A fistful of T-shirts. His favorite gray jeans. One pair of shoes. These are the only belongings he thinks to grab in his hurry. These will be his last physical ties, the sole remains, of a life spent wandering the north end of Flint, Michigan.
Later, he'll wish he had taken the photo of MaryAnn, his baby sister. MaryAnn was just 10 months old when she died after an asthma attack, and now he has no pictures of her left.
But his mother's husband told him to get out. To get out now. He ordered them all to leave -- Mike and his two little brothers and his two sisters and his nieces. "But they're just babies," Mike thinks.
He has been drinking, the husband, and he puts his hands on Mike's mother. Mike pushes him away, trying to separate them, tells him to calm down. All Mike wants him to do is to go outside, walk around the block, just take a minute to compose himself. Instead he grows angrier. He throws an ashtray. He screams he is sick of paying rent for ungrateful kids. He threatens violence, says he'll have someone come over to "shoot this house up."
"If I get shot tonight," Mike thinks, "at least I was protecting my mama."
His mom tells Mike not to leave. Not to betray the family. But Mike is tired of feeling uneasy in his own home. He's tired of worrying whether he and his siblings talked too loudly that day, if they ran in and out of the house one too many times. He's tired, too, of the realities of his life in Flint, of the mornings he wakes up to find his sidewalk taped off because someone was killed, another life taken by this town.
And so on this early October evening in 2014, 22-year-old Michael Robinson takes out his phone and dials. It rings and rings but finds only her voice mail. He tries again. Voice mail. He dials again and again. Finally, at last, she picks up.
"Miss Sheila," he says. "I don't got nowhere to go."
Sheila Gafney stands in her driveway on July 29, 2014, when her partner of 18 years, Patricia Peters, pulls up to their gray ranch-style home in Grand Blanc, Michigan, a rural suburb 10 miles south of Flint. They bought this house together, 15 years ago; they put in the pine on their basement walls, the cedar in their bedroom.
"Feel like going to California?" Peters asks. Gafney, confused, only stares back at her, so Peters clarifies. "Feel like going to California ... with your volleyball team?"
Peters had taken the call just a few minutes earlier. Driving back home from an afternoon's worth of errands, she had just turned down her long dirt road when her phone rang. She is the area director for Special Olympics sports for two local counties, and a representative from Special Olympics Michigan had called to deliver the news: Gafney's team, the Area 13 men's volleyball squad from the greater Flint region, had been selected to represent the United States in the 2015 World Games.
Gafney has spent the past 30 years, exactly half her life, as Elmer Knopf Learning Center's adaptive physical education teacher. In three decades working with EKLC students -- children and young adults with autism and "moderate cognitive impairment" (IQ range: 35-55) -- she has coached hundreds of athletes to Special Olympics state games. Basketball, gymnastics, weightlifting, bowling. But none had ever earned an opportunity in the World Games. Until now.
She had coached her volleyball team to a gold medal in the Michigan State Summer Games just one month earlier, and barely survived it. "I didn't have any nails left," she says. "I don't remember the game, I just know that we won." It was that win, and that gold medal, that earned the team World Games consideration.
So now, in 12 months' time, she'd have a chance to coach them to another medal -- this time on a much different, infinitely more prominent stage. When the World Games' 7,000 international athletes converge on Los Angeles on July 25, it will be the single largest sporting event the city has hosted since the Summer Olympics 31 years ago. And when Gafney's volleyball team takes to the Pauley Pavilion floor on the UCLA campus, she'll patrol the same sideline John Wooden once strode. Her team will play on the same court as Bill Walton, Russell Westbrook, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Picturing herself there would be funny if it weren't so daunting.
First, there is the paperwork -- 25 pages worth to distribute, complete and return in short order for each of the 12 athletes who fill out her team. Each member must undergo a screening, and quick. The World Games require a national physical form signed by a doctor, so within two weeks of learning of their selection, the athletes need to be poked, prodded and given the go-ahead. It's a requirement Gafney will see through largely on her own.
"I ran, what, seven, eight of them, right over here to the clinic," she says. "I told all the parents, 'If you can't do it in time, I'll take them.'"
That's the thing about Sheila Gafney: What's hers is theirs too. Her time. Her energy.
Even, and perhaps especially, her home.
Her home has rarely been hers alone. In 1992, Sheila, newly single, learned her co-worker's mother, who was living on her own, had been robbed. She proposed they move in with each other, and they did, for more than 20 years. Even after Gafney met Peters, she made it clear that "Mom" was part of the package. "When Pat came into my life, I said, 'Pat, she stays. I'm not kicking her out.'"
