No Way Home

by Tyler Wetherall

  It was the hottest day yet. Not the same sort of heat as before, which burned the soles of our feet on the sand, but a humid, dense heat that weighed down the shoulders like a shrug.

  We spent the afternoon in the fishing village of Soufrière, visiting the volcano. Dad insisted the guide take us for a walk across the thin crust, ripe with rotten-egg gases.

  On our way back, we bathed in the Diamond Falls and took a mud bath, sinking deep into the dark gray silt like earth creatures. We walked through the botanical gardens and were lulled into a sweet stupor by the rich scent of the too-tall flowers towering over us.

  It was a perfect day.

  When we made it back to the resort in the soft tones of late afternoon, the receptionist was waiting to tell Dad that he’d missed several urgent phone calls, but Cait and I dismissed this as work related, already meandering along the path up to our apartment to dress for my lobster dinner in Rodney Bay.

  “I want you ready and at my office by six pm, okay?” Dad called after us.

  We had a few more moments to believe in him, to believe in all this.

  As we walked back down to his office, the sun, red and swollen, resting on the horizon far out at sea, we took it all in: the smell of the wet jungle, the thick nighttime air, the strange singsong beauty, rising and ringing out in a slow crescendo, leaving us drowning in the richness of it all, right up until that moment when we stepped into Dad’s cold office, and we looked at him, with his head bowed, and it all fell down around us.

  I now know the words behind that wasp-buzz. We were right; it was Mom’s voice, crackling and urgent, traveling all the way from the damp dark field in Bath in which she had waited, calling again and again until Dad had answered. And that voice was pleading, saying on repeat: “Just get my kids back to me, please, get them back before Scotland Yard arrive, just get my kids back to me…”

  Dad says that was the moment he knew it was over, and he hadn’t seen it coming. He really believed in Saint Lucia. That night he told Lana what was happening, and then his boss at the hotel, not just that he was a fugitive and he was leaving but that Scotland Yard and the FBI were following in his wake and they would be questioning everyone. And then he told us that he didn’t know how long it would be before we would see each other again. He cried those tears we all remember.

  Before we went to bed, Dad made us run down to find Ros and complete our PADI written exam papers, because he didn’t want our hard work to go to waste. I don’t know how Dad explained this strange late-night rush to Ros. When he gave me my PADI certification card, Ros said I was probably the youngest certified diver in the world, because you had to be twelve years old to qualify, and today was my twelfth birthday.

  Dad didn’t sleep that night as he tried to get things together, gathering cash and identification, buying tickets, and then saying goodbye to us. He says it wasn’t dawn. He remembers it being later in the day, hot already. He thinks he must have gone into Castries to buy the tickets first and then taken us to the airport. But Caitlin and I share that image of him, standing on the side of the road, wearing swim shorts, a baseball cap, and flip-flops with a sports bag thrown over his shoulder, waving goodbye. We watched until he disappeared into the dusty pink haze.

  * * *

  I don’t remember the flight home. Caitlin remembers we were frightened about who might be there to meet us at Heathrow. If it was Scotland Yard, what were we meant to say? She was angry too, that still no one had told us what was going on.

  An old man with white hair offered us aloe vera for our sunburned legs on the flight and then insisted we share his bag of sweets with him. Cait also remembers her period started on the twelve-hour flight, unexpectedly, and there was nothing we could do about it, too shy to ask an air steward for tampons, so she sat in discomfort all the way home.

  But I don’t remember anything.

  Mom says about twenty-four hours after she made the call, just when she began looking into flights to Saint Lucia herself, to trawl police stations and orphanages, anywhere the authorities might have sent two girls whose father had been incarcerated and whose mother was deemed unfit to care for them—at that peak of hysteria, Caitlin and I pulled up in a car with Stephen, one of the family friends who had accompanied us to see Dad in the South of France. We would have recognized him at arrivals and been glad to see him.

