Carry On

by Lisa Fenn

Leroy spoke little to me, but every sentiment he shared further cracked open the window to his heart. I collected each clue he dropped, lining them up to decipher his enigmatic code. His comments, his sketches, his physical appearance, all struck me as dares for someone to take notice. The ringed piercings through his lip and eyebrow cried, “Look up here, not down there. Look at my face, not at what is missing.” His artwork represented his inner battle with justice and injustice. He signed his sketches “Loki the Legless,” after the enigmatic god of mischief in ancient Norse mythology. Loki was the black sheep of his family who tricked his way into becoming a deity yet remained void of any true loyalties. Dynamic and flawed, Loki was depicted as being neither completely evil nor completely helpful. He ran afoul of not only societal expectations but also the laws of nature. Just when foes thought they had him pinned, Loki shape-shifted into another creature. Like Loki, Leroy prided himself in being mysterious, solitary, and unknowable.

  Shortly before the end of art class that day, I noticed whispers intensifying between Dartanyon and Jessica. She leaned closer to him, insisting upon something, as Dartanyon shook his head in disagreement. She pressed further, moving him to agitation.

  Finally, Dartanyon boiled over, revealing the crux of the issue. “For the last time, I am not sleeping with the ESPN lady!”

  The class collectively gasped and whipped their heads around toward the back of the room. Fifteen sets of hairy eyeballs waited for me to respond, which I did, physiologically: my face lit up like a Christmas ornament.

  “She’s an ESPN producer and married to a doctor,” Dartanyon continued, concerned only with his own defense. “I’m seventeen, blind, and homeless. Really?”

  The bell rang, perhaps signaling the end of my career. An accusation of sexual relations with a teenage boy is a matter for grave concern. I watched in full-body panic as Jessica stormed out and Dartanyon angrily fended off high fives from male classmates. In my own high school days, I was too inconsequential within peer hierarchy to be the subject of sophomoric rumors. This introduction to teen drama was neither pleasant nor warranting of the teacher’s condemning stare as I left the classroom. Dartanyon was propped up outside the door, staring at the ground as though waiting for a scolding. I fumbled for the words that would get us both out of this ordeal with as little collateral damage as possible.

  “Listen, if you really are destined for greatness, I don’t think it’s going to be with her,” I said. “Without trust, you’re asking for a lot of drama.”

  Dartanyon nodded. I rushed out to my car, anxious to put space between us. He broke up with Jessica later that afternoon, abruptly ending two years of dating. Jessica cried and begged him to change his mind. But Dartanyon never looked back. It seemed that for the first time, he cared about what someone else thought of his personal choices, and that someone was me.

  CHAPTER 7

  IMPASSE

  On days when we filmed at the school, I ran out to get substantial lunches for the boys in lieu of their meager cafeteria meals. If I drove them home from practice, we stopped for dinner on the way. Big Ma always cooked for Leroy, but knowing I could get one more good meal into Dartanyon that day helped me sleep easier.

  The boys’ fine-dining request typically landed us at a Subway sandwich shop: a seafood salad sub for Leroy, and the Italian combo for Dartanyon.

  “Who wouldn’t wanna eat fresh!” Leroy would shout, mimicking the Subway commercial tagline.

  “Nothin’ fresh about what you’re ordering,” Dartanyon would say. “Don’t you know better than to eat seafood out of Lake Erie?”

  “Don’t you know you’re black and not an Italian?” Leroy would chide.

  “Have them burn the bun so it’s a black Italian sandwich,” Kameron Mogadam, our cameraman, said. We’d initially used a handful of different crews, but Kameron had become a regular fixture in our days. He was a compact, fast-moving, faster-talking Persian in his early forties. Kameron liked to say that his brain ran on a caffeine-fueled stream of thoughts that had direct access to his mouth. And because he approached each day with the mind of an optimist and the heart of an aging cynic, he could be completely lovely and wholly irreverent in the same moment. Mix in a dash of self-effacing humor, and Kameron quickly disarmed even the most heavily shielded individuals. Even Leroy.

  “Your name is Kameron, and you’re a camera man?” Leroy snickered upon their introduction.

