Dani's Story: A Journey From Neglect to Love (9 page)

The words on the paper were swimming in front of me, and I realized it was because tears were falling from my eyes onto the paper. The whole day had been an emotional roller coaster. The excitement about meeting Danielle, the other children in her classroom, her fiendish behavior, Bernie’s immediate connection with her, my uneasiness while changing her diaper, and our relief that she had people like Mr. O’Keefe, Ms. Perez, and especially Garet the Angel watching over her. Then fourteen grueling pages of the good, the very bad, and the hideously ugly.

What really had hit me hardest in the report was hearing about the two previous times the DCF had been called to the house and had left her there. Aside from the obvious—to anyone but the DCF, I guess—neglect, I wondered whether Danielle had experienced something while she was wandering nearly naked and defenseless, under the “care” of her developmentally disabled brother.

What would have been different had the DCF taken Danielle into care when she was only three or had just turned four? What if, at the very least, the mother had been required to take parenting classes or take her daughter to a doctor or to speech therapy?

Instead, Danielle spent three more years with no medical care or education. For three more years she was denied love, affection, security, protection, comfort, teddy bears, hugs, lullabies, bedtime stories, good morning kisses, the feeling of sunshine on her face, and the sound of birds singing.

I couldn’t imagine how she had survived it. Reading the
Child Study
and hearing the things that Garet told us to fill in the blanks, we were amazed that Danielle had lived long enough to ever have her picture on the wall that day at GameWorks.

Seeing how much Garet loved Danielle, how Mr. O’Keefe and Ms. Perez cared for her, and hearing about Detective Holste, I began to believe that we were part of some bigger plan. I had read stories of the babies in the Romanian orphanages who ultimately died from lack of human contact. At the very least, those children were changed, bathed, and fed, but they were not given love, affection, attention, or hope, and they simply withered away. Danielle had experienced none of those things, but somehow she held on. For what? For us?

Chapter 10

Butterflies Are Free

The last page of the report was a signature page, with the name of the person who wrote it; that of Garet White, showing that she had reviewed and accepted it; that of her supervisor; her supervisor’s supervisor, and finally “Potential Adoptive Mother” and “Potential Adoptive Father.”

At that point, we could have decided not to sign it. We could have paid the check for lunch, thanked Garet for her time, wished her well in finding a home for Danielle, and driven back to our peaceful, orderly home in which resided one well-behaved and fairly quiet young man, three little house-trained dogs, and a lazy cat that awoke only to move with the sun and come into the house at night. No one would have thought badly of us or judged us.

When we first met Garet at her office before we went to the school, she told us that under normal circumstances, the procedure was for her to read the
Child Study
to “potential” parents while recording it for them, give them their copy, and get their signatures before they met the child.

But Garet knew these circumstances weren’t quite normal, to say the least. So she spoke to her supervisors, who agreed that it would be in our best interests, as well as Danielle’s, for us to meet Danielle up front, given all of her special needs and challenges. They thought it was impossible to explain on paper the struggles that Danielle was dealing with and that it was important for any family to meet and observe her before moving ahead in the process. They felt that Danielle would not be aware that we were interested in adopting her, so she would be none the wiser if we decided that she was more than we could handle. She would never know if, after meeting her, we decided not to follow through with adoption. We would just be two more people who came and went in her life.

Bernie and I looked at each other across the table and reached for the pen at the same time. Ever the gentleman, he let me sign first. In reality, we knew that signing the papers didn’t mean we had to go through with it, just as we knew that the signed papers’ calling us potential parents didn’t mean we were guaranteed to get Danielle. It was more like we were now committed to the next steps, and time would tell what might happen. But still, chill bumps came up on my arms as we signed our names, and looking at Bernie, I was afraid he was going to high-five me.

As we gathered up the paperwork, Garet suggested that we read the
Child Study
again and do some research on the Internet about brain development and speech development in children. She said we had seventy-two hours to make up our minds if we wanted another visit with Danielle, but legally we had to wait twenty-four hours to notify them either way. Bernie and I both looked at our watches. It was 4:05 p.m.

We practically ran to the parking lot to get in the car. Rush-hour traffic around Tampa is a migraine in waiting. We were eager to get back to Fort Myers Beach, sit on our deck, and watch the sunset.

