Dinner's cold. I've called his name up the stairs four times and I'm about to do it a fifth, which is the part I hate, the fifth time, because by then I'm not calling, I'm warning. The door stays shut. Behind it, that low tinny roar of other kids' voices, boys he's never met, laughing at something I'll never be let in on. Six hours today. I counted. I count now, it's a thing I do, I stand at the bottom of the stairs and add up the hours like a woman doing a sum she already knows the answer to.
This is most nights. I want you to know that going in. Not a bad patch. Most nights.
So I fight it, because what else is there. I've pulled the router cord out of the wall mid-match and heard him make a sound I'd never heard a child make, like I'd taken off a limb. I've grounded him. I've stood on a chair and hidden the console on the top shelf of my own closet like it was something illegal. And by the next afternoon we're back at it, the two of us, and it's me who ends up shouting, me who ends up crying in the kitchen with the tap running so he won't hear. Nine hours that Saturday. I told him the number. I always tell him the number, like the number is going to be the thing that reaches him.
It never reaches him. The number is for me. It's the score I keep in a game I keep losing.
I kept score of his hours like it was proof of something. It was just proof I'd stopped talking to him.
It got into everything. I stopped sleeping right. I stopped having anyone round, because someone always asks after your boy and I'd got very good at a small tight smile that meant don't. My hands shook by evening. I was so busy guarding the door that I forgot there was a child on the other side of it, an actual boy, mine, eleven when the tide came in and I never clocked the day it did.
The night it broke open, I didn't shout. I made a plate and I carried it up and I set it on the carpet outside his room, past midnight, because I'd stopped even trying to make him come down to the table. Through the wood I could hear the headset, that leaking chatter, him saying gg to someone, laughing easy, warm, a warmth he hadn't spent on me in a year. I stood there in the dark hallway with my hand flat on the door. Not knocking. Just feeling how far away six inches of pine can be. He was in there being happy with strangers. I was out here with a cooling plate. That was the whole thing. That was as low as it got.
There was no big talk that turned it. No expert came. It was him, actually, and he wasn't even talking to me. He was between two matches, thumbing the menu, and he said it half to himself, not looking up: 'You only ever come up here to take stuff off me.'
He wasn't wrong. That was the terrible part. Every time I'd climbed those stairs in a year, I'd come to confiscate, to time him, to warn. I'd made myself the one who takes. No wonder the door stayed shut. You don't open the door to the one who takes.
'You only ever come up here to take stuff off me.'
I didn't fix it that night. I changed one small thing and it was mine to change. The next evening the old fury came up my throat on schedule, and instead of opening my mouth I made myself go back down the stairs first. One flight. One breath. One night I climbed up with nothing to take and nothing to say.
I started going up to be near him instead of at him. I knocked and I sat on his floor and I asked him to show me the game — not to catch him out, just to watch. He didn't trust it for a week. Then one evening he talked me through a whole match, lit up, telling me who the enemies were and what the numbers on the side meant, and I understood I'd been standing outside his world for a year banging on the glass when the door had a handle the whole time.
It doubled back plenty. I still slammed doors. I still said the wrong thing and had to come up the next morning and say sorry to a fourteen-year-old, which is its own particular humbling. But the shouting thinned out. We made room in the house — for him, and for the screen too, because the screen was never the thing I was fighting. The gap was.
One small doable thing a day, that's all it ever was. Steady myself before I climbed the stairs. Say less. Go up empty-handed. Some nights the only win in the whole day was that I hadn't counted his hours out loud at him, and I wrote those nights down so a bad one couldn't tell me I'd learned nothing.
