A List of Cages

by Robin Roe

  It’s not.

  IT’S OFFICIAL—MY MOM’S been granted temporary custody of Julian. Delores comes into the room to say her good-byes, and then I follow her out into the hall. She gives me a strong hug. “I’m going to miss you, Adam, you know that?”

  “I’ll miss you too.”

  “I know as soon as you all get out of here, you won’t want to think back on any of this, but if you ever do, you come see me.”

  “I will.” I hug her again. “Delores, before you go—has there been any word on Russell?”

  “No.” She sighs. “The police did their interviews. They know he was fired last year after some incident with a woman at work, but no one there seems to know anything about him.”

  “It’s so weird that he wasn’t working. Julian said he was always gone on business.”

  “The last job he had that required any sort of travel was four years ago. He was fired from that one too.”

  “How was he paying for everything?”

  “Julian was paying.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Julian’s parents both had life insurance policies that went to him. The money was supposed to be used to take care of him.”

  I think of Julian’s ragged clothes and shoes and no cell phone, then Russell’s suits and flashy car. “Bastard.”

  “Agreed,” she says seriously. “Listen, Adam. It’s best you hear this now. Russell’s got a warrant out on him, but so far it’s for a child abuse charge and nothing more. Do you get what I’m saying?”

  “B-but,” I sputter, “how is that possible? He tried to kill him.” Delores nods slowly. “You think Russell’s going to get away with it, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know. You never can tell. Running off like that makes him look a lot guiltier, but the thing is, no one’s really chasing him. Fortunately for Julian, Russell doesn’t seem to know that.”

  WHAT KEEPS YOU trapped?

  Group starts out like it always does, the other kids resisting and rolling their eyes as if it’s an idiotic question.

  I’m out of the wheelchair and sitting in an actual chair in the circle, wearing the brand-new sneakers Adam brought me today. They’re bright red, and I can imagine myself running in them.

  No one speaks, but there’s a nervous strain in the air as if a live wire is snapping through the room. Kids are looking at the floor, at the ceiling, out the windows, at their hands. I squeeze my eyes shut, and I can feel it—pain—pouring out of everyone in the circle like smoke.

  The counselor asks again: What keeps you trapped? When you’re done with this program and you go back to your lives, what can stop you? What keeps you from living the life you want? What keeps you from being free?

  And I see it all at once—all the things that have kept me trapped. Not just Russell, but me—my fears.

  Afraid of talking.

  Afraid of trying.

  Afraid of wanting.

  Afraid of dreaming.

  Thinking about the people I’ve lost—and afraid of losing more.

  The counselor pushes until a few kids mutter answers. They pretend not to care, but they do, and like me they already know the answer to her questions. Soon their responses are rapid-fire. Drugs pills parents teachers him her fear friends me me me.

  The things I know stay in my head as I stand on my own two feet at the end of the day, and I walk back to my room with my journal to write my list of cages.

  “I NEED TO go back,” Julian says. “Back to Russell’s house.”

  We’ve been home from the hospital for less than an hour. His bruises have faded, but you can still make them out like smudges around his eye and mouth. His fingers are still bandaged and broken, and there are scars on his back that’ll probably never disappear.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “There are some things I need.”

  “Did you look through everything?” Delores and the police went to the house a couple of days ago to box up the contents of his room.

  “Not everything is there.”

  “If you need clothes, we can get clothes.”

  “It’s not that. It’s…everything that was in the trunk.” Neither of us says anything for a minute, like we both need to recover from hearing that word.

  As much as I don’t like that douche bag Clark, I say, “Okay, but we need to call the police, get an escort or something.” I’m not halfway through the sentence before he starts shaking his head.

  “I can go by myself.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  He takes a seat on the sofa, looking exhausted. I feel bad for him, because he’s finally using his freakin words, but it seems like every time he does, the answer’s no.

  “Fine,” I say. “No police, but we bring people with us.” I interrupt his protest before he can start. “That’s the only way. They can wait outside, okay? It’ll just be safer.”

  “In case Russell comes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you said it doesn’t matter what he wants. That I’m not living with him either way.”

  “I know.”

  “So why?”

  Because he tried to kill you! I want to shout. But sometimes it’s like talking to a five-year-old, and there are certain things you can’t tell a five-year-old.

  “Can you just trust me on this?”

  “I do trust you.”

  Julian stands on the front porch with his key, but he’s making no move to actually insert it into the lock. Sometimes with Julian you have to push, but sometimes you have to wait.

  I glance over my shoulder at Charlie, Jesse, and Matt. We’ve just finished our last day of high school—ever—and they should be out celebrating, so it says something that they’re all here, leaning against my van like a row of bodyguards.

  Julian takes a shaky breath, unlocks the door, and we walk inside. I expected signs of an investigation, drawers yanked open, tables overturned, but the house is just as insanely neat as I remember it. He tiptoes carefully down the hall like he’s watching for land mines, then stops outside his bedroom door.

  “Nothing’s in there,” I say, stepping in front of him. “It’s already been cleaned out.” I don’t know if the trunk is still in the room or not, but I don’t see what good it would do to look at that.