In 1995, Peters moved in, and "Mom" stayed. Eventually, Peters too would open the family's doors. They offered tuition and a roof to her niece, who joined the household for eight months in 2009 so she could attend Mott Community College in Flint. And in 2013, Peters, who like Gafney teaches special needs individuals in Genesee County, invited a 15-year-old named Nick to stay.
Nickolas Dowland had spent five years in Peters' classroom, and the outgoing redhead who loves playing basketball and volleyball and riding his bike was one of her favorites. Two years ago last spring, she learned that he was at risk for being placed in foster care -- Nick's father, Larry, had just returned from a 30-day jail sentence in downtown Flint, and his social worker deemed their living conditions unacceptable.
"I told the social worker, 'He's not going to foster care. Tell me what I have to do and I'll do it.'"
One month later, Nick moved in.
"I never thought I'd become a soccer mom at 56," she says, but so she did, shuttling Nick to sports practice, teaching him how to shave, reminding him to pick up after himself. So when Michael Robinson, one of those 12 Olympians heading to California in July, called Sheila on a rainy evening in October, it was unexpected, certainly, but not surprising. Sheila is the go-to, the in-case-of-emergency, the one-who-comes-through. She is home. And when Mike was desperate, he knew whom he could call.
Sheila is bone tired. She's been up since 3:30, having flown back from Indianapolis that morning after a five-day pre-L.A. trip, a test run, with her volleyball team. Most of her players had never been outside the confines of Michigan, let alone set foot on a plane.
It's just 8:30 p.m., still early, but she is in bed, ready for the quiet. And then her phone rings. "Nope. I'm letting this one go to voice mail," Sheila thinks.
It rings again. Then again.
"You better answer that," Pat says. Sheila sighs but picks up her phone. It's Mike calling. She hasn't seen him in days, even though he was supposed to spend Wednesday night, the night before the team left for Indianapolis on an early flight, at her house. But that Wednesday, Sheila dropped by Mike's house three times to pick him up, and he wasn't there. She called Mike's aunt but still couldn't find him. Eventually, his brother called: Mike wouldn't be going to Indianapolis, he said.
"Miss Sheila," Mike says now. "I don't got nowhere to go."
She tells him to pack some clothes and leave. She tells him to go somewhere safe. "Mike, walk to the stores on the corner. I'll call you when I get closer."
Sheila changes into her sweatpants, then goes to Nick's room to tell him Mike is in trouble. It's Nick's home too, and she won't bring someone into the house without checking with him first. "Go, go get him," says Nick, who knows Mike, has been his teammate. So she leaves with Pat and heads out into the night, up I-475, toward the north end of Flint.
Mike does as Sheila says, walking to the row of shops two blocks from his house. It's dark and uncomfortably muggy for October. But mostly it's lonely. He steps inside a Little Caesars pizza shop on the corner of Welch and Chevrolet, where he finds an empty bench. He waits. He cries.
Sheila calls half an hour later to tell him she's close, to ask where he went. A few minutes pass, then a black Dodge Journey pulls up outside. The license plate reads "MS GAF."
Mike stayed at Sheila's house that night. He hasn't left yet.
It's 4 o'clock on a mid-June afternoon and the air outside is heavy, Midwestern humidity taking root. The days tiptoe closer to July -- to Los Angeles and the 2015 World Games -- and Gafney knows it. As each day melts into the next, the team clocking two four-hour practices a week, the magnitude of what they're attempting to achieve grows heavier.
"Increase the speed to 3.5," she tells Eric Gloster, who walks the treadmill. "You can do that." The skinny 22-year-old ups his pace.
"All right, Eric, 4.5," she prods a minute later while placing a hand on another player, supporting his back, as he climbs the Stairmaster.
The team has convened at Anytime Fitness in Grand Blanc, and Gafney is manning the cardio station. The workout proceeds as most do: Some of her athletes push themselves, others need her to do the pushing for them. Bret Rife flexes and sweats, runs in place in front of the wall-length mirror. "Gotta get strong for my girl!" he huffs to himself. Behind him, Eric begs out of more pushups, his arms burning.
And there are reminders, quiet but abundant, that though they sweat and grunt and run themselves ragged like all athletes, this particular group of men faces challenges beyond the hurdles of physical progress. "Good job," Gafney tells Alex Norris, 20, who so rarely engages others in conversation but has stuck out his hand to introduce himself to a stranger. It's a small gesture but a reminder that for Gafney's group, social cues-even those as simple as a handshake-are not intrinsic.
