Riley was one of the leading experts in the country on the emerging field of parental alienation syndrome. It seemed that one of the primary by-products of divorces with children had become the use of those children as weapons. The paradox had always intrigued her. Here a defenseless child frequently became the most used weapon in a parent’s arsenal. Like any combat, there was suffering, and in this particular form of combat the weapon systems themselves, the children, suffered the most. They were slung at the intended target with all the ferocity of any arrow or bullet or missile.
Riley could see it so much in Amanda Garrett that it ripped out her heart. While her relationship with Zach had ebbed and flowed with the demands of each of their careers, his presence had always been with her. She carried him inside her heart the way many carried their first love. There were no bad memories, only happy thoughts and times that were sometimes interrupted by deployments. They had been happiest when Zach had left the service and worked the farm in Virginia. He did some defense consulting with a firm in Charlotte, and he had traveled regularly to South Carolina to try to see Amanda. They each had found peace, and in the summer of 2001 Zach began preparations to move to Charlotte for a full-time position with the company. It would keep him close to Amanda and place him with the woman he loved. They were ready.
Then 9-11 happened. Riley and Zach had spent the Labor Day weekend together, and Zach had stayed on for another week. He would head over to Spartanburg Swim Center to watch Amanda compete and then meet up with Riley afterward. She respected Zach’s decision not to introduce Amanda to her until he was ready. Privately she believed that it would be healthy for Amanda to see her father in a strong relationship with another woman. The absence of Amanda, such a large part of Zach’s life, had left a hole in their relationship. They would drift apart for a while and then come rushing back together. Not Amanda’s fault at all, but Zach would not be whole until he could integrate his entire life, she knew that much.
She watched him struggle with the abuse that his ex-wife would levy upon him and Amanda. He would come home from an attempted visitation shaking with rage. For a while Riley didn’t know what to do. Zach said very little, internalizing the pain, the frustration, and the injustice. She had wondered what was truly happening. Surely, no one could be that bad.
But it appeared that Amanda’s mother and grandmother had been worse than anyone could have anticipated. Perhaps in the early days when Amanda was much younger, after she had first met Zach, she had been inspired to study the disaffected child of divorce. She had surprised herself when she began to mine the uncharted caverns of maternal abuse of custodial children.
Riley had been laughed at, screamed at, and ridiculed by mothers and the media. She was cutting across the current of hate framed by such monikers as “deadbeat dads.” She had written an article for Parents magazine that, much to her surprise, had been published. The basic theme of the article was the existing inequity of the law where generally a father was forced to pay child support, but the woman was not compelled to honor the visitation schedule. She had explored reams of evidence in county courthouses around North and South Carolina where well-meaning fathers were gunned down by ignorant judges and attorneys who strung out cases so long that most men just gave up. It was a trap, she determined. The man, once divorced, was swimming upstream against the flooding waters of bias and stereotype. The courthouses were the floodgates, governing the tide against which the fathers braced.
She had once violated Zach’s rule about staying out of sight of Amanda. She wanted to confirm in her mind what Zach had not so much told her, but what she had witnessed in his stoicism. He was an enigma in her mind when it came to Amanda. She watched him wrestle with uncommon angst and pain, knowing that Amanda had been launched at him the way an insurgent presses the key fob of an improvised explosive device as a military truck passes by. In a flash, pain and suffering occur, while the terrorist walks away, whistling and looking innocently at the sky. So it was with the enabling parental alienator.
That day a few years ago, before the Ballantine event, when Zach had re-entered the service and was stationed at Fort Bragg, Riley had taken it upon herself to watch a swim meet in Spartanburg. Not fearing identification, she sat in the bleachers near Amanda’s mother and grandmother, listening to their conversation while Amanda glided to victories in all five of her races over worthy opponents. For a moment, Riley had forgotten her mission as she had become engrossed in the splashing and yelling as the competitors churned through the water.
It was the conversation, though, that had amazed her the most. The swimming was pure amateur hour compared to the well-practiced smoothness of the mother and grandmother, who openly derided the father, both in the presence of others as well as Amanda. It was a constant subtext to all that was done or said. Yet, none of it was obvious or overt.
“Don’t you know that Speedo race suit cost one hundred and eighty dollars?”
“Well, I know who didn’t pay for it.”
“You got that right.”
And so on.
And then, when Amanda was leaving with her mother.
“Good meet, Manda.”
“Thanks.”
“Too bad what’s-his-name wasn’t here.”
“Yeah, too bad.”
Then everyone was laughing.
She looked down at the paper, pondering her next move. The one positive sign was Amanda’s ability to unlock the secret compartment in her mind. She had been brave enough to go where she really wanted to go, which was to be allowed to love her father. Having been denied that opportunity since she was a small child, was it really possible, she wondered, for Amanda to love anyone at all? The transference and blockage that had occurred surely must skew any existing or future relationship. If you’re not allowed to love the father that you know is a good, decent man, then where is your baseline? What was her metric for attachment?
Her role models, the mother and grandmother, were clearly sociopaths, and had put Amanda in a canoe in that same river, giving her a good shove into the current. The distorted and pained contortions of Deep South love, Riley determined.
She had been gelling and crystallizing the two brief sessions with Amanda. She realized that she was basing her conclusions more on what she knew about Zach than on her interactions with his daughter. She had tried hard not to allow that to happen, but her love for Zach was a fixture in her life she couldn’t easily rearrange to make room for fresh analysis.
Nor did she think she had time.
CHAPTER 24
Amanda startled awake.
“What was that?”
She rubbed her eyes, pulling herself up out of Jake’s lap. She had been asleep, soundly, thoughts thrashing around in her mind not necessarily as dreams, but rather as lightning bolts. Her mind was the equivalent of an electrical storm, static electricity lighting the night sky. Thunder and lightning ripped through her mind and shook the windows of her soul.
“Nothing babe, go back to sleep. We’ve got another thirty minutes or so.”
Jake had stopped in Ashboro, North Carolina, grabbed a giant coffee, straight up, taken a leak, and then jumped back into the truck for the remaining leg into Sanford, North Carolina.
“We must have hit a bump.”
“No bump, babe, just smooth sailing.” Jake put a strong hand on her arm. Amanda looked out the window into the darkness.