Broken Doll Read Free Page A

months,” recalled Gelo. “He crawled at thirteen months, walked with an orthopedic walker at twenty-two months, and on his second birthday took his first independent steps. He survived and thrived, although his mother didn’t.”
    Shortly after requesting that her parental rights be terminated so the child could be adopted by “the only mom and dad he has ever known,” her drinking and drugging took their toll. She had cirrhosis, meningitis, hepatitis, renal failure, sepsis, and had been assaulted and beaten at a party. After two weeks in a coma and on a respirator, she woke up, looked at Julie Gelo and the pictures of her children, and passed on. “She was twenty-eight years old at her death, and both her parents died in their early thirties from alcohol,” recalled Gelo. The adoption was completed in October 1995.
    Illumed by the above history, Feather Rahier’s request for adoption by Gelo would appear both logical and prudent. Seeking outward stability as an anchor for inward instability, Feather sought a situation of inclusive permanence.
    Sadly, there was nothing permanent in Feather’s immediate future, least of all her own moods. Troubled and volatile, Feather was often found crying in her closet. “The next minute, she could be exploding in anger,” said Gelo. “It was very hard on her and on the rest of our family.”
    The youngster’s pediatrician wrote to the prosecutor’s office asking, if possible, that Feather be excused from having to testify. “He felt that all of this was having a real negative impact on her mental health,” said Gelo. “He was afraid that we would end up losing her totally.”
    Gelo repeatedly assured Feather that everyone was doing everything in his or her power to keep everything as easy, nontraumatic, and safe for her as possible. These assurances failed to calm Feather’s fears.
    â€œI would go in to check on her at night, and sometimes she would be thrashing around in her sleep. If I went to lay my hand on her shoulder, and went to talk with her and say, ‘Feather, it’s okay,’ she would kind of thrash at me with her hands and say, ‘Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, leave me alone.’”
    Feather’s behavior became more troublesome as the date of Clark’s trial grew closer. “She was attempting to draw attention to herself or cry out for help in some ways,” said Gelo. “She would come and tell me what she was doing and they were behaviors that she knew would get consequences, or knew would get attention, you know, from me and from the other people in her life. And it was things like accepting a bottle of cider from a winery down the hill from us that had alcohol in it and drinking part of that bottle, but bringing the rest of it home and giving it to me.”
    Feather also wore very provocative clothing to school—outfits that were not provocative when first purchased. “She was taking all of the new clothing that we had bought her and cutting it up and making it very sexualized—cutting, you know, the pants to be very short, or the T-shirt, so that they would expose her midriff,” Gelo said. “That isn’t what she would leave the house in the morning with, but she would carry these clothes in her backpack and change. And I would get calls from the school asking that I bring her more appropriate clothing.”
    One day, Feather vanished from school after first period. Students and teachers overheard her say that she was leaving with two boys. “The story was that they were going to a boy’s house,” Gelo recalled, “because the boys wanted to do drugs. Feather wanted to go along to do her ‘wild thing’ that day. She was back in school by the beginning of fourth hour, and didn’t appear intoxicated or under the influence of drugs. Feather knew that when she got home, she would be getting