It’s 1994 and my last year of junior school. Year Six. They’ve redesigned the uniform and the other girls turn up kitted out in the new tricolor blue, purple, and white striped dresses, a starched, stiff cotton that kept the collars upright, while I stay in the old uniform, softened with time and wear. If the teachers give me any trouble, Mom says to tell them she’ll buy a new uniform as soon as they make it affordable. I don’t care. As I grow taller, my skirt’s the shortest in the class, which gives me much-needed points in the social hierarchy, going a small way to compensate for the fact I can’t have a pair of Kickers like the cool girls. Best of all there’s nothing the teachers can do about it. They tell me to unroll my skirt, and I lift my sweater to show them it hasn’t been hitched one bit, taking great pleasure in their indignation.
I got in trouble at some point for kicking another girl in the shins because she called me a slut. Mom stood up for me when the teachers complained. “I would have kicked her in the shins too,” she said on the drive home from school. When I looked sullen, she added: “You drive yourself crazy, chicken. School may seem like your whole world right now, but it’s a teeny tiny portion of it”—she pinched the air with her fingers in demonstration—“and the rest of life is much more fun—trust me. Nothing’s as bad as you think it is, you know?” she added emphatically. I had a tendency to wallow and she had little time for wallowing.
Caitlin and I continued to march out to phone booths to speak to Dad; it felt completely normal now. He kept moving around with Lana in tow, us visiting on school holidays when we could. I was resentful that he bought Lana new skis for Christmas that year, when I knew money was tight. I could tell by the way the repairs had ground to a halt on the house and Mom budgeted our meals at one pound a day. She might have done this anyway, because she functioned on the premise that worse times were always around the corner, and it was best to be prepared. Dad swears he never missed a child support payment, but the longer he was on the run, the more I sensed Mom battening down the family hatches. Shortly before Christmas, knowing Mom was stressed about how to finance a tree and a feast and our festive expectations, Caitlin and I pooled our pocket money from our piggy banks and offered it to her, which must have been heartbreaking.
I was sure if it wasn’t for Lana-Banana, as we’d dubbed her, amusing Dad as he swanned around Europe like some sort of international playboy, then he would resolve this faster and come home. It hadn’t dawned on me yet that he was never coming home.
* * *
That spring, Dad was confident enough in his new identity to fly back to London for some business. We saw him waiting for us at Heathrow, his baseball cap pulled low over his lip-biting worry-face.
We flew back to Geneva together—the first time we had traveled alone with Dad for many years. At the Geneva airport, we crossed from the Swiss side to the French, a crossing Dad had handled many times without issue, but he was still on edge, which put me on edge too. At border control, an official extended his hand for our documents silently, and I waited for the cursory glance and stamp. But it didn’t happen. He was examining them closely. I looked up at Dad, whose expression hadn’t changed, but his eyes were wide and alert, his sunglasses dangling from his mouth, chewing on one arm as he was in the habit of doing. The official lifted his eyes to us again, and Dad removed the glasses from his mouth expectantly, but the documents were not returned.
The official asked Dad to explain his relationship to Cait and me. Dad said he was our father and that he had separated from our mother, but that didn’t seem to satisfy the official. His questions continued while his eyes scanned a computer screen, turned away from our view, until in a decisive action he stepped out from the booth and ushered us away from the line that had formed behind us into a different part of the airport guarded by serious-looking men. We were escorted into a gray, sterile box-room, one of a long line of similar box-rooms.
“Dad?” I asked, trotting along behind him.
“It’s okay,” he said.
Caitlin and I were offered the plastic chairs against the wall at the back, and a different man appeared to question Dad. He wanted to know where we were going; why we were going there; where our mother was; and why we all had different surnames. Dad gave his prepared responses, and started to get exasperated, acting like a man might act who was innocent, something Dad was practiced at. Occasionally this new official glanced over at Cait and me, as if terrible things had been done to us, things we probably didn’t understand.
“Listen, what do you need from me so we can get out of here?” Dad asked.
“We will need to speak to the children’s mother, just to make sure that you are who you say you are. You understand, we have to be very careful: a single man traveling with two young girls, who, by all indications, are not his own children.”
Dad raised his eyebrows in disbelief and then turned away, indignant, expelling air through his teeth in frustration. He said our mother was unavailable: She was on holiday herself and he didn’t know how to reach her. “Ask me anything about these girls, and I can tell you. Or ask them! I mean, look at her, look at her face,” he was saying, indicating Caitlin’s perfect freckles, each dot distinct, unlike Dad’s, whose freckles had grown thick and textured over time. “She’s clearly my daughter.”
Caitlin smiled meekly.
Dad kept protesting, but the more he protested, the more convinced of his guilt the officer became.
“You can use the phone in the hallway.”
Dad disappeared and we were left on the plastic chairs in the sterile room. He needed to produce a mother for us, and it couldn’t be Mom, because her phone might still be tapped and she would be livid. Any sign of trouble and she was ready to cancel all future trips.
The official came over, pulling up a chair so he could sit, leaning his elbows on his knees to meet us roughly at eye level. He asked us some questions. Easy questions. Who was the eldest; did we have more siblings; what was our mother called; and where did we live. And then he asked, “And that man? Who is that man?”
“He’s our dad,” we said almost in unison, and it couldn’t have been clearer that we were sisters. Our voices are almost identical in their faded American lilt, so similar that years later, when we were both teenagers, we dumped each other’s boyfriends over the telephone so the other one didn’t have to go through the ordeal, and they never knew.
The official nodded.
I wondered if we had done badly or well.
We were there for what felt like a long time. There was a yellow line painted along the floor, which indicated the border between Switzerland and France, we were told, and we played at jumping from one side to the other, amused by having a foot in each country.
