The only shot Peter had of getting the order he wanted was to go to court on an ex parte basis. If he had played by the rules, Allison Burnet would have been at the hearing and they wouldn’t have got a thing. She had told Justice Brenner, two years earlier, that Dash’s problem was his father and that he should be moved from his home. As Dash’s full legal guardian, joint custodial parent, and mother, I could have told the judge what had happened for the past twelve years. I could have relayed Dr. Brennan’s expert opinion on whether a safe, totally supervised, therapeutic wilderness program was better for Dash’s welfare than an empty, graffiti-covered bedroom in a dysfunctional home. I could have told them Ascent was working.
“But,” Sigurdson continued, “I don’t see what the difficulty is making the order, and then if there’s something your ex-wife can come forward quickly and say no, no, no, there’s this and this, and this is why it’s happened or whatever she might want to say. If she’s got nothing to say, then you’ll have the order.”
Why did he trust Peter to do the right thing? Because he was a lawyer? Because he “knew everyone down there at the courthouse”? Justice Sigurdson should have shut the hearing down and demanded my presence. Peter even told him that I was in Vancouver. I was ten minutes away. But no one called me. Three times during that hearing the judge asked Peter to notify me of the order immediately, so that I could present my case before the child was picked up. But Peter and Ken didn’t want that. They wanted Dash back in Vancouver first. He would be violently opposed to going back to Ascent, where there were rules and expectations and where no one believed his twisted version of their life story, and Peter knew from long experience that the courts wouldn’t make Dash do anything — they never had.
Peter wanted to be the one to go and get Dash, but Sigurdson didn’t quite buy it. The only order he was prepared to make, he said with finality, was one that directed me to bring Dash back to Vancouver. Peter leapt in, trying yet another tack. He used the same argument he had used for years, “He’s not going to want to see her. He’s hostile and angry. If you read his letters, they’re … he’s basically said, ‘How could you let her do this to me?’ He fought her. He hit her. He struck her, according to the Ascent people, when they put him in the car. This would be torture for him to have her go and … well … he won’t even sleep over at her house!
“I think it would be better off that I bring him back,” Peter suggested innocently. Why? Ask him why! “He only has a relationship with me.”
“Well,” Sigurdson continued, “why not an order that she bring the boy back, and if she doesn’t forthwith return him, then you can go down and get him?” he asked.
“Because it gives her the option of actually going there.”
Still, Sigurdson didn’t totally cave to their ceaseless “buts.” He had decided: I was to be notified immediately of his order, to give me a chance to go before the court and have it overturned before removing Dash from the program, and if Dash were still to be removed, I was to bring Dash back to Vancouver, not Peter. It was the one concession to my sole guardianship, I suppose. But Justice Sigurdson wrote an order so close to what Peter had wanted that Peter made it all he needed. He didn’t serve me for a day and a half and, as I held the order in my hands after the blue sedan had sped away, I was frozen. I had been utterly defeated. Here was an order ripping Dash out of the only protection he had known in twelve years, and the courts were now closed for the weekend.
All the hard work of the previous year — the decision to take Dash out of Lord Byng high school, starting him at Glen Eden, finding Cascade, crossing the border, lying to Dash, having him escorted to Ascent — took twenty minutes to undo, the time it took to make and drink a cup of coffee. Justice Sigurdson could have told Peter and Ken Westlake to hold their horses, gathered up his robes, swept out the back, and called me to come to the courthouse. There was a child involved. He could have taken a look at our history. He could have checked with Justice Brenner to see what exactly was up with Hart v. Hart. He could have scratched the surface of the thin veneer that Peter and Ken had given him. Judges can do anything; Justice Sigurdson did nothing.
I don’t believe a layperson would have been given the order Peter got that day. He knew from long experience that he could get away with his lies. He knew he could get away with serving me late, because he had never incurred any punishment for doing it before. None. He’d had a couple of slapped wrists and a whitewash in front of the Law Society a year earlier, when they had investigated his multiple contempts, but in all this time it had always been Dash and me who paid. Peter also knew he had to tread carefully. He waited until I had been served before doing anything with his order and meticulously planned every detail to ensure I would have no recourse until Monday morning.
