No Way Home

by Tyler Wetherall

  “Abducted? What for?” I said.

  “Child trafficking, I guess.”

  I wasn’t entirely sure what child trafficking entailed, but I added it to my list of things I did not want to happen to me.

  “And you got hold of Mom?”

  “No, not your mother. A friend in France who pretended to be your mother for us. I thought we were really stuck there for a moment.”

  Dad didn’t tell Mom about the trouble, but we never crossed a border alone with him again. Really he should have stopped crossing borders completely, because each crossing exposed and unnerved him. He later described the process as jumping from a high cliff into very cold water—but he kept doing it. Mom says during these months he was erratic and demanding, and she worried about him. He seemed to be searching for something; maybe for the man he had been.

  Dad likes routine. He likes going to the same tennis club every week; he likes frequenting the same holiday destinations; he likes the same restaurants, because he knows they’re reliable; he’s predictable in his tastes, and the one thing a fugitive shouldn’t be is predictable. When the FBI hunts for fugitives, they look at their former habits as a way to predict their behavior in their new identity.

  At some point, Dad appeared in Bath. He and Lana had broken up, and she had returned to London. We spent the weekend at a bed-and-breakfast in the Cotswolds. Mom was upset by his reappearance after everything she had done to support him out there, and now he was risking it all. “When will that man ever learn,” she said, exasperated, as we walked away from yet another phone booth call, their terse words still hanging in the air between us.

  “Never?” I offered.

  Shortly after this, Dad moved to Saint Lucia. He said he missed the sunshine and couldn’t bear another winter in Europe. There was a business opportunity on the island, something completely legit. In the past two years he hadn’t known what to do with himself. The available money was ever dwindling and the demands of keeping a low profile meant it was hard to create work. Dad’s former coconspirators were now somewhere under federal detention, drip-feeding information on his whereabouts. But in Saint Lucia he could leave that world behind. He was going to help manage a hotel opening there, owned by an old friend of his, who didn’t know about Dad’s past.

  At first Lana stayed in London, but she soon joined him on the island to work at the hotel too, and I guessed they were back together.

  Each time we talked, he was more excited about the future, which he spoke about like it was a thing that already existed. “We have this great place here on the hillside looking out over a bay,” he told us. “There’s plenty of room for you kids. The views are really something—wait till you see these sunsets.”

  * * *

  With Dad on the other side of the world, that summer we went on holiday with Mom down to Cornwall. We slept in tents, Caitlin and I lined up next to each other watching the insects illuminated in the lining, and Mom and her boyfriend in the other. Mom’s boyfriend was called John, and they’d first met when she was living in New York back in the 1970s. He was her busboy at Serendipity, and once they had stripped down in the middle of a shift and swapped clothes, him parading between the tables in her minidress. Mom had looked him up after she and Dad separated. He was living in London, and they’d been dating on and off ever since. He was a rock climber and disappeared to scale mountain ranges in faraway places at every opportunity. I liked it when he showed up, usually carrying a big rucksack of dusty ropes and a faint smell of tobacco. He had raggedy curly hair and big glasses and he loved to talk. He had one short finger and made up dramatic stories about how it had been amputated. I was enthralled by this stumpy half digit, taut and smooth.

  John never tried to do Dad things. He fixed stuff around the house and painted walls and dug our pond, but those activities didn’t trespass on Dad territory in my mind. At dinner, John talked to us like grown-ups. He was curious about our kid world, what music we listened to or books we read. Occasionally I felt guilty, because I knew Dad blamed John for Mom refusing to try again after they’d separated. I tried not to tell Dad about the time we spent with John, because I knew he would be jealous, but I decided loyalty didn’t necessitate that I dislike John. I just wasn’t allowed to think of him as a father.

