Growing Up

Isra Khan

I.

The labor is hard. Harder than most. 

It is long, grueling, and bloody. At the end of it, there is a boy. He is born healthy. 

This is his first crime. 

For his mother will never truly recover from the ordeal, and his father will never forgive him for it.

She holds him afterward. Looks down at the squalling, blonde-haired baby in her arms and says that he is perfect.

Father is more critical. He prods at Adrien’s pliant limbs, at his soft undefined features. He looks at his child and sees not a son, but a lump of clay waiting to be shaped, to be molded into perfection, into something worthy of his love.

II.

They see him, and say that he is lucky. Better to grow up with everything than nothing at all.  

And for a time, he does have everything. Or what seems like it. An empty house doesn’t seem so empty when you have someone there who loves you. A lonely childhood isn’t unhappy when there is someone who will hold you close, who will wrap their arms around you, and protect you from harm. 

It doesn’t always work. His mother is bedridden, and cannot be constantly at his side. But she tries. Oh, she tries. She coddles him as much as she can. Gives him all the love that his father will not. All the love she has in her heart, she gives to him, until there is nothing left for anyone else.

A child is not passive. A child takes up space, demands attention. Demands food. They cannot help it, it is in their nature to need. To want. 

This is his second crime.

In time, he will learn to be unobtrusive, to make himself as small as possible, but not yet. For now, he is a happy child. His green eyes follow every newcomer that seems to appear out of nowhere, looking for the flash of teeth, the smile that makes him gurgle happily in response. His mother delights in his every movement, in the way his hands curl around her fingers, tug at her hair, and put the strands in his mouth.

As he grows, she teaches him to read at her bedside, plays games with him under the covers, and soothes all his fears. She holds him close when Father scolds him and he feels her heart break when she sees him growing more cautious, wishing that he could be a little more free.

Adrien tries. He does. He sees what his mother wants him to be and plays tricks, cracks terrible jokes just to make her laugh. But still, he is careful, tongue poking out of his mouth as he concentrates on his coloring book, making sure that not a single pencil stroke escapes the thick black outline of his favorite cartoon. 

Father likes it when his work is neat.

III.

The arguments become more frequent once he’s older. Mother forgave Father for his distance when he was a baby, but now…

Now Adrien hears them arguing, long into the night. About him. About Father’s indifference. Still, nothing changes. Father has never listened to anyone but himself, after all. But Mother looks sadder now, her face drawn, and even Adrien’s jokes aren’t always enough to make her laugh.

“Why does Father hate me?” he asks one day, startling Mother with his question. She looks at him with stricken eyes, her answer automatic.

“He doesn’t—”

“Yes, he does.” Adrien’s words are matter of fact. He’s mulled this over for some time. He’s spent hours looking in the mirror, examining his features, cataloging them all. Sometimes, he wonders if it would have made a difference if he’d looked more like his Father. If, perhaps he’d seen himself in his son and found it in himself to love him. 

Adrien will never know.

“It’s okay, I don’t mind…I just want to know why.”  

Mother doesn’t reply. Instead, she pulls him close, dropping a kiss on the top of his head. “I don’t know,” she admits, finally, “But I can love you enough for the both of us.” 

IV.

When he is ten, Father finally finds a use for him. 

He looks at Adrien’s blonde hair, at his green eyes—so like his mothers—and sees a profit. Sees a way that his son can atone for the crimes he does not know he’s committed.

Mother is overjoyed, sending him off every morning with a tight hug and a kiss on his brow, telling him, “Be good for your father, now!”  

She is delighted by his father’s newfound interest in him, and Adrien doesn’t have the heart to tell her that they don’t even travel in the same car in the mornings. That he spends his days being shuffled from room to room, getting dressed and groomed for the camera before being bought in front of Father so that he can approve him for the day’s photoshoot. 

So instead, he spins stories, telling Mother about lunchtimes spent together, and pep talks before shoots. 

The shouting stops for a while, and he is glad. 

He doesn’t know that Mother is too weak to shout. Doesn’t know that her heart breaks with every lie he tells her, that with every passing day that she grows weaker, she worries not about herself, but about what will happen to her son.

V.

Adrien is twelve when his life falls apart for the first time. 

Father doesn’t let him see her when it happens, and he is glad. It is one of the few kindnesses he will ever show his son.

After the memorial, he stands in the doorway to mothers room and stares at the empty bed, the pillows piled perfectly against the headboard; the covers tucked in and smooth. Everything is packed away neatly, all signs of his mother cleaned out so thoroughly that he struggles to even conjure up the image of her, struggles to remember what the room had looked like when she had lived. When he had learned to read at her bedside, had lain with his head in her lap—the only place where he felt truly at peace. 

Overnight, the house became almost unbearably quiet. 

Adrien hadn’t noticed the silence before, hadn’t recognized just how many empty rooms there were. But now the silence is his companion. It wraps around him like a thick blanket as he eats alone, drapes itself over him as he does his assigned schoolwork, and abandons him when he cries himself to sleep at night, as tears soak his pillow and the sound of his weeping echoes loudly in his room.

–

Isra Khan is a sophomore at Barrington High School. She loves reading, especially fantasy, and has recently started writing short fiction stories. She also dabbles a little bit in poetry.