Cherish Farrah, page 16
On her side of the bed, Cherish is curled around a body pillow, facing away from me, one leg clamped down across the sheet and trapping the other leg beneath it. Our summer quilt that’s only twice the thickness of a sheet is bunched at the foot of the bed, where it always is when we wake up.
I put my hand against her back and feel it slowly rise before I get up and come around.
She doesn’t rouse when I move in front of her.
She doesn’t stir when I sit in a small space she’s left on the edge of the bed.
She doesn’t wake when I tug at her bonnet and tuck one of the cornrows that frames her face back underneath.
I know that she’s still fast asleep when I turn to her nightstand and open the drawer, but I watch her just in case. I lower my hand into the space that housed only two possessions—except I only feel one.
I pat around, but I’m looking inside now, too. I know the journal’s gone.
Cherish has moved her collection of tally marks, dating back to grade school, kept in the journal covered with stickers of our favorite cartoon character so that I would know the marks have something to do with me.
I added one strike, just so she’d know that I had seen it, and she hid it in a new place.
Like I wasn’t allowed to know. Like Cherish needs a secret from me.
All that’s left in the nightstand drawer is the jewelry box that holds her grandmother’s cuff, which Cherish has left for me. She’s taken the journal and the tally marks and left a family heirloom because she must think it’s a peace offering.
I only take it because it’s hers. I lift the box slowly out of the drawer, careful not to scuff it, and then I leave Cherish’s side for a moment while I bury it in the backpack I never had a chance to unpack once school ended.
Then I’m back with her, standing over her side of the bed the way she did in my dream, when I couldn’t see her face because of shadows.
“One two three four fiiiive,” I whisper, and I trace my finger softly on her side. “One two three four fiiiive.”
I only do it twice, and then I retract my hand.
She could almost be Kelly, if she’d buckled into this position because she found it hard to breathe. If she’d fallen this way instead of intentionally curling around a long pillow so that she could fall asleep. She’s quiet the way I made him, and just as helpless, even though she’s so much more at peace.
She doesn’t see it coming when I reach for her. Not quick or hurried, but calm, the way I was outside the gazebo.
I take her by the shoulder and jostle her once.
“Cherish,” I say, leaning closer to her face. “Wake up.”
This time when I shake her, her eyes open, slow and lazy.
“RahRah?” she croaks, and I can’t help but laugh.
The night always heals us. No matter what seems wrong during the day, everything’s okay again in the middle of the night.
“Come on,” I tell her, and I pull her out of bed and across the bedroom.
“What’s happening? Where are we going?” But my Cherish giggles. “Farrah, I think I’m still asleep.”
“Shh.” I hold my finger to my lips and press us both against the wall outside the bedroom door, and now she’s wide-awake, and her grin is spread across the width of her face.
We burst into a run, trampling down the staircase even though we’re as loud as stampeding bulls now. It doesn’t matter. Cherish knows where we’re going, even though this isn’t my house. There are no white birch trees, and no waterfall, but I’ve woken her up in the middle of the night and there’s still her and me.
We leave the kitchen door wide open when we run across the outside dining space and careen into the light rain, the soft grass slick beneath our feet, laughter pealing out of us.
I wonder if Kelly ever made it back onto his feet, or if he hears us. I hope that he’s still broken by the gazebo and that he can hear Cherish and me as we cross the Whitmans’ garden and come to the edge of the pool.
“Baptize me,” I say, when I’ve pulled her to face me, and I only give her time to nod before I fall backward into the deep end of the Whitmans’ pool.
The surface breaks and then the water is an open mouth that devours me whole, and Cherish is a wavy figure up above me. Raindrops are beating against the surface, just like they did in my dream, and then wavy Cherish walks around the edge of the pool, and I swim to meet her where she can stand.
My feet never touch the bottom of the pool. After I swim to the shallow end, I flip onto my back and float before Cherish, waiting for her hands to settle on my chest. When I surface, I don’t close my eyes against the rain. It’s warmer than the water that surrounds me, and I want Cherish to lie down with me, to float on her back the way I am and watch the clouds illuminate even though it’s the middle of the night. I want her to see it when the sky lights up; I want to squeeze her hand a little tighter when it catches me off guard. But I want to give her something, too, a reminder that we make each other powerful. That we let each other be. That we belong together, and whatever she is keeping tally of, there’s nothing more important than the two of us. Not even what Kelly said about Tariq. Not even if she knows. Not even if there’s something between them that I don’t know.
Cherish begins the ritual. The rain is falling onto my face, but she still lifts her hands from the pool and lets the water drip from her fingertips until it runs out. She still draws her finger down my forehead before crossing it, and then I put my arms over my chest and take in a long breath so that I am ready for what comes next.
But Cherish doesn’t push me down slow.
She doesn’t baptize me the way we always have—the way I last baptized her.
She puts both hands on mine, and with a burst of power that doesn’t match the girl who very recently was sound asleep, she shoves me back below the surface as hard as she can.
