No Way Home

by Tyler Wetherall

  We told Dad about Kevin the pizza delivery boy asking us out, though we didn’t tell him we had snuck out of the hotel room, and it made him happy to think that we might have some excitement while here away from our friends.

  “Already causing a stir in Lompoc after just one night,” he teased.

  Lunchtime came and Dad recommended the honey-roasted turkey burgers. I went to buy us three burgers from the vending machine and then queued for the microwave. As I struggled to work the machine, a voice came from behind. “First time?” I turned around and a young, handsome inmate with high cheekbones and freckles on his mocha skin smiled back.

  I nodded. “Yes, thanks, it is, sorry I can’t…” I said, trailing off as I pressed random buttons.

  “Your accent is cute. English?”

  “Huh, yes. I’m just visiting.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t want to be staying, that’s for sure,” he said, breaking into a wide grin, the lines around his eyes pinching together. I smiled shyly in return, excited by the attention.

  “Who is it, then? Boyfriend?” he continued.

  “No,” I said, suddenly blushing. “My dad.”

  The microwave bleeped, and I gathered together my burgers with a cursory goodbye and made a dash for the table.

  Dad opened up all three buns on the table in front of him, spreading the packet of yellow mustard and bleached white mayonnaise on the bread, while mumbling to us about how it’s actually pretty good like this. He used to do exactly the same thing when we ate breakfast together in London. He would prepare our bagels, explaining the perfect ratio of lox to cream cheese or insisting we pinch out the dough from inside the bagel before toasting. No matter how many times we ate lox, bagels, and cream cheese for breakfast together, he would always talk us through the same instructions and shake his head if we deviated from his tried and tested method. He was right about the turkey burgers, though; they were surprisingly good.

  Dad dripped some grease on his trouser leg, and cursed under his breath while he dabbed at it with a paper towel dipped in water. I noticed the careful way he wore his prison uniform. Unlike some of the other inmates, his was neatly pressed and his shoes freshly polished. He had always taken pride in his appearance; even when reduced to the khaki coat, shirt, and slacks of life on the inside he had tried his best to look presentable for us, and it broke my heart.

  With the sun high in the sky, Dad put his coat over my shoulders, worried my arms were going to get burned, and gave me a little squeeze. A guard came over and told him to remove his jacket from the visitor. Dad winced. He removed his jacket. Visitors aren’t allowed to wear a prisoner’s uniform. He hung his head, visibly deflated. I took his hand and kissed his knuckles, and there was a moment when I thought he might break down, but instead he began telling us a story about how an inmate once escaped by trading places with his visiting twin brother, and I could feel Dad rally, so Caity and I rallied too, making cheerful agreements about trading places if we were ever imprisoned.

  * * *

  The afternoon passed slowly, and we found ourselves covering topics we had already discussed in our hallway phone calls. I didn’t feel we should run out of things to say, as if we were just going through the motions of familiarity, which terrified me.

  We took one of the decks of cards available from the front desk to play gin rummy. Dad had taught us both to play as soon as we were big enough to fan a deck of cards, just like his grandmother had taught him when he was young.

  “Do you want to know the first time I ever broke the law?” he asked while dealing the cards with swift expert flicks of his wrist. We nodded. “When I was at college, I used to go down to Miami with a group of friends for spring break to gamble, meet girls, what young men got up to back then. I’d been playing with the old guys at the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc for a few years and earned myself a reputation as a mean gin rummy player.

  “On the last night of this one visit—I think I was there with Rick and a couple other friends—Skippy, the bookie’s son, let me play on credit to stay in the game. You know what that means … yes? I was sure I had him and threw all of the group’s money at it and some, but I lost. I couldn’t believe it. I never lost. I paid up the hundred dollars I had left on me and said I’d return with the remaining three hundred the next day.

