Dani's Story: A Journey From Neglect to Love by Diane Lierow, Bernie Lierow, Kay West Read Free Book Online Page B

absolutely delighted, and I didn’t know whether I wanted to hit him or hug him. But he had a look on his face that said, “Don’t worry so much, Diane. We’ll be fine. We can do this.” It was a look I had seen many times in our marriage, and he had always been right.
     

Chapter 6
     
    Falling through the Cracks
     
    When we left the classroom, we told Danielle we would see her again soon, but it didn’t seem to make an impression on her one way or the other. We said good-bye to Mr. O’Keefe and Ms. Perez and also told them we’d be back soon. I’m not sure if they believed us.
     
    We were tired and hungry and had a long drive ahead. Our friend Evie Barnes had kept Willie after school for us and would make sure he did his homework, but I knew he would be dying to hear about Danielle and the visit and wouldn’t go to bed until we got home.
     
    We probably would have gone to a drive-through and hit the road, except that we still had official agency business to attend to. The next step in the procedure was for Garet to do “Disclosure,” which meant giving us all of the information the agency had in Danielle’s file. It sounded very official and a little bit scary.
     
    Part of us wanted to know all of it, and another part wished that we could just burn the file and start fresh. We had heard some things about bug bites and the condition of the house, but that was all we knew. We thought it had to be pretty bad for her to be removed from the home.
     
    We drove to a Chili’s restaurant, sat down at a table, ordered, and talked a bit about the visit. Garet thought it had gone well, and so did we. Still, it seemed like our chatter was just delaying the inevitable, and Bernie—in that direct way he has—finally said, “Well, let’s get to it.”
     
    Garet reached into a folder and pulled out a stapled sheaf of papers. She gave us a copy and kept a copy for herself. The title page said Study of the Child Danielle Ann Crockett. I gasped when I saw the photo on the front—it was the same one I had seen at GameWorks. I was amazed at how different Danielle looked in the classroom a year or so later. It made me sad to see that picture again; she looked so vulnerable and lost.
     
    Garet put a small tape recorder on the table—required procedure—then turned it on and began reading aloud. This way, the potential parents couldn’t say that they were misled or not told something. I read along with our copy while Bernie listened to Garet.
     
    The report began with the biological family, headed by the mother, a forty-nine-year-old white woman who had two sons while living in Las Vegas with her husband before being widowed in 1997. Not long after he died, Danielle was conceived through a “very brief affair,” so brief that the mother didn’t know the man’s name.
     
    I read the sentence again. Even before Danielle was born, there was a huge missing piece in her history, one that would never be found. She would never know her birth father’s name, what color his eyes were, whether he was short or tall, or how he made a living. Because the “affair” occurred in Las Vegas, it was quite likely that he was from somewhere else, in town for a convention or just passing through. He never knew that she existed.
     
    I wondered what that would be like, to find out you were pregnant by someone you barely knew and who was long gone. Did the mother think of aborting or giving the baby up for adoption? What made her decide to keep Danielle? No one but the mother would ever know that, yet Bernie and I learned a lot about her from the report, with the exception of her first name. She was simply referred to as “Mother” throughout, which seemed like a bit of a stretch to me. She was born in Syracuse, New York, and graduated from high school there. At some point, she, her mother, and her two sisters moved to Florida. She claimed to have attended three years at the University of Tampa, but no proof of her enrollment there