No Way Home

by Tyler Wetherall

  Dad didn’t see it coming when Phil Shephard was arrested in Germany in January 1992. Over the next year, Dad helped liquidate their assets to be surrendered to the American government. To be safe, he moved once more to the house on Perrymead Street, putting the paperwork in a different identity and telling no one beyond us his new address. It felt like a superfluous precaution.

  When Steve Shephard turned himself in, making a deal with the FBI including full cooperation, Dad didn’t worry. From the beginning the brothers had an agreement to surrender if either was caught. Steve tried to convince Dad to surrender too.

  Dad didn’t anticipate that when they arrested two of the brothers’ associates, a married couple called the Goodmans who made erotic films, Mr. Goodman would give up Dad’s name in exchange for leniency for his wife, Mrs. Goodman, whom the Feds threatened with serious time. The Shephard brothers faced losing their deal with the FBI for withholding information about Dad, so they talked. The authorities soon discovered that British Martin Kane was the man formerly known as Benjamin Glaser, an American still at large for crimes committed nearly a decade previously. Scotland Yard couldn’t find Dad’s new address, but they could find his ex-wife and three children now living in a quaint little town in the West Country.

  28

  I’m standing in a disused railway tunnel in the middle of the woods outside Bath at an illegal party. The tunnel is lit only with UV strip lighting down either side, so all I can see are the glowing whites of people’s eyes and teeth as they dance, a dark sea of floating smiles. The bass from the music is absorbed in the old brick walls of the tunnel, making it shake and reverberate, and the air is coated in a damp, warm dust. In my palm I’m holding a pill, and I haven’t decided if I should take it yet.

  Mom had given me a drugs talk of sorts. One night while driving me to a friend’s birthday party, she said, “Tyler, I expect you’re going to try drugs at some point in your life, and I want to give you some advice which was once shared with me.” She pulled over to the side of the road outside my friend’s house and looked at me as she spoke, her tone serious. “If you decide to try drugs, do them with people you trust, in an environment you feel safe. If you stick to those rules, it tends to turn out okay.” I nodded and laughed, unsure how I was meant to react.

  “Okay,” I said, smiling. “I’m not doing drugs, though,” I added.

  “That’s good,” she said, “I’m not saying you should.”

  I got out of the car, calling behind me, “Thanks for the lift,” and I could feel her watching me go as I slackened those invisible ties between us.

  I thought of that conversation now as I turned the pill over in my palm, my fingers tracing a stamp on its surface, which it was too dark to see. I put it in my mouth—good advice unheeded—and pushed Leah Betts out of my mind. She had died five years earlier after taking a pill and falling into a coma. It was water intoxication that killed her, but that didn’t prevent her from becoming the poster girl for ecstasy death. As I swallowed it down with a swig of beer, I felt the pill’s coarse chemical chalkiness against the back of my throat.

  I’d come here with a guy I’d met earlier that evening at Bath Festival, an annual arts event that doubles as an excuse for the city’s teens to trawl the streets, wasted. I’d met Nick before, and I knew who he was anyway, one of the guys the girls at school liked to talk about. We’d watched the fireworks together in Victoria Park, our chins turned skyward and the pink chrysanthemum colors reflected in our eyes.

  It was his idea to go to the party, and I’d left my friends to drive out there with him. As Bath’s city lights diminished in the distance, he turned to me and said, “Don’t be scared.”

  “What for?” I’d asked.

  “I don’t want you to think I’m just taking you off into the woods.”

  I laughed. It hadn’t occurred to me to be scared until he said it, and even then I only acknowledged that this probably fell on the list of things I was not meant to do.

  We parked the car and stumbled through the dark between the trees, following the bass with our feet. Nick pulled back the graffitied steel sheet, which had once sealed the entrance, put the pill in my palm, and promptly disappeared into the party.

  I made my way through the tunnel, nervous anticipation brewing, as I imagined the ecstasy spreading through the spider web of capillaries and veins around my stomach, coursing through my blood toward my brain where the synapses would explode … with what, I didn’t know. Something like the fireworks earlier, I imagined. Pink chrysanthemums of light. Thinking about what I had just done left me reeling with excitement and stupidity.

