Chapter 15 #2
“You don’t look straight. You’re sitting in this big room with the lights off, the curtains closed. I thought you would be out with Uncle Tyler or something, doing some bachelor stuff, like partying with strippers or something.”
“Girl!” I exclaimed. “Strippers?”
“I know how y’all rappers do!” She giggled.
We both laughed then. I ran my hand over my head. “Yeah, well, not tonight anyway. I’m already in enough hot water as it is.” Before I could catch myself, I mumbled aloud. “Some stuff happened today.”
“Some stuff? About what? With who?”
I hesitated, then shook my head. “It’s nothing important enough to talk about right now.”
Yana didn’t push. She dropped her head and nodded as if she understood.
“Okay,” she said. “Well, . . . you wanna watch something? Or play a game? Or just . . . chill?”
That was one thing I enjoyed learning from my baby girl. She didn’t fix things with speeches. It was as if she knew and understood the value of presence. It was amazing how much I learned from her on my journey of discovering fatherhood.
I nodded. “Yeah. Let’s chill.”
She perked up immediately, reached forward, and grabbed the remote from the table. Then she dramatically plopped back on the couch as if she owned it.
“What we watching?” she asked.
“Something you not gon’ judge me for,” I muttered.
She laughed. “Too late, you old man!”
“Old?” I scoffed. “Girl, I’m not old.”
She clicked through the apps on the screen. “Okay, then pick something, grandpa. But you can’t pick nothin’ depressing. No documentaries. No murder either.”
I stared at her. “Why you think I wanna watch somebody being murdered?”
She cut her eyes at me. “Because you be listening to the most ominous stuff in the car. All that rap noise.”
I lost it then. I laughed so hard at that.
We agreed on an anime. It was one of the ones she’d tried to get me into before, but I kept falling asleep on it—something about chosen families and fighting demons that represented your trauma. I pretended not to notice the metaphor.
She leaned against the armrest and tucked her feet under herself, her eyes locked on the screen.
I caught myself as I stared at her. This kid had popped into my life and suddenly become my entire world. She was my family.
In that moment, it hit me quietly. The kind of love she gave me was unconditional, in a way I had never experienced in my life until I met her mother.
Princess had been the first person to love me without fear attached to it. Her love came without fists or threats. It came without me having to earn it or suffer.
Then she took that and gave me something even more special: a daughter.
A chance.
A reason to become the man I kept telling myself I wanted to be.
Yana’s breathing slowed as the episode rolled. At some point, her head dipped into the back of the couch. Her lashes fluttered. She fought sleep, but it won.
I reached over and turned the TV off.
Then I just sat there for a moment longer and watched her.
I was never given the opportunity to do this when she was little. I never had the chance to carry her to bed when she fell asleep on a couch. I never had the chance to tuck her in at night. I never even believed that was a real thing parents did.
Something in my stomach fluttered. I leaned forward and carefully lifted her into my arms. She was heavier than I expected, but she still fit into my arms perfectly.
She stirred slightly. “Dad?”
“I got you,” I whispered.
She relaxed immediately. I walked her to the second bedroom, laid her down gently, and pulled the blanket up to her shoulders. She rolled over as if it was instinct.
For a second longer, I stood there and watched her. A smile spread across my face, and I felt my eyes begin to water. That simple moment of tucking my daughter into bed felt like something I had waited a lifetime to do.
I stepped out quietly and closed the door halfway.
The suite was quiet again, but it didn’t feel as lonely anymore.
I walked to my room and closed the door. When I peeled back the covers and lay back, I picked my phone up and opened the browser.
I did a Google search for therapists in Los Angeles. I watched as the screen populated names, reviews, and availability.
A thought about my stepfather’s face when he dismissed me flashed across my mind.
You was just soft.
I placed my phone back on the nightstand and exhaled as I turned over.
I thought about Princess telling me that I hid my problems in my work.
I flashed back to my voice in that church, cussing and cracking open in front of everybody.
When I looked up at the clock, I realized how late it had gotten. I turned back over, tapped the light off, and let the silence wrap around me again. I turned on my back and stared at the ceiling.
I thought about how I tried to be strong through everything in my life. I had been taught that men weren’t supposed to cry. I had been taught that tears equaled weakness, and softness meant you deserved pain. I finally let myself unlearn that then.
Before I could stop it, the tears poured out of my eyes as if they carried all my pain through them.
The tears slipped down the sides of my face as my body released all the water my body had built up inside of me throughout the years, the tears I held back when I went into the studio and let the tracks do it for me.
I turned my head into the pillow to muffle the sound as if I still had something to be ashamed of.
That night, in a hotel room back in a city that I once believed tried to break me, with my daughter sleeping safely in the next room and a DNA kit on the table that waited to decide my future, I cried, and I allowed it to take me.
I fell asleep as my breath evened out somewhere between the ache and exhaustion.