No Way Home

by Tyler Wetherall

  Feeling desperate, Mom hurried back to the car and jumped in so the door slammed shut and everyone flinched.

  “Sorry!”

  “What were you doing?”

  “I was just checking everything was switched off and we hadn’t left anything behind.”

  “It’s fine, take your time,” came Dad’s muffled voice from beneath the blanket.

  Mom slowly pulled away, barely touching the gas, hoping to roll the car unnoticed past the FBI who might still be stationed in the derelict shed by our gates.

  We were to drive through the night to Los Angeles airport, where we would buy first-class tickets in cash to Rome. Dad knew his name could be flagged up on the system and they could stop him at any point, but he felt confident they weren’t watching. His lawyer had been instructed to prepare as if Dad was planning to fight his case, so the government had no reason to suspect him of running, especially with his young family in tow.

  It would be now that they had us in full sight. They would be able to see the car drive straight past them and get a full view of Mom at the steering wheel. Her instinct was to put her foot down and speed away, but she let the car continue its slow roll.

  She listened for the sound of a vehicle behind her. There were no headlights in the rearview mirror. Nothing. They could watch that gate for as long as they wanted. No one was coming home.

  21

  I’m going to visit my dad in prison for the first time. I told the other girls at school that he lives in Hollywood, and we’re going to eat sushi in famous restaurants and go shopping on Rodeo Drive like in Pretty Woman. It’s a half-truth or at least a manageable lie; Evan’s papa offered to house us at his place in Beverly Hills on the days between the allocated weekend visiting hours, so I’m just swapping one father for another, and who’s going to know any different?

  As soon as Dad settled into Lompoc Federal Correctional Institute after his self-surrender, he began planning our first trip to see him. Mom sat Caitlin and me down at the kitchen table to talk it over. “I know your father is putting a lot of pressure on you both to go see him this summer, but I want you to know that this is your choice,” she said, looking at us both solemnly. “You’re old enough to decide if this is something you want to do, but seeing him in prison is going to be tough, and you don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

  Mom had received a letter from the Organised Crime Group of New Scotland Yard, signed by one Detective Sergeant Andrew Sloane. It read that after the “lengthy investigation,” the casework lawyer had “directed that no criminal charges be brought against Ms. Wetherall in respect of her involvement with her ex-husband, Benjamin Glaser, and his activities in drug trafficking or money laundering,” and, just like that, our belongings were returned one June day, remaining in clear plastic evidence bags in the cupboard under the stairs for years to come. Mom still wasn’t prepared to come with us to America, fearful of being arrested as soon as she landed, a decade of anxiety too viscous to dilute with this one piece of paper. Maybe she had other reasons too.

  Dad never asked whether or not we wanted to visit, so he arranged for the tickets to be booked without further discussion, and we were on our way.

  I saw the city first through the plane window, sprawled beneath us, smog settled deep between the skyscrapers, a rash of buildings spreading as far as the eye could see. Everything was hazy and unclear, like you could taste the grit in your mouth already.

  Papa’s new wife, Jara, met us at the airport. We called her the “new wife” even after they’d been married a decade. She was a tiny woman, full of frenetic energy with flame-red dyed hair, who had been a country music child star in the 1970s. She had met Papa, a hotshot manager, when she was sixteen, and she said spending time with us was like reliving the normal teenage years she’d missed out on the first time around. She and I struck up an unlikely and intense friendship over these summers, cruising around LA together in between my weekend visits, talking endlessly.

  On this first occasion, however, Dad had arranged for Margarita, the wife of one of his fellow inmates, to transport us the two hours to Lompoc and act as our guardian in prison (anyone under sixteen requires a guardian). Jara drove us to meet Margarita in a barren car park on the outskirts of town, and this exchange felt surreal, clandestine even, stepping from one car of a woman we didn’t know to another’s with insufficient words in between to normalize the event with social niceties. Margarita was an attractive woman in her forties, but I don’t remember anything we said to one another while sitting in her car, watching the Pacific Coast pass by the window.

  It’s hard to differentiate Lompoc from the other prison towns that came later. A neat grid of flat-pack buildings with no real history or mystery or soul. Just forecourts and Domino’s and Dunkin’ Donuts and kids kicking dust with nothing to do but daydream. It was all novel to us, though, and distinctly un-British. Later that week our waiter—shortly after reading out the available specials for the evening—pulled up a chair and shared his life story about his salvation from drugs by Jesus. I was coming to realize America wasn’t home, no matter what they said at customs.

  A tall, lanky kid greeted us at the reception desk of our hotel.

  “You visiting?” he said cheerily.

  We must have looked a little alarmed.

  “First timers? Don’t think I’ve seen you here before.”

  We nodded.

  “Not that I’m prying, course, but most our business is for the prison. And the Wine Country often. How about a brochure for our tours?” He offered us a leaflet with pictures of fields filled with flowers in Technicolor detail across the front and a glass of white wine superimposed on top.