  “Don’t mess with me, Leroy,” Kameron said. “I’m slightly taller than you.”

  “Kameron the Kamera Man! Kameron the Kamera Man!” Leroy teased. “Man, that’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard!” In addition to being a gifted videographer, Kameron could engage in the juvenile sort of teen-boy humor that I could not—silly Internet videos, satirical scenes from Family Guy, and heated debates over PlayStation versus Xbox. The three of them sang songs I had never heard and quoted movies I had not seen. But after those exchanges were exhausted, Leroy and Dartanyon were completely blank slates. Any time I felt completely lost in teen humor, or on the verge of losing all control, I put my reporter cap back on and did what I do best—kill the mood with serious questions.

  “Dartanyon, what do you miss about your mom?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I guess I miss her cooking. Her pancakes were da bomb.”

  “Oh, I love pancakes too,” I said, excited about this connection. “I make them with lemon zest and cornmeal. Did she make them from scratch?”

  “Sure, like she scratched together a few nickels and got us all a box of Aunt Jemima for dinner,” he said, amused by my naïveté once again. “Yeah, I guess she scratched them up real good.” Leroy nodded in understanding.

  “Do you like your name?” I tried again. “I’ve never heard the name Dartanyon before.”

  “Only white people have time to sit around deciding whether they like their name or not,” he said, chuckling.

  “At least you have your own name,” Leroy said to Dartanyon. “I’m like the fourth or fifth Leroy in my family.”

  “Yah, but you’re the only one without legs, so you stand out over all the others.”

  When the three of us were together, I could count on Dartanyon to assume the role of group emcee, setting the rules of engagement and dancing around my awkwardness with a vibe that was always happy, always easy. Alongside Dartanyon, Leroy relaxed in my presence. But when we dropped Dartanyon off, either with a friend or a cousin or sometimes on a corner, the dynamic took a sharp turn.

  During our twenty-minute rides back to Big Ma’s, Leroy would retreat into an emotional and conversational shell I lacked the tools to crack. Was he deep in thought? Was he having phantom pain? Did he not want to be bothered, or was he waiting for me to speak first? Leroy was incredibly skilled at not showing you what he thought. I hoped he would speak first, to direct the conversation and thereby remove my risk of hitting a nerve. I feared that if I introduced any topic of substance, Leroy might recoil, reversing the weeks of positive gains. I could pepper Dartanyon with endless questions because nothing seemed to rattle him, but beneath Leroy’s surface, thin and brittle, he had a heart of porcelain.

  I rehearsed the simplest of statements silently, checking my words for notes of respect, thoughtfulness, and accuracy before volleying them out loud to Leroy. But on one such evening drive, the clanging bells of a railroad crossing filled our silence first. We reached the track as the bar lowered. Leroy looked down.

  “Sorry, bad route to take,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s fine,” Leroy replied. “I’m okay with it now.” The dirge of the engine’s horn encroached upon us.

  “You know, at some point, I am going to have to ask you about your accident,” I said. “It’ll be part of the story.”

  The shunting train passed in front of us, ringing and rumbling. Clickety-clack. Clickety-clack. Clickety-clack.

  Leroy picked at his thumbnail.

  “I was walking to school . . . the train was coming . . . and I slipped on the gravel,” L
eroy said. “My backpack got caught on the train . . . and . . . I just . . . went under.” He fiddled with the sleeves of his shirt.

  “Some people I’ve talked to think maybe you were trying to jump the train,” I said softly. “They said that kids did that for fun. I wouldn’t think any less of you if you were.”

  Leroy looked up at me with his eyebrows raised. “I lost everything,” he said. “There is nothing to gain from lying about how it happened.”

  Coal cars and oil tankers lumbered past us in a lonely cadence. As I weighed my next question, Leroy noticed me fingering the small silver cross hanging around my neck.

  “I used to go to church and sing in the choir,” he said. “I believed in God, like really believed in him.”

  He said that Big Ma sat beside him, clutching her worn Bible, covering those long hospital days with prayer. “Lord, we ask you for protection from enemies seen and unseen,” she called out, rocking back and forth in her chair. “Heal this child, Holy Father.”

