Two weeks passed. We hadn’t heard from Dad. We hadn’t heard from Scotland Yard either.
It was a Wednesday morning. Mom was walking the dog before work, accompanying Caitlin and me up the hill where we caught the bus to school. We saw them as we turned from the residential Beckford Gardens onto the main road. The same dark car, as always. It had been over a year since Caitlin or I had spotted them, but we still knew. Since arriving home from Saint Lucia we had been waiting for them to show up, which didn’t make it any less shocking when they did.
The car trailed us, as if looking for a parking place, and then pulled into a spot up ahead. We slowed our pace, Caitlin and I in our matching apple green sweaters with ladders in our tights, and the puppy tugging on the lead, wagging her tail, oblivious to the tension now knotting our little group together. I looked up at Mom, whose eyes were on that car, the worry wrinkle between her brows.
“Cait, Ty,” she said, halting. “I’m going to be late for work, so I’m just going to take Poppy along the towpath and back to the house. I’ll see you later, okay?”
We knew why she was leaving—she didn’t want us to see them pick her up—but it wasn’t okay. She cut left, joining the gravelly towpath, and we watched her walk away, past the brightly colored canal boats huddled along the water’s edge.
We kept going up the hill without her. We looked ahead at the dark car—I wanted to peer through the windows and catch a glimpse of their faces; I wanted to know what they looked like—but it was already pulling out, and by the time we had reached where it had been parked, it had turned around, heading in Mom’s direction. We both stopped to watch it go, making a right back down Beckford Gardens, which would coincide directly with where Mom came off the towpath.
We carried on toward the bus in silence, gathering with the other kids in the yard outside the boys’ school, waiting. Normally, Cait and I separated at this point—each to our own friends—but not today. We stood side by side in silence.
We got on the school bus with the other children as if today were like any other day. As if today were not the day they’d take our mother away.
Cait and I agreed to meet at the gates after school, and then went off to our lessons. I didn’t know that while I sat in a classroom, not concentrating on the Russian Revolution, there were men in suits gathered together, ominous as crows, in our front garden. I didn’t see these men ferrying clear plastic evidence bags full of our belongings into a van. I didn’t see Mom sitting in the backseat of that same dark car, with Poppy on her lap whimpering desperately at this invasion and powerless to stop it. I didn’t know any of these things were happening yet, but I felt them.
At 3:30 pm, Cait and I found each other at the school gates and began the walk home. We took the bus in the morning because Landsdowne Road was steep, but it took twenty minutes to get down the hill on foot if we cut through Hedgemead Park.
“Do you think those men arrested Mom?” I asked Caity as we walked.
She shook her head, unknowing, and shrugged.
“Do you think they’ll try to talk to us? Mom always makes out like they might.”
“I don’t think they’re allowed to. We’re minors, aren’t we? They’d need Mom’s consent.” Cait scrunched her mouth to one side, her thinking face. “I have no idea.”
“Someone should really tell us these things.”
“No, our family would never do something sensible like actually talk about stuff.”
We crossed the River Avon, its brown waters rushing beneath us, turgid from the winter rain, and then cut down the residential backstreets of Bathwick. We turned onto Forester Road. It looked the same as it ever did. Mom’s car was parked in the drive. There was no yellow tape, no police, and no padlocks across our gate. There were none of the signs we expected from TV shows that something was amiss, just the same small-town stillness. A cat screeched, and we both jumped, and then looked at each other feeling foolish. We dialed in the security code, and the door swung open, hitting the wall behind with a bang.
“Mom?” Caitlin called out instinctively.
Poppy was there, winding between our legs and wagging her tail.
“Mom?”
No answer.
I went to hang my coat in the cupboard under the stairs, and a reflective red object caught my eye. At my feet was the remnants of one smashed bauble, escaped from its Christmas box stowed deep within the cupboard. I flicked on the lights to look around, and there beside me was another box labeled photos #2, now empty. Our photos gone.
I went to look in the living room. Mom’s desk drawers were open, emptied of their contents. She kept a file for each of us kids in which she stored our birth certificates, our school grades, our vaccination records, and our passports—but these pieces of paper that define our existence had all gone. They had packed up our past lives and lies. Stolen our family history. Everything that linked us to the life of the Kanes or the family that came before had been systematically removed. We came to Forester Road to become new people with new names, but they found our old selves and had taken them away to testify against us.
