Five Days Left

by Julie Lawson Timmer

  PART II

  Wednesday, April 6

  FOUR DAYS LEFT

  13.

  Scott

  Scott woke late, having spent much of the night staring at the ceiling. He was surprised to smell coffee as he made his way downstairs, since lately the smell made Laurie nauseous. He had started buying a cup at a drive-through place on the way to work.

  She was dressed for work and sitting in the kitchen, finishing a piece of toast. He pointed to the coffeemaker as he walked toward it. “You drinking coffee?”

  She made a face. “I’m not sure I ever will again. It’s the ultimate rip-off of pregnancy, you know. You hear all the time about all these cravings pregnant women have. They don’t tell you about all the sudden aversions to things you used to love. I made it for you. I wasn’t sure you’d make it to the coffee shop this morning. Did you sleep at all?”

  “A little.”

  “Can I take a wild guess at what was keeping you awake?”

  He eyed her carefully as he debated whether he should make something up—staff cuts at school, maybe.

  She stood, set her plate in the sink and put a hand on his chest. “You know, I was awake myself for a while. And I was thinking, if you’re this devoted to a boy who’s not even ours, then this baby is going to have the most devoted father on the planet.” She moved her hand from his chest to his cheek. “I feel like maybe I haven’t been as sympathetic about it as I should be. I forget sometimes that as close as he and I are, you two are a hundred times closer. As hard as it’s going to be for me to see him go, as much as I’m going to miss him, it’s going to be so much worse for you. I’m sorry if I haven’t acknowledged that enough.”

  The understanding in her voice, in her eyes, was so unexpected he couldn’t speak. He closed his eyes and pressed his cheek into her hand.

  “You need me to get him from school today?” she asked.

  “No. I only have a few more chances to drive him home. I’m not letting anything get in the way of that. I could kick myself for letting it happen last night. You were right—I turned practice over to Pete this week so I could spend more time with him, and then I let that woman—”

  “Good for you,” she said. Her voice was soothing. He waited for a mild reproach about always putting the school first and decided he wouldn’t argue when it came.

  It didn’t, and grateful, he turned his head to kiss her palm, then her cheek. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  When she left for work, he was fifteen minutes behind in an already packed schedule. Curtis would have to hightail it, but there was a prize in it for him if he was in the mood to cooperate, and it was one of his favorites: pick the radio station on the way to school.

  Scott grabbed their lunch bags from the fridge and tossed them onto the counter, setting a banana and a granola bar on top of one—a “to go” breakfast for his passenger. He set his cup in the sink, peeled a banana for himself and downed it in four bites as he took the stairs three at a time. “Little Man! We’ve got to be in the car in six minutes! Let’s go!”

  Curtis was out of bed like a shot and easily earned his prize. “I’m not gonna bother with sports talk today,” he told Scott as he climbed into the backseat. “All they talk about is baseball now and I don’t care about it so much.” Quickly he added, “But I love the Tigers. Tigers allll the way!”

  “Tigers allll the way,” Scott agreed. “So what’ll it be, then? Rock? Jazz? Blues? A little Motown?”

  “My mom loves Motown.”

  “A little Motown, to celebrate seeing her again on Monday? Moving home?”

  He bit his lip the instant the words left him. Sending the boy to school with a weight on his mind was never wise. Scott kicked himself and composed an e-mail in his mind to Miss Keller: Sorry if Curtis is a pain today—all my fault. . . .

  But true to his young age, Curtis was as excited about the news today as he had been upset about it the night before.

  “Yeah! Motown to celebrate moving home with my mom!”

  “Motown it is.”

  He found the station and backed out of the driveway, joining Smokey in the off-key voice Laurie always begged him not to reveal in public.

  “So take a good look at my face

  You’ll see my smile looks out of place.”

  Curtis folded forward, hands over his ears in a show of being deafened. “Aaaaaah! Please! Make it stop!”

  “C’mon, you expect this Detroit boy to hear Smokey and not sing along? And what’s your excuse? Sitting there complaining when you should be belting it out. Let’s hear it.”

