A Mother’s Promise Read online

  Sturgis postponed the original hearing in November 1993

  Hans Paul, my last lawyer after Mendel fired me

  Only four people listed here – Dr Shecut, Dr Folk, Fred Sosnoski and, naturally, Samantha – really supported me and worked to look after my interests and what was best for my baby.

  These names will recur in the telling of this story, but aside from the twenty years I had disappeared with my baby, it might also be helpful to have the very barest of facts – without all of the intrigue, sins of omission and set-ups yet to be revealed from those players – before the story really begins.

  On 15 October 1992, my husband Harris walked out. I was ten weeks pregnant. I had called him at work that morning and begged him to come home, and his response was that he wanted a separation and wanted me out of his house. I replied that if he really wanted a separation he should make it legal. There was some effort made to fix things, including marriage counselling, though Harris was mostly resistant to this. At a counselling session in January 1993, Harris appeared and announced he wanted a divorce. I had known that this might have been an outcome because Harris had never wanted children, and had been adamantly opposed to me keeping this baby. We had numerous legal transactions to determine if I should stay in the house or not and, if so, who paid the bills. These cost thousands of dollars but it was determined I should stay at least throughout the pregnancy.

  I was in my final trimester when, on 10 March 1993, Harris counter sued me for divorce on the grounds of physical abuse and that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result. Savanna was born on 6 May and at the end of July, Harris sought custody. Naturally, I countered. For the remainder of that year I was in and out of court, often to defend my position against the liberal visitations forced upon me by the guardian ad litim, some falling within thirty days of the previous hearing. Over the same period of time, though, there were also many depositions that would be used in the custody hearing and which chewed up a great deal of time and money.

  From 19 January to 18 February 1994, we were in the Charleston Family Court determining who would have custody of Savanna (Samantha) with Judge Robert Mallard presiding. On 18 February, I lost custody of my daughter, who I was still nursing, and was accorded my visitation rights over the phone, which were to see my baby four nights a month! Still in February, I hired another lawyer, Hans Paul, to take the case to the Appellate Court, but we waited and waited for the written court order from Judge Mallard to do so. By the beginning of April we were still waiting. A judge has thirty days to write a court order and we were around Day 45 at this stage.

  On 23 April, I fled the country with my baby.

  But there is so much more that needs to be told.

  3

  THE DRASTIC ACTION THAT I TOOK AS A YOUNG MOTHER IN 1994 brought about surprising and enriching life experiences – many from travelling, most from the people I met – as I made a home for myself and my family on three continents.

  I was, however, born in the Low Country of South Carolina. This area was the home of my grandparents who moved there from Charlottesville, Virginia, in the 1940s. For me the Low Country is an enchanted land. The oaks dripping with Spanish moss create a sort of other-worldly fairyland that seeps into your core. My grandparents were from old money and our family home was a stately 150-year-old property surrounded by ancient oak trees on the edge of a tea plantation. At its rear was a stable for our horses and a tennis court that we later turned into a croquet lawn. My two brothers, my mother and I spent a lot of our time there because my father had died in a building accident in Puerto Rico in 1960, when I was just a few months old.

  We enjoyed a quiet life in my grandparents’ grand house and another historical home of my grandmother’s known as the Town Hall, one without hardship, but it lacked the most important characteristic for my mother’s happiness – freedom. She has always been a Peter Pan – always looking for adventure, always restless. So while we visited our grandparents a lot in South Carolina, we spent time in Florida, too – at Ormond Beach and the Florida Keys. And from my early years in the sixties through to the 1990s, many summers and Christmases were spent in British Honduras (now known as Belize), a place I felt at home in and truly adored.

  Mom certainly taught us about living life to the fullest. We saw first-hand the joy that came with embracing uncertainty instead of fighting against it, and the value of adventure. We didn’t have a television and instead spent our evenings with board games and encyclopedias – particularly the special edition encyclopedias from Animal Kingdom and Audubon Nature. Mom once conned a poor, unsuspecting salesman into giving her the special editions for free, probably with the false promise that she would buy the full set at another time. I mean, who can out-swindle an encyclopedia salesman? I was nearly a teenager before I realised our family was a little out of the ordinary.

