Collateral Damage

  The authors wish to thank Susan Olson, Professional Counselor, M.Ed., LPC, for her expertise on military families and thoughtful review of manuscripts in the Support and Defend series.

  Copyright © 2015 by Patrick Jones and Brent Chartier

  All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

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  Cover and Interior photographs, © David Ellis/Aurora Photos/CORBIS (man); © iStockphoto.com/mart_m (dog tags); © iStockphoto.com/CollinsChin (background).

  Main body text set in Janson Text LT Std 12/17.5.

  Typeface provided by Adobe Systems.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jones, Patrick, 1961–

  Collateral Damage / by Patrick Jones and Brent Chartier.

  p. cm. — (Support and defend)

  Summary: Ty is very proud of his father’s accomplishments as a U.S. Army sergeant, but when a brain injury and partial paralysis send his father home from Afghanistan in a wheelchair, Ty finds it hard to balance schoolwork, basketball, a girlfriend, and friends with the time and effort required to care for him.

  ISBN 978-1-4677-8050-6 (lb : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-1-4677-8091-9 (pb : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-1-4677-8818-2 (eb pdf : alk. paper)

  [1. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 2. People with disabilities—Fiction. 3. Basketball—Fiction. 4. High schools—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Soldiers—Fiction.] I. Chartier, Brent. II. Title.

  PZ7.J7242Col 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2015000593

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 – SB – 7/15/15

  eISBN: 978-1-46778-818-2 (pdf)

  eISBN: 978-1-46779-016-1 (ePub)

  eISBN: 978-1-46779-015-4 (mobi)

  TO THE BRAVE MEN AND WOMEN IN THE US MILITARY AND THE FAMILIES THAT SUPPORT THEM

  —P.J. AND B.C.

  1

  DECEMBER 27 / SATURDAY EVENING

  WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY FIELD HOUSE, DETROIT, MI

  Fifteen seconds and a 56–56 tie on the scoreboard.

  Tyshawn dribbled down court, head faking and cutting past his opposing guard. Cass Tech’s star center stood five feet in front, arms outstretched, ready to block Ty if he rushed the post.

  From the corner of his eye, Ty saw Arquavis drawing a double team. No one else who could shoot worth anything was open either.

  Good thing Dad wasn’t in the stands, thought Ty. He could just hear his father saying, You’re the point guard, Ty, you’re captain. Your job is to run the offense, not be the offense. Sacrifice your shots for the good of the team.

  9 seconds.

  Arquavis pushed off, but Cass Tech’s coverage held.

  7 seconds.

  Tyshawn had to act, think, and decide fast. The hulking Cass Tech center lurched forward.

  5 seconds.

  Ty turned and jumped sideways for the open shot, off balance, and let the ball fly.

  Ty fell to the floor as the ball sailed up.

  3 seconds.

  Too high, thought Ty, being as hard on himself as his father. But it wasn’t. In fact, the shot was perfect.

  2 seconds.

  The ball sank through the net. A three-pointer.

  The buzzer sounded. The crowd roared as the Warren High Wildcats won the Hungry Howie’s Holiday Basketball Tournament for the second straight year.

  With Ty still on the floor, his teammates cleared the bench and court and piled on—a four-foot-high pile of the best players in the city, Ty at the bottom.

  “Nice shot, man!”

  “Way to go, Ty!”

  “Great job, Teflon!” He’d earned that nickname by claiming no defender could stick to him.

  Ty could hear the crowd in the stands, “Ty! Ty! Ty!”

  A large hand reached in and pulled Ty from the pile of players. It was Coach Carlson. “Great shot, Tyshawn! Way to think out there!” Coach shouted over the crowd.

  Ty glanced at the off-court celebration. Leading it was Shania, the cutest cheerleader on the Wildcats squad, in Ty’s opinion. Though being her boyfriend made Ty biased.

