A Kidnapped Mind

by Pamela Richardson

  Dash fiddled with the zipper on his fleecy vest.

  “But I am concerned,” I continued, reaching for his hand to try and remind him of our bond, as well as the one to his dad. “I worry about Daddy picking you up and driving you around, because people don’t drive as well when they’ve had too much to drink. Everyone’s the same.”

  “He’s fine,” Dash said resolutely. “He doesn’t drink that much.”

  “Well, you’re certainly entitled to your opinion. But you’re my child, too, and I want you to stay here tonight.”

  “I’m going with my dad.” Dash got up off the couch. “Where is he?”

  I looked at his eight-year-old face and saw how hard it was then. His getting up had broken the spell I had begun to weave, and pushing it would fail and send him further away. I resigned myself to him leaving, because I wasn’t going to fight with him and I wouldn’t make him stay. I wouldn’t risk losing what marginal influence I still had over him. I tied it up with my standard pitch. “Okay, Dash. I understand and I’m not going to argue with you. But you’re my son and I love you. I want you to be safe, and I’m never going to stop trying to make sure you are.”

  “I know, Mom,” Dash said, climbing the stairs. He walked past his dad, got into the taxi, and shut the door quietly behind him. And while his father berated me as he walked back up the path, Dash refused to look at either one of us.

  The next week I tried to pick up Dash at four o’clock Wednesday, then at four o’clock Friday. I waited. And waited. Outside his house. No child appeared. This time I cracked. Still shaken from what had happened the week before and my bird’s-eye view of my total inability to protect my own son, I dialled my lawyer, Gerald Reid, as I drove away from Dash’s house.

  “Gerald? It’s Pamela.”

  “Pamela. What’s happening? It’s four o’clock. You’re at Hart’s home?”

  “I just left. Dash wasn’t there. No one’s home and I’ve waited fifteen minutes. Colby’s with his nanny, and she has to get home, and I’ve got Quin in the back seat.”

  I heard Gerald sigh, exasperated, a little bit sad.

  “How much more of this do I have to take?” I asked.

  “Go home, Pamela. If you like, I’ll send them a fax saying you’ll be there later.”

  “No, don’t. Not tonight. Dave’s mom is visiting from Winnipeg and I have to get home and start cooking. There’s no guarantee I’d get Dash anyway. Just leave it tonight.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Gerald, I’m never sure. You keep telling me things will change: Dash will grow up; Peter will settle down. Well, when will they? Norman Goodwell says they may not.”

  “Pam—”

  “This has gone on for three years. You keep telling me that, if Peter doesn’t settle down, he’ll do something that will allow us to go back to court. Fine, I watch and wait. But, Gerald, why does anything have to happen? Why can’t I go back and simply ask the court to enforce its own order?”

  “The court is not going to enforce this order because it feels stuck between a rock and a hard place. Hart will keep saying he tries to get Dash to visit but that Dash only wants to see you when he wants to see you. The courts don’t know how to handle that. Hart will say Dash shouldn’t be forced to visit if he doesn’t want, and he’ll say that Dash’s been clear on this.”

  “Dash has been clear? That’s absurd! Why would a court take the word of a young child who has been coached to believe that he has to choose one parent over the other? Peter is using this boy. Those words aren’t Dash’s. Those feelings aren’t Dash’s. That’s abusive, Gerald. That’s abuse.” My voice caught. This is the truth I live. I shook it off and tried to focus. “You say we can’t go in with ‘emotional abuse’? That it’s the hardest thing to prove?”

  “In my experience, yes.”

  “Well, I know Peter’s putting words in Dash’s mouth, Gerald. Why does he not want to visit? None of the reasons make sense because they are not real reasons — they are Peter’s.”

  “But Peter has custody, and that’s what makes it so difficult to argue this successfully in court. Like it or not, he’s the court’s first recourse. We will have a better chance if we have other reasons to add to the interference with your access.”

  “So the more we throw out there, the more something will stick.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what else can we go in with? I just want Dash to get his time with me. Peter keeps saying ‘Leave him alone, he’s fine, he’s thriving, he’s happy,’ but how can he be? Dash is eight years old, not eighteen. It’s important that he sees his mother.”

