We play tennis and I hear his voice in my head, just like when I was little: “Get your racquet back, run to the ball, bend your knees, follow through”—his mantra. He wants to teach me to drive too; I think he blames my inability to operate a car on his absence in my teenage years. He still has the patience; I, however, do not.
When lunch rolls round, I offer to cook and he tells me not to go to any trouble. I say I want to—it makes me feel at home. Wherever I go, as long as I can prepare and share food among a group of people, then I create Home. I carry it with me, a skill learned at my mother’s kitchen table. It’s not just me either. Since moving to America, I’ve discovered a generation of nomads who have redefined home to suit our needs. Home, for us, is a work in progress.
After this trip, I’m moving into an apartment in New York and I’ll practice staying still. I’ll unpack my giant red suitcase; I’ll stack books on shelves and place clothes on hangers. I still have my box of precious things, though now much diminished, my childhood teeth given to an artist friend to make jewelry and my old house keys long since discarded. The remaining objects of reverence travel with me, just like Dad’s painting of Mobutu the gorilla. I ask Dad who painted Mobutu, surprised that I’ve never known. Dad tells me the artist is called Tom Palmore, a friend of his from the 1970s. All the other pieces of art that Dad once collected were sold to support us; this was the one painting he refused to part with.
After lunch, Dad and I take a walk around Lake Lagunitas near the hippie town of Fairfax. It’s one of those hot-cold days in late spring when the warmth of the sun hasn’t reached the shadows beneath the trees so I sweat in the heat beneath my shirt and my arms goosebump in the shade.
We stop on a bench beneath a tree with a good viewpoint and we talk about the ending to my book. I ask if he remembers the conversation we had in the car on the road to Sausalito.
“No I don’t remember, but take whatever dramatic license you need,” Dad says, “not that the story lacks drama. We can have some sort of big confrontation—” He starts animating the scene, until I interrupt.
“No, but I want to know what you actually felt. Think about it: you’d just got out of prison, you’re what … in your late fifties, and your eighteen-year-old daughter is unloading all this stuff for the first time. How do you think you’d have reacted?”
I turn on the wooden bench to face Dad, and the weight of what I’ve just asked him to do hits me, like playing make-believe with the most painful parts of his past.
We’ve eaten the apples we brought for a snack, and he has the paper bag we packed them in scrunched tight in his fist. His eyes are hidden behind sunglasses so I can’t read his expression, but I can feel his consideration in this silence. It takes all my patience to wait for his response.
“I think my reluctance to accept responsibility and apologize for what I put everyone through,” he said, “was a sense that I was a victim as well, based on how my life had fallen apart and how the bust originated. The truth was it really didn’t matter what or how it all happened; until that conversation, and maybe to an extent even until right now, I hadn’t accepted that I had done a bad thing, an irresponsible thing and something I should be sorry for. There will always be scars and regrets and guilt on my part for that.”
We’re silent for a moment as I grapple with my conflicting emotions. I feel a sense of shame for making my seventy-two-year-old father suffer, but then there is a fast-growing tide of vindication as well. In all the years since the events of our childhood, I had never heard him express this sense of repentance or insight.
* * *
In the evening, Dad goes onto the balcony and has a few tokes on a joint while the sun sets over the Bay. He has a medical marijuana license now. The irony. I don’t join him; I haven’t smoked pot for years. One puff and I’m a paranoid stupid mess with the appetite of a teenage boy.
“I don’t bring it into the UK anymore,” he says when he comes back inside and joins me on the sofa to watch TV. “I’m too scared Caity will beat me up.” He laughs.
“Good!” I say, which doesn’t convey how cross this makes me.
Not long after his parole had ended, Dad came to visit us in London. Cait and I were living together at the time in a warehouse apartment just off Brick Lane. Nearly ten years after she’d left home, we found our way back to having bedrooms side by side. Evan lived nearby at the time too, spending many evenings of the week at our place. The three of us would trawl the East End bars, and people often asked how we knew each other, assuming us to be friends. “He’s my brother and she’s my sister,” we’d all say, pointing at each other.
We threw a dinner party for Dad’s arrival, and our other halves joined, making quite a rabble, as we liked it. Cait baked a whole fish, the desiccated carcass taking center stage with its glassy eyes, clouded over like cataracts, staring back at us.
Dad pulled his chair back from the table and pulled out what looked like a marker pen from his inside jacket pocket. Unscrewing the tip, it opened in half like a cigar case, and he extracted a perfectly constructed joint. There were other pot smokers in the group, but Caitlin always hated Dad smoking in front of us, something he hadn’t registered yet.
She was sitting beside him, and I saw her clock the joint, which he was then sparking up and taking a satisfied draw. He exhaled behind his shoulder, the thick marijuana smoke disappearing into the air around us.
“Where did you get that?” Cait asked, and already I heard it, the voice she uses when she’s containing emotion or making important phone calls.
There was a hush across the table, the atmosphere shifting. Dad passed the joint to the next smoker and lifted up this contraption, which he’d begun to explain, his voice tight from the smoke, was a vacuum-sealed container disguised as a pen, so the sniffer dogs at the airport could never detect it, but before he had finished his sentence, Caitlin had raised her fist and began beating him in the chest, as if she were trying to clear a blockage in his throat. None of us had seen Caity this angry before, not just angry, but fighting angry, eyes streaming with frustration and shouting words I couldn’t decipher at first. She had never shouted, not in all those years I was busy shouting at anyone who would listen and some people who weren’t. She kept Dad in his box, refusing to let anything stop her from being the person she was determined to be, and yet here she was in her late twenties, a successful doctor, doing all the shouting she had never done before.
