I had crossed my fingers and willed him to be brave, but, sure enough, Dash called the night before he was to begin his court-ordered time with me.
“Don’t you come and get me tomorrow. Do you get it? Don’t come over!” he raged. “Do you understand? I’m not coming with you. Do you get the message?”
I may have just scored two minor victories in court, but Peter had Dash and was using the court order to load his weapon. I knew now that the judge wouldn’t enforce the access order, or the assessment order, and I held ten thousand dollars in useless court orders in my hand; Dash was over there in West Point Grey, distressed and frightened, with anger the only legitimate vehicle for its release. I imagined Peter and Dash talking legal strategy with their on-site family lawyer, Suzanne, or plotting how to get out of the psychologist’s visit. I drove myself into an anguished frenzy going over and over the same question: What do I do? Peter might be at home right now, skewing the day’s proceedings, lifting sentences from my affidavits out of context to drive my betrayals into Dash’s heart. I couldn’t say, “I know this doesn’t look good, but believe me, I am trying to help.” I couldn’t say, “Now, don’t let all this affect your self-esteem. You’re a wonderful boy, and I’m saying these things about you only because I care.” I was Exxon in Prince William Sound, Union Carbide in Bhopal. I was the global bad guy whose explanations were dismissed as so much self-protective spin.
I wandered around the house late at night, because it was quiet then and I could think. I felt heavy and trapped, in checkmate again. What do I do? The momentum was with me. I was finally, if haltingly, being heard in court. It could go all the way. But at what cost? During my wanderings, I’d tiptoe into the boys’ rooms and kiss their warm baby-soft cheeks, and smell their sleepy smells, and sit in the rocking chair I had nursed all three of them in, and think of Dash, drowning in anger that wasn’t even his. As I drove around the West Side, picking up groceries or having lunch with girlfriends or taking Colby to and from gymnastics, I heard in my mind Peter telling Dash that they had to Stick together through this. Or You’re going to be forced to see your mother. Don’t you want to be with me for the summer, Dashy? Or that he was going to have to see Dr. Joy, someone he didn’t know and not the “trusted” Elterman. Remember we don’t believe in psychologists, Dashy. Dr. Joy’s on your mother’s side. She’s trying to take your dad away, and you know how much you love your dad, don’t you, kid? As much as I tried to keep my eyes on the prize — getting Dash assessed, getting my access enforced, or getting custody and starting to heal Dash — I saw now that it would take a miracle to get that prize, because Peter would stop at nothing. She says you’re a dummy, Dash. She thinks you’re nuts. She says I don’t feed you properly. Whatever it took to keep Dash primed and ready for battle. Dash’s “I won’t see you until you stop” was just Peter’s “You’ll never see Dash again if you keep going.”
I couldn’t bear it. I was exhausted. I’m hurting my son and I’m not guaranteed a result. All I want is Dash on my doorstep at four o’clock on Wednesdays and Fridays or, better yet, safely installed in his room upstairs.
Dave and I always found the money to go to court, but couldn’t seem to do anything real with it. I had two minor court orders, but Peter held all the cards. He had Dash, a boy with no bruises on him, a boy who usually acted like an ordinary kid. His extreme loyalty to his father looked a lot like love, and Peter’s obsession with Dash looked like devotion. Peter was presumed to be the best person for the job because the last judge had thought so, and he had thought so because the judge before him had thought so, and he had thought so because the court-ordered psychologist had taken a stab in the dark. Peter had layers and layers of credibility, where I had none. Justice Brenner had shown that he wouldn’t confront Peter. He couldn’t even threaten Peter with consequences for immersing a nine-year-old boy in his own custody case. I was pushing a rock uphill, without a guarantee that I would wind up with even a psychological assessment, let alone a strong access order or custody. I was prepared for an ugly, expensive trial, a big win, and many months of pain and adjustment for Dash, but as I sat numbly one morning staring at my desk, fingering the handle of a rapidly cooling mug of coffee, I realized, although I was ready to face all that, it was vitally important to Dash that we win this case. Overwhelmingly, though, I felt we were going to lose. Dash would be sent back to that house, with me not just scorned and dismissed this time but excommunicated for having taken “them” to court and lost. Dash would see for the third time that his dad was right. I was the wicked one. The courts would order Dash to stay with his dad, who was so powerful that not even his mother and “all her millions” could get Dash out of that house. That will be it for his damaged soul. The risk of continuing in court and failing was too great, and I lost my nerve. I wouldn’t bet Dash’s life on a crapshoot. I called my lawyer, John Fiddes.
