'Everything Happens For A Reason'

She felt bewildered, confused.
 
Tracy Davis ran out of money before she ran out of bills to pay that month, and the married mother of four children had no idea why.
 
Davis quickly thumbed through her checkbook ledger and discovered the alarming answer. She had spent more than $600 on food over the previous 30 days.
 
When you raise twin boys who would tip the scales at 230 pounds by the age of 16, well, sometimes your pantry shelves may stock more dust than Cheerios.
 
Before they raided quarterbacks, Carlos Davis and Khalil Davis raided refrigerators. With appetites bigger than Nebraska preseason expectations and metabolisms faster than Wan'Dale Robinson, the Davis twins, as teens, forced their parents to strategize.
 
In order to keep food for, you know, themselves, Tracy and her husband, Carl, secretly bought another refrigerator, a dorm-sized one, to put in their bedroom.
 
That worked.
 
For a while.
 
"Then we had to start a key lock on our bedroom door, because the boys would come in our room, look in our refrigerator," Tracy said, before pausing, then laughing, "to see what was in our refrigerator, and eat it."
 
Let's say the family went out for dinner some evening and took home leftovers. Tracy's food would mysteriously disappear by dawn.
 
"You would ask them, 'Who ate my food?' and both of them would say, 'Not me, not me,' " Tracy said of her teenagers. "But they were the only two kids at home."
 
A self-described coupon-clipping queen, Tracy always waited for sales before buying groceries. She circled dates on her calendar when she knew Walmart would be marking down meat nearing its expiration date.
 
"I would have to get a whole family pack of chicken thighs," Tracy said of the twins' favorite food. "The boys would count the chicken thighs to make sure it was an even number."
 
In high school, Khalil would eat an entire carton of 12 eggs.
 
A day.
 
Those brown-n-serve turkey sausages that come 10 links in a pack? The boys would devour a box of those.

Each.

Same thing goes for those tubes of 10 biscuits.
 
Gone.
 
It's no wonder Carl, who already worked full-time at AT&T, had to take a second, part-time job running security at Macy's.
 
By the time they were high school seniors, Carlos and Khalil weighed 275 and 270 pounds, respectively. They graduated from Blue Springs High School in suburban Kansas City, Missouri, and then headed to Lincoln to begin their Nebraska football and track and field careers.
 
Tracy and Carl celebrated their departure by going out to eat every night for a month.
 
"They were so happy it was on somebody else who was going to feed us," Carlos said. "They were like, 'Nebraska, it's your turn.' "
 
It makes perfect sense, then, when Tracy tells the story about the day she and Carl sat down the pre-teen twins, saying they had something important to explain to them.
 
"You're adopted."
 
Foster care and adoption classes that Tracy and Carl had taken explained how to handle this very situation, but still, they didn't know – nobody would – how their boys would react.
 
They waited a few seconds.
 
Carlos, clearly unfazed, spoke first.
 
"Can I have some cookies now?"
 
Rough Upbringing
 
Drugs. Guns. Violence.
 
Carlos and Khalil escaped that inner-city lifestyle when they were 6 days old. That's when paramedics took the twins to the hospital after their birth mother, a mentally-ill drug addict, tried harming her babies.
 
"It just breaks my heart," Tracy said, "to think my boys could've been in prison – or dead."
 
A middle-aged woman who knew the boys' family but lived a clean, stable life, took in the week-old twins as a foster parent.
 
In the meantime, the boys' biological grandmother fought to keep Carlos and Khalil, even though caseworkers argued the woman wasn't any more fit than the mother was, and she wouldn't treat the boys any better.
 
Before the case went in front of a judge, the grandmother died.
 
The boys were 4 months old and continued to live with their foster mother, who wanted to adopt the boys. However, the courts wouldn't grant her full custody, saying the twins needed a two-parent home.
 
Despite her earlier attempts to harm her babies, the biological mother somehow still held visitation rights. One day, she drove to the foster mother's home and picked up the boys for an outing.
 
She put the boys in her car, drove to the end of the street, stopped, turned around, and headed back to the foster mother's house. She then removed the twins from her backseat, leaving them in their car seats, and sat them down in the cold, snow-covered front yard.
 
And she drove away.
 
The foster mother happened to look outside and found the boys.
 
"It's kind of messed up," Khalil said. "It's tough."
 
