Cherish Farrah, page 22
“One two three four five,” I tell her, and then I hook my fingernail into the opening I’ve made and rip again.
I don’t flinch. I don’t close my eyes or break my gaze. I watch Cherish watch me as I undo it.
“One two three four five.”
I dry heave, the third time. It’s a reflex that doesn’t seem connected to the tearing I’ve done, but my guts clench anyway. Something warm and thick rushes down and around the curve of my arm. I know when it drips and hits the bathroom floor because I feel droplets land on my bare feet.
“Mom!” Cherish is screaming, her hands flat against the floor, her fingers splayed as though we’re in the grade school yard and I’ll outline them in chalk.
I want it off me—for both of us. She’s scared, like Brianne said. That’s why I’m not angry. She’s scared at what she’s done, and it means Cherish doesn’t have the stomach for this, even if she’s the reason it’s happening. It isn’t a decision she made because she’d measured out the impact and the likely reactions and decided it was worthwhile. That isn’t how Cherish works. It isn’t the way she’s equipped.
I don’t know why she’s the one I always forgive. I don’t know why she’s the one I love even when I hate her. It’s involuntary like the multiple attempts my body makes to vomit while I tear away the skin without looking.
I don’t know how to explain that it’s the void in her, the way that even when she plots against me and succeeds, I know she isn’t built for this. She can’t be. She didn’t know that this was going to happen—not this, specifically. That’s why I’m willing to undo it.
“Onetwothreefourfive.”
I am tearing away the pain she caused me, but the damage is done and she needs to see. It adhered too well to me. Tearing it away is taking strips of me with it. I can feel it even though I won’t look away from Cherish. My feet catch splatter, but I only know for certain that it’s blood when she finally scuttles from beneath the sink and tries to stop me.
It matters that she comes. When she’s sloppily hurrying from her hiding place, her eyes jumping between my forearm and my face, I almost stop. I almost buckle at the sight of her wide eyes and contorted mouth, even though I’m not listening to whatever she’s pleading. It may be the first time Cherish has knowingly come toward something that frightens her, and I know that I am good for her.
She tries to get a grip on me, but her hand slips instead and I am still free to tear the skin. Both her arms windmill around trying to secure one of mine, and the palms of her hands are smeared with my blood. When she can’t get a hold on it, Cherish does what is unthinkable for her; she grabs my wounded arm instead.
“One two three four five,” I say, but I think this time it’s just a whisper. I’m sick to my stomach though I’ve seen very little of the carnage. I feel light-headed, but not much else, and it’s as though my body has finally decided to put a cap on the amount of pain I am allowed to feel in one day. “One two three four five.”
It isn’t a timid hold, as though she wants to avoid touching what she did not want to see. Cherish’s grasp of me is getting tighter, and even though it’s hot the way the inferno felt, the pressure is such a relief. It’s interrupting the now blinding pain the way a tourniquet interrupts the bleeding.
Face-to-face, she sees the way the focus is leaving my eyes. They are threatening to close, but I don’t want this moment to end. Not the hold she has on my forearm that’s dulling the pain, and not the hand she moves to slip around the back of me when she realizes I’m going to faint.
I let my knees buckle a little.
Control.
“I’ve got you, RahRah.”
“I know.”
The bathtub is cold behind my head, just like the floor should be beneath the rest of me—but I can’t feel it. In a moment I don’t think I’ll feel anything at all.
“I’ve got you.”
Cherish isn’t screaming for her parents anymore. She’s here with me. She’s using a blood-slick hand to hold the curve of my cheek, and when I can’t keep from smiling, she hiccups a fatigued sob.
“What’s wrong with you, RahRah?” She’s cross-legged beside me, and she leans all the way over so she can lay her forehead against mine.
I smile again, close my eyes, and press back against her so she doesn’t go away. I’m not angry when I remind her that I know who started this.
“One two three four five.”
XIV
We’re quiet when Jerry and Brianne find us. They don’t try to whisk Cherish protectively away, no one chastises her, but neither reacts to the ruin of my arm as though it’s my fault, either. It’s a comforting calm, the way they orbit us. If this were Nichole Turner’s house, she would have barged in and required control. She would have dissected the scene, rotating its parts until she’d deduced who had done what, and what was required of each of us now. She would have stood above us, looking down, locking eyes with just me until she didn’t have to say that I was the reason things had gone wrong. But the Whitmans don’t do any of that. They don’t single me out, don’t separate us or intrude. They only come down to where we’re seated on the floor, offering guidance to Cherish as I slip further and further toward unconsciousness. They gently relocate us to the bed because regardless of what’s happened or why, they are cognizant of our comfort. It matters.
“We’d better use gauze to bandage her this time,” Jerry says, both he and Brianne careful to speak softly.
“And some antiseptic,” his wife adds.
“I’ll give you a hand,” he says, and then: “Cherish, you keep an eye on Farrah.”
She nods at her father as both her parents leave, and when she turns back to me, she looks surprised to find my eyes open. I let my lids slide a little lower to put her at ease, and remove some of the focus from my gaze.