Forester Road was not a fortress; it was just a house, like any other.
I heard Caitlin behind me. “I’m going to call her office and see if she’s at work.”
At my feet was a forgotten photo of Dad in the bathtub in California with a thick black beard and all three of us as babies squeezed in with him, Evan, the biggest, standing at the end. We’re all grinning at the camera, our faces white with matching shaving-foam beards.
I went into the kitchen and felt their touch on everything. I felt like a trespasser in my own home, like I shouldn’t move a thing. They had unpinned the contents of our corkboard. They hadn’t removed Detective Sergeant Andrew Sloane’s business card. I wondered if he had been here. I wished I knew his face. I hoped he saw that we had crossed out Detective Sergeant and replaced it with Bastard.
I heard Caitlin asking for Mom on the phone in the other room and then hanging up.
“She called in sick,” Cait said, looking worried. “She never went in.”
The black wings flapped frantically in my chest, filling my mouth with feathers and dust.
They had to leave us one parent at least. Just one.
We decided to call Evan at university because he would know what to do. Cait told him that we thought Mom had been arrested. She held the phone out so I could hear, our two heads crowded together.
“Well, she’s not going to have forgotten about you,” Evan was saying, as if we were being childish to worry. “You’re both fine, right?”
“But what should we do?”
“Nothing. She’ll be back. I don’t think they can hold someone for longer than twenty-four … or maybe it’s forty-eight hours without pressing charges.”
“But what if they press charges?”
“Even if they do, they’ll let her out on bail.”
“Do we need to bail her out?”
“No,” he said flatly. “Don’t do anything.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know. But she hasn’t done anything wrong. They’re just giving her a hard time because they’re pissed off they didn’t catch Dad. Don’t worry!”
“How can we not worry?” I asked.
“Okay, worry all you like. It’s not going to change anything.”
“Are you all right?” Caitlin asked.
“Yeah, they were here too.”
“Really?” we said in unison, horrified.
“Yeah.”
“Did you talk to them?”
“No, I was out. It’s not like we know anything, is it?” he said. “The student union has this legal advice bit, so I went to chat to them, just about my rights and stuff, and when I told the guy my story, he didn’t know what to say. I think students usually ask about their rent or stolen bikes or shit like that,” Evan said, laughing. “He told me I needed to talk to a real lawyer.”
“We were saying before that someone should have told us what to do if this happened,” Caitlin said.
“Listen, I’ve got lectures all day, but I’ll drive back either tonight or first thing tomorrow. And if she does come home, tell her to call me.”
“Thanks, Ev,” we said together.
“It will be fine. Tyler, don’t make yourself mental, and both of you, no wild partying in the house while Mom’s gone!”
We said goodbye, feeling better.
Last summer, Mom had gone to Cornwall for the weekend with John and asked Evan to keep an eye on the house. The three of us had gotten drunk together on the beers Evan had bought and a bottle of old cherry brandy we had found in the back of the cupboard, until Caitlin vomited on the bathroom floor, and Evan had to put her to bed. He swore us to secrecy, otherwise Mom wouldn’t trust us all in the house alone again, and blamed the stained carpet on the cat.
Not knowing what else to do with ourselves, Cait and I took the dog for a walk. The air was heavy with the approaching dusk, like the sky was weighing down on us. We walked up to Sydney Gardens, between the grand pillared entrance and past the rows of freshly turned flower beds. I could see the creamy stone houses in the distance on the hill beyond the trees. It felt absurd for this to be happening here, amid the quaint historic beauty of Bath.
I wondered where in the world Dad was right now. Mom had thrown the cell phone into the canal, so he couldn’t reach us, and we had no way to let him know what was happening. I thought of him out there in hiding, leaving us to face this alone, and I felt the first stirrings of a new feeling, something with talons and teeth, which I hadn’t felt before.
Cait kept up a good pace, as if she wanted to know what happened next, when all I wanted was to sit down and cover my face with my hands. I felt unprepared for this.
Cait slowed in order to link her arm through mine. It started to gently drizzle, leaving oily prisms on the pavements.
“It’ll be all right, Smudge,” she said, as if she had read my thoughts.