Mom wrote Dad a long letter explaining our position, beseeching him to listen to his children. At the end she mentioned Lana, suggesting that he might consider relocating to the UK after his release, as without a green card to move Stateside herself, she would endeavor to have us study and settle in England, which translates in the many layers of Mom-speak as “You made your bed with Lana in America, now lie in it.”
Dad didn’t talk to us about the letter, but he was bewildered by Mom’s reaction to his marriage plans: she no longer had feelings for him and she was in a relationship herself, he argued. They spoke afterward, and Dad says that was the first he heard about her idea that they remarry, something he said he would have agreed to if it meant we were out there with him. But their memories of these events conflict, and it’s impossible to know whose to favor. It was probably the same thing that happened throughout their marriage: when Mom talked, Dad didn’t listen, and when Dad listened, Mom never said precisely what she meant.
That weekend Evan came back from university and entered into the debate.
“Listen, it doesn’t matter whether what he did was right or wrong or whose fault it is that he’s there,” Evan said, outraged at our behavior. “It’s him that’s in that cell day after day, living with his regrets and the knowledge of his mistakes, which is punishment enough. The least we can all do is take two weeks out of our year to go see him and make this time a little less unbearable. Right? And we should be pleased he has Lana out there now. It takes the pressure off of the rest of us.”
Mom scoffed, but Caitlin and I felt suitably chastised. Rotten children. Evan has always been a good moral compass like that. He visited every summer too, though he tried to go on different weekends from us to break up the time for Dad.
Next time Dad called, we told him we wanted to come to California after all, and he was thrilled, setting his preparations back in motion. Uncle Rick invited us to stay with him in Maui for the five days between the visits and act as our guardian for our second weekend in Lompoc, which gave us something exciting to focus on that wasn’t seeing our dad in prison.
* * *
Lana collected us from LAX. For a change that year we stayed in Solvang, a surreal town not far from Lompoc, styled like a Danish village with timbered facades, kitsch windmills, and women wearing mock-up dirndls serving pastries, as if Disney Land had parked “Denmark World” in the midst of California’s Santa Ynez Valley. At night, the houses emptied out when the tourists went home, leaving the buildings eerily vacant.
We went to see Saving Private Ryan one evening at the small movie theater, and Lana left during the opening scene, her exit punctuated by machine-gun fire. We found her in the car afterward, smoking and shaking. I realized we knew very little about her. She came from a big family in Ireland, and she had worked in the budget department at a hospital before she met Dad. He had picked her up at his club in Kensington and he had lied about his age, which he told us so the blame for the age difference was on him, but the six years younger he made himself was irrelevant. I knew she loved photography and her feet were a size smaller than mine. Dad said she drank too much, but Dad doesn’t drink, so I didn’t take this seriously. If things had been different, this woman, now married to my father, might have been an ally, one of the few people I could have talked to about what we had gone through, but it never happened. I found her cold and closed down. Being older now than Lana was back then, I wonder how she must have felt to find herself transplanted to America away from her family and friends, married to a fifty-four-year-old convict and now chaperoning his teenage daughters around California, but I never had the opportunity to ask, and hers is not my story to tell.
That night, lying in our hotel bedroom, in sheets that smelled of strangers, a streetlamp casting the room in alien yellow light, I asked Cait how she always seemed to cope so well. I could see her thinking, her eyes switching back and forth across the ceiling. Despite the arguments we’d had leading up to this trip, I was enjoying our time together. She had a boyfriend now and was officially In Love. He lived alone, so she usually decamped to his house on weekends. When she did come home we had house-shaking fights about trivial things like a small stain on a pair of her jeans or whose turn it was to poop scoop the garden. We’d be left raging, unable to decipher what we were really fighting about. I felt she had abandoned me and I wanted to punish her for it. We were jealous of each other too. I was dark haired and she was fair; I was artistic; she, scientific; I’d been cast as the bad girl and she, the good; and while I was on Dad’s side, she took Mom’s. These labels weren’t categorical beyond hair color, but once we began defining ourselves against each other, it was hard to go back.
