A List of Cages

by Robin Roe

  Sometimes, if I try hard enough, I can picture the Jared I met way back in kindergarten. I remember when Mom picked me up that first day, I told her there was a very mean boy in my class. Jared pinched kids when the teacher wasn’t looking. He scribbled on everyone’s watercolors with black crayon. He knocked down their towers in the block center.

  Mom listened, nodding, then she said there was no such thing as a mean child, only an unhappy one.

  “But you don’t know,” I told her. “You didn’t see.”

  “I don’t have to see. I know.” She wouldn’t tell me how she knew, but she swore that Jared deserved nothing but my sympathy.

  The next day, when he kicked down my tower, I put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay,” I said. “I know you’re just unhappy.” Then he punched me in the eye.

  After school I told Mom she was wrong. Jared was evil—he’d hit me. I waited for her to be angry, to tell me she would call his mother. Instead she said no one is evil, only unhappy, and unhappiness festers inside like a sore.

  Later, as I watched Jared on the playground, playing alone or hiding under the wooden beams of the jungle gym like a real-life kindergarten troll, I’d worry, imagining festering sores under his skin where no one could see.

  But I could see. I can still see, and I can feel all the sympathy Mom told me I should feel.

  But that never made me any less afraid of him.

  As soon as I get home, I open my trunk, and today I take out the green spiral notebook. I found it on my mother’s desk in our old house, and I grabbed it before everything we ever owned was catalogued, boxed, and stored away. Sometimes I can picture it: paintbrushes, toothbrushes, shirts, quilts, books, and musical instruments, all in boxes in the dark.

  For all I know, in one of those boxes there are a hundred more spirals like this one. But this is what I have, a single notebook, sheets filled front to back until the words stop right in the middle.

  I flip at random, landing on a familiar page. The first time I read it, I thought it was a list of her favorite movies. I didn’t recognize most of them, but I knew a couple were ones she really liked. But if they were her favorites, then where were all the Shirley Temple movies? She loved those. And why were war movies on the list? She hated war movies.

  So if it’s not a list of favorites, and it’s not a list of least favorites, then what is it? If she wrote them down, they must be important. Maybe something happened on the day she saw each of them. Or maybe…I don’t know, but they have to mean something.

  For the millionth time I wish she’d titled her lists, because the entire notebook is like this. A list of places. A list of colors. A list of songs. But no titles. No context. No way to understand what they mean.

  I OPEN CHARLIE’S front door, and it’s like stepping inside a bad Western. The life-size Sylvester the Cat doll he won at the fair last spring has been hanged and disemboweled. White fluffy guts explode from its stomach as it swings from the chandelier by its jump-rope noose.

  One of Charlie’s brothers flies by wearing nothing but a Superman cape. Three more kids, dressed in clothes that barely fit, are hot on his trail. One is carrying a jar of jelly, and the others are waving cap guns. I dive in between them.

  Soon I’m surrounded by identical blond children. Two leap up, digging footholds into my ribs like I’m one of those climbing walls. The rest giggle and hug my legs, looking up at me with faces so dirty it’s like they’ve been cleaning chimneys. This house is basically a Charles Dickens orphanage, except the kids are happy and the villain here is completely outnumbered.

  Speaking of Charlie, he’s just begun his menacing march down the stairs. The kids in my arms cling to me and bury their faces in my shoulders. The ones on the ground try to flee but don’t make it before Charlie grabs the jelly from Tomás and orders Olivier to put on some pants.

  “Gotta go,” I tell the kids in my arms. They kiss my cheeks before hopping to the ground and following the other horde of children up the stairs. I don’t know how they’re growing up to be so sweet when they live under a constant reign of terror.

  Charlie grabs his jacket from the dining room table, then glares at it in astonished fury. Something purple and sticky is dripping from the sleeve. I can’t help but laugh.

  “Tomás!” he bellows, and even I’m scared. Several more little blond heads scatter in all directions with frightened squeals. He takes an ominous step, and I grab his arm.

