Dani's Story: A Journey From Neglect to Love (24 page)

The good news was that since there was no kitchen, for a while I was off the hook when it came to cooking. “Where are we going for dinner, Bernie?” I could learn to like the sound of that.

In fact, the next couple of weeks were miserable on all of us. Dani missed the pool; in Florida she swam every day, sometimes twice a day. I’m sure she wondered why we didn’t go to the beach anymore, where was Dorothy, where was Grandpa Bill, where were the manatees and the banana trees? I worried that sleeping on a mattress on a plywood floor in a virtually empty room would bring back bad memories for her and cause her to regress. Dani had been sleeping on the top mattress of her bed since the night we came home after the adoption in Tampa.

Luckily, that didn’t seem to be a problem, so much as the long days with nothing to do while her mom and dad hammered and glued and shooed her away. I had set aside some of her toys, books, and DVDs in a separate bag, but I knew Dani was bored. And when she was bored, she got fidgety, which might escalate to bouncing off the walls and then exploding in a nuclear meltdown.

Hoping to ward off that ugliness, I broke frequently to take her, Willie, and the dogs for a walk in the small neighborhood. We never saw people outside, the humidity was horrendous, and everyone on this blue-collar street left for work early in the morning and was gone all day. There was no pool to jump into, to cool off. The road we lived on wasn’t like the paved, flat streets in Laguna Shores. Dani had such a hard time riding her bike that she grew frustrated one day, got off, and left it in the middle of the street, where it rolled down the hill and into someone’s yard. I told her to go get the bike, but she was having none of it. I really couldn’t blame her. My attitude wasn’t much better. I handed the dog leashes to Willie and went to retrieve the bike. Dani walked on ahead of us back to the house. Ms. Phipps’s observation echoed in my head. “Boy, she is developing a temper! That’s good.” It wasn’t feeling so good to me at the moment.

Finally, Bernie had all of the floors down except the kitchen, so we could start moving in the furniture that had been in the garage/workshop for two weeks. Bernie and I carried in Dani’s armoire and bed while she and Willie were watching a movie, and she didn’t notice. My plan was to recreate Dani’s room exactly as it had been in Florida, so I asked Bernie to take her to do some errands and pick up some lunch, and I enlisted Willie to help me. He has a better memory than I do and would remember what went where, down to every stuffed animal.

Willie is a hard worker and meticulous, so within an hour, Dani’s bedroom was an exact replica of the one we had left behind in Florida, from the tile and the rugs on the floor to the prints on the wall and the shades for the windows. The Hello Kitty comforter, the pillows, and probably fifty stuffed animals were sprung from the boxes they had been confined in for the last two weeks and were happily in their places on her bed and the top shelf of her bookcase, which was filled with her favorite books.

Willie stood on the front porch waiting for his father and sister to drive up the street. When he saw the car, he opened the door and hollered to me, “They’re home!”

Bernie knew what we had been doing while they were gone, and he wasted no time getting Dani inside. I was already in her bedroom because I wanted to see her face when she first saw it. The way she had been moping around the house the last few weeks, I so much needed to see her smile, anything that would let me know that maybe we hadn’t completely ruined her life by taking her out of her comfort zone.

I heard Willie say, “Dani, we have a surprise for you. Here, hold my hand and come with me.” Their footsteps echoed through the empty living room and down the hall. Willie had his hands gently over her eyes as he guided her to the door. He took them away, and as she saw her room, her entire face lit up exactly as it had the day a year ago when we brought her home for the first time and she saw her own girlie bedroom. Just as she did that day, she leaped onto her bed, hugged her Hello Kitty pillow, and laughed for joy.

