As my shoulders slumped, Dave reached for my hand. “Look,” he said, “at some point Peter’s going to be left behind, talking to himself, plotting and planning with no one listening, least of all Dash. It’ll be okay. Just keep going over there and getting him.”
So I did. I went every Friday, and when I could get him, which was every few weeks, we went together to his Saturday games. Despite Peter’s malevolent looks in front of all the other moms and dads, I gave out oranges at halftime and cheered and clapped from the sidelines, watching my beautiful eight-year-old running his heart out on the field. The delight of it all didn’t last long, though. Peter ignored my weekly requests that he send along the soccer uniform with Dash those times he came with me on Friday nights, so I called the league and got an extra team jersey, shorts, and socks. I picked up a pair of soccer boots, too, to make sure Dash could get ready at either house on Saturday mornings. When Peter found out he demanded that I hand over the uniform. I refused. He repeated his demand; I refused again. Then, when I was out one morning, he told Colby and Quinten’s nanny, Mimi, to immediately go through Dash’s drawers for “every sock and short.” She was told to put them in a bag on the front step (“Get them out there!” Peter had yelled), where he would pick them up immediately. Mimi had had enough runins with Peter to know first-hand how angry and difficult he could be. Despite her strength of character, Mimi was no match for Peter. He intimidated and frightened her. Mimi knew exactly what it meant to be gathering up Dash’s soccer clothes and giving them to Peter, and she was in tears as she did it. She knew the reason I had got them in the first place. I wasn’t there to protect her from Peter’s demands, and she couldn’t refuse him. Peter said Dash wanted “to wake up on Saturday morning, at his home, put on his uniform, shin pads and choose his foot gear. He wants to be here when we receive phone calls early Saturday morning from other teammates, and when I speak to other coaches. He wants to be part of the team. Remember, his father is the coach.”
Ah, yes, the coach.
“Imagine yourself as a little eight-year-old girl being dressed in your tutu and pointe shoes and delivered to a dance session by your father when your mother is the instructor?” he continued. My gut screamed. This is not right. Why should an eight-year-old boy be made to feel bad for not being with his dad to get dressed for soccer? Peter is a grown man! Why does he do this to his son? I watched Dash on the field and saw a boy who just wanted to have what other children had. He wanted to play soccer; he wanted to ski. He wanted to see and love both his parents. He didn’t want to choose.
Two Saturdays later, Peter called me early and demanded that I bring Dash back to his house immediately, but I stood my ground. “I will get Dash to the game, Peter,” I told him, but he hissed, “If you don’t have him over to my house by 9:30, I’ll make sure you never get any access. I’ll never let this rest, and I’ll fight you to the end.”
Under the pressure he was receiving from home, Dash crumbled. How could he say, “Isn’t it my weekend with Mom?” without letting “their” team down. I think he tried. In the same way I used Dash’s little school friend Myles to get Dash to come over, Dash used him to try and stay — “I’ve got Myles here.” But within a couple of months, Dash was able to tell me firmly and to my face that he had “the right to decide” where he spent his Friday nights, and he wanted to spend them with his dad.
Through soccer, Peter obliterated the ski weekends in Whistler and nearly all my Friday nights with Dash. I would often lose Saturdays and Saturday nights, too, because, regardless of the fact that Dash was supposed to be with me for the weekend, Peter would arrange a post-game play-date for Dash with a teammate, which would drift into the evening and more often than not become a sleepover. Spending time with Mom, already a grossly devalued exercise, was quickly forgotten amid all the fun.
More people fell away. Like those with Sandy and my brother, Dave, the wonderful relationship Dash had with my mother disintegrated. For a whole year before she died, two months before my third son, Quin, was born, when Dash was eight, he showed no interest in seeing her, but I couldn’t believe it was really true. This was not the boy who just a couple of years earlier had chattered noisily on the phone to his Gramma, then waited at the front door for her to arrive and take him hand in hand off to the park. When he stayed the weekend with his Gramma, every few weeks in those early years, Dash would lead me to his bedroom there and show me the project they had started that day — a Lego town, or a complicated colouring book — or he’d take me to his teddy bears, all lined up on the shelves of his bookcase, and tell me in great detail what each one had had for afternoon tea with Gramma.
