A List of Cages

by Robin Roe

  “For…” He looks down at the round white stickers pasted to his chest, then fiddles with the tubes at his nose. I’m about to tell him to stop when his arm thuds to his side like it’s too heavy to lift. “For the summer.”

  “For the summer? No…we still have a couple weeks left.”

  He looks so confused and alarmed that I expect the heart rate monitors to start beeping wildly like they do in movies. “It’s next year?”

  I don’t understand what he means. It’s nonsense, like leaving the trunk open for the stars. “Next year?”

  “I missed next year. I missed summer.”

  “No. It’s still this year. We haven’t had summer break yet.”

  He sinks a little and closes his eyes. “That’s good. I always miss it.” Then his eyes spring back open, looking wild and panicked again, while mine flit to the monitors. “But I must have. I was there for so long. I counted. But I couldn’t count anymore. I was in a shell, then the shell disappeared and I didn’t know where I was. I knew you’d be gone. Everyone would be gone.”

  “Inside a…? You were in a trunk, Julian.”

  “A shell. I was all alone in a shell.”

  My fear and worry are ramping up and I think about getting a nurse, but I can’t leave him. I don’t want to upset him by getting upset myself, so I try to keep my voice calm. “It was a trunk.”

  He shakes his head, but it looks like he’s working in slow motion. “You…sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. When I found you, it was nineteen days after you checked out of school.”

  His eyes close. His eyelids look pink and translucent. “Adam?” I lean in closer to show I’m still here, still listening. “It didn’t…feel like nineteen days. It was like a thousand years…longer than my whole life before it. Why?”

  I have to hold my face rigid, because it’s happening again. The burning throat and the urge to cry. I went years without crying, but now it’s like I can’t stop. In spite of my decision to be calm and soothing, I have to blink and brush away tears, but then more stupid tears just refill my eyes like a faucet I can’t turn off. I drag in a breath and try to answer his question.

  “It must’ve felt like forever.”

  “But why?”

  “Because it was so awful.”

  “But why can’t good things feel like forever? It was all so fast…before they left. I want to spin it back…slow it down. Why is time like that? Why does it slow down in the places you don’t want it to, but it speeds away when you’re happy?”

  I wipe my face again. “I don’t know.”

  He gazes toward the window even though the curtains are drawn and there’s nothing to see. Then his head drops in the jerky movements of a robot powering down.

  THE NEXT TIME Julian wakes up, my mom and Delores are both there. Delores is good with him, all things considered, trying to get him to eat something without being pushy about it. But he stays on edge till they stop talking to him altogether, then he aims his attention at the blank television screen.

  “You want to watch something?” I ask, grabbing the remote control/nurse call attached to his bed. He doesn’t say no, so I click it on and flip through the channels. He nods when I land on the Disney Channel. Some sitcom I haven’t seen in years about a teenage girl with magic powers.

  He’s watching with absorbed concentration when Officer Clark and his friends fill the doorway. “We’re here to speak with Julian Harlow.”

  Delores stands, looking tall and formidable in her bright pink power suit. She presses a business card into Clark’s palm and tells him firmly that she won’t be going anywhere. He looks impressed.

  “All right,” he says. “Everyone but the guardian, out.”

  Julian shrinks into his bed with wild-wide eyes.

  Delores grows six inches taller. “He’ll be more comfortable if they are allowed to stay,” she tells him.

  She and Clark argue for a while, then he points a finger at me. “You can stay as long as you’re quiet and out of my way. Against that wall.” Clark loves making me stand against walls. Mom looks irritated on my behalf but doesn’t say anything.

  “Son,” Clark says to Julian, “I need you to tell us exactly what happened.”

  Julian looks small in his hospital gown, surrounded by cops who don’t even bother to sit. I can see the impatience on Clark’s face when, instead of answering, Julian starts to pick at the tape on one of his broken fingers.

  “We have to know, so I’d appreciate it if you’d cooperate.”