  Poppy had started barking at the sound of a car passing, and Mom had gone out into the street, as she had done countless times already, half hoping it would be us and half fearing it would be the police, there to arrest her, and up until then it had been no one at all. But this time there was a car, and Cait and I got out of the backseat, looking frazzled and delirious.

  “Am I glad to see you two!” she said with a wired, unconvincing levity, looking from Caitlin’s face to mine. She thanked Stephen, inviting him in for a cup of tea, and that was it. We didn’t talk about what had happened. Even if I had wanted to talk about it, I didn’t have any words. I had left them all in the dust of a banana field and I didn’t find them again for years.

  13

  Two weeks passed. We hadn’t heard from Dad. We hadn’t heard from Scotland Yard either.

  It was a Wednesday morning. Mom was walking the dog before work, accompanying Caitlin and me up the hill where we caught the bus to school. We saw them as we turned from the residential Beckford Gardens onto the main road. The same dark car, as always. It had been over a year since Caitlin or I had spotted them, but we still knew. Since arriving home from Saint Lucia we had been waiting for them to show up, which didn’t make it any less shocking when they did.

  The car trailed us, as if looking for a parking place, and then pulled into a spot up ahead. We slowed our pace, Caitlin and I in our matching apple green sweaters with ladders in our tights, and the puppy tugging on the lead, wagging her tail, oblivious to the tension now knotting our little group together. I looked up at Mom, whose eyes were on that car, the worry wrinkle between her brows.

  “Cait, Ty,” she said, halting. “I’m going to be late for work, so I’m just going to take Poppy along the towpath and back to the house. I’ll see you later, okay?”

  We knew why she was leaving—she didn’t want us to see them pick her up—but it wasn’t okay. She cut left, joining the gravelly towpath, and we watched her walk away, past the brightly colored canal boats huddled along the water’s edge.

  We kept going up the hill without her. We looked ahead at the dark car—I wanted to peer through the windows and catch a glimpse of their faces; I wanted to know what they looked like—but it was already pulling out, and by the time we had reached where it had been parked, it had turned around, heading in Mom’s direction. We both stopped to watch it go, making a right back down Beckford Gardens, which would coincide directly with where Mom came off the towpath.

  We carried on toward the bus in silence, gathering with the other kids in the yard outside the boys’ school, waiting. Normally, Cait and I separated at this point—each to our own friends—but not today. We stood side by side in silence.

  We got on the school bus with the other children as if today were like any other day. As if today were not the day they’d take our mother away.

  Cait and I agreed to meet at the gates after school, and then went off to our lessons. I didn’t know that while I sat in a classroom, not concentrating on the Russian Revolution, there were men in suits gathered together, ominous as crows, in our front garden. I didn’t see these men ferrying clear plastic evidence bags full of our belongings into a van. I didn’t see Mom sitting in the backseat of that same dark car, with Poppy on her lap whimpering desperately at this invasion and powerless to stop it. I didn’t know any of these things were happening yet, but I felt them.

  At 3:30 pm, Cait and I found each other at the school gates and began the walk home. We took the bus in the morning because Landsdowne Road was steep, but it took twenty minutes to get down the hill on foot if we cut through Hedgemead Park.

  “Do you th
ink those men arrested Mom?” I asked Caity as we walked.

  She shook her head, unknowing, and shrugged.

  “Do you think they’ll try to talk to us? Mom always makes out like they might.”

  “I don’t think they’re allowed to. We’re minors, aren’t we? They’d need Mom’s consent.” Cait scrunched her mouth to one side, her thinking face. “I have no idea.”

  “Someone should really tell us these things.”

  “No, our family would never do something sensible like actually talk about stuff.”

