I stayed with her at the hospital. My youngest daughter couldn’t bear to visit her because she was so mutilated. She sent notes instead.

The next day my two older daughters were leaving to drive home. My fifteen-year-old had just gotten her driver’s permit. Within sight of the hospital they were broadsided by another car that ran a stop sign. They were brought back to the emergency room by ambulance.

The nurses in the emergency room already knew them from their mother’s accident. The nurse called upstairs for me. I told my wife I was going to get a Coke and take a walk. In her condition I couldn’t tell her right then that the kids had been in an accident. But she knew something was wrong. “Why aren’t they coming to visit me tonight?” she asked. “They’ve got a lot of homework,” I said. “I told them to stay home.”

Our girls were not seriously hurt, just bruises and stitches. They were treated and released. My wife’s parents had flown in the night of her accident, and so were on hand to help take care of their injured grand-daughters as well.

I started thinking, What the hell’s going on here? What have I done wrong? I had been on this job since the summer of 1976. Now it is the summer of 1978. Two years and I haven’t been home two months. And everything could have been wiped out in the last two days.

I wish my circumstances allowed me to describe my family more completely, what they looked like, their relatives and friends, where we lived. At least to use their names.

Actually they changed their names—their last name. They dropped Pistone and adopted a new name. We never traveled under Pistone, anyway, and I used different names for everything, so it wasn’t such a big deal. Also, the girls had always been teased about their last name—Yellowrock, Wetstone, etc. So they were happy to be rid of Pistone. And my feeling was, they would probably eventually get married and change their last names, anyway.

But I used various names, just to make it a little more difficult for anybody ever to trace me. That got to be a pain for everybody but me. Sometimes my wife would get confused at an airline counter when she couldn’t remember which name she was supposed to be using that day. Or when she went to pick up things I had left at the cleaners, she often had to try several names before she came up with the one that I had left the clothes under.

My long absences were bothering my family more and more. “What kind of marriage is it,” my wife would say over the phone, “when the husband is never home?” The fact is, if we hadn’t had so strong a marriage, it probably wouldn’t have survived these years.

The way she coped with it was to develop a life of her own, even more independent of me—almost, she would say, as if she didn’t have a husband. It was not in her nature to brood or to feel sorry for herself. The family had moved to its present home only a few months before, and it had not been easy. My wife was recovering from major surgery she had undergone shortly before the move. And in the first weeks after the move, the kids were having trouble adjusting. They wouldn’t go to school. I offered advice, support, whatever, mostly over the phone. My wife dealt with it all on the scene. Friends included her in everything, with or without me. She encouraged our daughters to have kids over, and she cooked for bunches of teenagers all the time. She went out with our oldest daughter—just girls out on the town having a good time.

Her way of avoiding worry about me was to maintain a semblance of normalcy in the home. The hardest thing for her, she would tell me, was that when I went undercover, she had to start taking care of all the bills. That was the one thing she had never done, and she hated it.

She kept so occupied, she said, that she could go for long periods without ever thinking about being alone. Except that when I would call, she’d turn angry. Frustrations would pour out, sometimes in strange ways. She had focused so totally on the household that she would want to talk about that. The lawn mower wouldn’t start. The washing machine was broken. I’ve only got five minutes to talk, I would say, I don’t want to talk about that stuff. “To me,” she would say, “this is the real stuff, right here at home. I can’t see any further right now than what’s bothering me here.” Sometimes we would yell at each other.

The telephone became our link, our lifeline. When I called, I wanted to talk to everybody in turn. My wife always filled me in on everything that was going on with the kids. That was important. Often there were problems—school, discipline, personal—and my wife would tell me about them over the telephone and I’d try to straighten things out. But more often than not, I couldn’t straighten things out over the telephone. There’d be crying and screaming and everything. Everybody would be upset, and all I could do was put my two cents in. The kids were upset that I was away so much. I couldn’t defend myself very well, except to say that I had a job to do. Their mother would try to make them understand about my dedication to the job. What did they care about how dedicated I was? They were kids. They wanted their father home.

Sometimes when frustrations got bad, my wife would holler at me something like, “Either get out of this job or I’m getting divorced.” She never meant it. I knew that. But the kids didn’t know that, and sometimes they overheard it.

My youngest daughter sometimes pretended that we were divorced. Some of her friends had divorced parents. So she would play this game in her mind that she was a kid from a broken home. Somehow that made it easier for her to get along during some of the tough times, especially when they moved into a new area.

Then when I did come home, they would resent me. My wife said to me, “I get so excited when you’re coming home, I really can’t wait. Then when you get here, I get furious. It’s bad enough you being gone for long periods of time. But then when you come home, you want to run the show again. You’re home a couple of hours and you want to become boss. You want to run the show. But I’m running it. I’m used to doing things my own way around here.”

I couldn’t help walking into the house and wanting to be the head of the household, and she couldn’t help her resentments of that. Sometimes it would take us a couple of days to get reacclimated to each other. A lot of the times we didn’t have two days. Sometimes we had only one. Sometimes we had half a day or just a night. She clung to her own system, and I was sometimes an outsider. She found herself even resenting having me crowd her in her bed. So she bought a king-size bed to be able to sprawl like she was used to.

As the girls were growing up, they had more outside activities. I would get home to find one or two or all of them going out. I would say, “Aren’t you going to stay home with me?”

They would say, “You never stay home with us.” Or, “We can’t count on you being here, so we can’t make appointments around you, Dad.”

Sometimes I would get home for a day and would have to leave the next morning before they were up. I didn’t always say when I was going. My youngest daughter cried when I got home and cried when I left.

I had frustrations too. If I came home for a day and a night and found out there was a problem, I would have to try to straighten things out instantly—there was no time to take time. I would try to make rules. My daughters would tell me that I was like a visitor and had no right to make rules. Sometimes I just seemed to get on people’s nerves.

Over time the girls developed the habit of going to their mother with everything they wanted to talk about. They went to her first. They told her everything. As understandable as that was, it hurt me.

They came more and more to resent the job, and the FBI. “What you’re doing is not a job for a married man with a family,” my wife would say. “They don’t care about us. They don’t care about you.”