TOTOWA, N.J. — There is a pretty, strong woman inside a palatial six-bedroom mansion on a hill with a breathtaking view.
There is a sweet four-year-old boy who on this day decides to put on a pair of boxing gloves to pummel his Uncle Justin.
There is an 18-month-old girl who relishes the role of drama queen.
There is a former New York Football Giant Super Bowl hero in protective custody inside a tiny cell on a bed too small for him inside the Oneida Correctional Facility in upstate Rome, N.Y.
THE NIGHT PLAXICO BURRESS’ FAMILY’S LIFE CHANGED
Vince Lombardi may have coined the term, but few know what it means to run to daylight better than Plaxico Burress does now.
Out of the darkness of his shame and guilt and into the arms of a wife named Tiffany who longs for a full-time husband again. Out of the long arm of the law and into the arms of a little boy named Elijah who looks just like him and a little girl named Giovanna who does not know what it is like to be spoiled by the towering figure she runs to during jailhouse visits crying out “Da-da.”
All this sorrow and loneliness later, years after Super Bowl XLII, Plaxico Burress has learned the hard way, the hard time way, that knowing he will soon be a free agent again is so much more trivial, so much less significant, than knowing he will be a free man again.
“Every time I think about it, I just get tears in my eyes, happy tears. Just so excited that he’ll actually be out and just . . . be free,” Tiffany Burress tells The Post in an exclusive interview. “Be a free man and be able to come home back to this family.”
Burress is slated to be released June 6 after serving a 20-month sentence on a weapons charge.
“Every single day, Elijah wakes up: ‘Is it June? Is it June yet? When’s June?’ ” Tiffany says.
She is a bright, ambitious personal injury attorney for Dario & Yacker who is starting an online maternity clothing line called Joiful. She has spoken with Plaxico virtually every day, visited him approximately 35 times. Elijah talks football with him.
“They talk on the phone every night for 20 minutes,” Tiffany says. “It’s pretty incredible.”
It is better to have a distant father figure than no father figure at all. Plaxico Burress, who grew up without one, can tell you all about that.
“I tell [Elijah] he’s in a correctional facility,” Tiffany says. “I tell him that he violated the laws, and because of that, he has to serve time. I don’t know to the extent that he understands that. When he gets a little bit older, I’ll go into more detail and more depth.”
Plaxico didn’t learn that Giovanna was born until she was five days old.
“Randomly, during that period, they weren’t letting him use the phone, so I actually had to write him a letter,” Tiffany says. “I called while I was in labor and I asked the correctional facility to relay that message to him, but they didn’t.”
There were tears in his eyes and the biggest smile when he held his daughter for the first time, when she was three months old, cooing, “Oh my goodness, my little princess, my little princess! Look at her chubby thighs!”
“I think the most emotional I’ve seen him was the first time that he saw Giovanna,” Tiffany recalls. “I didn’t take her up immediately because I wanted her to have some of her shots and everything to be OK. The only thing that he could experience was the pictures that I was sending him.”
Tiffany was overrun with bittersweet emotion.
“It was sad and happy at the same time,” she says. “Because I was so excited and happy for him to see her, but then it was sad in that he’s not home with her. I have to explain everything to him: ‘This is what her personality is like, this is what she’s doing.’ Whereas if he was home, he would know what she’s like, what she does.”
Plaxico and Tiffany met one night in Pittsburgh when she was celebrating the end of her first semester at Duquesne Law School with girlfriends.
“I remember he had asked me for my number, and then I didn’t give him my number, and I remember he gave me three numbers,” Tiffany says with a laugh. “Who gives somebody three numbers? Who does that?”
She called a month later. Their first date was at Red Lobster.
“I remember we ended up talking for hours,” Tiffany says. “I felt his heart. There was something there, and the more he talked, the more I even liked him even more.”
They wed in the Bahamas on June 12, 2005.
“I knew I was getting ready to marry my best friend,” Tiffany says. “We were just like, ‘Oh, we’re taking the next step in life together.’ ”
Plaxico cried that day, cried when Elijah was born, and she has no doubt he will cry the moment they are together again, when he no longer has to be inmate No. 09R3260, no longer has to walk toward her in that green prison garb and handcuffs.