  “On our way back to the room, the hotel manager stops us with the bill. We now owe the bookie’s son three hundred dollars and had a hotel bill we couldn’t pay. We approached the problem like we did so many others later in life”—he paused for effect—“we smoked a joint and ran.” He laughed. “Rummy!” he called, and we grumbled as Caitlin tallied the score—Dad was in the lead—before he continued. “So, our hotel room was on the ground floor. We wait until three am when it’s quiet and climb out the window, crawl on our bellies past reception, and drive away. On the way home, we had no money for food, so we made a plan. We went to a Howard Johnson’s diner and ordered steaks, burgers, fries, milkshakes, cherry pie, ice cream, more food than we even needed, and we toss a coin to see who’s going to be last to leave the restaurant, and I lose. One by one each of my friends goes to the toilet and climbs out the window. They pull the car round to the front. When I see it waiting, I go up to the till to settle the bill, trying to act all cool and natural, then, as she’s adding it up, I rummage in my pockets and say, ‘I’m sorry; I’ve left my wallet in the car. I’ll be right back.’ At this point my heart is pounding, and I’m sure we’re all going to jail, but I manage to walk casually outside, and then I jump in the backseat and we speed away yelling and screaming.”

  He enacted the scene, his arms flaying in the air in the guise of his younger self.

  I smiled. Caitlin creased her eyebrows in the middle, an expression that said she would look amused for his sake, but she didn’t approve.

  “So, what happened with the bookie’s son?” I asked.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what, and this is what actually matters about this story: a few years later, after getting my first decent job on Wall Street, I found Skippy’s address and posted him a check for the three hundred dollars with an apology for my ignoble behavior. That’s what we call ‘honor amongst thieves.’ Unfortunately, sentences are so harsh these days, there isn’t much of that around anymore.”

  * * *

  Eventually, the conversation slowed to silence, and all that passed between us was the gentle traffic of the shuffling cards and the numbers called out as the scores tallied up. This silence was something to get used to. It’s different than other silences, because time here is so precious. Seven hours each visit for Saturday and Sunday, and then five days to wait before the next weekend, and then home until the following year. That’s just twenty-eight hours a year. You have to see the silent time of sitting together as just as valuable as the talking time, because there’s so much time to make up for: the other 361 days of each year for a too-big-to-tell-us number of years longer.

  But that first day it was new to us, and I wished I had more to share with Dad that he hadn’t heard or that I could ask the questions I had never found the words to ask.

  At the end of the next game, Dad put the cards to one side. He looked at each of us in turn and then, speaking carefully, he began: “Girls, we’re going to have a lot of time to talk over the coming years, and as you can see, there’s not much else to do apart from really work on our game.” He smiled, staring out beyond the barbed wire to the flat horizon. He turned back to us. “I want to use this time to try to explain a little more how I ended up in so much trouble.” He shifted in his seat, and it dawned on me that he had been nervous all this time too, unsure how to reconcile fatherhood with the humility of imprisonment. “I know looking back some of my actions may seem foolish to you now, but I made what I believed to be the right decisions at the time. When we first went on the run, your mother and I decided it was the best course of action for us all, because I didn’t want to miss out on watching you kids grow up and we didn’t want to break up our
little family.” He shook his head sadly. “That’s the tragedy, isn’t it? The thing we were running to save is exactly what we ended up losing. But listen: I don’t regret it, because I wouldn’t swap those years we had together when you guys were small for anything, even if that meant I was out there now,” he said, gesturing to the world at large. Finding his feet in his role as prison dad, he continued: “I know we’ve been dealt a rough hand, kids, but as a family we can pull through this and one day we’re going to come out the other side stronger. Okay?”

  That evening, as Caitlin and I lay side by side in our hotel bedroom, both unable to sleep, her voice emerged muffled in the darkness. “He doesn’t get it, does he?” she said, and I wasn’t sure I got it either, but I shared her frustration all the same.

  22

  When Dad described life on the run to me during those prison conversations, I remember feeling glad that we had been happy at the beginning, the Midas touch of the Yellow House still with us. I was looking to balance the scales of our family history so the good outweighed the bad.