  Julian gives a shaky nod, and for the first time he explains in quiet stutters about being locked inside the trunk. After a while I can’t look at him, so I stare at the wall and focus on a smiling sheep.

  When he stops talking, I feel sick.

  “Do you know where your uncle is now?” Clark’s tone is so unaffected, so compassionless, it pisses me off.

  “Maybe at work? He works a lot.”

  “Your uncle hasn’t worked in over a year,” Clark snaps, as if he thinks Julian’s lying.

  I look away from the happy sheep to see Julian’s eyes widen in confusion. “But he goes to work. He always—”

  “If you know something,” Clark says, “you need to tell me.”

  “But I don’t know.”

  “Could you guys maybe give him a minute?” I say.

  “Son…” Clark says son in the most condescending and grating way imaginable. “I’m gonna need you to wait outside.”

  Julian looks even more panicked now.

  “He doesn’t want me to go.” I gesture to the obviously terrified kid.

  “Are you refusing to leave this room?” The officer’s deliberate tone sounds like a dare.

  Delores stands as if she’s going to intervene, but before she can, my mom steps in front of me.

  Clark drops a hand to his holster. “Ma’am, I’m gonna need you to take two steps back.” This has suddenly become a deadly serious game of Mother, May I.

  “Yeah, because she’s such a threat,” I say. Furious, I cross my arms over my chest, and I almost want some sort of video to memorialize this moment when I’m completely not me anymore.

  “If you don’t stop talking”—Clark steps right into my face—“I’ll arrest you.”

  “You can’t do that,” I sputter. “You can’t arrest someone for talking.”

  He pulls his cuffs out with one hand and shakes them in the air. “I’ll arrest you for interfering with a criminal investigation.”

  Mom disobeys the stay-two-steps-back order and grabs my arm. “Adam, just leave.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I demand of Clark. “Look at him!”

  Mom grabs my shirt. “Adam, go.” And that pisses me off too. Where’s the person who’d take on anyone? Julian’s pale and shivering in his bed, and Clark actually smiles at me. I open my mouth, but Delores quickly shakes her head.

  “I’ll be right outside, Julian,” I say. Seething, I go.

  WHEN I WAKE up, I find Adam asleep in the chair next to me, his mouth hanging open and a physics book across his lap. A tall nurse cheerfully greets me as she comes in, and she startles him awake. He rubs his face, somehow managing to knock his book, notebook, and pencil to the floor.

  “I hear you’re ready to take a shower,” the nurse tells me with a proud smile, holding a pink plastic tub of supplies: a fresh gown, tiny shampoo, and body wash.

  “Yes.” I need to shower. I smell bad, like the trunk.

  While the nurse unhooks me from the IV, she and Adam continue a conversation about her son that they must have started while I was asleep. She leaves the needle in my hand, wrapping it in plastic and gives me a warning not to get it wet. Then she reaches down and unties the first string on my gown.

  “What are you doing?” I shrink back. She looks shocked, as if she has no idea what the problem is. “I can do it.”

  I’m blushing, but it’s only one of a hundred emb
arrassing things that have happened while I’ve been here. They ask personal questions, touch you in personal places, and they don’t care who is in the room to see it.

  “I can help him,” Adam offers.

  “Don’t let him fall.”

  “I won’t.”

  For the first couple of days I had a catheter. Then I used a plastic bucket before graduating to walking to the toilet, but even that was closely monitored.

  As soon as the nurse leaves, I shift my legs over the side of the bed. “I can walk,” I tell Adam.

  “I know.” But he still stands right beside me until I enter the bathroom and shut the door. I’m a little shaky and I have to hold on to the silver bar attached to the wall while I pull at my hospital gown. It reminds me of my old karate top, the same folds and hidden strings to tie it all together. Karate was another thing I gave up when it became too hard. Now everything seems too hard. Untying strings. Breathing. Thinking.

  The lightbulb flickers over my head with a staticky buzz. It sounds like it’s about to blow out. My breathing starts to get heavy, but I’m not sure if it’s from exertion or fear. I want to leave this tiny room, but I still need to shower. You stink, I can hear Russell say.

