through the pub and went back out with a bang. When I turned around, Mom was at the bar.

  “Sarah?” someone asked, and we all turned round. The man’s eyebrows were raised over bright blue eyes, and one hand hovered expectantly in the air between us like an offering. He had a handsome face, dark gray hair, and a red nose, moist like a toddler’s. Mom leaned back and looked a little startled.

  They shook hands and he asked grown-up niceties about the drive and the pub, which Mom answered curtly, as the barmaid poured her two orange juices and a Coca-Cola for me, which was ominous, because I only had Coca-Cola on special occasions.

  Mom was distracted and distant. She didn’t like this man and she didn’t want to be here.

  We followed him to his booth in the corner, sheltered from the rest of the pub people. Discarded in the ashtray were the skins of three oranges. He told us he had a terrible cold and we should keep our distance. He smiled. We smiled less enthusiastically. He blew his nose and apologized.

  “Is everything arranged?” Mom asked.

  “Yes, it’s really straightforward. We drive to Dover and get the ferry over. Then it’s a few hours on the other side.”

  Mom made a whimper and that little wrinkle appeared between her eyebrows. She was trying to say in the friendliest way possible that she did not like this plan one bit.

  There was an awkward pause.

  “You’ll look after my babies, won’t you?”

  He smiled reassuringly.

  She was going to cry. She had changed color and her eyes had become heavy and wet and pink, her face slightly skewed, and I could tell her head was full of bad things, because when that happened she found it very hard to be nice to anyone.

  “I may as well leave you to it then. No, don’t get up, please.”

  She handed us both our passports and a ten-pound note for the journey. She gave him a letter, which said he could act as our guardian. Signed by our mother. She handed her children to the care of a gray-haired, soggy-nosed stranger. This was the thing she could not do. This was too much to ask.

  She kissed us each goodbye on the head and the nose, and I felt her face wet with tears against mine. My cheeks felt cold when she withdrew the warmth of her own. I felt her pain like hunger, just like when I was a baby and we breathed, and ate, and slept at the same moment with my fingers curled round her blond hair. I felt how she felt now, and it ached in my belly, replacing the emptiness of nausea with loss.

  * * *

  We finished our drinks and followed the soggy-nosed man to his car. Climbing into the backseat, we pushed two giant net bags of oranges out of the way, for which we later dubbed him the Orange Man.

  “Let’s hit the road, girls.”

  “Don’t call us that—we’re Caitlin and Tyler.” It was one of Caitlin’s pet hates to be grouped together as if we were one sibling entity.

  “Our dad calls us the Individuals instead,” I said.

  “Sure thing.” He smiled. “Do you remember me? I came over once when you were having breakfast, and I think you were heading out to play tennis. No? Well, Martin talks about you tons. Caitlin, you’re the great horse rider, am I right? And Tyler, you’re the family artist? He said you got that from his mum. You know I met her when she was visiting here? I joined them for dinner one night…”

  He went on, an amicable ramble. I liked how he talked to us. I could tell he felt bad for us, which was gratifying even though I knew it shouldn’t be.

  “Your dad’s so excited to see you. You don’t know how much he’s missed you guys.”

  We hadn’t heard anyone talk about Dad out loud for so long. The Orange Man spoke without whispering, as if he didn’t know that you spoke about Dad in whispers or not at all. Those were the rules.

  “When I last saw your dad, I promised that I’d drive you to him as soon as possible, and now here we are,” he declared cheerfully.

  Feeling emboldened by his openness, I leaned forward to ask, “So, where are we going?”

  “You don’t know? Paris! We’re going to the City of Light,” he said dramatically. “Throw me up one of those lifesavers … can you peel it for me?”

  We passed up a peeled orange and he ate it in two mouthfuls, before loudly blowing his nose again.

  We didn’t know the Orange Man’s story back then. He had been a neighbor of Dad’s in London and now they were dear friends. One day he received a phone call from Dad asking if they could meet in a nearby hotel as a matter of urgency. He found Dad holed up in his room in a state of distress, and the first thing Dad asked was whether he could be trusted with a secret. Once the Orange Man had given Dad sufficient assurances, Dad proceeded to explain that his name was not Martin Kane, as he had been for the entire time the Orange Man had known him; he was called Ben Glaser and he was a fugitive from the FBI and Scotland Yard. The night before, Dad’s house had been raided and was now under surveillance. They had taken Lana in for questioning, and the police had most likely been alerted of his car registration. The Orange Man was the only friend Dad felt confident Scotland Yard would not be watching. And, finally, Dad got to the point—would the Orange Man help him get out of the country?

