No Way Home

by Tyler Wetherall

  Hazel and her daughter Alexa took us to the market, where the stalls overflowed with fresh produce from faraway farms, guarded by stocky women with only a handful of teeth between them. Alexa was a year younger than Evan and took charge of me from the moment we met, joining our ragtag sibling crowd, along with her big brother Sean, a junior golfing pro who had grown up on the courses of the Quinta.

  Alexa dragged Mom and me around pointing at lettuces and oranges and getting Mom to repeat the words in Portuguese for next time, while Hazel chuckled. Alface. Laranjas. Repolho. Espinafre. Mom rolled them around on her tongue like new tastes, and Alexa would throw her hands up despairingly, saying in perfect English, “Ah, Senhora Sarah, your Portuguese is terrible.”

  They were our first new friends, and from them our circle grew, as Dad joined the tennis club and Cait and Evan took riding lessons at the local stable. Mom began learning Portuguese in earnest, and she followed our maid, Antonia, around the house with a notebook, pointing at objects and writing down Antonia’s words. Árvores. Telefone. Marido. Antonia waggled her cheeks and muttered words she did not teach under her breath, as if these language classes were the most absurd task an employer had ever asked of her.

  The other women at the Quinta shunned Mom for paying Antonia too well when all the other maids began demanding higher wages. The diamond-ring brigade insisted Mom pay Antonia less, chided and ostracized her, but Mom refused to back down, saying a woman who was her cleaner, her nanny, her language tutor, and her friend deserved not an escudo less. When her Portuguese was good enough, she took Antonia out for lunch at the clubhouse to say thank you, and the other women stared disapprovingly.

  I don’t remember Portugal, really: just the geometric patterns of leaves on the pool where Dad taught me to swim, one hand beneath my belly as he coaxed me away from the edge. But everyone else remembers it fondly. Mom dug a small vegetable patch in our yard because it would be nice to watch things grow, even for a short while. She had decided it wouldn’t be a terrible thing to stay a few years before going Back Home, or maybe Back Home could be here.

  * * *

  Dad was the only one who suffered. A month after arriving in Portugal, we watched a news report of a hijacking in Egypt on TV. Grandma was on a cruise liner traveling the Mediterranean at the time, but Dad assumed it was a different ship. When it turned out that seven men from the Palestinian Liberation Front had commandeered Grandma’s boat, the Achille Lauro, Dad hoped she was one of the hundreds of passengers who had disembarked at Alexandria to see the pyramids that day. It was only after he managed to have a call discreetly put through to his sister that he learned his mother was among the hostages. Grandma had a pacemaker and high blood pressure, and there were fears for her health. The hijackers were holding the hostages up on deck at gunpoint, and later it was discovered that a wheelchair-bound Jewish man, Leon Klinghoffer, had been shot and thrown overboard. Dad spent two days unable to eat or sleep as he waited for news about whether his mother was next. When he heard that the terrorists had made a deal to abandon the Achille Lauro for safe passage back to Tunisia, Dad broke down in Mom’s arms and wept. There was little he could have done anyway, but the ordeal compounded his sense of helplessness and isolation.

  Every day, Dad would drive to a hotel in Cascais to use the pay phones, talking endlessly, hoping there was some magic series of words that could fix what he had broken. He used the same phone in the corner and had a man at the hotel help him put the calls through, because the international dialing codes were troublesome. Those calls were the only thing that connected us to our past, to the people and problems we had left behind. And yet he was unable to give them up.

  He was determined to support the other members of his group also implicated. Five were on the run, nine had surrendered and were going through the grand jury process, and two had cut loose. Aaron’s and Dad’s expenditures had already spiraled into the millions. The legal costs at least were predictable, but fugitive life carried unforeseen expenses. George, one of the pot cleaners, was struck down with prostate cancer, so they financed his private medical bills, but once he was cured, the man tried to extort them for more money and was cut off. The bookkeepers, a married couple, who would be the most damaging of the group to be subpoenaed, as they were the key to the accounting ledger’s code, had broken up due to the stress of being on the run. Divorce was too complex, so Dad furnished them both with a new identity, and they went their separate ways.

