Five Days Left (9 page)

Consequently, when it’s been time to return them to their parents, we haven’t felt like we’re having our innards ripped out, the way we would if we were being forced to give up one of our own children. From all you’ve said about your relationship with LMan, I have to surmise that what LaksMom said about you earlier is accurate: you have gone all-in, and instead of reserving some part of your heart for safekeeping, you have given it all to the boy.

If this is true, I suppose the only thing for you to do is to keep reminding yourself what’s best for the child. As you and I have discussed at length via personal messaging in the past, in most cases, the best thing for a child is to be with their parent(s). If LMan’s
mom has kicked her habits while serving time—and you informed me some months ago you believed this to be the case—then indeed, the best thing for him is to return to her. Focusing on that will lessen the pain of letting him go. Not by much, perhaps, given how you care for him, but hopefully by some. Good luck, my friend.

Scott checked his watch. Six minutes till his first-hour class arrived. Time for him to post a reply to Franny.

Wednesday, April 6 @ 7:54 a.m.

@Frans—I guess I should’ve asked you for advice *before* LMan moved in. You and LaksMom are right about how much of my heart I kept sequestered from him: 0%. Not sure I could’ve done it differently even if I’d set out to, though—this is a kid who gets right in your bloodstream.

Good advice to focus on what’s best for the boy, and your wisdom on that score, from our PM chats a few months ago, has stayed with me. More than that—it’s what’s getting me through this. To the extent I’m getting through it, that is; I definitely feel like my guts are being ripped out. But it’s easier to take when I’m doing it for him.

@2boys—how’re your Yanks looking after last night’s drubbing by the Orioles, you think? ;) Tigers alllll the way. I’d offer a big money bet on this if I knew I’d be able to track you down to collect. Wonder if SNWicked would make an exception to the anonymity rule for that?

Thinking about last night, and how he had been unable to sleep, he added:

@SNW—how about extending our membership into Asia? I’ve got insomnia these days and it’d be nice to have someone to chat
w/ in the middle of the night. I’ve seen all the classic games ESPN replays in the wee hours and am dangerously close to switching to infomercials to keep myself company. I need to sock away every spare cent I have for all the baby paraphernalia my wife’s been talking about—the last thing I need is to be tempted to call in a 2 a.m. order for a collection of ceremonial plates depicting all of the presidents. . . .

He shut down his laptop, stuck it in his briefcase and checked his watch. Two minutes. He thought about Franny’s too-late advice to avoid becoming too attached. And how, even if he’d heard it in time, he couldn’t have kept the little man out of his system if he’d tried. The minute he said yes to Bray last year was the minute he signed up for having his guts ripped out next week.

Bray had shown up on Scott and Laurie’s front porch, Curtis in tow, almost a year ago. The brothers were a long way from home—the apartment they lived in with their mother was a few ugly blocks from Logan Elementary, in a squalid beige cinder-block complex unrivaled for the past decade in the number of reports of domestic violence and drug dealing. The boys had different fathers and their mother never appeared quite up to the task of raising two boys on her own.

Scott had tried to talk to LaDania many times during his tenure as Bray’s coach at Franklin Middle, and he had worried out loud to his wife about LaDania’s level of sobriety after every attempt. LaDania had this vacant look about her whenever he saw her, and she always seemed distracted and unfocused. She didn’t seem to grasp the things he tried to tell her, about how talented her older son was on the court, what a future he had ahead of him. So, although Scott was surprised to see Bray and Curtis on his front porch that cold April night, he was not entirely shocked when, after he ushered them into the house, Bray whispered that he needed to talk to the Coffmans privately about a drug-related complication his mother was having.

Once Curtis was occupied in the family room with paper and crayons, Scott led Bray and Laurie to the living room, where Bray confessed that “complication” might have been a bit of an understatement: LaDania had been arrested that morning for drug possession and she faced a twelve-month sentence—eleven months in jail, followed by a monthlong stay in a halfway house. The public defender told Bray there would be no leniency, since this was her third possession charge. Arrangements would need to be made—for her belongings, her mail and her seven-year-old son, Curtis.

