Dani's Story: A Journey From Neglect to Love (10 page)

The police photos were in their own envelope, and I steeled myself before I pulled them out, but nothing could have prepared me for what they showed. I turned them over, closed my eyes, and rested my forehead on my palms, pressing hard as if that would make the images go away. Bernie came into the kitchen and put his hand on my shoulder. He picked up a copy of a picture, gasped, and turned it back over. “Diane, she isn’t there anymore. That’s in her past. She will never go back there again, and her mother will never have control over her again. She is safe from her.” I knew this, but Danielle had lived seven years in that hell, with a monster for a mother. What was that going to mean long term? Would Danielle ever recover? Was being safe enough? What about love and kisses and hugs, baby dolls and puppies, Christmas and the Easter Bunny?

I heard Willie’s bedroom door open, followed by the bathroom door closing. I put the folders aside and started to make breakfast, feeling as if I were on autopilot. An hour later, Bernie threw me a kiss and a “Love you” on his way out the door. I yelled for Willie to hurry, the bus was coming. Waiting outside with him at the corner, watching him play with our dogs, I tried to picture Danielle doing the same. Maybe I was crazy, but it wasn’t impossible to imagine, not after seeing the way she responded to Bernie. The bus lumbered up to the stop, Willie scrambled on and stuck his hand out the top of the window to wave good-bye. I waved back, smiled at his grinning face, and as the bus went in one direction and the dogs and I in another for our morning walk through the neighborhood, I wondered what a day with Danielle might look like.

Chapter 11

All in Good Time

We moved to Florida in the fall of 2002, happy to flee another cold, wet, and dreary Tennessee winter. We loved that Fort Myers Beach was on an island—the seven-mile-long Estero Island in the southern Gulf Coast of Florida. Accessible by a four-lane bridge at the north end and a two-lane bridge on the south, it made us feel removed and secluded. Though it was a popular tourist destination, it wasn’t glitzy, flashy, or fancy like Miami or filled with bars and spring breakers like Panama City Beach.

It had that Old Florida charm of cottages, screened porches, ceiling fans, slamming screen doors, clean beaches, narrow roads dusted with sand, and small mom-and-pop businesses. If visitors wanted luxury, they could find it, but people who came to Fort Myers Beach were typically looking for a quiet, low-key family vacation.

We felt like we were on family vacation all year. The weather was almost always sunny and warm. The bay was on one side of the island and the Gulf on the other, so close we could walk to either one. There were several parks close by with playgrounds that Willie loved. It was five minutes to great seafood restaurants, and there was always some fun festival or art show in one of the beach communities. The boys loved to skim board and Jet Ski. We spent most of our waking hours outdoors.

When we first moved to Florida, Paul was a junior, Steven was in middle school, and Willie was almost three. We liked the schools, and there was plenty of part-time work for the older boys after school and on weekends.

I didn’t think of Laguna Shores as a subdivision but as a neighborhood. It was small, with a mix of older and newer homes, big and small, all with tidy lawns of grass or pebbles, gorgeous tropical flowers, towering palm trees, and citrus, mango, and banana trees. We could literally pick our own fruit salad fresh every day. Residents had pride in their homes and in the community and watched out for one another. It was the kind of place where everyone greeted their neighbors by name. It was safe for the boys to ride their bikes and scooters on the streets, which had as many golf carts as they did cars.

There were no over-the-top houses, although a couple of fairly well-known celebrities had second homes there. They weren’t treated any differently from anyone else, which was part of the appeal. No one really paid any attention to them unless their yards got overgrown or papers piled up.

Mostly, it was retired older transplants from the north, snowbirds, which suited Bernie and me just fine. I have always been comfortable around older people, and Bernie missed his parents—who were still living in California—terribly. He was able to lend our neighbors a hand when they needed a fence fixed or a shelf put up on the wall. Paul, Steven, and Willie had their pick of nanas and papas who were all too happy to treat them as their own.

