Carry On

by Lisa Fenn

  Dartanyon fretted through the weekend, like a defendant waiting for the jury to return with its verdict. We spoke several times, during which he cried and repeated that he had “lost everything.” Letting him believe his future hung in the balance was among the harder things I have done. I tried to turn this moment into a learning opportunity, talking about the importance of adjusting to structure and how real men do ask for help. “I know I messed up. I know I need to change,” Dartanyon said. I believed him.

  On Monday, Liddie summoned Dartanyon to his office. “Son, there are a hundred kids who would give anything to take your place,” he said.

  “They can’t have it,” Dartanyon replied.

  “I took a risk on you, and you’re making me look like a fool.”

  “Coach, I’ll never oversleep again,” Dartanyon promised. “I’ll do anything you ask.”

  “If you’re late to one more weight-lifting session, you are done here,” Liddie said. “Last chance.”

  For several months thereafter, until his body clock adjusted, I called Dartanyon every weekday morning at 5:30 a.m. to rustle him out of bed. I had assured Coach Liddie that Dartanyon had the discipline to make this move. I could not let something as avoidable as oversleeping be the cause of his demise. And though our morning calls were void of any pleasantries, they were somehow unifying in our unsavory missions, for as Dartanyon made his way, groggily, to the weight room, I staggered, nauseated, to the bathroom to begin another day of ceaseless vomiting.

  AS IT TURNED out, practice was not the only thing Dartanyon had trouble showing up for; he had been dodging his tutor, Wendy, as well. Wendy had helped him enroll in two more classes for the 2011 spring semester—remedial English and logic—thinking that if she worked alongside him, he could still earn college credit while she got him up to grade level. Though Dartanyon did not expressly oppose this plan, he objected in more passive ways, such as repeated tardiness and arriving to tutoring sessions without his books or his computer. Wendy sent him shuffling back to his room to retrieve his items, thereby eating up much of their time together. I began texting Dartanyon reminders thirty minutes before each appointment: Remember your books, computer, notes, and a pen. 10 a.m. By midspring he had shown up for fewer than half of their meetings, rarely notifying Wendy in advance. Dartanyon unapologetically tossed out lame excuses like having to do laundry, or a conflicting appointment with a physical therapist, or that he simply wasn’t feeling well.

  “Dartanyon, it is completely rude not to show up for appointments without calling,” I fumed. “Wendy was waiting for you, and we still have to pay her for her time.” My reprimands bounced off him like rubber balls, garnering silence. His lack of courtesy confounded me. The Dartanyon I knew was so much more considerate than this. What was he hiding? “You have to tell me what you are thinking. Help me understand.”

  “There’s nothing to understand. I just forgot, and I didn’t see your reminder until it was too late,” he would say. This was a boy who seemingly remembered every lyric to every song he ever heard. Ed reported he was absorbing judo at an alarming rate. No, Dartanyon had a lock-box memory.

  “I don’t believe you,” I would say. “Try again.”

  “Maybe I’m not cut out for school,” he said. And he was right. In his current state, he was not. I thought that if I provided him with the correct tools and constant reminders, he would embrace learning in a way that led to success. Instead, I made him loathe school and avoid me. By late spring he’d given up entirely, ignoring assignments and failing both classes. I had little energy with which to fight. I was surviving on orange Popsicles, and as I entered my third trimester, I arrived at each prenatal checkup with a suitcase in tow, for if our child had not gained an ounce, I would be induced to deliver.

  “I am sorry to give you this news, especially knowing the physical challenges of your pregnancy,” Wendy wrote, “but I am convinced that my tutoring Dartanyon is not the best use of time or money. He simply does not believe that he needs help, at least from me. I am uncertain as to what the best course of action should be for Dartanyon. I will continue to pray for him—and you. With great sadness, Wendy.”

  “I don’t like feeling dumb. I hate school. I hate studying,” Dartanyon said when I confronted him yet again. “I don’t want this goal for myself.”