  He grabbed a towel from the bench, wiped sweat from his face, and winked at Shania. Shania blew him a kiss.

  Arquavis saw it as well. “You get the game and the girl, since you wouldn’t pass me the ball?” he asked Ty. “They should be cheering me,” Arquavis said in his best playground trash-talking tone. That had been the plan, but in the last seconds with Arquavis double-teamed, Ty felt he could handle the pressure. Ty narrowed his eyes at the verbal slap, but he couldn’t wipe the smile from his face.

  The announcer spoke over the PA system. “Congratulations to our tournament champions, the Warren Wildcats!” With that, Ty waved the towel over his head, whipping the crowd to an even higher frenzy.

  Coach Carlson came over to Ty as two older white guys in suits carried the trophy to a table at center court. “Follow me,” said Coach.

  Ty thought how proud his dad would be when Ty showed him that giant, shiny trophy. But his father’s return from Afghanistan was deferred, again. He’d been first scheduled to return in the fall, but the days of delay fell like dominos. All Ty knew was his dad got concussed and was recuperating in a hospital in Germany.

  One of the white guys handed Ty the trophy. “Nice job, Son,” said the man.

  Son. Ty was ready to hear that more often. This time when his dad came home, it would be for good. No more deployments. Ty lifted the trophy above his head.

  The announcer spoke. “If I can direct your attention to the big screen, we have a special announcement for the most valuable player of today’s game, Tyshawn Douglas. Please join me in welcoming, all the way from a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, Tyshawn’s father, Sergeant Denver Douglas of the United States Army!”

  The crowd hushed. Ty saw his father all right, sitting up in a hospital bed, tubes running from his arms, a bandage covering half his head. “How did this—?” Ty asked his coach.

  His coach whispered, “I got connections, and you deserve it. I knew with your hard work, you had a big game in you.”

  “Ty,” his father started, slowly, weakly. “Congratu—lations—Son—I—am—so—proud.” The crowd cheered, but not a word came out of Ty’s mouth. It was the first time he’d seen his father in months. On his father’s last mission on his last deployment this summer, he’d been wounded. Now here he was, Denver Douglas, as big as a house, up on the screen.

  Ty set the trophy down. He covered his face with the towel, now wet with both sweat and tears.

  2

  DECEMBER 31 / WEDNESDAY

  TYSHAWN’S HOUSE, WARREN, MI

  Ty didn’t wait until the ball dropped in Times Square to kiss Shania; he didn’t need an excuse. Their first kiss had happened exactly one year earlier at a New Year’s party thrown by a senior on the team. They’d hardly come up for air since then.

  “You sure you’re okay with this?” Ty whispered. The two were curled up on the sofa in Ty’s basement in front of the big-screen TV. “There are lots of parties we can go to.”

  Shania cut him off with another kiss. “I don’t want to be anywhere else but with you.”

 
“I just don’t feel like being in a crowd,” Ty said. At six-foot-five, Ty almost always stood out, especially when he was with the six-foot Shania. With a wild streak of Wildcats purple in her hair, Shania attracted attention—sometimes too much for Ty’s taste.

  “You nervous about your dad?”

  Ty reached for the remote and paused the DVD of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon. He and his father knew every Bruce Lee film by heart. On the screen, Bruce Lee stood frozen, mouth open but silent, just like Ty. He didn’t know what to say; this wasn’t a simple yes-or-no question.

  “Ty?”

  “Mom’s seen him, and she said he’s kind of messed up.” Ty stumbled over his words.

  Shania nodded. “I saw that in the video too.”

  “But this is my dad we’re talking about here, Shania.” Ty’s voice grew stronger. “He is a living, breathing hero. I think Mom’s just trying to make excuses. She does that a lot.”

  “Is he going to be okay?”

  “Sure ‘nuff. Mom says I’ll need to help him some, but Dad’s got this. I know it.”

  “What’s he like?” Shania asked. Ty’s father was deployed to Afghanistan a few months before Shania entered Ty’s world.

