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.”