No Way Home

by Tyler Wetherall

  She never finished peeling the potatoes, which sat in the sink like discarded sandbags, their wet skin turning dark yellow then brown. She threw a frozen chicken and mushroom pie into the oven instead and some spinach into a pan to cook with a stick of butter, her finger now bandaged.

  Every movement was metallic banging: the oven door clunking closed, the crash of plates dropped carelessly on the table, and the clatter of cutlery left in a pile in the middle, while Caitlin and I sat and watched, our eyes occasionally resting on Dad’s empty chair. The smell of chicken warmed the kitchen and stirred our stomachs, but we recognized the warning signs and tried to remain invisible.

  Evan came in and, peering over the counter, he grimaced, saying as he took his seat “Urgh, spinach,” at which point Mom spun round, her nostrils flaring and her eyes wide as a night creature. She let out a deep primal grunt, rich with frustration, and, picking up the bowl of spinach, she hurled it across the table so it smashed against the wall, leaving trails of green slime and a pile of broken crockery. All three of us looked at the wall and then back to Mom. She approached the table, as we all leaned back to make way for her anger, and, stacking our four plates on top of each other, she unceremoniously dumped them in the trash, declaring, her voice unnervingly steady, “Fine, if you don’t like it, you can make your own bloody dinner,” and with that she stormed out of the room. We heard her stomps reverberating through the house until her bedroom door slammed shut, all somewhere above our heads.

  We sat in stunned silence.

  Taking on his role of eldest, Evan fetched more plates from the cupboard, took the pie from the counter, and gave us each a slice: “Here, guys.” He wiped the spilled spinach from the table and tidied up the mess as well as a ten-year-old could, before sitting down with Cait and me. Neither of us had started to eat.

  “Go on, it’s fine,” he said.

  “But I want Mom to cut mine,” I said.

  “Give it here.”

  He took the plate from me and roughly crisscrossed my pie into small mushy squares and pushed the plate back across the table at me.

  “There. Now eat!”

  He took a few bites, and Cait and I followed suit, watching him because he was in charge with Mom out of the room.

  After some unsatisfactory mouthfuls, he stood with a look of resolve, put a slice of pie on the last plate, took a knife and fork, and left the room. We listened to his footsteps up the stairs, across the ceiling above our head, and his knock on her wooden door. Caitlin and I left the table and scrambled up the stairs, making quieter, quicker thumps than Evan.

  With our hands on Mom’s doorframe, Caitlin roughly a head taller than me, we peered around and saw Evan standing next to Mom’s bed, holding out her dinner. Mom was curled on her side looking up at him, swollen and pink in the face. She gave half a smile, so we both took a few steps closer.

  “Thank you,” she said, reaching a hand up to stroke the back of his neck with an affection that was total forgiveness, and we joined him next to the bed. I kneeled down so my elbows rested on the edge.

  “I’m okay. It’s okay,” she said, stroking each one of us on our cheek or hair until we felt less guilty.

  “Now go finish your dinner. I’ll be down in a bit.”

  We filed out of the room, Evan leaving the plate on the floor by her bed. We finished the pie, our stomachs full already on feelings, and put our dishes in the sink because we wanted to be good kids and to make her happy.

  The skies were now thundering violently outside, lighting the woods in flashes of theater. We went to bed with every window rattling, and I lay terrified, sure the frenzy outside would soon engulf the house, and there was no dad here to protect us.

  A few hours later, a thunderbolt struck so close that our beds shook with the force of it, as if a bomb had fallen from the sky. I screamed and ran into the hallway.

  “Mom!”

  Cait and Evan were up too, and Mom shakily got out of bed as we gathered around her legs. She tried the light switches, but they were all dead. I began to cry.

  “Come on, it’s just a storm. Anyone who wants can come sleep with me,” and we all ran past her and piled into the never-ending bed.

  The following morning we woke early for school. As Mom filled the kettle with water, she looked out the window, and her eyes were struck by something in the driveway. Immediately my thoughts turned to Dad.