  “I only know the ‘good look at my face’ part. I don’t know the rest.”

  “Well, mister, you’d better learn it if you intend to keep living in this town.”

  They drove the rest of the way in companionable silence. Despite Curtis’s impossibly high energy level the rest of the day, he wasn’t a morning person. Scott reached behind and patted the knee of the quiet child now gazing blankly out the window at the buildings and trees whipping past him. Their morning drives often played out this way, sports talk or music on the radio, the two of them content to be together but lost in their own thoughts.

  Scott was happy to dial up the excitement when the boy was in the mood, but he was also happy to spend the commute quietly, thinking about what new plays to try at practice, what new novel to introduce to his eighth graders. Today, he let his mind go blank as he watched the tony sections of Royal Oak give way to the blighted streets of Detroit.

  After ten years of working at Franklin Middle, Scott had seen it all a million times. But there were small changes from time to time, and he watched for them when he could. Usually, the changes were depressing—another boarded-up house, another smear of graffiti on a building whose owner had cleaned the last paint off a week earlier. Another square paper nailed to another front door, its size and color announcing it was an eviction notice even if the words weren’t readable from the car.

  From time to time, though, there were encouraging signs. Lights on again in a small machine shop that hadn’t operated for years, a few cars in the employee parking lot. A “Now Open—New Management” sign in the window of a produce store that had gone out of business a year ago. Laundry hanging in the yard of a house that had been abandoned but now showed new curtains in the windows, children’s toys on the peeling, slanted front porch.

  It was these changes that kept Scott hopeful. Things could get better here. Families could reclaim houses and apartment buildings. Honest businessmen could reopen stores and small factories. A kid like Brayden Jackson could get a college scholarship. A degree. A real job. A life away from here.

  Franklin, where Scott spent his days, was a microcosm of Detroit, at once depressing and beautiful, a has-been and a might-be. It must have been majestic once, Scott imagined, when it was new. Three stories of red brick with tall windows and huge double front doors. The front lawn would have been lush green, the outdoor basketball court flat and black under solid white court lines, the fence around it straight and proud. The marble hallway floors shone then, he bet, the wooden classroom doors smooth and clean.

  He wondered how many people who had attended Franklin in its first days had studied it lately, and how they felt when they did. The brick was faded now, gray in some places and black in others, the discoloration a remnant of the now closed row of factories down the street. Several windows lacked a complete pane of glass, and the different solutions teachers had come up with to fill the gaps—duct tape in varying colors, squares of cardboard—had turned the façade from impressive to clownish.

  The front “lawn” was no more than a brown patch of dirt now, with sparse clumps of weeds and grass struggling to lift themselves. The lines no longer showed on the basketball court, and much of its surface had heaved into cracked waves by the force of decades of Michigan winters. The fence had been cut or torn i
n multiple locations; no longer straight and proud, now it was bent and twisted into a drooping, sad thing.

  And inside. The hallway floors were dull, scuffed. The walls were a putrid pale green that might once have been a cheerful shade but now reminded Scott of the sixties-era psych wards he had seen in movies. The classroom doors were barely recognizable as wood, covered now with kids’ initials and curse words, some scrawled in ink, some etched by knives.

  They arrived at Logan Elementary, Curtis’s school, located a few blocks from Franklin, and Scott pulled into the parking lot. Logan hadn’t started out looking as majestic as Franklin. It was one story of pale yellow brick and green metal doors. But it also didn’t appear to have fallen as far as Franklin. The brick was blackened in fewer spots and not as dark. The windows were still in one piece. There was no graffiti. The classroom doors, Scott had pointed out to Laurie on parent-teacher conference night, bore no curse-word tattoos.

  Scott put the car in park. “Your stop, Little Man.”

  The boy jumped out, hoisted his backpack onto his shoulder, grabbed his lunch bag and walked around the car to Scott’s open window.

  “Fist,” Scott said, holding his own out.

  Curtis bumped his fist to Scott’s.

  “Cheek,” Scott said.

