Dani's Story: A Journey From Neglect to Love (4 page)

Chapter 3

The Girl in the Photo

It is 160 miles from our quiet little subdivision in Fort Myers Beach to Ybor City, but on a late fall morning in 2006, it seemed like it was taking Bernie and me forever to get from point A to point B. As it turned out, that three-hour drive was the easiest part of the journey we were starting.

Willie was in the backseat and already bored, but Bernie and I were anxious. Navigating through the narrow streets of this unfamiliar area was challenging enough, but knowing that once we parked the car and walked into GameWorks, we would be stepping into completely uncharted territory was unnerving.

We knew about the Heart Gallery of Tampa Bay from our online searches for adoptable children. Children who are available for adoption and are selected to participate have a portrait taken by a professional photographer, which is then put online in the Heart Gallery with a couple of paragraphs of information and usually a bit of audio from the child. “My name is Ian, I’m twelve years old, I get good grades in school, my favorite subject is science, I play baseball and hope to grow up to be a major leaguer.”

The event in Ybor City was going to be a live version of the website. There would be kids in foster care who were available for adoption onsite for prospective adoptive parents to meet in person and spend some time with. People could get more information about children they were interested in. It was supposed to be “fun,” but we were not having fun yet.

We are not arcade kind of people. My boys had no time for video games when they were smaller and the three of us were living in the country. There were too many chores to be done after school and in between homework, dinner, and bedtime. When Bernie and I married and we still lived in Tennessee, it seemed like we always had some big project going on, and the boys were expected to pitch in.

In my opinion, an arcade is like a kiddie-size version of casinos. Artificially lit, cacophonous, frenetic, addictive, and a big waste of money. We left daylight behind and walked into a cavernous room filled with loud machines, blinking neon lights, simulated weapons, junk food, and about a hundred kids from toddlers to teens showing clear proof of the effects of all of those. This is your brain on arcade.

But for the Heart Gallery, there is a method to the madness. The crazy environment provides a distraction from the reality of this event—these are children who for the most part have been abused, neglected, abandoned, or literally thrown away. They are on display, jostling one another for a position, looking for ways to stand out, auditioning to become a part of what is known in the adoption world as a “forever family.” I thought it was like a bad combination of speed dating and
Survivor
.

Everybody loves babies. What’s not to love? There they lie, swaddled in soft, pastel-colored blankets, with round cheeks, adorable toothless gums and hairless fuzzy heads, little fingers reaching for yours, perfect little toes, cooing and babbling. Like precious little puppies and kittens, minus fur, fangs, and claws.

But even the four-year-olds here looked big to us. Bernie and I are both pretty compact—he is barely 5’6" and I can still wear girls’ jeans. Not surprisingly, given the gene pool, Willie is small for his age and probably always will be. I could tell that some of the kids were also eight or even younger, and they towered over him and outweighed him by at least ten pounds, if not more. We couldn’t bring a giant into Willie’s wee world.

And they were so loud! Though Willie can bend my ear for hours about a beetle he saw on the deck or what might happen if he was hit on the head by a falling mango from our neighbor’s tree, he was by nature a quiet child, not prone to yelling or shrieking.

But we had just driven three hours, we were there, and we were determined to see it through. Families and children were divided into groups. During the event, the groups rotated, so that everyone had a chance to interact for a brief time with everyone else. You also got to see the kids interacting with one another and playing in a casual environment. The children all wore name tags, and the adults were each given a card. If you were interested in a particular child or group of siblings, you put their names on the card and went to a table staffed by agency employees, and they would give you more information on those children.

The younger kids were playing and having fun. They were just excited to get unlimited access to games, eat pizza, and run around like lunatics. But the older kids knew the score. They walked right up to you, introduced themselves, told you where they went to school, what grade they were in, how they were doing, and what their interests were. They wanted loving parents and a healthy, safe home so desperately, it seemed like they might burst with their yearning.

They all needed families, they all deserved families, and in a perfect world, they would all walk out of GameWorks hand in hand with their forever families to live happily ever after.

