The letters came every week at first. I hid them from my friends so they wouldn’t find out. I imagined leaving one where someone might find it and then they would know my secret. This secret felt weighty and adult, grander than the adolescent worries around me. I was sure the other girls at school didn’t have fathers in prison.
I took the letters to my room for the uninterrupted pleasure of communing with Dad’s voice in my head. Mainly he wrote on prison-issue legal paper in his familiar chicken track scrawl, though occasionally he would buy a card from the commissary for a special occasion or when he was feeling sentimental. He did his letter writing in the space between dinner and lights out while lying on his bunk. On the wall beside his bed he pinned photos of my siblings and me, and drawings I sent him. It was details like these of his life inside that he shared when he ran out of other things to say.
Dad was arrested in February 1996 after Scotland Yard followed me on my 12th birthday to the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia where he was in hiding. He was transferred to the county jail in San Francisco, an entire continent and the Atlantic Ocean away from where we lived in England with our mother. International calls were expensive, and there were only two phones in Dad’s unit, so we wrote instead.
These letters were our lifeline.
Returning to them for the first time while researching my memoir, No Way Home, about my childhood growing up on the run from the FBI, I am fearful of the feelings they might unlock. My relationship with my father in many ways was defined by his absence: first through divorce when I was four, and then by his fugitive status, and finally by his incarceration. My childhood was spent missing him.
The letters are bundled together in my box of precious things, along with stacks of diaries, old house keys, and all of my baby teeth. I hoarded his words, taking the letters he wrote my sister and brother too as if these flimsy sheets of paper were part of him. I put them in chronological order. This is evidence, I think, something solid, unlike the hazy fragments of memory I’ve been working with so far.
Dad wrote about everything from the cost of cigarettes on the black market ($8 for a single; $100 a pack) to the racial politics of the television room. He told us stories too. About the friend who nursed a wounded mouse back to health to keep as a pet in his cell. Or the standing ovation one inmate received as he walked out a free man after fighting his case for six years. He told us about the 4pm mail call when the men gathered like children at Christmas in hope of a letter. “Some guys wait and wait and never receive anything,” he wrote. “I am lucky.” He built a picture for me of his life inside, a life entirely foreign to my 13-year-old schoolgirl existence. I imagined him waiting with these other men for my letters and it kept me writing, each letter an act of reassurance that he didn’t feel alone in there.
But I’m not writing a book about prison. I’m writing a book about a father and a daughter and growing up to accept your parents as mistake-making people and loving them all the same. I stop writing down the details and listen instead. Here is the voice of my dad as I heard it during my teenage years; the voice of a man in his fifties whose past had finally caught up to him after a decade of running from it. A man who had made millions smuggling marijuana, fallen in love, had a family he adored, and lost it all. Through these letters I might get closer to that man, in that moment, not the father I know now.
There is a sense of searching, of reaching into the darkness for the threads that tie a family together, and gently tugging on them in hope they still hold. In a card he sent – with the aphorism on the front “Do what you love, and the rest will come,” which seems particularly ironic – he wrote:
“I just saw Sophie’s Choice. […] I thought about how much I would like to talk with you about the film, and how often I miss talking with you about a lot of things. But in the ‘half-full’ cup perspective, I thought how lucky I am to have such a special relationship with you, that we can discuss anything, and how wonderful that is.”
This optimism was trademark Dad, rallying us through.
He looked for ways to interact. He sent brainteasers and he would give me the answers on our next call. He commented on everything we sent him—school reports, photographs—and encouraged us in our endeavors. “Don’t let anyone discourage you from writing gruesome or “dark” stories,” he said. “They are unique and part of your own style.” He shared advice from the writing craft books he was studying. I didn’t realize until I returned to these letters how much of my early story writing lessons came through him. He was writing his memoirs and shared some chapters. At this point, he still hadn’t told us what he had done; these chapters primed us for one day hearing his story. “When we are together, I will tell you a long interesting story,” he wrote.
Here was a man doing his best to parent from afar. The letters are repetitive, and that repetition has the effect of an incantation, reinforcing the spell of parenthood, the spell all children are under in order to believe their parents aren’t real people, as if through repetition he could make it true. It is the breaking of this spell and the subsequent trauma that first forges who we are.
***
I’m staying with Dad at his home in California where he now works as a financial manager. He still writes letters to me even though we talk every few days. He cuts articles out of the New York Times and sends them with a post-it note reading: “You could do a better job, of course, but thought you would enjoy it.”
I’m here to work on my book. He gets up at 6am every day to check his stocks, and enjoy the quiet dawn hours alone. His apartment has a wall of windows with a view over the Bay, which he never tires of watching. When I wake up at 8am he makes me a cup of tea, shuffling around the kitchen in a toweling robe and slippers, his reading glasses dangling between his teeth. I ask how he slept. “Badly,” he says. “Mainly I don’t dream because I take an Ambient to sleep, but whenever I do, I have nightmares.” He dreams he’s back in prison. Nothing particularly bad is happening; it’s the monotony that horrifies him. I think of a line from one of his letters. “Today was one of those long boring days with little to do, and if you are not careful, you could fall into a depressed state,” he wrote. He rarely let us hear moments of despondency such as this.
After breakfast he pulls down a box of documents from inside the cupboard. He kept my correspondence in turn, the conversational counterpoint to the letters he sent me. We turn the bed into a makeshift desk and sift through.
