Carry On

by Lisa Fenn

  “It’s mine. And this is good news,” Leroy said, growing equally agitated. “I’m finally going to have a legacy.”

  “A what? Leroy, a legacy is something you leave behind,” I insisted. “You’re eighteen years old. You have nothing. What could your legacy possibly be?”

  He looked down and released a frustrated sigh.

  Robinson leaned over to me. “That’s just one of those things people say in the hood,” he whispered. “No one really knows what it means.”

  I locked eyes with Leroy, pleading for him to tell me this was not true. How could he be sincerely happy about an unplanned, out-of-wedlock pregnancy between two people with no jobs, minimal education, and two thousand miles between them? He stared back, wondering why I saw this as problematic. After all, his own mother had birthed Tony at the age of fourteen; Kayla’s mother had had her first child at the age of seventeen. Teenage pregnancy was not cause for alarm in their experience. It was standard operating procedure.

  “We’ll figure it out,” he said. “Kayla’s going to drop out of high school. I’ll get a job.”

  How dare he play roulette with his future? I thought. He had to finish college. Employers were not lining up to give jobs to disabled people with high school degrees. My mind raced through the decades of implications for Leroy, Kayla, and this child. Dartanyon mumbled an obligatory “Congratulations, man.” Robinson shook his head and kicked a table leg. I wept in a bathroom stall. And then we all took the stage to preach empowerment.

  The next day I sat beside Leroy, just he and I. I set aside my questions, my accusations, and my disappointment, clearing the way for him to speak. He struggled, as always, to find the words, but he managed to confide that the most difficult part of his accident was not losing his legs but letting go of the idea that anyone would want to marry him and grow a family. And now he’d found a girl who was happy about having his child. He believed this would be his forever family, the one that comes complete with nightly dinners, Christmas mornings draped in mistletoe, and cloudless, lazy summer vacations at the beach. He would never regain his legs, but with this news of a child, Leroy had recovered a lost dream.

  “But you don’t understand what goes into pulling off that idyllic sort of life,” I said. “Children don’t come out holding your white picket fence. They’re expensive and demanding. Your mom couldn’t give you the kind of life you deserved because she had you so young.” I extolled the virtues of adoption. I offered to raise the baby myself until he and Kayla graduated. Leroy countered that having a child would improve his focus; it would give him the sense of stability and family that had always eluded Kayla and him. I argued that adding a child to a teenage relationship limited in education, income, and transportation was a recipe for disaster. But once Leroy closes on a decision, there is no changing his mind. “I am going to be the father that I never had,” he said. “And that is final.”

  How could I discourage him from accepting responsibility? How could I tell him that in a world where men are chastised for walking away, he should do the same? In good conscience, I could not. And though every fiber of my being screamed that Leroy’s choice was a catastrophic error in judgment, I was left with only one remaining question: “How can I help?”

  I RETURNED TO ESPN in May 2010 after six months at home with Saxon.

  “How are Leroy and Dartanyon doing?” Victor asked. I couldn’t bear to tell him Leroy’s news.

  “They are well,” I lied. “Things are evolving.”

  “Great, such an amazing turn of fate,” he said.

  “You have no idea,” I replied. Victor handed me my next assignment—a series of World Cup soccer features that had already been shot while I was on leave. “I just need you to write the scripts and edit them,” he said. “I figured I’d keep you off the road your first few weeks back, to ease into working motherhood.” As he walked away, I moved the stack of soccer tapes aside and began helping Leroy compose a letter to his donors, breaking the news of Kayla’s pregnancy and affirming his commitment to school. They each responded supportively to Leroy, yet called me separately to express grave concern.

  Leroy had offered up little information about Kayla’s pregnancy over her first trimester, which allowed me to indulge in a bit of denial. I tried to pack Leroy’s remaining days of childless freedom with positive experiences and pushed him to resume powerlifting through the Paralympics. One of his donors paid for a gym membership, and Leroy got his bench press back up to 350 pounds. He participated in two domestic qualifying meets to earn a spot at the Paralympic World Championships in Malaysia in August 2010. We applied for his passport, had him classified, and reserved his plane ticket. The excitement served as a happy distraction, at least for me, until I received his term grades toward the end of that summer:

  C-minus, D, F.