  You notice a warmth in your forehead first, a bubble and rush beneath your skin and an achiness in your legs, but then that warmth starts to spread down your neck and into your limbs, making your fingers and toes twitch, until everything you touch sends sparks back to your brain, like each cell is fired up and shooting back signals in double-time. You stretch your back and roll your shoulders, which spreads the feeling further, as your jaw starts to tighten and clench. I felt the thud-thud-thud of the music right through my bones, until I realized it was my pulse and the white lights of the tunnel seemed to be shaking with it, the sound swelling around me with the ragged hum of the generator in the background.

  We ended up back at Nick’s new apartment with a group of his friends. He had been evicted from the last, so his parents found him a new one with fewer antiques to break and no doorman to witness his misdemeanors. I barely knew anyone, and I felt my place as the youngest, wide-eyed and eager to be part of it all. High on acid, someone started to draw on the walls with a Sharpie, and then another person, so I took out a pen from my bag and joined in.

  At six in the morning I found myself lying on the floor of Nick’s bedroom, eyes pinned wide, fixated on the bare bulb hanging from the white ceiling overhead, because the rest of the room was empty. Nick’s back was to me, a single sleeping bag plaited between our limbs. The drugs had worn out of my system, though I wasn’t sure if I had slept. Maybe. Time had definitely passed.

  I had crossed a line last night, and already I knew I would do it again. But now it was over, my head was circling with the lies I would have to tell Mom when I got home. It was a week before the first of a dozen GCSE exams, which ultimately count toward university applications, and I would be in trouble for not studying, let alone being out all night without warning. The more I thought about how badly I had behaved, the more nervous I became in anticipation of facing her.

  I dressed and left quietly, picking up my feet over the tangled sleeping bodies in the living room to retrieve my belongings. Each item I picked up sparked a memory from the night past—my stash tin, my pens, a book—and the feeling I had of being so eager to share everything with these people, who were now near strangers half asleep at my feet.

  A hand reached up my leg from a guy on the ground with his eyes still wired as he battled with the last of the hallucinogens in his system. I had been sleeping with him the month before, but he had ended it with me, saying we didn’t have an emotional connection, which made me laugh at the time. I had said something like “What kind of bloke complains that the sex is too casual?” even though I was wounded.

  I batted away his hand, friendly enough, and let myself out.

  * * *

  The dog barked as I opened the security-coded front door, and I hushed her, shutting it carefully behind me, hoping Mom might still be in bed. I smelled of last night’s stale cigarettes and had two ladders in my tights marching determinedly up the inside of my thigh, the skin pale and goosebumped beneath. Mom was in the bath, the door slightly ajar. She retreated to the bath for hours some Sundays, the newspaper slowly growing soggy at the corners. Caitlin and I would join her sometimes, sitting on the floor with our backs against the radiator to chat or read the supplements. We still do this now.

  This day was different though, and I scurried past the open door into my bedroom. I heard the sound of water falling away from he
r body as she stood up, and her footsteps into her room. I thought maybe I had gotten away with it, but then she was standing in my doorway, her hair twisted into a messy chignon on her head, wearing her empire blue kimono, which with her height made her an imposing figure. She looked at me sternly.

  “I crashed at Bella’s after the festival,” I began. “Sorry I didn’t call, I didn’t want to wake you up.”

  But she wasn’t having it, raising her eyebrows, incredulous. “Bullshit,” she said. “I give you a lot of free rein, Tyler, much more than either of your siblings had at your age, which they’ve both complained about, but that only works if I can trust you.”

  “You don’t trust me?” My eyebrows raised right back at her.

  “No, right now I don’t trust you.”

  “Great, that’s great,” I said, playing indignant.

  “How can you expect me to trust you when you’re behaving like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “It’s seven in the morning, and you haven’t been home. You’re sixteen years old, and your first exam is in less than a week. What do you expect me to do?”