The team is disparate in both age and ability. Danny Sabedra is the elder statesman, an EKLC alum who, at 43, lives on his own. Twice a week, he makes his way to Flint's Fuddruckers, where he works maintenance, often undertaking the 3-mile trek on foot. But Sabedra has the developmental ability of a 12-year-old, his parents say -- and many on Gafney's team won't ever match this level of independence. Nick Hutchinson is 24, but his mom says he has only reached a 7-year-old's level. He can't operate a microwave well, can't differentiate between a washer and dryer. Born three months early, Nick suffered a ministroke when he was just 13 and requires four medications a day. Even a responsibility as seemingly basic as this, remembering when and what pill to take, proves too much to bear.
As the gym session winds down, a trainer takes to the front of the room with a small, black medicine ball in hand. She tells the players to follow her movements. If she points the ball toward the front of the room, they run forward. If she claps the ball, they crouch, knees bent and arms akimbo. It's a race to not be last -- musical chairs style -- but at times they struggle to mimic the trainer. She points the ball left, some go right. She directs the ball forward, some sprint toward the back.
She is good-natured and patient. Hers is one in a long line of sacrifices, some small, some so great they're life-altering, that allow this team to endure.
Sacrifices like the one made by Jamie Goll, the local owner of Anytime Fitness, who offered up her gym space and trainers, twice a week, at no expense to Gafney's team.
Sacrifices like the one made by Christy Bloss, a truck driver who scaled down to part-time hours and a smaller paycheck to be more available for her five boys, four of whom have special needs. Her middle son, Drew Callahan, is Gafney's outgoing, lighthearted spiker.
And sacrifices like the one made by Sheila Gafney, who took an early-October call from Michael Robinson and wound up his legal guardian.
Gafney returned home with Mike that October night to find Nick had already made up the den sofa. Sheets, pillows, blankets -- and if that was his unofficial welcome into the Gafney-Peters-Dowland household, his official induction came six weeks later, when on Nov. 4, 2014, the Genesee County probate court declared Gafney and Peters to be Mike's legal guardians. Nearly two years after they brought Nick into their lives, Mike moved in too, and Gafney and Peters redefined their family ... again.
Mike spends much of his time hiding. In his room, with the door closed. In his music, with his headphones on. In his silence.
It's early April -- Mike has lived with Sheila and Pat for nearly six months now -- but the space between player-coach and child-parent reveals itself to be an abyss.
Small cracks splinter, grow deeper. There's routine for Mike now, structure that's new and foreign to him. In this new world, he's responsible for doing his own laundry and cleaning up dishes. He has to pay bills, for rent and food and his cellphone. "We're 22 years behind," Sheila thinks. "How do we make up for 22 years that we didn't have him?"
Even his time isn't just his own anymore -- family dinners in the evening, mowing lawns after school, slight shifts in the tide that for him amount to a sea change.
"Our house is not a rich man's house," Sheila tells him. "But we work hard to keep it nice, and we're asking for your help in doing that."
Still, Mike withdraws, alone, in his room, in his silence. Daily affirmations -- "Grow dreams," "Always kiss your day goodnight" -- pepper the walls in his bedroom, but they don't reach him. Sheila doesn't reach him.
Frustration boils over on an afternoon just a few days before Easter. Sheila's in the kitchen and calls out his name. She wants his help, but he has his headphones on and can't hear her. She calls out to him again. No response. She finally explodes. Not over this one afternoon but the many afternoons that preceded it.
"We could be on fire and you wouldn't even know it!" she yells. "This can't continue! You're living here and you have to show us some respect. I've done nothing to you to deserve this."
And that's when he finally hears her.
Gafney sits in a windowless room at Elmer Knopf Learning Center with Mike's social worker, his teacher, the teacher's consultant and the principal of EKLC. They had gathered there, with the 2015 school year drawing to a close, to decide Mike's next step. He had been at EKLC for 13 years but "was going through the motions at the Learning Center," Gafney says now. "I told him, 'Mike, you're not getting anything from it anymore. You need a new start.'"
That new start would be the Transition Center, where young adults like Mike turn their focus to vocational and daily living skills -- so they spend a day busing tables at a restaurant or learning basic cooking techniques. It's the beginning of the road, they hope, to independence.
Mike abhors change, though, and he comes armed with excuses for why he shouldn't be made to leave. But he's outnumbered -- everyone votes for the Transition Center, save Mike -- so he loses the vote, and then his composure.
Mike storms out, slamming the door behind him.
Outside, he walks the hallway back toward class, cursing, working himself into a lather and then out of one. He comes back an hour later to apologize. And that's the truth to his journey, and to all of his teammates' journeys. Theirs is not a straight line to the World Games, or independent living, or realizing their potential. Sometimes things get worse before they get better.