The thrust is too sudden, and it’s too unexpected, and my mouth pops open even though I don’t mean to breathe in. My eyes bulge and at first I don’t have a choice; I resist like a reflex. I struggle underneath her hands because I’ve inhaled the water, and I need to come up for air—and Cherish’s arms go slack.
She’s willing to let me up. Which means this is a test. This is Cherish’s way of asking me if I’ll resist, if she’s really allowed to be strong, if I trust her the way she always trusts me.
Control.
There’s no way to stop my body needing to breathe. I don’t know how to get control of myself without coming up first, but I refuse.
I grip Cherish’s hands so that she’ll hold me down, and I force myself to open my eyes, even though the rain is still disrupting the surface too much for me to see her face. She’s obscured just like the Cherish in my dream, but just like in my dream, I know it’s her. That has to be enough.
When there’s a fire raging through my sinuses like the water that flooded my nose has turned to lava, or like the blood vessels inside it are coursing with flames, it’s enough to know it’s Cherish.
It’s Cherish who shoved me into the water, so the pain that’s tearing through my head and up behind my eyes doesn’t change my mind.
My heartbeat is thundering inside my chest, but I can feel and hear it against my eardrums, and it hurts in a way I didn’t know a pulse could, but I hold Cherish’s hands so that I won’t come up.
My body is screaming, sending messages to every part of me that we are desperate to breathe, and I can’t inhale, so I force whatever air is left inside me out.
It’s a relief, and a lesson. Everything inside me was sure I needed to let something in, that there was no other way, that terrible things were imminent if I didn’t give in, but what I really needed was to expel even more.
There was something vital I was being told I could not live without, but I forced what little I had out, and still my body calmed. Still a tiny rest.
And all at once, I can feel the rain on my face again.
“RahRah!”
Cherish’s voice is sharp and loud, like I haven’t heard it in a long time. Like I haven’t heard anything.
There’s something sharp across my back, just below my shoulder blades, and it takes me a moment to recognize it as a step.
I’m not where I was a moment ago, in the center of the shallow end of the pool, with Cherish standing over me. She’s beside me, I’m propped up on the pool steps, and my nightshirt feels tight because she’s got some of it balled up in her fist.
“You have to breathe,” she says, and she’s patting my cheek.
I don’t know why but it finally makes me cough, like I should have when I first went under.
I buckle forward and clear my lungs, while Cherish wraps one arm around my back.
“You’re okay,” she whispers, and lays her wet cheek against my forehead while she rubs my arm. “You’re okay; just breathe.”
“I didn’t resist,” I say, and once I try to use my voice I realize how hoarse it is.
“You didn’t,” she confirms. “I pulled you out.”
When she pulls back and finds me smiling, she tries to bite hers back, but she shakes her head and lets it break.
“You’re awful,” she says, before pulling me into her chest, both of us sitting on the step, half in the pool and half in the rain. My body still feels limp and I let her hold me.
“Do you really think so?” I ask her.
“It wouldn’t matter if I did. You’d still be mine.”
I only smile in response.
“Nothing can change that,” she says. “Not ever.”
I hold her more tightly even though my arms feel like rubber, and the pain I felt in my sinuses is beginning to ache again. It’s throbbing itself back into my attention, reminding me that my body thinks something traumatic just happened even though I know better.
“Not ever,” I repeat, and then we’re quiet. There’s the pitter-patter of the rain on the surface of the pool and on our skin, and the low rumble of distant thunder. There’s the warmth radiating between the raindrops, and the way the clouds above us are holding light.
“I don’t remember the first time I saw you,” Cherish says.
“You don’t?”
“Mm-mm.” Her hand moves up and down my arm. “I remember the first time you smiled at me, but it wasn’t the first time I’d seen you. It was like the first time you saw me. It felt like the first time I realized I could be seen. Like you weren’t just a figment of my imagination.”
I could see a small Cherish, with perfectly diagonally parted ponytails, except her hair was twisted, and fastened at the top and the bottom by bobbles the color of the academy uniform. She was sitting with a gaggle of girlfriends, looking serene. Like no one had told her to feel out of place among them, even though her legs were the only ones that were brown, so that they would’ve looked dark no matter her complexion, and even though her lips were the only ones so full. She was so perfectly calm and confident where she was, and I felt every single set of eyes that landed on me like they all had edges.
No one told me to feel that way—but I did get a long talk about how to behave, as though I was known for acting out of turn. I did get daily reminders to wait my turn to speak, whether I’d opened my mouth yet that day or not.
No one said I didn’t belong; they just treated me like I had to prove I did. And the first time I saw Cherish, she looked like she had a right to be there. So I walked right past her, the way I walked past everyone else, and when I saw her parents for the first time I decided she was like everyone else. How could I trust her?
I only studied her because I had to know whether there was someone else who could construct a mask that convincing. I had to know whether Cherish was a stunning performer, a rival where there had never been one before, or whether she was silly enough to really feel that safe.
I watched her for a week and she wasn’t perceptive enough to notice. She didn’t play at obliviousness only to send discreet signals that she was aware of my surveillance.
Cherish was genuine. She was that soft. Armorless. And like anything without a protective outer shell, pliable.