  In the daytime, we scrabbled down the steep cliffs to Pedn Vounder, a nudist beach full of hippie types, their bronzed penises bouncing as they played beach ball. John taught us to boulder on the big rocks where we would tumble safely onto the soft sand. One night his climbing club had their annual party on the beach at Porthcurno. We traipsed down the coastal path with flashlights and gathered around a fire in an upturned barrel. We barbecued sausages and ate bananas filled with melted chocolate in aluminum wrappers. We were put to bed in sleeping bags near the warmth of the fire, listening to the music and laughter around us and catching glimpses of the revelry between our dreams. A man held by his ankles having beer poured in his mouth. Mom and John running naked into the ocean, screaming and waving their white arms in the air about them; and then turning right back around as soon as their toes touched the cold Atlantic waters.

  In the morning, we ate bacon sarnies and drank tea from plastic beakers in the muggy damp porch of the tent, still wrapped chrysalislike in our sleeping bags, waiting for the sun to break through the clouds.

  At some point, Mom said she was sorry the holidays she gave us weren’t as glamorous as our trips to visit Dad. I don’t know what we said, probably nothing adequate to reassure her, but she didn’t realize that those trips down to the Cornish coast, or similar ones in the hills of the Lake District, or wherever we went, normally involving long walks and tents and packed lunches and anoraks, they meant something else to us entirely. We complained about walking so far, or we squabbled in the car, and Evan once shut Caitlin inside the Murphy bed and didn’t tell anyone where she was; but there was no Scotland Yard and no fugitives and no need to lie to our friends or question who had done what and why and where that fell on the scale of love. No question of blame. On the beach in Pedn Vounder, with Caitlin and me sitting in our dinghy, alternating on snake watch with the snorkel and mask, armed with a snake-bashing stick, life felt completely normal.

  9

  Barton Orchard was burgled one night. The police said they were professionals, cutting the glass in our dining room window in a perfect circle without a smash. They crept through the house starting in the living room, where they found Mom’s christening silver in the dresser. They stole up the stairs from the kitchen into the Hum—so called because none of us knew what to do with the room, adjoining Mom’s like an awkward antechamber. Caitlin had a fever and was sleeping in the Hum on a spare mattress, so Mom could check in on her. She was hallucinating that she could pass her hands through her belly, like a magician’s trick, and she probably looked up, wide-eyed and pale, sticky with sweat, to demonstrate this to the burglars as they passed.

  They moved onward into Mom’s room, where their flashlight briefly darted across Mom’s face, asleep in the never-ending bed. She woke, but stealthy like a mama tiger, she kept her eyes closed until they had passed and then she grabbed a roll of wallpaper—the nearest blunt object available to her—leapt out of bed, gave a wild banshee scream, and chased them out the front door, only realizing halfway down the street that she was stark naked—at least, that’s how we tell it. The burglars disappeared into the shadows and she was left panting and heaving out in the open, the roll of wallpaper now hanging by her side, a tatty sheet trailing behind her as she returned home.

  We drank tea with the policemen, feeling startled as they told us that the burglars had probably lowered themselves down from the main street, which ran along the hill above our cul-de-sac, onto the roof outside my window, climbing down once more to reach the dining room at the back of the house.

  We were all shaken by this invasion, following not so long after Scotland Yard’s own affront of sorts, and so we did what our family does in times of crisis: we moved house
. Mom says the majority of decisions in her life have been instinctive, and there has never been a grand plan from the moment she left home at sixteen years old to this day. Grand plans never panned out the way you intended, and as none of us has the power to know what the future might hold, what better basis for decision making than instinct?

  As soon as Barton Orchard was sold, I began to love it like I had loved Canna, and entered my period of letter-box kissing.

  We packed up our lives into boxes labeled #1 to #26 and stacked them alongside the never-ending bed, the piano, and the Victorian school bench. Mom instigated a toy cull. I was eleven years old now. It was time to let go. Old friends with threadbare fur and little plastic people of all bizarre proportions were deposited in a black bin bag on the doorstep of Oxfam for other kids to name and love. One mother, two cats, and three not-so-small children packed into a car.

  Evan had finished school and been offered a place at UCLA to study politics. That summer he left for California, but after two weeks he changed his mind; frat boys were a bore and he couldn’t buy a pint in the pub. It turned out he wasn’t a real American after all. He came home and went to university in Nottingham instead. He invited Caitlin and me to go clubbing when we were old enough, which fueled a whole new thread of daydreams.

