Brenner sighed. “So this long, sad saga simply continues,” he said. “Nothing has changed.” The last six years’ worth of access orders weren’t worth the paper they were printed on because they contained no consequences for Peter if he continued — as he would — harbouring Dash in breach of court orders.
“There is no doubt in my mind that this access would have occurred with the father’s support,” Allison continued. “If the child is now told that, if he doesn’t go with his mother then his dad is going to jail, frankly it might make both of them realize that there are laws in this land and that they can be enforced.” Allison Burnet was really getting going. “The Canadian courts have an abysmal record of enforcing their own access orders. In my view there is a way to deal with it. When an order such as yours was made, it should have stated that the access will occur or custody will revert to the other parent. If the court had had any sense there would have been an order that the minute access was denied a capable parent, there would have been a reversion of custody. It works. It’s just that most judges don’t seem to want to do it.” The only remedy now was for Dash “to be in the primary care of his mother for long enough for him to be reprogrammed. This child has been programmed, and he has been programmed on a regular basis. It will not stop unless there is a change in primary placement.… This child has no major grievance with his mother. None. And the ones that he does have he can barely remember. Some of them lack all credibility when you determine his age now and his age when he alleges some of the things happened. The things she had done are the same picayune things that have been raised in this court for an extended period of time. They have nothing to do with his capacity to have a relationship with his mother. They have to do with his father’s incapacity to have a relationship with his mother. The barrier here has nothing to do with his feelings for his mom or anything that his mom has done. The barrier is excessive loyalty to his dad, which I have no doubt has been actively encouraged by his dad. Mr. Hart cannot actively encourage this child to go to the mother’s home. Without that active encouragement, there is no alternative but for the court system to do something about it.”
Allison Burnet believed, as I knew, that Dash wanted to be able to love me, that his rejection of me was skin-deep. He melted too quickly when he was with me for it to be anything but a programmed response. “If this child were brought into this courtroom today and you told him that he was going to spend time with his mother and that his father had agreed and endorsed the plan, that child would go and have a lovely summer holiday with his mother. I have no doubt.” She had seen the PAS in Peter’s willingness to involve Dash in his battles with me. She had seen it in his badmouthing of me. But she had seen it most clearly, as Justice Brenner should have, as Dr. Elterman perhaps did, in the near-complete lack of access I’d had since the sole-custody decision eight years before. “I think it’s long overdue that Mr. Hart recognizes that this child should have an opportunity to spend part of his childhood with his mother. His trouble is that he has a loving mother who wishes to see him and he is unable to break free and see her.” Justice Brenner watched as this veteran child advocate, this woman uninterested in the desires, needs, and rights of Peter or I, fingered Dash’s father as the sole director of the alienation.
Allison Burnet knew who to empower. The judge. He needed to stop vacillating and listening to a programmed child and start bearing ownership of Dash’s fate. “Obviously quite an extended time ago, this child’s wishes should have been overruled by the court,” she scolded. “We are long past the point where we should listen to Dash. I think it’s time Dash listened to you. You represent the best interests and welfare of this child and it is you who I want to deal with this.”
“Now will Dash get help?” I pleaded to my lawyer’s assistant, Jo-Anne, at the lunchtime recess.
“The family advocate knows what she’s doing, and so does Jamie,” she replied, reaching out and enveloping my cold hands in her own. I looked down at my hands, then up at Jo-Anne again and saw her compassion, felt her support. This caring mom who had sat in court with me day after day over the past two and a half years hadn’t once wavered from the belief that something wrong was happening in Peter’s home and that it was dangerous to my child and worthy of our fight. I was struck then by just how much I had always liked this smiling, curly-haired girl and how lonely I would have felt sitting in court without her all this time. Sandy came as often as she could, but Jo-Anne was always there. As she held my hands so tenderly, like my mother would have done if she’d been there, I realized that one of the reasons we had become so close was that she wasn’t involved in my case in a legal sense, not really, not like Jamie had to be. She was there as the mother of three children, as a woman, and, now, as my friend.
Jamie walked over to us. “Come on,” he said softly. “They’re ready.”
