Alison Sanders: EIGHTEEN • Cleaver Magazine

Alison Sanders
EIGHTEEN

I hear her in the shower. There’s a gulping sound like she’s drinking straight from the faucet, or she’s trying to but she can’t keep up because the water is coming way too fast. It sounds like she’s drowning. She thinks she’s hiding in there—that no one can hear her. And when she comes out, she thinks that eye drops can hide the angry scarlet in her eyes. She thinks makeup can conceal the swelling of her eyelids and the redness at the tip of her nose. She hopes that putting on clean clothes will hide the way her shoulders hunch in defeat, in surrender.

Mom says she’s not disappointed in me; she’s just disappointed in my actions. She says it carefully, as if it really matters. That’s a difference without a distinction, I tell her. See, she yells. You say shit like that but you’re not graduating from high school? And idiots like Chris-fucking-Swanson are graduating? She shakes her head and rubs her face like she’s washing herself clean. Now she has mascara smeared all over, and it just makes me sad. I don’t get it, she says. Her sigh quavers, and I am hollow. I don’t know what to say, again. Still. So I look down at my hands, big useless slabs of meat. My thumbnail is bleeding a little from biting.

Mom says she loves me, that she’ll always love me. She’s leaning against the door frame and she hardly even looks at me for more than a second before her eyes flick away, staring at something out my window—a cloud maybe. She used to just watch me. I remember that. Whatcha doing, sweet boy? Not anymore. Now when she does look at me, there is hurt in her eyes like a pool, and it is so deep that I want to fill my pockets with stones and step in and drown.

Mom tries to hug me, but I don’t fit anymore. I am too large, too stiff, too big a failure, and her arms are so small. Our bodies remember when I fit in there perfectly, like a little bean nestled in its pod. Our bodies ache with that memory.

After a while, she pulls back and wipes tears off her face. She says it’s going to be OK. I know I should nod, but my head won’t do it. She says we’re going to get through this. We both know we don’t believe that. She finally leaves, and my door clicks as she pulls it closed, and I hate the silence that follows. I look out the window and there’s not a cloud in the sky.

Alison Sanders is a mother of three and an Assistant District Attorney in Santa Cruz, California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Expat Living Singapore, Stanford Magazine, Seaside Gothic, and Bluebird Word. She was a finalist in Bellingham Review’s 2021 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. She is working on her first novel.