  On one rare night when she went home to sleep in her own bed, Big Ma placed her Bible on Leroy’s lap. “You turn to this here book marker if you have a bad dream,” she told him.

  Lying alone with a Bible got Leroy wondering about God. “I kept asking Him ‘Why? Why did this happen to me?’” Leroy recounted. “And God never answered. Can you imagine not answering your eleven-year-old child when he’s crying alone in a hospital?”

  Leroy thought about the neighborhood kids who tortured gerbils by dangling them by their tails over a cigarette lighter flame as they flailed with fright. “That’s what I felt like to God,” Leroy said. “I was nothing more than a gerbil that He wanted to abuse for His own amusement.”

  Leroy had looked down at Big Ma’s Bible in his lap at the hospital that night. He turned to her bookmark and her underlines in Psalm 23.

  For though I walk through the valley

  of the shadow of death, I fear no evil.

  Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

  Leroy decided then that he would rather crawl through the hollow alone than be accompanied by one who had taken his legs. God could have saved him but didn’t, and that surpassed any other kind of evil Leroy could imagine. He shut the Bible and closed the door on God.

  “How sadistic and cruel of a person do you have to be to sit there and believe there is a good God?” he asked me. His eyes stayed on me, insisting upon an answer from the woman who so boldly wore a cross around her neck. I stiffened, shuffling through my index of tidy Christian answers, the ones that are supposed to fill these explanatory vacuums. Should I tell him that God is inherently just and loving and that our limited human emotions cannot always be trusted? Should I tell him that God does not cause suffering, but rather allows us free will in a broken world, where bad things happen to good people? Should I tell him that God does not always fix things in the ways we want but extends the strength to endure? I thought I believed those teachings as surely as I believed in the sun coming up in the morning. But how could Leroy trust in the existence of a loving God when so much of his experience was rooted in neglect? As the train vibrated in my bones, I could not say I would have responded any differently than Leroy had God dropped out of the race in my moment of greatest need. My tongue prickled under the demand of Leroy’s waiting stare. My once reliable ideas on faith could not neatly fold and launder Leroy’s history. I remained quiet, as did he. There seemed no answer big enough for a grievance so severe. And sometimes just sitting still in that galling impasse leads to the deepest spiritual understanding of all.

  Darkness had fallen as we pulled up to Big Ma’s house. Five stairs led to the front porch; Leroy insisted he didn’t need my help. He slid from his wheelchair onto the second step of the stoop, then hoisted his thirty-pound, twenty-eight-inch-wide chair up over his head by its wheels and laid it down with a controlled thud on the porch. I let out my breath. I didn’t know I had been holding it. This extraordinary measure was quite simply how Leroy got into and out of the house each day. He saw nothing newsworthy about it, and yet to me, it painted the discordant portrait of Leroy the Loki: heroic yet resigned, determined yet desperate, neglected yet resilient. I had to film this. I had to fix this. And as the door closed behind him, I lingered on the porch steps, wondering: If I found this young man a ramp, would God consider using it to come down and sort this mess out?

  I NEEDED TO visit the site of Leroy’s accident. And so on an early April morning under a carbon-gray sky that looked like it was holding a grudge, I went. I parked at the end of Elinor Street, whose modest homes dead-ended into the open railroad tracks twenty feet from the street. No fence had been erected to keep children at bay, no signage indicating that life could be irrevocably altered in this place. In the distance sat the General Metals Powder Company, where Leroy’s brother gasped for help. To my left was an abandoned automotive garage. Straight ahead was the steel rail that divided Leroy’s life like the spine of an open book. Most lives possess a before and an after. A truth revealed. A path chosen. Words we cannot reel back in. But the marker separating the two sides of Leroy’s story lay uniquely tangible in front of me. I folded my hands in reverence, as though visiting the gravesite of a person still alive.