Bray had driven in from Ann Arbor that morning in a car borrowed from a teammate, and spent the day talking with the Wayne County public defender and trying to sort out what to do with his younger half brother. One option was to take Curtis with him to Ann Arbor. But he couldn’t very well move a child into student housing. The apartment he shared with three of his fellow teammates was crowded as it was, and hardly the kind of environment suitable for a first grader. And given his packed schedule of classes, practices and games, Bray didn’t have the time to play father for the next year.

Plus, he had talked to Curtis’s teacher at Logan that afternoon, and that conversation added another complication: despite fairly significant behavioral issues, Curtis was beginning to show some progress. Progress that might be undone if he were uprooted to a new school in a new city. The boy would return to Logan when their mother was released, and pulling him out for a year, only to return him again later, seemed unwise.

Another option was for Bray to drop out of Michigan for the year and move home. He could try to re-earn his spot on the varsity roster the following year, once LaDania was released. As much as he loved his kid brother, Bray wasn’t thrilled about this option. He’d just begun living his dream and he wanted to follow it to the end if he could. But he wasn’t ruling the alternative out. He couldn’t promise to be happy about it, but if there was no other way, he was prepared to move back.

The public defender was as keen as Bray to find a different solution.
He had seen too many kids throw away their potential by getting caught up in trouble and never finding their way out of the inner city, and he urged Bray to consider every possible alternative. Wasn’t there anyone, the defender asked, who could help out? Someone Bray trusted, who could serve as limited guardian for the boy until LaDania was free? Someone who could step in for the year so Bray didn’t have to ruin his future?

Bray had never known his own father or Curtis’s, and in his nineteen years, the only relative he’d ever met was LaDania’s mother, who died soon after Curtis was born. The Johnsons, live-in superintendents at the housing complex, had been good to the boys over the years, but they were older, Mrs. Johnson was sick a lot, and Bray didn’t want to trouble them. Their neighbors, and the crowd his mother ran with, weren’t worth considering.

Desperate, Bray turned to the person who had already done more for him, and shown more interest in him, than anyone else, including his mother. The one person in the world who he was sure would want him to stay at Michigan as badly as he wanted to stay there: Scott Coffman.

A year was a long time, Bray acknowledged, looking nervously from Scott to Laurie. It was a lot to ask, he knew that. But at least he could guarantee it wouldn’t be a day more. LaDania would spend eleven months in prison, the twelfth in a halfway house, and then she could return to her apartment and reclaim her son. Twelve months, and they would be done.

It was an easy decision for Scott, who had known within the first few minutes of seeing Bray on the court eight years earlier that there was something special about him. After one week of practice, Scott announced to Pete, and later, at home, to his wife, that Brayden Jackson was the best player he would ever coach. He had never seen such talent or work ethic in such a young player, and the kid’s height—six feet in sixth grade—made him that much more impressive.

Equally impressive was Bray’s personality. He was a natural leader on the court and in the classroom and he was mature and responsible far
beyond his years. Part of that, Scott knew, was Bray’s home situation. At her best, his mother wasn’t the world’s most attentive parent. At her worst, she wasn’t even lucid. She wasn’t an excessive drug user, Bray said—at least, not relative to the people she hung around. And he wasn’t sure he’d call her an alcoholic, either, based, again, on relativity. But she “had too many feelings” from time to time, and she had taken to smoking or drinking them away.

From what Bray had reluctantly revealed to Scott, the boy was more of a parent to his younger brother than their mother was, bathing and dressing and feeding Curtis while his mother was out, or passed out. He was a caregiver at school, too, always watching out for the younger kids, both on the team and in the hallways. When Bray approached Scott at the end of sixth grade and asked for Scott’s help in improving his game, Scott was more than happy to help the kid who was always helping everyone around him.

