The sun dropped lower. The sky turned colors that would’ve been beautiful if I wasn’t terrified. Orange and pink and deep purple bleeding into each other the same way they did in Sedona when I proposed.
Mehar’s eyes were closing. Her head dropped against my shoulder and I felt her weight settle into me as her breathing slowed. I knew she was going under. Sleep or exhaustion or the concussion pulling her down. Her hands were still on her belly. Even fading out she wouldn’t let go of our baby.
I kept paddling.
One arm at a time. Right hand in the water, pull, lift, reach, pull again. My body was doing it without permission from my brain. Muscle memory from a life spent refusing to quit. The sun touched the water. Half the sky went dark. Stars came out one by one like they’d been waiting backstage. I scanned the horizon one more time, left to right, slow, the way I’d been doing every few minutes for hours.
And there it was.
Dead ahead. Maybe two miles out. Maybe three. A dark shape breaking the flat line where sky met water. Low, uneven, and wrong. Wrong because it didn’t move like water. Didn’t rise and fall with the waves. It just sat there. Solid. Still. Trees maybe. A ridge. Something that existed outside of the ocean and outside of the nightmare I’d been living in for the last five hours.
Thank God it was land.
I stared at it until my eyes burned from the salt. Blinked. Looked again. Still there. Getting clearer the longer I watched, darker against the dying sky, more defined with every second that passed.
I didn’t wake Mehar. Not yet. Not until I was sure my mind wasn’t showing me what I wanted to see instead of what was real. I paddled harder. Both arms. Pulling through the water with whatever was left in my body after five hours of fighting the ocean with my bare hands. The shape got bigger. Trees. I could see trees. A shoreline. Something solid and real and close enough to reach if I didn’t stop.
I wasn’t stopping.
Mehar shifted against my shoulder. Murmured something I couldn’t hear. I kept paddling toward an island I couldn’t name, on a map I didn’t have, in an ocean I couldn’t navigate. Nothing but raw hands, a pocket knife, a baby on the way, and the kind of stubbornness my grandmother called foolish and my brothers called Banks.
The island got closer with every stroke.
2
Justice
I loved both my daughters equally but I swear, one of them made it much harder than the other. Whoever created #Girldad, ain’t have a daughter like Storie. She was my baby, but she was gettin’ on my last nerve.
I was standing in the driveway loading the last suitcase into the trunk of my Range Rover. Storie was on the front steps with her arms crossed, her hip cocked to the side, her face arranged into an expression that her mother used to make when she was about to say something she knew would start a war. Monica had been dead for almost four years and that woman was still showing up in our daughter’s attitude like a ghost with perfect timing.
“I’m not going,” Storie announced.
“You’re going,” I replied without even lookin’ up.
“No I’m not. I’m fourteen. I should have a say in how I spend my summer. This is a violation of my rights.”
“A violation of your rights.” I closed the trunk and looked at her. “Where did you get that from?”
“The Constitution.”
“Lil’ girl, the Constitution does not protect you from spending July in Pittsburgh with your grandparents. Get in the damn car, before I send you up there without a phone.”
“I don’t want to go to Pittsburgh, Daddy. I wanna stay here. All my friends are here. Jaylen is here.”
There the fuck it was. She finally admitted that it was some lil nigga that was the real reason behind the constitutional crisis happening in my driveway.
Jaylen was a fifteen-year-old boy from her school who had started texting her about two months ago. She didn’t know I knew about him. She didn’t know I’d already run his name through every database I had access to, found out his parents were divorced, his father drives for UPS, his mother works at a dentist’s office in Bowie, and the boy had a 2.5 GPA that was trending downward. I knew more about Jaylen than Jaylen knew about Jaylen. And I was not leaving my fourteen-year-old daughter within a twenty-mile radius of a boy with a declining GPA and unsupervised summers.
“Who’s Jaylen?” I asked, because I wanted to see how she’d play it.
Her eyes flickered. Just a fraction. Just enough to tell me she was calculating how much to reveal, which told me there was more to reveal than she wanted me to know. She was fourteen. She thought she was slick. But she couldn’t pull shit over me. One of the reasons I was sending her away was to drive distance between them two.
“He’s just a friend from school,” she said.
“A friend.”
“Yes. Afriend. Boys and girls can be friends, Daddy. It’s not 1952.”