“Stop everything. I can’t do it.”
Unmoored and utterly dejected, I sat at my desk after the call, casting about for some hope to appear, something to cling to. I had a two-year-old banging away on blocks next to me and a husband who would be home in a few hours. I had to find something in this mess that would give me hope and allow me to survive my decision. Dash’s wild reaction to my going to court for him had shocked me and allowed me insight into just how entwined he and Peter really were. Their personalities had melded. Peter’s needs became Dash’s duty. Dash’s “happiness” became Peter’s raison d’être. This was much more complicated than any of us had thought. A court case was a cataclysmic event for them. It wouldn’t get us where I needed to get us. I couldn’t remove Dash from his father by court order. It would never work. I saw it clearly as I sat at my desk. Pulling us all out of the court system would ease the pressure on Dash at home. If Peter wasn’t threatened by the prospect of me getting custody, he might let Dash visit. I would use those visits to bolster my relationship with Dash and help moor him that way. I’d still be outside the gates, but I’d be there. I had to get them both to trust me. I had to work with them both and recalibrate my expectations. I would bide my time and watch and learn. There would be no court again unless I was guaranteed a win. I wouldn’t need court if I could pull off my plan: I would take my beautiful son’s pain in my hands and replace it with love. I would rely on Dash to keep his promise that he would visit if I stopped “the court stuff.” I would go on his word.
Chapter 4
Armed and Dangerous
“Mom! Look at me!” It was Dash, running down the boards, about to leap off the end of the dock. He didn’t have to tell me to watch. I hadn’t taken my eyes off that wonderful creature for days. He crashed into the water in a perfectly executed dive-bomb and came up spluttering and laughing, a boy on holiday. He could have been anyone. Because it was Dash, though, it was a miracle. A year had passed since I pulled out of the court process upon Dash’s promise to visit. He hadn’t come more than a handful of times and then would go months without coming back. The only thing that had changed was my capacity — and that of my family — to cope with the disappointment.
“Did you see that?” he called, bobbing up and down in the lake. I waved from my deck chair, called, “Loved it, Dash! Do another!” and drank him in, each moment a pleasure, each of his shouts a tangible, almost shocking, reminder that he was actually with us.
“Dash!” I called, “if I pass Quin to you from the ladder, can you take him while I get into the lake?”
“Sure,” Dash said, swimming closer. “Quinner, look at me! It’s great in here!”
It was August 1994. Dash was ten. I couldn’t remember the last holiday he had taken with us. But now we were all at Lake of the Woods, Dave’s parents’ summer camp. Dash had last come here when he was six and had loved it so much. Maybe that’s why he was able to come this time, because it had been so special to him before. I had tried to keep Dash’s first Lake of the Woods trip alive in him as a wonderful holiday memory and that might have been enough. Who knows? Maybe Peter
was throwing me a bone or he wanted to go away with Suzanne. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. Dash was with us. And look at him! How he’d grown. Dash stuck close to me, as ever, and he really seemed happy, squealing with delight whenever he fell off his water skis into the clear, bracing lake. He was demanding of my love, and I gave him whatever he needed. I had to be in the boat whenever he water-skied, and I had to be there to praise him whenever he swam out into the lake. He hugged me all the time and wanted me to rub his back every night. I recognized the subtle desperation in his constant demands for love and attention, but there, on that beautiful island, when I closed my eyes tight and drew a protective barrier around our history, it was as if our bond had never been broken and I could forget we had seen each other so little. Dash was the funny, thoughtful, and charming boy I had thought lost, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world to swim and fish and sail with him. When we started to prepare the evening meal, I could almost see him look around the kitchen for his stuffed animal, Woofie, and the little pine stool he had sat on as a boy, chattering away, while I made dinner in our West Vancouver home so many years before. Dash took seriously his role as a double-digit big brother and was patient with his brothers, keeping a special eye out for toddler Quin and letting Colby hang off his shirttails day in and day out. Just that morning Dash had come running outside to me.