Now, when I opened the order that was delivered to me, I saw that it had been stamped and dated much earlier. I was not served until after the courts closed on Friday afternoon. The “courier” had not needed a signature because not having one ensured there would be no evidence that I was not notified immediately as Justice Sigurdson had requested. Mimi had not witnessed the delivery because she left for the weekend as soon as she knew I was on my way home to accept the delivery.
At half past four Peter got the call from his courier — job’s done — and then he acted quickly. He faxed the order to Brian McInnes at Ascent, and when I called Brian moments later he told me his hands were now tied. The order was legal. I called Ascent’s lawyer, John Wohlgemuth, who worked out of California. Peter had just faxed him the order, too, and John was beside himself. “No judge in California would ever have given an ex parte order under those circumstances, especially when the absent party is the child’s sole legal guardian,” the lawyer said. “For a judge to have done that here, there would have to have been overwhelming evidence that the child was being abused; he would have to be black and blue all over before a judge would take a chance like that.” But John warned me, “This is a legal order. It may be an appalling one, but it’s real. You have to go and get it overturned. But Pam, if Peter goes to Idaho before you can do that, legally we have no choice but to give him Dash.”
After all my years in court he didn’t have to tell me that. I knew only too well that going back to court was the only way to question a judge’s mistakes. I had to wait out the weekend. I sank into my writing chair at home, exhausted and traumatized. I could hear my boys’ laughter filtering from the kitchen, where they were enjoying the snack Mimi had left them and playing with their beloved Westie, Bobbi. I needed to rest, just for a minute, before I went into the kitchen and pretended everything was fine. After three bunny-hops on a plane and a long drive, I had just come back from two days in northern California visiting Cascade in anticipation of Dash’s arrival in three weeks time. I had called my travel agent to organize a plane ticket for Peter to go down there and check it out as well. I had so much work ahead of me now. And I was so tired.
I faxed Peter and told him I would withdraw my financial support of Dash if he took him out of the program. I knew that, first thing on Monday morning, Jamie and I would once again be strategizing and planning, rounding up Allison Burnet and Dr. Rick Brennan, writing long affidavits about what had happened, and preparing to go back to court. I was too tired to even cry, and all I could do was wait for the weekend to pass and try to function normally for my family. I felt beaten up. And now I was overcome with guilt: I had failed. I had failed Dash yet again. I couldn’t even bring myself to call Dave, yet. I couldn’t tell him what had happened. I had to just sit.
Peter got up early the next morning, and through a crisp October Saturday drove the eight hours to Idaho for a tearful reunion with his “abducted” son. I can’t even imagine what lies Peter and Dash told each other on that long drive home, but I bet neither of them spent one solitary second planning anything constructive for Dash upon his return to Vancouver, something honest and achievable that would halt Dash’s decline and address his depression. Ascent had been the
one thing that had started to help Dash, and it had been pulled out from under him. What was Peter going to replace it with? Despite the hugging and crying that apparently took place when Dash ran to join his father, I believe Dash liked it at Ascent more than he ever let on. Lana felt strongly that Dash didn’t really want to leave the program, but had to because that’s what his father wanted. He was cared for there, and treated as though he mattered. He must have registered that, at the very least. Dash was only the second child in four years to have been taken out of Ascent by a parent. When Peter showed up that Saturday morning, both Brian and Lana tried one last-ditch attempt to get Peter to leave Dash alone. “He is showing the first signs of healing,” they said. “It will be monumentally injurious for him to leave now, because he has started to open up.” Peter just ignored them.
I was more worried than ever about what would happen to Dash once he was back in Vancouver. My relationship with him was over, I knew that. Without Cascade there would be no way in for me. Dash had nothing to go back to: no family, no goals, no self-esteem, few friends, no school, no structure, and the same home environment that had sent him into the deadly spiral that Ascent had been trying to stop. He was going back to that environment with fresh, open wounds and his father, his hero, once more responsible.
