Five Days Left Read online

  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 t
his 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.

  Plus, she reminded him, she had dreams, too, and one in particular: to have a family of her own. They had spent the past three years trying to get pregnant—years that involved a considerable amount of heartbreak, frustration and tense moments between them, not to mention countless doctor’s appointments, fertility tests and IVF. The first IVF round hadn’t worked, and they had recently concluded they had the financial and emotional capacity to try only one more round, in the fall.

  All of Laurie’s energy and attention was directed toward the baby of their own they were hoping for. She didn’t see how she could direct that attention toward someone else’s child.

  Seizing on her singular obsession with starting their own family, Scott tried to sound casual as he suggested having Curtis there while they waited to start the second IVF round, and then waited to see if it had been successful, might be exactly what they needed. Busying themselves with a child would distract them from the crazy-making process of waiting, hoping, wondering, worrying. And a child with a few minor behavioral challenges? All the better to distract them, right?

  And the timing was perfect, he pointed out. It would be a relief to spend the summer months entertaining a seven-year-old instead of fretting about their impending “last chance” at IVF. If they were lucky enough to get pregnant this time, they would still have an entire school year of pregnancy. By the time their little bundle was born, their temporary charge would have gone back to LaDania.

  Laurie wasn’t entirely convinced that taking on a yearlong babysitting job was a good idea. She could think of any number of ways she’d rather spend their hopefully final child-free year. But it was true their journey to parenthood had been fraught with worry and tension, and more impatient waiting didn’t appeal to her. The distraction of having a child in the house had its allure. And she knew how important Bray was to her husband. So she reluctantly agreed.

  Curtis could stay for the twelve months of LaDania’s sentence, she told Scott. He couldn’t stay longer—by that time the next year, Laurie fully expected to be making preparations for a baby—but he could stay for twelve months.

  The following morning, Scott, Laurie and Bray met with Janice, the social worker appointed to the Jackson family case. Ideally, Janice told Scott and Laurie, they would keep Curtis for one year and one week. That would allow LaDania a week after her release from the halfway house to apply for a job and to get herself and her apartment ready for her son’s return.

  Scott looked pleadingly at his wife, who sighed, but agreed Janice’s plan made sense. That afternoon, with LaDania’s blessing, along with her signature on the limited-guardianship placement plan form, the four of them appeared before the judge to request the Coffmans be made Curtis’s limited guardians for twelve months and one week. A few statements by Janice, a half dozen questions from the judge to the Coffmans and Bray and one rap of the gavel later, Scott and Laurie were Curtis’s guardians.

  LaDania had moved out of the halfway house and back to her own apartment the previous Sunday night. She was looking for jobs, Janice had reported to Scott and Laurie, and she was fixing up the apartment in preparation for having Curtis move back on Monday, after the court formally dissolved the Coffmans’ limited guardianship at the hearing set for Monday morning. And now, Scott only had until Sunday with the little man, four days left with the boy who had made him feel more like a father than a “limited guardian.”

  The fact that LaDania hadn’t called Curtis more than a handful of times all year, or even responded to half the letters he’d sent her in jail, wouldn’t be relevant to the court. Nor would the fact that Scott and the boy were connected by so much more than a one-page legal form.

  LaDania was Curtis’s mother, and Scott was merely a man who’d looked after him temporarily.

  14.

  Scott

  The joke was on Scott. Curtis had played his role of distractor as well as Scott had promised Laurie he would do. He had occupied so much of their mental energy, in fact, that Laurie credited the boy for her pregnancy. Her doctor had been telling her to try to stop obsessing about getting pregnant, to occupy her brain with other things so she could go into the next IVF round with a body that wasn’t taut from anxiety about conception.

  Curtis arrived on the scene in April, and by September, Laurie was so embroiled in behavior charts and reward systems, so consumed with getting his reading level up and his visits to the principal’s office down, that she had little time during the day to perseverate about fertility, and no energy at night to do anything but fall soundly asleep. When they found out the IVF had worked, her first statement was, “This is because of Curtis.”

  Her gratefulness for the boy’s distracting qualities didn’t translate into her wanting him around longer than the agreed-upon twelve months, though. Scott didn’t blame her for this at all. He was the one who had gone off script, letting himself get closer and closer to the little man with each passing month so that now, when it was time to say goodbye, he couldn’t bear the thought.

  For the past several weeks, they had reversed roles, and Laurie had been the one trying to convince Scott to seek distraction elsewhere, starting with the child she was carrying.

  “Our child,” she liked to emphasize, in a tone that made it clear she wasn’t happy to have to remind a father-to-be that he was, in fact, a father-to-be, and that such title was (in her mind) far more important than that of limited guardian to someone else’s boy. So far, Scott had managed to refrain from saying out loud, “How can I get excited about a child I haven’t even met yet, when I’m so upset about losing the child I already have?” But the looks his wife had given him over the past few weeks suggested his general mood had conveyed the same message.

  Like his wife, Scott had dreamed of having a family, his mind swirling with images of father-son games of catch in the front yard, hockey and HORSE in the driveway, family cookouts in the back. He had been overjoyed about the pink lines on the white stick in Octobe
r, and he’d felt his own heart might burst when he heard his baby’s heartbeat for the first time, saw her shadowy image on the ultrasound.

  He was excited. Beyond excited. Who wouldn’t be? But feelings were relative, so he had learned, and the fact was, he hadn’t been able to maintain the same level of giddiness as his wife. He had tried; man, had he tried. And then he’d beaten himself up over the fact that something so easy should require such an effort—as had his wife.

  But their baby girl was still over three months from arriving. And there was a boy here, now, who needed him. A boy who would be returning to a world of skipped meals and grimy clothes and a not-always-lucid mother. And while Scott had mostly come to terms with the concept that being with his mother was better for Curtis than being separated from her, it still tore him apart when he thought about the kind of life his little man was leaving, and the kind he’d be returning to. And it was just so goddamn hard to think about anything else.

  Scott was startled out of his reverie by the clanging of the bell announcing first hour. Moments later, muffled voices in the hallway turned into louder ones inside his classroom as a herd of eighth graders made their way to their seats for Mr. Coffman’s first-hour English class. Scott lowered the hand that had been clutching his stomach at the thought of the little man’s future after next Monday.