That day Justice Brenner made the first and only decision that acted in my son’s true best interests. He didn’t give me the interim custody I was asking for, but he did give me what we had asked for in the alternative: ninety consecutive days of access — the whole summer — with police backup to bring Dash back to me if he ran home to his father, as both Peter and Ken assured us he would. I heard a cry of “It’s house arrest!” from either Peter or Ken. To me the ninety days was time to show Dash what it was like to be part of a functioning family; what it was like to be fed regularly, worked with, and cared for. I wanted to show him what it was to be a child, not a cherished weapon of war. The access order was a “no-contact” order. Dash was allowed to call anyone, anytime, but Peter was not allowed to contact Dash for the first ten days of the ninety-day order. Beyond the ten days, Peter was to call no more than three times a week and for no longer than twenty minutes at a time. (Allison Burnet had recognized that Peter’s incessant phone calls to Dash in the early years had been prime programming tools. Her demand for a no-contact order sought to limit their effect.) Ken Westlake, with his grandfatherly airs, promised the judge that he would respect this. “Oh, I have no intention of calling, Your Lordship,” he said. I was to monitor all phone conversations between Dash and his father, and I, alone, was to sign any forms necessary to place Dash in the school’s intervention program. Dash was going to have summer with me and start the one-on-one at Lord Byng when school restarted in September 1999. This was all Allison Burnet’s doing. My gratitude couldn’t be measured.
At two o’clock the next day, Peter brought Dash to the courtroom for the transfer. We all stood when the judge came in, then sat solemnly again. Jo-Anne was to my left, and once again Sandy had come. She had been with me through all these years, and I could see her pride now, her joy for me. I had tears in my eyes as I looked from her to the judge as he spoke.
“Now you know why you’re here, Dash, don’t you?” Justice Brenner asked. Dash nodded, eyes on the ground. He was pale. Peter looked mortified. “You’re here so that you can go with your mother for the summer.” Dash nodded again. “Now, when you’re ready, I want you to say goodbye to your father and go with your mother.”
Peter started crying. Dash burst into tears, too, and started sobbing, “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go.” He clung to his father and Peter clung back. The B-movie drama of the moment was astonishing. Is this for real? This child is only going to visit his mother! Jamie looked over at me. The four of us were speechless, and I wanted to shout at the judge for watching them so indulgently. This isn’t Sophie’s Choice! It was the only time I’d ever seen Peter cry. And yet I looked at Dash, red-faced, desperate, clinging to his father like he was his life raft. I watched them for as long as I could stand, then got up and walked over to them both. Peter had the devastated look of a man watching a lover leave. I put my arm lightly on Dash’s shoulder.
“Come on,” I said. “Time to go.”
Dash and I walked out. He was crying in great, wracking sobs. This is not healthy. This is not healthy! I dared my will to crack. We walked and kept walking. I didn’t slow my pace. Dash di
dn’t slow his. And the moment we were out of the courtroom, Dash grew completely quiet. I glanced at him. His whole body had relaxed. He didn’t look at me, but he was calm. I reached out and took his hand, which he held tightly all the way down the steps of the courthouse.
“Dash, how about we go to your house and pack some things to take up to Whistler. Maybe your skateboard and CD player?”
And, as if nothing had happened just minutes earlier, he said a level, “Sure, Mom.” There was no anger in his voice, no venom. Just total acceptance, even a slight spark of enthusiasm. He spent five minutes inside his house packing some clothes and music tapes, then came out with his skateboard under his arm and jumped back in the car.
I drove straight home to pick up Mimi and the boys and the luggage I had packed that morning. Within minutes the five of us were piled into the car and on our way. Colby and Quin bombarded Dash with happy questions. Dash, can you take us canoeing? Dash, can you jump off the dock with us? Hey, Dash, let’s go fishing as soon as we get there! Can you ride a bike? Mom, can we light the fire outside and roast marshmallows? Dash, have you done that? From the passenger seat Dash laughed and gave his whole, happy attention to each of the boys’ questions. On and on they went as we drove over the Lions Gate Bridge and out of the city. I pushed back the sunroof and let the wind flow through my fingers. My body slowly calmed. Mimi’s hand came to me from the back seat and squeezed my shoulder. I touched her hand and smiled at her in the rear-view mirror. We had done it.
