I couldn’t believe she had said it. We were meant to be in this together. Us versus them.
“But what was it all for, then? If he just turns himself in, then it would all have been for nothing.”
“Exactly. It’s not like it can go on forever, can it? I’m sick of this. He’s meant to be the grown-up, and he’s too selfish to see what he’s putting us through. He can’t keep running if he wants a life and to see us. I want none of this to have ever happened, but that’s not possible, so the next best thing is to get the whole thing over and done with, and the only way that will happen is if he goes to prison.”
My eyebrows shot up. I hadn’t considered him going to prison. The rare times we did talk about Dad, we used “turning himself in” or “returning to America” like euphemisms, but we never talked about what came next. I didn’t know anyone who had ever been to prison. It was a place that existed in books and movies, not somewhere people I knew were sent. Metal bars and orange jumpsuits, bulletproof glass and visiting-room tears; the things I knew of prison had no weight beyond a shuddering cinematic montage.
“More than anything,” Caitlin continued, “I just want them to leave Mom alone. Why should she have to go through this shit? I mean, where even is she right now? Probably locked up somewhere being questioned by that creep, and all because of something Dad did forever ago for a bit of cash. It’s not fair. And worst of all, he doesn’t even see it.”
She threw the stick again and started walking on. I could see she was worked up.
She stopped, turning back to face me. “Is that awful of me?” Her eyes welled up.
I shook my head and hurried forward to catch up with her. “No, Caity,” I said. “Even if he would just tell us what he did—”
“Or say sorry for all this…” she said, indicating around her.
“I wish we had a way to tell him what was happening,” I said.
“What for? It’s not like he’s going to turn himself in, is it?” Cait sighed. “I hate to think of what they’re doing to Mom right now. We should get back. If she comes home and we’re not there, she’ll be worried.”
The image of Mom in a cell was too much, let alone thinking of her there for hours or for future weeks or future months or an unimaginable length of time. The proximity of that possibility struck me hard, and then the injustice of it. Dad always said the moment Mom was in trouble because of him, he would turn himself in, but that moment was now, and where was he?
We arrived home and the house was empty. I went to fetch my diary from beside my bed, to put words in orderly rows and enjoy the calm that came with it, but there was just an empty space where my diary ought to be. I pulled back the covers, leaving the duvet on the floor, and pushed away my pillows, until the bed was stripped, bare and empty like a surgical table. My fingers flicked through stacks of paper and magazines on my dresser, but I already knew it was gone. It had been disappeared. Taken away in a clear plastic evidence bag with the rest of our memories.
I remembered shortly after I first found out, I had written one long entry about Dad, and later I had written about our first trip to Paris, and then panicked and meticulously crossed it out. Is a diary of a twelve-year-old girl permissible as evidence?
I ran down the stairs to Cait.
“What is it?” she said. I must have looked crazed.
I joined her on the sofa, and she leaned forward to look me in the face, and something about the kindness in her made me start to cry, and then I couldn’t talk, just swallowed gulps of tears. She rested her head on my shoulder and waited for me to stop.
“Hey, what’s happened?”
She gave my shoulders a squeeze—this was one of the moments that qualified for a hug.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“My diary’s gone,” I said.
Her face was blank for a moment, and then her eyebrows creased in acknowledgment.
“I’m sure there’s nothing—”
“I’m not sure…” I said, afraid of her censure.
We sat there for a moment, looking toward the switched-off TV.
“It doesn’t matter,” she declared, and I looked up imploringly. “Whatever you wrote, it doesn’t matter. As Mom says, whatever will be will be, and there’s fuck all we can do about it.”
“I feel awful. I can’t stop thinking it was my fault somehow, that they found Dad because of me, because it was my birthday and they knew we’d be together, and now they have my diary, and I don’t know what I wrote, and I can’t even think about prison…” I trailed off.
“This is no one’s fault but Dad’s, Ty. Even if you wrote an entire confession in your diary of everything you know, which really isn’t much, and even if they could possibly use that as evidence, even then, it still wouldn’t be your fault.”
I didn’t reply for a few moments.
“Gah!” I made a guttural noise. “Things are pretty shit right now.”
“Could be worse.”
“Really?”
“Totally,” she said with confidence. “Apart from both our parents probably going to prison, life isn’t that bad.”
We laughed.
“Bastards, shitheads, cunts!” she shouted to the walls. “If anyone’s listening, that’s for them.”
I gave a wet laugh. “Tossers, dickheads … schmucks!”
We carried on until we ran out of insults.
We played Rock Paper Scissors sitting cross-legged on the floor staring intently into each other’s eyes. The aim of the game wasn’t to win but to guess what move the other was going to make and do the same. We were trying to develop our telepathic skills.
We made a round of tea and switched on the TV to watch Neighbours at 5:35 pm like every other day, lying head to toe on the sofa, with Poppy in the middle, her head resting on Caity’s shoulder.
“Do you think if Mom and Dad go to prison, they’ll let us stay here and look after each other?” I asked Caitlin.
“No. They’d take the house away and send us to live somewhere else.”
