Cherish Farrah, page 25
“I am getting hurt,” she tells me, and I lift my head from her lap to look Cherish in the eye.
“I know, Che.”
* * *
—
I’VE RUN AWAY in the middle of the night. That’s what Cherish tells Brianne Whitman when she goes into her parents’ bedroom and only wakes her mother.
I am in the back of the car when Brianne and Cherish take off to find me at the only place my best friend can imagine I’d go.
“Did anything happen?” Brianne is asking her daughter. She’s been woken up abruptly and hustled into the night before she could gather her thoughts or alert her husband, but now, as she buckles her seat belt and simultaneously backs out of the garage, her blond hair in a messy bun at the nape of her neck, Brianne only looks like an actress portraying frenzy.
“She left!” Cherish whines, and when she lurches away from her mother’s consoling hand, it doesn’t give us away. She’s white girl spoiled, allowed to return annoyance and mild violence for doting affection. “I told you something was wrong!”
“Calm down, sweetheart.” Brianne Whitman cannot accept her daughter’s rejection for more than a moment, and she lays her hand on Cherish’s leg to rub and then pat her brown skin. “She just went back to the house, I’m sure.”
“What if she doesn’t want to come back? What if she runs away for good, like Kelly did?”
It’s a gambit, assuming information from very limited intel and then testing it. It wouldn’t work for me, but Cherish is the one asking where Kelly has gone and why Tariq had access to his phone—despite the fact that I’m the one with something to give him. There’s a trophy in the white box nestled inside the circle of Eloise Whitman’s heirloom bracelet, and I have decided to gift it to Kelly. For exposing Tariq to me, or for at least placing Tariq like a sacrifice before me at the gazebo if he couldn’t have known how well I’d excavate the truth. Kelly wouldn’t have known what I can do if I hadn’t sealed his judgment in the Campbell house the night I went to find Cherish. He couldn’t have known if I hadn’t brought him to his side on the lawn outside the gazebo. But he knew Tariq, and I didn’t. I have more than repaid any debt I might have to Kelly, but I will give him the tip of something more when Brianne tells Cherish where he went.
I know Brianne will answer by the way she glances away from the road at her daughter and then can’t help but glance again.
“What?” Cherish presses, a hint of concern in her voice. “What is it?”
“Kelly didn’t run away, baby,” Brianne tells her, and when the car slows to a quiet and creeping stop at the next sign, I know she is going to idle here. It is the wee hours, and there will be no cars pulling up behind us, forcing us to move. “Cherish. Kelly didn’t run away, but—he isn’t going to come back.”
I am lying on the short carpet behind the back seat, compressing it further still and feeling the solid frame beneath it. The carpet is a thin veil meant to make the harsh metal structure look like something soft and welcoming, rather than the monstrosity it would be in its natural state. It takes so little to trick the eyes, but I am lying on the thin deception, and the cold, unmalleable frame is bleeding into me until I start to shiver.
“Kelly is going to prison,” Brianne says, and I can hear the tears welling up in her blue eyes.
“Prison?”
Control.
I can’t sit up; I can’t tell my best friend to keep calm. That it’s possible to resist hysterics no matter what you hear and no matter how unexpected. There’s no way for me to communicate that we must keep control.
“Kelly isn’t going to prison. Judge Campbell wouldn’t allow it.” Cherish says Leslie Campbell’s title and name with ease, like there are many things she has refused or doesn’t have the capacity to simultaneously process. She wants to know whether her parents are monsters, but without a personal incentive, she has left Tariq and his father as they were. As they are and have always been in her mind. She bucked away from her mother but speaks of him without malice, and I understand how so many of them escape repercussions. “Kelly’s just a kid.”
“I know that’s how you see him, Cherish, but he’s not like Tariq. Kelly’s gone through so much, and it’s hardened him. Leslie tried to save him, but he didn’t want to be saved.”
“What happened?”
“Kelly got arrested a few nights ago, with one of his younger brothers. It doesn’t surprise me that the boys were smoking or using, but Leslie said they had enough on them to be charged with possession with intent to distribute.”
I shiver almost to the point of vibration in the back of the car. I will make the whole vehicle rattle in a moment.
Control.
It isn’t working. Justice is a blindfolded woman who looks too much like Brianne Whitman for her lack of vision to matter, and when her scales are equal, they still tip.
I look up at the car’s ceiling and am relieved to hear the fire on the other side. I can breathe more steadily when the roof begins melting, the metal buckling at the heat of the lava as it creates a gaping mouth and the red-orange liquid begins dripping around the edges. The night sky is above me now, and I fix my gaze on it while Brianne Whitman relays a lie.
“But he made a stupid mistake,” she says, and she doesn’t mean the possession that would never have landed Tariq Campbell in handcuffs. “He took a plea deal to send his brother home, when the boy would’ve ended up in juvenile court anyway. Leslie could’ve helped him, the way he helped Kelly. Now he’s the sole defendant, and he’s going to be sentenced as an adult.”
Cherish isn’t like me. She was there tonight, somewhere hidden behind Tariq and me, but she doesn’t put it all together. She won’t understand what Kelly has done until I tell her, and I don’t know whether I’ll try. There are things I couldn’t know.
