1985

On a pleasant Sunday afternoon after church in late October, Bill and I donned running shoes and shorts and hit the pavement of our suburban neighborhood to jog three miles.  Our daughters, eleven and nine years old, stayed home to be with a napping Will.  Our usual jogging circuit took us past our home every eight minutes, and the girls were aware of this.  We had not even been gone thirty minutes when we knocked lightly on the front door for the girls to let us in.

"Granddaddy came," Heather said.

"Yeah, took Will for a ride," chimed in Vanessa.

"What?" I screamed.  I ran to Will's bedroom just to make certain I had heard correctly.

"He said he'd be back in a few minutes," Heather said, the look on her face betraying the fear that she had done something wrong.

I was hysterical - murderous, actually.  My father lived two hours away and just showed up unannounced.  Within an eight or nine minute span of time, he had entered our home, taken our son and run!  Like a caged animal I paced and yelled.  Bill was telling me to calm down, but that just was not possible!  I grabbed my purse and ran out the door, got into my car and started driving.  The town was not large; I began with parks nearby.  Panic and anger melded into such an explosive concoction I could barely see the road. He has my son!  How stupid is he?  What is he doing with Will? I will kill my father!  I hate this man, and I will kill him!

Tears and sweat coursed simultaneously onto my tee shirt as I came dangerously close to imploding.  My father was no longer the doting grandfather of my precious children, but the sick neighborhood pedophile who could not be trusted with anybody's kids!  Three parks.  No Daddy.  No baby boy!  I wanted to run to where they were and grab my child and slap and slap and slap my father!  But I did not know where to run.  I had been gone for twenty minutes or so; maybe he had returned.  With that thought, I raced home, my heart pounding with anticipation, arms eager to rescue and embrace the chubby little angel my father had stolen.  When I  approached the driveway and did not see Daddy's car, it felt as though my entire body began sinking into a massive dark hole that was looming in the floorboard of the car.  Sinking, sinking to a flatness; a dark dread, a pervasive numbness in my stomach.  All I could do was wail, "Oh,God!  Where is Will?"  My soul sank down through that opening and collapsed.  I felt momentarily dead and hopeless, trapped in a surreal nightmare. 

Suddenly, I came back to myself with the hopeful thought that perhaps he had come and gone while I had been away.  I grabbed my purse and ran inside.  "Did he bring Will back?" I shouted this, but no one answered.  Three very grim and anxious faces mirrored my own despondency.  By this time almost an hour had passed.  Pacing and hating; hating and pacing.  Where else can I go?  Where else might he be? Venom escaped from me in hysterical hisses.  All the hurt and bitter disasppointment, all the grief and lost sense of safety was boiling, churning, rising up and up in me ready to spew!  When I saw him, I knew I would blow!

I was about to call the police when my father showed up with Will!  I grabbed my baby and pushed my father hard, back against the entryway wall.  "Where did you take my son?" I screamed. "Don't EVER take my child anywhere again!"

Crying, completely over-wrought, my hands moved all over the smooth sweet body of my boy as if they could heat-sense or somehow perceive any harm that might have been done to him.  The moment froze; I was the only one moving.  It was horrible.  It was vomitous.  Had I had a gun, it would have been deadly.  I looked over at my father still penned to the wall where I put him and spit out the question again, "Where did you take my son?"

"To...the park."

Oh, God....the park...in his car.  Rage rose up so fiercely I did not recognize my own heart.  It was pumping black and making me tingle all over.  "What park?" I seethed.

"By the lake. There were kids playing with toy airplanes, and we watched them." He spoke in monotone. Scared of me, reasonably.

"Did you hurt him?"  I am certain Daddy saw the feral anger in my eyes.

"No.....I wouldn't."

"Never, EVER think you can take him or the girls anywhere alone again! NEVER, EVER, DO THIS AGAIN!" I was barely breathing. I backed away from him, giving him room. "You need to leave."

Daddy's body came away from the wall like moistened wallpaper falling slowing away from its surface, limp and lifeless. He tried to say something about meeting a woman because his psychiatrist said that would be good for him.  Incredulous that he did not even now sense the urgency of the moment and the inappropriateness of his "outing," I opened the door so that he could slither out.