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  Author’s Note

  The scenes and dialogue in this book are reconstructed from my memories and the memories my family has shared with me. I have woven together fragmentary recollections by mining journals, letters, and photos, and by returning to the original locations for visual cues. Where necessary, I have collated related events to form a single cohesive story.

  Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the parties involved, especially concerning criminal activity, and I have excluded certain persons from this story so as not to interfere with ongoing legal cases.

  I did not retrieve police records or seek court documentation. As a memoir, this is an artifact of memory. It represents my family narrative as it has been created and shared among us, with all that might be misremembered and muddied by time.

  NOW

  December 2015

  It’s just me and my giant red suitcase on the platform in Penzance when my mother arrives to take me home. I see her across the parking lot, a bluster of blond hair, wild and windswept, with the dog eagerly leading the way. We hug, my lungs filling with the sea air, and when Mom pulls back, her cheeks lift like rosebuds, pink with pleasure at seeing me.

  “Ty Ty!” she says, and then looks down at my disproportionately large piece of luggage. “What is this?”

  “My entire life,” I reply as we walk to the car.

  I’ve come home for the holidays. By “home” I mean my mother’s house in Cornwall, located on the trailing skirts of England’s Southwest. We didn’t grow up here, but I still call it home. It was a six-hour train journey from London—hurtling along the coastline as the waves crashed high against the tracks—and before that, I took a seven-hour flight from New York. I was living in Brooklyn until a few days ago, when I packed up my life and booked a red-eye back to London. I had no reason to move again; at this point, it’s just habit. My siblings have managed to settle, but I keep on moving, thirty-six houses and counting, not to mention the hotels or Airbnbs, friends’ sofas and spare rooms—the interim spaces of lives still in limbo. My belongings are scattered around the world, secreted in the attics and basements of the people I love, like deposits to ensure my eventual return. My life is conducted from one giant red suitcase. At times I loathe this object, a weight on wheels perpetually dragged behind me.

  Evan, Caitlin, and their respective spouses turn up later in the week, and Mom’s small Victorian farmhouse expands to accommodate the extra bodies and noise. The Christmas turkey is in the bathtub, because there isn’t room in the fridge, and we keep the beer cool on the back doorstep, along with the stinky cheese. This year’s turkey is named Tarquin. After three decades we’re running out of decent T names, and I vetoed calling the turkey Tyler.

  “Tea!” I hear my brother cry from the upstairs bedroom. “Tea!” a voice calls back, the morning refrain, kept up until one of us relents. There are shuffling sounds from the kitchen, and I wait in hope, buried in a makeshift bed on the sofa surrounded by books. A few moments later, Caitlin appears in the doorway and deposits two cups of tea on the windowsill.

  “Budge up, fatty!” she says, and pulls back the covers to join me. A draft of fresh morning air comes with her.

  “Get those cold kipper feet away from me,” I say, and she torments me with her long toes in jest, just like when we were little and I hated her feet touching me. We practice ourselves with our family, falling back on stock phrases and phobias like talismans through which we return to who we once were.

  Caitlin’s hand waves erratically in front of my face, which means she wants me to pass her the cup of tea. I take a sip as I hand it to her.

  “Oi, shit face,” she says.

  “Tea tax,” I reply.

  We say this in monotone because we have said the same thing many times before. I imagine us when we’re old ladies, in bed together, affectionately insulting each other and shaking out the cobwebs of our childhood, hopefully dying at exactly the same moment so neither of us has to be sad.

  “What you doing, Smudge?” Cait asks, examining the journals nestled in the folds of the bedspread along with a packet of shortbread biscuits and a hot-water bottle, now tepid.

  “Research,” I say, handing her one of the journals. “I just discovered that one. I don’t remember getting it back from Scotland Yard. Here, that’s what I wrote after we found out about Dad.” My handwriting is neat and concentrated. It reads: “Dear Diary, I haven’t written because explaining a certain problem of mine would take forever, but I think I need to.” I was ten years old.

  Each book is different: some tied up with string to deter a prying big sister, customized with stickers and dark scribbles, and all bulging with letters and photos and notes passed in school, an archivist approach to ephemera. The phone numbers of boys whom I’ve long since forgotten. Ticket stubs to concerts I didn’t enjoy.

  I’ve set about labeling the spines with their corresponding date range in thick marker pen on masking tape, so I can dip in and out of my past. This is a sufficiently useful undertaking that I can pretend it isn’t procrastination.

  I’m not after facts.

  I seldom wrote about the important things happening in our lives, like whether Dad was going to prison and what that would mean for us if he did. I couldn’t write those things then.

  Cait hands back the journal. “I didn’t realize how much we knew,” she says.

  “No, me neither. That’s the only entry I can find. I was looking for something about my birthday in Saint Lucia. I wanted to start with Dad in the cornfield from the car window—”

  “It was a banana field,” Caitlin interrupts matter-of-factly.

  “Really?” I say as I scan the cornfield in my memories.

