July 30, 2006

Everything about the child is beautiful. She has beautiful hair, beautiful eyes (made even more beautiful by silver glitter on the day we meet), a beautiful smile, and a beautiful soul.

You can see a child's soul when they're new. ``Where did you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere into the here." So says the poem. But as they age? Souls often hide.

Mikaela Moore's soul shines. She is 9 years old and going into fourth grade. She lives on a quiet street in Abington with her mother, Patrice, her father, Dean, her sisters Deanna, 14, and Alexa, 7, and her new umbrella cockatoo, Sassy. She likes to write and draw and go fishing with her Uncle Scott. And she wants to be a teacher. Or a doctor. Mikaela, in many ways, is a typical kid.

Except that what happened to her and to her family is not typical.

But I am not at her house to talk about a heart infection that nearly killed her. Or how sick her sisters were, or how her father got an infection in his vocal cords and couldn't talk for three months. Or how her mother had pneumonia more than 20 times in six years. Or how a baby boy born nine months before she was died when he was just 6 months old.

I have come to meet not a victim but a young author who, along with a dozen other classmates, wrote a book.
``Angel and Meggy" is the title of Mikaela's self-published story. Angel is a red speckled ladybug and Meggy is a little girl with long blonde hair and a big smile , and they are friends. There's a blue sky, a yellow sun, and bright green grass. Everything is perfect , but then the friends quarrel and Meggy cries until Angel says ``I'm sorry" and the world is right again.

If only an ``I'm sorry" could make the world right again.

``My angel," is what Mikaela's mom called her son. ``He was the most perfect little boy." And ladybugs are her spiritual connection to him.

Mikaela never met her brother, Ryan. But he lives in her heart.

You can't tell by looking at her that she's missing a brother. Or that for the first six years of her life she was always sick, that everyone in her family was sick. Because now she is better. Now the whole family is on the mend.

Except for Ryan, who died on Valentine's Day 1996.

Dean and Patrice Moore grew up in Dorchester. They dated in their teens. They got married, lived in East Harwich, had a healthy baby daughter, and then moved to Abington, to a four-bedroom Cape.

Six months later , Ryan was born. ``He was the best baby. Always smiling." His death was seen as a fluke. A tragedy. Bacterial meningitis.

Inexplicable.

After Ryan died, Dean and Patrice and daughter Deana suffered bouts of dizziness, and had rashes and kidney infections and lung problems. ``We thought it was grief." Patrice says.

And then Mikaela was born , and she had rashes, too, and chronic strep throat. When she was 6 months old, doctors found a bacterial infection in her blood.

``It was a nightmare," said Patrice. Then Alexa was born, and her face kept swelling up. ``We all had different problems , so no one saw the same medical people."

So no one put the pieces together -- sick parents, sick kids, even the dogs were sick. The family's two cocker spaniels both developed lung and kidney disease.

The Moores had their water tested. But it wasn't the water. Dean's mother believed it was the house. So Dean went looking, and in the crawl space under the master bedroom, an addition built by the previous owner, he found ``black mold spores everywhere."

And then he discovered what he believes is the source. ``I'm out in the backyard, digging, and boom, I hit concrete." Just 12 inches from the bedroom -- against code and against logic -- there was a septic tank that had been left full when the property was linked to the town's sewer system in 1991.

Wearing protective gear, he cleaned up the mold and poured concrete over the dirt-bottom floor that separated the addition from the crawl space. And then he had the house tested. The experts said to get his family out, to tear the place down and leave everything. The house was toxic.

``The spores were like dust, and they were everywhere. Overnight, a high chair sprouted ``stuff that looked like something out of a horror movie," he said.

Mikaela's scalp started to ooze. ``The doctor thought it was goose poop from doing headstands in the park," her mother said. ``But then they tested it. She had mold coming out of her head."

The contractor who built the addition 12 inches from a septic tank is immune to any legal action. It happened too long ago. The town inspectors? They're immune, too. No one is culpable. No one is legally guilty because, while the family believes the black mold caused them to get sick, there is no definitive proof.

But, morally?

The Moores tore down their house and carted it away. And decontaminated their lot. Friends helped them. The insurance company canceled their policy, so friends helped them build their new house, too, on the cleaned-up site.
They took a second mortgage and moved in three summers ago. The house is beautiful. The girls are beautiful.

``They're healthy. That's all I care about," Patrice says.

But they still have asthma, and Patrice has polycystic kidney disease, and Mikaela has learning difficulties. And the dogs had to be put down.

``So you have three girls," people say when they meet the Moores. ``Yes, three girls," they reply.

But they had a boy, too. Ryan, called Angel by his mother. ``We didn't just lose our home," she says. ``We lost our son."
 
 
 
 

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