  She pulled on her shoes and coat and walked outside with us following in our slippers, tiptoeing so our feet wouldn’t get wet. We saw what had surprised her. It wasn’t Dad.

  At least three trees had been knocked down in the wind and lay like slain giants across our driveway, barricading us in the woods.

  “I guess that’s it for school today,” Mom said with a smile.

  Walking back toward the house, Caitlin let out a little gasp and covered her mouth, pointing with her other hand up at the electrical cable.

  “Look!”

  A squirrel must have fallen out of the tree during the storm, grabbed onto the cable, and been electrocuted. It was nothing but a black frazzled fur ball, a stiff charcoal tail and a beady eye.

  As we ate bran flakes, Mom hushed our natter and turned up the news report on her battery radio, cocking her ear in between interference.

  “At least thirteen dead and damage running into millions of pounds, the chaos on the day a storm battered southern Britain without warning … a million people without electricity … Britain clearing up after what the Home Secretary has described as the worst night of disaster since 1945…”

  “Do you think Dad’s okay?”

  “We’ll call him later if the phone lines are back up.”

  After breakfast Mom brought out an unused toolbox and took up the saw, hacking off branches for the simple act of doing something, with no hope of clearing the obstacles in our way. We spent the day climbing trees, clearing branches, and resurrecting our house, which felt like the last bastion of civilization.

  As the sun lowered in the sky, we made our way inside. The phone was dead so we could not contact Dad, and I imagined him out in the woods battling his way toward us, as if thinking about it might make it happen quicker. He was somewhere out there worrying about us; I knew it.

  Darkness fell and we curled up in the study around the only working fireplace. Huddled under wool blankets, we roasted sausages on skewers over the open flames, and our hands and faces became sooty from the smoke like street urchins.

  The small battery-powered radio gave us hourly updates, and during the nine o’clock news we learned that the storm had destroyed the animal enclosures at the local zoo and a puma was believed missing and on the prowl. “Pet owners should bring in their cats and dogs and parents should watch children carefully in the parks.”

  Mom took the candle to check the doors were locked and teased us about the wild cat. We all slept together by the slowly dimming fire, until there were just red and amber coals illuminating the hearth.

  In the morning, the dead squirrel had slid down the cable a little closer to the house, the trees were still blocking our way, and Dad was still gone.

  27

  Dad didn’t come back until the following weekend, long after they had cleared the trees. Without warning, one day he was waiting for me outside school in his big black BMW. On the twisting lane through the woods back home, I could barely sit still in anticipation: everything was going to go back to how it was meant to be.

  But Mom wasn’t there when we got home. Dad said she was at an apartment in London, which they had found for when they needed to be in the city. She didn’t come back until Wednesday afternoon, when she was waiting to pick me up from school.

  The days shrank away to nothing, leaving only a short window of light between the time we woke and the time we came home from school. The woods were too dark to play in, and the stiff stone bones of our old house moaned in the night so I didn’t want to play alone in my room. I didn’t want to play at all, because I spent too long look
ing for the lights of a missing parent returning. Just as one appeared the other would vanish in between the trees that led to the big city without a word about why.

  Occasionally we all sat down for dinner together. I ate slowly, because after dinner one of them always disappeared again. Sometimes I refused to eat at all. They got angry, or I got hungry, but it made it all last a little longer. Cracks were appearing in the walls, and also in my skin, which began to itch. A dry rash spread in the crease of my elbows, behind my knees, on the inside of my wrists, and all over my fingers. I watched as the skin hardened and split open. The more I worried, the worse it became. The raw bits on my hands stuck together over night and would rip afresh each morning. I didn’t understand this pain or why Mom taped mittens to my hands to stop me scratching, when scratching was the only thing that made it better.

  I didn’t like England at all. England was always dark, my skin was on fire, and Mom or Dad were always gone.

  I turned four years old during half-term break. Granny made me a blue sequined dress, and I didn’t take it off for days. Dad was there making up games for us all to play in the red and orange leaves that had settled between the trees, a mosaic of colors dying slowly. I remember looking up at him and at the bare branches above. Mom was there too. I was hopeful still, grasping at the normality of jelly and tea.