  Each piece of bad news concentrated his sense of failure. He stopped sharing these incremental losses with Mom. He tried to leave them in the lobby of the hotel, toss them out the window as he drove home, drop them in the wrinkled brown hands of the beggar women along with his loose change, but they stayed with him, making him distant and sad. His only solace was in our home, a microcosm of the world he was trying to save.

  In March 1986, after nine months in Portugal, the indictments came out and were worse than Dad had feared. One of his group had cracked, telling the Feds everything he knew. He had been with Dad from the beginning and gave them details of deals that had been tied up years ago, deals that the authorities hadn’t even known about. Dad and his two partners were charged with running a Continuing Criminal Enterprise, the Kingpin Statute, the same charge as Al Capone, which under new laws now carried a twenty-year minimum to life sentence. He was officially a Wanted Man.

  Dad’s name appeared in the papers across San Francisco as one of three ringleaders. He asked a friend to read the article to him over the phone. “Eighteen people were indicted yesterday on charges of smuggling one hundred tons of marijuana worth nearly a half billion dollars from Thailand to the United States between 1976 and 1983,” he read. The Assistant US Attorney was quoted saying all three ringleaders are now fugitives believed to be living in Europe, which really spooked Dad.

  He also learned he had been ill advised by his lawyer, who was trying to eke out Dad’s legal case for his own financial benefit; the government wouldn’t negotiate with him back then or now, not unless he cooperated. Dad wanted to offer his surrender in exchange for them dropping the CCE charge. But they wouldn’t enter into a dialogue with him until he gave himself up.

  The final straw was when he discovered that Portugal’s extradition exemption didn’t apply to drug offenders. He had registered us all at the American embassy in order to get legal residency. The upshot was if the FBI looked for us here, they could find us, and if they found us, they could extradite Dad after all.

  Suddenly he didn’t feel safe in Portugal living as Ben Glaser. He decided we were going to have to move on again and this time all change our names.

  At first Mom refused. She said if she broke the law as well, they’d both wind up in jail, and then who would look after us kids? Dad put pressure on her, saying that she was placing the whole family in danger and that her concerns were unfounded, which infuriated her. Mom felt we were lucky to have found another corner of the world that could be home and she didn’t want to uproot us so soon, especially as we had no evidence that the FBI knew where we were. The authorities were so ineffectual here, she argued, that the computers in the airports weren’t even plugged in. But Mom also felt she couldn’t insist on staying; she wasn’t at risk of being imprisoned—Dad was. She argued her position all the same, hoping Dad would come around to her way of thinking, and continued the argument in her head long after they had stopped talking.

  In the end, Dad proposed a compromise: he wouldn’t purchase any illegal documentation for her, so she wouldn’t be breaking the law, but once we left, we would live under false names and do our paperwork with them so we weren’t traceable. This way she could choose any name she wanted, and she chose Samantha—a name she’d always hated.

  As part of the compromise, Dad agreed to move back to England, the only place Mom could muster sufficient enthusiasm for to undertake the process of relocating the family again. Mom began to get excited about introducing us to our English family, and told us about our aunties
and uncles and cousins, some of whom we’d never met. She found an English cottage in the countryside and good schools for us all to attend.

  Evan was old enough at nine to pick up threads of arguments that traveled to the backseat of the car or up the stairs, words slipping carelessly beneath his bedroom door. He was big enough to ask questions and to be asked by anyone suspicious of our circumstances, and he was big enough to miss the life we had left behind in California—his papa and his baseball team and his school friends. Dad sat Evan down in the midst of this crisis and told him everything. That he had smuggled marijuana for many years; that it wasn’t a bad drug but it was illegal; and that now the police were looking for him. He said that he was sorry he had separated Evan from his papa, and he entrusted Evan with this secret, to help protect us from it as our big brother. Evan felt the weight of this secret and accepted it like a stone in his pocket, something to be kept and gently turned over in his palm when alone.

