No Way Home

by Tyler Wetherall

  That night, lying in our hotel bedroom, in sheets that smelled of strangers, a streetlamp casting the room in alien yellow light, I asked Cait how she always seemed to cope so well. I could see her thinking, her eyes switching back and forth across the ceiling. Despite the arguments we’d had leading up to this trip, I was enjoying our time together. She had a boyfriend now and was officially In Love. He lived alone, so she usually decamped to his house on weekends. When she did come home we had house-shaking fights about trivial things like a small stain on a pair of her jeans or whose turn it was to poop scoop the garden. We’d be left raging, unable to decipher what we were really fighting about. I felt she had abandoned me and I wanted to punish her for it. We were jealous of each other too. I was dark haired and she was fair; I was artistic; she, scientific; I’d been cast as the bad girl and she, the good; and while I was on Dad’s side, she took Mom’s. These labels weren’t categorical beyond hair color, but once we began defining ourselves against each other, it was hard to go back.

  Cait turned on her side to face me. She said she had a method: in her head she had a Dad box, and she kept that box firmly closed for most of the year. She only opened it for the short period of time when we came out to visit him, and when we left, everything that had happened was sealed back in the Dad box until next time. She said she often felt guilty for not being a better daughter to Dad when he was having a hard time, but mainly she felt that way when we were sitting opposite him in a prison visiting pen, and afterward she would dump all that guilt and heartache into the box. She recommended I get a Dad box too, and that way I wouldn’t have to think about it all so much. I placed the Dad box on the shelf next to the box of things not-to-be-discussed and the box of precious things. These boxes were beginning to require a mental administration system I wasn’t sure I had the capacity to manage.

  Lana, Cait, and I went to see Dad together the next day. We bought a carton of strawberries from the vending machine, a treat for Dad, who didn’t get them inside. I found these prison vending machine strawberries unutterably tragic. Strawberries, to me, were the epitome of British summer; they were topping and tailing at home in the kitchen ahead of a feast; they were strawberry picking when we were small, squatting between the rows of fruit to pee, as Mom extolled urine’s virtues as a fertilizer. They were home and freedom and grass under my bare feet—all the things that this place was not. And worse still, we had to eat them with an air of celebration.

  After our strawberries, Dad and I took a walk together. He always made time to speak to us kids one on one: to get to know each other as individuals, as he said it. As we circled the perimeter of the visiting area, he asked if I had started smoking pot yet, as if it were inevitable.

  “I’ve tried it,” I said, playing it safe despite the weekends spent smoking bongs in my friend’s basement or learning to back-roll spliffs to impress the boys. Caitlin hated these conversations, which he had with her too. “It’s not his job,” she would say to me afterward. She felt chided for not being demonstrably wild, when in fact she was wild in her own way, she just chose not to share it with Dad.

  “It’s good to try,” he said. “It’s not a dangerous drug, and a lot of artistic people like yourself have found it stimulates their creativity. Did you find the colors around you were heightened and music sounded better?”

  This was becoming a surreal conversation.

  “I guess so,” I said. “Usually I just get the munchies and pass out.”

  He laughed. “Well, maybe next time try to do some drawing or painting and see what happens. Do you know about Rastas?”

  “Like Bob Marley?”

  “Yes, but Rastafari is an actual religion too, the dreadlocks, the smoking cannabis, is part of their religious beliefs. They say it helps you connect to God or Jah. When I was in New York, I was actually introduced to Bob Marley, and…”

  Dad continued to tell me about going to stay with Bob Marley at his mother’s home in Miami and listening to a song Marley was working on, which later turned out to be “Buffalo Soldier.” Back home, when friends would play Legend, I struggled to not share this story with them, much like when Mr. Nice was published, Howard Marks’s bestselling autobiography about his life as Britain’s biggest pot smuggler, and I’d have to bite my tongue not to say my dad smuggled way more drugs than he did, a dubious boast.