Chapter 9
A Final Statement
I didn’t see the handcuffs on Dash when he left the hotel room in Seattle and I didn’t see them five and a half weeks later when he was in them again. He had been brought to my house by the police, but the cuffs were removed while he was still in the paddy wagon, which was parked in the driveway. He had been back from Ascent for two weeks, and was brought to me only because his father wasn’t home. The story of Dash’s arrest was short and predictable: he and Stephen Frosch had climbed onto the roof of a house under construction near Dash’s house to smoke a joint. A neighbour called the owners, and they arrived in short order and demanded that the boys come down. When they were down on the ground, Stephen and the owner began pushing and shoving each other, and Dash brandished a garden fork, yelling at the owner to leave them alone. When the police arrived, the boys ran, but were picked up immediately.
Where Stephen started crying, Dash became mouthy and arrogant. He didn’t care. Authority was nothing to him. Dash said to the police officers, “My family isn’t any of your business.” Although he was known to the police from an earlier, similar incident, they didn’t want to charge him — even one night in Juvenile Detention damages children, they said, and they tried to avoid it at all costs. So Stephen was taken home and, upon his mother, Melody’s, suggestion, Dash was brought to me. By the time I saw him, Dash was once again the boy I knew so well — the other side of the sixteen-year-old tough-guy façade: he was polite, quiet, and subdued. He ambled down the path toward my front door in his uniform: baggy T-shirt, baggy low-slung pants, sweatshirt jacket, sneakers with laces that trailed the ground.
The police had already spoken to Dash at length in the car, so there wasn’t much left to do but hand him off. “We’re not going to charge you,” they told him in front of me. “We’re content to leave you with a parent.” Dash stared at the ground and nodded. “Mrs. Richardson, would you take Dash into your care today?” one of the officers asked.
“If he’ll stay with me,” I replied. I turned to my son. “Dash, will you?”
I didn’t want him to go back to his father’s. Peter was frustrated — not even he could control Dash any more, and Dash had screwed up, publicly. I didn’t want them to be anywhere near each other for a while.
“I won’t stay with you,” he said. “I want to go home.” He was calm. He wasn’t angry. He just wasn’t interested.
The police used my phone to call Peter, and Dash talked to him for a minute. The police left, and Dash stood with his back to me on the pathway. I sat on the steps with my friend Teresa, a lawyer. I had called her after the police had called me, en route to my house. Like Sandy, she had sat in court with me many times, and she had come, within minutes, to be with me now. Dash hadn’t caught my eye since he’d arrived, and now he just watched the street ahead of him. His dad was on his way.
The last time I had seen him he had slapped me across the face and called me a slut. He was a big boy now, and even though that slap had been light, he had such a great capacity to wound me with his words. I realized how afraid of him I was, afraid of his anger. Where there was one slap there were more. He had thought nothing of wielding a gardening fork as a weapon against that man earlier in the day. Dash came to inventive, violent blows with his father. I felt apprehensive around him now, as if he were a lover whose cruelty had finally become equal to his love, and whom I continued to forgive and reopen myself to. I couldn’t even guess what Dash felt for me now. After Ascent any trust he had begun to feel had surely been comprehensively quelled; his disgust for those charged with looking after him had peaked. This poor child, being brought in a police wagon to a mother he does not trust. Going home now to a dysfunctional, pathetic father. How could I explain to him that Ascent had been the start of a new life for him? He wouldn’t have believed me. How long could I continue saying, “You have to trust me,” and then keep failing him by the help I promised not coming, or by his father coming instead and leading him back to nowhere? I got so angry then, sitting on my doorstep, Dash’s back to me. Peter had brought him back — but for what? More court appearances, more sleepless nights, more directionless days, dope, isolation, fights, when he could have been protected and started on the journey to being well. If Peter could have just left him alone for six weeks — that’s all Dash needed to get started.
And Dash shouldn’t have been delivered here. The bond I had tried so hard to mend and rebuild over the past two years was wrecked utterly, and I couldn’t do anything to take away his pain. Seattle had been the end. If he had got through Ascent, maybe. But there was a gulf between us now, so wide. I didn’t have the courage to make any big move. I couldn’t bear being spurned or attacked. Not today. Perhaps not any day now. Maybe I was changed, too. I could have reached out for him as I always had done, but I couldn’t even bear his flinch, let alone a “fuck off.” I couldn’t take his rejection.