  Ever since Caitlin, now nineteen years old, had left for medical school last September, it had just been Mom and me rattling around this big house, with two empty bedrooms, one old dog, and the fading fingerprints of Scotland Yard. Mom let me be all the shades of angry I needed to be, and I pushed back even when I met no resistance, until now. The only nonnegotiable was I had to keep my grades high, but I found that bit easy. I was a book geek who behaved badly outside school hours. I had been awarded an academic scholarship for my final two years of study, which I felt gave me carte blanche to do as I pleased.

  I heard Mom sigh, and I glanced up at her, fighting off the creeping feeling of shame, as I noticed how exhausted she looked, as if she had barely slept the night before.

  “Listen, it doesn’t matter where you really were or who you were with, but it will matter when you screw up your exams,” she said.

  “I’m not going to fail,” I said, defensive and suddenly a little frightened that she might be right. I shouldered my way out of the room to escape the confrontation. Her footsteps followed mine down the stairs, and then she really started on me. She said I was a toxic presence in the house and my bad attitude impacted on everyone around me, but I was too selfish to see it. That all I cared about was my social life and how I looked, and I had no regard or respect for anyone else’s happiness. We had once been a unit in this together and now we were barely a family anymore. She said I didn’t even give a shit about Dad being in prison; I was only upset by how it affected my life.

  I shouted back just as hard. I said she’d always acted like I was the troubled one and Caitlin was the star so what did she expect to happen? I knew they talked about me behind my back like I was a problem that needed to be solved, so no wonder I went out all the time to get away from it.

  Mom had to go to work, but she told me I was grounded until my GCSEs were over, and we would talk again when she was home. Before she came back, I went out to meet Nick in the pub. I was twenty minutes late, and he’d dropped a pill because he got bored. We went to sit in his car so he could play guitar and I watched his eyes rolling back in his head, his lids fluttering and, for a moment, his pupils disappearing completely. I left him to it, suddenly feeling the imperative to be home.

  Mom was waiting for me when I got back, sitting patiently on the blue and white striped sofa in the corner of the dining room. We had turned the room into a makeshift studio after Caitlin left. The shelves were now lined with art books, and she was introducing me to Käthe Kollwitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, Barbara Hepworth and Mark Rothko, work that spoke of other people’s suffering. Now in her third year of art school, she taught me how to sketch the shadows as well as the lines, how to look at an object and see past your expectations of its shape to something true. Pinned in our hallway was a series of bloodred prints Mom had made: the desiccated carcass of a turkey in a slaughterhouse strung up by its cartilaginous ankles, something violent and tragic in how it hung.

  She asked me to come talk to her, and I agreed, sitting on the other side of the sofa, with my knees drawn up to my chest. I’d grown my cropped hair out into a short bob, which I pulled back into two tight little bunches.

  She smiled gently and looked so desperately at me, I could see how much she wanted me to be happy and for there to be an understanding between us again. Her look made me want to say I was sorry and hear her say I was forgiven, but I also wanted to shout and make a scene, because this wasn’t as easy as one conversation settling it. I wanted to demonstrate I was unhappy. That I felt isolated with Caitlin away at university; Evan a real working person now living in London; my school friendships ever shifting and tempestuous; and Dad, still in prison. What I lacked was the empathy to see that Mom was lonely too, stuck in that big house with just a dog and a deranged teenage daughter for company. She had curtailed her weekend visits to John in London after coming home early once to discover me having a party in the house. We’d only recently recovered from that last fight before this one happened.

  “I want to tell you why I was so angry with you earlier, because if you can understand, then maybe things can be better between us, which I want very much. When I see you acting like this”—I visibly flinched—“I get scared, and being scared makes me angry. You’re so very much like me, Tyler, when I was your age: willful, independent, determined to do everything regardless of the consequences. I recognize in you what I had in me when I was sixteen, which is what made me run away from home and get married and head off to New York. I was such a baby then, and I was very lucky it didn’t turn out differently for me. It makes me scared to see you like this; I’m scared that you’re going to run away like I did and screw up your life, and I don’t know how to stop you.”

  I listened, surprised more than anything, because no matter how crazy I felt at times, I had never considered running away.