  Maybe days or maybe weeks later, but before Christmas, Dad sat Caitlin, Evan, and me down on the sofa during one of the rare crossovers with Mom. He had something important to tell us. Evan was grumpy, because he already knew what was going to happen. I think they told him first so he could process it and be there for us when we needed him.

  Dad took a long time to begin.

  “Kids, this is going to be very hard for you to understand, and I want you to know that your mom and I love you very much and you are the most important thing in the world to us,” he said. “You may have noticed that we’ve been spending a lot of time apart from each other, and I think it’s time you knew that we have decided not to live together anymore…”

  He began crying before we did, which left us too stunned to cry ourselves. Caitlin asked a lot of questions—why don’t you love each other, will you get back together, where will you live—and I understood now why Evan was angry. He didn’t want Dad to go either. I didn’t follow everything Dad said, but I knew that he wasn’t coming home and that nothing would be the same again.

  Afterward Mom told him off. He had broken the rules: adults don’t cry and they don’t feel sad.

  I didn’t understand why Mom made him go away or why she didn’t love him anymore, because I knew from Dad’s tears he didn’t want to go anywhere. Why did she always have to be cross with him?

  That night in bed, I quietly tore at the skin on my left hand and then on my right knee, using the temporarily satisfied left hand. I wanted to use my teeth to bite the flesh away from the bones until there was nothing left.

  Mom came into my room, sitting on my bed to kiss me good night, and I turned my back on her and faced the wall, hiding my cheek under the duvet. I didn’t want her kisses. I wanted my dad to live at home again.

  “I want Dad to kiss me good night.” My voice emerged muted from beneath the blankets.

  I squeezed my eyes shut so I didn’t see her reaction, but I felt it through the particles of air that carry hurt feelings without sound. I felt her stand and leave, patiently heartbroken.

  * * *

  Dad relocated to his first tall white townhouse, this one on Swift Street with the playroom in the basement, while Mom and us kids moved into Canna (house #10) with the tree in the garden as big as the house, which we named Tree. They divided our belongings in two, Mom wavering in her decision only when it came to separating out our toys. With a My Little Pony gripped in one hand and her head cradled in the other, “It’s just too tragic,” she said, and Dad hoped she might soon relent. Mobutu the gorilla painting and the black cashmere rug went to Dad, the last remnants of the life of Ben Glaser; the never-ending bed and the piano went to Mom.

  On weekends his tall white townhouse came to life with Ping-Pong championships and tea parties; French toast for breakfast and Fox’s U-Bet chocolate milk for tea; the sound of our shrieks as he chased us up the stairs, a ruse to get us in our beds; and then we left, and the house fell silent again.

  I didn’t know this then, but those months after the separation were the loneliest of Dad’s life. He took to walking. Not for any reason or with any direction, but just to fill his head with sights and sounds beyond his own thoughts. He walked past the lights of Fulham Road until the streets filled with bodies and he knew six o’clock was approaching. His head turned toward laughter and he twirled it round his mind like the smoke of a fine cigar. Occasionally he found himself adrift in the perfumery of Harrods, the scent suddenly unbearable to him, and he retreated onto the streets once more, shunning the festive jingles. Each reminder of Christmas weighed heavily on Dad, an unresolved issue. Mom argued that his Judaism made him exempt from the occasion, and she offered him Hanukkah instead. He tried to be reasonable, hoping she would compromise and agree to spend Christmas together. He wanted to remind her of what they were trying to save. But when she refused, he became unreasonable, and it ended in a bitter exchange.

  Even in the solipsism of childhood, I worried about him alone in that big house. When he discovered Mom was dating John a few months after the separation, he was devastated. He quizzed us over our weekend visits to see him—did John eat meals with us and how often was he there—and I learned which answers made him feel worse and which did not, so I covered up John’s presence in our lives to protect him. Dad hated the idea of another man spending time with his kids, let alone his wife.