  “I don’t think they grow corn in Saint Lucia.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She pauses, as if in thought, and then: “Yes, definitely bananas.”

  * * *

  It was my twelfth birthday. Dad was going to take us for lobster in Rodney Bay. We’d never had lobster before. Caitlin asked if they were boiled alive, and Dad made pincer motions in the air, squealing like a lobster in distress.

  He was working as a manager in a hotel. We’d never known him to have a job before. He used to carry a locked attaché case, scribble numbers on a yellow legal pad in black spiky ink, and spend a lot of time talking on the phone, but we never saw him actually go to work. This was a new dad, with a new life and a new name too. He was called Paul Ricci now, not that any of us could remember. Caitlin and I looked blank if someone asked where this “Paul” was, and Lana, his girlfriend, still called him Martin, which wasn’t his real name either. His name was Ben Glaser.

  It was a special occasion so Caitlin and I dressed carefully, washing the sea from our salt-straggled hair. I liked being a beach kid: the freckles on my nose spreading across my cheeks with a golden-hued happiness, days spent padding around barefoot, the sand like cookie dough betw
een my toes. It felt safe here, sheltered between the sandy arms of the bay with the thick jungle blanketing the mountains on either side. It felt far removed from the rainy gray England we had left behind, with all its concrete and problems.

  We wore the necklaces Dad had bought us from a stand in the parking lot of the Sulphur Springs, which we had visited that day. They were made of polished volcanic rock, smooth and ashy black, with a dangling fish pendant. Dad had encouraged us each to pick one out, and we had, though neither of us had wanted them, really. We knew it was important for him to give us something to mark this time as special, and we wore them to make him happy.

  We walked down to Dad’s office, following the stone steps carved in the hillside. The sun was red and swollen, resting on the horizon far out at sea. Each night we had watched it setting together from the deck outside Dad’s bungalow, waiting for the flash of green light they say occurs at the moment when the sun hits the water. Dad said it would bring us good luck.

  In his office we were greeted by a cold wall of air from the AC. My sunburned arms shrank from the chill. Dad was sitting at his desk, on the phone, his head bowed with one hand kneading his temples, so I couldn’t see his expression—just the atmosphere of tension around him. Lana was in a bamboo chair in the corner, looking at him intensely. The cigarette in her hand had burned down to the filter, still gripped between her two fingers.

  I could hear a woman’s voice on the line. I could not make out the words, just a shrill panic. One single wasp buzz of warning, and I knew from that buzz that it was Mom.

  “Hold on,” Dad said down the receiver. He looked up at us with one hand over the mouthpiece. He was in a deep green silk shirt, dressed for dinner.

  “Sorry, we’re—” I began.

  “I need you both to go back to your room and pack your bags. Bring them up to my place when you’re done.”

  We stood still for a moment because we already knew what was happening, and maybe if we stayed completely still, we would never have to know what happened next.

  “Can we speak to Mom?” Caitlin asked, and I heard that break in her voice.

  “Not right now,” Dad said, raising his eyebrows in a do-as-I-say expression, one he used rarely. “I’ll be up soon.”

  We left.

  The air was thick and suffocating outside. A mouth of mothballs and treacle.

  We took the two-seater cable car back up the hill to our apartment. On our first night, a week earlier, this rickety funicular had thrilled us: a toy train in an amusement park, tacked onto the hillside, which juddered and shook with the effort of transporting us upward, rattling like an old man’s cough.

  We lay down on our bed, side by side, which was exactly how we had started that day, looking up at the fan, now motionless. We both knew this was it, without saying a word.

  “Right! Let’s pack,” Cait said.

  We worked quickly, in silence. We were good at this now. We had done a lot of packing. I threw away my flip-flops and wet swimsuit. It was too small anyway, and I didn’t want these things, these holiday things that were already assigned to a life we would leave behind.

  Caitlin was angry that we hadn’t been allowed to speak to Mom. She wanted to hear what had happened in Mom’s words. We sat on the edge of the bed with our bags at our feet, and we thought these things without talking, and when we were done thinking, we stood up and carried our bags up to Dad’s place, like good girls.

  The wide jungle steps were now illuminated with night-lights against which small, Icarus-like insects battered their wings and fell to their deaths, frazzled and hopeless. All around us the invisible tree frogs were whistling their song. Wheepa-wheep-wheep, they sang.

  Dad lived in a bungalow farther up the hillside. From his deck we could see the Pitons in the distance, two volcanic spires, one big, one less big, always side by side. Two sisters.

  Inside, Lana was cooking pasta. I had forgotten we were hungry; I had forgotten about lobsters and birthdays and the evening we were meant to be having. There were unopened presents on the table waiting for me.

  Dad was sitting on the bed with the phone on one side and a yellow legal pad and pen in his lap, like I had seen him so many times before. In another life, which another Tyler was living, I would have taken my place beside him and put on an old movie. But I wasn’t that child anymore.

  “I’m going to get you girls off the island,” he said, “and back home to your mom.”