  Dad left Casa das Bruxas immediately, too paranoid to stay any longer, and went to Annecy in France, where we’d taken a villa for the summer (house #7). During this time he traveled down to Saint-Tropez to visit the other fugitives who had settled there, and when he came back, he decided we weren’t going to England after all, despite our English family, despite the good schools and the house that Mom had found for us, despite his promised compromise. We were moving to the South of France instead. He had fallen in love with a town called Mougins—where Picasso once lived, he kept saying, as if that mattered—and he thought Mom would love it too. He argued that it was safer to settle where he knew other fugitives had already established themselves and we would have friends to support us. But Mom didn’t want to live in France; she didn’t want to live within a community of fugitives; she wanted Dad to keep his promise. He asked her to give it a chance, and if she wasn’t happy we could all move to the UK next. He was sure it would be the right thing for all of us, when really it was only the right thing for him.

  That was the last thing Dad did that Mom could not forgive.

  Before we left Portugal, Mom went to the hairdresser and cut her long blond locks into a short crop, dyed bright orange. She looked in the mirror and saw a different woman than she had been before; this woman was called Samantha Kane. When we drove away, we left the Glaser family behind. They stayed on in the Casa das Bruxas like ghosts, living the lives we could have led, and once we crossed the border into France, we became the Kanes.

  23

  My family arrived in Mougins (house #8) late in the summer of 1986. It’s the first house I can really remember. The bulk of our belongings, which had only just made it to Europe from California, were now rerouted here, so we were again reunited with the never-ending bed and Mobutu the gorilla painting.

  I was going through a phase where I changed my name every few days. I would announce over breakfast that I was now Rainbow Raindrop Sunshine Moonlight, and I would only answer to that one name, and the next day I would claim to be Princess Moon Star, and so on. Variations on a celestial princess theme. In the end, my family just called me Tyler the Tyrant. Mom and Dad had impressed upon us that our surname was now Kane; this I had accepted, and then I quickly went around naming everything else as I saw fit, myself included.

  It was here in Mougins, in the only house we never gave a name, that all the laughter and noise of our childhood grew a shade quieter. Mom was unhappy from the moment we arrived. The house had marble floors and ivory carpets, with a grand staircase down which Mom would glide, diaphanous and thin, warning us not to run in socks on the polished floors, her voice echoing spookily through the rooms.

  I haven’t been back, but Mougins looks picturesque in photos, burnt-umber rooftops and tightly wound streets spiraling like the shell of a snail into the hillside. Mom remembers a sterile ostentation. She says Mougins was an enclave for the filthy rich, like Baby Doc, the Haitian dictator who lived next door to us. We had a Saudi Arabian arms dealer on the other side, who was courting me on behalf of his son in the mistaken belief we were an important American family. Occasionally I would be summoned for play dates or their emissary would come laden with sweets and toys and present them to me. Caitlin and Evan glowered as I tried to eat every one before Mom told me to share.

  One day when walking past one of these grand houses, a hulk of a dog bounded out barking at us, but as soon as we said hello, she rolled onto her back, legs splayed in the air, panting adoringly. We adopted Bricky after that, an unloved German shepherd, whose real family we never met. Each time we left the house she ran behind the car, and Dad had to circle the roundabout to tire her out so she didn’t follow us all the way up the highway.

  Evan and Caitlin attended the international school nearby, which turned out to be a shambles. The school had told Dad they would be renovating and moving to better premises, but the renovations never happened, and now Evan and Caitlin’s schooling was suffering, which added to Mom’s list of grievances. She didn’t like the garden here either. It wasn’t her garden, she said, and what was the point of planting anything when Dad had arranged for a man to come every week and preen out its imperfections. She took a job working in the lending library for a dose of daily normality. But she didn’t take pleasure in speaking French as she had Portuguese—French was the language of boarding school classrooms, a language imposed on her. At the root of these grievances was a grander realization, which had hit her as we were leaving Portugal: we were never going home.

