Dash had missed so many of our special occasions, and so much of our lives, but he always came for the tree-trimming. So there he was with his favourite baseball cap on — turned backward — standing in front of the naked tree, all set to trim it with past years’ ornaments and brightly coloured baubles and gifts.
“Hurry, Mommy!” said Colby, now four years old. His body wiggled in anticipation.
Quin, two, and a solid little boy, tucked in next to his big brother Dash and cried, “Now, Mommy! Now, Mommy.”
“Hey, Quinner! You almost knocked me over!” Dash said, opening his eyes briefly and nudging him back, sending Quinten into gales of laughter.
Dash went quiet again, but his fingers jittered and his scrunched-up face was smiling as he waited for his gift. I gently placed the three little tissue parcels in their outstretched hands and said, “Okay, you can look now.” They opened their eyes in unison and ripped open their parcels. They threw the tissue to the ground and held up their special ornaments. In each of my boys’ hands was a furry brown teddy bear with a shiny gold string coming out of its head. It was supersoft and had a red-and-white striped scarf, along with a happy smile made of pink felt. The boys ran to the tree to put them up. Quin took a low branch, and I helped him wrap the string over the pine needles. Colby dragged a little stool across the floor and, with Dave holding him steady, put his ornament high up on a branch so his teddy bear was visible from every corner of the room. Dash reached up on his tippytoes and pulled the teddy’s string carefully over a branch in the middle of the tree. When they were done, the boys all stood back to look. There were three bears for my three boys. We spent the next hour putting a riot of other sparkly, colourful trinkets on the tree; their bears were still in perfect spots.
I made our favourite tree-trimming meal of beef stew and whipped potatoes, and when Dave took the little boys off to bath and bed, Dash and I sat at the kitchen table with big mugs of hot chocolate and did the planning for another tradition I treasured. Dash and I had made a gingerbread house together every year since he was five. When he was six, we had made a barn and filled it with animals. The following year we had made an ornate church, the next year a log house, its roof covered in snowy white frosting. No design was too complicated — we were up for anything! We would flip through the magazine pages, and Dash would point to one, grin, with his eyes sparkling, and say, “We can do that, Mom! Come on, it’ll be easy!” On the day, we would chat happily as we worked, both of us in aprons, our heads pressed together gently as we tested the icing to see if it was stiff enough to glue our pieces together. As hard as we tried, our gingerbread creations never looked anything like the glossy step-by-step pictures we tried to emulate, but to Dash and me, they were flawless pieces of art. We took pictures from all angles, and I always got shots of Dash with a wide smile and an apron that was plastered, by the end of the evening, with vibrant swirls of hardened icing. The finished product held a place of high honour in the centre of our dining-room table. The year before I had decided to do the baking of the gingerbread alone the day before Dash was due, knowing we would only have a few hours to put it together and decorate it before he went home.
While sipping hot chocolate, Dash and I decided this year we’d make a winter ski cabin, and we planned it meticulously, constructing a long list of ingredients I had to go and buy and deciding what kinds of finery the cabin needed to really come to life. I cherished every minute of the planning. The gingerbread nights were something I did only with Dash and, no matter what, our gingerbread night was the only other thing that Dash always came for.
But a week later the phone rang, and when I heard Dash say “Hi, Mom,” my heart broke. He only ever called to cancel something with me. He was matter-of-fact, almost cold. “I can’t come tomorrow night.” I was devastated but went straight into emergency-mode — my window of opportunity was always so short on the phone. I knew from long experience that I had to leap straight ahead to make sure he didn’t hang up without booking another time to see me.
“How about Thursday, Dash?”
“Um, I don’t know.”
“Friday?”
Nothing. I paused. “Oh, Dash, I’m so disappointed,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Well, let’s think of another night? Not Thursday, not Friday, what about—?”
“I don’t really know, Mom.” He wanted to get off the phone and, with a silent sigh, I closed my eyes and stopped pushing. I’d gone as far as I was willing, so I let it go.
“Let’s say I call you tomorrow and you can tell me then what day works?” I said. “I love you so much, Dash.”
“Yeah. Okay, Mom,” he said noncommittally.
I put down the phone and the disappointment hit me. This was going to be the first gingerbread night he’d ever missed. But it’s not his fault, I reminded myself. If his home were healthy, he’d be able to come. We’d had the tree-trimming, but now I felt suffocated and cheated. Black clouds were swallowing our Christmas traditions. What chance was there that Dash would come for Christmas if he had lost the courage to come for our gingerbread night? I called Dash the next day and every day that week, but got only the answering machine or Peter, who told me each time that Dash was “out.” I kept trying. I couldn’t let Christmas slip by. On Christmas Eve, I got through, and Dash sounded bright. Maybe he had found a private place to talk or maybe he was just happy, because he told me boisterously that he was excited he would be opening his presents with us the next day. My heart soared. Dash was going to do it.
“Well, we have big plans for Christmas Day, you know, Dash. We’ve got piles of presents here, and then we’ll all drive over to Uncle Dave’s and have Christmas dinner with him and Aunt Bev and Mikey. They haven’t seen you for a year and are so excited!”
