I lie in my bed, open eyes watching beams of light that from time to time skim through the slits in the venetian blinds and cross the walls. A knot tightens in my stomach. The street lamps have been on for some time, and my eyes  have  adjusted to the familiar  greenish  light that they cast into the room. My back is turned  to the door in an attempt to escape the harsh  yellow glow that spills from the crack underneath. I can hear the wind throwing itself into the walls of the house, the faint scratching of an unknown  rodent somewhere behind my pink  flowered wallpaper, and the low hum of the furnace waffling its way up the vent from the belly of the house. I focus my ears on these low comforting  sounds, trying in vain to blot out the inescapable, agitated, voice coming from kitchen.
 I want to melt into the room and become  part of the comforting noises and muted light, but they do not seem to want me, and my body will not let me go. Anger bleeds. It cannot remain contained, and it is only a matter of time before the voice will crescendo not in volume but because of its increasing proximity to me. It matters little whether or not I caused my mother’s outburst, for she never fails to twist things so that I become subjected to  her anger.

 I  begin rummaging through my memories of the day to try and predict  which  of my shortcomings  she  will attack when   she storms into my room. I had come home from school on time, clothes clean, despite the playing at recess, and I had put all of my toys away before bed. I had cleared my place after dinner. I had spoken politely and not complained  when I was told to stay home instead of going out to play. I have learned to do all of these things, I have learned to mould my behaviour and actions according to my mother’s demeanor. I have learned a great deal, but I know that I have not learned  enough.

 I  hear the agitation in her voice mounting. I try to block my mother out and  picture the smiling mother from a T.V. program I  had watched  earlier  today. In the episode she had reprimanded and scolded her son when she found the spider that he had secretly hidden in his room. However, she had been  smiling and shaking her head  at him too, when  his  back  was turned. After the scolding, and the spiders  release into the back yard, the issue  had died and she had not made it out to be larger than it was.

  In my mind I can picture my own mother, the brown  brittle hair that frames her  sharp  edged face,  the fine  hairs under her nose and chin, her spindly legs and arms. I try to transpose her onto the image of the T.V. mother. It does not work; she  will  never  be  pliable or have the softly  blurred  edges of the light haired  woman. She will remain  sharp, hard, and heedless no matter how much my mind tries  to will her otherwise.
 I can  hear my brother  trying to defend himself.  He is still young enough to believe that by protesting  something  can  be accomplished. He has not yet realized the futility of his efforts, nor how much they make things worse.  Suddenly there is silence. I have been waiting for it. It is not an absolute silence, but for an instant the shrill voice of my mother has ceded. I shiver. I know her thoughts are shifting to me.

 My heart  is  racing. Then  the waiting is over, her  voice  is yelling my name. I shut my eyes. I think she says  something about shoes. Have I left  mine out by the door? Maybe she  will  think me asleep if  I  remain quiet,  for I have been in my room for  some time. I do not want to hear her voice, I do not want to see the light come spilling into my room as she opens the door, I do not want to hear what her accusations  will  be. I want darkness and stillness and to hear the lull of the furnace. Instead, my door is  pushed  open  and I am demanded to get up.
 I clutch the blanket that  covers me. I can feel my nails pushing through it and into my palms so that  they  begin to hurt, but I do not dare to move and blow my cover by relaxing my grip.  Mother sees everything. She also knows everything. I sense that she does not believe that I am asleep. I realize I have made a mistake;  pretending to be asleep  will not do anything except increase her anger. I flinch.  She sees this. My eyes are still closed and my back is still to her, but I know  that her hand is darting to the light  switch  an instant  before  she  flicks it by the familiar sound that she makes from the back of her throat.

 Suddenly, involuntarily, my eyes are open and the  flooding light is both white and black at the same time. I think that I am blinded. I am like the naked mole rat in the science video my sixth grade teacher had shown my class. I stare stupidly, my eyes blinking, and my mother is over me, her voice for the moment  low and furious.

 She asks me what I take her for, do I think she is stupid enough not to know  her daughter is pretending to be asleep? I say no. I say I was almost asleep and that I thought she was still yelling at Matthew. This is a trick I have learned, sometimes you  can  shift  her attention back to the person  who first  fanned the flames of her anger. It fails to work this time. She starts getting louder and tells me I am not a responsible girl, and that I will never be anything because I am lazy. She tells me I never do what I am supposed to do, and that she will not  always be around to make things right. She asks me what I will  do then? She tells me the answer, I will be a bum. I will have nothing and be nothing because I can do nothing.

 I know this already,  so I do not  have to fully listen to her. If  she thinks I am not  listening and asks me what she has said I can simply repeat the words that have been ingrained into my mind. I train my eyes upon her to keep them from wandering,  but I am still puzzling over what has gotten me into trouble.

 This works, until she catches me off guard; I  think she  will tell me what I  have done wrong but she does not. Instead, she  asks me what  I am supposed to do upon  arriving  home from school. I answer  that I must make sure that all of my things are put away. She asks what else, and I know enough now, by the sound of her voice, not to say that is all I’m supposed to do,  even if it is the only truth I know. So I say nothing. She raises her voice and again asks me what else am I supposed to do. I look at her, her eyes are twitching.  She grabs my arm, pulls me from the bed, and tells  me to go to the front door. I go, half stumbling, and she follows me with her rising voice.