  Increasingly, Dad withdrew into fugitive life, spending time with his coconspirators, who Mom dubbed The Fugues. She saw them as complicit in Dad’s downfall, the men who had encouraged him to keep smuggling, because without his involvement their income would evaporate. She didn’t want to waste another minute of her life discussing the vagaries of the fugitive existence, which was all they seemed capable of sharing. The women swapped notes on how to get kids enrolled in school under fake names; how to stay in touch with family and friends back home; how much to tell the children; and the men discussed their legal cases.

  As Reagan’s war on drugs raged on back in America, the sentences faced by this clique of former pot traffickers kept mounting, tightening the bonds between them. When you can’t tell new friends about your past, the people within your inner circle become the only ones who really know you. It was in this community that Dad felt most comfortable, and it was this community that made Mom feel like her entire life was now dictated by his fugitive status.

  Mostly they fought in long, drawn-out silence, but the rare times they fought out loud, Dad was defensive and challenged her unhappiness, saying she hadn’t made any effort to make friends or settle in here like she had in Portugal. She was living in the South of France in a beautiful house with all the money and time she could want. His legal situation was a strain, but there were worse things a husband could do, like cheat or run off. In exchange, she didn’t have to cook, or clean, or work, or do anything she didn’t want to do. Many people would think she was very lucky; the other fugitive wives didn’t seem to have any trouble adjusting, he said. And she responded that if he wanted the sort of woman who could be placated with a pair of designer shoes and a jaunt on a fucking yacht, he should have married one.

  After three grim months in Mougins, Dad agreed to move to England if it would make Mom happy. He felt we should wait until the end of the school year so as not to interrupt our education more than was necessary, but he later agonized over the decision after things had fallen apart. If only we had left right away, he thought, perhaps it would have been different.

  For our remaining time in that house with no name and no stories we want to share, they slipped into a bitter dance of recrimination and regret, his retreat into denial propelled by her own stormy silence. We would have gone to England with or without Dad, not that it was ever said out loud.

  * * *

  One afternoon, shortly before we were due to leave, we all heard the same terrible howl from the dining room, and we ran downstairs to see what ha
d happened. In the dining room, Dad had Bricky in a corner, and it was clear he had just planted a firm kick on her ribs. He stepped back when we came in, the trance of rage broken. We looked down at the dog, her tail between her legs, and up at Dad, who, now that his frustration had been spent on the ribs of a hungry dog, stood lost and confused, anger still flashing across his jaw in place of the shame he was reluctant to feel.

  “The piece of shit got hold of the dinner—took it right off the table,” Dad said in his defense, indicating to the room around him. It looked like a massacre. Dad had bought steaks from the butcher, planning a special dinner for the family, and had left them on the dining room table, and now the red meat was strewn all over the ivory carpets. Grisly lumps of gnawed steak bone. Mom hated those carpets. What sort of people have ivory carpets? she would say.

  Noting her disgust and our shocked little faces, Dad stormed out of the room to his office. We watched as Mom started to pick up the pieces of meat and collect them in a pile in the middle of the table, but the maid appeared, making those shuffling, wafting motions parents make when children are in the way, and Mom disappeared back outside through the sliding doors.

  Sensing it was over, Bricky slunk away too, head held low, refusing to be comforted or loved, to return to her real family, in a kennel at the end of the drive.

  24

  A few months after our first prison visit, shortly after I turned fourteen, Stephen came to visit us in Forester Road. The same family friend who had collected us after we returned shell-shocked from Saint Lucia.

  During lunch Stephen mentioned that Lana was in California now, and she and Dad were talking about getting married. He didn’t mean to break the news like that, but it was a shock all the same. Mom said the right things, but her voice went up a few semitones and her accent became more arch and British.