The Raven Room

by Ana Medeiros

  “I like your place,” he said, looking around. “It’s homey.”

  Meredith glanced at the coffee table, seeing the forgotten magazines, piles of books, bottles of nail polish, pens, candles, an overflowing ashtray and a half-empty box of chocolates. “And messy?”

  He grinned. “Yes, and messy.”

  They enjoyed their wine as they listened to Nina Simone’s nostalgic sound. The smoke of the burning incense was floating toward them and Meredith felt herself relax. She loved the smell of it. “Who’s the redhead?”

  He looked at her like he didn’t know to whom she was referring.

  “The woman at the club tonight.”

  “Her name is Alana. And she’s not a redhead. She’s a blonde.”

  “No, she’s a redhead. But if you want to think she’s a blonde, please go right ahead,” she replied with a shake of her head. “Alana…fucking amazing hair.”

  Julian had never spoken to Meredith about another female in his life and that made the redhead important. She wasn’t just another woman.

  “When you texted me a while back giving me the heads-up you had had unprotected sex, was she the one?”

  Julian nodded.

  “Okay, so you guys are sleeping together. She didn’t look very happy with you earlier. What happened?” she continued. “The guy she was with tonight gave me the creeps.”

  “That’s Thompson.”

  “Who?” Meredith frowned, resting her feet on the coffee table, beside Julian’s. “Who’s Thompson?”

  “Steven Thompson.”

  “Holy shit, my dad and stepmom were telling me about him. He goes to The Raven Room? And Alana knows him?”

  “You know the answer to both of those questions. You were there. You saw it with your own eyes. She was with him the first night I saw her.”

  “What is he to her? How do they know each other?”

  “She won’t tell me. But she’s afraid of him. That I am sure of.”

  “You’re sleeping with Thompson’s girl and now he knows you and me.”

  “Why are you saying he knows us?”

  “Are you kidding me? Did you see how he looked at us after Alana stormed out?”

  “How did he look at us?”

  “Like we’re on his shit list. You, especially.”

  Julian rubbed his temples. He looked concerned.

  “You didn’t answer my question, though. What happened between you and Alana?”

  “We got into an argument.”

  “Details?”

  Julian turned to look at her. His expression was inscrutable. Holding the wine glass between her hands, she continued to stare at him. She wasn’t ready to let it go.

  “Don’t, Meredith.”

  She didn’t care if they got into a fight but, at that point, dealing with Julian’s brooding mood felt like more than she could handle. Antagonizing him never got her anywhere. She knew better ways of working around his temperament.

  “I need a cigarette,” she finally said, grabbing the pack on top of the coffee table. He didn’t like when she smoked but, at that moment, she didn’t care.

  “Can I please have one?”

  She thought she must have heard him wrong. “What?”

  “Can I please have one, too?”

  “Since when do you smoke?”

  “Meredith, can you just pass me one?”

  After lighting hers she passed him a cigarette and the lighter. They smoked in silence.

  “I respect you not wanting to tell me what happened between you and Alana.” Meredith’s voice was firm. “But don’t bully me into it. It’s abusive and I don’t appreciate it.”

  “I’m sorry. But you can be so difficult….”

  “Now it’s my fault?”

  “No, that’s not what I meant. I’m sorry, okay?” He sounded defeated and his eyes appeared to be pleading with her.

  “Don’t do it again,” she said, not dropping the hint of coldness from her words. When it came to push and shove Julian would always revert back to being domineering. She just had to remember to never stop being difficult. “What happened after your fight?”

  “Tonight was the first time I saw her since then.”

  “You have been going to the club every chance you get, hoping to run into her there, haven’t you?” Meredith was staring at him but now he was not willing to face her. She refilled their wine glasses.

  “She had asked me before not to approach her at The Raven Room so it’s not that I was going to talk to her.”

  “You almost did tonight.”

  Julian rested his lit cigarette in the ashtray and stood up. “Almost. I’m glad I didn’t, though. After our argument that would be the stupidest thing I could do.”

  “What do you know about her?”

  He turned over the vinyl record. “Really nothing.”

  “What do you mean nothing?”

  “I saw her at the club the first time I took you and then I ran into her at a coffee shop. We have hung out since then but she won’t tell me much about herself.”

  Meredith hadn’t even noticed the music had stopped. She watched him gently lower the needle onto the record. “What does she know about you?”

  Her question made Julian pause. “Almost nothing.”

  “That’s not surprising.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You haven’t willingly told me anything about yourself.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I don’t know, everything. What was your childhood like? How did you end up being adopted by Hazel?”

  He returned to the couch and Nina Simone’s voice came to life again. Julian was silent for so long she didn’t think he would answer.