  No one knows where Russell is. The police believe he’s hiding, but I can’t imagine Russell hiding from anyone. Wherever he is, he must be angry. I left the trunk.

  I pull back the shower curtain. There’s no ledge to step over or any sort of barrier, and I wonder what keeps the room from flooding. I step inside and stand near the bench attached to the wall. When I close the curtain, the light flickers again, and suddenly the space shrinks to nothing.

  My pulse in my ears. My sweat in my nose. I can’t breathe.

  I tear at the curtain.

  I fumble at the doorknob. Locked.

  I start scratching, crying out in pain when I bump my broken fingers. I yank the door open, and fall out.

  “What is it?” Adam asks, rushing to my side. “Are you okay?” My knees buckle, eyes looking up for something, for stars. He grabs my arm, steadying me. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He nods as if this is an explanation. Still holding on to me, he gives me a towel. “You want to get back in bed? You don’t have to do this now.”

  “I have to get clean.”

  “Would it help to leave the door open?”

  “I don’t know.”

  This time Adam walks inside with me and leans against the wall. “Just shower. I’ll wait here.”

  I step back into the stall. I close the curtain. “Adam?”

  “Still here.”

  I turn on the water. It’s not ice-rain cold, but it doesn’t get hot either. I wash quickly, starting to feel sick and dizzy. I hold on to the metal bar as my knees shake. I remember riding my bike. I was so fast. I could ride forever. Will I ever be strong again?

  I wrap the thin towel around my waist before getting out. Adam gives me a clean hospital gown, but I want to put on real clothes. I lean on him all the way to the bed, then he hands me underwear and pajama pants.

  He presses the call button to tell the nurse I’m out of the shower so she can reattach my IV and blood pressure and pulse monitors. Tears sting my eyes. I didn’t want him to call her. I just want a few more minutes of being unplugged like a real person who can go anywhere. I want my body to be mine again.

  I’VE LOST TRACK of how long I’ve been in this room. I left for a little while….Was that only yesterday? Julian had nodded off, so I jogged down the hall to grab a pudding from the mini fridge in the visitors’ kitchenette. I was on my way back when I heard him crying because he’d woken up alone. I haven’t left the room since.

  The cops still don’t know where Russell is, which gives me that unsettled, deer-in-the-woods foreboding.

  Julian isn’t eating, in spite of the nurse scolding him last night like a pushy grandmother. Under her stern glare, he shrank back into his bed and mumbled, “My stomach hurts.”

  “You have to eat,” she insisted. “We’ve got to get you back up to fighting weight.”

  He relented and drank another protein shake, but he wouldn’t touch solid food.

  It’s past midnight now, and he’s asleep, but the TV’s on. I tried muting it sometime—yesterday?—but he woke up panicked, said it was too quiet. So it stays on all the time, tuned to Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel or some other network meant for kids.

  I’m lying on the fold-out bed by the window, scanning all my texts on the new phone Mom brought me a few hours ago. She’s convinced that Julian and I could’ve both died the other night and it would’ve been her fault since she didn’t replace the phone immediately.

  There’re a million messages—mostly from Emerald and Charlie—but there are also a bunch from people who never text me. I don’t know if they’re genuinely concerned or just curious. Deciding not to respond to any of them, I turn off the phone. I pull the thin blanket up, close my eyes, and try to sleep under the extreme bright colors, high-pitched kid voices, and studio-audience laughter.

  I wake up inside the refrigerator box. It looks exactly like I remember, only smaller—or maybe I’m bigger. Darren’s glossy photos of insects cover every surface. Their prehistoric-looking bodies are grotesque, but they’re sad too. Hard evidence of all the time he spends alone in here.

  A picture of an enormous copper-backed beetle catches my attention. It has long antennas, black leathery wings, shiny black legs with a dozen joints in each one. I’m looking right at it when a single antenna twitches.