Then she did something she had never done before. She patted the bed beside her and said, “Buh . . . buh . . . buh . . . buh. Buh . . . buh . . . buh . . . buh.” The three of us looked at her, looked at one another, and repeated what she said back to her. “Buh . . . buh . . . buh . . . buh? Buh . . . buh . . . buh . . . buh?” It was Willie who shouted, “Book? You want a book?” She smiled and patted the bed again. “Buh . . . buh . . . buh . . . buh.” Willie scrambled to find her favorite, sat beside her, opened the book, and began to read. “Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see? I see a red bird looking at me.” As Willie said “red bird,” Dani patted the bird, and I believed my heart would burst.

Chapter 23

The Public Eye

While we were still living in Florida, Bernie got a call out of the blue from a woman with the Children’s Board of Hillsborough County. The Children’s Board is an umbrella agency for lots of children’s services and parenting education programs. It was the agency that put on the Heart Gallery event at GameWorks in Tampa where we first saw Dani’s photo.

The woman in charge of communications, Carolyn Eastman, told Bernie that a reporter from the
St. Petersburg Times
was interested in doing a story on successful adoptions and wanted to know if we would participate. She told Bernie it would just be a paragraph or two on each family, and that they planned to publish it around Valentine’s Day, hoping to motivate people to become adoptive parents.

Bernie told her he would talk it over with me. It went over like a brick. I said, “No, thank you!” I didn’t want to be in the newspaper. I had never even had any of my weddings listed in the paper. We were not public-eye kind of people in any way, shape, or form.

I told Bernie there were hundreds of other families in Florida who could do it and probably wanted to do it, so we didn’t need to. We were having financial issues and job insecurity and were fighting with Dani’s school to get the occupational therapy we knew it was obligated to give her. I didn’t feel as if we needed to add one more thing to our plates.

He told Carolyn Eastman, but she was persistent and called him again a week later. She thought our story was so moving and inspirational. I didn’t see how it was any more inspirational than anyone else’s, and Bernie didn’t either. But he pointed out that if it weren’t for the Heart Gallery, we wouldn’t have Dani at all. I could tell he was softening, but I stood my ground.

He called Carolyn Eastman back and gave her my number, and one of her staff members called me the next day. Thanks, but no thanks, I said.

So she called me herself. There is a reason Carolyn Eastman is in charge of communications. She definitely has a gift for it. She told me more about the Children’s Board and what it does and about what an impact the Heart Gallery has had on finding “forever families,” as they are called. I listened while I folded clothes and kept an eye on the clock.

She told me that although she had met Danielle only once, she had been unforgettably touched. I knew lots of people felt that way about Dani. There was something about her that made an immediate impression on people and made them want to help her.

Then Carolyn told me her personal story, why she felt so passionate about adoption and why she felt so drawn to our story. “I was in foster care myself before being adopted by my foster family. My foster mother actually worked for our sister agency in St. Pete for twenty years, so I know this world well. Both of my daughters are adopted. I have traveled this path my whole life, and working here is the way I give back.

“I remember when Danielle first came into care because a good friend of mine called me to sound off about the case, she was so upset over it. Garet really pushed for Danielle to be included in the Heart Gallery. She took the lead on it, as she did with everything else. You know that Garet is adopted, too?” Carolyn asked. I didn’t respond, so she continued, “When I first saw Danielle in the Heart Gallery photo, I thought she looked very sweet. But I knew how great her needs were and how much care she would need, so I don’t know that I was as optimistic as Garet was. She always believed Danielle would find a family.

“My girls like to look through the Heart Gallery photographs and pick a child to pray for, pray that the child will get a home just as they did. It personalizes the photos for them. They’ve done it since they were itty-bitty. Out of all the photos, they chose Danielle and prayed for her to find a family. Something about her spoke to them, too. I didn’t find out until later that Danielle was the child I had heard about.

“As I told Bernie, this is such an amazing story. I know it will touch people and hopefully motivate some of them to adopt, too.”

That was some sales pitch. I had stopped folding clothes and was sitting on the sofa, blown away by what she had told me. I knew Garet was adopted, but it was unbelievable that Carolyn and her girls were, too. Bernie and I had always felt that finding Dani and bringing her home was part of God’s plan, but this was bigger than we realized. It occurred to me that maybe adopting Dani wasn’t the end of God’s plan for us.