We became close to two couples in particular. The first house we bought was just down the street from Dorothy and Paul LaPiccola, who had moved to Florida from Michigan. I met Dorothy while out walking the dogs. She was like the mayor of Laguna Shores—she knew everyone and everyone’s business and on any given day was taking in mail and feeding pets for at least a half dozen neighbors when they were out of town. She was gregarious, opinionated, and in charge, the kind of person you’d describe as a real pistol, and I was immediately drawn to her. Paul was quieter and easy-going, happy to sit on the sofa and watch whatever game or sporting event was on ESPN or work jigsaw puzzles. There was always a puzzle in some stage of assembly on the table.

She and Paul had a grown daughter, who had blessed them with five grandchildren. They all still lived in Michigan, which explained her attachment to Bernie, me, and our boys. They also doted on their dog, Amber, who had her own bedroom with a full-size human bed. Dorothy cooked Amber chicken breasts for dinner every night.

Our other set of surrogate parents/grandparents were Doris and Bill Kenny from Pennsylvania; of the two, Bill was the more outgoing.

About two years after we moved to Florida, the house across the street from the Kennys came up for sale, which Dorothy knew before anyone else and told us to get on it right away. As much as I know she would have liked us to stay in her sight, the other house was on the bay, and it was an opportunity to live directly on the water that we couldn’t pass up. We could see the bay from our second-floor deck, and our own dock was less than fifty feet away through the backyard. There was a beautiful screened-in pool and a hot tub.

Bill was so excited, I thought he was going to start moving our furniture in by himself. He told Bernie that it wasn’t often you got to pick your own neighbors, and he wasn’t going to let just anybody move so close by.

The dogs and I were barely a block down the street on our walk when we ran into Dorothy, out on her morning rounds of dog, cat, and bird feeding and newspaper gathering. She peppered me with questions about the visit to the school and what we had found out.

She, Paul, Bill, and Doris had known for a long time that we were thinking of adopting, and of the four, Dorothy was the most taken aback. In fact, she told us she thought we were “out of your cotton-picking brains!” She and Paul both pointed out to us that we were on top of the world. Our Paul had graduated and moved out, Steven was close to it, William was in school, and we had our dream house with the pool.

Before we went to see Danielle for the first time, Dorothy pleaded with me not to do it. I reminded her that she and Paul had adopted their daughter, and she countered with the fact that Gayle was a perfectly healthy seven-year-old girl when she came to them.

After we saw Danielle, I gave Dorothy the highlights of the visit—Danielle’s playing with Bernie, how wonderful Garet, Mr. O’Keefe, and Ms. Perez were, how much better Danielle looked than in the pictures we had seen, how energetic she was. Thankfully, before Dorothy could ask me any more questions, my cell phone rang. Saved by the bell.

I waved good-bye to Dorothy and answered the call. It was Bernie, wanting to know if I was still going through the files and if I had found out any more information. I told him I was on my way back to the house to do just that, so I could finish before Willie got home from school at three. Bernie normally got home from work around four, but he said he was going to skip lunch and come home early so we could talk.

Back at the kitchen table, I turned to the court testimony of Dr. Kathleen Armstrong, the psychologist Garet had taken Danielle to for testing. She worked at USF—the site of the stolen chicken leg incident. Dr. Armstrong had taken the stand as “an expert in child psychology.” She stated that she had examined Danielle in October 2005 and described her as “pitiful.”

Scanning ahead, I could see that “pitiful” was the good news. I rummaged around in the pencil holder by the phone to find a highlight marker. Bernie has a tendency to skim over things he doesn’t want to see, and I wanted to be sure he got the whole picture, as bleak as it was.

. . . the child wandered around the room and had no communication skills with anyone in the room and could not use gestures or signs to express her thoughts or feelings. She made guttural sounds, had no “functional” play and failed to communicate with Dr. Armstrong or anyone else during the two hour period she was examined. . . . the child does not respond to her own name. . . . she does not engage with people. . . . she is small for her age. . . . walked on her tip toes (which is a form of neurological immaturity) and did not have much affect or emotional expression. . . . she “freaked out” if anyone tried to touch her. . . . The child wore a diaper (although she was seven years old) and could not feed herself. She feeds from a bottle but if finger fed, she choked.

