AS MY DAUGHTER DIVES DEEPER INTO the whirlpool of her teenage years I often kid her that I must be the envy of other fathers. I am in prison and the razor wire keeps me safe. Under the watchful eyes of visiting room guards, our black humour is what we share best.
I have not been in the natural presence of my daughter since she was ten years old. We talk on the phone, write letters; our time in visits seems all too fleeting, never long enough to get down to the ground of what really hurts her out there in the real world. Sitting at right angles under revolving cameras is too strained and artificial a setting in which to untangle the confusion and conflicts. We have our occasional heart to heart but mostly we make small talk, an unacknowledged pact not to disturb much below the surface. Sophie knows, with the clarity of a fourteen-year-old, that I can only go to those places where she lives in the abstract. I see how fiercely she wants to shield me from her burdens: it is her way of loving me now, protecting me as if I were the child.
I was in the delivery room when she emerged into this world, saw how wide her liquid eyes opened for the first time. That morning an unbreakable filament of love connected us forever.
In the ensuing months I warmed her formulas and mashed her carrots. I changed a thousand nappies. I watched her learn to crawl, then stand for the first time. I heard the first words she ever uttered: “More!” I pushed her in strollers, dozed with her glued to my chest like a pygmy tree frog, and buckled her into car seats to take her everywhere I went.
I read Goodnight Moon until she knew where to spy the mouse on each page. We teeter-tottered in every park. We survived the stages where she wouldn’t be caught wearing clothes in public, where it was lullabies on demand until I fell into a dreamy sleep beside her, and her obsession with hog-tying her nanny to the patio chairs.
I slid coins from the tooth fairy under her pillow, hid chocolate bunnies in the garden at Easter, drank the brandy and ate the Mediterranean dip she left every Christmas Eve for Santa. I drove to swim lessons and jazz-tap and ballet classes, patched bicycle tires, placed kisses on her bruises and bandages on her knees, slept beside her when she was sick, on a cot in the Children’s Hospital. I piggybacked her through rain forests, built her a castle in the sand on Haida Gwaii, and built her an even bigger one when the first washed away. When my daughter grew older we fished our quota of dorado in Mexico and waltzed in a Cuban ballroom during a wild lightning storm.
Ever since I can remember Sophie has made me cards for Father’s Day. She decorated them with buttons, tiny seashells, or bits of macaroni painted in splashy colours. Now that she is older she has dispensed with the decorations, but the cards haven’t stopped and the messages inside haven’t changed. We remain bound to one another in as primal a way as any parent and child, by our experiences, our love, and our DNA.
In 1999, the dragon that has haunted my entire life reared its fearsome head again. Within months I was living with a monster heroin and cocaine habit. Crazed and desperate, seeing no way out, I lit my life on fire. I harbour no romantic notions of what took place, only the sad admission that I robbed a bank and shot at a motorcycle cop, barely missing a woman bystander. Of all the people harmed that day Sophie remains my most enduring reminder of an innocent victim.
The day after my arrest my wife found Sophie in her room absorbed in crafting a Father’s Day card, as if by this deliberate act she could bring everything back to the way it had been. But before she finished she looked up at her mother and cried, “He’s not coming home is he?” Then threw herself on the bed, and sobbed her grief away.
We are about to observe our eighth straight Father’s Day in prison. When I first told Sophie I would be eligible for parole on her graduation day, she seemed consoled. Then I realized she thought I meant graduation that year, which was less than three weeks away. Sophie was in Grade five, and high school must have been unimaginable.
Early in my bit I pondered the idea of taking myself off the count. A psychiatrist, one for whom I have a great deal of respect, was conducting a pretrial assessment, and saw through to my private thoughts. “This isn’t about you anymore,” he told me. “You’ve had your life, you’re going to prison for a long time. This is about a ten-year-old girl. You have to show her that no matter how badly you screw up your life, you can survive, maybe even find redemption. That is the one gift you have left to give.”
I began to lay a lot of hard bricks, to rise out of my addiction, up from that pit where only the self matters. I started to reclaim the heart-place of a parent, re-entered the realm of selflessness in the small and ordinary ways.
There are days when the memory of those little button and macaroni cards fill me with a terrible caring and I am overwhelmed with the numbing regret of it all. Then my name is called for a visit. Though Sophie has learned to live with the fact her life has been diminished in some ways, her love is relentless: it jumps over the razor wire. I go back to my cell, lifted by the knowledge that everything she needs is already there inside her.