  “Leroy, how did this happen?” I asked. “Every time I ask how you are doing, you say you’re fine. People who are fine don’t fail classes.”

  He confessed that the stress of Kayla’s pregnancy had been weighing on him. They fought over the phone late into the night, causing him to oversleep and fall behind. Furthermore, he had overdrawn his bank account again, which added to his anxiety. “I started paying Kayla’s phone bill and ordering her pizza when she has cravings,” he said. This came at the expense of July’s rent, which was overdue. I once again set aside the edit I was prepping and started tackling Leroy’s predicaments.

  AT THE END of the summer, Leroy returned from Malaysia as the eleventh best powerlifter in the world in his weight class. Dartanyon returned from a short break in Cleveland with an overdrawn bank account and an unpaid phone bill, which I discovered only when the automated message informed me that his number was no longer in service.

  “I had to buy my own food over the summer,” he said. “I couldn’t eat and pay the phone bill.”

  “Why didn’t you ask me for help?”

  “I don’t know.”

  As had been the case with Leroy’s money woes, Dartanyon’s explanation was understandable. But I couldn’t grasp how they’d failed to plan ahead for routine expenses. Why were they repeating the same mistakes? I paid the last two months of Dartanyon’s phone bill, and with him on the line, I asked to have the late fees waived. I hoped that forcing him to engage in groveling conversations with the phone company would serve as a future deterrent.

  Like many of the other athletes, Dartanyon planned to take classes while he trained. He enrolled in his first semester of school at Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado Springs that September, registering for English, computer science, and microeconomics. We agreed that a part-time course load was a good plan as Dartanyon assimilated to his new school and schedule, but a third of the way into the semester, he was already struggling in economics. “The professor is just really hard to follow,” he said. I suggested he go in for extra help. Instead, he stopped attending class altogether. And though he told me he was doing well in English and computer science, I learned toward the end of the semester that he was on the brink of failing those classes too.

  “I don’t think you’re taking school seriously,” I said. He did not respond. “Why are you not doing the work? Are you missing things because of your vision?” Still he said nothing. Feeling dismissed, I wanted to bash the phone receiver against my desk. “If you don’t answer me, I’m left to assume you’re just lazy!” This was the first time I had raised my voice at Dartanyon.

  “No, I am trying,” he answered weakly.

  “You’re going to have to start trying a lot harder,” I reprimanded. “I don’t think you know how fortunate you are to have people paying your tuition.”

  I hired a tutor, Wendy Allor, to see if she could save the semester. She called me after her initial evaluation.

  “The good news is that Dartanyon does not have any learning disabilities,” Wendy reported. “The bad news is that he doesn’t appear to have ever done a lot of learning either.” The results were grim: Dartanyon tested at a fifth
-grade math level and an eighth-grade reading level. “How is this possible?” I asked. “He graduated high school with a B average. He passed all of his standardized tests.”

  I went on a mission for answers. I began tracking down teachers in the Cleveland public school district, desperate for insight. What I learned was disheartening. From the onset, Cleveland’s schools expected less of Dartanyon as a visually impaired student. While mainstream kids needed 90 percent or higher to earn an A, Dartanyon needed only 80 percent. A passing grade for others was 60 percent; for him, it was 50 percent—or in other words, all he needed to pass a test was decent guesses. On exams, he was permitted to use calculators and have questions read aloud to him by teachers who at times used suggestive inflections to guide him. I learned of one elementary teacher who stood over him during tests and whispered things like, “You probably don’t want to choose that answer. You might want to reconsider the one above it.”

