Chapter 28: Kiara's Grave
In the spring, Darnell asked if he could take Zuri to see her birth mother.
I said yes.
I went with them.
Kiara Price was buried in a small, overgrown county cemetery outside Valdosta, Georgia. A flat bronze marker, half covered by grass. KIARA RENEE PRICE. That was all. No dates. The county had paid for it.
Darnell knelt and pulled the weeds away with his bare hands.
Zuri stood beside me, holding a bunch of purple wildflowers she had picked from the side of the road.
She was eight.
"Is she really under there?" she asked quietly.
"Her body is," I said. "But I think the part of her that loved you is somewhere else."
"With Mommy Simone."
"With Mommy Simone. And Grandpa Harold."
Zuri nodded. She'd worked this out a long time ago, in her own way. Heaven was a crowded place where all the people who loved her sat together and kept an eye on her. Grandpa Harold, she'd decided, was in charge of the boats.
She knelt down beside Darnell.
She laid the flowers on the bronze.
Then she reached up and took the small white bow clip out of her curls.
The one she always wore. She'd had one like it since she was three.
She pressed it gently into the grass beside Kiara's name.
"So you know it's me," she whispered.
Darnell made a sound like he'd been punched.
Zuri looked at him.
"Did she want me?" she asked. "Kiara?"
It was the question I had dreaded since the day I met Darnell.
Because none of us knew.
Darnell was quiet for a long moment.
Then he reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
"Her cousin found this," he said, his voice rough. "In a box of Kiara's things. Last month. I've been waiting to give it to you."
It was a page torn from a spiral notebook. Blue ink. Handwriting that sloped hard to the right.
Baby girl,
They say I can't keep you. They say I'm not well enough. They're right. I'm sick and I can't stop being sick and you deserve better than a mama who can't stop.
I'm going to let them find you a family. I'm going to pray every day that it's somebody who holds on to you tight.
I'm sorry. I love you. I named you Zuri. It means beautiful.
Don't let anybody change it.
— Mama
Zuri read it slowly, sounding out the hard words.
Then she read it again.
Then she folded it very carefully and put it inside the clear pouch on her lanyard, right in front of the phone.
"Nobody changed it," she said.
"No, baby," I said. "Nobody did."
She looked at the bronze marker.
"Kiara," she said. "They held on. I got the family that holds on. You prayed right."
Darnell broke down completely.
May you like
I knelt beside them and put my arms around both of them.
And for a long time, the three of us stayed there in the tall grass of a forgotten cemetery: the man who made her, the man who raised her, and the girl who had somehow made room for all of us.