We talked all the way home in the car—about Danielle, about Ms. Perez and Mr. O’Keefe, about Detective Holste and the Florida DCF. Whether it was incompetence or indifference, the DCF had, as Garet said, blown it. I asked Bernie what he and Garet had talked about while I was in the restroom collecting myself. He had asked her how she came to work in this field and how she had met Danielle. If the Wal-Mart greeter thing doesn’t pan out for him, he could be an investigator of some kind. He is so good at getting people to open up about themselves. He can be so disarming and ingratiating that before you are even aware of it, he has sucked you right in.

It turned out that Garet was adopted. She told Bernie she had always known. She even met her birth mother when she was older and had a good relationship with this woman, but Garet considers her parents to be the people who raised her. Garet was from Cleveland but was enrolled in boarding schools in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, and then in Philadelphia. After high school, she went to Boston College, then floated back and forth between New York and Los Angeles to try to break into acting. That surprised me a little bit. She was so reserved. I couldn’t imagine her getting up on stage as the center of attention.

Garet eventually went back to college to study sociology and psychology and, after getting her degree, did social work in various areas, but when she had her son six years ago, she felt a calling to work with kids who had issues. Which is how she ended up with one of the three private agencies under the umbrella of Hillsborough Kids, Inc. HKI took over many of the duties of the DCF, after some highly publicized incidents involving children who had become lost in that system. All the DCF was supposed to do was investigate reports of abuse or neglect, determine the validity of the reports, and then turn everything over to the police and the private agencies. Considering how the DCF blew it with Danielle, I was surprised it was still allowed to do that much.

If Garet wanted to work with kids who had issues, she found a bottomless pool of them in child protective services and the foster care system. There aren’t many children more prone to having issues than kids who have been physically, sexually, or emotionally abused by their parents; neglected like Danielle; or abandoned altogether.

Garet told Bernie that she just happened to be in the courtroom on the day of the shelter hearing for Danielle, which was the day after Danielle had been taken to Tampa General. Everybody had been whispering about the case, the condition of the house, the condition of the child. The police had taken photos to be entered into evidence as proof that Danielle needed to be sheltered. The hearing Garet was attending had finished, but she decided to stay to see what would happen to this girl. The DCF described the condition of the house and the child, and everyone was aghast. Garet asked the bailiff to ask the judge which care center Danielle would be assigned to, and, as it turned out, it was the one where Garet worked. Garet asked the judge whether she could have the case, if her supervisor okayed it, which apparently was not the way things were supposed to proceed, and Garet was definitely not following protocol. But she told Bernie that for whatever reason, she was drawn to this little girl whom she still hadn’t met. Garet called her supervisor, who called his supervisor and got the okay, but Garet ended up getting a reprimand from her agency and the DCF. As Bernie told me all of this, I said a silent prayer of thanks to Garet. If she had not risked pissing off her supervisors and the DCF, who knows where Danielle might have ended up?

From the courtroom, Garet went straight to the hospital and found Danielle at the nurse’s station in one of the little wagons they keep in the children’s hospital. A nurse was feeding her chocolate pudding, and it was all over her mouth. The situation was pretty overwhelming for the staff. They have a lot of sick patients to care for, and then they get this little girl who can’t speak, can’t feed herself, isn’t potty-trained, and is making animal noises and throwing herself around. Under the bug bites, the ratted hair, the pale skin, and the sunken eyes, you could see that Danielle was a pretty girl, but Garet told Bernie that it was like there was no one inside her. She looked right through everyone around her as if she didn’t see them.

After Garet showed the nurses her ID, she asked if she could take Danielle for a walk. They practically shouted, “Yes!” So Garet pulled the wagon with Danielle through the halls of the hospital. The theme of the children’s hospital is fish—they’re painted on the walls and on the floors, and there are live fish in big aquariums. Garet stopped and pointed out the fish to Danielle, but she didn’t seem to especially notice or like them.

I wondered what Danielle had been thinking, whether anything was registering. She had been indoors for years. She had never been to the beach or seen fish. She had never visited the park. She had never been taken outside of her house for any reason, except to move from Las Vegas to Florida and then from one crummy rental to another.

Garet pulled the wagon to a big picture of butterflies. She pointed to them and told Danielle, “These are butterflies, they are beautiful, like you. They fly around outside in the sun, just like you will one day.”

