While on the run, Mom used to travel in a floor-length pink fake fur coat. She argued that no one could suspect a woman dressed so outrageously of having anything to hide. She looked formidable with her five-foot ten-inch height in a blaze of fuchsia topped by her now-blond cropped hair, yet so thin, the brittle birdlike bones in her neck pushed tight against her skin, making her look like a sorrowful bird of paradise.
We left Mougins in June 1987, kissing Bricky’s wet nose goodbye. “Such a good dog,” Mom said, sadly stroking her worried ears. She ran behind the car until we were far away, us three waving at her through the back window until she was just a panting speck in the distance, left to return to her real family.
I was three-and-a-half years old now with scrappy short hair. Mom had frequently threatened to cut my hair off with the kitchen scissors if I didn’t sit still while she brushed it, and after one tantrum too many, she did just that. I was bereft. Caitlin gave me her sticker collection to stop my crying. She had never found a replacement for Henrietta the taxidermy chicken and instead decided she would not be a person who needed things to make herself feel better. She was six now, all freckles and bones, suffering unbeknownst to us from a tapeworm. She would get so hungry, she wept while watching Mom prepare dinner. Evan was ten and wore his hair in a straggly tail down his back, and Dad had grown a black mustache, like he had when Mom first met him, perhaps to remind her of happier times.
Dad traveled separately from us from the moment we arrived at the airport in Nice until we made it through to arrivals in Heathrow, a precaution in case our passports were flagged. He and Mom had agreed on a signal she would give when we successfully passed through customs to confirm it was safe for us to reunite. But on this occasion, when we emerged into the arrivals hall, Mom didn’t make the signal, and from his hiding place behind a pillar, Dad panicked, readying himself to split the airport. He waited, just in case, until he saw her searching for him among the crowds and subtly caught her attention. When he realized she had forgotten to make the sign, he was angry, but quickly their anger traded places, and she turned on him. How did he expect her to remember a stupid little hand signal when she was trying to curb the behavior of three children intent on riding the cart into strangers’ legs while simultaneously negotiating the visa requirements of our American passports at immigration, entirely on her own?
* * *
We drove through the squelchy green fields of the British countryside to reach Fullers Farm (house #9) in Surrey. It was accessed by a single muddy lane lined with knotted hedgerow and crossed by the occasional damp wood stile or kissing gate.
I saw a picture of the real house recently, and it was handsome and rectangular. The house I remember is from a recurring dream I had when we lived there. In my dream, it stands on top of a cliff. We leave in a hurry, as the skies turn a dangerous color, fractured with cartoon lightning. We find ourselves on the cliff edge, staring at a brown, thrashing sea below with the crests of serpents rising between the waves. Mom pushes Evan in, and one by one the rest of us follow. I swim until I realize my family has disappeared into the murky depths.
I dreamed this in frightful fits on broken nights. With the light on and tears close by, Dad sat on the end of my bed and said, “You’re more afraid of being afraid than what’s actually scaring you.” But I thought: no, I’m not. I’m scared of the shadows that follow us in this house.
We were only there six months, but summer ended before it began, and Fullers Farm will forever be trapped in that winter of bad dreams.
By day, we disappeared into the small woodland surrounding the house, running through the scraggly trees, as gray and tall as the sky, to play in an abandoned toy house. It smelled damp inside and leaves rotted in the corners where spiders went to die.
Mom didn’t expect us back until nightfall, and we got used to peeing in the bushes like wild children. One day I was squatting in a rose bush when I felt a tickling between my legs. I looked down and my knickers had turned black, swarming with ants. I had peed on an ants’ nest, and they had fled into my underwear and all over my thighs. I cried out, ripping off my knickers, and ran into the house. Mom scooped me into the kitchen sink and washed the ants off with brisk sweeps of her hands.
Caitlin insists this never happened, but I remember, and I thought Mom did too, until one day she revealed, “Well I don’t remember it happening, but you’ve always been so sure.”
I tell the story regardless, like a tribal myth; stories such as these define our place in the world when we lack other markers of past or country to pin us down.
The other story I like to tell from Fullers Farm is about Bambi. Driving down the winding lane one day on her way home from an early shop run, Mom came across a baby deer stranded in the middle of the road after being hit by a car. The deer had given up, folded its legs beneath it, and was waiting to die. Its mother stood by the side of the road yelping—the same noise all mothers make when their baby is in danger. The mother deer watched Mom scoop up her baby and take her away, whispering apologies for the abduction.