  “We’re gonna be late.” There’s actually no set timetable for playing laser tag and video games, but I’m trying to avoid bloodshed.

  “I just bought this jacket.” Charlie takes his possessions very seriously. Money’s always tight—a side effect of having so many kids—so he works for a landscaping company, mowing and raking and hauling heavy things.

  “I’m sure it’ll wash out.”

  He King-Kong-roars. “I can’t wait till I graduate!”

  One pale head peeks over the banister. “Us too!” A few scattered giggles are heard from the shadows. Charlie hurls his jacket on the table and stomps toward the stairs. More frightened squeals.

  “Charlie. Let’s go.”

  “I’m gonna freeze,” he says, which is ridiculous, since it’s gotta be sixty degrees outside.

  “Poor Charlie. You want to wear my jacket?” I make a show of taking it off, and he shoves me so hard I stumble, then trip, but luckily land in a pile of Sylvester guts. “Seriously, man, one of these days you’re gonna really hurt me.”

  He smiles—the thought of that boosts his mood just a little. Anything I can do to help.

  “Can you make this thing go any faster?” This time Charlie’s complaining is purely perfunctory.

  “Say whatever you want, but you know my car is awesome.”

  “It’s a station wagon.”

  Technically, it’s a 1968 Saab delivery van—one my grandfather gave my mom when she was a teenager. She’s kept it all this time, strangely sentimental of her considering they haven’t spoken in over ten years.

  When my grandfather bought the Saab, it was olive, but decades have morphed it to an oxidized green. Outside it looks like an old-fashioned ambulance. Open the door, and you fast-forward a couple millennia. Most of the interior had to be replaced, so the dashboard and controls look like what 1950s television writers thought spaceships would look like one day. There’s a lot of curvy silver and enormous red buttons, but the weirdest part’s the centrally located heating vent that looks exactly like a robot’s face.

  Charlie turns on the heat—probably to make a point about his lack of jacket—and the round robot mouth glows red.

  “Just be grateful I have a car,” I say, “or I’d be carrying you on the front of my bike.”

  “My parents could afford to buy me a car if they didn’t have nine million kids.” I walked right into that one. “Anyway, pretty soon I’ll be able to buy my own car.”

  “That’s great, man.”

  “So,” he says, “I hear you groped Emerald during English today.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Everyone.”

  “It wasn’t groping. It was hugging. I needed the oxytocin.” In third period our teacher went off on some tangent about the healing properties of oxytocin—the chemical produced when people touch. When I tried it on Emerald later, she consented like a princess allowing a peasant to kiss her hand, then attempted to break contact after about four seconds. I had to remind her that it takes twenty seconds for the chemical to activate, which was weird since she has the second-highest GPA in our class and should’ve remembered that.

  Charlie rolls his eyes. “Right.”

  “It’s true. Ms. Webb said that people who don’t get enough physical contact can actually die.”

  “I guess I don’t have to worry about that. Me and Allison are making plenty of oxy-whatever.”

  “Good to hear.”

  “So you just happened to pick Emerald for this? At random?”

  I know what
he’s getting at. Emerald and I went out for a month—in the sixth grade. But he’s convinced there must still be burning suppressed feelings.

  “You know she has a boyfriend,” I remind him. Not just any boyfriend either, but a guy so badass he doesn’t even sound like a real person. Brett’s a college sophomore, on the rowing team, who’s a pilot in his spare time. Like he flies actual planes.

  “I know,” Charlie agrees. “But if she didn’t—”

  “But she does.”

  Charlie heaves a defeated sigh. “Yeah, I guess. And if that guy’s Emerald’s type, there’s no way you’d—”

  “Let’s talk about how much I’m gonna kick your ass tonight at laser tag.”

  “No! You said we’d be on the same team this time.” He looks so upset, like a six-foot-five six-year-old, that I burst out laughing. Then consider pulling over to hug him.

  “All right. All right.” I’m still laughing. “No splitting up this time.”

  “Same side?”

  “Same side.”