All summer long, Scott met Bray at Franklin the minute Scott’s summer school classes let out. They spent hours working out on the school court or, when that was occupied, in the Coffmans’ driveway. Bray’s dream was to make the Parker High varsity team, and he hoped that if he worked hard for the next two years, he’d have a shot at it. Scott thought Bray had more than a shot at it, whether he kept up the rigorous extra practice or not, but he preferred that Bray spend time on a basketball court rather than on the streets. Like the public defender, Scott had seen plenty of kids with potential blow it by getting involved with the wrong crowd. So he kept his opinion about Bray’s chances to himself and offered to keep up the extra coaching for as long as Bray wanted.

Two years later, Bray made the Parker team and quickly became a starter, and then a star. Scott and Pete went to every game during Bray’s first season, and Scott posted on his classroom bulletin board every newspaper article that mentioned Bray. There were plenty. When the season ended, Scott was bursting with happiness and pride for Bray. He was also consumed by a level of sadness that surprised him when he
realized his time with this talented, dedicated, amazing boy, whom he had come to love, would now be over. Bray had secured his spot on the Parker team; he wouldn’t need Scott anymore.

But Bray had no intention of resting on his freshman success, and the day after the season ended, he called Scott to ask if they could resume their workouts that weekend. His season as a star had been great, he told Scott, but he wanted more. He wanted to be the best player Parker High had ever had. And then he wanted to get a basketball scholarship. He had dreams of being a businessman, of making a better life for himself, his brother and his mother. And he knew there would be no college in his future unless he paid his way himself, with his talent on the court.

They continued their sessions at Franklin and in Scott and Laurie’s driveway, week in, week out, for another year. And Scott and Pete, who were at every game of Bray’s sophomore season, saw him blast through his goal by the end of the next year; the local papers declared him to be not just the best player Parker High had ever seen, but the best the city of Detroit had seen. Scott cut out the articles and headed for his bulletin board, carefully setting the prior year’s clippings in a file folder in his desk drawer to make room for the new ones.

Bray broke scoring records that had been held for decades by players two years his senior. Letters of interest started pouring in from colleges. Scouts started appearing at his games. He didn’t want to ease up, though, so they kept up their driveway sessions, and by the end of Bray’s junior year, the articles on Scott’s bulletin board reported that Brayden Jackson was considered one of the top high school players in the nation. Bray narrowed his many scholarship offers down to Michigan; he wanted to be close to home so he could check in on Curtis and his mother.

By the end of Bray’s senior year, Scott and Pete, who hadn’t missed a game in four years, along with the reporters who continued to provide material for Scott’s bulletin board, predicted that college ball would not be the stopping point for this player. They’d be seeing Brayden Jackson in the NBA.

Scott’s devotion to Bray had cost him hundreds of hours over several years, but he had loved every minute of it. He considered it a small price to pay for the enormous future Bray had created for himself through his determination and hard work. The young man whose long limbs were folded awkwardly on Scott and Laurie’s living room couch that April night the year before, his leg shaking with nerves, was mere weeks from finishing his first year of college. If his exams went as he expected, he told them proudly, he would finish the year with a good enough grade point average to get him into the business school sophomore year.

What Bray didn’t tell them, though Scott knew it, was that more and more, Bray’s business degree was starting to become a nice backup plan. Rumor was that a handful of NBA scouts had already made a few trips to Ann Arbor to see the freshman phenom at work.

For Scott, despite the suddenness of Bray’s request that they take in Curtis, not to mention the unfathomable magnitude of it, the answer was simple: he would do anything to keep Bray at Michigan, playing basketball, working toward a degree and quite possibly the pros. It wasn’t so simple for Laurie, and she said this to Scott in hushed tones after they excused themselves to confer in their bedroom about how to respond to Bray’s request.

Laurie’s relationship with Bray wasn’t at all the same as Scott’s, her investment in the boy’s future not nearly as great. The idea of having her life turned upside down wasn’t so quickly minimized by the lure of having Bray realize his dreams. The work involved in caring for someone else’s child—a child with behavioral issues, no less—wasn’t as easily waved away for her by the vision of seeing Bray in a business suit, or even an NBA jersey, as it was for Scott. They had seen Curtis from time to time over the years, at Bray’s games, or when he tagged along to the training sessions in their driveway, and they had seen what a handful he could be. An afternoon with him was one thing. An entire year was something else.