Twenty-four

“Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Twenty-“

He finally stops screaming as his shrieks turn into the familiar sound of vomiting. The cracks in his voice spill out with the pizza we ate for lunch today – without anything but ketchup on it. Just the way he likes it.

“You need to get up Angela.”

My mouth is filled with blood and tears. There is not a cocktail in this world that has a mixture I am more familiar with. But I’m starting to overdo on the blood part. The insides of my cheeks feel like one of those scratchcards, and if I tried to push against them with my tongue with just a little bit of force, I feel like I would tear them open.

“GET THE FUCK UP ANGELA!”

I swallow and with a sloppy movement I am back up on my legs, or at least what’s left of them. I try to straighten my dress with my hands, but the cheap material is wrinkled in all the wrong places and it’s too late to iron it now. I sigh.

The vomiting has finished. He starts screaming again.

When I get to the kitchen I find him sitting on the freshly mopped up floor, now covered with even fresher evidence of his anger on top of it.

“Go to your room Kael!”

The cracking of my knuckles was barely audible as the screams got louder. A few years ago I would’ve tried harder. I would’ve sat down with him, held him. I would’ve spoken in a gentler voice. I would’ve looked into his eyes - tried to get ahold of the little bit of cognition I would keep assuring myself was somewhere in there, buried in the countless shades of blue.

They always said he had your eyes. I think that’s the reason that you were so persistent on buying him sunglasses.

I grabbed one of the chocolate bars I kept on the highest shelf and held it in front of his face. The world went silent.

“Kael – room,” a voice I didn’t recognize came out of my throat and continued down my shaky finger that pointed towards the hallway. He followed it.

Somewhere on the surface of the two wine glasses sitting on the table I caught my reflection and thought of my mother. I think that the only time she was disappointed in herself was when she realized that she believed that she would get to choose a daughter with the six letters she decided to pin against my forehead, hoping, praying, that I would be some holy creature she could proudly hold in her hands. She didn't.

But I think that that’s exactly where my hatred for white came from, yet today I couldn’t make myself put on a black dress. It was Kael’s birthday, after all.

It took a whole fifteen minutes to get the kitchen to look the way it looked this morning, and another nine for me to fix my face. Even after all these years, the blonde hair wasn’t getting any thicker like all the commercials promised, and I hoped the cheap clip ins would hide the bald spots.

I heard the doorbell ring and cursed. You never remembered that he didn’t like doorbells and I could have taken it down, but what would be the point? It would just be money thrown down the drain, and anyway, you never visited more than once a year.

“Wait, Kael, it’s fine,” I say as I start running to get you another chocolate before opening the door.

“Angela!” a big smile spread over your freshly shaven face, and someone would even think of it as a normal reaction, had it not stayed in the same position for an unnatural number of seconds, “You look great!”

I nodded instead of saying thank you and let you come in. We both knew it was a lie.

“Where’s my birthday boy?” the level of false excitement lacing your voice made me remember why I saved a tear each of those sleepless nights I spent crying after you left me. After you left us.

“He’s in his room.”

I waited for you in the kitchen. I couldn’t stand watching you hug him like he actually meant something to you. It’s funny how at some point your son turned into a birthday cake for you, a simple mix of eggs, chocolate and sugar you had to see once every 365 days.

“Angela?” you walked into the kitchen, putting down the bag with the cake onto the counter. I looked down at my hands. The cheap foundation that wasn’t even my color anymore, or maybe it never was, didn’t do a good job at covering the bite marks.

“I couldn’t find a single candle that said twenty-four, so I had to buy two.”

“You know he won’t like that. We tried it for his twenty-first birthday.”

“Then you pick the one we’ll put on the cake. It’s not like he’ll know the difference.”