  He contemplated turning himself in, quietly hoping that Mom might reconsider if he did, and we could all move back to the States to start again. The prosecutor on the case had changed and didn’t harbor five years of spite toward his group. When we left France, Dad had cut the last of the indicted off the payroll, giving them carte blanche to say whatever they could to lessen their sentences. None of them knew his new identity, and the government already had enough evidence to convict him, so they could do him no further harm by testifying. Three more of the group surrendered, some refusing to cooperate on principle, and they all received lenient sentences. But Dad and his two partners, who all faced the dreaded Continuing Criminal Enterprise charge, had not tested the system.

  * * *

  It was around this time that Steve Shephard moved to London and settled with his girlfriend nearby in Kensington. The Shephard brothers had partnered with Dad on two of the major Thai smuggles, using their 105-foot schooner The Sol to cross the Pacific Ocean, fending off pirate attacks, surviving storms, and at one point defending the illicit cargo at gunpoint against a crew who had lost its nerve. Phil Shephard, known as Silver Tongue, said he’d lost his pilot’s license when he flew a plane beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, and the pair ran a treasure-hunting dive business, which they used as a cover for their illegal income. They hadn’t been brought down by the disastrous final deal and had continued to work, their smuggles getting grander and more audacious.

  Dad was pleased to see Steve in London, eager for friends. He had invested $50,000 in the Shephards’ last operation, and when it went smoothly he regretted not investing more. Dad wasn’t interested in smuggling again, but he offered to advise them on managing their vast fortune. They had amassed so much money, they were chartering planes to fly boxes of hundred-dollar bills straight into Switzerland. The Shephards authorized Dad to trade with a few million dollars, earning him 20 percent of the profits. He and the brothers also partnered on an art fund, collecting Picassos, Twomblys, and Judds. Dad enjoyed returning to his Wall Street roots and he began to study art history in earnest. The money pleased him too, his own fortune whittled away by life on the run.

  But it was about more than the work. Living as Martin Kane, Dad had successfully evaded the authorities, but he had paid a price f
or his freedom: his wife, his home, his name, his country, the ability to eat breakfast with his children every day. He was a forty-four-year-old man moving through the city like an amnesiac, whose past may as well never have happened. Having the brothers back in his life gave him a sense of continuity—he felt like himself again. What he didn’t adequately appreciate, however, is that the losses he had incurred in exchange for his freedom would all be for nothing if he made the same mistakes again.

  He said to me recently while we were driving, “Not many things scare me in life—perhaps that’s been to my detriment,” and if he hadn’t been behind the wheel as he said it, I would have shaken him and said, “Goddammit, they scared me, and that should have been good enough.” Dad argued that he needed the money, and opportunities for legal work with his background were limited. He trusted the Shephards not to implicate him; he felt secure in his position.

  And so he put thoughts of surrender to one side, as he handpicked impressionist paintings to purchase in Paris, test drove Ferraris in Italy, and laundered money in Lichtenstein, making the occasional pit stop in Ibiza, where the club scene was taking off.

  Martin Kane was fast becoming a real person. He had an ex-wife and a custody agreement. He part owned a restaurant and a club in Kensington. He had girlfriends. Martin Kane had bank accounts. Martin Kane paid taxes. Martin Kane could go to court for a speeding ticket and no one knew he was the living, breathing reincarnation of a baby killed in 1943. The more Martin Kane moved forward with his life, the more of a past he accrued, memories he could share and had shared with people in his new circle, and it wasn’t long before Dad realized he had become Martin Kane, and being Martin Kane wasn’t nearly as awful as it had first appeared.

  Meanwhile, Mom moved us from Canna to Wimbledon (house #11) to be closer to good schools and then a few years later, via an apartment in London (house #12), to the rambling old Barton Orchard (house #13), where this story began, as Mom sought some distance from Dad’s intrusions in her life. Soon after that, Dad met Lana, and a new status quo of sorts was established with our bimonthly visits to London.