  The lagging school district felt pressure to elevate its poor graduation ratings, and that pressure trickled down to teachers, who in turn passed well-behaved kids like Dartanyon along. “Some of the instructional assistants felt badly for him, and probably helped more than they should have,” Val Barkley, head of the visually impaired program, told me. “After all, a high school diploma is better than no high school diploma.” Staring at Dartanyon’s string of community college Fs, I disagreed. Wendy confirmed that Dartanyon couldn’t outline a book chapter. He didn’t know his way around a decimal point. And he had never heard of a topic sentence, let alone knew how to compose one.

  As I stewed over Dartanyon’s deficiencies, suspicion about Leroy’s downward-spiraling grades rose within me. He continually pointed to his impending fatherhood as the cause of his decline—a plausible line of reasoning that did not initially raise any red flags to me. But now, in light of Dartanyon’s difficulties, I wondered if Leroy had similar academic shortcomings.

  I obtained Leroy’s syllabi and asked to see his weekly assignments. A bare minimum were complete. The assignments he did submit were littered with grammar mistakes and run-on sentences, and in many cases devoid of punctuation. Certainly Leroy’s external stressors were not helping, but Dartanyon’s assessment had crystallized an alarming realization: neither Dartanyon nor Leroy had any business being in college.

  I went into a full-body panic, feeling like I had deceived viewers and defrauded donors. I had blindly assumed that when someone graduates from high school, they are ready for college. I didn’t know that 42 percent of Ohio students need remedial coursework in their freshman year of college. “The Ohio Graduation Test is not a test of college readiness,” one teacher explained. “It tests very basic skills.”

  In Ohio, Leroy had passed through ten schools in twelve years, never once transferring at the start of a school year. His trail of transcripts was replete with Ds and Fs, but since he rarely finished a school year in the same place as he started it, he too was ushered along. I spun myself in circles trying to decide whether the school system or the teachers or the parents or society were to blame. But pondering why it happened was akin to Monday-morning quarterbacking: A lot of fingerpointing, but none of it changed the outcome. All that really mattered was that the jig was up, and the resulting mess had landed in my lap.

  LEROY’S BABY GIRL was due the week of Christmas. With only a two-week break from school, he and Kayla hoped to coax the baby out as soon as possible to maximize Leroy’s time with her. The night he landed in Cleveland, they guzzled castor oil together and ate spicy rice and beans. Kayla did squats while Leroy did push-ups beside her in solidarity. They were giddy kids, naively in love, and five days before Christmas, their daughter Alani Kaylee Sutton was born.

  “I had this whole plan where I was going to look at her and say ‘Hi, I am your daddy and I am going to take care of you for the rest of your life and protect you,’” Leroy said. “But instead, I was completely speechless. Something about those big Martian eyes got me, and I had no words for her beauty and perfection.”

  Leroy used his Christmas money on a tattoo, inking a replica of Alani’s birth bracelet around his right wrist. When he told me, I chastised him for foolishly spending money on a tattoo that he could have used for diapers and food. “No, it was well spent,” he insisted, drawing my attention to the scarred slices and pinpricks of his tortured teens now hidden beneath the fresh green ink. “I needed to cover the darkest part of my life with the happiest part of my life.”

  THAT SAME WEEK, I said good-bye to some of the best years of my life. I left ESPN. Navid had completed his fellowship and received his ideal job offer from the north shores of Boston—the area in which he attended college and to whose craggy coastlines he longed to return. There I planned to divide my time between caring for Saxon and freelance work. Navid would have settled for a practice in Connecticut had I pushed, but I had fulfilled so many aspirations already. It was his turn.

  On my final Friday night at work, I sat alone at my desk boxing up old beta tapes, filled with big moments and brave people. My father had told me that if I found a way to get paid for what I love, I would never work a day in my life, and that was true of this job—a job I had dreamed up on that crumpled bit of paper. Every encounter, every edit, every word I put on the air, felt like a gift.