Dash stretched his legs, reclined his seat, smiled out the window, and took in the exquisite scenery. We passed lakes, mountains, and hundreds of acres of forest swathed in brilliant sunlight. He was fine. The tears were all gone. He was just an ordinary boy going on a holiday. The performance had been for his father, and now he was free.
Chapter 7
Winged Angel
I hauled open the heavy Roman blinds in Dash’s room. It was midmorning; the sun was high in the sky. “Dash, good morning. Look at the day! It’s beautiful.”
Dash wiped his eyes and blinked against the light. Sometimes he woke up feeling foul and hating everybody — other times he didn’t. I took my chances each morning. He growled lightly. “Well, I can’t see any clouds anyway, Mom.”
“Right! And so guess what — I’ve got a great idea. Mimi’s going to take the boys on a picnic and then swimming, so we’ve got a whole bunch of hours to ourselves. You know what I was thinking?”
“What?” He was starting to smile.
“Sailing. Just you and me on a boat. Out there.” I pointed to the lake. “I haven’t done it in years and years, and you haven’t ever, have you?”
He nodded and shook his head at the same time. “Yeah, let’s do it. I’ve never sailed before.” His grin was broad now. Boys are so easy. Point them at a lake or a boat or a car and they’re all yours. At the jetty, the dockhand took us through a brief explanation of how the little sailboat operated, handed us our lifejackets, and waved us goodbye.
“You got all that, right?” I joked with Dash.
“Sort of, I think so.” He looked serious, found his footing, and glanced around him. He picked up the yellow rope the dockhand had shown him. “Let’s see. You take the rope and sheet in —” And we were off. We shot over the steel-blue lake, shrieking with laughter. The wind blew in our faces and we squinted against the sunlight vaulting off the waves.
“I’m going to turn us around now, all right, Mom? I’ve got to put the boat in this direction and — Mom! Bend your head! The boom is coming over!
I ducked, a little dramatically, and we laughed.
For an instant we lost our concentration and, while Dash was looking at me instead of where we were going, the wind picked up the sail and tipped the boat over. Sunny it might have been, but the water was glacial. We tumbled into it. “Oh, my God!” I shouted as Dash clam-oured back to the boat, his teeth chattering. My legs screamed from the cold, but we laughed like the recently released as he pushed and then hauled the heavy wet sail out of the water and righted the boat.
“Mom, come on. You can do this!”
“Easy for you to say! You’re already back in! Okay. One, two, three,” and I hauled myself up. Dash stepped forward and took my arm. And over the boat went again. When we got going once more, I took the rope. “It’s my turn now. I’m the captain and you’re the passenger — you’re my captive now!”
We swapped places gingerly and took off. “You got it, Mom! Hold tight and — oh, no!”
We’d spent more time in the water than on it. “Dash,” I spluttered, clinging to the hull, “do you think we listened to the guy who told us how to do this?”
The good moments at Whistler that summer were exquisite. Sitting outside at night around the fire, staring at the stars, all of us trying to figure out which constellation was which. With Quin sitting so close to Dash he was almost on top of him, and Dash just smiling and putting his arm around him, we could almost forget everything and just be. Dash was sweet with me, kind to the boys. He was in every room I was. Every evening he wanted me to rub his back and feet, but while it was always something he’d loved, his demands had changed in quality. They came from something deeper. There was a palpable, almost desperate quality to Dash’s need. At Whistler we slipped into a constant physical connection, watching television with our legs draped over each other, his hand in mine.