  We crossed the River Avon, its brown waters rushing beneath us, turgid from the winter rain, and then cut down the residential backstreets of Bathwick. We turned onto Forester Road. It looked the same as it ever did. Mom’s car was parked in the drive. There was no yellow tape, no police, and no padlocks across our gate. There were none of the signs we expected from TV shows that something was amiss, just the same small-town stillness. A cat screeched, and we both jumped, and then looked at each other feeling foolish. We dialed in the security code, and the door swung open, hitting the wall behind with a bang.

  “Mom?” Caitlin called out instinctively.

  Poppy was there, winding between our legs and wagging her tail.

  “Mom?”

  No answer.

  I went to hang my coat in the cupboard under the stairs, and a reflective red object caught my eye. At my feet was the remnants of one smashed bauble, escaped from its Christmas box stowed deep within the cupboard. I flicked on the lights to look around, and there beside me was another box labeled photos #2, now empty. Our photos gone.

  I went to look in the living room. Mom’s desk drawers were open, emptied of their contents. She kept a file for each of us kids in which she stored our birth certificates, our school grades, our vaccination records, and our passports—but these pieces of paper that define our existence had all gone. They had packed up our past lives and lies. Stolen our family history. Everything that linked us to the life of the Kanes or the family that came before had been systematically removed. We came to Forester Road to become new people with new names, but they found our old selves and had taken them away to testify against us.

  Forester Road was not a fortress; it was just a house, like any other.

  I heard Caitlin behind me. “I’m going to call her office and see if she’s at work.”

  At my feet was a forgotten photo of Dad in the bathtub in California with a thick black beard and all three of us as babies squeezed in with him, Evan, the biggest, standing at the end. We’re all grinning at the camera, our faces white with matching shaving-foam beards.

  I went into the kitchen and felt their touch on everything. I felt like a trespasser in my own home, like I shouldn’t move a thing. They had unpinned the contents of our corkboard. They hadn’t removed Detective Sergeant Andrew Sloane’s business card. I wondered if he had been here. I wished I knew his face. I hoped he saw that we had crossed out Detective Sergeant and replaced it with Bastard.

  I heard Caitlin asking for Mom on the phone in the other room and then hanging up.

  “She called in sick,” Cait said, looking worried. “She never went in.”

  The black wings flapped frantically in my chest, filling my mouth with feathers and dust.

  They had to leave us one parent at least. Just one.

  We decided to call Evan at university because he would know what to do. Cait told him that we thought Mom had been arrested. She held the phone out so I could hear, our two heads crowded together.

  “Well, she’s not going to have forgotten about you,” Evan was saying, as if we were being childish to worry. “You’re both fine, right?”

  “But what should we do?”

  “Nothing. She’ll be back. I don’t think they can hold someone for longer than twenty-four … or maybe it’s forty-eight hours without pressing charges.”

  “But what if they press charges?”

  “Even if they do, they’ll let her out on bail.”

  “Do we need to bail her out?”

  “No,” he said flatly. “Don’t do anything.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know. But she hasn’t done anything wrong. They’re just giving her a hard time because they’re pissed off they didn’t catch Dad. Don’t worry!”

  “How can we not worry?” I asked.

  “Okay, worry all you like. It’s not going to change anything.”

  “Are you all right?” Caitlin asked.

  “Yeah, they were here too.”

  “Really?” we said in unison, horrified.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you talk to them?”

  “No, I was out. It’s not like we know anything, is it?” he said. “The student union has this legal advice bit, so I went to chat to them, just about my rights and stuff, and when I told the guy my story, he didn’t know what to say. I think students usually ask about their rent or stolen bikes or shit like that,” Evan said, laughing. “He told me I needed to talk to a real lawyer.”

  “We were saying before that someone should have told us what to do if this happened,” Caitlin said.

  “Listen, I’ve got lectures all day, but I’ll drive back either tonight or first thing tomorrow. And if she does come home, tell her to call me.”

  “Thanks, Ev,” we said together.

  “It will be fine. Tyler, don’t make yourself mental, and both of you, no wild partying in the house while Mom’s gone!”

  We said goodbye, feeling better.