  We moved first to Rome (house #2), where both of Dad’s partners had set up with their respective families, until Mom threw a fork at one of the men after he suggested I was traumatized by the move because I wouldn’t stop crying, and she refused to stay a minute longer—him, Dad, the police, the case, everyone be damned.

  We moved on. We traveled to Pisa to see the tower leaning and then drove through Tuscany, us kids singing along to Fiddler on the Roof in the backseat, while Mom tried to point out the beauty that was passing us by. Fiddler had been Evan’s favorite musical as a little boy, and Tevye was the reason he called his dad Papa, so we all called him Papa too. Before we left, Mom had asked Papa’s permission to take Evan with us to Europe, and Papa had agreed. She couldn’t tell him exactly where we were going, but she would ensure that Evan stayed in regular contact and would visit as soon as it was safe.

  We reached Forte dei Marmi, where we lived atop the white marble cliffs Michelangelo once chipped into. The family from whom we rented our villa (house #3) was living secretly in the basement beneath us, tiptoeing through the corridors by night, and we only discovered them by accident, when Dad spotted the other father from the world beneath us stowing away through a trapdoor for the evening.

  Mom couldn’t shake the sensation this was one long holiday, and any day now we would pack up our bags and go home. She found herself making mental notes about what needed to be done—like painting the spare room or making apricot jam in the style she had tasted while in Venice, where she and Dad had taken a second honeymoon—and then she would remember with a start: that life wasn’t there anymore.

  But while the illusion lasted that we were just on sabbatical from our very lovely daily lives, this European sojourn felt like an adventure—though perhaps it didn’t feel so adventurous for Mom, lugging three small children around Europe from city to city.

  We kept moving; after a month we left Forte dei Marmi and flew to London, where we found an apartment in Chelsea (house #4). Dad needed to develop, or “season,” his fake identity. Dad had traveled to Rome on his real passport, because he knew we wouldn’t settle there, and he wanted to create a false lead for the FBI to follow, hoping they would scour the Italian countryside for a man who no longer existed. After London he switched to his fake ID, and Benjamin Glaser effectively disappeared.

  He had purchased two passports for $10,000 each. He decided to be British, as he would be hiding out in Europe and he hoped his documentation would be less scrutinized at border crossings. Being born in 1943, he was a good candidate, as the deaths of infants during WWII were often unrecorded, but their birth certificates could be procured from hospitals with a little bit of work. Once in possession of a birth certificate, it was easy to resurrect these dead babies in an act of criminal black magic.

  His first two identities were Martin Kane and Paul Ricci. I think about these babies sometimes, Martin and Paul, and wonder at the lives they could have led had they not died. Perhaps Dad once passed their parents in the street, and they would never know.

  While in London, Dad practiced being Martin Kane, the name he felt more affinity with, Kane being potentially Jewish. What does Martin eat for breakfast? he thought to himself. What sort of clothes does Martin wear? What is Martin’s story? During this month in London, Martin joined a gym, got a credit card, and took a driving test, a test that over the years Dad would take on three more occasions, each time under a different identity. Martin Kane had been reborn and was now busy creating the paper trail that legitimizes us all. Eventually Dad felt like a Martin. If someone calls out the name to this day, Dad turns around. He kept his second identity, Paul Ricci, stowed away in a hidden compartment in his specially designed attaché case—for emergencies.

  Mom attempted to teach Dad to speak with a British accent, practicing “tuh-MAH-toh” and having him recite “The Rain in Spain Stays Mainly in the Plain,” but the rounded vowels imparted by his Long Island childhood would not flatten out to resemble the narrow-lipped British intonation, so they invented a new story, one that fit the things he knew and the way he spoke: he had been born in England, but after his father died in the war, his mother sent him to American relatives, and he had lived there ever since. This was the story he would tell anyone he met as Martin from now on.

  After a month of summer rain, we packed up, despite Mom’s pleas to stay in England. Dad said it was too dangerous for him to be in a country from which he could be extradited if he were found. Mom said he just didn’t like the weather. We gathered ourselves back into our five suitcases and prepared for the next leg of our journey.