  Dad went on to talk about the severity of the American criminal justice system, occasionally sharing a story about someone around us to exemplify a point. “That’s Brian. He’s maybe twenty-four, twenty-five now,” Dad said. “He was sentenced to life imprisonment for dealing methamphetamine. It’s a terrible drug, rots your insides out, but both of his parents were addicts, and he needed help. They got him on the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ rule when he turned eighteen for selling a completely insignificant amount, and now he won’t be free until his forties, his whole youth—gone.” Dad shook his head sorrowfully.

  These conversations made me an unlikely expert on the subject. It was 1998, and a person convicted of armed robbery served about five years; someone convicted of rape served about twelve; and the average punishment for an American found guilty of murder was eight years and eight months. There were people being more harshly punished for selling marijuana than for killing someone with a gun, and later I’d find myself going off on inappropriate diatribes about it at a friend’s dinner table, as their parents looked at me curiously, this teenager impassioned by a judicial system in a country far away.

  I hadn’t asked Dad how long he was facing before, but I did now, cautiously. We’d taken a seat on one of the benches. “And you? How much time do you have?”

  He pursed his lips, looking intently at his hands. “Too much time,” he said, rubbing his face and finally looking up at me. “Any time away from you guys is too much time.”

  “But, Dad, I need to know now. I need a number to count down to.”

  He hesitated before saying “I don’t want this to shock you, because I’m working on getting my sentence reduced and there are lots of things I can do to make this happen. I was charged under old law—that means the sentencing guidelines from before 1984 when Reagan’s new harsher penalties kicked in, something called the Sentencing Reform Act, because the majority of my crimes were committed between ’76 and ’83. That makes me eligible for good time, which could mean a third off my sentence. I could get another ten months off from working in prison, which I’m doing with the stock market class I’m teaching—I told you about that, right?—and if I’m lucky, I go to a halfway house six months before my sentence ends, so with all that considered, I could end up serving just over five years of my ten-year sentence.” He’d dropped ten years as if I wouldn’t notice, but thinking better of it, he added: “Ten years is a scary number—I know it scared me—but I’ve got a few options on the table, which I don’t want to talk about just yet in case they don’t pan out. I can tell you I’m doing everything I can to get back out there with you,” he said, adding with morbid joviality, “I’m not getting any younger in here, that’s for sure.”

  I nodded distractedly while making mental calculations. He’d been in prison for more than two years already, which meant I would be eighteen years old when he was released, if he managed to reduce his sentence; otherwise I would be twenty-two. Twenty-two felt like a foreign country at fourteen.

  * * *

  I had plotted to start an argument about Lana. I imagined scenes of cutting remarks about marrying a woman half his age and how I thought it was pathetic. But once I was there with him, whatever resentments I built up over the course of the year would diminish in significance, and I wanted so much to make it better, for this fraction of time we had together to help in some way. Prison is pitiful and degrading, and although he was guilty, it was hard to accept this punishment as commensurate with his crimes.

  He insisted we talk about his marriage, because he knew it had upset me, but I didn’t know how to express everything that I was feeling, especially
with Lana sitting not so far away, playing cards with Caity to give Dad and me some time together, a reminder that she was a real person, not the evil stepmother I cast her as. I didn’t want to call it jealousy, a slithery eel of an emotion that one none of us readily admit to.

  He repeated his theory that I was hurt because it confirmed he and Mom were never getting back together, and maybe there was some truth in that. We talked about the breakdown of their marriage. “I always blamed our problems on the strain of my fugitive status,” he said, “but what I couldn’t see at the time was the real issue: we had stopped communicating. As far as I was concerned separation was never an option, but your mother didn’t see it that way, and it took me a long time to forgive her for not trying harder.” He said when I was little, he had let me believe there was a chance of reconciliation between them, because he’d needed to believe it too, but looking back, he knew that it would never have happened, and it was irresponsible of him to encourage me to think otherwise.