  Julian nods, then turns around. On the opposite end of the house, he opens a door to the neatest garage I’ve ever seen. Everything’s boxed in plastic containers and marked with typed labels. We search through the orderly rows but come up with nothing that looks like it belongs to Julian.

  Julian starts shivering and breathing hard.

  “You need to sit down?”

  He shakes his head.

  We go back inside, and again Julian pauses anxiously outside a door. This time when he opens it, it’s obviously Russell’s room. There’s an antique four-poster bed in the center, so enormous I’m not sure how it fit through the door, and a matching dresser and chest of drawers.

  There’s something strange about the room I can’t quite put my finger on. Then it hits me. It’s just furniture. Like he moved in yesterday. Nice enough, but there’s no indication that someone actually lives here. I pretend I’m not creeped out, but I am. No one knows where Russell is. What if…what if he’s hiding inside the house?

  “Jesus!” I jump at the sound of my cell. “It’s okay,” I tell a startled Julian. “Just Charlie.” Then I say into my phone, “We’re fine. Just a lot to look through.”

  “Sure you don’t want us to come in?” Charlie asks.

  “No, we’re cool.”

  I end the call, then start yanking open drawers. Inside the dresser are neatly folded clothes. Julian hesitantly opens the closet while I peek under the bed. It’s totally empty and dust-free, like maybe Russell actually crawls under here to clean.

  I stand up and find Julian getting bolder and more panicky, digging through the closet. “It’s not here!”

  “Let’s keep looking. We’ve got a whole other floor
.”

  The guest room upstairs looks a lot like Russell’s bedroom—nothing but furniture. I open the drawers, which are totally empty, and it makes me think of this Twilight Zone episode where a married couple gets stuck in a strange, empty town and it turns out everything—the trees, the houses, the animals—are just props in an alien child’s train set.

  When I hop up, I take one look at a too-pale Julian and tell him to sit down. He shakes his head. “Seriously,” I say. “Do it before you pass out.”

  He sits on the bed while I pretend to look around, even though it’s obvious there’s nothing here. “I think he threw it away,” Julian says bleakly.

  I’m starting to believe the same thing. “Where else can we look?”

  “His office.”

  “Think you can get up?”

  “I never said I needed to sit down.”

  I jump when my phone rings again. I open it and snap, “Jesus, Charlie. We’re fine.”

  “Making sure,” he says.

  Julian gets up, still too pale, but we head down the hall to Russell’s office. I open the door, Julian right behind me, and stop short. “Holy shit.”

  I CATCH JULIAN’S expression—just as shocked as mine—then look back to the room. It’s the office of a diagnosed hoarder, crammed so full it’s hard to even walk inside.

  I take a giant step over a crooked stack of boxes and look around. There are rows of glass-doored cabinets like the one downstairs, but instead of the contents artfully arranged like a store window, if you opened one, everything would probably fall out on top of you like in a cartoon. What’s really weird is that none of the cabinets are against the wall. Instead they’re staggered haphazardly around the room.

  I dodge a teetering stack of books to get a closer look. One of the cabinets is full of ancient calculators—or maybe they’re cash registers. Another’s full of stick-figure sculptures twisted into weird metal poses. The walls are covered with more stuff—masks, coins, a huge white canvas with a thousand impaled butterflies. It makes me think of Emerald, all those butterflies she collects. But this man collects everything. Looking through all this could seriously take hours.

  “I guess we should get started,” I say.

  Julian nods uncertainly and kneels to open a cardboard box.

  The room’s so crazy full that it takes me a while to even notice the desk against the wall. I yank open the top middle drawer—pretty typical office stuff except everything’s in multiples, like five staplers and eight pairs of scissors. The next few drawers are filled with the same kind of junk.

  I tug the bottom drawer on the left. Locked. I grab a letter opener—he has a collection of those too—and stab it while Julian prowls the room, pushing aside papers and boxes. The drawer slides open just as he gasps, “It’s here!”

  I look up to find Julian hugging a green spiral notebook to his chest, and I smile. I’m about to stand when I spot a folded red T-shirt with a picture of a cartoon dog on it—obviously a kid’s shirt—in the open drawer.

  “Is this yours too?” I ask. When I grab it, a sleek black object clatters to the floor—an external hard drive.

  Julian squints at the little red shirt in my hand. “Yes. I remember that shirt. I haven’t seen it in years, though.”

  Why would Russell have Julian’s shirt locked in a drawer? And why would it be carefully folded around a hard drive? When Julian goes back to digging through his box, I stuff the drive into my pocket.

  “Let’s go.”

  I wait till we’re back home to show Julian. I wasn’t planning to show him at all, but without really thinking, I’ve asked, “Is this yours?”

  “No.”

  “It was in Russell’s office.”

  “You took it?”

  “It was in your shirt.” He looks puzzled, but not exactly concerned. “Do you care if I see what’s on it?”

  “It’s not mine.” Taking this as permission, I plug it into the desktop computer in the living room. A window full of files opens on the big screen—all of them videos. I click the cursor down and open the oldest one.