  Yet how much life had this place taken from Leroy? I wondered. Who was he when he walked out the door to school that morning, and who did he become later that day upon learning he would never walk again? And is there a difference? We all live at the intersection of our essence and our experiences, but how do we tease out one from the other? As William Butler Yeats wrote, “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

  I sat beside the rusted rails, as though waiting for them to divulge their secrets. A handful of rocks and gravel sifted through my fingers—the same sharp cinders that had gouged Leroy’s cheeks as he rolled through them. I hoped that by connecting myself to the contours and textures of this place, perhaps I could better connect myself to Leroy. I lay between the rails, as though offering myself up as a messenger. What was to be learned? Where was the redemption? My body tensed in wait, vulnerable and still. No comfort came. Instead this place was loud with nothing, with no one. I forced myself to stay longer, needing to outlast Leroy’s ghosts, to free him from their haunting. I wrapped my hands around the tracks. They remained unapologetically cold. And when I finally resigned to leave, I paid homage, mourning all that Leroy lost that day—his legs, his faith, his worth.

  An hour later, I met my camera crew and a uniformed officer on Laird Street. I had called the police station the week before to let them know of my plans to film the outside of Leroy’s childhood home, and the officer had advised me not to enter the neighborhood unaccompanied. “Noon’s about the time those people start waking up,” he said. “They’ll be wondering what you’re up to.” I cringed at his “those people” remark—two words with the power to construct an entire sociological hierarchy steeped in suspicion.

  Our crew’s van followed the patrol car down the street, plodding together with the amble of a holiday parade to allow us to film what we call “scenic shots” out the passenger window. Laird’s “scenery” possessed a hazy morning-after feel, with empty beer cans and plastic cups lining the tops of rotting wooden porch railings. At several points we got out of the car to film markers of the lower class—balding tires strewn on lawns, boarded-up windows, and stray dogs, hollow-stomached and mangy, roaming for food. The old man with the crazy hair framed just right with the broken window in the background. From the leaning homes to the scrubby grass to the barefoot children roving the streets, everything on Laird gave the appearance of being uncared-for.

  I felt like I was on a field trip through poverty, riding a zoo tram through cautionary exhibits. And over on your left, through that chain-link fence, you can see the Perpetual Misfortune Display. I was doing my job, capturing the visuals of Leroy’s backstory, just as I had done for so many of my other subjects before. Yet Laird felt disturbingly different, becau
se this time I had a squad car in front of me, and eyes in the back of my head.

  If the officer was trying to protect me from drawing attention to myself, this clearly was not the way to go about it. Several residents scrambled into their homes as our van approached, “probably fearing that we were filming an episode of Cops,” our officer joked. I imagined them stashing drugs under mattresses. I imagined them pulling pistols out of bureaus. I began to pulse with the type of us-versus-them fear that I thought I didn’t possess. I caught myself thinking the worst of them, which in turn exposed the worst of me.

  We ensured that black trash bags and overgrown bushes were framed in backgrounds. We got the rusted basketball rim bending forward with a ripped net. We got the beater Chevy Impala cruising toward us with six layers of Saran Wrap duct-taped over the broken passenger window. In one trip down the street, we successfully and efficiently checked all of the boxes on our poverty scavenger hunt, equipped to show how Leroy lived as an eleven-year-old boy. Finally, we neared the corner white duplex at the far end of Laird where Leroy’s life had ended and begun anew. An older man, leathery and worn, sat on the front steps. I did not get close enough to talk to him, yet I felt that what we collected on the tapes would have spoken volumes to him, and to all of his neighbors: I don’t know you, but I’ve gathered all of the necessary evidence to demonstrate that your world is sad and shameful.

  But how far off was I? “We call this Laird Land because once people are born onto Laird, they’re like citizens of it,” the officer volunteered. “They never leave. They just move down the street, house to house, following the drugs.” Had there been no accident, would Leroy have become the sullen figure now sitting on what was once his porch? Had the train maimed him or saved him? The policeman didn’t let me wonder for long.

  “Your guy must have been real lucky to get out of here,” he said, folding his arms across his chest. “Real lucky.”

  BY MIDSPRING OF 2009, Navid and I were “paper pregnant,” which is the phrase couples use when enmeshed in the adoptive process. We filled out a forest’s worth of forms. We recruited friends to write letters of reference. We provided three years of financial records. We passed physical exams, criminal background checks, and life-saving courses. We created photo books marketing our life to prospective birth mothers. Frankly, this type of gestation suited my compulsive love of lists and tasks more judiciously than a physical pregnancy.