  The Orange Man was a struggling writer at the time, so perhaps the drama appealed to him. Or perhaps he believed Dad to be a good guy in genuine need of help. For reasons I don’t know, he agreed.

  Dad left with nothing but a small bag and his attaché case. Shortly before the ferry crossing to Dublin, Dad asked the Orange Man to pull over. He took out his case and his wallet and one by one threw every piece of identif
ication that attached him to the name Martin Kane in a trash can, and then he lit a match and set it on fire. My mind has always stuck on this image. A man between names watching his past disappear in a smoke trail with the stench of melting plastic.

  * * *

  It took us three hours to reach Dover. The Orange Man shared gold nuggets about Dad with the occasional point of interest about our surroundings. It appeared we were in Kent.

  The white cliffs looked dirty in the persistent drizzle and we only saw them sideways briefly as we followed the coastal road, more excited by the sight of the ocean, a deep shade of angry blue gray.

  “You ever been on a ferry?”

  We both shook our heads.

  “No? Well, here goes.”

  He smiled a lovely conspiratorial smile like this was one exciting adventure. Like it was more The Famous Five than The Fugitive. The sort of smile that made you feel like equals at the same time as letting you be a kid.

  By the time we set off, it was getting dark outside. Dad hated winter. He would say it with a shudder, tucking his head into his big coat like a turtle retreating into its shell.

  We drove onto the boat, parked, and got out of the car to head on board. It looked like a floating hotel with plush red seats and a bar. The windows were black eyes, the sea only just visible when we pressed our noses to the glass. The Orange Man found himself a bench where he could rest before the drive on the other side and told us to stay out of trouble.

  The rain had picked up to a storm and rocked the ferry back and forth. At first, Caitlin and I ran around the corridors letting our stomachs rise and fall with the waves. But soon the lingering moment of groundlessness that occurred at the peak of every wave settled into a dogged nausea. I told Caitlin I was going to be sick, and we searched for a toilet as I held one hand over my mouth. We tried to go up the stairs, but I couldn’t make it any farther and threw up all over the red-carpeted steps. The staircase was suspended above the dining room, so it dripped onto a table below.

  I saw one waiter call over another to examine the mess I’d created. I tried to hide my green face. They looked up. I felt mortified. Caitlin had found the toilets and took me to get cleaned up.

  When we returned, the Orange Man opened one eye and looked at us.

  “What’s up, Individuals?”

  “I was sick,” I said, looking at my boots.

  He raised one eyebrow, yawned, and took us out onto the deck, where the waves thrashed violently, spitting in our faces and filling our lungs with damp air until we felt better. I never wanted to take a ferry again. We stayed on deck until the lights of Calais appeared in the distance, their brightness muted by the storm.

  As passport control approached, the Orange Man looked nervous, and we were nervous in turn. He took out the letter from Mom and gave it a quick read, despite having read it before. But we were waved through without incident, and once we were back in the car the mood felt celebratory. There was just one more leg of the journey, and we would be smuggled safely right under the nose of Scotland Yard to our dad. We turned up the music, singing loudly and out of tune: “If you’ll be my bodyguard, I can be your long-lost pal.”

  On the road into Paris, Caitlin and I sat up, eager to see the city streets through the rain streaming down the windows. Now that we were close, I started to feel nervous; this dad was a different man from the one I had last seen four months ago in a big white townhouse on Perrymead Street.

  We descended into a multistory garage. We climbed out of the car and waited. Caitlin shifted her rucksack from one shoulder to the other. I twiddled my hair furiously around my fingers, winding my worry into broken ends and knots. We followed the Orange Man into the elevator. The doors shut with a clang and we waited, not moving, until we realized no one had pressed the button.

  “First floor, please,” the Orange Man said, as if I was a bellboy, but my head was too busy with anxiety to smile a nice little-girl smile.

  The doors opened onto a shopping arcade. It was late in the evening and only a few shoppers sauntered through the empty neon brightness. I searched every face for Dad, and then we saw him. He was wearing his gray overcoat that tied at the waist and a woolly beanie, which made him look a little more like a criminal than usual. His hands were in his pockets, and he was chewing his lip, looking worried. His eyes scanned the distance from where we might come.

  He spotted us and opened his arms wide, dropping his mouth into a look of mock shock like we were the last people in the world he expected to see. We both ran up and hugged him. He hugged us together and then one at a time and kissed our heads. I held his dad hands, with their big dad nails, and smelled his dad smell, which felt like home. He made a little friendly growl when he hugged.

  The Orange Man waited a few steps back for us to say our hellos. Dad’s eyes were glassy with happiness. He went over and shook the Orange Man’s hand, pulling him in for a hug. Dad shook his head in a speechless expression that meant more than thank you—and then he quizzed the Orange Man extensively about the crossing.

