I am lying on the short carpet behind the back seat, compressing it further still and feeling the solid frame beneath it. The carpet is a thin veil meant to make the harsh metal structure look like something soft and welcoming, rather than the monstrosity it would be in its natural state. It takes so little to trick the eyes, but I am lying on the thin deception, and the cold, unmalleable frame is bleeding into me until I start to shiver.
“Kelly is going to prison,” Brianne says, and I can hear the tears welling up in her blue eyes.
“Prison?”
Control.
I can’t sit up; I can’t tell my best friend to keep calm. That it’s possible to resist hysterics no matter what you hear and no matter how unexpected. There’s no way for me to communicate that we must keep control.
“Kelly isn’t going to prison. Judge Campbell wouldn’t allow it.” Cherish says Leslie Campbell’s title and name with ease, like there are many things she has refused or doesn’t have the capacity to simultaneously process. She wants to know whether her parents are monsters, but without a personal incentive, she has left Tariq and his father as they were. As they are and have always been in her mind. She bucked away from her mother but speaks of him without malice, and I understand how so many of them escape repercussions. “Kelly’s just a kid.”
“I know that’s how you see him, Cherish, but he’s not like Tariq. Kelly’s gone through so much, and it’s hardened him. Leslie tried to save him, but he didn’t want to be saved.”
“What happened?”
“Kelly got arrested a few nights ago, with one of his younger brothers. It doesn’t surprise me that the boys were smoking or using, but Leslie said they had enough on them to be charged with possession with intent to distribute.”
I shiver almost to the point of vibration in the back of the car. I will make the whole vehicle rattle in a moment.
Control.
It isn’t working. Justice is a blindfolded woman who looks too much like Brianne Whitman for her lack of vision to matter, and when her scales are equal, they still tip.
I look up at the car’s ceiling and am relieved to hear the fire on the other side. I can breathe more steadily when the roof begins melting, the metal buckling at the heat of the lava as it creates a gaping mouth and the red-orange liquid begins dripping around the edges. The night sky is above me now, and I fix my gaze on it while Brianne Whitman relays a lie.
“But he made a stupid mistake,” she says, and she doesn’t mean the possession that would never have landed Tariq Campbell in handcuffs. “He took a plea deal to send his brother home, when the boy would’ve ended up in juvenile court anyway. Leslie could’ve helped him, the way he helped Kelly. Now he’s the sole defendant, and he’s going to be sentenced as an adult.”
Cherish isn’t like me. She was there tonight, somewhere hidden behind Tariq and me, but she doesn’t put it all together. She won’t understand what Kelly has done until I tell her, and I don’t know whether I’ll try. There are things I couldn’t know.
What did Tariq do to warrant the punishment that Kelly has defiantly worsened for himself?
How pure is this game the families play? How often is a punishment displaced correction for their beloved children, and how often is it meant to keep the whipping child in line?
I’m willing to bet that like the bull’s-eye on Kelly’s side, the Campbells’ abuse isn’t always Tariq’s punishment. Kelly’s ingratitude is reason enough to involve his younger brother in the fraudulent charges and replace him.
The sky shining above the hole I’ve melted in Brianne’s car is a bruise, black and blue, with stars like the blood of burst capillaries stippling the surface, and distant gases clouding the edges with a molding green.
Control.
It’s Cherish who needs me. It’s Cherish I said I’d forgive and protect.
I’ll bury Tariq’s tongue, and Kelly with it. After tonight the thing that connects us, the likeness, will be destroyed. There will be no whipping girl the way Kelly ensured there is no more Campbell whipping boy—not from his bloodline.
When Cherish sobs in the front seat, her mother leaning over the center console to embrace her and moan sympathetically, there is nothing Brianne or Jerry Whitman would do to interject. Her tears are required.
They’re the ones who did this right. Between Tariq and Cherish, only she suffers when the whipping children do. Only she loves me the way a beloved child must for the pain of the surrogate to matter. Whatever the Whitmans have done, they believe in it. They believe in Cherish’s need of it—and at the baptism, we will make Brianne tell us why.
When we arrive at the home where my family used to live, Brianne doesn’t pull into the drive even though the house is still unoccupied. While she parks alongside the island on which Cherish and I buried the last one’s remains, I see that another white post has been staked into the lawn. Another transparent box holds pamphlets extolling the desirable qualities of what once was the Turner home.
Like the Whitman property after last night, after Nichole Turner came and together our conversation began the unveiling that Tariq completed, this place looks different. The sky above it has split, and it isn’t the fact that the sun will soon rise. The color that is bleeding into the sky is the fire that began in my dream. The fire that will burn everything but Cherish and me.
I wait while she walks to the back of the car and opens the door for me.
“Farrah,” Brianne says, but she isn’t calling my name; she’s identifying me. She is questioning my presence because while she expected to find me here, she did not know she’d brought me. “Cherish . . .”
The woman stays beside the car as though the effort it is taking her brain to make sense of this impedes her motor skills. Her brows cinch and spread and then repeat, her mouth slightly opening and then failing to close completely.
“Come on, Mom,” Cherish tells her, as she and I cross the street and begin up my driveway. The command itself is enough to compound Brianne’s confusion—that the confusion is hers alone, and the daughter who was so recently frightened and unaware in the car is not out of sorts.
We’ve gotten to the fence and I’ve reached over to unlatch it before Cherish and I turn again and find Brianne exactly where we left her.
“Come on,” I say, and then I disappear into the backyard, leading Cherish by the hand behind me.
We have time to undress before we see Brianne again. She’s moving elegantly, though she doesn’t mean to. Her hands float around her body as though searching for some guide rope that will make this descent safer—which means that some part of her knows it isn’t. If Cherish were at all intuitive, it would be as good as a confession, the way Brianne’s chin tilts one way and then the other. She is as worried as if these surroundings are foreign and she can’t know what she’ll find, despite all the times she’s laughed and lunched here.