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The next year, she called him Daddy for the first time. She called Phillip Papa.
They’d both cried.
She was the flower girl at their wedding in the backyard, stamping her feet, glaring at the both of them for daring to be late, and don’t you see my dress, Daddy? Don’t you see how pretty my hair looks, Papa?
Yeah. They’d seen. They’d seen all of it.
And she was seven when they’d sat her down and showed her pictures of where she’d come from, explaining that while he and Phillip were her parents, she also had another set of parents who had loved her very, very much, and were with God now. She looked at the pictures with wide eyes, glancing through all of them, then back up at David and Phillip.
They’d waited.
Finally, she said, “Will I see them again?”
“Yes, sweetheart,” David had said. “You’ll see them again.”
“And you still love me?”
“More than anything in the world,” Phillip had said, a hand in her hair.
“Okay,” she’d said. “Okay.”
And she’d grown. Good God, how she had grown. She went from little girl to awkward, moody tween, to a goddamn beauty queen, this statuesque woman who they loved and were terrified for in equal measure. She was fearless, sarcastic, and oh so funny, with this great, dusky laugh that sounded like she’d been drinking whiskey for years. She got everything she wanted from her fathers; all she had to do was look at them with her big dark eyes and David and Phillip were absolutely helpless.
When she was ten, another girl asked her why her parents were both white and both men when she was black. Who was her mother? Didn’t she know she needed one too? David had been borderline furious, ready to go and berate some little girl he didn’t know, and Phillip was already plotting how to get away with it, but Alice had looked at both of them and laughed, saying she already handled it. “I told her that I was so lucky, God gave me two sets of parents in different colors. And then I told her to mind her own damn business.”
She was twelve when her grandmother passed. She’d cried, but she’d said, “I’m sad, but I’m happy too because I still have you. I didn’t know you could be sad happy.”
When she was thirteen, she told them both that she’d started bleeding. “You know,” she’d said. “Down there.” And of course they’d both freaked out, because they never had to deal with anything like that before. And didn’t that make them the worst parents in the world? Jesus Christ, they weren’t ready for that. She’d sighed, like she was disappointed in the both of them, and then dragged them all to the computer, and they’d sat down for an hour on some bright and flashy website that talked about boybands and which actor had been shirtless where and wasn’t he dreamy (“He really is,” Phillip had said before David had smacked hi
m upside the head), but it’d also had a section for SIGNS FOR YOUR FIRST PERIOD, and they’d both read through it, all three of them grimacing before David had gone to the store with specific instructions on what to buy.
And when she was sixteen, she said to Phillip, “You should adopt me too, because I want it to be real for you like it is for me. Can we do that? It’s 2009. It’s time we get this going, Papa. Get our asses in gear.” There’d been tears for that too. But they’d done just as she’d asked.
She was seventeen when she became a Greengrass, “like, for real, for real, because now I’ve got you both.” And even though they’d had their funny little ceremony when she was still so new in their lives, and Phillip had had his name legally changed a short time later, she’d insisted that they get married, “like, for real, for real,” when it became legalized in the District of Columbia in March of 2010. So they had, riding the train down to get their marriage license, hands clasped, grinning at her as she threw flower petals on the Metro, making sure everyone knew where they were going and what they were doing.
She’d cried that time when they kissed in their tuxes.
And then she graduated, and David and Phillip had been the loudest parents there, because goddammit, their baby girl was walking across that stage, and she was doing so with a 3.75 GPA, and a partial scholarship to George Washington University. Even though they told her she could go anywhere, that she could do anything she wanted to do, she told them she wanted to stay right where she was. When they told her they’d been saving a college fund for her ever since the first day she’d been theirs, so of course she could live on campus if she wanted to and get that full college experience. “Riiight,” she’d said. “And leave the two of you without me? No offense, guys, but we both know you’d be lost without me. I think I’ll stick around for a little while yet to make sure you’ll be okay in the end.”
And she’d kept that promise.
Until March 22, 2012, when her purse was found and she was not.
Oh, the terror they’d both felt then, the unimaginable terror that consumed them both and shattered them into the tiniest of pieces. He remembered, vaguely, how anytime he’d been watching the news or looking online before and there being a story about a woman disappearing or being murdered, and how he’d think to himself, almost absently, Thank God that’s not my daughter, and maybe he’d hug her a little tighter when he’d see her next after that, not even realizing what he was doing. But nothing, nothing could compare to what it felt like to actually have it happen to them. They always thought that. Everyone did. Even if it was unconsciously, everyone thought it: At least it didn’t happen to me.
But then it did happen to them, it did happen to David and to Phillip, and they’d understood then what it meant when people said, “You don’t know what it’s like until it happens to you.” Because they loved her, they loved her more than they loved their own selves, they were her parents, for fuck’s sake, and she was there until she wasn’t, and no one knew, none of their friends or people they considered their family, none of them knew because it hadn’t happened to them yet.
Oh sure, they tried, they hugged David and Phillip, they cried with them, they scoured the city with them, burying the streets with her picture, demanding of everyone that passed, “Have you seen this woman? She’s missing, tell me, have you seen her?”
Everyone would take the flyers, the thousands and thousands of flyers that were printed, and they’d smile sympathetically and shake their heads, and David knew what they were thinking, he fucking knew it.
At least it didn’t happen to me.
The police came for them when they finally got their asses in gear, the trail already days old. He was so angry about that, but in hindsight, he should have expected it. Alice wasn’t dating anyone, her last boyfriend having left for Seattle for school. The parting had been amicable (“He’s just a boy, Daddy,” Alice had said, rolling her eyes. “I’m not sad because I have the rest of my life for boys”), and he had an alibi, so he was cleared. After that, it left the parents, and it was fine, they had to rule everyone out so they could focus, but David was so angry at their intrusiveness. “Have you ever hit your daughter?” they had asked him. “Have you ever put your hands on her?”
“No,” David had said, eyes bulging from his head, convinced that this had to be a nightmare that he could not wake up from. That he was still in his bed, twisting and turning, the sheets tangled against his sweaty skin, and maybe, just maybe, he’d open his eyes, and there would be that moment, that breathtaking moment that is one of the greatest human experiences: waking from a nightmare and realizing it wasn’t real.
“Did she do drugs?” they asked him. “Sleep around? Have men over or stay out late?”