Bernie and I had seen the odd tip-toe walk, as well as the constant motion. We knew about the diaper and that she had to be fed. We heard the guttural sounds, along with some bizarre animal-like screeching. But we also saw a difference in the year since Dr. Armstrong’s examination and when we met her in Mr. O’Keefe’s classroom. She had progressed from a bottle and was able to chew and swallow solid food as long as it was cut small. She didn’t freak out when I started to change her diaper, at least not until I freaked out. She actually looked tall for her age to us. And she most definitely “engaged” with Bernie when she was on the swing.

That she had made so much progress in one year seemed promising to me. But as I read on, I felt like someone was turning off all of the lights in the room until all that was visible were the streaks of Day-Glo green highlight marker on the typewritten pages.

The child is severely to profoundly mentally retarded, scoring below the one (1) percentile. . . . the child’s cognitive skills at the level of a two-month-old baby. . . . the child’s motor skills at the level of a 27-month-old toddler. The child’s global score was 50, showing that she was quite developmentally delayed. . . . the child is not autistic. . . . could find no physical basis for this child’s condition. . . . found no medical reasons for this child’s condition. . . . . the condition could be the result of severe neglect and deprivation. The information from the child’s history was consistent with severe neglect. . . . Dr. Armstrong testified that eighty percent of development happens in the first five years of life. . . . The lack of early intervention or stimulation could have contributed to the child’s permanent inability to communicate with others. She expects the child will not learn to talk and her prognosis is very poor. . . . If the child had received early intervention, in her opinion, she might have done better. . . . The child is now almost 8 years old. The lack of stimulation in her environment of the last 7 years contributed to her severe condition.

I felt as if I had been kicked in the gut, all of the air violently expelled from my body, then rage rising in me like bile.

“If the child had received early intervention, in her opinion, she might have done better.”

That statement reminded me of something I had read in an article by Dr. Bruce Perry, a child psychiatrist and an expert on the effects of severe neglect on child development, and that I had bookmarked on the computer. There they were, three little words that stood out as if they were framed in blinking neon lights on a stadium Jumbotron. “Timing is everything.”

In the article Dr. Perry wrote that “the time in life when the brain is most sensitive to experience—and therefore most easy to influence in positive and negative ways—is in infancy and early childhood. It is during these times in life when social, emotional, cognitive and physical experiences will shape neural systems in ways that influence functioning for a lifetime.”

Side-by-side CT scans of the brains of two three-year-old children—one of a healthy child, and the other of a child who had suffered severe sensory-deprivation neglect—showed the neglected one to have a significantly smaller brain. Experience plays a crucial role in the “wiring” of a child’s brain.

Areas of the brain develop, organize, and become fully functional during different times in childhood, and each area has its own timetable. There are “windows of opportunity” that must be taken advantage of or, ultimately, that window will close. Contrary to the cliché, in brain development when one door closes, it does not mean a window will open.

Early childhood is the most intensive period of brain development during the life span. The really crucial years for language development are from two to five years old, although the groundwork is laid even prior to that by exposure to language and by caregivers speaking to children.

In every aspect of child development, early nurturing is essential. Brain and biological development during the first years of life is highly influenced by an infant’s environment. During early childhood (from the prenatal period to eight years of age), children must spend time in a caring, responsive environment that protects them from neglect and inappropriate disapproval and punishment.

Deprivation of key experiences during development may be the most destructive type of child maltreatment. The earlier and more pervasive the neglect is, the more devastating the developmental problems for the child, and the degree of recovery from severe neglect is inversely proportional to the age that the child was when removed from the neglecting caregivers.

Timing is everything. How much difference would it have made if Danielle had been removed from her mother’s home the first time the DCF came to investigate a claim of abuse when she was not yet four years old? When every window had not yet closed? Instead, it took three more window-of-opportunity years for Danielle to finally be taken from Michelle Crockett’s “adequate care.”

I found myself thinking, “If only her mother had hit her or her brother bitten her.” Abuse is easier to recognize than neglect is. At least, until neglect gets to the stage when it is absolutely undeniable, as it was when Detective Holste carried Danielle out of her house. By then, the damage was done. Timing is everything.