  AT TEN O’CLOCK I close the curtains on a flat wax-paper moon and get into bed. I’m tired, but my body won’t relax. The house is empty. It looks like Russell won’t be coming home tonight, and I’m always more afraid on nights when I’m alone.

  Maybe it would be different if the house weren’t so quiet. I wish I still had the little portable DVD player Mom and Dad bought me for long road trips. For years I could fall asleep listening to sitcoms or my favorite movie, Swiss Family Robinson. But one day the DVD player stopped working and nights became too quiet.

  I can hear the rattling thud of the water heater. Below that, the hum of the refrigerator.

  Above, the scrape of tree branches along the roof. None of these sounds is unfamiliar, but I still feel the vague dread that I can’t stop or sort out.

  I turn on my flashlight and roll over to gaze at my sand-colored walls. For just a second I see my old walls in my old room. Brilliant ocean blue. I close my eyes, and suddenly I’m teleporting—I’m there. The yellow light beside me is not from my flashlight, but from my lamp, the one with the pedestal shaped liked a crescent moon. Beneath my window is the little bookcase with peeling red paint and shelves stuffed with movies and Elian Mariner books. And the blue of my walls is broken by bursts of color from all the posters I’ve hung.

  The first time Russell ever punished me was for hanging a picture in this room. I should have checked with him first, I know that now, but I didn’t think to do it at the time. In my old room I could hang pictures whenever I wanted. Russell’s punishment wasn’t all that severe, but that had never happened to me before, and it shocked me. After it was over, he asked if I would nail holes into a stranger’s wall.

  Crying, I shook my head.

  Then why would I think I could do it here? he asked. These weren’t my walls, just like this furniture wasn’t my furniture. “Is this how you behaved with your foster family? Is that why they finally put you out?”

  The day I moved in, he’d told me I’d caused so many problems and was so spoiled that my foster mother and brother were done with me. The way he’d said spoiled wasn’t the way you’d talk about an overindulged child, but how you’d describe meat left out in the sun. Spoiled meant ruined. He’d warned me that if I pulled that in his house, he’d be done with me too.

  “Yes,” I answered, because I had hung pictures in my foster brother’s room.

  Russell nodded as if he wasn’t surprised. Then he told me something he’s told me a thousand times since: the problem with the world was that fathers weren’t raising their sons anymore, so boys never truly became men. If these fatherless boys ever had sons of their own, inevitably they would fail. Boys could not bring up other boys.

  Some words stay in your head long after they’re spoken. Those words meant he thought little of my father, and that was because he thought so little of me.

  Now my brain begins to fill with static until I can’t see my old blue walls anymore.

  The dread resurges, more intense now. I roll over, refocusing my attention on the ceiling, and tell myself, Think good thoughts.

  Spider-Man pops into my head, but I quickly push him out. Those movies always scared me.

  Think good thoughts.

  If I can just think good thoughts, I can fall asleep. Again I try, and now I can see it. Elian Mariner. Only he is me, and I’m standing on the deck of a ship in his crayon-colored world, and my ship can go anywhere.

  I get home around ten and let myself in through the back door. The yellow kitchen’s semiclean by normal people standards, which means it’s immaculate by ours. Dishes done, garbage out, herbs in the windowsill all lined up. It also smells freakin amazing—freshly baked almond bread on the counter.

  I don’t bother getting a plate, just grab at it with my bare hands like a starving animal. It still shocks me that my mom knows how to make bread now. Till about five years ago, we ate practically nothing but fast food.

  I push through the swinging yellow doors into the living room. Mom’s still awake and sitting in the center of our yellow couch.

  “She’s a monster!” This is Mom’s version of a greeting. I chuckle when I glance at the TV. The Bachelor.

  “What’d she do this time?” I ask, dropping down beside her.

  It turns out to be pretty much the exact same horrible thing she did last time—saying evil things to the other women but pretending to be a decent human being in front of the guy. I suffer through the Rose Ceremony, which would be a lot more entertaining if I were allowed to laugh, but I’m not.