  We moved around quite a lot but there were two constants as I was growing up – animals and the ocean. Animals were always a part of our family and they came in all sizes and types, herbivores and carnivores, cold-blooded and warm-blooded. They made our little family complete. Just like the purity and openness I found in Belize, these relationships were without judgment. Animals love unconditionally, which, I suspect, is why my mother’s maternal instincts were more pronounced when it came to our pets then with her children; instead, we were her playmates.

  My earliest memories are from the Florida Keys somewhere around 1963 or 1964. I was around three or four. I remember one day Mom, Tommy, aged seven, and Cliff, six, were swimming in the porpoise enclosure with Mitzi, the real-life Flipper. We were friends with her owner, Mr Milton Santini, who allowed us free and unlimited access to Mitzi when she wasn’t filming. As usual, Coco our cocker spaniel was with us.

  I was sprawled, face down, across one of the docks that surrounded the enclosure, tired from treading water and watching the boys hog all the fin time with Mitzi. Through the cracked, aged boards resting on pilings which formed their own natural reef, I looked with wonder at purple sea fans and bright orange coral, dotted with bouquets of multicoloured sea anemones whose fingers waved to schools of tropical fish.

  The combination of sun and exercise caused me to drift off to sleep – until I felt a familiar, painful tugging at my hair. It was Petey the Pelican, another resident of the enclosure. Not only was he bigger and stronger than me, but for some reason he had declared war on me the instant we met.

  ‘Mommy!’ I screamed, as Petey snared my right arm in his beak and reared back to swallow me. ‘Mommy! Mommy!’ I shrieked.

  Finally, my mother, all elegance in the water, turned slowly in my direction.

  ‘What is it, Lee?’ Her tone dripped with irritation.

  ‘Mommy, Petey’s eating me!’

  As if on cue, Petey released me, and sat with a monstrous innocent air about him.

  ‘Oh, Lee! He’s not bothering you. He looks half asleep!’

  The boys snickered, having seen everything Petey had done.

  ‘Lee, either get back in the water or be quiet. We’re all having fun, and you’re ruining it for us!’

  I jumped in and swam over to Mitzi. I reached for her dorsal fin and flew through the water, away from my uncaring family.

  Later we ate lunch on the dock and watched Coco and Mitzi play hide-and-seek with a tennis ball. Suddenly I noticed this white powder on my arm.

  ‘What’s this, Mommy?’

  ‘Lick it, and you tell me what it tastes like.’

  ‘Yeah, Lee! Lick it!’ the boys chimed in.

  Tentatively, I did, then squinting with confusion asked, ‘How did I get salt on me?’

  The boys flew into hysterics, chanting, ‘Lee’s so dumb! Lee’s so dumb!’

  My bottom lip puffed out. ‘Mom, tell them to stop!’

  Instead, Mom told me to stop being such a baby, that the boys were only kidding, and then explained it tasted like salt because the ocean is made of salt water. Sulking now, I moved away and sat facing
the other direction. I whispered in my defence, but mainly to myself, ‘I’m not dumb. I’m just little. I’m not dumb.’

  We lived in a tiny rented house, one of only a few on Key Colony, which is in the middle of the Florida Keys. We spent most of our time outside or at the only motel on the island. Our feet were as tough and coarse as elephant skin as we roamed the coral island barefoot, climbing coconut trees and jumping into canals.

  At the motel we often approached tourists staying there to offer them a ‘freak’ show. Three tow-haired, blue-eyed children with dark, tanned skin stood out like sore thumbs to the northern ‘snowbirds’. We were scrawny, shirtless and made a perfectly adorable troupe.