Cait turned on her side to face me. She said she had a method: in her head she had a Dad box, and she kept that box firmly closed for most of the year. She only opened it for the short period of time when we came out to visit him, and when we left, everything that had happened was sealed back in the Dad box until next time. She said she often felt guilty for not being a better daughter to Dad when he was having a hard time, but mainly she felt that way when we were sitting opposite him in a prison visiting pen, and afterward she would dump all that guilt and heartache into the box. She recommended I get a Dad box too, and that way I wouldn’t have to think about it all so much. I placed the Dad box on the shelf next to the box of things not-to-be-discussed and the box of precious things. These boxes were beginning to require a mental administration system I wasn’t sure I had the capacity to manage.
Lana, Cait, and I went to see Dad together the next day. We bought a carton of strawberries from the vending machine, a treat for Dad, who didn’t get them inside. I found these prison vending machine strawberries unutterably tragic. Strawberries, to me, were the epitome of British summer; they were topping and tailing at home in the kitchen ahead of a feast; they were strawberry picking when we were small, squatting between the rows of fruit to pee, as Mom extolled urine’s virtues as a fertilizer. They were home and freedom and grass under my bare feet—all the things that this place was not. And worse still, we had to eat them with an air of celebration.
After our strawberries, Dad and I took a walk together. He always made time to speak to us kids one on one: to get to know each other as individuals, as he said it. As we circled the perimeter of the visiting area, he asked if I had started smoking pot yet, as if it were inevitable.
“I’ve tried it,” I said, playing it safe despite the weekends spent smoking bongs in my friend’s basement or learning to back-roll spliffs to impress the boys. Caitlin hated these conversations, which he had with her too. “It’s not his job,” she would say to me afterward. She felt chided for not being demonstrably wild, when in fact she was wild in her own way, she just chose not to share it with Dad.
“It’s good to try,” he said. “It’s not a dangerous drug, and a lot of artistic people like yourself have found it stimulates their creativity. Did you find the colors around you were heightened and music sounded better?”
This was becoming a surreal conversation.
“I guess so,” I said. “Usually I just get the munchies and pass out.”
He laughed. “Well, maybe next time try to do some drawing or painting and see what happens. Do you know about Rastas?”
“Like Bob Marley?”
“Yes, but Rastafari is an actual religion too, the dreadlocks, the smoking cannabis, is part of their religious beliefs. They say it helps you connect to God or Jah. When I was in New York, I was actually introduced to Bob Marley, and…”
Dad continued to tell me about going to stay with Bob Marley at his mother’s home in Miami and listening to a song Marley was working on, which later turned out to be “Buffalo Soldier.” Back home, when friends would play Legend, I struggled to not share this story with them, much like when Mr. Nice was published, Howard Marks’s bestselling autobiography about his life as Britain’s biggest pot smuggler, and I’d have to bite my tongue not to say my dad smuggled way more drugs than he did, a dubious boast.
Dad went on to talk about the severity of the American criminal justice system, occasionally sharing a story about someone around us to exemplify a point. “That’s Brian. He’s maybe twenty-four, twenty-five now,” Dad said. “He was sentenced to life imprisonment for dealing methamphetamine. It’s a terrible drug, rots your insides out, but both of his parents were addicts, and he needed help. They got him on the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ rule when he turned eighteen for selling a completely insignificant amount, and now he won’t be free until his forties, his whole youth—gone.” Dad shook his head sorrowfully.
These conversations made me an unlikely expert on the subject. It was 1998, and a person convicted of armed robbery served about five years; someone convicted of rape served about twelve; and the average punishment for an American found guilty of murder was eight years and eight months. There were people being more harshly punished for selling marijuana than for killing someone with a gun, and later I’d find myself going off on inappropriate diatribes about it at a friend’s dinner table, as their parents looked at me curiously, this teenager impassioned by a judicial system in a country far away.