  I always worried that my lawyer would grow tired of my urgent calls from the car outside Peter’s house, the endless faxes he sent to Peter’s lawyer, or Peter himself, trying to set up access visits that mostly failed. I worried that I was too time-consuming, that my case was too ugly and stressful.

  “Pam, we have to go in loaded. We can’t go in with a complaint they can label frivolous.”

  “But that’s what I mean! Why would these people think that my not getting access to my son is frivolous? Ask any mother, Gerald, any parent. This isn’t frivolous. Dash has two parents, he should be able to have both parents. I was given generous and specific access times that, for a range of reasons, I am being denied. Where is the ‘frivolous’ here?”

  “Peter will tell the court what he tells you when you complain. He’ll say it’s what Dash wants.”

  “I’ll never believe that what Dash wants — or at least what Peter thinks he wants — is more important than having a relationship with his mother. At some point Dash will be an adult and all this will really matter. He has a mother, Gerald. So what do we do? How many of Peter’s affidavits do I have to read that say he ‘chirps like a bird,’ when others tell me, and I see myself, that he clearly doesn’t? How many times does Peter get to turn up on my doorstep drunk and take him home? One day they’re not going to get home, and I’m going to have to live with that. I haven’t been able to stop this, Gerald, and I’m this boy’s mother. At what point am I being negligent by not going back into court?”

  We both paused. I hadn’t even taken a breath. I had pulled up in front of my house and sat there, wanting to finish the conversation before I went inside to my family.

  “I just want my son to have a normal life again, Gerald. I want him to have a normal relationship with both parents. I want him to want to see me. He has never given me a valid reason why he doesn’t want to visit, and I’ve never done anything that would justify his not seeing me. Children of divorce don’t do what Dash is doing. They want peace. They want stability. They stick close to both parents, and they don’t choose one over the other. Norman Goodwell says this is something different and unhealthy, and I believe him. If Dash really was thriving without me in his life, then it would be easier to accept, but he’s not. Peter’s attitude toward me hasn’t moderated one bit since we split up; it might even be worse because of the substance abuse. I don’t know. Dash isn’t doing well at school, but he’s always been a bright child. Elizabeth tells me — that’s Elizabeth MacKenzie, her daughter is in Dash’s class at school — that his teacher wants to meet with me but isn’t allowed. Dash is having serious problems, the teacher says. He hardly attended school last month. He had the flu for two weeks, Peter said. Two weeks! Then he went to Mexico for another two weeks. The drinking is getting worse and the more Peter drinks the less he is able to stop himself from badmouthing me to Dash. Myrna told me that, when she went to pick up Myles a few weeks ago, Peter answered the door slurring and disoriented. He’d spilled red wine all down his shirt and tried to laugh it off. She doesn’t let Myles play there any more.” I paused.

  “Is Peter still leaving those messages?” Gerald asked.

  “Yes. Or I talk to him and he’s slurring his words or saying things like ‘This is Bert’s Beanery’ and laughing to himself.”

  My frustration was clouding my thinking and, above all, through this, I h
ad to think. If I felt, I’d be done for. “Gerald?”

  “Yes, Pamela?”

  “If I don’t do something, then I’m saying it’s okay, and it’s definitely not okay. Nothing about this is okay. I’ve tried to do this alone, but I think the only way this will change is to go back to the courts. They made the decision in the first place that Dash should be with his dad. I know Peter will use it against me and it’ll make me and Dave — and you — and Dash targets again. I know that he will involve Dash, but I don’t have any other choice aside from just watching myself fade out of my son’s life, and I won’t do that. I want to go back. I want my access,” I said quietly. “I want this fixed.”