  * * *

  We went to Maui after that first weekend, and Uncle Rick showed us around the island, giving us yoga classes and setting us up with the local boys for surf lessons.

  “This,” Rick said one evening while waving a joint in the air, “this got myself and your father in a whole bunch of trouble.”

  In between making us laugh and emboldening us to be young and wild, Rick would talk to us about what was happening in our lives, sharing his own experiences too. He spoke with the wisdom of someone who had studied with the Maharishi in India and as someone who had experienced the darkness of his own mind. I remember it was the first time I had heard an adult talk openly about mental health, which meant a great deal to me, to know that other people struggled too, and it was okay.

  At the end of our stay, Rick told me that I was harboring a lot of anger toward my father, and I needed to find a way to resolve it. If I was able to make peace with the choices Dad had made in his past and forgive him, we had a relationship we could enjoy for the rest of our lives.

  26

  While on the run, Mom used to travel in a floor-length pink fake fur coat. She argued that no one could suspect a woman dressed so outrageously of having anything to hide. She looked formidable with her five-foot ten-inch height in a blaze of fuchsia topped by her now-blond cropped hair, yet so thin, the brittle birdlike bones in her neck pushed tight against her skin, making her look like a sorrowful bird of paradise.

  We left Mougins in June 1987, kissing Bricky’s wet nose goodbye. “Such a good dog,” Mom said, sadly stroking her worried ears. She ran behind the car until we were far away, us three waving at her through the back window until she was just a panting speck in the distance, left to return to her real family.

  I was three-and-a-half years old now with scrappy short hair. Mom had frequently threatened to cut my hair off with the kitchen scissors if I didn’t sit still while she brushed it, and after one tantrum too many, she did just that. I was bereft. Caitlin gave me her sticker collection to stop my crying. She had never found a replacement for Henrietta the taxidermy chicken and instead decided she would not be a person who needed things to make herself feel better. She was six now, all freckles and bones, suffering unbeknownst to us from a tapeworm. She would get so hungry, she wept while watching Mom prepare dinner. Evan was ten and wore his hair in a straggly tail down his back, and Dad had grown a black mustache, like he had when Mom first met him, perhaps to remind her of happier times.

  Dad traveled separately from us from the moment we arrived at the airport in Nice until we made it through to arrivals in Heathrow, a precaution in case our passports were flagged. He and Mom had agreed on a signal she would give when we successfully passed through customs to confirm it was safe for us to reunite. But on this occasion, when we emerged into the arrivals hall, Mom didn’t make the signal, and from his hiding place behind a pillar, Dad panicked, readying himself to split the airport. He waited, just in case, until he saw her searching for him among the crowds and subtly caught her attention. When he realized she had forgotten to make the sign, he was angry, but quickly their anger traded places, and she turned on him. How did he expect her to remember a stupid little hand signal when she was trying to curb the behavior of three children intent on riding the cart into strangers’ legs while simultaneously negotiating the visa requirements of our American passports at immigration, entirely on her own?

  * * *

  We drove through the squelchy green fields of the British countryside to reach Fullers Farm (house #9) in Surrey. It was accessed by a single muddy lane lined with knotted hedgerow and crossed by the occasional damp wood stile or kissing gate.

  I saw a picture of the real house recently, and it was handsome and rectangular. The house I remember is from a recurring dream I had when we lived there. In my dream, it stands on top of a cliff. We leave in a hurry, as the skies turn a dangerous color, fractured with cartoon lightning. We find ourselves on the cliff edge, staring at a brown, thrashing sea below with the crests of serpents rising between the waves. Mom pushes Evan in, and one by one the rest of us follow. I swim until I realize my family has disappeared into the murky depths.

  I dreamed this in frightful fits on broken nights. With the light on and tears close by, Dad sat on the end of my bed and said, “You’re more afraid of being afraid than what’s actually scaring you.” But I thought: no, I’m not. I’m scared of the shadows that follow us in this house.

