No Way Home

by Tyler Wetherall

  “Oh, well, maybe that’s for the best having Lana out there to visit him regularly,” she said. “And as this citizenship business works both ways, perhaps he’ll now consider returning to England one day too, though I doubt it. He could never stand the lousy weather.”

  I was quiet for the rest of the afternoon, as I tried to digest this new information. When Dad was first inside, Mom had offered to remarry him in order to renew her green card, and then we could relocate the whole family back to California, Back Home like we had always intended. We had discussed it over the dinner table: whether we wanted to move to America and transfer to American high school. Cait and I were open to the idea, and Evan was already looking at entertainment jobs in LA for after he graduated. Mom felt it was a good time in our education to switch, and she thought it made more sense than ferrying us between England and America, a constant negotiation between time, money, and love. But now with Dad marrying Lana, that would never happen. It felt like he had chosen her over us.

  I didn’t tell Dad that I knew; I wanted him to tell me himself, and he didn’t for weeks. I was sitting on the stairs of Forester Road with the house phone in my lap, listening to the gentle percussion of Mom’s cooking in the kitchen in one ear, while in the other Dad told me what I already knew. The occasional distant holler served as a jarring reminder of where he was calling from, as he continued to explain what a huge support Lana had been to him during this time and how being able to see her regularly would help him get through his sentence.

  “Wow, congratulations,” I said without enthusiasm.

  “There’s a small chapel here where it’ll take place, no conjugal visits, unfortunately.” He laughed, and I didn’t respond. “Some friends are coming to be witnesses, though it won’t be much of a wedding,” he added. “Not like my last to your mother, the surprise wedding. Did I ever tell you about that?”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a pause, when I knew I was expected to say more, to respond how he wanted me to respond, which is what I normally did, but this time was different.

  “I can tell you’re upset, Ty,” he said, serious now. I didn’t say anything, because if I spoke he would hear that I was crying. I listened to Mom in the kitchen and willed her to put down the pots and pans and come find me on the stairs, because if she didn’t see me crying, then I wouldn’t tell anyone, and I desperately wanted to talk to someone. “I know you’re upset, because it’s the finality of your mother and me never getting back together, which is something you’ve held on to for a long time, so it’s tough for you to let that go, but I want you to understand…”

  He continued to explain to me how I felt, but he was wrong this time, and that made it all the more isolating. Mom and Dad divorcing had fallen way down the hierarchy of problems in recent years, trumped by the FBI and prison; I was upset that I had found out through someone else that he was getting married, and I held on tight to this reason, because if I let it go, I might have to admit that really I was just angry. It was easier to be angry with Dad for marrying Lana than it was to be angry about everything else, and it was easier to resent that he hadn’t told me this one thing, rather than all the other important things he had kept from me.

  I didn’t say these things to him, because I didn’t want to tell him how I felt anymore. If he didn’t trust me enough to confide in me about his life, then why should I tell him anything about mine? He was just some guy I had to speak to on the phone every few days about meaningless crap and then visit once a year in that shithole prison, and he didn’t know anything about who I was or who I wanted to be. I’d waited for this to end for so long, and now it never would, because nothing would be the same again. I was fourteen years old, and he had been fucking up my life since I was born, and I was sick of it, and right then I wished I could cut him out completely. I wrote this in tight angry script in my diary, on which I had glued a postcard of Uma Thurman, cigarette in hand and severe black bob, in her Mia Wallace guise, an addition on my list of teen idols—not for nearly dying but for doing it with such style. In the back of that same diary was a list of all the boys I had kissed so far with a score out of ten for each.

