Soon it will all be quiet.
Cherish only stops pushing down when her arms sink below the surface to her shoulders because there is no more resistance.
When she finally lets go, her mother bobs up toward her and Cherish screams as though unprepared for the consequence of what she’s done.
“RahRah.” And I’m at her side, pulling her away and toward the edge of the pool. I lower us both to the stairs and hold my Cherish close.
Brianne Whitman’s body tilts underwater, slowly turning so that her back can crest, and I shield her daughter’s eyes with one hand, shushing her.
“We’re safe now,” I whisper, and close my eyes to feel the way her arms tighten around me, this Cherish who is capable of so much more than her parents or I thought. “You saved me.”
“What happens now?” she asks, and I know what she means. I know that she is asking whether there will be another baptism when Jerry Whitman arrives, so I reassure her.
“Your dad will be here soon.”
“I’m scared. He’s gonna see what I’ve done.”
“He has to,” I tell her, rocking gently on the step, the way we did the night she drowned me. “But it’s okay, Che. He loves you more than anything. I wouldn’t have let you do it if he didn’t. He’ll do whatever it takes to protect you. He’ll rewrite the world again, for your sake.”
“What about you, RahRah?”
I’m still swaying with intoxication, at being in the water with Brianne’s body, at having watched Cherish hold her down. I’m too overwhelmed with it to tell her why I’m safe. Why it had to be her, why she had to hold her mother underwater, and how Jerry Whitman will know that the void they created in their daughter has been entirely filled. I inhabit her, and without me, she’ll fall apart. It’s their fault that Cherish needs me to survive this.
No more whipping girl; now I am her guide.
“He wants you safe, Cherish,” I manage. “So he’ll protect me, too.”
“Then you’ll still come home? You won’t leave me, after everything they’ve done?” she asks, and I kiss Cherish on the top of her head. Squeeze her back while her mother’s phone starts to ring again. In the distance, around the front of the house, I hear it faintly echo, as the phone the call’s originating from is close by.
The fire outside the fence darkens like it will soon recede, and the light in the sky dims so that it’s only daybreak. Nichole Turner is gone, and Brianne Whitman bobs in the water.
Control.
“You’re my home,” I tell Cherish. “That’s what we’ll tell him.”
The fence creaks, and before he speaks, I know Jerry Whitman is here with us.
“He has to know that we belong together.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bethany C. Morrow is a national bestselling author writing for adult and young adult audiences. She is the author of the novels Mem, A Song Below Water, A Chorus Rises, and So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix. She is the editor of and contributor to the young adult anthology Take the Mic, which won the 2020 ILA Social Justice Literature Award. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Bustle, BuzzFeed, and more. She is included on USA Today’s list of “100 Black novelists and fiction writers you should read.”
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