  “My mother was pregnant with me when she arrived in America but shortly after I was born, we returned to Hungary, where she was from. Life in Budapest was tough. We were very poor. I don’t think I can explain to you how tough it was,” he paused, chugging half of his wine, “I don’t think I can explain it to anyone. It wasn’t just the poverty. It was also the discrimination. No matter what we did, we were always treated like dirty gypsies. To this day I have no idea who my father is. I assume he wasn’t Romani, since I think getting pregnant with me was the reason my mother was banished by her family. She never mentioned him. When we were in Hungary she worked as a prostitute. She didn’t try to hide it from me. We lived with her boyfriend, who was her pimp. If she were a stray dog he would have treated her better. All he did was beat her up, get drunk and yell. I hated him. When she and I returned to America, I was scared but I thought things were going to get better. Maybe I believed that because that’s what she told me. Many times I heard her say she was bringing me back to where I had been born and I was going to have a better life.”

  Meredith didn’t want him to stop talking, so she sat very still, all her attention on him.

  “A few months later she vanished,” Julian continued with a heavy sigh. “When I was growing up in foster care several people would say, what type of mother would abandon her seven-year-old son in the middle of the night, during wintertime, on the steps of some church. But she had always tried to be a good mother. She loved me. That’s why it was so hard for me to accept she had left me. I think it still is.”

  “Do you think something happened to her?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I hope that’s the case. I want to believe she would have come back for me if she could.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Ina.”

  “Have you ever tried to search for the rest of your mother’s family?”

  “They were dead to her. They are dead to me.”

  “What was growing up in foster care like?” she asked, guessing what his answer would be.

  “Horrible.”

  “Was it always horrible?”

  “You have to understand, I was only adding to it. I was not a good kid. I was mean, angry, and very aggressive. By the time I was thirteen I was s
moking a pack of these a day,” he said, looking at the cigarettes on the couch. “And doing hard drugs.”

  Meredith already knew about his drug addiction from reading it on the file Pam had showed her.

  “That’s when Hazel came along,” Julian said, his hard expression softening. “Social services were desperate to find a home that would take me. No one wanted me. And I didn’t want anyone. Finally, she came across a foster family that agreed to take me. They were a last resort. This family had had incidents with previous foster children but Hazel was trying to keep me off the streets. She figured that I was already so out of control, there wasn’t anything that could happen to me there that I hadn’t already experienced. In some ways she was right.”

  “Did they live here in Chicago?”

  “Yes, Back of the Yards. It was worse then than it is now.”

  “How long did you stay with this family?”

  “Two years.”

  “Two years?” Meredith was surprised. “That was a long time for you, wasn’t it?”

  “Considering I ran away every couple of months from every place I had stayed at until then, yes, that was a very long time.”

  “Why did you stay that long?”

  “Because of Tatiana and Sofia.”

  “Who were they?” she asked, not failing to notice how the tone of Julian’s voice had changed when he said their names. She reached for his hand.

  “They were my foster parents’ biological daughters. Six-year-old twins.”

  “What happened?”

  “You have to try to imagine how this house looked,” Julian ignored her question, staring at her hand on his. He laced his fingers through hers. “It was the top floor of a crumbling, old triplex. I had seen and stayed in condemned buildings that looked better than this place. I remember the first time I walked up the stairs toward the top floor. The smell of mold, the damp filthy carpet, mixed with the smell of stale cigarettes and cooked food coming from the apartments was overwhelming. It was January. Imagine what it smelled like in the summer months, with the heat. There were sounds of people shouting, doors banging, kids crying. For as long as I live I’ll never forget that stairwell. Hazel was walking ahead of me and she stopped a few times. I thought she was going to turn around and run.” Julian laughed without mirth.

  “We entered the house and there was stuff everywhere. You could barely see the walls. There were boxes piled up from floor to ceiling. Every surface had either objects or papers on it. They were what you could call hoarders. Right away I disliked the parents. To me they looked just as filthy as the place they lived in. Hazel stayed for a while but it was late and she needed to leave. I know she wanted to take me with her. If I was disgusted with this place, imagine her. She’s one of the most organized and clean people I have ever met. They told me where my room was and all I did was carry my bag with me, drop it on the bedroom floor, and collapse on the bed. Prior to that night I had been living on the streets so I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in a while. I was so tired.”

  It was hard for Meredith to imagine the Julian she knew as a homeless boy. He was always polished, impeccably dressed and groomed. However, there was a time when he had looked like so many of the panhandling teenagers she passed by when walking around her city.

  “When I woke up it was morning. I had slept on top of the covers and I still had my shoes on. My bedroom was not more than a tiny square, with a window facing the wall of another building. The only piece of furniture in it was the bed I was lying on, which was a good thing since it might have been the only place in the whole house that wasn’t packed with junk. As I thought how long I could put up with living in this place, I heard my bedroom door open and these two little heads peeked in. I was so surprised I didn’t move. I just stared at them. Slowly, they walked into the room and they stood, dressed in blue matching pajamas. They stared back at me. At first I thought I was hallucinating. But then they smiled at me and all I could do was smile back. They became my whole world. Everything started and ended with Sofia and Tatia.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “You’re asking me if you can ask me a question?”