What did Tariq do to warrant the punishment that Kelly has defiantly worsened for himself?
How pure is this game the families play? How often is a punishment displaced correction for their beloved children, and how often is it meant to keep the whipping child in line?
I’m willing to bet that like the bull’s-eye on Kelly’s side, the Campbells’ abuse isn’t always Tariq’s punishment. Kelly’s ingratitude is reason enough to involve his younger brother in the fraudulent charges and replace him.
The sky shining above the hole I’ve melted in Brianne’s car is a bruise, black and blue, with stars like the blood of burst capillaries stippling the surface, and distant gases clouding the edges with a molding green.
Control.
It’s Cherish who needs me. It’s Cherish I said I’d forgive and protect.
I’ll bury Tariq’s tongue, and Kelly with it. After tonight the thing that connects us, the likeness, will be destroyed. There will be no whipping girl the way Kelly ensured there is no more Campbell whipping boy—not from his bloodline.
When Cherish sobs in the front seat, her mother leaning over the center console to embrace her and moan sympathetically, there is nothing Brianne or Jerry Whitman would do to interject. Her tears are required.
They’re the ones who did this right. Between Tariq and Cherish, only she suffers when the whipping children do. Only she loves me the way a beloved child must for the pain of the surrogate to matter. Whatever the Whitmans have done, they believe in it. They believe in Cherish’s need of it—and at the baptism, we will make Brianne tell us why.
When we arrive at the home where my family used to live, Brianne doesn’t pull into the drive even though the house is still unoccupied. While she parks alongside the island on which Cherish and I buried the last one’s remains, I see that another white post has been staked into the lawn. Another transparent box holds pamphlets extolling the desirable qualities of what once was the Turner home.
Like the Whitman property after last night, after Nichole Turner came and together our conversation began the unveiling that Tariq completed, this place looks different. The sky above it has split, and it isn’t the fact that the sun will soon rise. The color that is bleeding into the sky is the fire that began in my dream. The fire that will burn everything but Cherish and me.
I wait while she walks to the back of the car and opens the door for me.
“Farrah,” Brianne says, but she isn’t calling my name; she’s identifying me. She is questioning my presence because while she expected to find me here, she did not know she’d brought me. “Cherish . . .”
The woman stays beside the car as though the effort it is taking her brain to make sense of this impedes her motor skills. Her brows cinch and spread and then repeat, her mouth slightly opening and then failing to close completely.
“Come on, Mom,” Cherish tells her, as she and I cross the street and begin up my driveway. The command itself is enough to compound Brianne’s confusion—that the confusion is hers alone, and the daughter who was so recently frightened and unaware in the car is not out of sorts.
We’ve gotten to the fence and I’ve reached over to unlatch it before Cherish and I turn again and find Brianne exactly where we left her.
“Come on,” I say, and then I disappear into the backyard, leading Cherish by the hand behind me.
We have time to undress before we see Brianne again. She’s moving elegantly, though she doesn’t mean to. Her hands float around her body as though searching for some guide rope that will make this descent safer—which means that some part of her knows it isn’t. If Cherish were at all intuitive, it would be as good as a confession, the way Brianne’s chin tilts one way and then the other. She is as worried as if these surroundings are foreign and she can’t know what she’ll find, despite all the times she’s laughed and lunched here.
“Cherish,” she begins, still resembling a brilliantly trained stage actress, her movements and her voice filled with a perfect trepidation and concern. “You said Farrah ran away. What’s going on?”
Cherish won’t reply. The gate was the threshold. Now that we are by the pool, where the lights still shine, rippling through the water as though the light itself is enough to interrupt it, Brianne must supply the answers.
I extend my hand to Cherish and lead her into the pool. The water breaks to accept us, the way it always has, even though we ease in instead of jumping. The entry must be slow and silent. Brianne Whitman must have time to watch her daughter and me walk into the water, so that she recalls what the security guard said.
“Cherish, what’s going on?” she asks again, and there is a storm approaching. I can feel it in the water that sways away before returning to slap my naked torso, and I can hear it in her voice.
Her cell phone rings.
“Cherish,” she says again. She’s trying to steady this scene, whatever it is about to become, by steadying her voice. She says her daughter’s name like a gentle command.
“Don’t answer that,” I tell Brianne, standing shoulder to shoulder with Cherish in the water.
As though my words alert her to the sound at all, Brianne fishes out her phone and looks at it.
It’s Leslie Campbell. Or Jerry Whitman, who’s only woken up because he received the call from Leslie Campbell and is calling to find out where his family is—where I am.
“Don’t answer it,” I repeat, and when her eyes raise to find me over her screen: “You’ll miss the ceremony. Be present with us; Cherish wants to share this with you.”
Cherish has been watching her mother, too, but now she sinks into the water. She lowers herself in until her chest is submerged, and then lies back, her legs lifting back to the surface. When she is floating beside me, I easily pull her around so that Cherish’s body is between her mother and me.
Brianne’s eyes dance. From her daughter to me, to her daughter, to her phone.
“None of this should worry you,” I tell her, and then I press her daughter underwater.