I hadn’t asked Dad how long he was facing before, but I did now, cautiously. We’d taken a seat on one of the benches. “And you? How much time do you have?”
He pursed his lips, looking intently at his hands. “Too much time,” he said, rubbing his face and finally looking up at me. “Any time away from you guys is too much time.”
“But, Dad, I need to know now. I need a number to count down to.”
He hesitated before saying “I don’t want this to shock you, because I’m working on getting my sentence reduced and there are lots of things I can do to make this happen. I was charged under old law—that means the sentencing guidelines from before 1984 when Reagan’s new harsher penalties kicked in, something called the Sentencing Reform Act, because the majority of my crimes were committed between ’76 and ’83. That makes me eligible for good time, which could mean a third off my sentence. I could get another ten months off from working in prison, which I’m doing with the stock market class I’m teaching—I told you about that, right?—and if I’m lucky, I go to a halfway house six months before my sentence ends, so with all that considered, I could end up serving just over five years of my ten-year sentence.” He’d dropped ten years as if I wouldn’t notice, but thinking better of it, he added: “Ten years is a scary number—I know it scared me—but I’ve got a few options on the table, which I don’t want to talk about just yet in case they don’t pan out. I can tell you I’m doing everything I can to get back out there with you,” he said, adding with morbid joviality, “I’m not getting any younger in here, that’s for sure.”
I nodded distractedly while making mental calculations. He’d been in prison for more than two years already, which meant I would be eighteen years old when he was released, if he managed to reduce his sentence; otherwise I would be twenty-two. Twenty-two felt like a foreign country at fourteen.
* * *
I had plotted to start an argument about Lana. I imagined scenes of cutting remarks about marrying a woman half his age and how I thought it was pathetic. But once I was there with him, whatever resentments I built up over the course of the year would diminish in significance, and I wanted so much to make it better, for this fraction of time we had together to help in some way. Prison is pitiful and degrading, and although he was guilty, it was hard to accept this punishment as commensurate with his crimes.
He insisted we talk about his marriage, because he knew it had upset me, but I didn’t know how to express everything that I was feeling, especially with Lana sitting not so far away, playing cards with Caity to give Dad and me some time together, a reminder that she was a real person, not the evil stepmother I cast her as. I didn’t want to call it jealousy, a slithery eel of an emotion that one none of us readily admit to.
He repeated his theory that I was hurt because it confirmed he and Mom were never getting back together, and maybe there was some truth in that. We talked about the breakdown of their marriage. “I always blamed our problems on the strain of my fugitive status,” he said, “but what I couldn’t see at the time was the real issue: we had stopped communicating. As far as I was concerned separation was never an option, but your mother didn’t see it that way, and it took me a long time to forgive her for not trying harder.” He said when I was little, he had let me believe there was a chance of reconciliation between them, because he’d needed to believe it too, but looking back, he knew that it would never have happened, and it was irresponsible of him to encourage me to think otherwise.
* * *
We went to Maui after that first weekend, and Uncle Rick showed us around the island, giving us yoga classes and setting us up with the local boys for surf lessons.
“This,” Rick said one evening while waving a joint in the air, “this got myself and your father in a whole bunch of trouble.”
In between making us laugh and emboldening us to be young and wild, Rick would talk to us about what was happening in our lives, sharing his own experiences too. He spoke with the wisdom of someone who had studied with the Maharishi in India and as someone who had experienced the darkness of his own mind. I remember it was the first time I had heard an adult talk openly about mental health, which meant a great deal to me, to know that other people struggled too, and it was okay.
At the end of our stay, Rick told me that I was harboring a lot of anger toward my father, and I needed to find a way to resolve it. If I was able to make peace with the choices Dad had made in his past and forgive him, we had a relationship we could enjoy for the rest of our lives.