Chapter 2: Before the Boat
Let me tell you who she is, before I tell you what happened next.
Her name is Zuri Grace Callahan.
She was eight months old when she came to live with us. A foster placement through the state of Georgia. My wife, Simone, and I had been trying for a baby for five years. Two rounds of IVF. One miscarriage at eleven weeks that we never really talked about afterward.
Then one night, Simone sat down on the edge of our bed and said, "Ryan, what if our baby is already out there? What if she's just waiting for somebody to come get her?"
We took the classes.
We passed the home study.
And on a rainy Tuesday in March, a caseworker named Denise Holloway carried a tiny girl with enormous eyes into our living room and set her on Simone's lap.
Zuri didn't cry.
She looked at Simone for a long time, very seriously.
Then she reached up and grabbed Simone's earring.
Simone laughed so hard she cried, and that was it. We were finished. We belonged to her.
The adoption was finalized fourteen months later.
My father didn't come to the courthouse.
He sent a card. Inside, in his heavy, slanted handwriting, he had written: Congratulations. — H.C.
Not "Love, Dad."
Not "Welcome to the family."
Just initials.
Harold Callahan built Callahan Marine from a single bait shop in Key West into one of the largest yacht manufacturers on the East Coast. He was hard, proud, and fiercely old-fashioned, and when I married Simone, a Black schoolteacher from Atlanta, he shook her hand at the wedding like she was a business associate.
When we told him we were adopting, he was quiet for a long time.
Then he said, "Well. It's not a Callahan, but I suppose that's your business."
It.
Simone heard him.
She didn't say anything. She just took my hand under the table and squeezed it so hard it hurt.
That was the last real conversation I had with my father for almost two years.
Fourteen months ago, Simone collapsed in the kitchen while making pancakes.
A brain aneurysm.
She was thirty-five.
She died before the ambulance reached the hospital.
Zuri was standing in the kitchen doorway in her pajamas when it happened. She was two. She didn't understand. For weeks afterward, she would walk into the kitchen every morning and say, "Mommy pancakes?" and look at the floor where Simone had fallen.
I still wear my wedding ring.
I don't know when I'll stop.
Three months after the funeral, Zuri started drinking water constantly. Wetting through her diapers. Losing weight. Sleeping too much.
Type 1 diabetes.
The doctor said it had nothing to do with grief. Just terrible timing.
So now my daughter wears a small sensor on the back of her arm that reads her blood sugar every five minutes and sends it to a phone. The phone has to stay within range. That's why it lives in a clear waterproof pouch on a colorful beaded lanyard around her neck. Simone made the lanyard before she died. Pink, purple, yellow beads, with one wooden bead that said Z.
Simone also taught her the song.
She made it up one night while giving Zuri a bath.
If you're lost and you're scared and you can't see me, Hold the phone up high and say it with me. Hey Siri, call Daddy. Hey Siri, call Mommy. Somebody's coming. Somebody's coming.
Zuri sang it a thousand times.
After the funeral, I deleted "Call Mommy" from the phone.
I couldn't bear the thought of her calling a number nobody would answer.
Two weeks ago, my father called me for the first time in a year.
"I'm turning seventy," he said. "Celeste is putting together a little cruise down through the Keys. Family only. I'd like you there."
A pause.
"Bring the girl."
I almost said no.
But Zuri had lost her mother. Her grandparents in Atlanta were gone. My father was the only grandparent she had left.
And some stupid, stubborn part of me still wanted him to love her.
So I said yes.
May you like
That was the worst decision of my life.
And also, I think, the one that saved it.
