“I guess I can understand that,” I tell her, and finger one of her stud earrings. “We’re just alike. I guess the parent who sees themselves in the child knows exactly what struggles they’ll face.” Her expression tightens. “But you also know I’m smart, and capable. And ruthless. Just like you.”
“Why do you do that? Why do you need to think I’m a monster, too?”
It’s like the gazebo has a decloaking effect. The same way I was with Kelly, I feel honest and free with my mother, despite the lack of moonlight. We’ve both slipped out of cryptic, coded speech, and neither one of us is surprised.
“Why do I have to be a monster just because I scare you?”
“Come home,” she begs me, and it doesn’t seem to follow.
“I am,” I say, before I can stop myself. I’ve started uncoiling again, and it’s because of Kelly writhing on the grass, the way the moonlight bathes his white shirt and seems to make him glow. It’s the way I hurt him so badly but I didn’t make him bleed. The way I let myself, and still managed to scale it back. “You don’t have to worry about me, Mom. I’m in control.”
“I don’t think you are, Farrah.”
“If we aren’t alike, then how would you know?” I say with a bite. “How could you know anything about me?”
The way her expression shifts is insulting. Nichole Turner looks at me like I’m a ridiculous child, like what I’ve implied is beyond reason and she’s surprised to hear me say it.
“We’re not alike, Farrah,” she says. “Why would I have to be to see you clearly? I can see past myself.”
Our eyes are locked but I say nothing.
“I’m always alert, even when I think I’m getting what I want. I don’t mistake fixation for loyalty. I don’t think someone showering me with attention makes it healthy, makes me safe.”
“Am I a predator, or is someone preying on me, Mother? Which is it?”
“A smart girl would know it can be both.”
“This is about Jerry’s friend finding Dad a new job. A better job,” I stress.
“And when you thought Dad and I were responsible for it, it was a betrayal,” she says, and it quiets me. “When you thought we’d given up on the life you still want here, you twisted our words and feelings until we let you have your way. No strategic, chess-master level of interrogation now, Farrah? No wondering where this shark of a headhunter was when we were drowning for a year?”
Despite what they can clearly see with their eyes, people always say that dark skin doesn’t blush. Before me, my mother’s face has flushed, a fresh pink lifting beneath her skin, as though a light is shining from inside her. Her eyes go glassy and a rose rim begins to form around them. It’s lovely.
“The Whitmans don’t owe me anything,” she says, as though to keep me from saying it first. “I’m just wondering why this fast-acting salvation didn’t come before the bank foreclosed.” She bites her lip and looks down where Kelly used to be.
She’s embarrassed now.
“Maybe they wanted me to be their daughter,” I say dryly, burrowing into my mother with the strength of my gaze. “Maybe everything that went wrong in your career is somehow their fault, not yours.”
I should feel remorse. It’s been so long since she was on top, but my mother was good at what she did. I know that. She was good enough to have her own team, even though she found out not long before she was laid off that one of her subordinates made more than she did. I shouldn’t use live ammunition when this is just a war game—but she should’ve lost graciously.
My mother takes in an abbreviated breath, but it’s too sharp and the smile she doesn’t mean is pained.
“I wouldn’t even know, Farrah,” she tells me. “Whatever else you are, you’re still a Black girl. One day you’ll know how impossible it is to tell the difference between personalized terror aimed straight at you, and good ole run-of-the-mill systemic prejudice. That the only difference is, I can protect you from one.”
I hold her hand and sit, forcing her to follow me down to the grass where Kelly lay. She doesn’t know he was ever here. She can’t hear him struggling to breathe, or see the colors decorating his abdomen, the bull’s-eye that I didn’t make.
She’s just about to ask. I can tell by the way her brow crinkles when she looks between me and the blades of grass I’m delicately touching. She wants to ask, but she’s near exhaustion, suspecting the unthinkable and not knowing how to phrase it.
“You’ve always worried about what I might do,” I say, pulling the blades of grass between my fingers without pulling hard enough to pluck. “What would I need protection from? What is it you think might happen here? Do you think Brianne’s gonna kidnap me? Wouldn’t you make me come with you right now if that’s what you thought?”
“I don’t know what I think, Farrah,” she confesses. “I just know I don’t like it. And I know you can’t see anything but the story you’re telling.”
“And?”
“And there’s always more than one. We know that.” And I know who she means by we. “We know there’s always another narrative, and we don’t have the luxury of ignoring it, even if we think it suits our needs.” She reaches out and stops my hand. “Brianne Whitman wouldn’t know to teach her daughter that, no matter how conscious she is.”
I watch my mother until she slowly releases her hand and sits back, shaking her head like she knows she hasn’t made an impact. She’s losing again, because she still doesn’t think enough of me.
“Who doesn’t tell someone their child is sick?” she asks me, and I don’t have an answer so I go back to stroking grass.
XII
Do you still miss him?” I ask Cherish when I find her sitting alone in the garden. Half the distance between the pool and the gazebo, there are raised flower beds and a serpentine pathway made of rectangular mosaic stones. The path snakes between and beneath the lattices that create an overhang of sheltering ivy. It shades the garden furniture, raining down star jasmines along with their beautiful aroma. It’s the single most relaxing place on the Whitman property—but Cherish isn’t relaxed. She almost drops her phone, and then locks it as though I could’ve seen the screen from where I’m standing outside the ivy shade.
“Or maybe you don’t have to.” I come around the beds overflowing with tulips in a range of colors. There are other flowers, in other beds, but I’ve only come to water them with Brianne once or twice, and I’ve only asked about the ones I like.