“What, like, social services? Or would they let us go live with Evan in Nottingham?”
“Dunno. Living with your little sisters is probably pretty uncool at uni.”
“Do you think they’d separate us?”
She was silent.
“I think they’d try not to.” She squeezed my foot. “There’s no point thinking about these things until they happen.”
The gate chinked outside, and we both sat bolt upright on the sofa. Poppy ran toward the front door, and we followed. A silhouette keyed in the code, and we took a step back to allow the door to swing open, and there was Mom.
She looked haggard, crushed, and surprised to see us waiting for her like this.
“Bastard Andrew Sloane,” she said, by way of explanation, already walking toward the kitchen. “I’m fine, I’m fine. I just need a cup of tea, and then I may go to bed.”
* * *
Mom had been formally charged now for assisting an offender and money laundering, not that she told us these things back then, but we knew she was in trouble, and we knew they were trying to take the house away from us. They wanted to prove that it had been paid for with Dad’s criminal funds, but it hadn’t. Mom always taught us to keep our own money separate from a man’s, just in case, and it was her house, fair and square. She just had to prove it, which would mean tracing the money all the way back to the 1960s, when she paid for her first-ever house in New Rochelle, New York, with a down payment earned from her role in Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.
Mom was furious. I could see her anger pulsing under her skin, hardening with time like knots in deep tissue that stayed with her for years. I think she was as angry with herself as she was with Dad.
Andrew Sloane was angry too. He was angry they had missed Dad at the resort, and he blamed Mom for his escape. Scotland Yard didn’t know where Dad was, but they knew exactly where we were, and they weren’t going to leave us alone unti
l they found him.
* * *
I have very few memories of these months. I don’t start a new diary until May 1996, and I don’t write about Dad. I don’t mention our situation at all until June, when I’m invited on holiday to Spain with my best friend, Anna, and her family, and I’m worried I won’t be able to go because Scotland Yard hasn’t returned my passport yet.
At Christmas a blue-and-white china windmill arrived in the post from Holland, which played “Tulips from Amsterdam” as the spokes went round. Dad sent us a letter too, perhaps with the windmill, perhaps later. He included photos of our final day trip around Saint Lucia. I tried to imagine him somewhere out there in the Caribbean or Europe, in a photo printing shop, dropping off the roll of film, then his hands tucking the pictures into an envelope for us, and now they were here, in my hands. There is a picture of Dad with Caitlin and me sitting on either side of him taken by the boat driver; Dad is squinting into the sun, an arm around each of us, with the majestic Pitons rising out of the water behind us. Cait is looking up at Dad’s face, and we’re all bronzed and happy. In another, Caitlin and I pose with the man who sold us the volcanic rock necklaces. That necklace is stowed in my box of precious things still.
The letter is written on yellow legal paper, and reads:
My Darling Daughters,
Here are the pictures of one of the happiest days of my life. Sadly, I have had to leave paradise to decide which direction to go. I am glad you were able to share some of that special time with me, although it was much too short.
Tyler, I am sorry your birthday got fouled up, but at least we were together. I was so proud of you both with your diving. I am sure we will get to dive together another time, another place. That is if I can catch up to you both. Maybe even back in the Bay sometime in the future.
Give Evan my love and tell him about Saint Lucia. You two became part of the community. I am happy that you saw me working and shining, if only for just a short time.
I will be content just to know that you are well and together. If you miss me, just think of that wonderful time together and know that it will surely happen again. Life is long and full of surprises.
Much much love,
Dad
xxxxxxx
15
I don’t remember being told that he’d been arrested. I should remember. I can walk around the house of my memories, as if twenty years haven’t passed since I stepped through that door, and yet this moment, this moment when someone must have told me my dad was going to prison, is gone.
They say when we forget, the synapses which connect the neurons that make up that memory decay from disuse; they’re recruited for a new memory, which makes me think of holding a bunch of slowly deflating balloons, and each time we reach for a fresh new balloon, we neglect to notice that one balloon has slipped from our grip and is slowly receding away behind us, a red dot in a wide blue sky.
I know now that Dad was arrested on February 8, 1996. He called Lana first, still in Saint Lucia, and he asked her to tell his sister in Florida. My aunt called his mother and mine to pass on the news. I try to build it up, how it might have been, in case that helps: Mom probably sat Caitlin and me down after school to tell us, probably at the long wooden kitchen table or in the never-ending bed one morning, and we were probably drinking tea, and she probably made it sound as straightforward as possible, but none of us can remember.
* * *
Back then Dad didn’t share what he had been through since we had last seen him. But it was one of the chapters in the autobiography he wrote painstakingly on a typewriter in the prison library with notations and corrections in his black chicken-track scrawl. This would eventually become a staggering 300,000-word document testifying to the minutiae of his life and crimes. He joked that it wasn’t like he was short on time.