  * * *

  A few weeks later, I woke up to the sound of Mom and Caitlin in the kitchen, making domestic clatterings downstairs, and I hurried out of bed, eager to be included. This didn’t happen so often anymore. While working part-time at the small real estate firm, Mom had gone back to study art at the local college, picking up a passion she had left behind when she ran away from home at sixteen. She and Caity were both usually out of the house early to go to the stables. Caitlin had bought a damaged horse cheaply; Comet was a sinewy strong chestnut show jumper who was too scared to get into a horse box after a near-miss car crash with his previous owner, and a horse who won’t be boxed is no use as a show jumper. Cait was retraining him in a tiresome seesaw of trust and obstinacy. Comet was soon renamed the Beast for his steadfast refusal to be coaxed back to sanity. On the weekends Cait served scones in a small teashop called Hands Cafe, and between school, friends, waitressing, and the Beast, she was rarely home either.

  “Morning,” I called out, shuffling sleepily into the kitchen, a beanie on my head and sock slippers slouched around my ankles. I had taken to sleeping in a hat to keep my cropped hair from going fluffy.

  “Kettle’s on,” Mom said without looking up.

  “What time is it? I thought you’d all be at the stables.”

  I settled into the wicker chair in the corner, drawing my knees up to my chest and pulling my T-shirt over my bare legs for warmth—and then I noticed the atmosphere of recently departed tension.

  “We’re making a puffy omelette,” Cait announced with a wired look about her. The whisk rattled against the metallic bowl aggressively, and I winced at the racket. I had gone to the cinema with my friends the night before, and we’d filled our soft drinks with vodka, falling about the back row foolishly until we were booted out.

  “Do you want me to do you some French toast?” Mom asked, pausing from her activity in the junction between kitchen and dining room. We’d knocked the wall down in a fit of renewal, but we’d run out of money to finish the renovations, so the load-bearing beam remained exposed, the innards of our house on crude display. I had overheard Mom arguing with Dad on the phone about his paying for Lana’s house in Santa Barbara and a new car while Mom couldn’t afford to buy us school uniforms. It made me hate them all. The girls at school teased me about the holes in my sweater and the stained collar on my shirt, though our perpetually poor attire was as much about Mom’s attitude toward laundry as our lack of available funds. Mom said it was important to do laundry badly or people might expect it from you, and if a man ever asked us to iron his shirt, we should immediately burn a hole through it, so he’d never ask again.

  Puffy omelette was Caitlin’s and Mom’s favorite breakfast. I settled for a cup of tea while trying to assess what had happened in my absence. I caught Cait’s eye and cocked my head quizzically. Her eyebrows shot up even higher, Charlie Brown stress lines appearing on either side of her face, and in this series of silent gestures I read that there had been tears and this puffy omelette was placatory.

  The omelette emerged from the oven, bronzed and sculptural, and I joined them at the table while they ate, waiting for someone to tell me what was going on.

  “Ty,” Mom began, “Cait and I were talking about this proposed America trip next summer, and she asked that I have a word with your father to help explain why you don’t want to go.”

  I looked at Caity, who remained deeply involved with her breakfast, scooping crème fraîche onto her plate. This tête-à-tête suddenly felt like a coup and I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with it. Dad had already begun planning our next visit for the following summer; we had dutifully supplied our school holiday dates, but when the organization stepped up a notch, Cait had protested. She would have to take time off work, she said, and she needed the money for the horse livery, and she couldn’t
abandon the Beast in the middle of his training. She was hoping by the end of the summer to have cured him of his phobias and to sell him at a profit, using the money to buy a car. There was more to it than that. She didn’t want to spend another summer holiday being carted around California by strangers in order to spend a few hours in a stifling prison pen with our dad, just to hear him boast about his years as a drug baron without once acknowledging how much he put us all through because of it—but that last point never came out right.

  “Have you said anything to Dad yet?” Cait asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “Ty!”

  “What!”

  “But we talked about it. Do you want to go now?”

