The Cut (6 page)

He picked up the Gatorade bottle and jogged back to the house, entering through the sliding door on the porch. Corey Jr. was sitting on a stool in the kitchen, eating saltines with peanut butter and watching Nickelodeon. Jeanine was boiling the fat out of some chicken breasts in preparation for a barbecue. She wasn't smiling, Reese noticed. She didn't smile much anymore.

“Where are the other two?” he asked.

“Upstairs, playing and fighting.”

Reese nodded. In happier times that would've been funny, but the money problems were like storm clouds that never cleared. They were always overhead, blocking out all warmth and sunshine.

“Can I show you something?” Jeanine asked, setting the stove to simmer and wiping her hands on a towel.

“Sure.”

They went through the living room, which had a thirty-foot ceiling, and into the office, furnished with a small desk, some bookshelves, a computer and printer, and a cabinet with a lock. Jeanine opened the latter and took out the latest set of overdue notices. They had arrived earlier in the day, but she'd waited to show them to Corey so he wouldn't be distracted during his workout.

He read through them quickly. More penalties, more punishments. He was beginning to grow familiar with the names. The language was increasingly hostile, the underlying sentiments more threatening. Lawyers were now involved because no one felt there was any choice. The situation was drifting out of control, and the numbers were staggering—five and six figures. Numbers he had dismissed in the past were starting to become real. He had bought a car for an old friend that cost more than his parents' combined income for a year when he was a child. He thought nothing of it at the time. Now he thought of it in exactly this way.

“I'm going to talk to Freddie tomorrow,” Reese said, hoping the thought of getting his agent involved would provide some comfort, some sense that things were happening. “I'll see if we can get something going.” Little did either of them know his agent would be calling later that very evening, after he first spoke with the Giants.

“Are you sure you're ready to play again?” she asked. “I don't want you forcing it and ending up … you know, crippled.” Tears broke free; she was unable to help that. Just the thought of it, and of everything else that was happening right now.…

He smiled and took her in his arms. “Come on, now. I'm ready. I can do it. Look, either I can or I can't. But I'm not going to sit around here and wonder about it. The only way I'm going to know is by trying.” He lowered his voice and added, “And the only chance we have of getting out of this mess”—he held up the letters—“is by trying.”

She nodded, but she clearly didn't like the idea. She had a feeling she would never know if he was being completely truthful or if he had decided to take the risk in order to keep their world intact. She knew he'd be willing to take that risk, even with the possibility of spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair, but she could not determine how great the risk really was. Truthfully, neither could he. All he knew for sure was that they had run out of alternatives.

He had sacrificed everything for this life. He would take any opportunity to hold on to it.

4

Foster

His mother sat, as she always did, in the rocking chair by the largest window in the living room. The oversized pages of her latest book hung over her legs as she ran her wise fingers over the Braille pimpling. Her face was a living catalog of expressions, revealing the emotions of each passage. Sometimes her lips moved, too, but silently.

Cleona Foster began losing her vision shortly after her sixty-second birthday. She developed headaches when she read—a favorite activity all her life—because she was suddenly having trouble seeing the text. Her primary care physician referred her to an ophthalmologist who misdiagnosed the condition, and by the time a second doctor realized she had cataracts, her vision was so cloudy that the damage was irreversible. As she had accepted so many other bad breaks in life, she accepted this one and began learning Braille while she could still detect bright light and a few hazy shapes. She also practiced getting around her small home on Caspian Avenue in Atlantic City. The last image her dying eyes ever registered was the soft-edged figure of her son, Daimon, coming into her bedroom on the afternoon of December 9, 2004, to kiss her on the cheek before leaving for work. She could barely detect his movement as he left. Then she took a short nap, and when she awoke, there was only darkness.

Daimon watched her from the doorway that separated the living room from the tiny kitchen. He watched her rock slowly back and forth, reading line after line, smiling at the happy parts and shaking her head at the sad ones. And he felt a familiar anger rumbling inside. It had been there so long that he couldn't remember the time when it wasn't. The unspeakable cruelty this woman had endured, the harshness that had been delivered upon her. The blindness, the failed marriage, the other child she lost, the lifetime of poverty. All that she'd been through—and yet there she was, smiling and happy, asking for no more than a good book and a comfortable place to read it. She'd been beaten down that far; she accepted everything now. She'd played the game of life and lost. That made her son so angry there were days when he felt homicidal.

Alicia came into the room via the door on the other side, the one that led into Cleona's bedroom. Cleona used to sleep on the second floor, but not since she'd lost her sight. After this adjustment, her entire world consisted of just four places—bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom—totaling about two hundred square feet. She might as well be in a goddamn zoo, her son thought.

“I'm putting your pills on the table,” Alicia told her, “right in front of the lamp.”

Cleona nodded. “Thank you, sweetheart.”

“Sure. And your soup will be ready in a few minutes. We'll eat together.”

“That sounds wonderful.”

“Are you enjoying the book?”

“Oh, yes, very much.” It was a comprehensive history of the Harlem Renaissance. Sometimes she read fiction, sometimes nonfiction, and she seemed to have no particular preference for either.

Alicia reached for her hand, and Cleona took it briefly before letting go. If there was one bright spot in Daimon's life, it was Alicia Spencer. She understood him, understood his suffering and his anger. She had been stuck in this sorry neighborhood all her life, too. Technically, she lived two blocks over, on Magellan Avenue, but she was rarely there. Her mother had died when she was three, struck by a public bus while walking to work, and her father, an alcoholic who couldn't hold a job for more than a few months, was violent even when he wasn't drinking. She met Daimon at the New Hope Baptist Church, which she still attended but he had given up on. They were both twenty-two, although she looked much younger. She had a beautiful, fresh-faced innocence about her, which would have been an advantage under ordinary circumstances. In this town it was more of a liability.