  “Let me show you.” Ty left the sofa. He dangled his long fingers behind. Shania intertwined her fingers with his and followed him to a corner of the basement.

  On the wall were the two careers of Denver Douglas as told in framed photos. The first set of photographs was of Denver Douglas, high school basketball star and freshman star forward on scholarship to Eastern Michigan. But no photos of what he thought would follow: a pro career. A set of bad knees, ruined from years of pick-up ball on the hard, cracked cement of Detroit playgrounds coupled with a crippling ACL tear in his junior year ended his basketball career before it really started.

  Then, photos of his dad’s second career. “That’s from basic,” Ty pointed at his father in uniform. He didn’t explain the ten years difference between the end of his basketball career and the start of his military service. Ty remembered moving a lot around Detroit, sometimes at a moment’s notice before the landlord evicted them for not paying the rent, leaving most of his belongings behind. That all changed when his dad joined the Army. It gave him more than a job; it gave him stability. “He just looks right in that uniform, don’t you think?”

  Shania nodded, but Ty was already back to studying the photos. Each one showed a new rank, from a private to a sergeant, and with it a new confidence. Ty saw in the pictures how the Army had given his father self-assurance, purpose, and a sense of being part of something larger, even if it often took him away from their family.

  And with each deployment, Ty’s tension had increased, always fearing the call every military family feared, informing him his small family had gotten smaller.

  “You’re so proud of him,” Shania wrapped her arms around Ty’s neck.

  “More than I can say.” His dad was another step closer to home, at Dingell, the VA Hospital in downtown Detroit. His mom had told him his dad wasn’t ready yet for a visit from Ty, so they’d just talked on the phone. But Ty did most of the talking. Like on the video, his dad spoke slowly, like each word hurt. Ty wondered what else about his father would be different.

  “When’s he coming home?” Shania asked.

  “Next week, unless there’s another delay.”

  “I can’t wait to meet him.”

  Ty stopped himself from saying “me too.” Even from the few seconds of grainy video feed after the tournament win and the hour or so of difficult phone calls, Ty could tell his dad had changed again. Maybe it would be like meeting a new person. The Army gave his dad everything, but what had it taken in return?

  3

  JANUARY 5 / MONDAY, AFTER SCHOOL

  TYSHAWN’S HOUSE

  Ty stared out the window of the school bus as it rounded the corner and came to a stop in front of his house, its brakes squealing. Ty hated taking the bus, but he didn’t have much choice, seeing as he didn’t have money to buy gas for his dad’s old Ford.

  “Way cool, Teflon. You got a skateboard ramp on your house,” said Demonte, a skinny skater kid sitting in front of him.

  Ty watched from the bus window as three men, two in army fatigues, nail-gunned boards of lumber to a ramp that ran from the porch to the driveway.

  “Skateboard ramp?” said Ty aloud. “I don’t skateboard.”

  “We’ll be over tonight,” said Benj, another skater. “Once it snows, it’ll be too icy.”

  “I’ll check it out,” said Ty as he exited the bus and walked up the driveway.

  One of the men met Ty halfway down the driveway. “You must be Tyshawn,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” said Ty. “Is that a skateboard ramp?”

  The man took his hat off and laughed. “No, but I suppose it could be,” said the man. “That’s for your father’s wheelchair.”

  Ty’s heart sank in his chest. Wheelchair? he thought. Nobody said anything about Dad being in a wheelchair.

  At that moment, Ty’s mom called from the front door. “Tyshawn, come quick. I need you.”

  Ty started for the door, but the man reached for his shoulder and stopped him. “Young man, tell your father welcome home, would you, please?”

  “Yes, and give him our thanks for his service,” said another of the workers.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ty made his way to the front door. When he stepped inside, his mother was putting in earrings. She spoke quickly. These days, it seemed like she was always in a hurry.