  I wondered if Al Jaffe would be proud of the girl who’d fumbled miserably before him thirteen years before, for I was leaving knowing that the Vezina Trophy awards the NHL’s top goalie each season. I learned the difference between NFL nickel and dime defenses. I learned that sports shouldn’t be reduced to questions and answers, dates and statistics. Sports can serve as a backdrop of resilience and a field of redemption, giving us a vehicle to move from who we are to who we wish to become. Sports are treasure troves of the heart’s greatest stories, some of which need to be told and some of which need to be held.

  As the clock ticked toward midnight and my key card turned into a pumpkin, all that remained at my barren desk was a black-and-white photo of Leroy and Dartanyon, taped to my cubicle wall. I took their image in hand, comforted that this story had not ended just yet, and I walked out the door for the last time.

  THE NEXT DAY, Navid packed the U-Haul for our move to Massachusetts. I felt queasy as I watched him carry out boxes. “This is an emotional transition for you,” Navid said. “I’m sure your body is just figuring out how to process it all.” I was terribly sad to leave our first home, a home that had warmed so many memories in a short time—our marriage, Saxon’s homecoming, Navid’s residency. I went for a final walk around the nearby lake, stopping at my favorite bench to pray. Once there, I threw up.

  “You probably caught a stomach virus,” Navid said.

  “This doesn’t feel like a stomach virus. This is a new sensation,” I said. “I think I am pregnant.”

  After our first miscarriage in 2008, we learned that Navid has a genetic translocation. The top half of one of his second chromosomes has switched places with the bottom half of one of his sixth chromosomes. The mutation is not linked to a specific disease or deformity, but it leads to spontaneous abortion in 50 percent of pregnancies. After four losses between 2008 and 2010, our doctor put my chances of carrying a child to term below 10 percent. This was sobering news to Navid; while he had fallen head-over-heels in love with Saxon, he still occasionally wondered what it would be like to have a biological child. I saw the prognosis as further confirmation of my calling to adopt and was almost relieved to learn I would never have to expel a pint-size human being from my body.

  Needless to say, we were both shocked when we conceived for a fifth time, and this one stuck the landing. My pregnancy was immediately different from my previous gestations in two critical ways: I got sick, and then I got exceedingly sicker. My morning queasiness did not discriminate against times of the day. I hurled morning, noon, and night. In the first three months, I lost seventeen pounds from my already slight frame. The clinical term for my condition is hyperemesis gravidarum; the reality would be seve
n months of intractable nausea and vomiting, hospital stays for dehydration, and biweekly ultrasounds to monitor our baby’s anticipated low birth weight. Navid went ahead to Boston to begin work. My mother flew to Connecticut to care for Saxon while I writhed in bed. Once I joined Navid, we recruited care for Saxon, and in between naps and hovering over toilets, I tailed Leroy and Dartanyon’s movements as closely as my compromised state allowed.

  In February 2011, while the room was spinning early one morning, Ed Liddie called. “Listen, Dartanyon is not working out here,” he said. “He’s been late to the team’s morning lifting sessions for the last few weeks. This morning he didn’t show up at all. The guys who run the weight room have had it with him.” Liddie planned to tell Dartanyon he would have to pack his bags and return home. “But what he doesn’t know is that I’m going to give him one more chance, so if he calls you, don’t book his flight yet. I want to see if I can scare him into taking responsibility first.”

  Five minutes later, the phone rang again. A terror-stricken Dartanyon was on the other end. “I messed up bad, and I don’t know what to do,” he said, his voice quivering. “Ed is kicking me out.”

  I calmly asked him to tell me what happened. He said he had been so worried about sleeping through his alarm each morning that he would lie awake, too anxious to fall asleep. “Why didn’t you tell anyone you were having this problem?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  I suggested he first write an e-mail to his coach, explaining his sleep issues and reiterating his commitment, and then follow up with a face-to-face conversation. Dartanyon worked all morning on his letter before sending it to me to check grammar and spelling. In it, he asked to see a sleep specialist, and said he would do anything to stay. “Asking for help isn’t something I’m used to doing, but I know I need it now,” he wrote. “I have never been so scared of losing something in my whole life.”