  Curtis feigned embarrassment, but smiled as he leaned his cheek closer for Scott to kiss.

  “Promise,” Scott said.

  “Promise.”

  “Nope, not good enough. I want to hear the whole thing.”

  Curtis sighed. “I promise to do what Miss Keller tells me.”

  “For how long?”

  “For the whole entire day.”

  “Nice. Go get ’em, Albert Einstein.”

  Scott reached his classroom with ten minutes to spare before his first-hour class. Enough time for a quick forum check. As he opened his laptop, he thought how odd someone might find it that during a week when he was trying to cram in as many experiences with Curtis as possible, he was thinking about the forum at all, let alone making time to post there. And it might seem equally odd, if not more so, that at a time of such devastation, most of his shoring up was coming not from his best friend, Pete, or even his wife, but instead from a group of people he wouldn’t recognize if they stepped into his classroom this second. Not that Pete and Laurie weren’t comforting—or at least, they tried to be. But, as oxymoronic as it sounded, when it came to revealing his most intimate feelings, nothing beat the total anonymity of the Internet. Unlike the people who knew him in “real life,” LaksMom, flightpath, 2boys and the others had no context in which to put his posts, no history—good or bad—against which to measure the things he said. To Laurie, the phrase “It’s going to kill me to live without him” was hurtful, offensive, because of all the implied meaning she heard along with it: “Curtis is more important than the baby. Curtis is more important than you.”

  Pete didn’t read the same hurtfulness into it, but he couldn’t escape the big picture any more than Laurie could: “But, dude, you’ll see him again, when he’s a student at Franklin. Three solid years with the kid. And in the meantime, you’ll have your own baby to focus on, not to mention the twenty kids on the team and the three hundred others you walk past in the halls every day.” It was an attempt to be helpful, Scott knew. But it didn’t help.

  Scott’s friends on the forum didn’t know his big picture. They read a phrase like “It’s going to kill me to live without him” for its precise meaning, and nothing else. They didn’t read more than those nine words into the message. They didn’t take offense, didn’t try to talk him out of it. Didn’t resent it for its presumed relativity.

  “Of course it is,” they said. And it was the same way they’d responded to every other thing he’d told them about himself: his thoughts on parenting, on marriage and sex, on education and race. They read what he wrote, and only what he wrote, and they responded. Not always in agreement—he’d had plenty of heated discussions over the past year on this issue or that. But he didn’t need yes-men any more than he needed someone to read twenty-one extra words into the nine he’d written.

  As for this week, he didn’t need Laurie to make him feel guilty on top of feeling heartbroken. He didn’t need Pete to try to cheer him up, to make him see things in a shinier light. He had only four days left with Curtis: there was no cheer to be found, no silver lining. He didn’t need anyone to fix the problem—there was no fixing it. He needed someone to acknowledge his feelings. Accept his pain. Agree that his heart was broken, and that it should be. And that it might stay broken for a long, long time.

  And that’s precisely what he got when he talked to his nameless, faceless friends on the forum: pure, unadulterated acknowledgment. That’s why he was making time for the forum today. And that’s why he would keep making time for it, when he had three days left, then two, then one, and after the boy was gone.

  When he found the prior day’s conversation, he was touched to see how many people had commented about his situation. There were more than thirty new posts. These weren’t mere strangers at unknown IP addresses. They were friends, and they cared about him as much as he cared about them. He couldn’t help smiling as one member after another came forward to wish him good luck in the next few days.

  There was a reminder from SoNotWicked that it’s okay for men to cry, and he laughed. He had tiptoed into Curtis’s room the last few nights after Laurie drifted off, eased himself into the rocking chair and let the tears pool in the corners of his eyes, one or two slipping down his cheeks and neck, under the collar of his T-shirt, as he watched the flickering eyelids and twitching lips of the boy who was no doubt sassing and complaining to some dreamworld creature.

  Scanning further, Scott stopped at a post he was hoping to see, by a now-and-then poster who called herself FosterFranny and had, along with her husband, fostered almost a dozen children over the past decade or so.

