Untitled Document
I’ve got a belated Valentine. I’m a day
late, but everything’s relative: The love story I’m about to
tell you was delayed for nearly a decade. It begins with a pair of high-school sweethearts
— Heather Siebert and Jason Morgan. They started dating in July 1994
and broke up eight months later. “He broke up with me the day before my 16th
birthday,” Heather says, “and, the day after my birthday, I found out
I was pregnant.”
Why did they break up? “Just differences and gossip and high-school
jealousy,” Jason mutters, with the dismissive tone grown-ups save for
adolescent melodrama. “He liked somebody else,” Heather says,
for the second or third time. I notice that Jason doesn’t ever admit
that she’s right on that point, possibly because, well, you’d
have to see Heather. But when they were both just kids at Southeast High
School and Jason had just broken Heather’s heart, he thought her
pregnancy was probably a ploy. He started dating someone else. Heather
didn’t; she told everybody she was carrying Jason’s child. “It was 16-year-old love,” she says.
“There was no one else. Despite the rumors, I’m not a
cheater.”
When the baby arrived, Jason elected not to sign the
birth certificate, but Heather named the child Cheyenne Nicole Morgan
Siebert — wedging Jason’s surname in, just because she was
certain.
Jason played along. His family kept Cheyenne at their
home on weekends, and they all fell hopelessly in love with the little
girl. “I loved having a grandchild,” says
Jason’s mom, Vicky. “Jason would play with her, and it was
great, because I saw him growing with her and getting attached.”
“She was pretty much my daughter,” Jason
admits. So it seemed almost like a technicality when the
Illinois Department of Public Aid asked for a DNA test. Heather’s
cousin drove them all to the Springfield Armory, where a lady sitting at a
picnic table snapped Polaroids of Jason, Heather, and Cheyenne — then
almost 2 years old — and swabbed their mouths with Q-tips. A couple of months later, they received test results
from National Legal Labs Inc. It looks like an unintelligible list of
alleles and variants and decimal points, but it ends with a statement
that’s crystal clear: “Mr. Morgan is EXCLUDED from being the
father of Cheyenne.”
Because Heather was out of town when the letter
arrived, her mother took on the task of delivering the news to
Jason’s family. “Heather’s mom called me, and we cried on
the phone together,” Vicky says. Suddenly the memory overwhelms her, and Heather, and
Jason so intensely that someone has to run and get a box of Kleenex. “Heather said we could keep Cheyenne in our
lives, but I said no, that would be too hard,” Vicky sobs, “so
we just stopped right then.”
For Jason, the test told him all he needed to know.
“Hey — DNA is DNA,” he says. “My dad’s a
correctional officer. People get sent to prison because of DNA. Obviously
she isn’t mine.”
Heather, on the other hand, was mystified. “I
didn’t know what to think,” she says. “The test was
wrong. I was not lying about this. If it wasn’t Jason, it was God
— that’s the thing I kept on saying, for years and years and
years.”
Heather and Cheyenne moved to Chicago. Jason
graduated from high school and became a carpet installer. For several years
he was involved in a serious relationship that produced two children, now
ages 6 and 3. He discovered that he really relished fatherhood, and that
revelation made him worry about Cheyenne. “I’ve got a daughter now, and it was hard
realizing that another little girl was being told I’m her
father,” Jason says. “I can only imagine what she’s
thinking — why doesn’t my dad want to see me? Why doesn’t
he want to be part of my life? All she knows about is a test separating me
and her. It was weighing on me.”
He would hear from Heather about twice a year, and
she would update him on Cheyenne. When the little girl was 5, Heather told
Jason about Cheyenne’s Christmas wish: She asked Santa Claus for a
dad. Jason decided to do what Heather had been hoping
— take another paternity test. It took some time to work out the
logistics; to save up the fee, almost $700; to find a lab. Heather got the
results on Jan. 26: Jason is definitely Cheyenne’s dad. Since then, they’ve been noticing clues that
were there all along: Cheyenne has Jason’s jaw, Jason’s ears,
and her fourth toe curls in just like Jason’s and Vicky’s. Last
Friday, while Cheyenne was spending the weekend with the Morgans, Jason
called Heather with another piece of proof: “Man, all you had to do
was bring her around me to eat,” he said. “Cheyenne hums when
she eats, and I do the same thing.”
Now he’s got her every weekend, along with his
four other kids from other relationships. “We have a blast,” he
says. “We do it all! Daddy bakes cakes, we make brownies, we get
movies, games. . . “
They’re making up for 10 years of lost love, a
decade of missing father/daughter time, a gaping hole in their family. On
Monday, they were planning to go ice skating, and sledding, and play
football, and baseball, and . . . well, how’s that for a belated
Valentine?
Contact Dusty Rhodes at drhodes@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Feb 8-14, 2007.