  The screen fills with a small shaking boy standing with his back to the camera in Russell’s living room. Russell enters the shot. Next to the boy, he’s a giant. He’s holding a long thin stick in his hand.

  My stomach fills with acid.

  Take off your shirt, Russell says.

  The boy takes off his shirt, then grips his bare upper arm with one hand.

  Turn around.

  It’s me. I’m smaller and younger, probably only nine or ten years old, but it’s me. I see my face, twitching in fear before the switch falls. I see my eyes, filling with pain before they squeeze shut. I see what I look like when I cry. And for the first time I see what Russell looks like too, an expression I never saw when my back was turned.

  “He taped them?” I whisper. “Why did he tape them?”

  “Julian.” Adam says my name, then says nothing more.

  The boy starts to scream.

  “So he could see it again?”

  I feel Adam watching me as I watch myself.

  “Is that why?”

  The boy’s screams get louder.

  “Jesus.” Adam’s hands fumble to close out the screen. We’re left with silence, and a white square containing a list of so many more files.

  “Delete them.”

  “I can’t,” Adam says. “This is evidence. I can’t just—”

  “Please.”

  “We have to show this to the police.” He ejects the hard drive.

  “Give it to me.”

  “No.” The firmness in his tone and the fact that he’s holding something that holds all my secrets have my eyes watering.

  “You can’t show that to anyone.” I imagine police, detectives, judges, everyone, seeing me cry, seeing me…I don’t want them or anyone to look at me. “Some of the other videos will be worse.”

  “Worse how?”

  “In some…I’m…I’m not wearing clothes.”

  “What do you mean you’re not wearing clothes? What the fuck did he do to you?”

  The humiliation is unbearable, as if he can see me from the inside out.

  “Julian. What did he do?”

  I shake my head. Push my fingers against my eyes. “The same,” I finally answer. “The same as that…without my clothes. Please just delete them.”

  “I can’t.” Adam’s voice breaks. “I won’t show them to anyone, but I can’t delete them. Not yet.”

  The screen is blank now, but I still see Russell’s face and the way he looked when my back was turned. You don’t really know people when your back is turned. “You want to look at them.”

  “Jesus, no.” Adam grimaces like he’s going to be sick. “I just want to do one thing that isn’t stupid. Throwing it away would be stupid. I’m holding on to it, just in case.”

  “In case what?”

  “In case he comes back.”

  “WHAT COLOR WOULD you like to paint your room?” Mom asks Julian. She’s got that weird, overbright face on—the one that means she’s pretending to be happy but she’s really worried.

  The guest room—now Julian’s room—is insanely girly. White wicker furniture, pink and yellow daisies stenciled all over the place, and white straw hats nailed to the wall, as if that’s any kind of decoration. To top it off, there are framed photos of Mittens, the Persian cat she used to have, everywhere.

  Julian looks around the room. “I don’t need to change the walls.”

  “Are you sure?” Mom asks.

  “It’s fine. I mean, nice. Thank you, Catherine.”

  “This is definitely not fine,” I argue. “How are you gonna sneak a girl into your room if it looks like this?”

  “Oh, Adam,” Mom says, amused and scolding.

  Julian just looks puzzled. “I won’t sneak a girl into this room.”

  “Hopeless,” I say. “We’re painting.”

  Around ten o’clock, Mom sits on the edge of the
white wicker bed, actually tucking Julian in like he’s five, but either it doesn’t embarrass him, or he’s too polite to protest. Even though it’s not that late, I’m tired enough to go to bed myself. I shut my eyes, but I can’t shut out the sounds in my head, the screams I heard earlier today, and I can’t stop thinking about all the obvious and weird things I should’ve noticed before.

  Like Julian being out sick all the time. And the fact that his uncle made him shave his legs. I figured the guy was some kind of germophobe, but now…was he trying to make Julian look more like a girl? Or a child? Both answers do weird things to my stomach.

  God, I can’t freakin sleep. What did I used to do when I couldn’t sleep?

  Think good thoughts.

  I try, I really try.

  I WAS PROBABLY naïve to assume everything would be perfect once Julian got home from the hospital. That first night I almost stepped on him when I got out of bed—he’d used all his blankets and pillows to make a pallet on my floor—and he’s done this every night since.

  Days aren’t any better. He follows me from room to room, trailing after me even if I’m just going to the kitchen or to use the toilet. It’d be okay that he has to be glued to my side, except he refuses to leave the house, like, at all. Which means I can’t leave either. Maybe the house isn’t as cramped as the hospital room, but by the end of a week, I can’t take it. I need to go out. I need fresh air. I need five to seven minutes in the bathroom without someone standing right outside.

  When Charlie shows up unannounced in the middle of the afternoon, I’m ready to hug him. “You want to go get something to eat?” he asks. “You too, Julian.”

  Looking wary, Julian doesn’t answer.

  “No, I think we’re good here,” I finally say.

  Charlie shrugs, then holds up a couple of video games. Soon we’re sitting on the floor in front of the TV, while Julian watches from the couch. When I ask him if he wants a turn, he answers, “We never had video games.” Because if it didn’t happen while they were alive, it never would.