You probably can assume the answer when asked if Carlos and Khalil wished to find and meet the woman who gave them birth.
 
"It's not even worth it at this point," Carlos said.
 
Carlos and Khalil know very little about their birth mother and father, and have few avenues to gather what information they want to know. They're part of a closed adoption, and in the state of Missouri, it's an adoptive relationship in which the families agree to have little or no contact, and exchange no identifying information.
 
"From what we were told, they weren't good people," Khalil said. "They didn't live very well. We know she was on drugs, and that was the biggest reason they wouldn't let her take care of us."
 
Tracy and Carl don't know everything about the boys' background, either, but they do know more than they're willing to tell their sons. However, Tracy says after Carlos and Khalil finish playing at Nebraska and begin the next phase of their lives – ideally the NFL – she will happily provide answers.
 
"Then if they are interested," she said, "I will give them all the information they need to know."
 
The boys do know they were born with different names, and Tracy and Carl renamed them.
 
They know they have a brother, born to the same woman, who's also adopted, is now a teenager, and lives in the Kansas City area. In fact, Tracy and Carl had an opportunity to adopt the boy themselves, when Carlos and Khalil were toddlers, but declined, saying they had all they could handle at the time with the twins.
 
They know when they were born, they had a 14-year-old sister, "a big, tall girl," Tracy said, a girl she and Carl learned about while going through the adoption process. Tracy knows the twins' biological grandmother was a big woman, too, and that their birth mother stood 6-foot-1.
 
The boys know nothing about their birth father. Tracy says she has no information, either.
 
"When we were younger, our mom didn't like us to ask questions," Carlos said, "because she thought we were trying to get in contact with (their birth mother)."
 
That, both twins said, was never the case.
 
"We just wanted to know where we came from," Khalil said, referring to background information such as medical history, or if they had more siblings they didn't know existed.
 
"There's also a lot of things our Grandma still won't tell us today," Khalil said, "because it was bad."
 
To clarify, when the twins reference "Grandma," they are talking about their foster mother, the aforementioned middle-aged woman who raised them until they were 9 months old. She has remained very much a part of the twins' lives.
 
"I love her to death to this day," Carlos said.
 
The feeling has always been mutual.
 
"She loved those boys so much, that she couldn't stand to not be in their life," Tracy said. "That's all right, because we needed her to help us with two babies."
 
The woman, whom Tracy said wishes to remain anonymous, knows the twins' birth family but is against the boys having any contact with them, or vice versa.
 
"She would always say, 'Why do you want to know about them?' " Khalil said.
 
That marked the only tension in a loving, family-like relationship. Carlos and Khalil still spend every Christmas with their original foster mother, and growing up, would spend entire summers staying at her house, which boasted a large, wooded area beyond the backyard, where the boys would spend hours upon hours navigating, exploring.
 
"We were like kids in wonderland," Carlos said. "The only time we ever came back was to go eat. She would make breakfast, lunch and dinner, so we would come back and have a grilled cheese or something."
 
Grandma would tell the boys not to wander very far into the timber, which stretched about a mile.
 
Of course, they did.
 
"There were times me and Carlos got lost," Khalil said. "But we would never tell her. She would always trust us to come home, and we always did, but there would be times we'd be lost, and she'd be, 'What took you guys so long?' We'd have to make up a story."
 
The worst part about the extended visits was leaving to go home. The twins didn't want to. That upset their mother.
 
"Moms, they want you to be happy when you see them," Carlos said. "They don't want you to be crying because you have to go back home."
 
Part Of The Family
 
From the moment they joined hands in marriage, Tracy and Carl Davis knew that someday, they wanted to adopt.
 
"This was always a passion of ours to do," said Tracy, who already had a daughter, Monique. Together, Tracy and Carl had another daughter, Cymone. They're 32 and 28, respectively.
 
When the girls were in elementary school, Tracy and Carl began looking to adopt. Tracy knew a woman from her workplace who had fostered several children, and she put the Davises in contact with an agency.
 
Tracy and Carl took foster parent classes, and upon their conclusion, received a call from their caseworker about a baby they could first take in as foster parents. When Tracy asked to see the baby, the caseworker paused and said there was a catch.
 
Actually, there's two babies, not one.
 
"I said, 'Two?' " Tracy said. "I said, 'Can we just get one?' "
 
That wasn't an option.
 
"They had to take both of us," Khalil said, "or none at all."
 