Bernie stopped talking. I looked at him, and he was choked up. I touched his arm and asked him what had happened. He said that Garet told him that after she showed Danielle the butterflies, Danielle reached up from the wagon toward Garet to be picked up. Garet held her up to the picture, and Danielle stretched out her hand, gently patted the butterflies painted on the wall, and smiled. Bernie said this was the moment that Garet knew there was a little girl inside, and she made a promise to Danielle that she would do anything and everything she could to find a family who wanted to take Danielle home, who would give her the care and love she had never had.

Garet told Bernie that no one else in the adoption unit thought Danielle could be adopted, but Garet always had a feeling that Danielle would find a home somewhere. She believed that there was a better place waiting for Danielle. Garet knew it would be tough, but she didn’t think it would be impossible.

Bernie laughed. Garet admitted to him that she never thought she’d find that family in a GameWorks arcade or that the initial connection would be made through the terrible photo taken on the day Danielle was admitted to the hospital. All of the social workers and the Heart Gallery people on duty that day thought we were a little bit delusional.

Besides the
Child Study
, Garet had also given us copies of legal documents from the time of the shelter hearing to that of the Termination of Parental Rights and up to the present, as well as copies of the medical reports and evaluations for Danielle, her mother, and the boys from which the
Child Study
was written. There were thick black lines drawn through the mother’s name; we assumed her last name was the same as Danielle’s but couldn’t be sure.

There was a copy of the most recent abuse report, the one that resulted in Danielle’s removal, and photocopies of the photographs the police department took of the house on the day Danielle was removed. At that point, my mental and emotional in-box was overflowing, and all I wanted was to go home and see Willie.

I turned back to Bernie, who was replaying the classroom visit out loud, with as much enthusiasm as if we had been to a grade school pageant or field day. He was thrilled about the connection he had made with Danielle through the swing and the Slinky, and he was convinced that she had connected with him, too. “Diane, she made eye contact with me! They said she had never done that with a stranger before. They were crying over it! It was incredible.”

If he believed that she had connected with him, then I believed it, too. I was glad to see him so excited—he had certainly come a long way since telling me I was crazy for wanting to bring another child into our home. Hello, pot, kettle speaking. At this point, he was possibly crazier than me.

I was the pragmatic one in our marriage. I needed to form a realistic picture of how bringing this little girl into our home would affect our family, especially Willie, who had been sold on the idea of adoption, thinking that he would have a playmate. How much of a playmate would or could Danielle ever be? She would need an extraordinary amount of attention, which would mean less attention for Willie He was a sweet-natured, compassionate, patient, incredibly generous and nurturing child, but would Danielle be such a burden that he would come to resent her?

We could not possibly make a decision about the impact on Willie without his input. How he felt about it would be key, so he had to be nearly as informed as we were. There would be things that would be tough for a nine-year-old boy to hear and almost impossible to understand. Willie had never known anything but love from everyone around him. How could he possibly comprehend what happens to a little girl who has never known love at all?

It was dark, close to his bedtime, when we picked him up from Evie’s house. After giving Willie a short version of the day, promising to elaborate at dinner the next night, and settling him in, Bernie and I both fell into bed, but only one of us fell asleep. I stared at the ceiling, then at the clock beside the bed, and then the ceiling again, hoping that the whirling blades of the ceiling fan might do the trick. But my mind was racing, and I was curious about what was in the other papers Garet had given us. Finally, about 3 a.m., two hours before I normally get up, I figured that as long as my brain was so busy, I might as well put it to good use. I got out of bed, went to the kitchen, started some coffee, got the folders, and sat down at the kitchen table.

The court papers were long and laborious to slog through, and we already knew the results of the hearing from what was included in the
Study of the Child
. I skimmed through them quickly but stopped when I saw for the first time the mother’s name: Michelle Crockett. Michelle was such a pretty name for such a monstrous woman.

I read on and found that sometime between the Expedited Petition filed a year earlier and the event at the Heart Gallery, Garet had changed jobs from case worker to adoption case manager. It really turned out to be the best of all worlds for Danielle. Garet was by Danielle’s side to navigate the first steps through the hospital, the exams, testing, and the Expedited TPR and get her into foster care when she first came into the system. Once Danielle was at least safe in the foster home, Garet then devoted herself to finding a family for the little girl.