In Julie's case, Dr. Wilmer was adamantly committed to doing exactly that, and as everyone who knew her was aware, when Dr. Wilmer set her mind on a goal, she accomplished it. At thirty-five, Terry Wilmer had a pleasant, refined bearing, a kind smile, and a will of iron. In addition to her impressive assortment of medical degrees and a family tree that read like The Social Register, she had three other special attributes in great abundance: intuition, compassion, and total dedication. With the tireless fervor of a true evangelist dedicated to saving wayward souls, Theresa Wilmer had abandoned her thriving private practice and was now dedicated to saving those helpless adolescent victims of an overcrowded, underfunded state foster care system. To achieve her goals, Dr. Wilmer was shamelessly willing to exploit every tool at her disposal, including recruiting support from among her colleagues like John Frazier. In Julie's case, she'd even enlisted the aid of distant cousins, who were far from wealthy but who had room in their home, and hopefully in their soft hearts, for one very special little girl.
"I wanted you to have a peek at her," Terry said. She reached out to draw the draperies over the glass, just as Julie suddenly stood up, looked desperately at the fish tank, and plunged both her hands into the water.
"What the hell—" John Frazier began, then he watched in stunned silence as the girl marched toward the preoccupied receptionist with the dead fish cradled in her dripping hands.
Julie knew she shouldn't get water on the carpet, but she couldn't stand to see anything as beautiful as this fish with its long, flowing fins being mangled by the others. Not certain whether the receptionist was unaware of her or simply ignoring her, she walked up close behind her chair. "Excuse me," she blurted in an overloud voice, holding out her hands.
The receptionist, who was thoroughly engrossed in her typing, gave a nervous start, swung around in her chair, and emitted a choked scream at the sight of a shining, dripping fish directly in front of her nose.
Julie took a cautious step backward but persevered. "It's dead," she said boldly, fighting to keep her voice empty of the sentimental pity she felt. "The other fish are going to eat it, and I don't want to watch. It's gross. If you'll give me a piece of paper, I'll wrap it up and you can put it in your trash can."
Recovering from her shock, the receptionist carefully suppressed a smile, opened her desk drawer, and removed several tissues, which she handed to the child. "Would you like to take it with you and bury it at home?"
Julie would have liked to do exactly that, but she thought she heard amusement in the woman's voice, and so she hastily wrapped the fish in its tissue-paper shroud and thrust it at her instead. "I'm not that stupid, you know. This is just a fish, not a rabbit or something special like that."
On the other side of the window, Frazier chuckled softly and shook his head. "She's dying to give that fish a formal burial, but her pride won't let her admit it." Sobering, he added, "What about her learning disabilities? As I recall, she's only at a second-grade level."
Dr. Wilmer gave an indelicate snort at that and reached for a manila folder on her desk containing the results of the battery of tests Julie had recently been given. Holding the open file toward him she said with a smile, "Take a look at her scores when the intelligence tests are administered orally and she's not required to read."
John Frazier complied and gave a low laugh. "The kid's got a higher IQ than I do."
"Julie is a special child in a lot of ways, John. I saw glimpses of it when I reviewed her file, but when I met her face-to-face, I knew it was true. She's feisty, brave, sensitive, and very smart. Under all that bravado of hers, there's a rare kind of gentleness, an unquenchable hope, and quixotic optimism that she clings to even though it's being demolished by ugly reality. She can't improve her own lot in life, and so she's unconsciously dedicated herself to protecting the kids in whatever foster care facility she's put into. She steals for them and lies for them and organizes them into hunger strikes, and they follow wherever she leads as if she were the Pied Piper. At eleven years old, she's a born leader, but if she isn't diverted very quickly, some of her methods are going to land her in a juvenile detention center and eventually prison. And that's not even the worst of her problems right now."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that despite all her wonderful attributes, that little girl's self-esteem is so low, it's almost nonexistent. Because she's been passed over for adoption, she's convinced she's worthless and unlovable. Because she can't read as well as her peers, she's convinced she's completely stupid and can't learn. And the most terrifying part of it is that she's on the verge of giving up. She's a dreamer, but she's clinging to her dreams by a thread." With unintentional force, Terry finished, "I will not let all Julie's potential, her hope, her optimism, go to waste."
Dr. Frazier's brows shot up at her tone. "Forgive me for bringing this up, Terry, but aren't you the one who used to preach about not getting too personally involved with a patient?"
With a rueful smile, Dr. Wilmer leaned against her desk, but she didn't deny it. "It was easier to follow that rule when all my patients were kids from wealthy families who think they're 'underprivileged' if they don't get a $50,000 sports car on their sixteenth birthday. Wait until you've done more work with kids like Julie—kids who are dependent on the 'system' that we set up to provide for them and have somehow fallen through the cracks in that same system. You'll lose sleep over them, even if you've never done it before."
"I suppose you're right," he said with a sigh, as he handed back the manila folder. "Out of curiosity, why hasn't she been adopted by someone?"
Teresa shrugged. "Mostly, it's been a combination of bad luck and bad timing. According to her file at the Department of Children and Family Services, she was abandoned in an alley when she was only a few hours old. Hospital records indicate she was born ten weeks prematurely and because of that and because of the poor condition she was in when she was brought to the hospital, there was a long series of health complications until she was seven years old, during which time she was repeatedly hospitalized and very frail.
"The Family Services people found adoptive parents for her when she was two years old, but in the middle of the adoption proceedings, the couple decided to get a divorce, and they dumped her back into the arms of Family Services. A few weeks later, she was placed again with another couple who'd been screened as carefully as humanly possible, but Julie came down with pneumonia, and the new couple—who'd lost their own child at Julie's age—went completely to pieces emotionally and pulled out of the adoption. Afterward, she was placed with a foster family for what was only to be a temporary time, but a few weeks later, Julie's case worker was seriously injured in an accident and never returned to work. From then on it was the proverbial 'comedy of errors.' Julie's file got misplaced—"