Mom made Bambi a bed in the corner of the kitchen on a rug and woke us up to come see. Still half asleep, I met this baby deer covered in tiny white fuzzy spots, eyeing us suspiciously, her enormous black eyes unblinking.
Each morning we came downstairs and took turns feeding the deer from a baby bottle. Eventually Bambi came to trust us, and sat up on her front legs to say hello. When she seemed strong enough to travel, Mom took her to the vet, but she returned just hours later with no Bambi, speechless, and retreated to her never-ending bed. We felt her silent sobs swelling the damp wood of our house. Bambi’s lower back had been broken, and she would never have walked again. The vet offered to put wheels on her back feet, but Mom thought it was too tragic to be a deer that remembered frolicking but would never frolic again, and Bambi was put down.
* * *
I knew we were hiding in the woods, but I didn’t know what we were hiding from. I came to think Mom and Dad were hiding from each other, because they were never in the same room. They stood in doorways and looked through each other. They shared a bed but never embraced. They had forgotten the language they learned to talk together.
Mom swore with words I never understood when she hit her head on the timber beam outside my room like it was more than a physical pain, and she hit her head every time she passed.
I came into their bedroom one morning to watch their TV. There was a time when we all climbed into bed together, and they welcomed us in, letting us play games around them, or I would fall asleep between their warm bodies, like I was still a baby, curling Mom’s hair between my fingers. It’s just a sepia-stained scrap of a memory, but I’m sure it was real once.
Sitting cross-legged in front of the TV screen, I noticed their silence. The sudden silence when you walk into a room where there had been words that you weren’t meant to hear. I didn’t look behind me, but I knew they were at separate sides of the bed and their silence was a wake.
Later that day I saw Dad leave from my bedroom window, the car just a dark stain against the wall of falling water. I went downstairs to the kitchen where Mom was peeling potatoes at the sink, her motions hard and fast and her fingers pink from the cold water. Strips of potato flew at the wall, leaving brown dirty dribbles down the tiles, until she screamed, “Fuck!” and clasped one hand around her forefinger tight, wincing.
“You okay?”
“No,” she said, not looking up from her finger, like if I touched her she might start crying.
“It’s fine,” she said, peeling away a corner of her hand to tentatively view the damage, then clamping it shut again and heading toward the bathroom.
She never finished peeling the potatoes, which sat in the sink like discarded sandbags, their wet skin turning dark yellow then brown. She threw a frozen chicken and mushroom pie into the oven instead and some spinach into a pan to cook with a stick of butter, her finger now bandaged.
Every movement was metallic banging: the oven door clunking closed, the crash of plates dropped carelessly on the table, and the clatter of cutlery left in a pile in the middle, while Caitlin and I sat and watched, our eyes occasionally resting on Dad’s empty chair. The smell of chicken warmed the kitchen and stirred our stomachs, but we recognized the warning signs and tried to remain invisible.
Evan came in and, peering over the counter, he grimaced, saying as he took his seat “Urgh, spinach,” at which point Mom spun round, her nostrils flaring and her eyes wide as a night creature. She let out a deep primal grunt, rich with frustration, and, picking up the bowl of spinach, she hurled it across the table so it smashed against the wall, leaving trails of green slime and a pile of broken crockery. All three of us looked at the wall and then back to Mom. She approached the table, as we all leaned back to make way for her anger, and, stacking our four plates on top of each other, she unceremoniously dumped them in the trash, declaring, her voice unnervingly steady, “Fine, if you don’t like it, you can make your own bloody dinner,” and with that she stormed out of the room. We heard her stomps reverberating through the house until her bedroom door slammed shut, all somewhere above our heads.
We sat in stunned silence.
Taking on his role of eldest, Evan fetched more plates from the cupboard, took the pie from the counter, and gave us each a slice: “Here, guys.” He wiped the spilled spinach from the table and tidied up the mess as well as a ten-year-old could, before sitting down with Cait and me. Neither of us had started to eat.
“Go on, it’s fine,” he said.
“But I want Mom to cut mine,” I said.
“Give it here.”
He took the plate from me and roughly crisscrossed my pie into small mushy squares and pushed the plate back across the table at me.