“Me, too, Mom.”
“Think of all those extra presents you’ll get,” I teased.
“Will I be able to open my presents first?” Dash’s voice rose an octave.
“Of course! Then breakfast. As many pancakes as you can eat!”
“All right!”
“Now what time did you say your dad would drop you here tomorrow?”
“He said ten o’clock.”
“Well, then, that’s exactly when I’ll see you. I love you.”
“I love you, too, Mom.”
The next day Colby woke up early, ran in to get Dave and me, then raced downstairs to the mantel to unhook his stocking. He handed Quin his stocking, and they sat down together and turned them upside down, squealing as little wrapped toys and colourful candy flowed onto the floor. They were impatient to open the pile of presents, but Dash was coming at ten o’clock, and they knew they had to wait. Mommy and Daddy would make themselves coffee when he arrived, and then they’d get to open their presents. The boys were just as excited to see Dash as they were about their gifts, but ten o’clock came and went. Colby perched himself on a seat with a wide view of the street outside and waited, but no car arrived. We waited and waited, but an hour later we made our coffees and let the boys open the rest of their presents. They spread their gift wrap all over the floor and I knelt between them, explaining who the gifts were from and reading instructions, while Dave installed various sizes of batteries. I knew Dash wasn’t coming and I couldn’t talk about it yet, so Dave just let me be. We acted as though everything was normal, but my heartache filled the room. This was not normal. Where is my son?
Dash finally called at lunchtime, and I knew exactly what he would say. His tone was defensive and unapologetic. “I’m not coming,” he said. He gave no explanation; his statement was a challenge. Dave had followed me to the phone and, as my shoulders sagged, I saw anger flash across his face, anger for the disappointment this wild child had brought to his wife and children, anger at Peter for creating this mess. And impotence. Dave couldn’t do anything to protect me from all this, and he couldn’t do anything to make Dash’s life any different than it was. All he could do — and it brought him little comfor
t — was support me, and all I could do was try and stay in Dash’s life. Dave had spent three hours the night before, on Christmas Eve, walking around the stores after work, aimless and helpless. He finally came home at nine o’clock, worn out, with a Krups waffle iron under his arm. “I think Dash would really like this, don’t you?” he said softly.
I saw right through him. “Dave …” It’s okay.
Dave shook his head and I saw his face drop as tears came to his eyes. “Pam, I’m so frustrated about our situation with Dash. I have no idea how to fix this. You know, I’m used to being able to fix … to solve … things—”
This gentle man’s heartbreak was so hard to watch. He had been so steady for so long. Mad, not sad. Tall, not bent. And all I could do to solve him, in that moment, was to hold him and love him and for just one solitary instant be just his wife, not Dash’s mother, not the mother of our boys, but the woman he married, the one who had promised to cherish and protect him. I was acutely aware of how much stress I had brought to Dave’s life, and every day I saw how this man loved me and how he cherished Dash and wanted him in our lives — it was a testament to the sort of person Dave was. He had so much to give.
“It’s because of you and the boys that I have the strength to keep going, Dave, and don’t ever forget that,” I said, while this courageous man slumped in my arms. “It’s your love, Dave. It’s you. I’ll never forget it and I’ll never take it for granted.”
The following year, the year in which Dash turned eleven, I could count on my fingers the number of times I saw him. I wrote them all down, so extraordinary and fleeting were my encounters with him. I would find myself sitting at my desk writing a note or planning my week and wondering numbly what he was doing. Days and weeks passed when nothing dramatic happened, when no new salvo came from Peter, when he and I even had halfway pleasant conversations, but it only underscored how far I had fallen out of Dash’s life, how irrelevant and harmless I had become to Peter. I saw Dash for a total of twenty-four hours the whole year: ten minutes on his doorstep in March, when I gave him a conch shell I had found for him on a beach in the Caribbean; a few hours in April, when Dash came over for Quin’s third birthday; five minutes, later that month, when I took over an armful of Easter eggs and we hugged happily on his doorstep and chatted for a few minutes. When he made a love heart out of his fingers and thumbs as I was leaving, I was overcome with as much joy as unbearable grief — he had remembered our old goodbye, and I struggled not to cry right there in front of him. With breathtaking presence Dash released his fingers and took hold of my hand, saying gently, “It’s okay, Mom.”
I called him the day before Mother’s Day, and he sounded flat. His voice registered no emotion at all at the sound of my voice. He answered my “How are you?” with an apathetic grunt. I had been planning the call for hours, and had hoped to catch him in a good mood. I shifted into a higher gear.
“Dash, do you know what day it is tomorrow?”
“No,” he answered, suddenly wary.
“It’s Mother’s Day!”
“Oh, yeah!” he shouted, instantly brightening. I could hear him smiling. “Mom, I forgot.”
“You know, we’re having a special dinner tomorrow night. I’d love to see you.”