  When it’s finally over, Mom says gravely, “I swear to you, Adam, if he doesn’t send her home next week, I’m never watching this show again.” We both know this is an empty threat.

  She turns off the television, then pulls Connect Four from under the coffee table. While we play, she asks who I was hanging out with.

  “Charlie.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Same.”

  She makes a mild noise of disapproval. She’s known Charlie since he was six, so she can’t outright dislike him—in her mind he’ll always be a kid—but he’s not her favorite person either. She thinks he’s way too grumpy. I’ve tried to explain to her that’s what makes him so entertaining.

  “Emerald wasn’t there?” Mom’s tone is so casual that it doesn’t sound casual at all.

  “Nope.” I drop a checker into the board with a grin. “Connect four.”

  “How did I miss that?”

  “I don’t know.” I slide the tray, spilling the checkers onto the table.

  After I win again, Mom suggests she may have early-onset Alzheimer’s.

  “You do not have Alzheimer’s,” I say. “You’re only thirty-seven!”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  Which is my cue to tell her, “But you look way younger.” Of course, this is partly because she’s extremely short—like only up to my shoulder. But there’s no need to mention that out loud.

  “Well, something’s going on. I never used to lose!”

  “Maybe I’m just getting better. You ever think of that? You could beat me when I was nine.”

  “All right, Punky Brewster,” she says, which means she thinks I’m being a punk. It doesn’t make sense. I found that ’80s sitcom on YouTube, and despite the character’s name, she was a nice little girl.

  Same thing with the Rudy Ruettiger—what Mom calls me when she thinks I’m being rude. I’ve seen the movie about the plucky Catholic kid who finally got to play for Notre Dame. I’ve told her it would make more sense to call me Rudy the next time I persevere and overcome all obstacles, but she doesn’t care about making sense.

  “Besides,” I say, “if you had dementia, how could you know where everything in this house is at, like, a photographic memory level?”

  “That’s a mom thing.” She smiles. “We always know where our kids’ missing shoes and schoolbooks are.”

  “Your memory’s fine. I just happen to be better at Con
nect Four.”

  Now she frowns, but she’s pretending to be more irritated than she is.

  “Harvey and Marissa went at it again today,” she tells me during our third game. At times like these I can tell she misses being a social worker. Her happiest days are when her office coworkers fight and she can sort it out. “I really think Harvey just needs some counseling.”

  Which makes me think of him.

  “I saw Julian today.”

  Mom’s face loses all animation, and her lips turn up in a creepy plastic smile, the way it does whenever she’s upset but trying to pretend she isn’t. “How did he look?”

  “About the same.” Still small for his age, still too much black hair falling into huge round eyes. Only he seemed different in ways that would just worry her—too quiet, and flinching away like a skittish kitten when I got too close. “I tried to say hi, but he took off.” I don’t add that he literally took off, as in turned and ran.

  She places another checker in the board, but she obviously isn’t paying attention anymore. “I still think about him every day,” she says.

  I drop another checker, but I’m not paying attention anymore either. “I know.”

  MISS WEST IS unhappy. I know this because she’s mean the way Jared is mean, like the grown-up version of kicking over your tower. She teaches Physical Science, the class I have first period. It’s a nerve-wracking way to start the day, but sometimes I think it’s for the best. At least I’m getting it over with.

  I find my seat in the back, and as soon as the bell rings, Miss West confiscates one girl’s phone and screams at a boy for whispering. A moment later Dawn, the girl with cerebral palsy, is wheeled into the room. Miss West watches while the aide helps Dawn transfer from her wheelchair into a desk, a process that always has the girl wincing and sweating.

  “Dawn,” Miss West says once the aide is gone, “wouldn’t it be easier to just stay in your chair?”

  Dawn looks caught off guard, her eyes big and distorted behind her glasses. “I like sitting in a desk,” she finally answers. Her voice is a little strange, like all the letters don’t come out quite right, and every time she speaks it makes Miss West cringe.