  He showed us to our room. We learned that everyone in Lompoc worked at either the Air Force base or the prison. He offered us a catalogue of local restaurants and takeaway options, and I took it along with my brochure, as if we were on a real holiday.

  Dad had told us about Lompoc beforehand. “It’s a small town and there isn’t much action, but Grandma says there are a few basic restaurants. She ate at the steak house and says the steak is decent. The hotel is simple but comfortable, and there’s a pool, which you girls might enjoy. I doubt there are many hip young people for you to hang out with, but…” And he went on, as if it mattered.

  Margarita excused herself for the evening, so Caitlin and I ordered a pizza. The delivery boy was a few years older than Cait with hair clipped close to his skull and baggy jeans. We paid him, said thank you, and went to shut the door, when he stopped it with his foot. Propped up against the doorway, he asked where we were from. Cait told him nicely, sounding very British, and went to shut the door again, but he kept talking.

  “Me and the boys are getting together for a few beers tonight. We thought maybe you girls’d like to come along?”

  He was bigger than the anemic-looking British boys I hung out with and had the confidence to look us in the eye as he asked us out. I had my first sort-of boyfriend back home. Jamie had been the boyfriend of one of my best friends, and I’d been jealous of their underage sex and late-night drinking. When Jamie asked me out straight after they broke up, I knew I should say no, but I said yes all the same. “Muff before mates” was Evan’s take on the affair, shaking his head.

  The pizza delivery boy was called Kevin. Cait took his number, flirted, and said good night. She was sixteen now and had finally been freed from her five years of orthodontic torture, which was as much a transformation in how she felt as in how she actually looked, because suddenly she gave a perfectly pearly straight white smile, which had been hidden behind closed lips before, and with her caramel-colored glossy hair and dappled tan from her clusters of freckles, she had turned into the kind of golden wholesome beauty of American high school, if we had ever gone, and the type of beauty I felt I could never be. She occasionally took me out with her under duress from Mom—“include your little sister!”—and I would sheepishly tag along with her friends.

  Cait and I
ate our dinner while scheming nighttime excursions, thankful to have something else to talk about apart from tomorrow, when we would see Dad. A few hours later, we slipped out the sliding window of our hotel room, leaving it slightly ajar, to meet Kevin and his friend, Chris, in the parking lot. I don’t know who we thought might catch us and tell us off or why we didn’t just leave from the front of the hotel.

  We sat in Chris’s car, drank beer, and talked the same nothings we talked to boys back home. Kevin asked Cait if she wanted to try driving his car, so they disappeared, leaving me with Chris. We made out with our necks stretched across the gearshift, a hand tentatively on a thigh. Cait knocked on the window at 2 am and we snuck back into our hotel room.

  * * *

  Dad had sent us the prison’s instructions on what we should and should not wear: “Watches, open-toed shoes, see-through clothing, tight pants, revealing shirts or blouses, halter or sleeveless shirts, hoodies, athletic pants or jogging shorts are not allowed.” Etc.

  There were other rules too, like we could only hug when saying hello and goodbye.

  I wore a silver headband over my cropped hair in order to look more like the daughter Dad might remember. It wasn’t long after this trip that I gave myself a buzz cut. I turned up to school assembly late the next day, so I had to walk through the middle of eight hundred girls to find my seat as I felt the sound of their heads turning. I was thrown off sports teams and the dance teacher said she couldn’t have a girl that looked like me representing the school in public, which I thought was pretty cool. Mom defended my right to self-expression; she knew it was better I shave my head than the other things I might do.

  Margarita was waiting for us at reception. There was a tray of donuts on the counter, the icing perspiring gently in the morning sun. I couldn’t eat. I found it hard enough to keep the emptiness down, which was when I realized how nervous I felt, and I wrestled with those nerves all the way to Lompoc FCI, as we passed the fields of farmed flowers in bright multicolored columns, the occasional figure stooping low among them.

  The prison complex was made up of clusters of low-rise white buildings, the American flag waving out front. The entrance hall was nicely kept with houseplants and polished floors. A man with his head down was sweeping, and I wondered if he was a prisoner too. There were rows of plastic chairs fixed firmly to the floor, partly occupied by people waiting. Margarita went up to reception, which was protected by thick glass, took a ticket for us, and we joined the other visitors.

  On the wall above the chairs hung framed photographs of the prison staff. Dad hated the guards. He never understood how they found so many small-minded people to run the prisons. They must be really bad, I thought. Dad likes most people.

  The guard came out of his bulletproof room and called out a list of names, including our own. Everyone in the room stood up and gathered around. We had been told to bring nothing with us except our passports and $20 in one-dollar bills in a clear plastic bag. The prisoners are not allowed to touch money. Dad wasn’t allowed to feed the dollar bills into the vending machine even when one got stuck and I couldn’t make it work.

  Margarita showed them the letter confirming her as my guardian. We completed some forms. We went through a metal detector. The guards verified our identity at a booth, keeping our passports, and stamped our hands with invisible ink. We were patted down, and then led farther into the compound, but I was no longer concentrating on what the guards were doing—I was looking out the window at my first sight of prison. Grass and wire; grass and wire. Gray and green, gray and green. So much barbed wire.