So I smiled at her.
“Your whole face lit up,” I say. “Like I’d never seen. Then I knew your calm hadn’t been the same as happy.”
“I thought you couldn’t see me,” she says again, “or you didn’t care. And everyone kept asking me about you, if I knew who you were, or if we were related.”
I guffaw against her.
“But then you smiled at me, and I didn’t care. I didn’t care if they thought we were cousins, or even sisters, because I did.” She laughs.
“You thought we were sisters?”
“Something like that. I knew we were kin,” she says. “I knew I needed you. Before my parents explained why. I felt it. In a way they could only know. They knew a lot of things that made them amazing parents, always. But I didn’t need them to tell me why you mattered so much to me. Why I needed to know you could see me.”
“I still can,” I say, but more quietly, in case there’s any part of her as upset as she was yesterday. In case she moved the tally mark journal because there’s something she doesn’t want me to see. “Always.”
She doesn’t answer me with words, but she turns and pushes off of the steps on her back without fully letting go of me. In a moment, we’re both on our backs, watching the sky and letting the raindrops fall on our faces while we hold hands beneath the water.
No one can tell me anything about Cherish and me that I don’t already know. Certainly not Kelly. And no one can come between us. Not even Tariq.
She isn’t just the home I’ve chosen; I’m the one who mattered. I’m the one who saw her. When she thought she was comfortable in the life her parents made for her, even with their hair- and skin-care classes, and their social awareness, and the way they’ve been intentional in raising a healthy, protected Black daughter. They made her vulnerable. They gave her a void, and I filled it. She needed me to see her, and no one can replace that.
I have to remember it. Brianne can’t ever be what Cherish is to me, even if she puts me first. Even if she shows me the secret side of herself that even Cherish doesn’t know exists, and gives me things that are just between us.
I will keep Cherish first in my heart, because I will always be that way in hers.
I want it to be night forever. This night, when Cherish thrust me underwater and I passed her test. I want to remember that I won this confession, no matter what happened in the moments I can’t remember passing, between the middle of the pool and finding myself on the steps with her. It doesn’t matter. Cherish and I belong together.
XI
I t’s clearly afternoon.
The sun is beating down outside, but on the pile of pillows and blankets Cherish and I assembled beneath the window last night when we came back in, we’re still comfortable. The glass is a hundred different kinds of energy efficient, so not even the rabid heat can come through. Just the sunshine, streaking across our wild and crisscrossed limbs. Just the spilling light that glows around us like a halo.
My parents would have woken us up by now, summer or not. For some arbitrary reason summed up in mantras like “Don’t waste the day away,” like leisure has to be constantly regulated or rationed or it’ll become unwieldy. It’ll turn against us somehow, however comfort can. But no one has disturbed us in the Whitman home, even though the morning’s come and gone. No one’s afraid of what might happen to us if we wile away the day fading in and out of dreams. No one thinks Cherish and I’ll spoil if we stay sealed away inside our bedroom. There’s even a tray on the unmade bed with what looks like muffins and fruit, because someone came in to offer us food instead of a lecture.
“I’m tired,” Cherish whines with her eyes still closed. “Turn off the sunshine.”
My limbs are still wobbly when I stand up to close the blinds and pull the white summer curtains together. I’m as unsteady on my feet as if I were still in the swimming pool, and I wonder if that’s because of what happened last night. I don’t think I’ve ever blacked out before, but I’ve been tired a million times. I take a few steps more to prove to myself that’s all this is.
“Someone brought us breakfast,” I tell Cherish while I retrieve the tray and spy the clock beside the bed. “Well. Lunch. Do you think they know we were up all night?”
“We cleaned up after ourselves.” She yawns, batting away the strawberry I press against her lips.
“Eat it,” I say, trying not to laugh.
“Stop,” and she folds her lips into her mouth and rolls her face into the pillows.
“Fine, none for you.”
“Save me some,” she says, but it’s muffled.
“Too late,” I tell her, and she can hear the fruit I’ve packed into my cheeks.
“RahRah,” she whines, and sits up quickly, yanking the bowl out of my hands and snatching both containers of yogurt and both of the spoons.
We’re laughing and wrestling things out of each other’s grasps and making at least as much noise as when we “cleaned up after ourselves” last night. We’d tried to mop up our footprints, hunching over onto our hands and bending our legs so that we could scurry the towels around the kitchen and toward the staircase in the middle of the next room, but we kept trying to run each other off track, or swiping our arms out from under each other before collapsing into a bellowing heap.
We could have woken the dead, so there’s no chance we didn’t at least wake Brianne and Jerry, and we were making so much noise, we wouldn’t have known. Just like we don’t hear whoever’s knocking on the bedroom door until they open it a crack to let their head in while they knock again.
“Mom,” I blurt out at the sight of her, and for some reason I leap to my feet.
She’s wearing a smile, but it’s made up of politeness. I can always tell. When she looks at me, it doesn’t change. And when her eyes find me, they just hold. All the laughter and ease in Cherish’s and my bubble deflates, and my mother and I just stare.