“This big one, Tufty, eats a lot of food, Mom. He’s a greedy guts. Gramma said he needs to exercise and watch what he eats, so I gave him my banana today and I ate the muffin Gramma made.”
“Well Gramma knows what she’s talking about, Dash. Hey, perhaps you should take him jogging in the park with you!”
“No, Mommy. Bears don’t go jogging,” he said seriously, pulling Tufty’s sweater over his swollen and misshapen tummy. “Ooh. I think his ear needs sewing. Look, Mom.”
“Gramma will fix him.”
“Let’s go ask her.” And off we’d go.
My brother’s children weren’t born until Dash was five (Colby was a year later again), so Dash had Gramma’s time and attention all to himself. His comfort with and enjoyment of his Gramma came from spending such a lot of time with her. It was a privilege my father did not quite share. My parents had divorced when I was eighteen, and though they remained close for the rest of their lives, it was Gramma who got the bulk of Dash’s attention. Dash loved his Grandpa to bits, but Gramma was the constant in his life. They would eat boiled eggs and soldiers for lunch and then while away whole afternoons playing board games and cards. They’d spend Sunday mornings preparing and cooking favourite meals like French toast with icing sugar. “Gramma lets me sprinkle it on myself with the big shaker!” he would tell me slyly, as though it were naughty. Then they would do it all again for dinner. The litany of little joys I heard when I came into the house after their days together, I can still hear today. “Mommy, guess what! Gramma taught me a game today. Crib! It’s so much fun with her and guess what, too, guess what? I won!” “Gramma says we’re going to the toy store next week to get some more playdough, because we ran out. You know what we do, Mom? We get out all her cookie cutters and make shapes!” “Do I get to sleep over again soon, Mom? Gramma says it’s time to make the Christmas pudding. I have to stir it and I get to make a wish! Can I go, Mom?” “No, Mom! I can’t tell you the wish! Gramma says if you tell anyone, the wish won’t come true. Not even you!”
But slowly, in those first two years after the trial, Dash grew distant. He would be uninterested in speaking on the phone with her, and it became disheartening to try and convince him to say hello. Much as I tried to keep his relationship with Gramma alive, even when Dash wouldn’t see her, he eventually showed so little interest that I stopped doing so. When my time with Dash became sporadic, I had to focus on things that would interest and please him, so he would enjoy himself enough to want to stay and then come back. Those early relationships, with Warren, with Sandy, with my brother, Dave, and with my mother, so infused with history and meaning, faded out until there was nothing left but a dim memory attached to a name.
The effects of not being free to look forward to seeing me, or to talk happily in his home about our time together, to see the people he had loved so much, or to soak up the love Dave was so desperate to give him started to show. At school Dash ran over to the window of his classroom, three storeys up, and threatened to jump out. “There is no reason to live any more,” he said to his friend Dorio, “and if no one was here, I’d jump.” I didn’t even hear about this until years later. Level-headed Dorio pleaded with Dash not to jump and desperately listed all the reasons Dash should live. Dash told another friend around the same time, “My life is a mess.” Was the suicidal threat a cry
for help or a prank? Who knows, but a girl who knew Dash at that time told me years later in a hushed, angry, voice, “You can bet there would have been no support at home over that incident. His dad would have yelled at him, telling him not to do stuff at school that would reflect badly on him.” Peter still claimed far and wide, usually in the form of a florid letter to me or a random affidavit that Dash was “happy, confident, doing well in school, and well cared for.” He wrote that description weeks before Dash ran desperately to the classroom window. Suzanne had written, “Dash is the happiest child I have ever seen. He is enthusiastic, playful, and has a wonderful sense of humour and fun. He whistles and sings around the house.” Their lawyer friend, Dave Martin, believed Peter’s “incredibly balanced guidance” allowed Dash to “thrive.” But Dash wasn’t thriving — he was regressing, rebelling, and retreating — by no means all the time, but often enough to jar me. It was worse when he hadn’t seen me for a couple of weeks, and better when school was in session, but there was no pattern to it. We never knew until we saw Dash whether he would be his old self or this new, malcontent version.