  As we shuffled along, I saw a tidy little garden with yellow flowers. Two inmates tended the beds. They both had garden tools. A vague sort of hope came and tossed around inside me. They had a shovel. It couldn’t be that bad inside if men were allowed shovels.

  We were escorted outside. More green, gray, barbed wire, and grass. The blue sky without a cloud, just the white smudge of an airplane long gone. We waited for the guard to lock the gates behind us and then escort us farther along a double-fenced corridor crossing the prison grounds.

  It was eerily bright. Empty. Clean. I looked up and saw a man in a watchtower with a sniper rifle walking in slow circles, while below him men all dressed in the same khaki uniform walked in circles for what seemed like years.

  The moment I looked away from the sniper I spotted Dad. Beyond the wire corridor and the gardens tended in silence, through another double fence, I could see him, squinting in the sunshine, a hand raised above his eyes. He was standing close to the fence, waiting to see us come through. It brought me back to school, his look, when he still picked us up. He had exactly the same expression on his face—a mix of anticipation and worry, a face so particular to him.

  He spotted us, and in that awkward period when someone is too far away to say hello but close enough that an acknowledgment should be made, I waved at him. He turned his back on me. I was stricken for a moment by his turn, but then the guard told me off and I understood. It was forbidden to make hand gestures at the prisoners. Shovels or no shovels, this was going to be awful.

  I looked back and Dad had gone.

  Finally, a door opened into the visiting room full of circular tables and plastic school chairs. In the middle, a fat woman sat at a desk surveying the room, looking determinedly grim.

  Dad was waiting and smiled when he saw us. He looked so much smaller than the dad I remembered and so much older. His hair was grayer than before and thinner at the top. I saw all at once that prison shrinks you so you’re more like children—easier to package and control. He had been in prison for less than two years and already he was shrinking.

  We both left Margarita’s side to embrace him. All three of us wrapped around each other in a big hug, and Dad made his happy growling noise, as he always had.

  “How was it getting in?” he asked, and then, spotting Margarita with her husband, he pulled her in for a hug and thanked her. She accepted warmly, standing snugly against her husband’s side. We were introduced to this cellmate of Dad’s, who recognized our faces from the photos on Dad’s wall.

  “Ah, Caitlin, you’re the one who’s going to be a doctor? You’ve got your dad’s freckles. And Tyler, you’re a very talented artist; we love getting your drawings. They’re all over our room.”

  His words animated that image I had of Dad sitting on his bunk, except now he wasn’t alone; he was sharing details of his life and pictures with this man, who shared details of his life in turn, these conversations repeated to keep the outside world from fading away.

  “I’ll let you guys get on. I know your dad is thrilled to have you here,” he said, as if we were visiting Dad’s place of work.

  We went outside to the garden area. There were a dozen picnic tables arranged on a lawn. This could be any normal Saturday, I told myself, at a picnic in the park. And then I let myself acknowledge that this wasn’t normal and it would never feel normal. Seeing your father behind bars will always be quietly sickening.

  “It’s fine,” Caitlin said, and I knew she was saying that for Dad’s sake, and she found this quietly sickening too.

  “It’s not bad, no,” Dad replied.

  “Sorry we’re late,” I said, feeling guilty for having taken an extra ten minutes that morning for nothing apart from changing my T-shirt and changing it back again; putting on a little makeup, then deciding it was too much and taking it off, and all just to look however I was meant to look for this momentous occasion, while having no idea what that was. “Were you waiting long?”

  “Not really,” he said. “They get all the prisoners who have visits to arrive before, then we’re all strip-searched on the way in and the way out. Lift your balls, turn around, bend over, cough,” he said authoritatively, and then laughed, while I looked at him, horrified.

  “Isn’t it awful?”

  “No, to be honest, I don’t even think about it anymore. It happens so often, you just switch off. That’s the thing about this place,
one of the things, nothing here is private.”

  Lompoc was a low-security prison, which meant it had better facilities than most, but it still had a system of controlled movement—every hour they would allow prisoners to move between prison buildings during a ten-minute window, after which the doors would lock down again—and regular counts, for which a prisoner had to either be at his designated place of work or standing by his bunk.

  Dad told us about the black market and what people smuggled in and out.

  “I used to be in on a poker game that’s held in the gym,” he said. “The guards turned their backs, and we’d play for cigarettes or credits in the commissary, but I decided it was too dangerous and quit.”

  “At least you’ve stopped smoking,” Caitlin added.

  “Yes, terrible habit. Lana was a bad influence in that department. You two, never start,” he warned, and I felt guilty. I had brought over two cigarettes in my pencil case.

  (I later learned the real reason he quit the game: he had caught one of the men cheating and warned another player. The next day, a Chinese gang member came into his room with a baseball bat, and he agreed to stop playing.)