  “I promise I’m not going anywhere,” I said, almost smiling, because the idea was suddenly absurd to me. “Where would I even go?”

  We talked a lot that night, about how she felt when she was my age. She explained that she gave me the freedom to make my own decisions, because when her parents had cracked down on her, she grew more rebellious, and she hoped that by letting me get whatever this was out of my system within the safe context of home, then I might come out the other side intact.

  There was a tentative truce between us after that, pushing and pulling but moving slowly forward. Whenever I came back from visiting Dad I was slightly unhinged. After the following summer’s trip, my friends and I went to Newquay to celebrate our exam results (my straight As had vindicated me). It was a surfer’s town packed with bars and clubs, but small and safe enough that a group of sixteen-year-old girls were given parental permission to rent a small cabin in a beachside resort for the week. I bought five pills and took each one over the course of the six nights without telling the others—that is, until one night when I vomited into a black bin outside our cabin and panicked, thinking that I was going to die. As I lay in my bunk bed, I stopped myself from sleeping, scared that I would slip away and not come back. The next day I confessed to one of my friends what I was doing, just in case it happened again and they would need to tell a paramedic what I had taken.

  When Caitlin came home from university, the tension between Mom and me flared up again; I thought they were ganging up on me, staging some sort of intervention, when actually Mom had just recruited Caitlin to talk to me, hoping I might listen to my big sister more than I would listen to my mother, when in reality I wasn’t going to listen to anyone until I was ready.

  29

  January 2016

  It’s my last few days in Cornwall. I’ve been here with Mom for nearly a month, over Christmas and into the new year. This morning, we heard on the news that David Bowie had died. Mom and I play “Space Oddity” while making breakfast, and she stops in her tracks and says, “Oh
, it’s just too tragic, Bowie out there somewhere, floating in his tin can.” She walks to the window, her fingers covering her nose and mouth. I see that she’s crying, and I cry too. She turns up the stereo full blast, and we dance, occasionally laughing because it’s so silly to cry like this.

  It’s been a warm winter, and when I run the ground is wet beneath my feet, the dog snapping at my ankles playfully. Looking out over the horizon, at the vast and endless sea, somewhere beyond which is America, where I will return shortly, I try to soak it all in, this moment. I’ve been so embroiled in the past that I’ve neglected the present. Writing about your past does something uncomfortable to your experience of time, compressing it flat so yesterday could be ten years back. It erases the past too, replacing your memories with the words you make on the page.

  My legs are heavy and I feel drained. These past few chapters have made me sad: sad like I used to be when I was a teenager, as if I am that younger self again, and at the end of the day when I leave my desk, I can’t return to the twice-older bones of my twice-older body—all that feeling doesn’t fit in this form any longer. I’ve taken my Dad box down from the shelf, and when I peer inside, it disintegrates in my hands and that thing with black flapping wings flies down my throat and beats panic through my chest again. The creature with talons and teeth is here too, the wiry tendrils of its sharp claws gripping my heart.

  It’s different now, of course, because I know that these feelings come and go, and one day I’ll wake up and they won’t be here, even if it does take me a few days to notice their absence. But when I was sixteen, I didn’t think this would ever change; I couldn’t imagine feeling better or normal, in my limited understanding of the word. Caitlin tried to talk me into getting therapy, confiding that she had done it herself after leaving home, typically taking her anger away to untangle alone. She asked, “What is it that makes you so unhappy?” and I shook my head because I didn’t know. I didn’t think other people felt this way; otherwise, how could they get out of bed every single day, and if they did, it terrified me more, because I couldn’t do it for much longer. But a few days later I would be happy again, excited about the future, and it was up and down like that for years. Mom nicknamed me Hormona, dictated by mood swings and boy mania, and Caitlin made a deal with me that if I didn’t have sex with the next guy I dated for more than six weeks, she’d take me on holiday—which should have worked. I felt this deep internal swelling, something primal and urgent, which I had no idea how to contain. Mom did; as soon as I hit sixteen, she promptly put me on the Pill.