  “All right, you have my blessing to quit,” I said. “Just send me a detailed proposal for how you plan to support yourself for the rest of your life, because employers are not lining up to give jobs to visually impaired, uneducated black men.”

  Meanwhile, Leroy and I were engaged in different sorts of discussions, about diapers and infant reflux—conversations I’d never imagined sharing with him. I had begged him and Kayla to remain apart for the first year of Alani’s life so that Kayla could lean on her family’s support in Cleveland while Leroy remained focused on school and built up savings. But they were determined to raise their daughter together, in Arizona. Kayla would work at night when Leroy returned from school, they said. They would save, get married, and buy a house. They were eager to build a life together. I feared they were building a house of cards. But like Dartanyon, Leroy wasn’t terribly interested in hearing my thoughts. Kayla headed west, and I braced for the worst.

  History is like gravity. It can pull you down. We wanted to succeed, but we needed someone to show us how—someone who believed our potential was more important than our past.

  —LEROY

  CHAPTER 13

  THE DARK AGES

  Our daughter, Talia, arrived on a hazy August eve after a phenomenal epidural and three pushes. I laid in recovery the next morning staring down Leroy’s financial aid papers. I had planned to finish them the day before but went into labor instead, a bit earlier than expected. I cradled Talia in my left arm as I tapped Leroy’s information into the computer with my right hand.

  “You’ve already mastered multitasking,” the nurse said. “How many children do you have?” I looked down at the paperwork, pausing to consider. “Four,” I said slowly, speaking it aloud for the first time. “She is my fourth, basically.”

  “You’re a busy mama,” she said. “How old are the other three?”

  “Twenty-two, twenty-one, and two,” I said. The nurse looked at me quizzically, clearly wondering about the age spread but careful not to offend by asking. “Let’s just say that God got creative and gave me the family I always wanted but didn’t know to ask for.”

  We had Saxon, the child I’d felt destined to mother since my own childhood, and who had already moved my father to reach across racial lines; Leroy and Dartanyon, the teenagers in need of mothering, who were sent in the direction of a white lady who thought she might be just nutty enough for the job; and now here was new baby Talia, fulfilling Navid’s hopes of knowing a biological child. Early on in my pregnancy, I questioned why God was sending this child, for at the time, Navid and I were about to begin our second adoption. We wanted to give Saxon a sibling who could share his racial identity and adoptive origins. Yet God impressed upon me that this little girl was being sent in large part for Saxon—to fortify his sense of belonging and to be his comforter. And so we gave Talia the middle name Shalom—the Hebrew word for completion—to remind us of how God longs to gather up our broken pieces and make each heart whole.

  TALIA’S HOMECOMING WAS far from the hallowed bliss of Saxon’s arrival. For as miserable as her gestation was, she arrived intent upon making life outside the womb equally uncomfortable for both of us. Her first two weeks of life were a dizzying cycle of insatiable feedings, protracted screaming, projectile vomiting, and watery bowel movements. And yet because I was propped up in a sleep-deprived survival stance—quite literally standing, breast-feeding upright, because my stitches made it excruciatingly impossible to sit down, as though I had sat on a cactus—I hadn’t the presence of mind to see that Talia’s patterns were abnormal.

  “Maybe she has a milk allergy,” my mother-in-law finally said. “Try a bottle of soy milk
and see what happens.” Talia inhaled it and went to sleep without bodily protest. But before I could enjoy the quiet, I doubled over with my own wrenching cramps and irregular blood loss, which intensified over a period of days. Navid rushed me back to the hospital on our fifth anniversary, where we learned that I had retained portions of the placenta during labor, and as my uterus contracted to its original state, these remnants were breeding infection.