“You have to keep an eye on me,” I tease her, but I don’t have to exaggerate the amount of effort it takes to push the words out. We’re on the bed, still untouched by the fire that I’m beginning to hear whinny from the other side of my mind. There’s a crackling sound, dim but approaching, and I squeeze Cherish’s hand to keep the dream at bay for a moment. I push my shoulders back into the headboard we’re leaning against and lay my head against hers. “Che . . .”
She hasn’t said anything directly to me since the bathroom. Her reflection watched me through the mirror while her mother took her to the sink to wash my blood off her hands and her father draped a quickly ruined hand towel around my arm, telling me to hold it vertically against my body while we moved to the bed.
“Say something, Che,” I whisper to her now, and even though she nuzzles me back, she won’t speak.
It’s for the best. I don’t know how much longer I can stay awake, and there are things I have to tell her while it’s still just her and me.
“Then just listen. I don’t want Tariq,” I say, and I feel her tense beside me. “I don’t need him, I swear. If it’s a choice between you and him, you should have known that you can have him. I would have given him to you, if you’d asked.”
She’s holding her breath, and if the adrenaline weren’t leaving my body and stripping every ounce of energy along with it, I’d twist both our necks so that I could see her face.
“I want you to know that, Cherish. I’d give you anything. You never had to take it from me.”
I can feel her stiffening next to me, and I speak more quickly, while I know she still has no choice but to listen.
“You can’t. You can’t take something out of my hand. And you could never hurt me as badly as I can hurt myself. Okay?”
Silence—but it’s stiff, like Cherish. It’s stuck, suspended in the space between us. Like this moment had to happen and she couldn’t move even if she wanted to.
“I know you understand that now, Che. I’m only telling you so you don’t ever try again. No more tally marks. No more journal. Okay?”
It’s work to turn my head; I have to push against Cherish’s to do it, and instead of holding steady to support me, she wavers. I want to see her face, but I don’t make it that far. Instead I see her chin, pointed straight ahead, as though she can see the fire that’s come back to wreath the bed. I’m looking at her neck. It only takes a moment to find her heartbeat, her pulse jumping beneath her skin like it wanted my attention. Like it will always answer, even when she won’t. Like it’s reminding me that she is real, the way she didn’t know she was until I smiled at her.
I want to say the words again because I know she doesn’t always grasp things on the first pass—but I must be careful not to frighten her. I have to remember that despite anything she’s done, Cherish is WGS. She’s demanding, not diabolical. Petulant, not premeditated. And afterward, she will always be preoccupied with the way she feels. She’ll always be most concerned with herself, and she’ll never be self-aware enough to know it. Antagonist or not, she’ll never even comprehend that she could be, and there’s nothing she could’ve done to avoid this fate. As a child of the Whitmans—because they have the means to fashion a bubble in which it’s true even for a child who looks like Cherish—the world revolves around her. How would she begin to frame or understand events outside of how they impact her? How would she understand herself, except as being central? At the center? No matter what I say, it will always be impossible for her to understand that she might deserve a repercussion based on something she’s done.
So no.
I can’t tell her the truth more than once, and I can’t require too much of her, because Cherish—my Cherish, with the void her parents ingrained in her—would not survive it.
“I don’t want to change you,” I tell the pulse jumping beneath Cherish’s skin, leaping toward me because Cherish still hasn’t turned to face me. “I love you just the way you are, Che. You have to love me that way, too.”
Her parents are coming back now, and the edges of the room are going dark, black like the edges of my wound were, like the edges of a picture as it burns. I stop fighting the fatigue and slowly let my limbs go limp.
“Cher-bear, why don’t you dress her arm?” Brianne coos to her daughter when she’s close enough to stroke Cherish’s hair. “I think she’d feel better that way.”
Cherish doesn’t respond. It’s a small and silent gift, but I receive it—the proof that she wasn’t just refusing to speak to me.
“Come on, baby,” Brianne coaxes her, and then I feel Cherish shifting next to me before what must be Jerry’s strong arm is holding me between himself and the bedframe so that I don’t slump while his daughter gets up.
My breathing is slow and steady while they rearrange themselves, but I’m still here. I’m somewhere between wake and sleep, with the Whitmans’ voices echoing around me just like the fire does. They both lap the vaulted ceiling and tumble back down, both ebb away and then flow back to comfort me. This bed is my island in the midst of them, and while Jerry and Brianne bob not far away, Cherish returns to beach with me. The mattress dips when she settles on the opposite side and follows her mother’s instructions on how to carefully clean and then cover my arm. I can’t feel it anymore but Brianne doesn’t know that, and she is adamant that Cherish take gentle care with me.
“Farrah needs you right now,” Brianne tells her daughter in a way that accompanies a delicate touch. Her fingers are neatly adjusting Cherish’s perfectly hydrated and separated coils; I know without opening my eyes. She knows how to admire them without disrupting the curl pattern, how to give the tactile expressions of love that she herself receives without hesitation or complication because her hair is thought unfussy. Standard. It is a testament to Brianne’s open-eyed, full-hearted definition of love that it required learning to respectfully dote on her daughter’s hair. To become accustomed to the product and the texture so that Cherish was accustomed to the same tenderness Brianne had always known—and without being made to feel self-conscious. “It’s so important that you’re here for her, Cher-bear.”