 At the bottom of the stairs I see Matthew through the kitchen doorway. He  looks confused and his eyes are  watery and have an  imploring. My mother pushes me away from him and towards the door. She tells me to look. I look and see that there is nothing of mine in the entrance way. She asks me what is wrong with the room, I answer that I do not know.  She tells me that is not an acceptable answer. She asks again and I keep silent. This angers her even more. She wants an answer. Her voice  is  loud  enough so that when I look into her eyes I almost  think she will hit me, but I know that she will not. My mother does not need to use physical force as a weapon.

 She is screaming at me now, and I can hear my brother whimpering in the background. It is the shoes after all, only not my shoes but my brothers that are the cause of her discontent. He is only five and sometimes he forgets to clean up after himself. In my head I ask God that  if he is up there to please tell my brother to be quiet so that my mother does not remember it was he who caused her anger to flare.

  My mother is asking  if  it is too much for me to put  his shoes in the closet  when I come home from school. She is asking me if it is too much to do this one simple thing when she does so much for us. I  need to be more considerate and to take more responsibility. She is blaming me for his shoes being in the way. Though I feel this is not my fault I do not argue with her. Instead, I pick them up and   place them behind the  sliding  mirrored  doors of the closet.  I close the doors and in the mirror I see my mother’s face has  become my own. My breath catches in my chest.  I blink and look again. It  was only the  result of the angle from which I was kneeling. My own blank face looks back at me and I turn away from the mirror.

 My mother moves  towards the kitchen, now  yelling at my brother. He should have been in bed long before now,  and she is  asking him what he thinks he is doing staying up so late. She disappears down the hall saying  that both of us had better shape up.

 Matthew still looks  confused, but now  he remains silent. He is learning. Without a word spoken between us I put him to bed and give him a kiss. As I  leave him I hear  his breathing change. I go to my room and  close the door  behind  me. My eyes  had adjusted to the harsh artificial lights in the entranceway and now it is almost black in my room. I  feel my way to the bed,  lie down, and  fix my eyes on the dim  green light from the street  lamp that falls upon the wall. I let my ears  readjust to the stillness, waiting for them to  pick up the hum of the furnace. Rain must have started to fall when I was downstairs, for I can now hear it pattering against the window pane. My mind is already storing my mother’s  words and anger in some dark crevice; I know that in the morning I will wake up with an unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach and a foggy memory of why I feel so drained.

 There is a different  noise now coming from downstairs now. I think I hear drawers opening and closing but I am not sure. Then I hear the  faint  jangling sound of metal against metal. A  door shuts. I feel the fluids in my stomach  churning. I think I might throw up. An  engine  starts and suddenly  my room  is  flooded  with bright light. I follow its flight with my eyes; up the back wall of my room and along the ceiling before it slides to the side wall, moves  forward and disappears.

 I am afraid to breathe. The silence smoulders, it is alive and it is sharp and it hurts  and  bruises me more than any words or physical pain ever have. I had not expected this.

 I am afraid to move, but I fear I will choke on the silence of the house. I am  afraid  it   will  smother me. I move from my bed and open the door. The hall light is longer off and there is no light to blind me. My  bare  feet  plod softly  along the ceramic floor,  I do not want to wake my brother. I head to the front door and unlock it. The air is cool and damp and causes my white night shirt to stir in the late night air. I close the door behind me and leave the shelter of the overhang to sit down on the small cement porch.The rain  is cold  and  falling  softly. Rain drops run down my cheeks and seem to dig into my skin like tiny knives. I feel warm droplets mixing with the cold ones against my cheeks.

 I do not know how long I sit here for, but it is long enough for my nightshirt to soak through, my hair to plaster to my scalp, and for my tears to run dry. Long enough for a set of headlights to turn into the driveway and for my mother to climb out. I tense, but not the way I once would have. I no longer care if she will be angered at finding me like this.

 She does not see me at first. Her head is down as she walks to the front door, but when she looks up I see that her eyes are red. She looks older than usual, and  when  she sees me her eyes  do not look stormy. Her face seems to crumple in upon  itself. She throws  her arms around me. I remain  stiff  and continue to look  forward, unsure of how to react. For a moment I consider returning the embrace,  but only  for a moment. Then  she  remembers  herself and pulls away from me. She looks lost, and her spidery hands are fidgeting. I know she wants to touch me again, but instead she lets her hands crawl back and  forth up her  wet arms. I have just hurt her, but for the first  time a part of me does not care  how my actions affect her. For the moment I am cold; I am hard. She is me and I am her.

 We sit there letting the late night drizzle soak us for what seems an endless space of time until she begins to speak to me.  I learn that as a child, if she wanted to play, her mother would tie her up to a tree in the yard so that she would not have to watch her. When she was a teenager her father, being a doctor, gave her Valium as a solution to her mood swings and newly rebellious nature. She goes on to tell me of what it was like to live in a house where her younger brother and sister were given priority over herself, how she was labelled and expected to behave a certain way because she was the doctor’s oldest daughter in a small town. When she finally stops the drizzle has long since been finished and only an empty silence remains between us.

 She looks at me now as if she is expecting something from me but I am too exhausted to try and guess what it is and my new found lack of care allows me to get up and begin to walk up the stairs towards the door.

 “I’m sorry” she says, and stuns me enough for me to spin suddenly and slip on the wet cement.

 “I know the love I try to give you is far from perfect, and probably a lot of the time it doesn’t seem any better to you than hate, but I swear it is a thousand times better than indifference” she finishes as she tries to help me stand up . I refuse and she backs away, seeming timid for the first time that I am able to remember.

 I rub my throbbing tail bone and look at her. I want to remember this moment as I turn my back to her. My feet move soundlessly along the ceramic tiles as I go back to the dim green light of my room and close the door behind me.