At the same time, it was just overwhelming. After two hours, Bernie was getting cranky—no doubt, he was thinking about how nice a peaceful one-child house would be. Willie looked uncomfortable, and my head was pounding. We had written two names on our card—a seventeen-year-old boy who we later found out was adopted by an older couple, and a fourteen-year-old girl whom we ended up crossing off our list when she was joined by her extremely hyperactive younger brother. The girl was darling and her brother was sweet, but Willie had just been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and we felt that adding such a hyperactive boy to our family would not be good for him. We were all getting a little discouraged.

I was ready to call it a day, but before we left, I went to the Heart Gallery desk to see if there was any information or a brochure we could take home with us. That’s when I saw the picture of the little girl on the board behind the table. Her photo didn’t look like any of the other Heart Gallery portraits, which were all in color and taken outdoors under trees, beside a flower bed, or near a pond. Some of these children held dolls, others clutched footballs, and a few carried books. All had big smiles on their faces and were dressed in their Sunday best.

The photo of the little girl was grainy black and white, even a little blurred. There was no pretty background behind her, no fun prop, and no cute outfit. In fact, I couldn’t tell what she was wearing, if anything. The dark hair framing her pale face didn’t even look combed or particularly clean, her bangs were uneven and jaggedly cut, and she wasn’t smiling. She had a vacant, distant look in her eyes. Even so, she was pretty in a very frail way and had a beautiful mouth. But it was those eyes that pulled me in and grabbed my heart. I knew I hadn’t seen her among the children that day and I wondered why. Maybe she was sick?

I looked around for Bernie and found him standing over Willie at a game, practically asleep on his feet, despite all of the noise. I grabbed his arm and told him I thought I had found a child. He perked up and looked around the room. “Where? A boy or a girl?” I told him it was a little girl. He asked again where she was. I told him that she wasn’t exactly there, as in present in the room. She was in a photograph. He looked at me like I was crazy.

“There are a hundred live kids right here. Why do you want the one in a photo?” I took him over to the board and pointed at the little girl in the picture. I could tell he was moved and possibly even a little bit curious but skeptical. Who could blame him?

I got in line, and he went to grab Willie, who didn’t have a clue what was going on. When we all made it to the desk, I pointed at the photo and asked who she was and why she wasn’t there. The woman glanced back over her shoulder and said, “Danielle? Oh, she couldn’t handle something like this. She is not used to being around this many people.” Then she looked around us and gestured to the next couple who had a filled-out card. We were dismissed.

I took Bernie’s hand, and we went to the back of the line. When we got to the front again, I asked more questions. The people were nice but were getting a little frustrated with me. We were told that the girl came from a horrible situation, that the damage she had suffered before being taken into state custody was likely permanent. The more the staff tried to steer us toward other children, the more determined I was to know more about the little girl named Danielle.

Finally, one woman looked me in the eye and said, “Trust me. Raising this child will be a lifelong struggle. You just don’t want her.”

I felt hopeful for the first time that day. If you tell Bernie and me that we can’t do something, we will do everything in our power to prove you wrong. After we heard those words, I knew Bernie would jump on board. How was this little girl ever going to find her way to a real home if everyone was told the same thing? I looked at my husband and said, “Bernie, she needs us.” He answered, “I know.”

We both knew. It wasn’t a clap of thunder or a bolt of lightning kind of revelation. There was no sense of “Eureka! We’ve found her!”

It was a calm and serene moment, an answer to our prayer, although not quite the one we thought we were praying for.

Chapter 4

The Feral Child

All the way home from the Heart Gallery event, Bernie and I talked about Danielle. On Monday, I began making calls to the agency. We weren’t told much, just that after she was removed from her mother’s home a year earlier, she was in the hospital for about three weeks and then was placed in a therapeutic foster home. The mother had appealed the termination of parental rights, but no one believed she would win, so the agency continued with the adoption process and added her to the Heart Gallery.

The agency officials said they would look over our Home Study and make sure that we would be eligible to adopt Danielle if the time came. We were happy to have made even that little bit of progress, but their examination of our qualifications was taking forever. Bernie started to pester them, calling the agency to ask what was happening and why it was taking so long.