  He was trying to fix this, but it couldn’t be fixed, not this time.

  “Give me a couple more minutes,” Dad said as the phone rang. “Yes, that’s right,” he said down the receiver, motioning for me to leave. “London Heathrow, your next available flight. Two passengers. Is there anything leaving in the morning? It’s how much?”

  There wasn’t much time. I could sense that. Mom didn’t want them to get their hands on us. The detectives had threatened her: they said they’d take us away if they found us and not give us back. Mom hadn’t wanted us to visit. She said it was too dangerous, but Dad had insisted, and it was all happening exactly as she had feared.

  Before we ate, Dad called Caitlin and me into his room. He looked harrowed, his silk shirt discarded and slacks swapped for swim shorts, but his casual state of undress was incongruous with the intensity of his expression.

  “Girls, I’m going to have to go away again,” he said. “It may be a little while before we can see each other, I don’t know how long, but…” He swallowed, and when I looked up, Dad was crying, his eyes downcast as he gathered himself. His tears were shocking for me to see. This sadness was so unlike my father, who, even in the worst situations, found something worth salvaging. He took a deep breath and continued. “But I promise,” he said, looking from my face to Caitlin’s, “I am going to do everything in my power to get back out there with you soon.”

  We nodded, and never asked the questions we knew he didn’t want to answer.

  Cait and I slept for a few hours in Dad’s bed as he organized our departure. He threw a bunch of possessions into a small sports bag and left the rest behind. Lana wasn’t going with him this time. She would be waiting at the bungalow for them. She must have been scared, but I couldn’t see it back then. She was only twenty-four.

  Shortly before dawn we said goodbye to Lana and went back down those stone steps. The frogs continued making their wheepa-wheep-wheep song as we passed, down to the dock where the ferryman was waiting to take us to the other side. I could feel the danger lurking across the inky water. When I spotted a set of lights coming down the hill across the bay, I panicked. Don’t be them. Not now. Not like this. That was always what I’d imagined: Dad being arrested in front of me and knowing how broken he would be if I were to see it.

  The ferry pulled up, and Dad passed our bags onto the jetty, stepping out first to give us each a hand. The lights I had seen on the other side were nothing. Just fear approaching, and the people gathered were with our driver, waiting to take us to the airport.

  Cait and I got in the backseat. The car felt cold and sterile compared to the dense tropical heat and the buzzing fecund life outside. I watched the bay recede into the distance with its twinkling lights and the tall spines of the boats swaying from side to side. In my head I said goodbye to the palm trees, and the dasheens, and the blue blue sea, to the future that never happened.

  We drove in silence. Dad occasionally looked around and gave us one of his close-lipped sad smiles, the smile he shares with Cait, reaching a hand back to give one of our knees a squeeze.

  Once at a safe distance from the hotel, we pulled over in a banana field. Dad’s eyes darted up and down the road in search of lights or sirens, but there was just the sound of birds calling as dawn approached.

  “Okay, kids, this is it,” he said. “Your driver is going to get you to the airport. There’s one connection to make, but you’ll be fine changing planes, won’t you?”

  We nodded.

  “Experts now, hey? Caity, you’re in charge,
okay? Someone will be waiting with a sign for you at arrivals in Heathrow to drive you back home.”

  He gave us $100 just in case.

  “What will you do?” Cait asked.

  “Don’t worry about me, that’s my job.”

  He paused.

  “I’m sorry I screwed up your birthday, Ty. Next time, okay?”

  We nodded. The next time hung in the air between us. There wouldn’t be a next time. We all knew that. Even if he managed to get away, to get off the island without being caught, to run god knows where next, Mom would never let us fly out to see him again.

  He hugged us both, then one at a time. The moment seemed to unfold so slowly and yet was gone before we were ready.

  We climbed back into our car, and he shut the door for us.

  I looked out the back window as we drove away, the sun just beginning to rise. Dad was standing on the side of the road with a sports bag thrown over his shoulder, waving goodbye. I watched until he disappeared into the dusty pink haze.

  BEFORE

  1

  I’m nine years old, and I know nothing about Caribbean islands, or fake identities, or Scotland Yard, or that my father has gone by any name other than Dad. My name is Tyler Kane, and as far as I know that’s all I’ve ever been called. My family lives in Bradford on Avon in the West Country of England, a place of cobblestone lanes and huddled houses, a place where the past feels present again. We watch the river run through the wide arches of the ancient town bridge playing Poohsticks to pass the time: dropping a stick into the water upstream and rushing to the other side to see whose stick made it under first.

  Our home is on a quiet cul-de-sac called Barton Orchard, set beneath the main street like a secret hidden down a winding stairway, the stone steps worn away to polished black glass from centuries of footfalls. This is my thirteenth house. Thirteen houses, five countries, and two continents, and I’m not yet ten years old. I know this is strange by the way people look at me when I tell them, but I like that strangeness. “Is your father in the Forces?” another child’s mother asks. “No, he’s a businessman,” I announce, as if that explains it.