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.