  That was a difficult question. Part of me was eternally loyal to Dad and I wanted to support him, but there was another part of me that didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to see him reduced to a man I wasn’t sure I recognized as my father. I was also still angry, with the wedding to Lana looming that spring. None of that was easy to digest. What was easier to express was that I wanted to spend my summer getting high in the park with my friends and not miss out on whatever schedule of parties and gatherings and gossip would no doubt occur as soon as I went away. But immediately upon thinking that, a stab of selfishness would send me back to square one: indecision.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “No, not really, especially not with what’s-her-face with us. It’s not like he doesn’t have anyone to visit him now she’s there anyway,” I said, referring to Lana. “But I don’t have the same excuse as you with the horse or your job, so it’s harder, and I can’t just say I don’t want to go.”

  “You have to! It’s not fair! You’re letting me be the bad daughter when it’s not just me that feels this way,” Cait countered, cutlery down, the frustration that had been vented this morning again mounting.

  “It wasn’t my idea not to go!” I said, pitch rising.

  “Well, it’s fine,” she changed tack, “you can go even if I don’t.” She shrugged affectedly, knowing full well that I didn’t want to go without her. “Maybe he’ll take it better that way.”

  It was easy to mouth off about Dad when chatting to Caity and Mom, to feel righteous and indignant. But it was another thing to say those things to Dad.

  “I tried to talk to him and he didn’t listen,” I said, exasperated. “He said he’d find a way to make it work and changed the subject.”

  “I don’t know how to make him understand on my own,” Cait said, eyes now watery and swollen as she fought off the tears that Mom had only recently abated. “He got cross with me, and then last night I dreamed he ran over Poppy.” We all instinctively looked down at the dog, who looked expectantly back at us, the familiar thump-thump of her tail against the floorboards.

  “I’m not sure that means anything,” I said. Poppy had been hit by a car when Cait had taken her out with the horse, and her back leg had been broken. The dog and the car crash were tied up with feelings of guilt and anger at the unapologetic driver and now Dad, which was too much to untangle over breakfast.

  “I always had the same problem with him throughout our marriage,” Mom added. “He never listened to a word I said either.” She scooped a bite laden with crème fraîche and strawberry jam into her mouth, and I thought she might just be enjoying this insurgency, which made me want to defend Dad, unable to defend himself.

  “What are you going to say to him?” I asked Mom, resting my chin on my hand, feeling tired and anxious.

  “I’m going to tell him the truth. That it’s not that you don’t love him or want to spend time with him, and that you both feel a terrible sense of loss that he is no longer part of your daily lives, but he has to put himself in your shoes. When he was seventeen like Caity, I know he would rather have been at home with his friends than visiting his parents for half his summer holidays, and that doesn’t mean that he didn’t care about them deeply.”

  “It’s not just about the time,” Cait added. “I wouldn’t mind if we actually got to see him, but most of it is spent with random people being driven about like kids and we can’t do anything on our own. When we’re in LA they won’t even let us walk anywhere.”

  “No, only hookers and the homeless walk in LA,” Mom recalled. “Terrible city.”

  “I was curb-crawled last time,” I said. “I couldn’t figure out what was happening at first, then I realized this guy was trying to pick me up—so gross.”

  “When I can drive maybe it’ll be easier—”

  “Listen,” Mom cut in. “I’ll explain that when you’re at home you have all the freedom you want to come and go as you please, and that I’m only included when you need a lift somewhere—”

  “That’s not true,” I interrupted.

  “Well … I think he needs to be reminded what life is like as a well-rounded teenager with a full and exciting social schedule. It’s unfair that his sentence should be a burden of duty or guilt on either of you, and he shouldn’t be making you feel like rotten children for wanting to spend time with your friends in the holidays.”

  “I feel like a rotten child,” I said.

  “You are rotten,” Cait declared.

  “Oi.”

  “Let me talk to him. It’s worth a shot, and worse comes to worst, you just don’t go. Revolution!” Mom declared, and I felt uneasy. Mom was being supportive of our bid for independence, but this support also put pressure on us to please her. It was clear she didn’t want us to go. What Caitlin couldn’t articulate yet was that most of all she wanted to protect Mom; she saw how much it hurt her every time we went away, leaving her for weeks on end, and Cait had long ago made her camp on Mom’s side.