  My lawyer breathed deeply; when he spoke he was matter-of-fact. “Then we have to do it properly. We have to have more than an exwife’s concerns. You’ve lost that battle, twice: first at the interim custody trial and then at the custody and divorce trial. Your word against his on the alcohol question will never get us anywhere, no matter how many corollaries or slurring, incoherent tapes you have. If we go to court with anything less than hard, third-party evidence, we’ll be wasting our time. Peter has been given custody, twice. He had the psychologist’s support, twice. He’s brilliant in court and has a team of people to vouch for him, including his new wife, Suzanne MacGregor, and he has Dash working with him.” I felt myself getting smaller and smaller as he listed the obstacles we faced. I was exhausted just listening to him. I knew the path ahead would be dangerous. Because Peter involved Dash so heavily in his power plays, if I went back I had to win. Otherwise the household that was perpetually prepared for war would finally find its battleground.

  “Having said all that,” Gerald continued, “I agree that court is the only recourse we have if we want Peter forced to get Dash to see you, and of course it’s the only place we can go for a custody change — if and when you want to look at that.”

  If court was all we had, I had to start getting our ducks in line. Putting alcohol and abuse on the table was a major departure from my legal strategy. At every turn I had presented to the court the real me, as an antidote to the Pam that Peter repeatedly placed before it — the emotional, aggressive, blaming, frivolous, litigious angry woman. So, even as my gut argued for it, I held back. “We have to keep out of the fray,” Gerald had said, and the advice was sound. But Dave had begun to question that strategy, and I now agonized over it. I had tried once, at one of our earliest pretrial hearings, to put the issue out there. I had told the judge about Peter arriving to pick up Dash with an open wine bottle in the car and Justice Wetmore’s indulgent “Oh, c’mon, Pete.”

  The tolerance of Peter’s substance abuse by the legal boys’ club had long frustrated me. At one point, Dave and I went to a party in West Vancouver and, as we mingled, separated for a time, Dave was introduced to a group of four men. It came out after a few minutes that one of the men, David Gibbons, was the lawyer Peter had recently hired to represent him in a case he was bringing against Dave and me, accusing us of trespass, eavesdropping, and violation of privacy, because we had taped phone conversations. (Dave and I had all but left the charges in the hands of our lawyer, because it seemed so silly. Peter taped us, we taped him; it was a wash.) The lawyer shook Dave’s hand and said with a smile, “I didn’t know you were that Mr. Richardson,” and when Dave looked at him quizzically, the lawyer went on. “It’ll be difficult to pursue you aggressively now that I see what a decent fellow you are,” he said.

  “Well, thank you, David,” Dave said. “But I’m no match for my wife when it comes to decency. That’s why all this seems so unwarranted.”

  “You seem to be a good person,” Gibbons said warmly. “What’s caused the animosity between you, Pamela, and Peter do you think?”

  “David, I don’t want to be disagreeable, and I know he is your client,” Dave replied, “but I’ve long thought of Peter as the most self-destructive person I have ever known. His cruelty toward my wife seems to reflect some deep-seated rage.”

  The lawyer nodded, not giving anything away, but was clearly interested, and, when Dave saw that his audience was neither offended nor in shocked disagreement, he continued. “I think he’s fundamentally a really angry person and we both believe he has problems with alcohol that lead to our difficulties with him.”

  Dave paused, and the lawyer replied, “Yes, Peter’s problems are common knowledge.”

  Were Dash’s problems common knowledge? How could Peter flaunt his indiscretions so? The dichotomy between the real world and the world represented by the legal system staggered me anew every time. Not getting my access wasn’t enough to take to court, yet any mom I spoke to was horrified that my court-sanctioned relationship with Dash was being impeded the way it was by the custodial parent. Peter showing up drunk and dishevelled to take Dash home wasn’t proof enough to take to court, yet Peter’s colleagues knew all about it. There were no consequences. Peter was allowed to be as bad as he wanted to be. I had lost my patience. If I had to make a case the courts would understand, then so be it. None of us should be living like this, least of all Dash. I will play the game and the result will justify the journey.

