Ducane
two weeks later
“Skye, stop calling us. We good.” Her laugh still made me melt after all these damn years, and I hated that it did. “We almost home now.”
A month in, and I’d moved from level one to level two without much of a fight left in me, not after waking up to them in the mornings.
We were past careful co-parenting small talk, past pretending the distance between us was about anything other than both of us being scared.
I still slept down that hall every night, guest room technically still the guest room, but some mornings I woke up and forgot that was even true anymore.
Skye still had that fucking pull on me.
There was still a part of me that wanted Skye to hurt the way I’d hurt. To sit in the same silence. To ask the same questions. I’d be lying if I said that man disappeared overnight.
He just wasn’t the man I wanted Cadence learning from.
“Daddy, don’t be mean to Mommy. She just misses us.”
The word still got my attention every time she said it. I just wasn’t surprised by it anymore. I glanced down at the little judge in the seat beside me, arms crossed over her brand-new bear.
“Sorry, baby.” I bit back a smile. “But I took good care of you today, didn’t I? Tell Mommy that part.”
Kareem chuckled from the front seat. I cut my eyes at him.
Cadence never missed a thing, and somehow, she’d become my favorite person on this earth in a month flat.
We’d finally made it out of Build-A-Bear after an agonizing two hours.
Picking the bear took five minutes. The rest of the time was spent getting Buttercup settled.
She needed a birth certificate, a little cardboard house, a blanket, and, apparently, a whole personality before Cadence was willing to leave.
By the time we walked out, I knew Buttercup liked grilled cheese and wasn’t allowed to sleep alone.
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” Skye said in my ear, fake-wounded.
“I’m fucking with you, Skye.” I dropped my voice, so Cadence wouldn’t catch the word. “Does she need anything before she crashes?”
I was still learning everything I’d missed and everything I didn’t know. I just wasn’t living there anymore. I only had room for what was in front of me now.
“She’ll probably nap soon,” Skye said. “No outside without sunscreen, no bubbles, no chalk on the sidewalk or I’ll be receiving another damn letter from the HOA. Other than that, have fun, baby daddy.”
“Be cool. I’ll see you when you get in.”
“Don’t wait up. It’ll be late. This layover is taking longer than normal.”
Skye had decided to get back to work. I respected it. She’d always had a hustle about her, even back when she had every reason to let me carry the load and chose not to.
“What’s late, Skye?”
“Late, Ducane. I’m fine. I’ve been doing this for years.”
“I hear you. But not with me, you’re not.” I leaned back.
“Ducane.” A breath. “What does that mean?”
“I wanna pick my wife up from work.”
She went quiet for a second. I’d learned that silence meant she was trying not to let me hear her smile.
“Well.” Her voice came back softer. “Do that, then. I gotta go.”
She hung up before I could get the last word, like always.
We finally made it home, and Kareem helped us with the bags from our mini shopping spree.
Buttercup came everywhere with us, including down to the living room floor, where we dumped out a Lego set, the box of which promised a castle, give or take ten years. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d built a Lego anything. I couldn’t tell her no either.
Cadence settled in with a juice box and a bowl of Hot Cheetos. I had a beer I wasn’t really drinking. What held my attention was Buttercup and five more stuffed animals lined up against the couch, all facing us.
Cadence talked a mile a minute. One thought rolled right into the next without a single connection between them. That reminded me of her rambling-ass mama.
I nodded toward the audience.
“Cady, why all your stuffies watching us? Your mama got ‘em spying on me?”
She giggled, orange Cheeto dust all over her fingers.
“No, silly.”
I looked back at the lineup.
“Well, they making me nervous.”
She laughed even harder.
“We’re playing YouTube.”
I frowned.
“Playing YouTube?”
She pointed at Buttercup like I should’ve known that already.
“They’re watching us play with our toys.”
I looked at every last stuffed animal again.
“Baby...they’re stuffed animals.”
She shrugged.
“Pretend.”
She rolled onto her stomach and grabbed my face. I still wasn’t used to her doing that. Little hands all over me like she’d known me forever.
She traced over my eyebrows.
“Why do you have my eyebrows?”
“‘Cause you got ‘em from me, much like my whole face.”
“Oh.” She nodded like that settled it. “So we’re twins. Mama said that.”
She snapped another Lego into place, frowned at it, then gasped.
“OH—”
She disappeared so fast I barely had time to tell her to slow down before I heard her tearing through drawers upstairs.
I looked toward the ceiling.