I heard him take a breath, and he didn’t speak for a long moment. “Maybe,” he answered quietly. He sounded frightened, frightened, at the prospect of seeing me. I could hear the cogs turning in his mind, perhaps calculating the risk. “No, no. I can’t, Mom. I’ve got to go now, okay?” I closed my eyes and said quietly, “I understand,” and those two words brought the sound of my son’s audible relief.
Throughout the year, Dash continued to agree to all manner of visits and trips and weekends and days out and dinners and special shows — Aladdin on Ice came to Vancouver that year — and then morosely cancelled on me. Dash’s eleventh birthday in August came and went with just a parcel and a long-distance phone call from me from France. I had asked him to come with us, we had rented a house in Provence, and while he had been enthusiastic about coming, I could never get him to commit to the dates, or ask his father if he could go (we needed Peter’s permission as the custodial parent to take Dash out of the country), or even to admit, “Yes, Mom, I want to come.” He kept saying, “We’ll have to see.”
Everything Dash had ever enjoyed with me, with us all, was finally relegated to the past: our gingerbread houses, Christmas, our ski weekends, Canucks home games, family holidays. Trick-or-treating had long gone, but every Halloween we still went through the pretence that I would be involved. In the weeks leading up to that year’s Halloween, Dash and I talked often about him coming with me to the shop and picking out a costume and all the makeup and accessories. Dash wasn’t a little boy any more, so I had to create in him a bit of excitement about Halloween, but to his credit, perhaps to humour me, perhaps because he missed it, he talked happily with me on the phone about the kind of monster he wanted to be, whether or not he should wear black nail polish or would that be too weird? I had gone to the drugstore, the dollar store, and the costume shop, and had picked out all the stuff the three boys needed. I had everything for Dash’s costume in bags ready to drop off at his house when, the night before Halloween, Dash called. Here we go.
“My dad’s going to take me to the costume shop instead, Mom,” he said matter-of-factly, but there was the slightest hint of a “Sorry, Mom” in there, a whisper of empathy from which I took hope: sometimes he acted as if he didn’t care how his refusals and cancellations would be received. This time he did. I called the next night.
“Good luck! Are you all ready to go?” I asked brightly.
“Oh,” Dash sounded slumped. “No, not really, Mom.”
“Why not?”
“We didn’t end up going to the store,” he said. “It’s no big deal though, Mom.” He has no costume. But it’s no big deal. No disappointment seemed to be a “big deal” any more.
Given how bizarre our life together was, part of the responsibility I felt as Dash’s mom was to not do to him the things his father had done. So, no pressure. No manipulation. No lies. I piled on understanding and love and gave him, each day, a commitment I believed he privately relied on: that I would always keep trying to see him and I would love him no matter what had happened in the past or would happen in the future. Whenever Dash cancelled, he saved it until the last minute, as though waiting until the last possible moment to face the disappointment. His cancellations were as hard on our household as they were on me, because all four of us would have geared up to see him, the boys would save up their stories for him, but have only a couple of hours or a night’s warning that he wouldn’t be coming. The weeks became months; months became a year, and by the time Dash was eleven, I had stopped telling the boys he was coming at all, because he invariably didn’t, and I couldn’t bear their disappointment on top of mine. Whenever I did get Dash, it felt like a military coup. I would call Dave and Mimi from the car, and all I needed to say was, “I’ve got Dash with me.” I kept it casual, because Dash was sitting right next to me, but it was code, and they knew what it meant. Other plans were summarily cancelled, Mimi would stay longer, and Dave would come home early to occupy the boys. When Dash and I walked through the door, for the entire time — a couple of hours usually — the household revolved around him.
My fury at the way Dash lived had been kept so deeply buried that it was hard to access. I was too sad and deflated most of the time to raise the energy for an outburst, and I kept myself too focused on the next day, the next visit, the next moment, to wallow for long. I never slammed drawers or threw things. When I replaced the phone in the cradle, I did it gently and breathed out a whispered, “Fuck!” but the pain of knowing that Dash missed so many things and endured so many disappointments cut through my life like a knife. Everyone lost in this war — Dash, Dave, the boys, Mimi, me, my parents, my brother Dave, Sandy, Terry — saw Dash once a year at best. We were all casualties.
Dash, of c
ourse, was the biggest casualty. As Christmas 1995 approached, so did our end-of-year trip to Maui. As I did every year, I invited Dash to come with us. And as he did every year, when we talked on the phone, Dash said how excited he was about coming with us.
“Mom, I can’t wait to see the whales when they come out of the water!”
“Oh, it’s so beautiful, Dash. They call it ‘breaching.’ To see them lift their whole weight out of the water like that is a real thrill. It takes my breath away and reminds me of how we humans are just one part of the universe, pretty insignificant and small.”
“You mean kind of like ants?”
“Physically, yes, like ants. But I was thinking more on the cosmic level, too.”
“Cosmic? You mean like ‘Nanoo nanoo’?” he asked, breaking into laughter at this reference to Mork and Mindy.
“Yeah, nanoo nanoo! Hey, is that a Hawaiian word?”
“Sure, Mom. Right.” Oops, I was at risk of looking like a dork. “Can I snorkel, too?” Dash asked.
A Kidnapped Mind Page 11