I’m surprised by my candor. I told him about the boys I liked (“apparently he’s a good kisser, not that I know”), the beers we had clandestinely drunk in a pub garden (“don’t tell Mom!”), and the intricacies of my shifting friendships, all in a tone of breezy teenage cheerfulness, as if I’m just scribbling down my thoughts before rushing out the door to some party, and this is probably exactly what was happening. I tried to come up with different things to send him despite the prison restrictions: a mobile for him to hang from his bunk and paper filigree.
“Reading all of these,” Dad says, indicating our correspondence scattered around us, “I’m just amazed we came out the other side without falling apart completely.”
I agree, but I wonder if we did. Fall apart, that is.
He dreams he’s back in prison. Nothing particularly bad is happening; it’s the monotony that horrifies him.I went to fundraising event recently for Children of Promise, a New York-based charity offering support to children with incarcerated parents. On the tables they had framed letters from fathers in prison to their kids; I read the first, and felt a lump in my throat, and like a masochist I went from table to table reading each one, before downing my glass of wine and leaving. Back home I sat on the edge of my bed, my high heels discarded and my head in my hands, and I wept. These weren’t vicarious tears; they were my own, two decades old, and salty with age. Even while letting them come, I questioned their presence. What gives this particular pain the right to persist when others have long since faded?
Taking my letters home, I cross-reference them against my diaries of the time, these paper trails from our past tracking the shifting terrain of our emotions. Memory has a tendency to flatten out feelings, preserving the last felt, as opposed to charting all those that occurred en route. These letters and my diaries show the slow sea change.
In my diaries I’m tormented by depictions of prison on TV or in the movies. I fear Dad might get beaten up inside. Mainly I miss his physical presence in my life, his actual person. I long for a normal family without secrets or shame, without absence. Something from the Children of Promise event stayed with me: they spoke about the silent shame of incarceration. Losing your parent to death or divorce is supported by the community around you; losing a parent to prison carries with it a stigma that can’t be shared. We didn’t tell our friends for fear their parents might ostracize us, and I felt the solitude of this experience acutely. But I put none of this in my letters. Even when he wrote asking for us to confide our worries and our fears in him too. “Please talk about your problems with me as well,” he said. “I have lots of good advice.”
Just as he maintained a forward-thinking optimism, I maintained the tone of the well-adjusted teenage girl he wanted me to be. And it worked. In one letter he wrote, “You have both been so strong throughout this ordeal, that it has made me much more relaxed. Before too long, all this will be behind us and we can adventure together once more.”
I was absenting myself emotionally just as he had absented himself physically.
By the time I hit 14, I went from missing his presence in my life to resenting his absence. I started to challenge the choices he made, and why, and where they fell on the scale of love and blame. The unquestioning loyalty with which I had always met him started to crack accompanied by the realization he would be in prison for the rest of my teenage years, and it was his fault he was there. These thoughts, scribbled furiously on the pages of my diaries, never made it to him either.
My breezy tone belied a deep hurt, a hurt I wanted to punish him for, and at the same time a hurt I wanted to protect him from, and the urge to protect him always won out.
***
I wrote a short story for his birthday one year in which Dad had his freedom and all his riches restored by magical intervention. Dad wrote a screenplay about a scientist who discovered the secret of eternal youth. We were acting out our most hopeless desires: for me, that Dad would be free; for Dad, that he would be young again.
“I hope some day to take a river trip on the Grand Canyon with both of you, to visit my friends in Hawaii, to ski North America – all these things are ahead, but after some stormy days. One thing is for sure – I plan to share much of your future. I will be young no matter what age I am.”
He was trying to lessen the space between him and me, between then and now, between us, as we were, and us, as we might become. Looking at these letters now, this call and response from past to present, from father to daughter, we were so busy myth making we didn’t stop to hear one another. The words we traded in were like currency in a fictitious world of our creation, one in which we could write into place what we meant to each other, because then it might be saved despite these years of separation.
When we last said goodbye I still curled up to sleep with my head on his lap while watching a movie. The early letters are signed “Babby, snorts and grunts,” our own language for hugs and kisses. By time he got out I was 18. He was still my father, of course, but in his absence I had taken all the drugs and slept with all the boys, and no one had told him the type of teen I had become. I brought my boyfriend to visit him shortly after his release, and he and I spent the week knocking about LA getting high. Dad’s feelings were hurt that I wasn’t prioritizing time with him. It is probably the only fight we ever had. I said, “Welcome to having a teenage daughter. This is what you’ve missed out on.”
I wanted to hear he was sorry, that if he could go back he would do it differently, and not because he got caught, but because I was too precious to risk losing. Instead we played this game, this game that everything was fine and everything was going to go back to how it was before.
But all I needed to know was right there in his letters; I just couldn’t hear it then.
“I really miss you a lot, but you and I must make the extra effort to be strong and positive during this time. We are both sensitive, so we might tend to dwell on feeling sad about the situation. But we must not do that.”
Here is a man working out his emotions on the page, the push and pull of his conscience grappling with the guilt and loss and regrets he never directly articulated. Sitting at my desk in New York, an adult now, armed with that hard-earned adult empathy, I listen to his voice, and hear something I never could then. I remember so well being a daughter in desperate need of her dad. And here on the page is a dad in desperate need of his daughter. It’s enough to make me want to pick up a pen and tell him just that.