“Be careful, Cady. Your mama will kill me if you get hurt.”
“I’m okay!”
Thirty seconds later, she came flying back down the steps, tablet hugged against her chest like she’d found buried treasure.
“I found it. Look, Daddy.”
Bubble bath.
Swipe.
“That’s me.”
Spaghetti all over her face.
Swipe.
Curled up asleep on Skye’s chest.
“Mommy was tired that day.”
Swipe.
Then her finger slipped.
The picture disappeared.
Skye came up instead.
Younger. Hair in a wild bushy ponytail. Sitting in an apartment I didn’t recognize. She looked beautiful, but I could see the exhaustion on her face and on her shoulders.
Hey, Sugar Cane.
She was looking dead into the camera.
I stopped moving.
Cadence didn’t. She ate a chip and watched it like she’d seen it a hundred times.
“That’s me in her belly,” she said. “Mommy talks to you in these ones.” She tapped the screen, already bored, looking for more baby ones. “She does it a lot. I don’t know why.”
She found another video of herself and moved on, satisfied.
I couldn’t.
“Baby girl, go back to that one.”
She looked up at me, confused, then swiped back without asking why.
I let it play.
Hey, Sugar Cane, I don’t know if you’ll ever see this. I hope you do. But uhm, well. We’re pregnant. I’m so scared. And tired, a lot. It’s been a month since we said goodbye, and I miss you like crazy. I don’t know what I was thinking. But it’s better this way. One day you’ll see.
The video ended. I tapped the next one before I could talk myself out of it.
Skye, further along now, belly out, sitting on a different couch in better light.
Cane, I met a real life Mrs. Juniper today.
Guess what her daughter’s name is. Oh, we’re having a girl.
Her daughter’s name is Cadence. I’m stealing it.
It’s kind of like your name but not. Close enough.
I want her to have as much of you as possible.
I still miss you, but I gotta take care of our little one.
She’s rambunctious already. Our day will come.
I’ll keep recording for when it does. And if you’re watching this, the time is now. Do we have flying cars yet?
I leaned back against the couch and let out a slow breath.
I kept going because I couldn’t stop.
This wasn’t a highlight reel. It was somewhere she’d been going to talk to me the whole time, the way other people wrote in a journal or prayed before bed.
I reached over and turned the volume down a notch, buying myself a second before Cadence could catch her daddy sitting here leaking like a faucet over videos.
The next one I came to was the day Cadence was born, her propping the phone up and talking to me through contractions.
I smiled at her being tough as nails. My heart dropped once the video cut off mid-sentence.
She must have stopped recording once things got real. I tapped the next one fast as hell.
“What an experience,” she said with tears in her eyes and a smile on her face.
Skye was in a hospital bed, skin glistening with sweat, hair matted to her forehead, exhausted but so fucking beautiful. A tiny pink hat came into view before my baby girl's face took up the screen.
“She’s beautiful, Ducane. Look at her.” She placed her on her chest and wrapped her arms around her.
“Hey, you.” Her voice came out wrecked and soft at the same time.
“You are so special. Do you know that? You don’t even know it yet, but you already changed my whole life, and you’re not even a day old. ”
A nurse, off camera. “And what are we naming her, Mama?”
Skye held her back and looked right into the camera, right at me, for a long second before she answered.
“Cadence Noelle... Simmons.”
She hadn’t just kept a record. She’d been keeping me.
Kareem’s voice came back to me, loud as the day he said it in that front seat. ‘She did it scared, not cold. Don’t let the fear she had cost you the family you got waiting on you now.’
That was it. That was the whole thing right there.
I’d spent the last few weeks with one foot in and one foot out, acting like I still had a decision to make.
Truth was, I’d been holding back to punish her a little, or because that's what my father would’ve done, and some old, tired part of me still thought that made a man strong instead of just scared.
There wasn’t a decision to make. Not really.
I’d spent so much time trying to separate the hurt from the love that I forgot they’d always belonged to the same story.
I wanted my wife.
I wanted my daughter.
I wanted the life we’d almost had.
Cadence yawned, gave up on the Legos, and rested her head on my arm.
“You can watch the rest,” she mumbled, already drifting off. “Mommy won’t care.”
She got quiet for a second.
“Love you, Daddy.”
Before I could answer, she was asleep.
I kissed the top of her head and hit play.
I wasn’t going anywhere.
I wasn’t burning my life down to get back at my father, and I wasn’t leaving these two. Whatever it took, I was keeping them.