  In the summer of 1995 we arrived in Forester Road, house #14, in Bath, where I’d been at school for the past three years. Bath was a posh little city famed for its honey-colored stone buildings, Roman baths, and history—somewhere people could imagine Jane Austen types strolling with parasols, which they once did, her house proudly labeled with a blue placard, grockles assembled outside.

  Mom could now work full time at the real estate agency in the city where she had been working Saturdays, and my school was much closer—one bus instead of two. I started senior school in September and officially registered as Tyler Wetherall, leaving Tyler Kane behind for good. Caitlin was joining my school too. She had passed the entrance exam previously, but her marks fell short of getting an assisted place, so she had gone to the free local state school instead. Her first two years of education had been while we were on the run in Portugal and then France, so by the time we arrived in England, she was behind in reading and writing. Now she was coming up to the first set of important exams—and she aspired to be a vet, a marine biologist, or a doctor, all of which required excellent grades—so Mom wanted to give her the same opportunity as I had. Mom went to see my headmistress, Mrs. Winfield, a small, energetic, dark-haired woman, who knew every name of the eight hundred girls in school and their parents. Mom told Mrs. Winfield that our father was a fugitive, and with him AWOL indefinitely, money was tight. Mrs. Winfield asked to meet Caitlin and at the end of the interview offered her an assisted place on the spot. Mom asked for Mrs. Winfield’s discretion, worried we might be stigmatized by the other parents if they were to find out about our criminal dad. Mrs. Winfield kept her word and was always especially kind to Cait and me. Now that the school knew our secret, it would have been one less thing to worry about, except Mom didn’t tell us any of this at the time, so there was no reprieve in the not-talking-about-Dad rule.

  Caitlin decided to take Wetherall as her surname too, even though her birth certificate said Glaser, but seeing as the school still officially thought Dad was Martin Kane, if she changed her name back to Glaser it wouldn’t make sense to anyone. It barely made sense to us.

  * * *

  Forester Road was a proper house. There were no trapdoors, no back passages, and no holes in the floor. It had pebble-dashed walls and rooms with neat right angles, attached to other houses with pebble-dashed walls and neat right angles of their own. It was a much better house for pretending to be normal right-angled people.

  It was once a women’s shelter, so instead of a key it had a security-coded door. If you dialed the code incorrectly more than two times, the house went into lockdown and there was no way in or out. We had abandoned the labyrinthine time machine of Barton Orchard for this fortress. There were friends for the ghost to play with too. I could see women crying, men battering down doors, bruises and tears that still hung in the cold air, as other people’s memories lingered on.

  The cold came with us (all our houses have been cold). But Bastard Scotland Yard did not. This new house felt refreshingly free of their ever-listening ears, unsullied as it was by their presence. For some time now, like bad parents, Scotland Yard had neglected to meet us at the school gates or follow us home to our front door. If they were still listening to our phone calls, they would have long grown bored, because we never talked about Dad. All necessary logistics were conducted clandestinely, so clandestinely in fact that Cait and I often had little idea what was going on until it happened. If the authorities had looked a little closer, we would have led them straight to Dad’s front door, but they never showed up, and over time we started to believe they never would.

  * * *

  Dad had a cell phone delivered to us. It was a clunky brick with a long antenna, probably high tech for 1995. Caitlin and I wanted to commandeer it; if we had the phone, we could stay out later with our friends, because Mom could check up on us whenever she wanted. This was never going to happen. When I got my own cell phone about five years later—a hand-me-down from a friend, which I topped up with cash I earned working weekends in a teashop—Mom refused to call it. I would come home late from a night out, and she would complain that she’d been up all night worrying about me, and I’d say, “Why didn’t you call?” and she’d respond: “Why should I have to?”