  We were only there six months, but summer ended before it began, and Fullers Farm will forever be trapped in that winter of bad dreams.

  By day, we disappeared into the small woodland surrounding the house, running through the scraggly trees, as gray and tall as the sky, to play in an abandoned toy house. It smelled damp inside and leaves rotted in the corners where spiders went to die.

  Mom didn’t expect us back until nightfall, and we got used to peeing in the bushes like wild children. One day I was squatting in a rose bush when I felt a tickling between my legs. I looked down and my knickers had turned black, swarming with ants. I had peed on an ants’ nest, and they had fled into my underwear and all over my thighs. I cried out, ripping off my knickers, and ran into the house. Mom scooped me into the kitchen sink and washed the ants off with brisk sweeps of her hands.

  Caitlin insists this never happened, but I remember, and I thought Mom did too, until one day she revealed, “Well I don’t remember it happening, but you’ve always been so sure.”

  I tell the story regardless, like a tribal myth; stories such as these define our place in the world when we lack other markers of past or country to pin us down.

  The other story I like to tell from Fullers Farm is about Bambi. Driving down the winding lane one day on her way home from an early shop run, Mom came across a baby deer stranded in the middle of the road after being hit by a car. The deer had given up, folded its legs beneath it, and was waiting to die. Its mother stood by the side of the road yelping—the same noise all mothers make when their baby is in danger. The mother deer watched Mom scoop up her baby and take her away, whispering apologies for the abduction.

  Mom made Bambi a bed in the corner of the kitchen on a rug and woke us up to come see. Still half asleep, I met this baby deer covered in tiny white fuzzy spots, eyeing us suspiciously, her enormous black eyes unblinking.

  Each morning we came downstairs and took turns feeding the deer from a baby bottle. Eventually Bambi came to trust us, and sat up on her front legs to say hello. When she seemed strong enough to travel, Mom took her to the vet, but she returned just hours later with no Bambi, speechless, and retreated to her never-ending bed. We felt her silent sobs swelling the damp wood of our house. Bambi’s lower back had been broken, and she would never have walked again. The vet offered to put wheels on her back feet, but Mom thought it was too tragic to be a deer that remembered frolicking but would never frolic again, and Bambi was put down.

  * * *

  I knew we were hiding in the woods, but I didn’t know what we were
hiding from. I came to think Mom and Dad were hiding from each other, because they were never in the same room. They stood in doorways and looked through each other. They shared a bed but never embraced. They had forgotten the language they learned to talk together.

  Mom swore with words I never understood when she hit her head on the timber beam outside my room like it was more than a physical pain, and she hit her head every time she passed.

  I came into their bedroom one morning to watch their TV. There was a time when we all climbed into bed together, and they welcomed us in, letting us play games around them, or I would fall asleep between their warm bodies, like I was still a baby, curling Mom’s hair between my fingers. It’s just a sepia-stained scrap of a memory, but I’m sure it was real once.

  Sitting cross-legged in front of the TV screen, I noticed their silence. The sudden silence when you walk into a room where there had been words that you weren’t meant to hear. I didn’t look behind me, but I knew they were at separate sides of the bed and their silence was a wake.

  Later that day I saw Dad leave from my bedroom window, the car just a dark stain against the wall of falling water. I went downstairs to the kitchen where Mom was peeling potatoes at the sink, her motions hard and fast and her fingers pink from the cold water. Strips of potato flew at the wall, leaving brown dirty dribbles down the tiles, until she screamed, “Fuck!” and clasped one hand around her forefinger tight, wincing.

  “You okay?”

  “No,” she said, not looking up from her finger, like if I touched her she might start crying.

  “It’s fine,” she said, peeling away a corner of her hand to tentatively view the damage, then clamping it shut again and heading toward the bathroom.