  * * *

  Dad and Lana were living in a top-floor apartment in the Bastille. It was a small one-bedroom with tall windows looking out over the patchwork of slate and zinc rooftops. There was a sofa bed for Cait and me. The old copper pipes creaked and groaned at night, accompanied by gasps and spurts of jazz, as drunken shrieks sidled up the building from the bars below.

  Lana was there to greet us, with her long dairy-cow lashes and glassy blue eyes. Her blond hair was cut in a bob and curled up at the edges. She had a casual elegance about her, wearing tight-fitted jeans and a black polo neck sweater. She was now distinct from Dad’s other girlfriends, who had not gone on the run with him. This afforded her a privileged degree of suspicion from me. Later that week we flushed her cigarettes down the toilet, one by one, taking great pleasure in each. Dad told us off, but I could tell he only did it for her.

  Dad’s houses had always looked the same, his possessions displayed like treasured relics. There was a painting of a silverback gorilla called Mobutu, which took pride of place behind his desk, surveying the room, his gray fur iridescent and his dark eyes gentle and wise. There was a black Oriental rug along whose twisted cashmere serpents I used to tiptoe, telling stories in my head about their misdeeds. There were other things too, that for us embodied Dad: the art deco lamp, with two figurines balancing a glowing orb between their brass fingers, and the antique globe, which I spun compulsively, my finger landing on my imagined future home. But Dad’s Paris apartment was empty of his belongings, and it made this new father with this new name momentarily suspicious.

  “What happened to all your stuff?” I asked.

  “It’s all in storage, and all thanks to Lana,” he said, giving her a little squeeze around the waist, and I looked away. I didn’t like that he had taken her with him and left me behind.

  Lana had told Andrew Sloane that she was living with Dad, so he let her back into his townhouse. She secretly moved all of Dad’s belongings and artwork out the back door into a van, and they were now safely stowed away. Though Dad didn’t tell us these things at the time. Scotland Yard and his legal situation were mentioned only when it was unavoidable, and then through euphemism. Dad says he never knew how much Mom had told us, and he didn’t want to scare us by saying more than was necessary—it didn’t occur to him how scary not knowing had become.

  We were in Paris for a week. I remember the crisp bright blue cold by day, and by night everything seemed to glimmer like the impossibly glamorous women striding around the Galeries Lafayette, silk scarves streaming behind them; I remember moules-frites and chocolat chaud and this bustle about us everywhere we went. I remember taking a boat on the Seine with my dad standing beside me pointing out monuments. He acted as if nothing had changed, and that meant I could too.

  I remember precisely the items he bought me for Christmas that year—a white shirt that tied at the waist and a long crepe skirt dotted with small orange flowers—and I felt the
se new clothes conferred a grown-up, even Parisian, degree of sophistication on me every time I wore them.

  Caitlin remembers that trip differently, something I only discovered recently: she remembers a dark unfriendly place, dirty and brooding, the traffic outside our apartment circling the roundabout without reprieve and a sense of being misplaced and miscommunicating everywhere we went.

  7

  After that first trip, bolstered by our success, Dad planned more; the weekends in London now replaced with European jaunts, as if this could be the new normal.

  There was no more Orange Man, and he became a mythic figure from our childhood, chaperoning us safely from one world into another. The next school holiday, we flew instead, with Evan too. We didn’t know why it was safe to fly now when it hadn’t been safe to fly before; no one told us these things.

  The early-morning airport trips all blend into one surreal dawn haze, bundled into the car with a duvet and a pillow, as if Mom had scooped me straight out of bed.

  I was always carsick from the roundabout routes Mom was instructed to take—just in case. We stopped for breakfast and gas, and everything was too pungent: the buttery richness of microwaved croissants from the service station turning to chewy plastic in my mouth; and the petrol fumes against the cherry sweet smell of Caitlin’s Jolly Ranchers, which I could hear each time they touched her teeth, a gentle clicking against her braces.

  I always missed Dad between these trips, and then the trips came around, and I felt sad about leaving Mom instead, or I just felt too much and didn’t know what to do with it all. I didn’t question why she agreed to these trips. For me there was no question; of course we would go see Dad wherever in the world he was.

  I woke up somewhere along the motorway, when Evan began blasting Pink Floyd from the tape deck. Blue signs for Heathrow loomed upside down from my nest in the backseat.

  At the airport, Mom kissed each of us goodbye. “Tell your father I want you back in one piece, okay?” Her eyes squeezed pink like grapefruits, while she waved a hand in front of her face, as if she could waft away her emotions.