  The phone was stored in the attic. Mom wanted to banish it as far from our presence as possible, as if in its existence, she could foresee all the things she least wanted to happen. It was tucked inside some insulating foam hidden between the beams. There were no more phone booth trips; instead, when we wanted to call Dad, we took out the ladder, unlatched the attic door, and retrieved the phone. At least we could now talk to him in the comfort of our home. Sometimes we forgot to turn it off, and when Dad called it sent a shrill ring through the walls, which made Mom crazy, and one of us had to scrabble back up the ladder to answer. But it made her even crazier when we left it out, as if it were just an ordinary phone, as if it weren’t the link between us and our dad. Or between Mom and a known fugitive. Dad always reassured Mom that nothing he asked her to do was breaking the law—stretching it perhaps, but not breaking it. This phone, however, felt dangerously on the brink.

  * * *

  After a few months, Dad started planning our first visit to see him in Saint Lucia. We were going for two weeks over the half-term break and taking some time off school on either side, which meant I would be there for my twelfth birthday.

  I was enjoying senior school a little more. There was a fresh crop of girls, and suddenly I had a few more friends. I started taking drama classes and joined Bath Youth Theatre, where there were boys and it was okay to be weird. I was writing a musical about Hell. The premise was that Satan was a misunderstood guy, and it centered on a showy ensemble piece with Satan’s workers.

  We were excited about Saint Lucia, though Mom hated the idea of us traveling that far. If something went wrong, there would be nothing she could do to rescue us. Dad says she didn’t protest his plans, though I suspect he only heard what he wanted to hear. He is persuasive and stubborn, and part of his persuasiveness is the complete confidence he has in his decisions.

  Mom had started to smoke again. I saw the packet of Marlboro Reds in her handbag and smelled it on her breath when she came back from walking Poppy, our new dog. (She had finally relented and bought us a puppy on the premise it would protect us from another burglary, though probably also because she felt guilty about everything else that was happening.) Mom hadn’t smoked since before she had Evan, apart from the occasional drag on John’s roll-ups when the two of them were in the garden and didn’t think we could see. It was Evan who called her out on it when he came back from university one weekend. “Since when do you smoke?” he said, always more
at ease with addressing the unspoken than Cait or I. She looked taken aback and said they were left over from one of John’s friends, and she was just finishing the pack. Evan was also smoking, and the two of them shared beers and cigarettes on the back doorstep after Cait and I went to bed. I could hear them talking quietly beneath my window as I fell asleep.

  * * *

  Half term came round quickly. At the airport I was greeted with the now-familiar mix of nausea and nerves. The black flapping wings. We said goodbye to Mom, who kissed our heads and walked away quickly, making excuses about leaving the dog in the car. She hated for us to see her cry.

  I cried during the in-flight movie, and when I stole a glance at Caity, I saw she was crying too. We caught each other’s eye and laughed at ourselves. We felt everything more intensely in the sky than in the world below.

  I was reading Papillon on Dad’s recommendation (another story of an honorable fugitive unfairly blighted, much like Les Misérables, all part of Dad’s ongoing campaign to prime our powers of empathy). Henri Charrière is imprisoned in solitary confinement for two years in complete silence and darkness. But when he shuts his eyes after a day pacing in his cell, he can launch his mind into flight. He plays his memories on the backs of his lids until he can feel his mother’s slender fingers running through the curls in his hair as a child and hear her warm laugh. No matter how much life they steal from him, there is no authority in the world with the power to stop him traveling anywhere he desires within his own head.

  I hurtled forward in time and, gutted with a fear I didn’t want to define, I shut the book.

  10

  The heat hit us the moment we stepped off the plane. It was smothering. So thick I could taste it.

  A driver from the hotel was waiting for us in arrivals with a sign. TYLER + KATELYN, it read. We watched the island pass by the windows, the nerves from the plane now excitement. There were stretches of banana plantations with the yellow fruits spooning each other in cozy bunches. We passed a lone goat tied to a string, happily chewing on a grassy knoll. We saw women with bundles of firewood piled high on their heads, bottoms gently swinging in brightly colored skirts, walking for miles in the blistering heat. The whites of their soles winked as we passed.