“Mom, can Colby and I go up to Gammie’s” — that’s Dave’s mom — “house? She wants to show us an eagles’ nest.”
“Wow, a bald eagle?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“Of course, go, go! But,” I dropped my voice to be serious, “can you please make sure you hold Colby’s hand tight as you go up all those steps? They are in the shade most of the day and can get very slippery.”
“Okay, Mom.” I heard them chatting as they walked up the stairs. “Colby, you better hold my hand all the way up, okay?”
“I like holding your hand!” He slid his hand into Dash’s.
“Mom, I’ll see you later.” Dash turned back quickly and said, “And Big D said he’d take me wake-boarding later.”
“Wonderful.” Dash was being so kind to the boys. I mouthed “Thank you,” and pointed at Colby, who was transfixed by the steepness of the stairs and was looking away. I made my heart shape with both my hands, and Dash eased himself out of Colby’s hand for just a second and did the same back. My heart sang.
There were no tantrums. There was no running and hiding behind the couch when I needed the table set for dinner. Dash was loving and sweet the entire holiday. Dave’s parents fell in love with him anew, as they had the first time he had come to the lake. We listened to the crickets sing as we ate our evening meals, and after dinner Dash and Colby jumped into their jammies and raced each other to brush their teeth before piling onto our bed to snuggle in for stories. They were both careful to give two-year-old Quin room. Dave held the book in his hands, like a talisman, a grin on his face, the sorcerer. The two older boys scattered themselves on the bed, smoothing the covers beneath them and grabbing pillows then discarding them for being in the way. Dash finally lay stretched out on his tummy with elbows sinking into the covers and his hands propping up his chin. Colby copied him, lying in exactly the same position, changing only when he did.
“Now — are we ready?” Dave would ask mischievously.
“Yes, we are!” they chimed in, and into the magic of the story we would fly.
The holiday was a shot in the arm for me: Dash was still himself. Away from Vancouver, he could relax and be the wonderful him that he was. Those six nights in Ontario were heaven. But as we flew over the prairies toward home, I watched Dash shut down, something I had seen him do so many times. He was preparing himself to go back to his father. He sank down and put his head in my lap. I could feel his warmth through my light summer clothes, and, as I stroked his sun-streaked hair, out of the blue he said quietly, with just the slightest edge of defiance in his voice, “You know, boys should live with their dads, because of the sports they do.”
I paused. This was something he had been taught. Sport isn’t parenting. Moms do sports, anyway. I willed him to remember riding his bike next to me as I ran at Jericho Beach when he was little and skiing with me at Whistler all those years. I had been to nearly every one of his soccer games, but I didn’t prod him.
“Well,” I said gently, careful not to dispute his opinion and invoke his loyalty to his dad, “I think I understand what you mean, but, you know, there’s much more to raising children than their sports.”
One of the frustrations of being a parent to a child who had absorbed such bizarre messages was that I couldn’t take advantage of these moments of closeness to show him that he had been taught some really unhealthy ideas. Their loyalty to each other was so strong that he would be obliged to leap to his father’s defence. That would ruin the spell we had cast over each other at the lake. I had practised the art of letting go for nearly five years, and I did it now, biting my tongue and skimming over the surface instead of trying to turn his head. There’s nothing like parenthood to teach you to be patient, particularly having to be as peculiar a parent as I was now to Dash. Honest conversations would have to wait until he got older and grew independent of his father. So I looked down at that beautiful golden-brown boy, staring up at me with eyes that dimmed with every mile we flew closer to Vancouver, and said, “Well, to me, Dash, the important thing is not which parent you live with but that you have strong, happy relationships with both of them and you are happy.”
