“Cherish,” she begins, still resembling a brilliantly trained stage actress, her movements and her voice filled with a perfect trepidation and concern. “You said Farrah ran away. What’s going on?”
Cherish won’t reply. The gate was the threshold. Now that we are by the pool, where the lights still shine, rippling through the water as though the light itself is enough to interrupt it, Brianne must supply the answers.
I extend my hand to Cherish and lead her into the pool. The water breaks to accept us, the way it always has, even though we ease in instead of jumping. The entry must be slow and silent. Brianne Whitman must have time to watch her daughter and me walk into the water, so that she recalls what the security guard said.
“Cherish, what’s going on?” she asks again, and there is a storm approaching. I can feel it in the water that sways away before returning to slap my naked torso, and I can hear it in her voice.
Her cell phone rings.
“Cherish,” she says again. She’s trying to steady this scene, whatever it is about to become, by steadying her voice. She says her daughter’s name like a gentle command.
“Don’t answer that,” I tell Brianne, standing shoulder to shoulder with Cherish in the water.
As though my words alert her to the sound at all, Brianne fishes out her phone and looks at it.
It’s Leslie Campbell. Or Jerry Whitman, who’s only woken up because he received the call from Leslie Campbell and is calling to find out where his family is—where I am.
“Don’t answer it,” I repeat, and when her eyes raise to find me over her screen: “You’ll miss the ceremony. Be present with us; Cherish wants to share this with you.”
Cherish has been watching her mother, too, but now she sinks into the water. She lowers herself in until her chest is submerged, and then lies back, her legs lifting back to the surface. When she is floating beside me, I easily pull her around so that Cherish’s body is between her mother and me.
Brianne’s eyes dance. From her daughter to me, to her daughter, to her phone.
“None of this should worry you,” I tell her, and then I press her daughter underwater.
Brianne’s mouth falls open as though to match the action.
“What’s the matter?” I ask, and Brianne’s head turns involuntarily from side to side.
“Farrah . . .”
“Watch what happens if I try to remove my hands.” I lift them and Cherish grabs my wrists, forces me to stay attached, to continue the baptism.
A tear slips free and runs down the length of Brianne’s face. She is so thin I think I can see her heart slamming against her breastbone; this will not take long.
“We’ve done this so many times before. You were warned,” I say of the night Cherish and I came here last. “What could be different about tonight, that you have cause to worry what I might do to her, Brianne?”
“I don’t know, Farrah.” She sounds breathless. “I don’t understand any of this. Why did you girls bring me here? What are you doing?”
“We’re proving something to each other. That we trust. That we can be trusted. That we won’t fight back. I can hold Cherish underwater as long as I like and she won’t ever try to escape me.”
Brianne sputters out a sob, her face collapsing at last, her hands rising to cover her mouth.
“But why should that worry you? It’s the same for me. I don’t resist Cherish. Even when I think she’s hurting me. Even when I thought she made me the whipping girl.”
“Please, Farrah.”
Brianne Whitman is on her knees. I haven’t felt Cherish tense once beneath my hands, the way she does when holding her breath first becomes an effort, and her mother is already at wit’s end.
“I’m so sorry that we hurt you, Farrah, please.”
There is no defense. No argument, no denial. It is over before I’ve begun—but I am already uncoiled. The sky is already severed. It bleeds red-orange; it spills lava across the treetops and the gables of homes nearby. It lights up the world so that everything outside the backyard fences glows. Brianne and Cherish and I are the only things left untouched, and this pool.
“She’s my baby girl. Please don’t hurt Cherish.”
That is why this will work. It’s why it has. The reason the Whitmans imparted Cherish with a gaping flaw is the reason she needs me, is the reason they chose me, is the reason Brianne would rush out of bed without her husband, is the reason she did not answer her phone, is the reason she is on her knees. Because she loves her child, wholeheartedly and without defense. There is nothing self-preserving in it, and it will be the death of her.
I pull Cherish out of the water.
She doesn’t gasp or buckle forward dramatically to try to catch her breath. Her hands stay around my wrists, and we rest our foreheads together while she quietly recovers—though I open my eyes in time to see the way she watches her mother out of the corner of hers.
Cherish is mine. We are here, baptizing each other again, because it is true. We belong together, and she agrees.
“She has to tell you why.” I speak softly to Cherish because she is so near.
“Cherish.” Brianne is still crying softly. “Come here, sweetheart. Please.”
“She won’t come in after us unless you ask her to,” I tell my best friend when I see the worry try to move from her mother to Cherish like an airborne contagion. “You have to make her watch, or you’ll never know the truth. I am not the only monster, Che.”
She nods against my forehead, her eyes returned to me.
Brianne Whitman’s phone is ringing again.
“Cherish, it’s Daddy. Come tell him everything’s okay.”
She’s holding out the unanswered phone, dangling it in a desperate attempt to reclaim her daughter from me.
“Farrah hurt Tariq,” Cherish tells her, and I am as stunned as her mother. We didn’t agree to this. This is not part of the ceremony—telling her mother what happened outside the gazebo. But she keeps going, her hands still around my wrists. “That’s what Dad’s calling to say. He wants to know where you are, because he thinks she’s going to hurt us, too.”
“Cherish,” her mother says pitifully, prostrated on the stone outside the pool as though demonstrating a misleadingly simple stretch that will become increasingly difficult and painful the longer it’s held.
“But why would she?” Cherish asks as though there was no interruption. As though she is unmoved by her mother’s emotion—except that she is clamping my wrists more tightly and I can feel the way she shivers. “Why would Farrah hurt us, Mommy?”