  “Your father’s home,” she said, “but I got called to work. There’s a truck at the Canadian border they’re not letting through, and it’s costing the company money.”

  Before Ty was born, his mother took a job at an auto parts supplier that had grown to become one of the largest in the country. As the company grew, so did her responsibilities.

  “Can I say hi to Dad?”

  “When I’m gone,” she said, sounding almost out of breath. “I’ve got lots to show you.”

  She led Ty to the kitchen. “These are his medications,” she said, pointing to a row of orange pill bottles. “He takes one of these a half hour before dinner. This one,” she said, pointing to another bottle, “before bed. Don’t get them confused or you’ll throw his schedule off.”

  Ty followed her to the bathroom, which had been fitted with a toilet seat adjuster and a shower seat. “They just put this in,” she said. “He can’t stand to shower anymore, so if he wants to take one, you have to help him to his seat.”

  “Help him to—” Ty began, but his mother interrupted.

  “It’s a struggle for him to stand after sitting, so this height adjuster should help.”

  Ty swallowed. He was impatient to see his father again, but the image of helping him to the shower and toilet took some of the excitement away.

  She led Ty to the living room.

  “What’s with the furniture?” asked Ty.

  “We had to move it so he could get his wheelchair through,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Now, let me show you your room.”

  She led Ty to what had been his bedroom. In the room, his father lay, sleeping on a hospital bed.

  “Where’s my—” began Ty.

  “We had to move your bedroom downstairs,” interrupted his mother, whispering so as not to wake her husband. “There are just too many machines for our bedroom.”

  She was right. Where Ty’s desk had been, there was a machine with a large fan in front. Where Ty’s bookcase had been was a wheelchair. And in place of the dresser was another machine and a tall device with a swing attached. The Fatheads on his walls had been replaced by charts and a wipe board. His bedroom looked like a clinic.

  “How’d you get everything moved?” Ty whispered.

  “The volunteer vets outside, building the ramp, they moved everything this morning. They also threw a little welcome party for your father. I had an important call from work. Otherwise, I would have pick
ed you up from school for it. But the good thing is, there’s plenty of food in the fridge.”

  She turned her attention to the room. “This is his lift. For him to get out of bed, plug this in. Here are the controls. You bring the wheelchair over, lift him up, then set him in his chair. When he wants back in bed, do what I just said in reverse. Got it?”

  “It’s a bit—”

  “You’ll figure it out.” She kissed Ty quickly on the forehead. With one arm on his shoulder, she paused as she looked into Ty’s eyes and spoke. “Your dad’s home now. Home for good. But our lives will never be the same.” She patted Ty on the cheek and left the room. A moment later, he heard the front door close.

  Ty looked around his bedroom—what had been his bedroom—at the machines and the large, blue hospital bed where his dad was sleeping.

  He thought through all the directions his mother had given him—the pills, the toilet, the chair lift. What stuck out most were her final words: that his life would never be the same.

  4

  JANUARY 5 / MONDAY, LATE AFTERNOON

  TYSHAWN’S HOUSE

  “Ty? Ty?” His father turned his head, his eyes half open.

  “Dad, you’re home,” said Ty, leaning down for a hug.

  “Not too hard, son. I still . . . hurt quite a bit.”

  Ty stood up. Of the many things his father had been, frail wasn’t one of them.

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “She had to go back to work. Something came up . . . she said.”

  Ty’s father paused for a moment, like he was collecting his thoughts. “Could you help me get . . . out of bed? I need . . . to use the bathroom.”

  Ty knew he didn’t have a choice—he was the only one there to help his father now. Trouble was, his mother’s instructions weren’t the best.

  With his father directing him in sentences full of long pauses, Ty brought the body swing over and lowered it next to the bed. He then brought the wheelchair over.

  It took some doing, but Ty lifted his father onto the wheelchair and pushed him to the bathroom.

  “Where’s your mother again?” his dad asked. Ty thought he sounded confused.