Brianne’s mouth falls open as though to match the action.
“What’s the matter?” I ask, and Brianne’s head turns involuntarily from side to side.
“Farrah . . .”
“Watch what happens if I try to remove my hands.” I lift them and Cherish grabs my wrists, forces me to stay attached, to continue the baptism.
A tear slips free and runs down the length of Brianne’s face. She is so thin I think I can see her heart slamming against her breastbone; this will not take long.
“We’ve done this so many times before. You were warned,” I say of the night Cherish and I came here last. “What could be different about tonight, that you have cause to worry what I might do to her, Brianne?”
“I don’t know, Farrah.” She sounds breathless. “I don’t understand any of this. Why did you girls bring me here? What are you doing?”
“We’re proving something to each other. That we trust. That we can be trusted. That we won’t fight back. I can hold Cherish underwater as long as I like and she won’t ever try to escape me.”
Brianne sputters out a sob, her face collapsing at last, her hands rising to cover her mouth.
“But why should that worry you? It’s the same for me. I don’t resist Cherish. Even when I think she’s hurting me. Even when I thought she made me the whipping girl.”
“Please, Farrah.”
Brianne Whitman is on her knees. I haven’t felt Cherish tense once beneath my hands, the way she does when holding her breath first becomes an effort, and her mother is already at wit’s end.
“I’m so sorry that we hurt you, Farrah, please.”
There is no defense. No argument, no denial. It is over before I’ve begun—but I am already uncoiled. The sky is already severed. It bleeds red-orange; it spills lava across the treetops and the gables of homes nearby. It lights up the world so that everything outside the backyard fences glows. Brianne and Cherish and I are the only things left untouched, and this pool.
“She’s my baby girl. Please don’t hurt Cherish.”
That is why this will work. It’s why it has. The reason the Whitmans imparted Cherish with a gaping flaw is the reason she needs me, is the reason they chose me, is the reason Brianne would rush out of bed without her husband, is the reason she did not answer her phone, is the reason she is on her knees. Because she loves her child, wholeheartedly and without defense. There is nothing self-preserving in it, and it will be the death of her.
I pull Cherish out of the water.
She doesn’t gasp or buckle forward dramatically to try to catch her breath. Her hands stay around my wrists, and we rest our foreheads together while she quietly recovers—though I open my eyes in time to see the way she watches her mother out of the corner of hers.
Cherish is mine. We are here, baptizing each other again, because it is true. We belong together, and she agrees.
“She has to tell you why.” I speak softly to Cherish because she is so near.
“Cherish.” Brianne is still crying softly. “Come here, sweetheart. Please.”
“She won’t come in after us unless you ask her to,” I tell my best friend when I see the worry try to move from her mother to Cherish like an airborne contagion. “You have to make her watch, or you’ll never know the truth. I am not the only monster, Che.”
She nods against my forehead, her eyes returned to me.
Brianne Whitman’s phone is ringing again.
“Cherish, it’s Daddy. Come tell him everything’s okay.”
She’s holding out the unanswered phone, dangling it in a desperate attempt to reclaim her daughter from me.
“Farrah hurt Tariq,” Cherish tells her, and I am as stunned as her mother. We didn’t agree to this. This is not part of the ceremony—telling her mother what happened outside the gazebo. But she keeps going, her hands still around my wrists. “That’s what Dad’s calling to say. He wants to know where you are, because he thinks she’s going to hurt us, too.”
“Cherish,” her mother says pitifully, prostrated on the stone outside the pool as though demonstrating a misleadingly simple stretch that will become increasingly difficult and painful the longer it’s held.
“But why would she?” Cherish asks as though there was no interruption. As though she is unmoved by her mother’s emotion—except that she is clamping my wrists more tightly and I can feel the way she shivers. “Why would Farrah hurt us, Mommy?”
“Because she’s your whipping girl,” Brianne says, and then her forehead falls as though it might connect with the ground. It doesn’t, and she nods instead. “Daddy and I hurt her so that nothing would ever hurt you.”
The woman sits back against her heels now, her fair hair flying and falling in wisps, some catching against her wet eyelashes, some attracted to the corner of her mouth. She is every cinematic representation of beautiful despair. She is built to be lovely even as she falls apart.
“Let’s call Daddy, Cherish,” she suggests, her eyes wide as though she’s stumbled upon an escape. “He’ll tell you anything you want to know,” she promises, like she hasn’t put together that I already do.
“Did Jerry poison my toothbrush, or did you?” I ask, and her eyes leap to me and then between Cherish and me. “You know as much as he does. You’ve done as much as he’s done.”
Brianne licks her lips, her eyes returned to mine, and lifts her chin. When she breathes deep before opening her mouth to release it, I don’t know what she’ll say next.
“You love her, Farrah,” she begins. “I know you do. It wouldn’t have worked if you didn’t.”
Her shoulders sink and this time when her phone rings, none of us react. It is decided. The world outside these fences is aflame, and everything can burn but us.
“I hate that the world is this way,” she tells us. “I hate what this country’s done to you—but there’s no taking it back and there’s no denying how beautiful it’s made you.”