  Tommy, the brains of the group, set the scene. He would crush Coke bottles in a bag and arrange the broken glass on the ground to form a rectangle. Then the three of us would line up before Tommy began his perilous walk across the shiny slivers. The tourists would gasp and crease their brows and finish clapping furiously with ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ of relief. Tommy always finished with a deep bow. Cliff was next and he jogged across the shards, giving the crowd an even more thrilling show. Lastly, it was my turn. I mixed mine up a bit – sometimes I skipped across, and other times I did a little dance, with a pirouette of sorts. It was all in the showmanship.

  The snowbirds loved us and gave us money, asking how we did it. With a little prodding and a few extra coins, we shared our secret and let them feel our coarse elephant-skinned feet, whitened by Florida Keys limestone.

  We had such adventures in this part of the world. I remember turtle spotting on a friend’s Spanish junk. The three of us would perch on the bow of the boat watching for giant loggerhead turtles in the translucent water. Once we spotted them, we jumped in and swam up alongside the docile creatures. Then we would gently grip the edges of their shell, above their front legs and hang on. We were rangy, slightly built children so not too heavy, but when the turtles tired of us they would dive. We would hold our breath until we felt our lungs would burst and only then did we let go.

  Once we were school age, Mom would invite our friends to join us in exploring new and exciting places. If there wasn’t enough room in the car to squeeze in a few more children, she would convince us that the best seat in the car was the trunk – we actually fought over that coveted spot! But at least the trunk space of our 1958 Jaguar Luxury Sedan IX was spacious. More often than not though, space wasn’t the issue. Instead, always thrifty Mom generally took us somewhere that charged per person, not per car. This included the Lion Country Safari, where she would pay for one person – herself – drive into the park, passing all the warning signs to keep windows up at all times, then, when out of sight of the ticket-takers, stop the car and release the tribe of children from the trunk.

  Our summer pilgrimages to Belize generally started when the school holidays did, sometimes before. One particular summer when we left, at the end of my elementary schooling, I felt a new sense of myself. Not really a child anymore, but with no urgency to leave my childhood behind, just a peaceful feeling of being in between. We spent that wonderful summer swinging through the trees, looking for Mayan ruins and exploring deserted islands. We collected new pets to take back to the US, adding to our already over-populated family zoo. Our ever-present German shepherd, Gretchen, and our black Howler monkey, Alvin, made the family complete.

  In Belize we lived with local families on a peninsula called Placencia. It was only accessible by boat. There was no electricity, only rainwater for drinking and bathing and – until we brought one – I’m not sure there was even a mirror. The generosity of the residents was important to Mom’s plan: we rarely paid for accommodation, the food was plentiful and free, and we were always treated like family.

  We cooked what we caught during the day on an open fire using coconut husks and coconut oil. We cut up tough conch meat, mixed it with onion and lime, and ate it raw while the rest of dinner was cooking. Sweet lobster and fish were prepared in every conceivable fashion for every meal. After dinner when our bellies were full, the adults would warm theirs with Caribbean rum and coconut water. After the last dish was washed, we would climb the rickety stairs to a house high up on stilts above the water that gently swayed in the tropical breezes.

  We used to gather in the candle-lit living room, our eyes shining in readiness for the nightly entertainment. The furniture was moved to the corners to make a large circle in the middle. The nightly entertainment would begin with Freddie Senior’s magic tricks and circus-type acrobatics. Then we would wait for the main event.

  One night, out of nowhere an elderly white-haired man with ever-so-dark skin, appeared and moved to the centre of the room. This man was one of the oldest residents of Placencia, and his soft-spoken, Creole lilt had everyone in the room hypnotised. Slowly he held up the backs of his ropy hands to show us they were devoid of thumbs! Our eyes bulged at what this frightening story might be about. ‘Tata Duende is the ugliest little man alive. He has no thumbs and his feet are on backwards,’ he began. ‘He wears a big red hat and his clothes are made of animal skins. He is a mischievous spirit waiting for children like you, who dare to walk in his jungle. He protects all animals that live there, but he waits for naughty children. Remember to protect your thumbs at all times because if you meet Tata Duende, he will snatch them off your hands!’ Suddenly, he dramatically flung his head back, ‘Never, ever show him your hands!’