They clung to each other, waiting for the day when they could take flight. His athletic ability appeared to be key. By the time he was fifteen, he was six foot three and weighed more than 225 pounds. He had hands that could hold on to a catch even after receiving the most punishing hits. He was fearless when it came to using his body as a weapon, throwing blocks into defenders who outweighed him by fifty pounds or more. He let his anger fuel his passion, and none of his peers could match his intensity. It gave him an edge and, perhaps most important, had earned him a football scholarship to New Jersey's Rutgers University. Receiving that letter was one of the few happy moments of his youth. He framed it and hung it on his bedroom wall.

He decided to major in business administration. He figured if the football didn't work out, the degree would have multiple applications, landing him a job pretty much anywhere, certainly beyond the limits of Atlantic City. If, on the other hand, Lady Luck smiled upon him and he ended up with a pro team, the training would be valuable there as well.

He was tremendous on the field, first as a wide receiver, then as a tight end. He never gave much thought to the latter, but his coaches felt he was a natural at the position. He was starting for the Scarlet Knights by his sophomore year. When he graduated, scouts thought of him as a promising young prospect. A few agents called. There were whispers that he might be taken as high as the fourth round, maybe even the third. The dream was in reach!

Alicia threw a party at the house on draft day. There was pizza and beer, pretzels and potato chips, and an enormous football-shaped cake. Some of Daimon's teammates showed up, plus two of his coaches. No one had ever seen him so happy. It was as if he were a different person. The unsteady, deep-set lines that had been engraved into his brow by years of disappointment and rage were gone. He looked instead like a contented young man, cheerful and hopeful—and, in a way, like the little boy he probably always wanted to be. She was seeing a side of him she had glimpsed only fleetingly in the past.

He sat on the floor with his legs pulled up, arms hanging over his knees with his hands laced together, as he watched the proceedings from New York City. The first round went by without incident, which didn't surprise anyone. A first-round pick would've been heavenly, but it was so remote it wasn't even worth considering. Besides, Daimon had already studied all the teams thoroughly and concluded that none of them needed a tight end that badly. Of course, that was a crucial factor in this situation—team needs. If no one needed you, no matter how good you were, there was a chance you wouldn't be taken at all.

When the second round passed, the mood in the room began to change. Not much, but enough to be noticed. Even a second-round signing was a slim chance—but it wasn't impossible. The feeling of complete abandon, of unbridled celebration and the “anything's possible” mentality, began to fade. As all prospective draft picks know, the phone will ring right before a team chooses them. Usually it will be the head coach or the general manager, sometimes the owner. But there's always that call, and the magic words, “We've decided to take you,” from the other side. This call never came.

The draft resumed the next day, and everyone was there from the previous afternoon. Daimon was starting to look a little nervous, and the wavy pathways in his forehead reappeared. The first pick of the third round came and went, then the second … then the third. By two thirty, the fourth round had begun. Daimon's cell phone mocked him with its silence. People began making excuses, patting him on the back and hoping their reassurances didn't sound too much like pity. Alicia could sense his anger. Even more tragically, she could also sense the slow, epic death of his hope. In a life that had been marred by frustration from day one, here was one more dark moment to contend with. What had he done to deserve this? she wondered. Was he leading a secret life as a serial killer? A child molester? A dope dealer? It had to be something, she thought. No one should have to go through this much without a reason.

As the draft rolled to a close, Daimon's friends reminded him that undrafted free agents got signed all the time, and that some of them went on to great success—Wayne Chrebet, Priest Holmes, and Drew Bennett, to name a few. Kurt Warner won a Super Bowl MVP Award with the Rams, and Adam Vinatieri earned a reputation in New England as one of the greatest clutch kickers of all time. Daimon took their encouraging words with gratitude, but after everyone left he sat alone in his room while Alicia cleaned up. He wanted so badly to cry, but he refused to give whatever invisible forces were working against him any more satisfaction than they already had. He wanted to scream, beat his fists, break something into a million pieces. Instead, he turned on his side and went to sleep. He didn't give a damn about anything anymore.

He just wanted to disappear.

*   *   *

By July, the sting had mellowed into something more refined, adrift in the simmering cauldron of fury at the bottom of his soul. With his degree in hand, he found a job as a supermarket manager on the south side of town. He had to work the graveyard shift, the pay sucked, and the owner was a first-class prick. As he sat in his tiny office, which he shared with the two other managers—one of whom kept leaving stupid jokes on the marquee screen saver of the store's ancient computer in a flaccid attempt to bond with his fellows—he thought often about the opportunity that never was. He'd stood at a crossroads, with one way leading to unimaginable riches, the other to … this. How close had he really been? He wished there was a way to find out. Were there many discussions about him? Were there
any
? How many teams had really been interested? He knew the Bills had sent a scout, as had the Giants and the Packers. Surely their information traveled around to other teams. Scouts talked to each other. His statistics were available, both from college and from what he thought was a solid outing at the combines in Indianapolis. So was he ever a serious contender, or was he just kidding himself all along? Maybe he
was
supposed to be someone's pick, but then they changed their mind moments before their reps had to hand in that little card from their table down in the orchestra pit. Maybe it really was that close.

Then again, maybe it wasn't.

*   *   *

Alicia walked past him and into the kitchen, where she stirred the tomato soup on the stove one more time before pouring it into two small bowls. She set them on a silver tray along with a sleeve of saltines.

“You'd better get to work, sweetheart,” she told him, already sounding like the concerned and loving wife. They had talked about marriage, and she knew he'd pop the question sooner or later. Now just wasn't the time, though, and neither of them had any idea of when that time would be. “You're going to be late.”