Chapter 3 #2
It had a ramp out front and enough wheelchair accessibility that she could access the entire first floor without leaving her chair.
The upstairs was a bit more complicated, but I had a lot of connections even outside of shifters, so I’d had a top-of-the-line stairlift installed for whenever she was too weak to walk up herself.
Which, toward the end of her life, was more often than not.
I preferred to carry her, though, ignoring how much thinner and more fragile she had grown, and instead pretending we were a newlywed couple all over again. I never grew tired of carrying her like that. Or touching her. Or just being in her presence. The world was a darker place without her.
None of that now, I reminded myself sternly.
Some days it was so difficult to ignore the gaping wound in my chest, but I’d promised my wife I wouldn’t wallow, so I wasn’t going to wallow.
It was the least I could do for her. The girls and I had gone to counseling for a year, where I’d processed my grief, and that was that.
The therapist told us we’d made immense progress and didn’t need to attend biweekly anymore, so we were down to quarterly check-ins individually or as a family, or any emergency spots we might need if something triggered one of us.
But so far, no triggers, no signs of PTSD. Just regular old grief. Granted, what was regular about losing the love of your life or a mother?
“Daddy, you okay down there?”
I glanced up the stairs. Eva stood on the landing, a stuffed unicorn under one arm. Jeez, I had really zoned out, hadn’t I?
“Yeah, baby, just thinkin’.” Although I didn’t really have the thicker accent that some of my relatives did, it often slipped in at the end of my words when I was very tired or very happy.
“Thinkin’ ’bout what?”
Although both my children were incredibly mature for their age, I saw no reason to burden them with even more. They’d already gone through something no child should have to go through, so I had absolutely zero desire to add to it.
“Oh you know, stuff.”
“Stuff ‘n’ things?”
“Stuff ‘n’ things, baby girl.”
“Do you need more time for the stuff ‘n’ things?”
“Nah. I got more important things to spend my time on.”
“Like me?” Eva asked, raising her hand into the air and striking a little diva pose.
She could be a little reserved around others, but goodness, sometimes she was quite the firecracker.
Yet another way she took after her mother.
Apparently, when Zara was a kid, a lot of people thought she was mute.
Which was wild to think about, considering she and I had spent literal years of our lives just talking to each other until our voices were hoarse.
I was incredibly lucky that they trusted me enough to be so comfortable around me. I’d never take that for granted.
“Like you!” I ran up the stairs at full speed. I couldn’t often express my shifter side in the suburbs, but in the safety of my own home, I could indulge in some of it.
I was up at Eva’s face-level in about a second. She let out a happy cry and wrapped her arms around my neck, so her feet dangled in the air as I took the last few steps onto the landing. Turning, I saw Addy standing in the hallway, looking at us with staged horror.
“I will save you, sister!” she cried before launching herself at me.
I let out a dramatic oooph! and half collapsed to my knees, making sure to hold Eva steady. Addy yelled in triumph while Eva laughed, and I fell to the side so they could swarm me.
My daughters were too smart for their own good, though. They knew they couldn’t actually win a fight with their old man, so the next thing I knew, they were tickling me.
“No fair!” I cried, trying to keep from flailing as one of them went for my foot and the other under my armpit. The last thing I wanted to do was lash out accidentally, which was liable to happen when tickling was involved.
“All’s fair in love and war,” Addy said, parking herself cross-legged on my chest and tickling around my neck. I wasn’t very ticklish there, but Eva was going after my feet like she had a vendetta against me. I’d forgotten how sensitive they could be!
“Oh yeah?” I challenged.
“Yeah!”
“Well, if that’s the case…” Wrapping one arm around her back so she wouldn’t fall, I sat up, which scared Eva away from my feet. I stood, flipping Addy upside down. Eva giggled and clapped her hands.
“Do you surrender?” I declared, really laying on the drama. Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise that my girls were interested in chorus and musical theater.
“Never!” Addy cried, fake-pummeling my shins. “I will never surrender!”
“Then meet your doom!”
I began to walk toward the girls’ room, gently swinging my upside-down daughter, her upper body swaying from side to side. She gave up on reaching behind her to bat at my legs, and instead tried to grab onto doorways as we went along.
Was it rowdy and juvenile? Yes. But I didn’t care.
I was having a blast, and so were my girls.
I truly didn’t understand how some men only did the bare minimum for their kids and said that providing for them was enough.
I liked my girls just as much as I loved them.
Frankly, they were pretty fucking great in just about every way.
In my line of work, I had encountered a few guys who hinted I was feminine for doing my daughter’s hair or talking about taking a makeup course when they were older.