If that was so, how could I possibly say no? Besides, I told myself, it wasn’t such a big deal. A couple of paragraphs in a story that would be old news within twenty-four hours.

I told Carolyn it had to be on a weekend so that Bernie wouldn’t have to take off work and the kids would be home from school. She called me back within an hour and asked if the coming weekend would work. We didn’t have any plans set in stone—we had cut back pretty dramatically on entertainment and were sticking close to home. She said the reporter was Lane DeGregory, whom she had worked with several times and trusted completely. The same with the photographer, Melissa Lyttle. Carolyn was going to come along, and Garet wanted to come, too, so she could see us and visit with Dani.

Before the adoption, Garet had come down to Fort Myers Beach a couple of times to check on Dani because she was her adoption case manager. But her connection with Dani wasn’t only professional. Garet had loved Dani as soon as she met her at Tampa General Hospital and had made a promise that against all odds, she would find Dani a home.

The first time Garet came to check on her, though, Dani got so upset she had a major meltdown. We were all confused, especially Garet. We thought Dani would be so happy to see her. We didn’t figure out until after Garet left that Dani was afraid Garet was taking her back to the foster home because that was what had always happened when Garet picked her up.

Before Garet came the next time, we assured Dani that Garet was not coming to take her away but to play, and she was much calmer during the second visit. By the time Garet left, they were old friends again.

The Saturday of the interview I got Dani up early to leave plenty of time to get her hair brushed out and pulled into a ponytail and twist her favorite pink hair ornament around it to match her pink shirt. After breakfast I sent her and Willie outside to play so that the house would stay clean.

Bernie was out in the yard keeping an eye on the kids, and he yelled up to me from the first floor when the four women got there.

Garet squatted down in between Dani and Willie with an arm around each child’s shoulder. The photographer was easy to pick out—she was the one with the camera, and the reporter was the one with the notebook. Bernie was talking to the other lady, who had to be Carolyn. She held her hand out and introduced herself, thanked Bernie and me for agreeing to participate in the story, and introduced us to Lane and Melissa.

“I was telling Bernie that when we pulled up to your house, we saw a little boy and girl playing in the driveway. I assumed the boy was Willie,” Carolyn said, smiling at Willie, “and I remarked to Garet how nice it was that Danielle had another girl her age living in the neighborhood to play with. Garet laughed at me and said, ‘That’s Dani.’ I was flabbergasted! She has grown a foot! When I last saw her, she was brunette and so pale, so lethargic. Now look at her! She’s a blonde! It’s like a light has turned on inside her. She is unrecognizable.”

The grown-ups sat at the kitchen table while Dani and Willie went back to play in the backyard. I told Melissa I would prefer that she not take pictures of the kids unless Bernie or I were there. I didn’t know the reporter or the photographer, and I was still wary of allowing them too much access. I was nervous enough about talking to Lane.

We had never been interviewed before, so we had no idea what to expect, but it was easier having Garet and Carolyn there. It made us feel more as if we were sitting around talking with friends, and Lane did her best to put us at ease.

Melissa wanted a picture of the four of us together, and I warned her that Dani didn’t always like having her photo taken, so it would have to be quick.

Naturally, Dani made a liar of me. Bernie had his hand on one of her arms, while I held onto the other so that she wouldn’t run off or get wiggy, which was what she normally did. I don’t know what it was about Melissa, but while she got off a bunch of shots, Dani stood still, not exactly smiling but at least looking into the camera. I asked Melissa whether we might get some copies. So far, all of our attempts at family portraits at church had been thwarted by Dani’s obstinacy.