  I jump back, hitting my head against the wall behind me, but the cardboard doesn’t give. It’s cold and immobile like polished steel. Breathing hard, I squint at the photo. It’s just a picture—not real. But as I’m watching, both antennas straighten as if it can sense me. All at once a thousand black shiny eyes blink, and the box fills with noise.

  Buzzing, chirping, grinding.

  There are millions of them. Flying through the air. Crawling down the walls. They fill the box. They cover my skin.

  Adam.

  I kick and punch the walls, but they’re made of metal. I scream, but no one hears me.

  Adam.

  I can’t get out.

  “Adam!”

  I’m half-sitting, half-lying on the fold-out bed in the hospital room. No bugs, no noise except the chirping sounds of Julian’s machines. I sit up, still disoriented and afraid. Julian’s watching me, the television projecting light across his face.

  “You were having a nightmare,” he says. “Are you okay?”

  I’m not. I’m still scared, and the room’s too small. “Yeah. Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  “What were you dreaming about?”

  I kick the blanket off, feeling hot even though it’s always freezing in here, and I stand up. “Prom. I had three dates, but they didn’t know about each other.”

  Julian laughs softly, recognizing the plot of about five different Nick at Nite episodes we’ve seen this week.

  “They found out about each other, of course, and then they all teamed up to plan some seriously scary revenge scenarios.”

  He laughs again, looking like a little kid under his mountain of blankets.

  I glance at the clock. “It’s late. You should go back to sleep.”

  He nods agreeably, but waits till I’m on the fold-out bed and I’ve pulled the blanket up to my chin before he closes his eyes.

  JULIAN’S WATCHING SOME god-awful show about two twin brothers who run a hotel, and I’m making a halfhearted attempt to finish my Calculus homework, when Charlie peeks his head in the room.

  “Can I come in?” he asks.

  “Hey, man,” I say. I look over at Julian, who nods. “Yeah, come in.”

  Charlie glances around at the flowers and balloons, looking huge and out of place in this room with all its happy animals. “I didn’t bring anything.”

  “That’s okay,” I tell him.

  He stands there looking tota
lly awkward till I kick a chair in his direction. The three of us watch TV without talking for a few minutes, then a nurse pops in and announces it’s time for another test. She transfers Julian to a wheelchair and rolls him away.

  Still looking at the TV, Charlie mumbles, “He’s pretty beat up.”

  “You should’ve seen him last week.”

  “Yeah.” He looks guilty. “I wanted to. I just didn’t know if…I wasn’t sure if—”

  “It’s fine, Charlie.”

  Another long stretch of nothing but those annoying, screeching twins till he says, with the tone of someone confessing a mortal sin, “I used to be jealous of him.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean really jealous.” Guilty eyes study his hands. “I don’t know why, but it was like I-wanted-to-punch-him-in-the-face kind of jealous.”

  “But you didn’t. You’d never actually hurt anyone.” He’s still looking down when the ice-cream truck lullaby plays overhead. “Another baby.”

  “What?”

  “The song. It means a baby’s been born.”

  “That…” He smiles weakly. “…would be my brother.”

  A couple hours later, Mom stays with Julian while I leave the hospital room for the first time in days. Stretching my legs feels so amazing that I practically jog out of the colorful pediatrics ward to the colder white of the rest of the hospital.

  I find Charlie in a half-lit hallway holding a tiny creature wrapped in yellow. His hands are bigger than the entire length of the baby. He smiles at me—not a smirk, but a real smile. No one else is around, so I guess his dad went home with his nine million other kids.

  “Is that Shiv?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “I talked my mom out of it.”

  “What’d you go with?”

  “Elian.”

  “Elian?”

  “Yeah, like those books. I used to love them when we were kids.”

  “Me too.”

  Charlie looks down into the tiny face. “He’s pretty cute, huh?”

  He is. I mean, he looks like a hairless Shar-Pei puppy, but he’s a brand-new human with brand-new eyes, and…Jesus, it’s happening again. The burn in my throat, the pressure in my chest.