After two hours, Dad reappeared brandishing a phone number for the official, who left to call it. When he returned, the power had shifted from them to us. The official was looking at Dad like he knew he was guilty; he just wasn’t guilty of what the official suspected. He stamped our passports and handed them back, before we were released into France.
No one said a word until we were on the road again, and Dad started laughing under his breath and shaking his head.
“What happened?” Cait asked.
“They thought I’d abducted you two.”
“Abducted? What for?” I said.
“Child trafficking, I guess.”
I wasn’t entirely sure what child trafficking entailed, but I added it to my list of things I did not want to happen to me.
“And you got hold of Mom?”
“No, not your mother. A friend in France who pretended to be your mother for us. I thought we were really stuck there for a moment.”
Dad didn’t tell Mom about the trouble, but we never crossed a border alone with him again. Really he should have stopped crossing borders completely, because each crossing exposed and unnerved him. He later described the process as jumping from a high cliff into very cold water—but he kept doing it. Mom says during these months he was erratic and demanding, and she worried about him. He seemed to be searching for something; maybe for the man he had been.
Dad likes routine. He likes going to the same tennis club every week; he likes frequenting the same holiday destinations; he likes the same restaurants, because he knows they’re reliable; he’s predictable in his tastes, and the one thing a fugitive shouldn’t be is predictable. When the FBI hunts for fugitives, they look at their former habits as a way to predict their behavior in their new identity.
At some point, Dad appeared in Bath. He and Lana had broken up, and she had returned to London. We spent the weekend at a bed-and-breakfast in the Cotswolds. Mom was upset by his reappearance after everything she had done to support him out there, and now he was risking it all. “When will that man ever learn,” she said, exasperated, as we walked away from yet another phone booth call, their terse words still hanging in the air between us.
“Never?” I offered.
Shortly after this, Dad moved to Saint Lucia. He said he missed the sunshine and couldn’t bear another winter in Europe. There was a business opportunity on the island, something completely legit. In the past two years he hadn’t known what to do with himself. The available money was ever dwindling and the demands of keeping a low profile meant it was hard to create work. Dad’s former coconspirators were now somewhere under federal detention, drip-feeding information on his whereabouts. But in Saint Lucia he could leave that world behind. He was going to help manage a hotel opening there, owned by an old friend of his, who didn’t know about Dad’s past.
At first Lana stayed in London, but she soon joined him on the island to work at the hotel too, and I guessed they were back together.
Each time we talked, he was more excited about the future, which he spoke about like it was a thing that already existed. “We have this great place here on the hillside looking out over a bay,” he told us. “There’s plenty of room for you kids. The views are really something—wait till you see these sunsets.”
* * *
With Dad on the other side of the world, that summer we went on holiday with Mom down to Cornwall. We slept in tents, Caitlin and I lined up next to each other watching the insects illuminated in the lining, and Mom and her boyfriend in the other. Mom’s boyfriend was called John, and they’d first met when she was living in New York back in the 1970s. He was her busboy at Serendipity, and once they had stripped down in the middle of a shift and swapped clothes, him parading between the tables in her minidress. Mom had looked him up after she and Dad separated. He was living in London, and they’d been dating on and off ever since. He was a rock climber and disappeared to scale mountain ranges in faraway places at every opportunity. I liked it when he showed up, usually carrying a big rucksack of dusty ropes and a faint smell of tobacco. He had raggedy curly hair and big glasses and he loved to talk. He had one short finger and made up dramatic stories about how it had been amputated. I was enthralled by this stumpy half digit, taut and smooth.
John never tried to do Dad things. He fixed stuff around the house and painted walls and dug our pond, but those activities didn’t trespass on Dad territory in my mind. At dinner, John talked to us like grown-ups. He was curious about our kid world, what music we listened to or books we read. Occasionally I felt guilty, because I knew Dad blamed John for Mom refusing to try again after they’d separated. I tried not to tell Dad about the time we spent with John, because I knew he would be jealous, but I decided loyalty didn’t necessitate that I dislike John. I just wasn’t allowed to think of him as a father.
In the daytime, we scrabbled down the steep cliffs to Pedn Vounder, a nudist beach full of hippie types, their bronzed penises bouncing as they played beach ball. John taught us to boulder on the big rocks where we would tumble safely onto the soft sand. One night his climbing club had their annual party on the beach at Porthcurno. We traipsed down the coastal path with flashlights and gathered around a fire in an upturned barrel. We barbecued sausages and ate bananas filled with melted chocolate in aluminum wrappers. We were put to bed in sleeping bags near the warmth of the fire, listening to the music and laughter around us and catching glimpses of the revelry between our dreams. A man held by his ankles having beer poured in his mouth. Mom and John running naked into the ocean, screaming and waving their white arms in the air about them; and then turning right back around as soon as their toes touched the cold Atlantic waters.
In the morning, we ate bacon sarnies and drank tea from plastic beakers in the muggy damp porch of the tent, still wrapped chrysalislike in our sleeping bags, waiting for the sun to break through the clouds.
At some point, Mom said she was sorry the holidays she gave us weren’t as glamorous as our trips to visit Dad. I don’t know what we said, probably nothing adequate to reassure her, but she didn’t realize that those trips down to the Cornish coast, or similar ones in the hills of the Lake District, or wherever we went, normally involving long walks and tents and packed lunches and anoraks, they meant something else to us entirely. We complained about walking so far, or we squabbled in the car, and Evan once shut Caitlin inside the Murphy bed and didn’t tell anyone where she was; but there was no Scotland Yard and no fugitives and no need to lie to our friends or question who had done what and why and where that fell on the scale of love. No question of blame. On the beach in Pedn Vounder, with Caitlin and me sitting in our dinghy, alternating on snake watch with the snorkel and mask, armed with a snake-bashing stick, life felt completely normal.