  “Right, chuchu, are we going to go see this Beast?” Mom said, giving Cait some affectionate smacks on her thigh and then clearing the table. “Ty, want to come for the ride? Come on! Some fresh air will do you good.”

  I rarely went to the stables anymore, having swapped the pastoral pleasures of horse riding for booze and boys, hobbies I pursued with complete dedication, but I didn’t want them to go without me on this occasion. I saw an alliance forming, and I didn’t want to be left behind.

  The Beast was out in the field, and he came trotting up to the fence when he saw Cait. I let him sniff my hand, feeling the hot musty breath about his nose and his long soft whiskers. Last time I came, Beastie was too wild to ride, but this time Cait gave me a leg up and I took him for a gentle amble around the paddock, amazed at the progress she had made, healing this damaged creature until he wasn’t afraid of the world any longer.

  25

  Mom wrote Dad a long letter explaining our position, beseeching him to listen to his children. At the end she mentioned Lana, suggesting that he might consider relocating to the UK after his release, as without a green card to move Stateside herself, she would endeavor to have us study and settle in England, which translates in the many layers of Mom-speak as “You made your bed with Lana in America, now lie in it.”

  Dad didn’t talk to us about the letter, but he was bewildered by Mom’s reaction to his marriage plans: she no longer had feelings for him and she was in a relationship herself, he argued. They spoke afterward, and Dad says that was the first he heard about her idea that they remarry, something he said he would have agreed to if it meant we were out there with him. But their memories of these events conflict, and it’s impossible to know whose to favor. It was probably the same thing that happened throughout their marriage: when Mom talked, Dad didn’t listen, and when Dad listened, Mom never said precisely what she meant.

  That weekend Evan came back from university and entered into the debate.

  “Listen, it doesn’t matter whether what he did was right or wrong or whose fault it is that he’s there,” Evan said, outraged at our behavior. “It’s him that’s in that cell day after day, living with his regrets and the knowledge of his mistakes, which is punishment enough. The least we can all do is take two weeks out of our year to go see him and make this time a
little less unbearable. Right? And we should be pleased he has Lana out there now. It takes the pressure off of the rest of us.”

  Mom scoffed, but Caitlin and I felt suitably chastised. Rotten children. Evan has always been a good moral compass like that. He visited every summer too, though he tried to go on different weekends from us to break up the time for Dad.

  Next time Dad called, we told him we wanted to come to California after all, and he was thrilled, setting his preparations back in motion. Uncle Rick invited us to stay with him in Maui for the five days between the visits and act as our guardian for our second weekend in Lompoc, which gave us something exciting to focus on that wasn’t seeing our dad in prison.

  * * *

  Lana collected us from LAX. For a change that year we stayed in Solvang, a surreal town not far from Lompoc, styled like a Danish village with timbered facades, kitsch windmills, and women wearing mock-up dirndls serving pastries, as if Disney Land had parked “Denmark World” in the midst of California’s Santa Ynez Valley. At night, the houses emptied out when the tourists went home, leaving the buildings eerily vacant.

  We went to see Saving Private Ryan one evening at the small movie theater, and Lana left during the opening scene, her exit punctuated by machine-gun fire. We found her in the car afterward, smoking and shaking. I realized we knew very little about her. She came from a big family in Ireland, and she had worked in the budget department at a hospital before she met Dad. He had picked her up at his club in Kensington and he had lied about his age, which he told us so the blame for the age difference was on him, but the six years younger he made himself was irrelevant. I knew she loved photography and her feet were a size smaller than mine. Dad said she drank too much, but Dad doesn’t drink, so I didn’t take this seriously. If things had been different, this woman, now married to my father, might have been an ally, one of the few people I could have talked to about what we had gone through, but it never happened. I found her cold and closed down. Being older now than Lana was back then, I wonder how she must have felt to find herself transplanted to America away from her family and friends, married to a fifty-four-year-old convict and now chaperoning his teenage daughters around California, but I never had the opportunity to ask, and hers is not my story to tell.