Cherish Farrah, page 12
It’d take even less stamina to roll to the side and cast my impending vomit on the floor beside the bed, since Cherish hasn’t placed the bin like she suggested.
What isn’t easy is getting to her side of the bed.
Making my own momentum so that by the time the wave comes, rushing up my throat and out of my mouth in a torrent of orange, my head is on my best friend’s pillow.
VIII
Days pass. I’m mostly unconscious, fever dreams swimming to the surface and mingling with outside stimuli so that what’s probably the bathroom faucet becomes the waterfall in my pool, and what’s probably just Jerry Whitman’s normal speaking voice becomes aggressive growls from who knows where. They get mingled with whimpering that sounds like it’s coming from Cherish, and sometimes I moan, trying to console her, only to wake myself just enough to know she’s not around.
The sickness has officially exhausted its intrigue by the time I come to and find Brianne gently wiping my forehead with the softest hand towel. It’s cool and damp, and there’s a radiant glow around her because the sun is pouring into the bedroom. It might be morning or midday; it’s impossible to tell now that it’s basically summer.
I prepare for a struggle, but when I try to speak, my voice has miraculously returned, and it scrapes out of my throat with little effort.
“How long was I out?” I ask.
“Two days. I’m afraid you girls missed the last couple days of school,” Brianne tells me with a smile. “If you were gonna skip the end of the year, I wish you could’ve at least enjoyed it.”
“Are my parents coming?” Now that I can speak and control my eyes, it feels a little dramatic to ask for my mom and dad like I’m expecting my last rites. I can even sit upright, which I find out when I pull myself up on my elbows and then against the headboard.
“Do you want me to call them?” she asks, still tracing my face with the refreshing towel. “I didn’t want to worry them, when we’re taking good care of you.”
It sounds like she means she hasn’t told them I’ve been sick at all, but in the bathroom, she told Cherish she’d call them the morning after I first threw up. Except I can’t be sure what I heard, or when, or whether it was real or imagined. Every memory I have after driving home from Judge Campbell’s place is fuzzy and subject to reconsideration.
Not that it matters. For all I know, my parents would’ve overreacted and taken me to the hospital, and probably back to their place after that. And like she said, the Whitmans are taking good care of me.
“What do you think? Solid food today?” Brianne asks, folding the damp towel in her hands and sitting with her back perfectly straight so anyone can tell she didn’t quit ballet like Cherish and I did. Or maybe her posture comes from playing the piano with the restrained passion and rote precision of a debutante in a Jane Austen adaptation. Either way, the sun is bathing her in warm light, and there’s a sparkle in her eye as she looks at me, awaiting my decision.
“I’m starving,” I confess. “I haven’t eaten for days.”
“Don’t be silly, of course you have. Jer or I have made sure you’ve gotten all your nutrients in liquid form, even if it took ages.” She picks up a feeding syringe from the bedside table.
A blushing warmth washes up my neck and into my cheeks.
“That must have been a lot of trouble,” I say.
“Not at all.” Her hand collapses into her lap, syringe included. “But it did bring back memories of feeding a very good-natured, but very weight-resistant little Cher-bear.”
She’s smiling wistfully. That must’ve been Baby Cherish’s nickname. I’ve never heard it before, so she must have outgrown it. I know her parents didn’t by Brianne’s sigh.
“So. How do you propose we break your solid-food fast? What do you want more than anything in the world?”
The first thing I think of is my dad’s conchiglie, but it’s involuntary. It also almost makes me dry heave despite the fact that I know it isn’t what made me sick. My brain will no doubt hold it responsible until I know what did.
“Anything but pasta,” I say through a grimace, and Brianne gives one big nod.
“No pasta. Got it. How about some thick, delicious burgers?” she asks, eyes big and knowing. Maybe burgers are a staple of Cherish’s after she’s recovered from something. “Dad can throw some on the grill, and I can get you some ginger ale, just to be safe?”
I just smile a little. She’s in Mommy mode, and talking to me like I’m Cherish.
I don’t correct her.
“Definitely burgers,” I say. “And coleslaw.”
“Oh, that is a very good choice,” she replies, wagging a finger at me. “I am on it. Okay, you get a shower and get back to your beautiful self, and I’ll text Cherish to bring home ginger ale and coleslaw fixins—and maybe something sweet, just in case!”
“Where is Cherish?” I ask, trying not to let my eyes or shoulders slip.
“Oh, she just needed to get some air. She’s been joined to you at the hip this whole time, and I insisted she get out in the summer sun for a bit,” she says as she stands and starts gathering the debris of the past several days from my nightstand. “I think she and Tariq were gonna get brunch, but don’t worry, she should be ready to eat again by now!”
And Brianne Whitman kisses the top of my head.
“I’m so glad you’re feeling better, sweetheart,” she says, before bouncing out of the room.
It’s dimmer when she’s gone, quite literally, and I can actually see the stale air hanging in the bedroom. I get up and open the windows, even though there’s hardly a breeze to feel.
Before I hop in the shower, I strip the bed, and myself, shedding what I hope is the last of this illness, and spritz some of Cherish’s rosewater room spray so that when I get back from the bathroom, everything feels a little lighter.