  We took a train to Southampton for the ferry over the Channel to France; from there we took another train first to Paris and then to Santander in northern Spain, where we bought tickets for the sleeper train to Lisbon, Portugal, an eighteen-hour journey.

  Before we left America, Dad had drawn up a list of countries without an extradition treaty with the US. Once we arrived, he wanted to live legally as Ben Glaser again—if he didn’t break the law within that country, the government would have no basis on which to extradite him. The short list included Brazil, Australia, the Congo, and Portugal. Brazil had a certain daydream charm, but Mom didn’t think there would be good schools, and we were all to be sent to American schools so when we returned home we could slip straight back into the education system without struggling. The Congo was too dangerous and Australia was too far away. Dad also said it was full of criminals and no place to bring up kids, to which Mom raised her eyebrows at him. “Not like us,” he said. “Real criminals.”

  There’s a story Dad tells about the train station in Santander, a chaotic place, full of people pushing in every direction. The train pulled up twenty minutes late and was so crowded that people were hanging out the windows and squeezed into the doorways. Our only hope was to run to the end of the platform where it might be less full. With just minutes to board, we left our five suitcases in a pile, while Mom and Dad tried to reach the farthest end of the narrow-gauge train—with me bouncing on Mom’s hip and Dad leading Cait and Evan by the hand. Dad loaded us onto the last carriage and told Mom to look up our real estate agent in Lisbon if we became separated while he ran back for our luggage.

  We worked our way to our sleeper carriage, as Mom kept losing one or another of us in between strange legs. As the whistle sounded and the train pulled out of the station, we all looked out the window for Dad, wondering if we had lost him in Spain and if we had, how we would find him again.

  After nearly two hours, Dad burst through the doors of the carriage, dripping in sweat and out of breath but, astonishingly, wielding our bags. He had gone back for them and handed each one to the people crowded in the doorway, motioning for them to pass them down the train, before jumping on himself at the last minute. It had taken him two hours to work his way along the four carriages, back and forth with five bags through the crowds to our seats. His face broke into a grin.

>   “Made it!” he cried, and we gave him a round of applause.

  “Can we go home now?” Mom joked, and at that moment Dad remembers feeling a sense of peace in the decision they’d made, that it didn’t matter where we went, as long as we stuck together.

  * * *

  We arrived in the Quinta da Marinha, the Farm by the Sea, a sprinkler-heavy development populated by expats and the dubiously wealthy. Beyond the clipped green grass of the Quinta, with its club sandwiches and membership fees, were the rugged hills of the Portuguese countryside crisscrossed with treacherous dirt roads and the occasional rural village—just a cluster of stone houses on a crossroads. Dad said the landscape reminded him of a more grizzled and ancient California.

  We moved into a small cabin in the middle of the Quinta’s golf course (house #5), and balls would intermittently fly overhead, occasionally landing in our yard. Evan collected them into bags of three to sell back to the tourists—Dad was proud of his ingenuity. Our real estate broker, a rambunctious delight of a woman called Hazel, soon found us a bigger house to settle in called Casa das Bruxas, house of the witches (house #6), hidden in the shade of a pine forest. The whole area was circled by grand mansions now crumbling at the edges, once home to Russian royalty who had fled the revolution with jewels tied in their corsets and memories of bloodshed.

  For the first few weeks after we arrived we only ate from cans, packets, and Mom’s imagination. The grocery store in the local town had no fresh vegetables apart from the occasional limp, brown lettuce, and Mom had watched the butcher swatting flies from the carcasses in the window display. She braved it, but the meat tasted like he’d slaughtered one of the stray dogs out back for the stupid English family who didn’t speak Portuguese.

  Mom called Hazel, the only local she knew who spoke English, and asked how people fed themselves in this funny little place. Hazel’s delicious cackle crackled down the line as she told Mom to be ready at 7 am the following day.