The silence descends. The stillness, and suspended animation.
Jerry and Brianne Whitman were entirely unprepared for what their daughter just said.
Brianne is blinking quickly, as though batting something from her eyelashes, the way she’s done on the very rare occasion when something in her auction presentation hitches. When there’s a near catastrophe of an antiquity placed improperly and then stabilized mere moments before teetering to its end. She’ll sweep her thin hand across her hairline, intentionally loosing and displacing a blond strand in a distraction that simultaneously reminds the in-house audience that her imperfections are charmingly slight.
“Farrah was in a lot of pain,” Jerry answers for them both, but gently, as though only just now realizing how awful the ordeal must have been to make his daughter feel this way. “She must have had a bad reaction to the medicine I gave her, or it was expired and I wasn’t paying close enough attention. I know that was frightening, but imagine how badly it must have hurt.”
“She tore her own skin, Dad.”
“I understand that, Cherish. I’m just telling you it’s not that extraordinary when the human body experiences overwhelming pain, to want to get rid of what’s hurting us.”
“It’s not just this,” she insists—but she’s holding my hand. They can see our fingers are entwined, and only one of us has the presence of mind to be responsible for it. “It’s . . . everything. She wouldn’t let go of me!”
“Cherish, she was out of her mind in pain, honey.” Jerry is just as insistent. “I know you know that. She’s your best friend in the world. Isn’t she?”
Her eyes must snap to meet his.
“Of course she is, Dad.”
“I know she is. And I know this has been hard for you, too. But like your mom said, this is what it is to be close to people. We have to be close enough to hurt when they hurt. The way she was for you in fourth grade. Right?”
Cherish deflates around the hand she’s holding in her lap. I feel her shoulders sink, her eyelids falling partway to match.
As though she ever really wanted them to believe her. As though she would’ve forgiven them if they had.
As though she would’ve known how to make them, even if she wanted to.
This was a tantrum. I know that because she’s still my Cherish. I’m the one unconscious—the one who supposedly scares her sometimes—but her hand is closed around my index finger because she can’t help grasping me. Even while she flails for her parents’ attention, tries her hand at the kind of manipulation I employed on her father mere hours ago, she keeps hold of me. Her need of me is observable, and it both gives her away and saves her.
She didn’t tell them about the baptisms. She didn’t mention the only thing that might have actually troubled them—the only thing that predates the Turner family breakdown. Even now, while her father reminds her of the myth of us, when she doesn’t know that I can hear her, she doesn’t revisit the night at the security office when they came to pick us up to tell them that the guard was telling the truth. That’s how I know she doesn’t mean it.
This isn’t a betrayal; she’s acting out. Just like Jerry told her, she’s tired. Standing beside me, feeling the impact of all the waves that are only actually crashing into me, is taking its toll—and I should have considered that, too. I should have known how hard it would be for Cherish to see hardship, let alone experience it vicariously through the person she loves most in the world.
I should have taken better care of her.
I will.
Her parents are distracted by their concern for me, understandably preoccupied with teaching Cherish to make room for the only person they’d ever expect her to compromise for—a sibling. Another Whitman child.
I’m the only one who can make things right, because I’m the one Cherish has been hurting. I’m the outlet for all her frustration, for the impotent entitlement she experiences because the world has been promised to her since the moment she knew the world exists. I’m the one who has suffered because of the so-called affluenza Jerry and Brianne have bred, and the void they can’t see—so I’m the only person who can offer Cherish absolution.
Control.
I will forgive Cherish all her faults.
Control.
I will stay here with her. I won’t change my mind. I won’t hurt her back.
I love Cherish with eyes wide open, the way my mother seems to think I can’t. The way Kelly implied I wouldn’t, if I understood everything she’s done.
Of the two of them—Nichole Turner and Kelly—he’s the one I can tell. He’s the one in front of whom I can afford to unfurl enough to enjoy the telling. He will be my outlet, one more time.
* * *
—
CHERISH TAKES FOREVER to fall asleep, once her parents leave us. They place pain medicine at my bedside in case I wake again, and they promise her things will look better in the morning, sealing it with a kiss on both our foreheads after tucking her in.
Control.
I’ll be too impatient if I focus on Cherish, so I cull myself out of semiconsciousness again. I focus on the fire I can still hear, and smell, and see, and I wait for it to recede. Awake, and attentive to it now, I understand that this blaze—the one that’s been overlaying the bedroom like a transparency, like a mask affixed to an image so that it can be altered without changing—is not a collection of smaller flames. An inferno is not a congregation of lesser fires; it is another entity altogether.
Its roar is not a series of crackles and snaps escalated by sheer addition; it is a thunderous bellow all its own. It is threatening because it is singular in purpose. When it reaches, some tendrils scorching one way while some snatch another, it isn’t because its mind is divided.
At the foot of the bed, dark flames like shadow flicker and wave, but I know it’s fading. In a moment I won’t be able to see it at all—but that won’t mean that it’s really gone. I can always call it back, like Kelly on the lawn outside the gazebo.
I reach for Cherish, while the shadow flames are still just visible. I lay my hand against her back, and a sound escapes her, like I’ve released her breath with my touch. Like she was waiting for it, and now she’ll rest. She didn’t see the fire encircling the bed. She doesn’t know that it filled this room, consumed the window dressings and the furniture and the walls—so I tell her.
“Everything can burn but us.”
She answers with a soft murmur, and I roll toward her, leaving the fire to fade completely. I lay my head between her shoulder blades and breathe deep before the warm aroma is gone with the color of the flames.