  Expelling leftover fragments of placenta taught me what a bowling pin must feel like to be battered by a sixteen-pound ball for ten frames, and once I returned home, Talia greeted me with a bout of colic—incessant, inexplicable, inconsolable crying that left me wondering how I might trade her in for the gurgling baby on the box of Pampers. She screamed from nine o’clock in the morning to nine o’clock at night, forgoing naps. I had never heard of an infant surviving without naps. Her pediatrician smiled feebly and said Talia would grow out of it within twelve weeks, that colic is simply neurological immaturity and nothing to be concerned about. The concern was for my sanity, and for Saxon’s, because he took Talia’s screaming as his cue to howl along with her. I was woefully unprepared for the isolation that came with having two children under the age of two, and when Navid left for work each morning, tears flooded my eyes as I wondered how I would survive the next twelve hours. I did it minute-by-ghastly-minute, never faster, never easier. Once Talia finally screamed herself to sleep at night, I laid her down in front of the humming dryer and stumbled into my office to check in on Leroy and Dartanyon’s days.

  Dartanyon sat out the fall semester of school with plans to return in the spring. I hoped that time off might break his cycle of failure before it did irrevocable damage to his confidence. Meanwhile, he showed growth in other areas. He began adapting to the rigors of Olympic life. He learned to be punctual, and to socialize with people of position and pedigree. Liddie was pleased enough with his progress on the mat to send him to the Paralympic World Championships in Turkey earlier in that year, where he finished a surprising ninth. If he could break into the top three at the ParaPan American Games that November, he had a sliver of a chance to qualify for the 2012 London Paralympics. Liddie pounded Dartanyon that fall, pushing him to peak in time, and each time I called to find out how he was doing, Dartanyon’s breathless answer was the same: “Recovering.”

  I had gone more than a month without speaking to Leroy following Talia’s explosive entry into my world. My e-mails and voice mails to him went unreturned. He ignored my requests to read over his homework. His professors were not updating the class websites with his weekly grades, so in my exhaustion, I hoped for the best and went to bed, dreading morning and Talia’s impending assault.

  Finally, in early November 2011, Leroy responded to an e-mail with a desperate message: “I’m in a huge dilemma. My grades are low, and I have to write a letter to avoid being dropped from school. By the way, my chair broke and won’t fold down so it doesn’t fit in my friend’s car, so I don’t have a way to get to school. We’re almost out of food too. I am in a bad situation.” I immediately picked up the phone.

  “How did this all happen, Leroy?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You have to know, or else it will happen again.”

  “I don’t know how it happened,” he repeated, more forcefully. He seemed genuinely ignorant of the architecture of his demise. I asked a slew of questions, searching for the crux of the issues. From what I could gather, the thrill of playing house was wearing thin. Kayla was filled with resentment as Leroy left for school each morning and left her behind to care for Alani. Leroy returned home late, hours after the family dinner they once dreamed of had gone cold on the table. He was at the mercy of friends for rides, he insisted; she accused him of cheating on her. He said they fought long into the night, keeping him from his schoolwork. The two of them couldn’t navigate their finances any better than they could their mounting frustrations. Only eight days into the month, their $2,100 monthly allotment was gone. Their phone bills were three months past due. The electricity was one day from shutoff. The cupboards were bare. Leroy had already blown through his school stipends two months ahead of schedule. They were thousands of dollars in the hole and pointing fingers at one another.

  “How did you guys spend two thousand dollars in four days?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. I scrolled through his ledger. They’d frequented pricy restaurants, traveled in taxis, downloaded movies, shopped online, and bought an Xbox gaming console and a three-hundred-dollar pair of headphones.

  “My headphones broke, and I can’t do work without listening to music,” Leroy explained.

  “But you’re not doing work. You’re failing!” I exclaimed. “And your bills haven’t been paid for months. Why didn’t you tell me before things got so bad? I left you a lot of messages asking how you were doing.” More than a year into college, how did Leroy still not know how to pay a bill?

  He remained quiet, as if he was a child again, waiting on a whupping from his mother. And truth be told, I felt he needed one.

  “I didn’t want to be a bother,” he finally said sheepishly. I regrouped with a deep breath and reminded myself that he came from a world where there were no solutions, where there was no one to ask for help, and where his needs were met with huffs. At least he had reached out to me, even if he was grossly late.

  “Leroy, you are not a bother,” I said. “I’m always here for you.”

  He remained quiet. I wished I could hug him.