So Tracy called Carl, told him about the babies – plural.
 
He began to laugh.
 
"That," Tracy said, "is when I knew we were going to bring home two babies."
 
When the twins' foster mother brought them to the Davis house, she had them dressed in all white, including white shoes.
 
At 9 months old, they were already walking.
 
Correction.
 
"The boys never did walk, they ran. They ran everywhere. And they haven't stopped," Tracy said, laughing.
 
Before they officially adopted the twins, Tracy and Carl had a period as foster parents that didn't go as smoothly as planned. Subsidy foster money for supplies, like diapers and milk, wasn't coming, and the couple was growing frustrated.
 
"The caseworker kept saying, 'It's coming, it's coming, it's coming,' " Tracy said. "Finally, I told the caseworker, 'We're struggling here, paying out of pocket.' We had our own two kids, elementary school. We needed help."
 
They didn't want to, but Tracy and Carl said they'd have to return the twins if they didn't get help by a certain date.
 
The checks came, and eventually, on the twins' first birthday – Aug. 22, 1997 – paperwork became finalized, making their adoption official.
 
The twins grew up none the wiser, although they will tell you they questioned some things. Perhaps that explains their nonchalant reaction that day Carlos asked about eating cookies after learning what some would consider life-altering news.
 
"We didn't really think anything of it," Khalil said. "To me, even all the family members we grew up with, they always treated us like we were part of the family. It didn't make any difference at that point. We were a family."
 
Some children, of course, can tell they're treated differently as adopted kids. That wasn't the case with Carlos and Khalil.
 
"I asked the boys if they felt like they were adopted," Tracy said. "They looked at me and said, 'How is adoption supposed to feel?' I said, 'You know what? That just made me feel good.'
 
"That let me know that we were doing a good job."
 
Tracy remembers only one time one of the boys, as an upset-in-the-moment, rebellious teenager, referenced his adoption during an argument.
 
"When Carlos was a teenager, he tried to tell me one time that I wasn't his mother," Tracy said. "Khalil was with me, and Khalil was like, 'Oh, boy, this is not going to go good.'
 
"I said, 'You're right, I'm not your mother. Go find her, and let me know when you find her. Go find her.' I said, 'Like I told you so many times, God wanted you all to be here.
 
"You are where you are supposed to be. We're the ones who wanted you. That's why you two are here. I am your mother.' "
 
Tracy laughed.
 
"He thought he was going to hurt me," she said, "but he didn't."
 
Strict Household
 
Carlos will tell you he and his brother grew up in a strict household, with a mother that wouldn't let them out of the house often, kept them from parties and generally sheltered them.
 
"We had one friend that she would let us go over to his house," he said, "and that was our best friend."
 
Tracy admits she was a "hands-on" mother, especially when it came to her boys' high school education.
 
"I would check their grades every single day," she said. "I would email the teacher myself if I saw they made a bad grade on a test, or even a homework assignment. 'What can they do to bring up their grades? When can they retake this test?' I would do all this stuff myself."
 
A grade of C or worse wasn't acceptable. If Tracy found either boy had Cs in any of his classes, she would punish both.
 
"They cleaned baseboards. They cleaned windows. They cleaned doors. They vacuumed, they dusted," she said. "What teenager wants to clean?"
 
Perhaps a better punishment would have been to fix what they broke.
 
On second thought, that may not have been feasible.
 
"This house looked terrible before they left for college," Tracy said. "I was embarrassed to bring people over because of the condition of our house. But my husband told me we weren't spending a dime repairing anything until after they left."
 
The rambunctious twins broke lights. They broke lamps. They broke their beds.
 
They broke their toilet seat.
 
"They were sitting on the toilet rim," Tracy said, incredulously. "I'm like, 'Who does this? Who does this?' "
 
Sometimes, Tracy would move a piece of furniture, or a wall hanging, only to find a hole in the wall.
 
"I'd be like, 'OK, who put this hole in the wall?' and they said, 'Oh, Mama, that's been there.' No, it hasn't. It hasn't 'been there.' That's their favorite line."
 
Who did it?
 
It's been there.
 
How did this happen?
 
It's been there.
 
The boys played pranks, too, some of them involving Vaseline, laxatives, shaving cream – not all together, mind you.
 
Those usually occurred away from home, and never on their mother.
 
"Because," Tracy said, "I was a screamer."
 