  Tuesday, April 5 @ 8:41 p.m.

  I’m afraid I’m of less help than you might expect. The best advice my husband and I were given before we started fostering was this: don’t let yourself get too attached. We have followed that advice from the start, and while the children we have cared for have made a real imprint on our hearts, we have always used caution to maintain substantial emotional distance.

  Consequently, when it’s been time to return them to their parents, we haven’t felt like we’re having our innards ripped out, the way we would if we were being forced to give up one of our own children. From all you’ve said about your relationship with LMan, I have to surmise that what LaksMom said about you earlier is accurate: you have gone all-in, and instead of reserving some part of your heart for safekeeping, you have given it all to the boy.

  If this is true, I suppose the only thing for you to do is to keep reminding yourself what’s best for the child. As you and I have discussed at length via personal messaging in the past, in most cases, the best thing for a child is to be with their parent(s). If LMan’s mom has kicked her habits while serving time—and you informed me some months ago you believed this to be the case—then indeed, the best thing for him is to return to her. Focusing on that will lessen the pain of letting him go. Not by much, perhaps, given how you care for him, but hopefully by some. Good luck, my friend.

  Scott checked his watch. Six minutes till his first-hour class arrived. Time for him to post a reply to Franny.

  Wednesday, April 6 @ 7:54 a.m.

  @Frans—I guess I should’ve asked you for advice *before* LMan moved in. You and LaksMom are right about how much of my heart I kept sequestered from him: 0%. Not sure I could’ve done it differently even if I’d set out to, though—this is a kid who gets right in your bloodstream.

  Good advice to focus on what’s best for the boy, and your wisdom on that score, from our PM chats a few months ago, has stayed with me. More than that—it’s what’s getting me through this. To the extent I�
�m getting through it, that is; I definitely feel like my guts are being ripped out. But it’s easier to take when I’m doing it for him.

  @2boys—how’re your Yanks looking after last night’s drubbing by the Orioles, you think? ;) Tigers alllll the way. I’d offer a big money bet on this if I knew I’d be able to track you down to collect. Wonder if SNWicked would make an exception to the anonymity rule for that?

  Thinking about last night, and how he had been unable to sleep, he added:

  @SNW—how about extending our membership into Asia? I’ve got insomnia these days and it’d be nice to have someone to chat w/ in the middle of the night. I’ve seen all the classic games ESPN replays in the wee hours and am dangerously close to switching to infomercials to keep myself company. I need to sock away every spare cent I have for all the baby paraphernalia my wife’s been talking about—the last thing I need is to be tempted to call in a 2 a.m. order for a collection of ceremonial plates depicting all of the presidents. . . .

  He shut down his laptop, stuck it in his briefcase and checked his watch. Two minutes. He thought about Franny’s too-late advice to avoid becoming too attached. And how, even if he’d heard it in time, he couldn’t have kept the little man out of his system if he’d tried. The minute he said yes to Bray last year was the minute he signed up for having his guts ripped out next week.

  Bray had shown up on Scott and Laurie’s front porch, Curtis in tow, almost a year ago. The brothers were a long way from home—the apartment they lived in with their mother was a few ugly blocks from Logan Elementary, in a squalid beige cinder-block complex unrivaled for the past decade in the number of reports of domestic violence and drug dealing. The boys had different fathers and their mother never appeared quite up to the task of raising two boys on her own.

  Scott had tried to talk to LaDania many times during his tenure as Bray’s coach at Franklin Middle, and he had worried out loud to his wife about LaDania’s level of sobriety after every attempt. LaDania had this vacant look about her whenever he saw her, and she always seemed distracted and unfocused. She didn’t seem to grasp the things he tried to tell her, about how talented her older son was on the court, what a future he had ahead of him. So, although Scott was surprised to see Bray and Curtis on his front porch that cold April night, he was not entirely shocked when, after he ushered them into the house, Bray whispered that he needed to talk to the Coffmans privately about a drug-related complication his mother was having.