  Last summer, Mom had gone to Cornwall for the weekend with John and asked Evan to keep an eye on the house. The three of us had gotten drunk together on the beers Evan had bought and a bottle of old cherry brandy we had found in the back of the cupboard, until Caitlin vomited on the bathroom floor, and Evan had to put her to bed. He swore us to secrecy, otherwise Mom wouldn’t trust us all in the house alone again, and blamed the stained carpet on the cat.

  Not knowing what else to do with ourselves, Cait and I took the dog for a walk. The air was heavy with the approaching dusk, like the sky was weighing down on us. We walked up to Sydney Gardens, between the grand pillared entrance and past the rows of freshly turned flower beds. I could see the creamy stone houses in the distance on the hill beyond the trees. It felt absurd for this to be happening here, amid the quaint historic beauty of Bath.

  I wondered where in the world Dad was right now. Mom had thrown the cell phone into the canal, so he couldn’t reach us, and we had no way to let him know what was happening. I thought of him out there in hiding, leaving us to face this alone, and I felt the first stirrings of a new feeling, something with talons and teeth, which I hadn’t felt before.

  Cait kept up a good pace, as if she wanted to know what happened next, when all I wanted was to sit down and cover my face with my hands. I felt unprepared for this.

  Cait slowed in order to link her arm through mine. It started to gently drizzle, leaving oily prisms on the pavements.

  “It’ll be all right, Smudge,” she said, as if she had read my thoughts.

  14

  As we walked, I thought about what Dad must have done to get in this much trouble. I remembered once counting money out on his coffee table in London, stacks of it, at least I thought I remembered. It was an abstract thing, this wedge of soft green dollars, foreign currency to me, used as a tool for the math I always struggled with, so I wasn’t sure if it was real or not. We would work on my mental arithmetic whenever I went to stay with him in London, because he was good with numbers. But the money was just once, I think.

  He had a police Identi-Kit too, noses and eyes on clear plastic sheets, which Cait and I would play with, creating composite faces like Guess Who.

  But these things didn’t add up to anything.

  “What do you think Dad did?” I turned to Caitlin. She was breaking a stick in half with her foot for the dog.

  “I don’t know. They always make it out like it was something financial, tax evasion or so
mething,” she said, hurling the stick into the wet green.

  “But why would Scotland Yard bother with us if it’s just tax evasion?”

  Caitlin rolled her eyes at me as if there was a world of sinister tax evasion I knew nothing about, which was true.

  “Mom says they’re just after the money,” Cait said, dusting her hands clean on her school skirt. “That’s the only reason they’re so hung up on finding Dad. And the stupid thing is there isn’t any money left anyway. Or maybe there is and that’s why he’s holding out.”

  But I wanted a better story.

  “Do you think he could have killed someone? Maybe he did it for Mom, and maybe that’s why she left Dad, because of the guilt.”

  Caitlin played out this possibility in her head. “I don’t think Mom would have said he hadn’t hurt anyone if he had, and I can’t see Dad as a killer. I reckon Mom would be more capable of the two of them if she was cornered. Though I don’t think she’d shoot someone, because she’d hate the loud bang—”

  “If it was something really bad, would you love him less?” I asked.

  I saw Cait toying with the hypothetical. She had dealt with this so differently from me. I had been berserk at times, crazy with missing Dad and worrying. My skin was proof of that. My homeopathist had told me I was lucky I took my stress out on my skin rather than letting it calcify inside.

  But Caitlin didn’t have eczema; she didn’t seem to be affected. In between the visits, she barely mentioned Dad and just got on with everyday teenage life. Sometimes I wondered what was wrong with me that I found everything so difficult.

  She considered my question for some time. We’d had this conversation before, at least variations on the theme.

  “No, I don’t think it would change how I feel about him,” she said. “I don’t know how I feel. I just want him to turn himself in already so this can all be over, and we can get on with our lives.”