And so for now I thought of myself instead of him. I protected myself, as Dash was protecting himself. I didn’t reach out. I didn’t tell him I loved him and would always be there for him. I didn’t say a word. The damage now seemed insurmountable, and my powerlessness complete. God. I couldn’t do a single thing. I couldn’t even engage Dash in conversation. What on earth could I say that wouldn’t make his rage spike straight to the surface — or make him simply get up and leave? To alleviate the excruciating estrangement, Teresa chatted lightly with me. How it was still so warm out tonight. How her two girls were faring in their swimming lessons. How much fun their Halloween had been. I wasn’t listening, though. My mind was on the next day’s court hearing. I just hoped that the judge would listen to what had happened tonight, see how serious the situation was, and give us the order we needed, for Dash to go back to Ascent. I had to call Jamie as soon as Dash left and tell him what had just happened, so that he could work it into a last plea to Justice Sigurdson that we needed Ascent. Dash wasn’t even under Peter’s control any more. He was his own master, and it could only get worse from here.
I saw Dash’s shoulders twitch. He moved immediately toward the front gate without looking back at either of us. Out on the road Peter’s car had crested the hill in front of our house and was coasting down the hill. I got up and walked to the gate with Dash. Teresa whispered, “It looks as if he’s out of gas.”
“Goodbye,” I said lightly as Dash opened the gate.
He said nothing to me. He helped his dad push the car around the corner. I didn’t help, and I didn’t ask them if I should call the service company for them, or go and get them some gas. I couldn’t humiliate Dash any further.
I don’t know how they got home that day. I turned around and walked back to Teresa. “Sigurdson
has to order him back into the program, Teresa. There’s nothing I can do here. Nothing. He needs Ascent. He needs to be confined now, and treated.” She nodded and put her arm around me. I motioned vaguely, futilely, toward the street, tears finally coming. “He certainly doesn’t need this.”
Jamie and I had been in court four days earlier to overturn Peter’s ex parte order and have Dash taken back to Ascent. We were hit with a brick from the first. Justice Brenner — our judge of record, the judge who had been on our case for four years and who had promised to micro-manage us — abruptly took himself off our case. He didn’t give an explanation. He didn’t have to. People like me just have to deal with the consequences. Jamie was crushed. Back to well-worn square one.
In lieu of Justice Brenner, who had just become Chief Justice, Jamie asked for Justice Sigurdson, the judge who had given Peter his ex parte order. We hoped that, with Allison Burnet now back with us after missing the first rushed hearing, the judge would see what was really going on in this case. I wanted him to send Dash back to Ascent and then on to Cascade, or directly to Cascade. I wanted the judge to ignore Peter’s claims for his “access rights” and ignore Dash’s “clear wishes.” Dash was incapable of making healthy decisions for himself. Even before Dash had arrived at my house in a paddy wagon, I had known that he was just steps away from Juvenile Detention, and yet again I needed a judge to cut off his omnipotent power — and parent him instead. In the absence of capability from either of Dash’s parents, we needed the courts to take over. I wouldn’t have my child on the streets because of Sigurdson’s ex parte order.
But knowing that psycho-educational testing was one of the primary reasons Dash needed to complete Ascent — for Cascade to be sure it was the right school for him — Peter launched an offensive: he had already arranged for Dash to be tested at Edwards Thomas Learning Centre, he said. Edwards Thomas was a well-respected testing facility, but it was based in Vancouver — an “unsafe” environment as far as I was concerned. Peter had taken Dash out of a therapeutic program against the advice of the director of Glen Eden special school, Cascade’s director of admissions, the director of Ascent, Dash’s Ascent counsellor, and the child’s mother and full legal guardian. Now he was planning to have Dash tested and sent back to a public school in Vancouver. Peter was willing to believe his son had one and only one problem — a learning glitch: Dash’s known difficulty with pen-and-paper tasks. Peter would send Dash to a school in Vancouver that would help him with his academics. A stunned Allison Burnet told Justice Sigurdson, “This parent has not been concerned about Dash’s education since the child was twelve years of age.”
A Kidnapped Mind Page 29