Cherish’s hands continue to dress my wounded arm, her touch almost as delicate as her mother’s voice—but she still doesn’t speak.
“I know it can be hard to see people’s struggles close up, baby,” Brianne continues. “It can unsettle us, make us want to pull back or look away. But that’s the thing we shouldn’t ever do, sweetheart. No matter how hard it is to understand, we owe it to the people we love to witness those things we can’t experience with them.”
“There are things Farrah faces that you’re never going to completely understand, Cherish.” Jerry comes closer, and I know he lays his hand at the back of her neck, applying a bit of reassuring pressure, massaging her skin while she tends to mine. “And it isn’t just because you’ll never lose this house. But that’s part of it. You’ve got a stability that isn’t as easy to gift to someone as we wish it were. This world has intentionally made it that way for families like Farrah’s.”
“That isn’t it.”
Brianne and Jerry are just as surprised by Cherish’s interjection as I am.
Her voice is low, but it isn’t weak. It rumbles instead of wavering, and the register is so uncharacteristic of the Cherish we know that for a moment everyone else is quiet.
All I hear is the rustle of the bandage against my arm and Cherish’s fingers. The dull tear of first-aid tape.
“Cher-bear?” Jerry says her name like it’s a question. “What isn’t it? Talk to us, sweetheart.”
They’re standing side by side now, beside the bed. I know it. Their knees are slightly bent so that they’re eye level with their daughter, or they’re squatted down the way Jerry was beside me by the pool. She isn’t facing them yet. I feel both her hands on my bandaged arm, as though perhaps she’s saying a silent prayer to conclude the ordeal. When she turns to her expectant parents, it’s with my arm held in her lap.
“None of this is happening because Farrah’s having a hard time.”
There are spaces between her words, but Cherish isn’t hesitating. They think she is because they aren’t accustomed to the way she speaks when she thinks whatever she’s about to say is a lost cause.
“It’s not because Farrah’s Black and that’s hard—I mean it is hard but . . . that isn’t what’s going on. That isn’t why this keeps happening.”
Now their brows are cursive, but they wait a moment more. Maybe Brianne glances briefly toward her husband because he has a way with Cherish, a special bond they’ve always had. He’s the one it came easy to. He’s the one who rewrote the world as soon as he saw Cherish’s face, without needing time to adjust. He put up no resistance, unconsciously or otherwise, because like his wife, he thought he knew from personal experience what oppression meant. There was nothing he had to put aside in himself to protect Cherish the way Brianne did. He gladly made everything a lie for her to be true. If Brianne does glance at him, it’s why I hear Jerry’s voice next.
“I don’t think we can ever responsibly discount Blackness in someone’s experience or treatment,” he begins, and then even with my eyes closed I can see him raising his hands against his daughter’s inevitable irritation.
“Dad,” she says through a whine that sounds much more like Cherish than the low rumble from before.
“But I know you know that. So I want to know what you mean.”
Now she loses her nerve. She’s playing with my hand absently at first, and then she becomes attentive. She wraps all her fingers around one of mine, her thumb softly caressing the back of my hand.
Control.
I let my index finger tick, as though spasming, reacting to her touch from unconsciousness.
When she looks at me, she finds my eyes still closed, my face slack.
“Cher-bear?” Brianne presses, and the movement I sense is Jerry’s hand quietly coming to lie against his wife’s arm.
“It isn’t what you guys think,” Cherish says. She’s stalling—or else she’s reeling them in. She’s waiting until they lean far enough to lose their balance, so that no matter what she tells them, they’ll latch onto it. “This didn’t happen because of anything that’s happened to Farrah,” she repeats. “This happened because something’s wrong with Farrah.”
The silence descends. The stillness, and suspended animation.
Jerry and Brianne Whitman were entirely unprepared for what their daughter just said.
Brianne is blinking quickly, as though batting something from her eyelashes, the way she’s done on the very rare occasion when something in her auction presentation hitches. When there’s a near catastrophe of an antiquity placed improperly and then stabilized mere moments before teetering to its end. She’ll sweep her thin hand across her hairline, intentionally loosing and displacing a blond strand in a distraction that simultaneously reminds the in-house audience that her imperfections are charmingly slight.
“Farrah was in a lot of pain,” Jerry answers for them both, but gently, as though only just now realizing how awful the ordeal must have been to make his daughter feel this way. “She must have had a bad reaction to the medicine I gave her, or it was expired and I wasn’t paying close enough attention. I know that was frightening, but imagine how badly it must have hurt.”
“She tore her own skin, Dad.”
“I understand that, Cherish. I’m just telling you it’s not that extraordinary when the human body experiences overwhelming pain, to want to get rid of what’s hurting us.”
“It’s not just this,” she insists—but she’s holding my hand. They can see our fingers are entwined, and only one of us has the presence of mind to be responsible for it. “It’s . . . everything. She wouldn’t let go of me!”