The bad moments shocked me: my child was a monster. Some days, maybe one in three, Dash woke up radiating hostility, and we all tiptoed around him until he shook it off. If he didn’t want to do something, like help bring the groceries in from the car, he simply wouldn’t. He would shout, “No!” and stomp off to his room, swearing, throwing his shoes into the corner, and slamming the door. Sometimes he refused to come out of his room for lunch or to get in the car when we were going on errands. He ignored my pleas for him to not dangle his feet out of the car window, so I had to pull over and wind the windows up. He would say things like, “Come now, Pam,” when he wanted something, or “Get lost, I’m playing my game.” When he was hungry he’d say, “Feed me now, Pam.” When I picked him up from the skate park each day, he was often grumpy and critical. I would leave him be, and we would drive home in silence. His verbal assaults had an alarmingly misogynistic undercurrent, and they were always directed at me. Three times in those Whistler weeks he got angry at me over nothing and gestured masturbation in front of me. Once he pulled down his pants and showed me his bare bottom because I had “bugged” him about coming to the dinner table. Another time, when I asked him to help set the table for lunch he said, “Fuck off, whore.” The word sounded impossibly vulgar coming out of a not-quite-fourteen-year-old’s mouth. At first I was so shocked I couldn’t respond at all, but within a couple of days I had worked out an active strategy: just keeping loving him, no matter what. “Dash, you don’t need to say that,” I’d say gently. Or “I know you don’t really feel that way about me, Dash, so why say such horrible things?” I knew that, whenever he said such things, it added to the self-loathing that came with PAS. So I tried to neutralize it; take the shock value out of whatever he said by not fighting with him, by refusing to be provoked. It slowed Dash down. They never went away, but the number of incidents in our first week had halved by the second week and, despite Ken Westlake’s dire prediction, Dash didn’t try to run away either. He never threatened it, even when he was searching for horrible things to say to me. The stop for the Greyhound bus to Vancouver was only a stone’s throw from our house. The bus ran five times a day, Dash had money in his pocket, and he knew I wouldn’t stop him from going. Despite himself, Dash was having a good time. He even established a rapport with Dave again, who was easing himself back into Dash’s life by coming up on the weekends. Dash asked me shyly if he could start calling him “Dave” instead of “Big D.” Dash didn’t want to phone anyone, and he avoided his usual lifeline, his friends. He declined my invitations to have them come and stay, and he didn’t extend himself in their direction
. When I asked him about it he got defensive and said, “My friends don’t like you.”
“They don’t even know me, so if they don’t like me it must be because of what you’ve told them about me. I don’t think that’s really fair, do you?”
He paused, then said, “I’m only joking.”
Peter didn’t call for the first ten days, as he had been told by the court. Every time I suggested that Dash call home, I received an emphatic “No!” or an enraged “I’m not calling!” When Ken Westlake and Greg Hart called, they didn’t get much from Dash either. Ken had phoned just days into our time at Whistler, but Dash was at the skate park.
“I don’t want you calling, Ken,” I said. Giving Dash his cues. Reminding him he’s supposed to be mad. “Dash will call you if he needs to.”
I phoned Jamie straight away and told him to remind Ken of the promise he had made in court, but Ken called again and threatened to call “every half-hour until I speak to my client.” I wasn’t going to let this deputy ruin the progress Dash and I had made. “I’ll call the police if you phone again, Ken,” I said. I picked up Dash from the skate park and told him that Ken had called. He looked at me blankly, as though he didn’t even knew who “Ken” was, but on cue the next day, when Greg Hart called and asked Dash how he was doing, Dash flew into a rage. “I hate being here. It sucks,” he said. “I’m not having any fun.”
Beyond Dash’s polarized and sometimes savage moods, we had other difficulties. Dash had failed Math and Socials that year and was heading for a fail in Grade Eight, his first year in high school, if he didn’t retake them at summer school and pass. Dash had been enrolled in summer school but told me he had been “kicked out,” because he had been late and “because I had to go to court.” I called the coordinator of the summer school, Mr. Kerr. He told me that Dash had been so disruptive he had to Winged Angel be moved to a smaller class. Then, when Mr. Kerr interviewed Peter and Dash together to see if they could make some progress, Peter made so many excuses for Dash that Mr. Kerr finally asked him to “let Dash answer for himself.” Peter called within days and said Dash had a dentist appointment and couldn’t attend school that day, and Dash never showed up again. The amount of time that kid spent at the dentist, he must have had the shiniest teeth this side of Hollywood.
A Kidnapped Mind Page 22