While we were on vacation in St. Augustine, we got a call from a woman named Garet White, who was the adoption case manager assigned to Danielle. She had been at GameWorks that day, but neither Bernie nor I could place her. I’m sure everyone remembered us, the annoying crazy people who wanted to meet Danielle. Garet told us that she would be the liaison between us and Danielle and the agency and that the next step—should we decide to take it—was an in-person meeting with Danielle. She told us that would take place at Sanders Memorial Elementary in Land O’ Lakes, where Danielle was enrolled. All that we wanted to know was how soon this would happen.

Garet asked us to do one thing for her first: rent the movie
Nell
, watch it, and then call her back to let her know if we were still interested in Danielle. I had heard of the movie, but none of us had seen it. I called Paul and asked him to go to the video store and pick it up, then to come over and watch it with us. I popped a big bowl of popcorn, and we all sat down in front of the television as if we were about to watch
The Sound of Music.

The opening scenes of the mountains of North Carolina were breathtaking. We’ve never been to the mountains, and Bernie remarked that we should take a vacation there someday. At the beginning of the movie, a boy in a bicycle bumps down dirt paths to a cabin, where he is bringing a box of groceries. I was thinking, “What a beautiful place to live, so peaceful!” The mood in our living room changed pretty abruptly when the camera found the dead elderly woman on the floor, two fresh daisies covering her eyes. It spooked the boys and startled us. Now we didn’t know what to expect.

Neither do the doctor and the sheriff, who come to the house to remove the body. The sheriff is vaguely familiar with the woman, who has lived for years as a hermit in a backwoods cabin with no electricity or running water. But while they’re in the cabin, they find that the old woman has not lived alone when a young woman bursts in on them like a wild animal before running off into the woods. She turns out to be the woman’s daughter, one of twin girls; her sister died when she was young. The later scene where Nell shows the doctor her sister’s skeleton in a cave—with daisies over her eyes—was so sad, we were all crying.

The doctor goes back again and again, trying to win Nell’s trust. She has never been exposed to the outside world, she flails out at anyone who comes near her, she can scream like a beast, and when she does speak, it’s a strange language she acquired through listening to her mother’s garbled speech, caused by a stroke. Whew!

After the movie was over, we all sat there, quiet and drained. Only half of the popcorn had been eaten. Paul turned to Bernie and me and said out loud what Steven and Willie were probably thinking, “Are you two insane? Have you lost your minds?”

I got up and went to the computer. In the movie, when the doctor brought a psychiatrist to meet Nell and she reported on the woman to her colleagues, they described her as a feral child. They seemed quite delighted at the discovery, calling it rare and practically unheard of. I had heard the term but wasn’t exactly sure what it meant. I thought that even the word—
feral
—sounded ugly.

I Googled “feral child.” There were more than fifty thousand entries, and not one looked good. Wild, undomesticated, isolated from human contact, with little or no experience of human care, loving or social behavior, or human language. Some children had actually been abandoned and then raised by animals, and others were confined by their parents and denied interactions with others. There were famous stories of feral children from hundreds of years ago, like the boy raised with wolves, and fictional stories like
Tarzan: King of the Jungle
. Even more disturbing were the stories of children who are still alive now, like Genie, who was tied to a potty chair for ten years, and Oxana, who from the time she was three years old lived in a kennel behind her family’s home, raised with dogs.

My head was spinning. What was Garet trying to tell us? By the time I turned off the computer, Paul had left and everyone else had gone to bed. I looked in on Steven, pulled the sheet up around Willie, and kissed the top of his head. I got into bed beside Bernie and nudged him awake. “Bernie!” I whispered. “What are we going to do?” He opened one eye and looked at me. “Tomorrow, we’re going to call Garet and tell her we want to meet Danielle. Right now, I’m going back to sleep.” And he rolled over and did just that. I lay in bed awake for a long time, trying to remember Danielle’s pale face in the photo, wondering whether we were doing the right thing in even starting this, and praying for help and guidance. It was nearly dawn when I finally dozed off. Before Bernie left for work, he called Garet and asked her to set a date for our first meeting.