When I read his account, it was hard to believe it happened to the dad I know, and not to one of the other men he pretended to be over the years. When Scotland Yard found us in Saint Lucia, Dad switched identities again, this time to Simon Parker. He slipped onto a boat bound for the neighboring island of Martinique from where he could easily fly to Paris, since it is an overseas region of France. At the airport he still expected to be stopped. While making a phone call in a call box, he found a wallet with several thousand dollars inside. He was short on cash, having spent a significant amount on our flights and having left too quickly to gather more funds. He decided he couldn’t afford the karma of theft, so he handed the wallet in to the airline and was annoyed when the drunken tourist who claimed it didn’t offer a reward or say thank you.
He arrived in Paris wearing the same swim shorts, baseball cap, and flip-flops we had last seen him in. He remembers being terribly cold, holed up in a cheap motel, waiting. He bought a coat from a secondhand shop. It smelled of another man’s problems, preferable to his own. He passed the time by walking the city, trying not to despair, but the sidewalks of the Seine were steeped in memories of those early months he was on the run with Lana, when they were wildly in love. Lana wouldn’t fly out to meet him this time. The hotel in Saint Lucia was under surveillance, two federal agents posted there at all times, questioning the guests and the workers. It was bad for business.
Andrew Sloane had been furious to find Lana there. When he first interrogated her back in London, he told her that Dad was a dangerous man, that his actions had caused the deaths of children, and asked her if Dad beat her or performed perverse acts on her. She had cried, genuinely harrowed by the interview, and perhaps Sloane had interpreted those tears as innocence, believing her when she said she would call him if Dad made contact. With the innocence card already played, she had little room for maneuver.
Dad traveled to Amsterdam to stay with another fugitive he knew living there. Christmas came and went. He tried to negotiate a deal for his surrender, but they had already won—he just couldn’t see it. He didn’t have the energy to start again, to develop a new life as Simon Parker. He couldn’t ask us to believe in him again.
By January, he decided he couldn’t bear the cold any longer and, like a lost child, returned to where the sun still shone, to a place he could make believe he had something left to run for. Lana begged him not to come back, but he argued that maybe Saint Lucia was the last place they expected him to go, and if he couldn’t be there, he no longer wanted to be anywhere.
The ferryman showed no surprise at his return, greeting Dad with the same friendly banter they shared every time, allowing his safe passage back to paradise.
Some time passed.
Each sunset was a surprise.
He began to believe it might be possible, maybe he could be this man again, Paul Ricci, a man in possession of a future, shining.
Five whole weeks fortune gave him on the island, before they came.
It was February. He was out on the boat returning from a dive. Lana was waiting for him on the pier, panic in her pale blue eyes. This time it was too late to escape by land, as they were already coming down the one road into the bay, so Dad handed the boat driver a hundred dollars and asked him to turn the boat around. Lana watched him go from where she was standing. They didn’t wave goodbye. The boat bashed against the water, and just as it rounded the corner, Dad saw the police car pulling up to the ferry.
* * *
He spent five days in hiding in a secluded motel with Lana bringing him supplies by night, making her way through the woods behind the building. They conducted a sorry picnic on the bedspread: cheese slices in plastic, crackers, and tears.
For five days he was suspended in a state of anxiety. He ventured to reception, hungry and bored in his confinement, and the kindly owner offered him a pack of cards and a bag of potato chips for three dollars. He was grateful, though nervous.
With the help of his lawyer and a contact he had in the police, he found a way off the island. He started building a plan and building a future from nothing and for nothing except not to give in, when there was a knock on the door. For onc
e, in his manic state, he opened it without checking.
Four men looked back at him. They seemed surprised that he had opened the door. He looked back at them, surprised also, and yet he had known from the moment he stepped off the plane and drowned in the island’s sweet heat that they would come.
They wore no uniforms and carried no guns.
“Paul Ricci?” the man at the front asked.
The name gave him some hope, as if whatever they wanted pertained to his fake life as Paul Ricci, not his criminal life as Ben Glaser. They do this, I know now, so as not to spook the fugitive and cause a scene.
They told him there had been a series of robberies in the bay, and his name had come up during the investigation. They asked him to come down to the station to answer some questions. Dad protested, but he knew his protestations were futile. As the FBI didn’t have jurisdiction on the island, the Saint Lucian police would have to bring him in on a fake charge. The policemen gathered his belongings from the room and marched him down the corridor, two men in front, two men behind.
After a brief show of an interview with the police captain about the supposed robberies, which they both knew to be a ruse, Dad was taken by a relaxed and cheerful guard to be fingerprinted and booked. They exited the main station into a grassy area between police buildings. The guard asked him to wait a moment while he collected some paperwork from inside, leaving Dad completely alone, uncuffed. Dad took in his surroundings. In front of him was another police building: a closed, unmarked door, no windows. But to his left was the main entrance, not twenty feet away, the gate wide open. It led straight onto the street in Castries, and in a few steps, he could disappear into the crowds beyond.
But his feet would not move.
He had no fight left.
The guard returned. And Dad followed. His feet took him instead through the closed door in the shadow of a man in uniform, the first of many men in uniform he would follow in the coming years.
He was fingerprinted and booked as Benjamin Glaser.
Eleven years on the run had ended.
No Way Home Page 12