The words started to register: she was saying she couldn’t believe after all those years on the run, after going to prison, after getting out the other side, after everything we all went through because of him, that he would risk it all for a stupid bit of pot, because that joint in his hand, in its ridiculous vacuum-sealed pen, which he was showing off like a Bond gadget, if it had been discovered by airport security he would have been sent straight back to prison, and she refused to go through that all over again. Most of all she was furious that he had learned nothing. When she was done, she stormed out of the apartment, and we were left there in shock, no one more so than Dad.
So when Dad joked about the occasion, it was frustrating, because he still couldn’t see. He stopped bringing pot across borders for his personal use, because he didn’t want to upset Caity. When, in fact, he should have stopped because the risks were too great—and not just for him.
* * *
Dad and I go through a box of old documents, which he kept over the years—letters and photographs, many he hasn’t looked at since he got out of prison. We transform my bed into a makeshift workspace so we can divide the box into those things that are useful for me and those that are Dad’s alone. This is evidence, I think; this is something solid, unlike the hazy fragments of memory I’ve been working with so far.
Dad has the conversational counterpoint to the letters he sent me from prison, which I kept in my own box, a call-and-response from past to present, from father to daughter. Each envelope we open is a surprise. It is reassuring to see where my me
mory of these letters corresponds to reality: that picture I drew him for his birthday of the perfect scene, the short stories. I take a moment to read one: a retelling of Snow White, in which Snow is a cocaine addict living in a pub called The Castle.
“Did you worry about me with some of the stories I sent?” I said, scanning another stream-of-consciousness piece written in the second person by someone in an insane asylum.
“They were pretty dark a lot of the time,” Dad says, “but I felt it was a healthy way for you to express that part of your character. I enjoyed getting them.”
“God, I would have worried,” I said. “This is horrific…”
There is much I don’t remember too: in my letters I’m obsessed with the arrival of our first-ever home computer, which we named The Cow. After that my letters are written in garish word art, which looks suitably retro now.
“Sheesh,” Dad says, leaning back against the wall with a card in his hand.
“What is it?” I ask.
“From my mother,” he says. He’s lifted it up, so I can’t see his face, but I notice his hands are trembling. I look back down to the paper in my own hand, but I can’t concentrate any longer. Grandma died six months before he was released to the halfway house, unable to hold out despite her determination to see her son a free man once more. They denied him a furlough to go to her funeral, so he never had the chance to say goodbye, and I know of all his regrets, this one runs deep.
He hands me the card, his eyes glassy.
“It was the last letter she sent me,” he explains. I scan the words, recognizing her handwriting even after all these years. In the letter she reminds him how many people love him and will be there for him when he gets out—“including me!” she writes, underscored twice. There’s a slight wiggle in the lines where her own hands must have shaken as she wrote.
“I’m sorry to ask you to do this,” I say, feeling like a rotten child.
“No, no,” he responds, with genuine feeling. “We’re making good progress here.”
He starts shifting the papers about on the bed, busying himself with the task.
“But really,” I say, “thank you.”
“Of course, of course.” He dismisses my gratitude. And then, as if in answer to my internal monologue, he says: “I think if something good can come of everything that happened then that will be redemptive somehow. I know it’s hard, but it seems a fitting end to it all, for you to write our story. Don’t you think?”
I smile, and hand the card back to him. “If only it didn’t take so bloody long.”
“Reading all of these,” he continues, indicating our prison correspondence scattered around us, “I’m just amazed we came out the other side without falling apart completely. The breakup of your mother and me aside, which I think would have happened eventually anyway—we’re such different people—in the end we all pulled through, didn’t we, and that’s a sign of the strength of our family. I think that’s important. You’ll put that in your book, won’t you?”
That night when I go to sleep I think about what he said. We might have missed out on those years together and we can’t get them back, along with so many other things we lost. But Dad still has his story, and he gave me mine.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my brilliant agent, Emma Parry, for her unwavering support, and to my editors, Peter Joseph and Elisabeth Dyssegaard, for their careful editing and consideration. Also to Keith Addis for believing in my book when I had all but lost hope.
Thank you to the dear friends who have read the manuscript and offered feedback and encouragement over the years. I’m particularly indebted to Nicky Woolf, who has read every draft and is probably responsible for all the commas.
Special thanks to everyone at the Oracle Club, for offering a nomad a home and so much more. Thank you also to Philippa Donovan at Smart Quill Editorial, for her early editorial advice and Kerri Arsenault for providing the perfect writer’s retreat.
I was grateful to receive a Grant for the Arts from the Arts Council England, as well as the gift of time at a residency with SPACE on Ryder Farm.
But most of all thank you to my family, Evan, Caitlin, Mom, and Dad, for your love and support and standing by my decision to tell our story. You are more important than all the words put together.
About the Author
TYLER WETHERALL is a writer and journalist living in New York. She has written for The Guardian, The Times, and The Irish Independent. Her short fiction has been published in The Gettysburg Review, among other places. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Author’s Note
Now
Before
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
After
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Now
Chapter 31
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
NO WAY HOME. Copyright © 2018 by Tyler Wetherall. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by CJ Boyd
Cover photograph courtesy of the author
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Wetherall, Tyler, 1983– author.
Title: No way home: a memoir of life on the run / Tyler Wetherall.
Other titles: Memoir of life on the run
Description: First edition. | New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017049579 | ISBN 9781250112194 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250112200 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Wetherall, Tyler, 1983– | Children of criminals—United States—Biography. | Fathers and daughters—United States—Biography. | Fugitives from justice—Family relationships—United States. | Women authors, American —Biography.
Classification: LCC PS3623.E878 Z46 2018 | DDC 818/.603 [B] —dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049579
eISBN 9781250112200
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].
First Edition: April 2018
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