Dash had been well loved as a baby and had grown into an engaging and easy-going young boy. But now I caught sidelong glances from him that contained silent, inexplicable resentment. His eyes betrayed discomfort and confusion. He said strange things that repeated his father’s view of me. He told me I didn’t have a “real job,” and he began to compare us with his father. “My dad’s garage is bigger than yours,” he would say, or “My dad’s cabin is bigger than yours,” “My dad has a boat and you don’t.” Instead of telling jokes or clowning around at the dinner table like he used to, he often had outbursts and banged his silverware on the table to protest the late arrival of his food. He had a new and strong aversion to even the tiny amounts of structure I tried to impose, shouting, “I don’t need one!” when I suggested we get him a haircut and “I don’t need it and I don’t want it!” when I asked him to have a shower after a muddy soccer game. No parent in the whole world has had a child that doesn’t do those things now and then, but with Dash it was so peculiar, because it was simply not the Dash I knew. Dave and I threw a dinner party one Saturday night to say farewell to some friends who were moving to Rome. Dash knew them and I had told him I would spend all my time with him before the guests arrived, but Dash flew into a rage anyway. He demanded I make him a different meal. “I don’t want to be here if there’s going to be a dinner party tonight,” he told me aggressively, refusing his second dinner, too. He called home, and Peter and Suzanne dutifully arrived within minutes, despite my pleas to not let Dash play us off against one another. They didn’t even take Dash home. They took him to the dinner party they were attending that night.
That was an extraordinary blip, but for the most part changes in Dash’s behaviour were hard to spot: they were inconstant and inconsistent. We all saw the change in him, but it was impossible to describe to anyone else, and we second-guessed each other, too. I forced myself to under-react and concentrated on just loving Dash, to try and counter what I had long suspected he was getting at home — manipulations of his needs, plays on his loyalty. I watched him like a hawk and made mental lists of the things he had enjoyed before that didn’t seem to matter anymore. He told me he was “never homesick.” He didn’t seem to care about whether or not he saw me and never appeared upset that we had missed a night or a weekend together. He shrugged it off. His reasons for cancelling time with me were always vague. “I have friends coming over,” he might say, but when I asked, “Who?” he would say, “I don’t know,” or “Oh, I haven’t made the arrangements yet.” I would tell him I was disappointed to not be seeing him and he would just say, “I’ll see you soon. It doesn’t matter, Mom.” It doesn’t matter. Don’t worry. It’s okay. Why was it okay with him that he lost all this time with his mother and people he cared about? He didn’t say a word about it. He asked no questions about it — ever.
I saw in Dash a boy in distress. His emotional skin was getting thinner. When two-and-a-half-year-old Colby knocked apart the Lego house Dash had painstakingly built, Dash screamed at him, burst into tears, and hid behind the couch. It was a real shock because Dash had always been a resilient little boy. Another time he snapped “Where’s my food?” but then followed it with, “Mom, after dinner, can you massage my back?” To others, Dash looked fine. Even his “tantrums” could be considered “age appropriate.” What child doesn’t act out? He never became wild-eyed and crazy. He didn’t say anything really outrageous. “Dave ruined Daddy’s business,” something he said a number of times, isn’t that bizarre. I could have rationalized Dash’s lack of concern about his relationship with me, I could have rationalized his intense loyalty to his father, the way he kissed his father’s floor when he came back from visits with me (Suzanne and Peter described this in affidavits). Dash, they wrote, would say, “Home Sweet Home” as he did it. I could have rationalized his nicknaming himself “Peter,” his desire to be a lawyer “like my dad,” and even his threat to jump from a three-storey building. Children say crazy things. Children cry. Children get insecure. Children cling more to one parent than the other at various times in their lives. They are often indecipherable and unfathomable, Dash especially so because his parents’ separation had been so hard. But I knew Dash. I had raised him, twenty-four hours a day, for just under five years, until the separation. What I saw simply didn’t fit with the personality of the boy I had nurtured. Dash had been high-spirited, not a hell-raiser. He had been inquisitive and thoughtful, not desperate and needy, overwrought and sad. In my wildest dreams I could never have imagined him being “okay” with hardly speaking with me on the phone or not seeing me as much as he should have. Dash had held his arms wide open to the world and the people in it. Now he had shut all these people off. I didn’t believe his lack of caring had been established on its own. It wasn’t bred in; it was forced in, and the fit was bad because there was no reason for any of it.