The shower is divine. Between being conscious and coherent enough to stand up on my own and the exfoliating gloves Cherish convinced me are far superior to a loofah, within moments I’m feeling like I’ve shed a disgusting husk and am close to reclaiming my former glory.
The shower doors frost automatically when the handle is latched from the inside, but I let steam encircle me, laying my forehead against the tile wall.
I can almost hear Cherish whimpering and crying again. I can hear her grunt and grimace as she tries to undress me from an impossible position.
I can hear Brianne snap at her, her tone cutting even if her words aren’t. The not-so-hidden message in them clear even when I was in a delirious stupor.
You are both my daughters now, and I will not choose between you.
I feel her nimble fingers detangling my hair again, and alone in the shower now, I let my head fall into the stream of water. The conditioning product she worked through my coils flushes down the length of the twists and comes out of the Bantu-knotted ends all milky white, leaving my hair feeling soft and supple. Like it was an intentional hair masque and not a result of being too out of it to rinse before now.
Once all of me is clean, I’m energized. I want to be dressed and coming down the staircase while Jerry and Brianne and Cherish look on with relief, but I also want to look my best, so I take the forty minutes to diffuse my hair once I’ve terry-cloth-dried, oiled, and applied one of my best friend’s curl smoothies. All told, it’s an hour-long process and I use most of the contents of the bamboo container—which is to be expected with hair as dense as mine—but that just means my resurrection supper should be nearly done.
Except when I come back into the bedroom to dress, it’s exactly as empty as I left it.
No Cherish.
I would have definitely waited for her, or more likely come and joined her in the bathroom while she got ready, but she might be helping out downstairs, so I text her.
Which is when I realize that I have no idea where my phone is. And since my last memory of using it was en route to the Campbell compound after dinner with my parents, half a week ago, I have no idea where to look.
I start with the drawer of the nightstand on Cherish’s side of the bed.
The inside of it is just as magazine-cover ready as the rest of the Whitman home. I know someone keeps our bedroom and bathroom in pristine working order, even if I never see them, but I’m surprised to find that there is not one single junk drawer in a house with this many rooms and pieces of furniture, and that includes the nightstand in the teenager’s bedroom.
There’s a white box inside, and beside that, a notepad that flips open and has a magnetic closure, and one of those little pencils people use to record their golf scores. It’s a little infantile, with a cartoon character I recognize from my and Cherish’s elementary school obsession with its show. Stickers overlap on every centimeter of the cover.
At first I think it might be a diary, and from the looks of it, one from early in our friendship. Back when I spent days studying a young Cherish because at first I didn’t understand what I saw. If I asked what she thought back then, she wouldn’t remember. She’d never be able to tell me factually; instead she’d tell me what she’d like to think she thought back then, overlaying nostalgia and current ideologies on the memory without meaning to.
I take the pad with me to lock the bedroom door, and then I lean against it and flick the cover hard enough to disrupt the magnetic bond.
Once it’s open, there isn’t much to see. Just . . . tally marks.
Little clusters of five, neatly organized in tight rows and columns.
On the first page at least.
I flip through the pages and there’s really nothing but tally marks. No words, no secrets. No memories or confessions. No hearts and initials and arrows stabbing through. Nothing but marks that get increasingly sloppy and sometimes oversized, like whatever attention to precision and orderliness Cherish began with was frustrated the longer she made the marks.
I know they’re hers. I don’t know what they mean . . . but I know Cherish made them. And I know—I know—they’re about me. They have to be. The character on the cover almost requires it. It means it’s about me, and that it’s a code she didn’t want anyone to understand. Not the ninja housekeeper I’ve seen around the house but still never actually witnessed cleaning the always well-kept home, and not anyone else.
I want to take it. I want to move the notepad and the amputated pencil that used to make marks as though it had a perfectly sharpened point and now looks like one of my mom’s old lip liners whose stray peaks extend past the lead and threaten to shred her lip if she dares to use it again.
Control.
Of course I won’t take it. There’d be no explaining it if I moved the notepad from her nightstand. I couldn’t make anyone understand that there was a code in what by the end resembles chicken scratch.
I’m not even sure Cherish knows it.
I don’t take the notepad, but I leave a mark.
I chew off the collar creeping around the blunt shard of exposed lead, ignoring the bitter taste and then wiping the writing end clean with my finger, even though it marks me. Spitting the debris I can feel scratching my gums onto the bedroom floor, I find the last entry.
Several mismatched strokes, symbolizing three.
I add one to the end.
I make it match. Because I want Cherish to know I’ve seen them and understand—but only if she’s clever enough to work it out.
Whatever she’s keeping track of, I want her to know that I know.
I put the notepad back.
The white box is much less interesting. It’s a jewelry box, and inside, resting on a generous velvet cushion, is a somewhat plain solid silver cuff. I pick it up and turn it over to find Eloise Whitman engraved on the inside before replacing it on its cushion and putting the box precisely where it was beside the notepad, whose position I memorized before touching it.