Melissa took some more candid shots while we chatted in the driveway. I was pretty much done with being interviewed and knew that if we went back into the house, we’d be sitting there another two hours. I was almost wishing that Dani would throw a fit and drive everyone off, but she was being as good as gold. I asked the women if they’d like a bottle of water for the road, and they got the hint. Garet gave Willie and Dani big hugs. I know she missed seeing Dani on a regular basis. Since the adoption, Garet was no longer on the case. Bernie was good about keeping in touch with her and Mr. O’Keefe, but it wasn’t the same as seeing her.

Lane called the next week to thank us for meeting with them, then told us that she, Carolyn, Melissa, and Garet had talked about the story all the way back to St. Pete. She wondered if we might be agreeable to her and Melissa coming back the next weekend to talk to us some more. I wasn’t crazy about the idea, but I felt that if they were willing to drive three hours down and three hours back to talk to us again, I guessed we could give them another hour. I asked what happened to running the story on Valentine’s Day, and she said they had decided that Mother’s Day would be more suitable.

We cleared another Saturday, talked at the kitchen table, then went outside to take some more photos, mostly of Dani. She had inexplicably developed a love of the camera, and Willie—who had a keen interest in photography—stuck to Melissa like glue.

While Melissa was shooting, Lane asked whether they could come back on a school day to see what Dani’s regular routine was like. Bernie looked skeptical. “Don’t you have enough for a couple of paragraphs by now?” Lane said that when she had filled her editors in on the first visit with us, they all agreed that there was a lot more to the story than a couple of paragraphs could do justice to. I felt a red flag go up, and so did Bernie. “So, what are you talking about then, Lane?”

She explained that they would like to do a feature focused entirely on Dani, with more photos, to run around Mother’s Day. Bernie and I looked at each other, and he read my mind. “You know, Diane and I agreed to a couple of paragraphs as part of an article to call attention to adoption. This is much bigger than that. We’ll need to talk about this and sleep on it. We’ll give you a call on Monday.”

I could see that Lane and Melissa were disappointed and maybe a little surprised. They were probably more accustomed to people wanting to be in the newspaper, instead of the other way around.

The next day at church, we asked our pastor and his wife for help in making a decision, especially about our discomfort with tooting our own horn and violating Dani’s privacy. Were we being fair to her? Was the story going to make her look like some kind of freak?

We all talked it over, and we prayed over it. We asked ourselves, “If only one family is inspired by our story to adopt just one child, would that be worth it?” Thinking of what might have been Dani’s fate if we had not been led to her, there was no other answer but yes. It would be worth it. We prayed that Lane and Melissa would honor our trust, that no one would be hurt, that one child might be saved, and we decided to go forward with the story.

Lane and Melissa came to talk to us a couple more times and shot more photos and even some video. We had given our permission for Lane to talk to Dani’s speech therapist at school during one of her sessions with Dani because we trusted Leslie implicitly. She was nearly as protective of Dani as we were.

Lane told us she was talking to people in Tampa who had been part of the story before us, such as Detective Holste, the physicians at Tampa General, and Dr. Armstrong at USF. The more she said, the more anxious we got. Then she mentioned Michelle Crockett, and Bernie and I both froze. It didn’t occur to us that Lane might talk to her, and Bernie especially got upset. “I don’t want to know any more about it than I already know. Why are you giving her any attention? She doesn’t deserve anything but jail.”

Lane was taken aback. She said that one of her editors had asked if she had tracked down the birth mother and whether she was going to get Michelle Crockett’s side of the story. “Her side of the story? She has no side of the story!” Bernie was incensed. I rarely saw him lose his temper, but Michelle Crockett’s name was bound to do it. Lane said she would talk to her editor and let him know our feelings.

Mother’s Day came and went, and there was no story, but by then we were so wrapped up in selling our home, looking for a house in Tennessee, and preparing for the move that it was the furthest thing from our minds. About two months after we had moved into the Gilbert Valley house, Lane called Bernie one evening right before dinner, and he put his cell on speaker phone so that we could both hear and talk to her.