But I was stuck in the far bleachers trying to watch the game. Within two years of the trial, eight-year-old Dash was going weeks and weeks in a row without seeing me. He lived in an emotional environment in which seeing me had become almost impossible for him to pull off. I saw coercion in his eyes, in his apathy. With no information from Dash and less than no contact from Peter unless it was to tell me to lay off or “be responsible,” I worked, in a surreal vacuum, treating each tear, each moment of Dash’s rage, each rude, dismissive phone call or each missed visit with a mother’s understanding and kindness. I simply loved him, and used the only resources I had: the phone and those nights I saw him. I treated Dash’s distress, in every aspect, laughter and tears, with love and acceptance. Tend to him was my mantra.
I had no idea what went on in that household, and I had no idea what was happening at Dash’s school, although living in a close community with friends who had children at Queen Mary, I heard things. I knew Dash was late for school at least once a week and, worse, that he went home for lunch and often didn’t go back to school for his afternoon classes. I read Peter’s ceaseless stream of affidavits saying that Dash “runs down the block to school each morning, chirping like a bird. He runs home at noon for a hot lunch. He runs back to school for the afternoon, similarly chirping away.” I compared that description to what Dash had said to one of his classmates (whose mother told me). His dad “wouldn’t care anyways” about whether he was at school or not, he claimed.
Dash had slid into being a child of the community, a child that other parents knew about. He seemed to manage his life so that he was home as little as possible. Dash had a lot of friends, and he inveigled himself into more dinners and sleepovers than most other children, but it wasn’t noticeably alarming because Dash was a charming child and his friends’ parents enjoyed his company. They did worry, though, that no one at home seemed to care about his comings and goings.
I wondered what they thought of me. Did they believe everything Peter was saying? Did they say to themselves, “W
here is this boy’s mother? Is she a drunk, like Peter says? He says she has problems, that’s why we never see her around.” There were no limits to what Dash was allowed to do, except when it came to me. Dash roamed the neigh-bourhood, going from friend’s house to friend’s house, but he didn’t see me. Other parents wondered why Dash was so outspoken about his father, why Peter was Dash’s only proclaimed “hero.” They wondered who did his washing and bought him clothes, because he always looked slightly bedraggled. I still have a pair of Dash’s old sneakers. Once white leather, they had gone grey with ingrained dirt and grime, the toe of the right one was completely separated from the sole, leaving Dash’s sock-clad foot, too big for the shoe, hanging out in the Vancouver rain; the sole of the other was ripped and the upper torn. They looked like the shoes of a street kid, but Dash was eight years old and living in a five-bedroom house in West Point Grey with two lawyers and daily help. When I managed to get hold of Dash long enough to take him shopping, he would say at school the next day, quietly, “Yeah, my mom got me these” when other kids pointed out his new gear.
I had thought for so long — hoped really — that everything would get better. Peter would forget about me and get on with his life. Or Suzanne would get tired of his angry obsession and tell him to shape up or get out. But our appeals to Suzanne had roundly failed. Dave and I had tried dozens of ways to connect, but they had only bound her more tightly, more angrily, to Peter. “If I see one word of this conversation in an affidavit, I’ll sue you,” she had said during a phone call Dave made to her to see, as step-parents, if she would cooperate in Dash’s best interests. Those first months in which my hope had been realistic had now stretched into three years. and my belief that Peter would get over his anger had become frustrating to Dave and my family, and tiring for me. I had to analyze the problem.
A Kidnapped Mind Page 5