  I glanced around the room of children and saw that we were all sitting on our hands with our precious thumbs tucked away.

  He paused and looked at each of us in the eye. ‘Remember what I say children or you too will have no thumbs!’

  We slowly nodded our heads. And then he slammed his open palms on the wooden floor making us all jump and scream. It took a moment or two before we giggled with relief. I always found these sorts of stories thrilling, terrifying and completely unforgettable.

  Usually when we left to return to the US we had to wait for a fishing trawler, The Jane R. Sometimes it stopped if it had cargo to deliver, but sometimes we had to paddle out to it in a dugout canoe. Its captain, Isaac, might then let us ride (for a small fee) the ten-plus hours (if it didn’t break down) in his open boat back to Belize City. This particular time there was no cargo for Placencia and it was the very last day to leave so we had to get Isaac to take us to Belize City.

  We saw him some way from shore and all jumped in the canoe and began paddling. We yelled and screamed and, as the distance looked to be increasing, the boys tied their t-shirts on the ends of the paddles swinging them like flags of surrender. When we thought all was lost and The Jane R was disappearing, Isaac suddenly turned his head and saw our crazy family. His face lit up with the most beautiful smile as he waved his recognition.

  We hoisted ourselves and our belongings onboard. Our regular cargo comprised Gretchen, Alvin, numerous shells, and an assortment of animals including many boa constrictors, tarantulas, iguanas, and sometimes even coatimundis, a South American raccoon. We spent the journey making sure the pillowcases containing the snakes were kept damp and that all the animals had fresh water. And when Mom forgot to bring food for the journey, we persuaded Isaac to let us spear some fish and make ceviche with lime.

  We had so many crazy times as children yet I don’t remember any of us complaining or speaking back to Mom, not ever. Life with Mom was never boring. From simple outings like taking a midnight drive to a Florida beach to see spectacular bioluminescence as we splashed through the water, to searching for a Christmas tree on an island where it was rumoured the locals still practised cannibalism, or being shipwrecked on a deserted Caribbean island in the middle of a hurricane, we were nearly always on the move and never predictable.

  Throughout my life I have met people who pretended to be someone they were not. Many of these people were women, often working class who married well and put on airs, pretending to be better than everyone else. Mom was exactly the opposite. She came from old money and all the privileges that came with
such established traditions and yet she raised us in an environment which, from the perspective of outsiders, was often mistaken as white trash. At times I wondered if that was an act of rebellion. To my mind, the real goal of my mother’s – what she thrived on and craved like oxygen – was attention. And what better way to be noticed than to do things differently? I, on the other hand, despised too much attention and resented it being thrust upon me simply by being my eccentric mother’s daughter.

  It also needs to be said early on, before I get too far ahead of myself, that I was still lucky enough to have fabulously maternal influences around me. Two old family friends in particular, Aunt Clara (who was an aunt by default) and Ann Chabot, were indispensable support and stuck by me throughout the difficulties I faced once I became pregnant.

  4

  Queensland, Australia

  November 2013

  THE AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL POLICE WANTED ME TO MAKE A FORMAL statement inside the Maroochydore police station. I refused, thinking of Chelsea’s words, and was taken to processing. This took place underneath the station, which I thought of as a dungeon. Pedr explained they would take my fingerprints manually because the FBI didn’t want the electronic version to have the local police station’s name on it. ‘Sure,’ I said, having no idea that fingerprints could be anything but manual.

  After many more questions, I had to remove all my jewellery and hand it over. I struggled with my sapphire and diamond ring that had been in my family for many generations, and was offered hand sanitiser to help. My emerald and diamond engagement ring came off more easily. I had inherited the diamonds and my brother Tommy, who was a gemologist, had suggested to Harris that he would make the ring for me and had found an emerald at half the normal cost to do so. As I slipped it off my finger, I remembered how Harris was against me having an engagement ring and had later said the ring he estimated to cost $9000 should be his.