So it comes to pass that Eric, who is soft-spoken and mild-mannered in Gafney's practice on that June afternoon, finds himself in a battle with the Flint police just three nights later.
He'd lost his temper with his adoptive mother, Janice, trailing her around their house, threatening to hit her. When the police were called, he lost his temper with them too. Eric, who speaks so softly you have to lean in to hear him, is restrained, then shot with a Taser, then placed on a gurney before he's eventually taken to a Detroit-area hospital for a weeklong stay.
Eric has demons to fight. They all do.
Bret, who was diagnosed with autism at age 7, used to be terrified of thunderstorms. He'd scream and shake and wind up in bed with his mom, Tamara. The first time Gafney took Bret to state games, in 2002, he was just 13, and the first night it stormed hour after hour. Tamara had also made the trip to Central Michigan University but wasn't allowed to visit his hotel room -- Special Olympics rules -- and so she spent the night sobbing in her own room, railing against the storm, knowing Bret was too. But these days, with time and training, Bret has largely learned to manage that fear. He doesn't cry anymore, doesn't run to Tamara's bed after a clap of thunder. It's part of the reason Tamara knows he can go to California, even though she can't afford to make the trip with him. Those two weeks will be the longest they've ever been apart.
"It's hard, that we can't go," Tamara says. "That ..." She stops, choking on words she doesn't want to say. She cries because she so desperately wants to share this experience with him. Because year after year, she worked to make sure Bret could be his own person, and now he is, but she won't be there to see that triumph on its biggest stage.
The fact that they've reached that stage at all is a feat -- not just for Bret but for Mike and Eric, for Gafney and the entire team.
Sure, this group of players took gold 10 months earlier at Michigan's state games, but Gafney says the team that won then and the one prepping for the World Games a year later hardly play the same sport.
"Last June we played three in the front, three in the back, tapped the ball any way we could just to get it over the net. Everybody winged it," she says. The team didn't need to understand positions then, or formations, or strategy. They would now.
When Gafney began World Games practices in late March, she saw just how far they had to go. "Back in April, they looked at me like, 'This is a volleyball and you want us to do what with it? And you want us to go where? And you want us to stand how?'" Gafney recalls. "I wasn't sure it was ever going to work, but about two weeks back, I just went, 'Amen.'"
Patrolling the practice court, she watches as Eric rotates to the correct position without prodding from the coaches. The guys execute a proper bump-set-spike, trust that their teammate will find the right spot to hit the ball.
"I looked at them and thought, 'This is an actual volleyball team.'"
"What do you want to do this summer?" Sheila asks Mike. "Name a place you'd like to visit."
He wants to go fishing, he says. He'd like to go up north. He's even allowed to bring a friend, so he extends the invitation to Drew, his teammate on Sheila's volleyball team. He assumes Nick will be there. Nick, after all, is his brother now. He's always there.
It's Pat who reminds him, no, not this time.
After two years of living with Pat and Sheila, Nick has rejoined his father full time. The day she packed him up, she made sure Nick was at school. She didn't think she could move him out with him looking on. It would be too hard. "I love him," she says.
Nick still has clothes at Pat and Sheila's, and a bed. He'll always have a place there, but as of June 11, Nick's legal guardian is his dad, once again. So it's Sheila, Pat, Mike and Drew who pile in for the three-hour drive north to Lake Ann, just a few miles from Traverse City, Michigan. They spend the weekend Jet Skiing, bike riding, even visiting a car show, where a 1936 Ford Phaeton is on display. For two hours, Mike and Drew sit on a dock fishing, small-talking and dreaming of winning gold in Los Angeles. It's an ordinary family vacation, which in itself is extraordinary.
Day by day, the sting of the family Mike lost -- he hasn't spoken to his mother since that October night, and his siblings have scattered -- dulls a little. It eases each time Sheila calls him son and when Nick calls Pat asking for his brother. It recedes into the crevices of a life he has built with Sheila and Pat, one so different from the one he remembers from north Flint.
"I'm just playing the cards I was dealt," Mike says a few weeks after that family vacation. "I had a really bad hand. Now it's full of aces."
Watch the dogs. Feed the fish. Water the roses. These are small things, but big things too.
And as Sheila sits down in the den, taking a short break in her long windup to the World Games, she finds herself next to the couch where Mike spent his very first night under her roof. She waits for Mike and Pat as they finish mowing the lawn, then hears them open the front door. Sheila listens to them chatter about their morning spent outside in the sun. "That's my family," she says.