Other men said it was inappropriate for me to be so close with my “female progeny”—yuck—but those people were idiots.
I wrote them off along with the people who insisted that an alpha shifter had to act a certain way and that having anxiety or being in touch with emotions somehow made me any less of an alpha bear.
They were all losers, and I pitied them.
“Okay, okay, I surrender,” Addy said as I finally made it all the way into their room. Chuckling, I set her on her bed, and she whirled at me defiantly, finger pointed. “You may have won the battle, but you will not win the war.”
“Of that I’m sure,” I said, leaning down and kissing her forehead.
That seemed to change the mood, and a few minutes later, the girls were settled into bed, and I was reading them a story about a group of children who were obsessed with ancient Egyptology and formed their own club about it.
I thought perhaps it was a little too advanced for Eva, but she insisted, and I didn’t feel the need to argue with her.
Unsurprisingly, Eva fell asleep first, looking as angelic as her full name—Evangeline—implied. I looked at Addy, and she gave me another one of her nods that said so much without saying anything at all.
“Goodnight,” I whispered, getting up to give Eva a kiss on the cheek, and then Addy.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you have any other activities scheduled before we leave?”
I paused, racking my brain to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. Normally, Zara and I took turns planning stuff, and our first year without her, I’d skipped activities, for obvious reasons. This was my first year riding solo as the Christmas guide.
“Why? Was there something you wanted to do in particular?”
“No. Just curious. A lot has… changed.”
Yes, it had.
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow since it’s your last day of school before winter break. For now, you just get some sleep, okay?”
“Okay. See you in the morning. Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
She settled in, pulling the blanket up to her chin.
I turned the light off, then shut the door behind me, making sure to walk quietly as I went.
Although neither of my girls were old enough to have the advanced hearing of a shifter, kids always had an uncanny knack for being woken up by the last thing you’d ever expect.
Once I was at the end of the hall, I hurried to my bedroom and opened my laptop.
After Zara’s death, I couldn’t stand to stay in the master bedroom downstairs, so I’d set up the largest unoccupied room on the second floor and made that my new bedroom.
The master bedroom was now a combination study and a bit of a memorial to my wife.
Nothing quite like a shrine, but I had a bookcase with her favorite books, a table with her prettiest crystals, incense burner, and candles, and two of her favorite plants hanging from the window.
I had a bit of a black thumb myself—ironic since I was a landscaper—but I had reminders in my phone to water them and even rotate them when needed, because I wasn’t going to let anything happen to her spider plant named Queen, who was bigger than I was broad, and King, a variegated Pothos that had multiple branches that stretched all the way around the room.
Then there were a couple of photos of her from babyhood to before she became terminal, photos of us together, including our wedding, then her and the girls, and finally all of us as a family.
I loved looking at them, and I did whenever I was feeling a bit too down or terrified about where the world was heading and what my future looked like as the single father of two daughters who were black.
So many people outside of our area didn’t understand the melting pot of being Creole.
I was French, West African, German, and Spanish.
My wife was Portuguese, Afro-Caribbean, Haitian, Spanish, and Dutch.
And together, all of us were American through and through, with no plans on changing that anytime soon.
I just had to be realistic that as both a shifter and a man of color, there were some trials and tribulations my girls would go through that I couldn’t shield them from, no matter how much I wished I could.
I tried not to worry too hard about those. All I could do was be mentally prepared to deal with them as they happened. I would always protect my girls as best I could, but I didn’t want them to live their whole lives in fear.
So yeah, I looked at those photos quite a lot.
Wait, what was I doing again?
Oh right! Activities for the weekend.
I started to look at a few community boards and googled events in my area. I shuffled through a few—I’d already taken the girls sledding, and I also wanted to wait a bit longer before we went to look at all the light displays in the city—but then something caught my eye.
It was an advert for one of the bigger outdoor ice-skating rinks in the city. During the summer, it was a wading pool with geysers for city kids to keep cool, but in the winter they filled it, let it freeze over, and turned it into a skating rink. “Kids’ night, huh?”
According to the ad, it was free for anyone twelve and under.
Not that I was worried about money, but it made me feel better that there wouldn’t be many teenagers or try-hard adults racing across the ice and possibly knocking one of my girls over.
Besides, it seemed like a great chance for the kids to make friends.
It wasn’t that they were social pariahs at school, but Addy was very focused on her academics and extracurriculars, hence her self-induced competition with Symphony, and Eva was fairly reserved even among children she got along with.
Didn’t that work out just perfectly? It looked like we had a plan.