  I took a step back, as though surveying a messy room and trying to figure out what to pick up first. “How about we start digging our way out of this?” My inclination was to let Collins expel Leroy. I had grown convinced that he was not ready to handle the demands of college and fatherhood. But his landscape had become far more complicated than Dartanyon’s. I could not simply send him back to Big Ma’s basement, or even move him in with me, while also nurturing his academic skills. He had turned into a three-person deal, with Alani and Kayla now relying on his monthly stipends for their daily needs. In a sense, college was no longer his choice—it was his job. “School is your means of supporting your new family,” I said. “Do you understand that?”

  He mumbled that he did.

  To keep him enrolled, Collins required a focused appeal, identifying a cause of the failings and presenting concrete steps for change. While I ordered a grocery delivery for Leroy, he embarked on his appeal letter, in which he brazenly blamed his professors for being uninteresting and squashing his motivation. “Leroy, you can’t blame people for your problems and expect them to have compassion for you,” I explained, wondering why this was not obvious. I outlined a new letter emphasizing the pressures of new parenthood and taking responsibility for his failings. He begrudgingly wrote a second letter following my bullet points, but this sort of bowing to authority clearly irked him. I drafted a supplemental appeal to the dean, expanding on Leroy’s financial collapse. I committed to managing his money more closely to alleviate this pressure, monitoring his bank account daily and paying off his debts to clean the slate. The next day, Collins agreed to reinstate Leroy, with the provision that I maintain a tight rein, thereby cementing my involvement. I was relieved. Leroy sighed at the news—a declaration of feeling perpetually misunderstood.

  I went on a high-powered offensive, in hopes of avoiding future pitfalls. I arranged for Leroy’s monthly stipends to be deposited into my bank account for holding, and while I was at it, I made Dartanyon transfer his disability payments to me as well. I set up online payment systems to monitor their bills. I constructed budget-planning worksheets that they had to fill out by the first of each month before I would begin transferring their weekly allowances to them. They were not pleased, but neither could offer evidence of competency in their defense. “No matter what you achieve, if you don’t learn to handle money, you will remain poor for the rest of your life,” I said.

  Still, no preventive measure curbed their impulsive spe
nding. The idea of restraint and forethought was completely foreign. They were living out the financial model engrained in them by poverty. “Everyone in the ghetto gets their check on the first of the month, lives large that weekend, and then goes back to being poor for the rest of the month,” Dartanyon explained to me.

  “But doesn’t this get exhausting?” I asked. “Do you like seeing zeros in your bank account?”

  “It bothers me, but not enough to stop doing it, I guess.” He and Leroy believed they deserved what they wanted, when they wanted it, as a reward for living without it for so many years. They had been taught to live for the moment, for the next one was never guaranteed.

  “If you have no intention of helping yourself, then I’m wasting my time,” I said, exasperated. “I quit!” It was a bold attempt at shocking him into compliance, and I startled myself as I said it. Dartanyon was not fooled.

  “You can’t quit,” he said with a laugh. “That thirty-day return policy has long passed.”

  WHEN YOU ARE in the middle of a story, it isn’t a story it all. It’s confusion. It’s darkness. It’s a lingering ache in the gut. It’s stabs to the chest. It’s a feeling of being swept up in a reckless current with no boat, no life jacket, and no indication of whether you are headed for calmer waters or a deeper abyss. It is only afterward, when we tell someone else these experiences, that it becomes anything like a story at all.

  We were too far in to start over in a more prepared way, and we were too far from the end goal of self-sufficiency to glimpse light. We were groping our way through dense fog, living beyond our expertise. Dartanyon was masquerading as an elite athlete in a sport he had heard of just one year before. Leroy was trying to be a father, with no template to follow. I dozed off each night with a book on toddler development in my left hand and a book on the complexities of teenage boys in my right. My seemingly foolproof plan of getting these boys off to college had made fools out of all of us. Leroy and Dartanyon really had no business living on their own, but with so much money invested and so many supporters awaiting their returns, what choice did we have but to continue fumbling our way through the encroaching darkness?