  I made an appointment with Dr. Barry Beyerstein of Simon Fraser University, a tall, bespectacled man, whose twenty-two-page résumé established him as an expert in biological psychology and psychopharmacology. He was my expert on what drugs do to bodies and minds — and children. I needed him to tell me if my truth about Peter was in fact borne out by objective fact. I knew what I had lived with during my seven years with Peter, and I knew what it was to see Peter staggering to crosswalks and down my driveway, but I did not know the true extent of Peter’s involvement with alcohol at this point, and I didn’t really know whether my son was living with a problem drinker. I was acutely aware that I described a different Peter than the one his wife, Suzanne, wrote about. How much of that disconnect was my particular set of distresses surrounding the separation and Dash’s custody and how much was Suzanne’s standing as a family lawyer and future judge? If Peter was an alcoholic, then what sort of environment was Dash in, physically, emotionally? Was he being neglected? Did alcoholism constitute neglect? Was the danger just in my imagination? Would this be enough to take to court? I wanted an expert to give me some answers I could make sense of and use.

  Dr. Beyerstein and I talked for a long time in a room filled with papers and books while drinking hot coffee one rainy afternoon. I told him my story. Over the course of the dozen years I had known Peter, I had seen him mesmerizing, charismatic, endlessly charming, and boyish, but also deeply paranoid and highly secretive. After Dash was born, Peter became increasingly aggressive about his privacy. “That’s what closet drinkers do,” Beyerstein said. When Peter was away, he locked his home office and did not let anyone in. But occasionally I had cleaned the room and found half-empty liquor or champagne bottles in his desk drawer. Now Peter was completely unconcerned about hiding his drinking. The fact that he was now coming drunk to pick up Dash was for Dr. Beyerstein a signal of potential substance abuse. The last place a person with normal inhibitions would show up drunk would be on the doorstep of an ex-wife whose concerns had, within the community at least, been well publicized.

  I showed Dr. Beyerstein Peter’s scrawled faxes. When I saw them alongside the “normal” letters that Beyerstein had requested “for control purposes,” they resembled the writings of a lunatic. They were long and loopy, repetitive, and filled with sarcasm and aggression. They contained basic grammatical mistakes that were absent in the control letters, and the prose and presentation differed markedly. “They were not,” Dr. Beyerstein wrote later, “what I expected from someone accustomed to writing tightly reasoned legal briefs.” He dismissed “mere haste or fatigue,” and said that the letters appeared to be written by “someone without full control of his fine motor movements. The volume of material in Mrs. Richardson’s possession suggests that the state that produced such writings was not infrequent.”

  Dr. Beyerstein got out
a tape player and slipped in one of my answering-machine tapes. Peter’s “normal” voice filled the little room. “Pamela, it’s Peter. I just want you to know that I’ll be there at seven o’clock to pick up Dash. Make sure he is ready for me.” Erudite, crisp, controlled, curt, even polite. Normal. Then I played Dr. Beyerstein ten of the messages Peter had left on my answering machine over the past couple of months. The messages, many recorded during the day, featured Peter rambling, repetitive, and uninhibited. Beyerstein made note of Peter’s difficulty in calming his temper, his threatening tone of voice, and the speech errors — slurs, slips of the tongue, strained overpronunciation, overuse of “filler” words like “Okay.” I played Dr. Beyerstein the exchange Dave had recorded the night he tried to pick up Dash for me. Dave had told Peter when he answered the door, “I just want you to know, Peter, that I am wearing a recording device,” and the response, “Go away, little boy. You’re not getting Dash,” sounded shocking in the cold light of Dr. Beyerstein’s office. Peter’s “social disinhibition was very high,” Dr. Beyerstein wrote,

  possibly because his state of inebriation was greater or because Hart simply did not care that there would be a record of his contraventions of normal standards of social propriety. Either way, this sort of childish behaviour and lack of judgement is suggestive of a high blood alcohol level. He comes across as crude, taunting and gratuitously offensive to someone merely trying to facilitate young Dashiell’s visit with his mother.

  The report Beyerstein wrote up and sent to me was a technical breakdown of what I had been dealing with for a dozen years in far simpler terms: an aggressive, inebriated man. Drinking, for Peter, was “a pattern, rather than a freak occurrence,” Dr. Beyerstein wrote.