Dash looked hard at me. Then he blinked, and the moment was gone. He put his heavy head back into my lap, yawned like a puppy, and settled himself for a nap.
“Mom,” he said.
“Yes?”
“That was the best holiday I’ve ever had.”
Dash didn’t visit again for another three months, but he did join us for our Christmas-tree-trimming night in mid-December. After he had finally agreed to come, I had looked forward to the visit for days and called just before leaving home to pick him up to make sure he was ready. I flew down Trimble Street to get him and, as I pulled up, the door opened. A longer, leaner Dash ambled up to the car.
“Hi, Mom,” he said.
“Hello! Hello!” I said as he climbed in. “Can I give you a big hug?” I held him for a long moment, then drew back and smiled. “You’re not shaving yet are you, Dash?”
“Mom!” Dash smiled back.
“You’re not in college yet?”
“No!” he smiled even wider.
“I’m teasing. It is just that we haven’t seen each other for so long.”
“I know.”
“Have you got your seatbelt on?”
“Yup,” he said.
“Good. Then we’re off. The boys are waiting and there’s a lot of work to do tonight. You should see the tree — it touches the ceiling! Have you eaten?”
“Yeah, a bit. But I’m hungry. Can I have a snack before we start the tree?”
“You got it. How about honey-bear toast? It used to be one of your favourites, remember?”
“Kind of.”
“You used to love a snack before bedtime, so I would make toast with honey and we called it honey-bear toast!”
“Well, that or grilled cheese — whatever.”
It was tough when Dash didn’t respond with joy to little memories like that, but I rolled with it these days. “Okay,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Do you still drink lots of milk like you used to?”
Later I lined up my three boys in front of the bare Christmas tree the way I did every year. They shut their eyes and held out their hands; little Quin held out both, in case one wasn’t big enough to hold his prize. Every year at Christmas I bought each boy a special tree ornament — all three the same — and when we took the tree down in January, I packaged them up carefully and put them away in boxes. In time there would be dozens of boxes, filled with three identical sets of miniature skis, toy trees, snowboards, snowmen, little p
airs of skates, rustic canoes, log houses, Santas on snowboards. I loved the idea of my children growing up and taking their ornaments with them for their own trees, each ornament representing a childhood Christmas and the repository of a special memory. My parents had always made Christmas special, and I remember as if it were yesterday, that feeling of being a child on Christmas morning, opening my eyes wide and seeing our tree surrounded by presents left after Santa’s midnight visit, checking if the cookies had all been eaten, if the tea had been drunk. I wanted that same magic to exist for my boys.
After my separation from Peter, I had wanted desperately to continue a sense of family togetherness at Christmas, but instead of coming in for a Christmas-morning tea, so that Dash could be with all four of us for an hour or two, Peter and Suzanne simply dropped Dash off on Christmas Day. Still, Christmases had worked reasonably well, because Peter’s family tradition was to celebrate on Christmas Eve and mine was to celebrate on Christmas Day, so Dash stayed with his dad each twenty-fourth and came to us on the twenty-fifth each year. But on Dash’s ninth Christmas we hadn’t seen him at all, despite lengthy negotiations with both Peter and Dash, and I wondered now — will he come this year? Tree-trimming was one thing, as it wasn’t a threat to Peter the way Christmas Day clearly was, but the signs were impossible to read. When Dash and I talked on the phone, he told me he was excited to be coming over for Christmas and was looking forward to eating “shortbread cookies, turkey with tons of gravy, and Christmas pudding!” and seeing Colby, Quin, and Big D. He took seriously my suggestion that he make a list, so that Santa wouldn’t have to come up with everything off the top of his head.
A Kidnapped Mind Page 10