Her grandmother’s hand-me-down bangle is hardly as intriguing as the mystery of Cherish’s tally marks, and I still need to find my phone.
I look in my own nightstand second and find the device next to The Whipping Boy and the feeding syringe I slipped in there after Brianne left the room. I hadn’t noticed my phone, but it’s on its side, against the side of the drawer, so that I couldn’t have seen or felt it without looking.
Almost like someone didn’t want me to.
Cherish’s tally marks come back to mind, but I can’t be sure why. I can’t formulate a theory about how they might be related to my sort-of-hidden phone, but I still don’t know what they mean—which means they might.
What I can’t understand is how it hasn’t been vibrating against the inside of the drawer and making it impossible for me to sleep. I haven’t heard a rumble or notification ding, not once, and delirious or not, I’ve heard people talking in the bathroom.
It makes more sense when the lock screen flashes on and the Do Not Disturb icon is up at the top.
Not everybody is out to get you, the Cherish in my head chides me, and I smile.
“Okay,” I tell her. “Point taken.”
I may have overreacted. Of course they only wanted me to rest. And it isn’t like they hid it; it’s just been silenced and put in the first place I should’ve known to look.
The point was to find Cherish, but I’m immediately distracted by the number of calls and texts I’ve missed from my parents.
My mother’s phone.
My dad’s phone.
Their landline, which they insisted on getting because with me living somewhere else, they wanted to be triple-sure I could always reach them. Which is why they’ve taken my silence over the past several days as an intentional slight.
Fair, I know you’re under a lot of pressure, honey, but you have to talk to us.
If you want this to work, you’ve gotta communicate, Farrah.
Of course Dad’s message is gentler; Nichole Turner’s is more like a veiled threat. Until two days pass without any response.
Fair, she texts, I’m sorry if I underestimated how difficult we’ve made this for you. Take the time you need, sweetheart. Your dad and I have been talking about how this homestay situation might work . . .
There’s a voicemail, too, which was sent today, but I don’t play it.
Sitting on my side of the bed, I take a nice, deep breath and let it out slow, watching the particles float in the sunshine that streams into the room.
I can almost see them—my parents—huddling around the house phone that lives on the island in their unimpressive kitchen. The way they look at each other but can’t find anything to say. Or maybe they’re ready to tell the truth.
I’m not losing my daughter for you, Ben.
That’s where my mother would start. No more swapping supporting roles for each other, the way they always do. No more of the “united front” they’ve presented all my life, the one she told me is important to my development.
She thought I was intentionally trying to get between them. That even at six or seven, I was “playing both ends to the middle.” If I was, it was the way any intelligent child might, but she looked at me with a sternness that said she wasn’t talking to a child.
My dad told her I was too young to understand, but Nichole Turner never broke eye contact with me, and she didn’t simplify things, either.
I know she was proud. I was smart, like her. Shrewd, like Dad called her.
She entrusted me with more adult conversation after that. She didn’t tell me to go play outside or in my room when she was on the phone or had company. And while she still never told me what she really thinks of the way my dad needs her to fix everything, I knew she wanted me to know. It was obvious in the way she’d press her lips shut as though to say there was plenty to hear but I’d have to read it on her face or in her body language. It was just the way she had to communicate with me, to keep up that “united front” she’d claimed they were. But we were more alike than they were, and she trusted me to know that. So she wouldn’t be able to forgive him for making her betray me the way they have. She wouldn’t be able to stand him if it cost her our special relationship.
I couldn’t have answered her texts and voicemail any sooner even if I’d wanted to . . . but now I want to see how far she’ll go. I want to know whether reconciling with me is important enough to finally show herself.
I clear the notifications without responding.
Finally, I hold the camera above me and lean back across the bed, playfully seductive, before texting it to Cherish with the message, Waitin’ on you in the bedroom like . . .
I only have to wait a few minutes to see that she’s read it.
A few minutes later, she still hasn’t replied. No undulating dots to signify a message being composed, either. It just quietly changes from Delivered to Read, and that’s it.
I’ve been out of commission for days at a time, cutting the end of school short for both of us and probably trapping my poor Cherish in the sick, stale bedroom with me out of worry, and the first sign I’m back to my normal self gets nothing?
It’ll make sense if she’s waiting for me downstairs, with Jerry and Brianne, anxious to see my transformation with their own eyes. Ready to celebrate having me entirely back.
I head down to an empty kitchen whose island counter is the width and length of my parents’ whole dining table. There’s evidence of a recent presence, a mountain of cubed watermelon, half a lemon, its rind scrubbed off on one side by the nearby zester, a sprig of cilantro, and a few wayward blackberries left on a cutting board, knife unattended.
Even spills and messes know better than to disrupt the photogenic calm of the Whitman home. Various juices had dripped from the board and half seeped underneath, the rest forming a well-behaved puddle to the side of it. It almost looks staged. Like a delightful cookbook spread that tells a whole story in a picture—that this food was prepared with love, by a family member, which is always more impressive when there was the option of leaving it to the hired help. You know the family is somewhere just out of frame, literally enjoying the fruit of their labor, and now I can actually hear that taking place.
