“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.