  She smiled. “I can play nice when I want to, you know?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Something horrible happened, didn’t it?”

  Julian refilled their wine glasses.

  “You don’t want to talk about what happened?” Meredith asked.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you what happened. I never talk about them to anyone. You’re the second person I have discussed them with.”

  “Who else knows about them?”

  “Hazel knows. She was somewhat of a witness as the events unfolded. The first person I told about Sofia and Tatiana was my friend Pete. I told him a long time ago.”

  “Tell me more about them, about the twins.”

  Julian stared at the wall and his lips curved in a gentle smile. “They were trouble. Very mischievous. Smart. Incredibly smart. They both had this raspy voice and Russian was their first language, so they spoke English with a heavy accent that made you think they were these two mouthy old women trapped in these tiny bodies. They were hilarious.”

  “And adorable?” she had to add, now smiling too.

  “Very. Tatiana, who I called Tatia, was the most outspoken one. Such an extrovert. She would boss me around and I would let her. I don’t think I could ever say no to her, even if I wanted to. Sofia was quieter. More reserved.”

  “Was Sofia your favorite?”

  Julian was silent again.

  “It’s okay to have a favorite, you know. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Because she appeared to be more vulnerable, I was more protective of Sofia,” he said, lowering his gaze. “She and I had a different connection.”

  “Were you happy while you stayed with them?”

  “No. The house was hell. After being with them for a few months, Hazel found a group home that had agreed to take me, but at that point I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t leave the twins behind.”

  “What was going on in that house?”

  “A lot of awful things. The worst was the father sexually abusing Sofia. I don’t understand how I didn’t pick up on it. She was the one who told me. It was a late August afternoon. The father was at work and the mother had left to run some errands and taken Tatia with her. Sofia was sick so she stayed home. The place had no air conditioning and it would always get so hot, like the heat weighed two tons and pressed you down against the ground, making it impossible for you to breathe. That’s how it felt. Day and night.”

  Julian reached for his glass and sipped the wine. He was quiet and Meredith decided it was best not to speak. She was not sure what she should say.

  “We were always hungry. That was normal for us. But Sofia looked so hopeless, lying down on the stain-covered couch, that I needed to do something to make her feel better,” Julian continued, looking at the light coming from the only lit lamp in the room. “I had no money. So I did the only thing I could think of. Going to any of the convenience stores in the neighborhood was out of the question, they knew me already, so I walked far, maybe thirty minutes. I went into a convenience store I had never been to before and I stole a bunch of popsicles. By the time I got back they had melted so I put them in the freezer and both Sofia and I sat on the kitchen floor, staring at the fridge, waiting for the damn things to freeze again. She was so happy. The look on her face was one of pure delight.” He turned his head toward Meredith and she saw in his eyes sorrowful longing for a person that now only existed in his memory.

  She was witnessing a side of Julian that was completely unknown to her—he became a different person when he spoke about the twins. Seeing him now, Meredith realized how guarded and cold he always was. To her, this was a disquieting new awareness.

  “The parents would hit the twins, you know, good old-school discipline.” There was disapproval in Julian’s voice. “But Sofia had all
of these random bruises on her and I started asking her more about it. That’s when she told me. She was so matter of fact about it…she had almost accepted it as being something normal. It was part of her reality. She was just so beaten down. I knew that feeling and I would have done anything so she wouldn’t ever have to feel it.”

  “How about Tatia? Was he sexually abusing her too?”

  “When I asked Tatia she said he wasn’t. I never believed her.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t know what to do. I told their mother what was going on. She was this ignorant woman, cunning and angry, but regardless of all of her faults I believed she would protect her own daughters from her husband. I was wrong.”

  “She didn’t do anything?”

  “Oh she did. She told social services I was the one molesting her daughters.”

  Meredith gasped. “They didn’t believe her, did they?”

  “I was a delinquent. My track record made it look like a possible behavior. Hazel was the only one on my side. As soon as the twins found out I was being removed from the house, Tatia blamed her sister for everything, saying if she had kept her mouth shut I wouldn’t have had to leave. Sofia just kept repeating I hadn’t done it. The mother insisted her daughter was lying and was merely trying to protect me. The father just wanted me gone. The whole situation got really complicated, really quickly.”

  “I was packing my things when everything happened. Hazel was in the hall with the father when Tatia ran into my room crying, begging for my help. I followed her into the parents’ bedroom and I saw Sofia pointing a gun at her mother, asking her over and over again to tell the truth.”

  Meredith was stunned. “A gun? Where did she find it?”

  “The father kept a gun in the house. He would proudly show it off. We all knew where it was.”

  Meredith squeezed Julian’s hand, encouraging him to continue.

  “Everyone was screaming. I told Sofia everything is going to be okay, for her to drop the gun and then I heard this loud bang. I moved forward and I felt her body fall against my chest. As I was hugging her close, I looked up. That’s when I saw the mother on the floor, blood everywhere.”

  Meredith covered her mouth. “Oh my God, Julian.”