Quiet Screams and Sun Streams

 Eating dinner in a clean house was always cathartic to Wilson Rose. The warm silence peppered with the clinking of forks against plates and interrupted by his mother’s idle chastisement of her coworkers. He liked the way the air filled the room more than the furniture, the way moonlight or sunlight or shadows filled up all those blank spaces. He liked the way he had lived here forever; memories could be found in any dent or scratch on the table.

“Are you ready for your finals?” His mother asked, and Wilson chewed through his slight annoyance at the question. He swallowed.

“Yep.”

“Even math? Phin’s brother could tutor you if you’re struggling, you know. He’s always offering.” Wilson nodded, bringing another fork of spaghetti to his lips, that frustration getting harder to swallow with every word she spoke.

“Right.” He said, mouth half-full. He really didn’t need help in math, and even if he did, he would just ask Phin, not his pretentious brother. “Did you manage to sell that house, the one with the foyer?” He asked, and his mother gave a coy smile as if she knew why he was changing the topic.

“They all have foyers, honey.” She swept her soft, blonde curly hair behind her shoulder, trying to get it out of the way of her fork’s trajectory. Wilson realized that she hadn’t known after all.

“Well, did you sell any of them?” 

She looked down at her plate, eyes flicking to this and that, the way she did when she was startled into an unpleasant emotion. Wilson’s heart thudded against his chest.

“I didn’t mean it like that, Ma.” Wilson said softly, trying to draw her eyes to his. He had started calling her Ma after he had watched a cowboy movie from the fifties a few years ago. He had thought it sounded cool, and then it stuck. She pulled spaghetti into her mouth, eyes still finding anything to look at but him. He gently placed his hand on her shoulder, forcing her eyes to him. “I mean it. I’m sorry.” He didn’t bother with the excuses of stress, and homework, and finals, because they weren’t true. He hadn’t snapped at her because he was stressed. He had snapped because the childish belief that they didn't need to talk to communicate was proven wrong. Again.

Years ago he would cry in his room, as silently as a seven year old could muster, in agony, and his mother would know. She would know, and she would softly knock on his door, bundle him into her arms. Say it was okay. Say everything would be alright. The rolling tears being soaked up by her soft blue blouse.

But as he got older, his grief changed. He learned to cry more quietly. Looking back, remembering that pain he felt, that all encompassing loneliness and grievance towards the world while he was in middle school, it felt like death was coiling up inside him. Honest to god, it felt like death. He thought his mother should somehow be able to know, to feel his agony, to creep into his room. To hug him like he was just a little kid. But she didn’t. 

Wilson remembered his body feeling too hot, his face red and blotchy from the strain of keeping in his sobs. Terrible thoughts running through his head, confirming his worst fears, creating new ones. He remembered staring at the door in his quiet agony, nothing more than a crying boy alone in his room, he remembered staring so hard at that door. But it never opened. She never came, and it made the agony a little less bearable. And secretly, in the worst parts of himself, he blamed his mother for the pain he had felt then. If only she had come. If only she had opened the door and saved him. If only she had heard his quiet screams through the sunlight that blared through the windows of their house.

The air was colored gold by the sunset, and his mother nodded numbly at him, accepting the apology, but not understanding her son at all. Wilson ate a little faster, tried to get dinner over with. Tried to tell her why he hated her through closed lips and panicked thoughts she would never hear.

“Can Phin come over tonight?” He asked, even though he knew that that would leave her alone in the kitchen, in the room with air that got filled up with sunlight like a fishbowl. The feelings of this dinner remaining with her, inescapable. She nodded, standing up and taking her plate to the sink. She knew already what it felt like to be in the kitchen with the sun streaming through and clogging her throat. She was used to it.

She knew the story behind the dents and scratches on the table. She had lived here for years. But she hadn't lived here forever. It was less of a home than her last one. It was a chore; an empty feeling filled with moonlight, and sunlight, and shadows, and time passing, and her lovely boy, who she didn't understand. And all the suffering the two of them had felt, collecting in the blank spaces, filling up what the furniture couldn't.

Wilson placed his plate next to the sink gingerly, but it still clattered; sound and sun and pain ruffling thickly through the air that they breathed. His shoulder brushed hers, but the feeling was lost in the sun that cut between them.

"I love you." Wilson said, because sometimes he didn't say it when should, and that meant he certainly didn't say it enough.

Lindsey Rose loved her son. He was her boy, her savior during the hardest days of her life. He was that gurgling laugh a room over, that smiling face that was so hard to look at now.

It was hard for her to remember the days before him. It had always just been the two of them. Lindsey and her smiling boy and this home that wasn't hers.

He was growing older, his thoughts were racing faster than his expression would allow her to read, faster than he could ever convey through speech. Lindsey knew he was suffering - she could feel it bleeding through the air - but how could she possibly help him, when she couldn't even help herself.

"I love you, too." She said back, meaning it, and their eyes connected for a brief moment, straining to see the other through the heavy impression they held of one another.