If their parents had allowed them to go outside more often, Khalil said, like they did at Grandma's, perhaps the twins wouldn't have been as destructive.
 
"We probably never broke one thing in Grandma's house," Carlos said. "Maybe a few things, but not like we did in Blue Springs."
 
Athletes In The Making
 
Carl noticed the boys were athletic at a young age. One of the first sports they tried was competitive swimming, at age 8, and they excelled at the sport.
 
Then their father wanted Carlos and Khalil to become involved in track, believing the sport would help make them all-around good athletes. He took them to an inner-city track club, where the boys met Clarence Cadenhead.
 
They've remained close with him ever since, and will work out with "CB" whenever they return home. The former Missouri football player watches every Nebraska game he can, and Carlos and Khalil think of him as a second father.
 
The twins, who became accomplished throwers on the Nebraska track team, actually began the sport as sprinters, which helped develop their speed and quickness today, they say.
 
After swimming and track, the twins began playing football in the second grade, although they played a grade up because of their size. They played on the same club team until they began high school, and traveled across the nation. Initially, they played in the backfield.
 
Every time they had a practice, Carl would call his brother, and told him how impressive the boys were, how they could really play.
 
His brother, by the way, is former Nebraska Blackshirt Lorenzo Hicks.
 
"He never forced Nebraska on us, but we knew it would make his day, make his life, if we chose Nebraska," Khalil said of Hicks. "He told us how much it meant to him to be a Blackshirt. He's the one who really taught us what it means to play here, and what it means to be a Blackshirt."
 
The twins attended Blue Springs High School, and had an opportunity to play varsity football as freshmen, but chose otherwise. They were already playing with the freshman team on Mondays, the sophomore team on Tuesdays and the JV team on Wednesdays.
 
"Me and Khalil, we don't like to be rushed into stuff," Carlos said. "They just wanted to throw us out there. We wanted to take our time and develop, learn how to get used to high school football."
 
They earned their first collegiate scholarship offer from Missouri –merely off an impressive practice film.
 
"Later that afternoon, me and Carlos were sitting in our basement with our two best friends, playing Call of Duty," Khalil said, "and we get a call from Andy Hill (a Missouri assistant). He offered us a scholarship. That's when we knew we had to take football seriously."
 
Nebraska followed with a scholarship offer, then Kansas State.
 
No matter where they went, Tracy wanted the boys together, and also nearby.
 
But not too close.
 
Missouri?
 
"C'mon, that's down the street," Tracy said, laughing. "I don't want them home. They'll be coming home still eating! Too close."
 
Nebraska, she said, was the perfect distance.
 
The twins, recalling a memorable recruiting visit to their high school by former Nebraska coach Bo Pelini, also decided on the Huskers. When Mike Riley replaced Pelini, the twins initially said they were no longer interested in coming to Lincoln, but a certain uncle with Nebraska and Blackshirt connections – Hicks – helped smooth a rough situation.
 
Now seniors, both Davis twins – and their mother – are overjoyed to be playing for Scott Frost. Tracy only knows about the game of football what her boys tell her, but she says she's glad they're "actually playing the kind of defense they came to Lincoln to do – attack."
 
When Nebraska begins the season Saturday against South Alabama, Carlos and Khalil – with a combined 154 career tackles and 10.5 career sacks – will start on the defensive line together for the first time.
 
"It will definitely be a moment out there, just starting out the game together," said Carlos, who has 25 career starts, while Khalil will be making his first.
 
"Early on, we knew we might not be starters, or start the game together, but we always knew we'd be able to do what we love, and do it together," Carlos said. "It didn't matter if we were on the field at the same time.
 
"Going into our senior year, being able to play, starting out the game, it's a dream."
 
Beyond football, Carlos and Khalil earned their bachelor's degrees in child, youth and family studies, graduating August 17.
 
Tracy couldn't stop crying during the ceremony.
 
"I'm still so happy," she said. "I kept telling them they earned graduation."
 
Tracy and Carl now have four children with college degrees, including one daughter with a master's, and another daughter working on her second master's.
 
"I'm happy," Tracy said. "I'm over the moon."
 
Knowing their background, and how far they've come, the twins are equally happy.
 
"It's a blessing, because we're a big, religious, faithful family," Khalil said. "I believe everything happens for a reason."
 
Reach Brian at brosenthal@huskers.com  or follow him on Twitter @GBRosenthal.