“There. Now eat!”
He took a few bites, and Cait and I followed suit, watching him because he was in charge with Mom out of the room.
After some unsatisfactory mouthfuls, he stood with a look of resolve, put a slice of pie on the last plate, took a knife and fork, and left the room. We listened to his footsteps up the stairs, across the ceiling above our head, and his knock on her wooden door. Caitlin and I left the table and scrambled up the stairs, making quieter, quicker thumps than Evan.
With our hands on Mom’s doorframe, Caitlin roughly a head taller than me, we peered around and saw Evan standing next to Mom’s bed, holding out her dinner. Mom was curled on her side looking up at him, swollen and pink in the face. She gave half a smile, so we both took a few steps closer.
“Thank you,” she said, reaching a hand up to stroke the back of his neck with an affection that was total forgiveness, and we joined him next to the bed. I kneeled down so my elbows rested on the edge.
“I’m okay. It’s okay,” she said, stroking each one of us on our cheek or hair until we felt less guilty.
“Now go finish your dinner. I’ll be down in a bit.”
We filed out of the room, Evan leaving the plate on the floor by her bed. We finished the pie, our stomachs full already on feelings, and put our dishes in the sink because we wanted to be good kids and to make her happy.
The skies were now thundering violently outside, lighting the woods in flashes of theater. We went to bed with every window rattling, and I lay terrified, sure the frenzy outside would soon engulf the house, and there was no dad here to protect us.
A few hours later, a thunderbolt struck so close that our beds shook with the force of it, as if a bomb had fallen from the sky. I screamed and ran into the hallway.
“Mom!”
Cait and Evan were up too, and Mom shakily got out of bed as we gathered around her legs. She tried the light switches, but they were all dead. I began to cry.
“Come on, it’s just a storm. Anyone who wants can come sleep with me,” and we all ran past her and piled into the never-ending bed.
The following morning we woke early for school. As Mom filled the kettle with water, she looked out the window, and her eyes were struck by something in the driveway. Immediately my thoughts turned to Dad.
She pulled on her shoes and coat and walked outside with us following in our slippers, tiptoeing so our feet wouldn’t get wet. We saw what had surprised her. It wasn’t Dad.
At least three trees had been knocked down in the wind and lay like slain giants across our driveway, barricading us in the woods.
“I guess that’s it for school today,” Mom said with a smile.
Walking back toward the house, Caitlin let out a little gasp and covered her mouth, pointing with her other hand up at the electrical cable.
“Look!”
A squirrel must have fallen out of the tree during the storm, grabbed onto the cable, and been electrocuted. It was nothing but a black frazzled fur ball, a stiff charcoal tail and a beady eye.
As we ate bran flakes, Mom hushed our natter and turned up the news report on her battery radio, cocking her ear in between interference.
“At least thirteen dead and damage running into millions of pounds, the chaos on the day a storm battered southern Britain without warning … a million people without electricity … Britain clearing up after what the Home Secretary has described as the worst night of disaster since 1945…”
“Do you think Dad’s okay?”
“We’ll call him later if the phone lines are back up.”
After breakfast Mom brought out an unused toolbox and took up the saw, hacking off branches for the simple act of doing something, with no hope of clearing the obstacles in our way. We spent the day climbing trees, clearing branches, and resurrecting our house, which felt like the last bastion of civilization.
As the sun lowered in the sky, we made our way inside. The phone was dead so we could not contact Dad, and I imagined him out in the woods battling his way toward us, as if thinking about it might make it happen quicker. He was somewhere out there worrying about us; I knew it.
Darkness fell and we curled up in the study around the only working fireplace. Huddled under wool blankets, we roasted sausages on skewers over the open flames, and our hands and faces became sooty from the smoke like street urchins.
The small battery-powered radio gave us hourly updates, and during the nine o’clock news we learned that the storm had destroyed the animal enclosures at the local zoo and a puma was believed missing and on the prowl. “Pet owners should bring in their cats and dogs and parents should watch children carefully in the parks.”
Mom took the candle to check the doors were locked and teased us about the wild cat. We all slept together by the slowly dimming fire, until there were just red and amber coals illuminating the hearth.
In the morning, the dead squirrel had slid down the cable a little closer to the house, the trees were still blocking our way, and Dad was still gone.