5 - The Taking

I don't really know exactly what happened next, except that my father stopped seeing my great aunt, my mother filed for divorce, and my father fought for visitation and got it. There was a day when he was visiting me. He was at my grandparent's house. My mom was not there. He did something a little unexpected. He took all of the knives out of the drawer in the kitchen. He placed them under a chair. He took me, he left, and he started driving east.

In those days, a man with a baby on his own was something of a rare sight. He couldn't risk me being seen. People would be looking for us. He needed to get back to Sweden. Once he was there, he could convince my mother to come back to him, and he would have us both.

He couldn't risk me being seen. He couldn't. And so for the three days that he had me and traveled across the country with me towards Boston, he kept me in a box, in the trunk of his car.

I'd tell you how they found me, but I don't think you'll believe me. Ah, why not. I don't think you'll believe much of this anyway. They found me with a psychic. She told them where my father was. When they found him, he was parked on the side of the road, standing in a phone booth.

When they got me from the trunk of his car, I was very sick. I had to be put in intensive care. I was dehydrated. I had not been fed. I was deeply traumatized. I could no longer walk. I could no longer talk. I was in the ICU for several days. For many more I looked like a skeleton, not eating, and in pictures, I always had a haunted and hollow look on my face. Of those pictures, my grandparents often said, that was after your father took you. There were never pictures after my father took me in which I did not look sick or distressed.

There was a lengthy divorce. It was a fight. My father did not want a divorce. My father was a brilliant lawyer. He fought hard. He bent the judge and jury to his will. They believed his lies about my mother being unfit.

In fact, that is why, for all of my childhood life, my mother was not the custodial parent. No one but she, grandmother and I knew. Mother signed all of the forms, no one questioned it.

I think the divorce was finalized when I was 4. I have the paperwork in my basement. I've just never looked at it. I don't know if I want to. It's like those awful poems I wrote about love when I was in high school. Maybe the world, and more specifically me, would be better off without that stuff. I don't know if I want to remember. I don't know if I want to know.

My father and mother were officially divorced. My father was told he would never be able to return to the United States after what he had done, kidnapping me.