When she, too, can dry her tears and be freed from her own Heartbreak Hotel.
“I remember when he had asked me if he could have a bed that fit him,” Tiffany says. “He’s 6-6, and the bed is made for somebody that’s a lot shorter than him, so his feet every night hang over the bed.”
It pained her whenever there was no phone call from him, when protective custody became more of a curse than a blessing.
“Whenever [the guards] come around, if you’re not right by the door, then you can’t come out in the evenings during those times,” Tiffany says. “So the day he would just miss it coming out, I knew he was in there 24 hours.”
She never imagined he would be incarcerated for 20 months after pleading guilty to attempted weapons possession in the second degree in the wake of the incident when Plaxico shot himself in the leg with a handgun he brought to a Manhattan nightclub.
“I’m not angry with Mayor Bloomberg because I feel like you should divert your energy in a positive way, but I do definitely feel that Mayor Bloomberg did make an example of him,” Tiffany says. “Because there were cases that were similar to Plaxico’s where [the defendants] only got a year or time even less than that.”
For two Christmases, Plaxico could not wrap the gifts, for two Thanksgivings he could not cook alongside his wife, who continued Plaxico’s tradition of handing out turkeys in his hometown of Virginia Beach. But at least Tiffany could read his heartfelt letters.
“One time he wrote me a poem,” Tiffany says, and stops to laugh. “And I was just like, ‘Oh my, what is this world coming to?’ It was a love poem. He’s never done that before.”
He turns 34 in August, and he has told his wife he feels as if he is in great shape.
“My body feels like the way it did in college,” he tells Tiffany.
A diet heavy on vegetables has made him thinner. And the trademark goatee is gone.
“I was never a fan of that,” Tiffany says. “When I saw him, I couldn’t believe it. ‘Oh my goodness, you shaved it. I can’t believe it!’ And he just started laughing.”
Former Giants teammates Brandon Jacobs, Osi Umenyiora, Michael Strahan, Amani Toomer, David Tyree, Gibril Wilson and co-owner Steve Tisch have visited Plaxico. So have fellow NFL veterans Byron Leftwich and Fred Taylor. Tiffany ran into Eli Manning at a function recently.
“He just said that he felt really bad, and he couldn’t believe that [Plaxico] was actually in there for all this time,” Tiffany says. “He told me to tell him that he asked about him.”
Plaxico wants to return to football, and the Giants are a possible landing spot for the wide receiver.
“I love the Giants,” she says. “I just want to see him happy. Wherever he wants to go, I’ll just support that 100 percent.”
She will fly to Rome, N.Y., on June 5, the day before Plaxico’s release.
“I probably won’t even sleep,” Tiffany says. “I’m hoping that they let him out right at 12:01 or something, right after midnight, since he’s technically free on June 6. It probably won’t happen, but you never know [laugh].”
She is a spiritual woman. A plaque on a wall inside the Burress home reads: Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. Hebrews 11:1.
Plaxico reads the Bible now and sends verses to Tiffany.
“I hope [people] don’t have any negative feelings towards him, and if they do, I hope they can look at it as, ‘OK, if you felt he was wrong, he served his time,’ ” Tiffany says. “I feel like they can at least think of him neutral and not bad.”
A friend has arranged for a private jet to fly straight to their home outside Fort Lauderdale when he is released. When Tiffany told Plaxico she is planning for famed Harlem restaurant Rao’s to cater the meal, he laughed and said, “I’ll be going to the bathroom. I’m not eating that till the plane lands!”
She can hear the happiness and excitement in his voice, a changed man more than ready for two years of probation.
“I think whenever you’re in that situation, you just really realize to appreciate everything that’s given to you, because you go into that situation and everything is taken away from you,” Tiffany says. “So his whole thought process about everything has changed. He appreciates everything.”
A radiant Tiffany Burress looks up at the high ceiling inside their three-story home.
“I love how the light comes in,” she says.
On June 6, finally, Plaxico Burress and his family can run to daylight.