I took the elevator up to the NICU instead of heading for the exit because I couldn’t leave this hospital without seeing my daughter, Aziza, one more time.
When we arrived at opkins, Mehar and I did a deep dive on the perfect name for her. None of the other names we were considering before the plane crash fit her. We looked up names that meant strength because that’s what she was. We decided on the name Aziza which meant strength in some languages and precious in another. It was perfect.
The nurse on duty knew me by now and buzzed me in without asking. I walked past the rows of incubators andstopped at the third one on the right and looked through the plastic at her.
There she was, so preciously sleeping. Her tiny chest going up and down with the ventilator. Fists curled by her face. Legs drawn up to her belly like she still thought she was inside Mehar. Three pounds and eleven ounces of fight in a box. The nurses kept telling me she was getting stronger every day and that her oxygen levels were improving and that they were optimistic about weaning her off the machine soon. I held onto every word they said like it was scripture because right now their words were all I had.
I put my hand through the port and touched her arm. Her fingers found mine on instinct, curling around my fingertip with that grip that barely registered as pressure but somehow felt like the heaviest thing I’d ever held.
And then Aziza’s eyes opened.
Just a sliver. The same way they’d done when Mehar touched her for the first time. Her face scrunched against the low light and then they opened wider and there they were and everything inside me went cold.
Blue-green. Clear and vivid and unmistakable.
Rita’s eyes. Prime’s eyes. Cannon’s eyes. Proctor bloodline eyes staring up at me from my daughter’s face.
I knew those eyes. I’d grown up seeing them on my grandmother and my brother. And according to everything I’d been told about my own blood, I had no genetic connection to them. Vivica confirmed it. Rashid was my father. Alexander wasn’t. The Proctor line ran through Alexander’s side, through Rita, through Prime. I was outside of it.
So why the fuck did my daughter have those eyes?
The thought came fast and ugly. I didn’t invite it. Didn’t build up to it. It just slammed into me while I was standing there withmy finger in my baby girl’s grip and it was the most disgusting thought I’d ever had.
Did Mehar cheat on me?
Quindon’s face flashed through my head. Seven months old, hooked up to chemo, and me sitting in a doctor’s office finding out the baby I’d been singing to sleep every night wasn’t mine. Janelle’s face when I confronted her. The way she cried and begged and I already knew the tears were just another performance because everything about her had been a performance.
Then Camille. Rubbing her stomach at the kitchen counter talking about “our baby” with that smile on her face knowing damn well she’d gotten pregnant by another man because my vasectomy blocked her little plan. Looking me dead in my eyes and lying without blinking.
And my mother. Thirty-eight years. A courier at Rita’s birthday party reading a letter that blew up my entire identity while my family watched. “Quest Banks is not the biological son of Alexander Banks Junior.” Thirty-eight years of building a legacy for a man who wasn’t even my father because my mother couldn’t keep her legs closed and couldn’t keep her mouth honest.
I’d been down this road before. Three times. And every time I’d trusted the woman, and every time the woman had lied, and every time it broke me in a way I had to rebuild from.
I pulled my finger from the baby’s grip and stepped back from the incubator and tried to think straight. Mehar was not Janelle. She was not Camille. She was not Vivica. I thought back to when she would’ve gotten pregnant and tried to find a gap. A week I was traveling. A night she came home late. A period where things were off between us. I couldn’t find one. We were locked in during that stretch, spending every night together,building toward the engagement, planning a life. There was no window. No opportunity. No suspicious anything.
But I’d done the math with Quindon too. I’d looked at that baby and seen my own face because I wanted to see it. The math had told me one thing and the DNA had told me another and the DNA didn’t give a damn about my feelings.
I was sick for even thinking it. This was Mehar. My Peach. The woman who held my face in her hands on that island and told me she believed in us. The woman who lost her uterus bringing our daughter into the world. If she ever found out this thought crossed my mind, after everything we survived, we’d be done. And we would deserve to be done because suspecting her was its own kind of betrayal.
I wasn’t going to ask her. I wasn’t going to accuse her. I wasn’t going to let the worst parts of my past poison the best thing that had ever happened to me.
But there was something I needed to know for sure.
I walked out of the NICU and took the elevator down to the lobby and sat in a chair by the vending machines and pulled out my phone. At-home paternity testing kits. Discrete results in three to five business days. Cheek swab from me, cheek swab from one of my brothers.
I placed the order.
35
Serenity
“She’s so tiny,” I said, staring at the photo Quest had texted me of Aziza in the incubator. It hurt to look at. My niece was smaller than some of the stuffed animals people had sent for Sarai, hooked up to machines and wires, fighting battles no baby should have to fight. I zoomed in on her face and felt my chest tighten because she looked like Mehar. Same nose, same lips. Even under all the tubes you could see it.
“Is she?” Rita asked from her chair, squinting at my phone screen from three feet away like that was going to help. The woman could barely see the phone let alone a premature baby on a tiny screen.
“Grandma, you need to stop pretending you can see things you can’t.”
“I can see just fine.”
