A List of Cages(22)

After about thirty minutes of looping around the school, we head into the courtyard. “Smells like someone’s burning leaves,” I say. Julian shivers even though it’s not that cold. “I love that smell. Makes me want to carve a jack-o’-lantern or something.”

“Adam?” He’s holding his arm in that weird sore-shoulder way.

“Yeah?”

“I don’t want you to get in trouble.”

“For what?”

“For not taking me to Dr. Whitlock’s.” Finally. “I don’t want you to get fired.”

I burst out laughing. “You’re funny.” I eye the brick wall, wondering if I could do that thing where you run up a wall and backflip. “I won’t get in trouble. She said we could just hang out.” I take a leap and end up falling on my ass. “Ow.” I lie here while Julian cautiously sits on the wooden bench. “What are you doing later?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like tonight, this weekend.”

“I’m not sure. What are you doing?” he asks it carefully, like a kid who’s just learning correct phrases like please and thank you.

“Going to a concert. You like concerts?”

“We never went to concerts.” Julian hardly ever talks about his parents, but whenever he does, it’s like this. Like if something didn’t happen while they were alive, it never would. “My…”

After a while I realize he’s not going to finish, so I prompt, “Yeah?”

“My mom loved music.”

“I know.”

“She could play every instrument. She could sing anything. But we didn’t go to concerts. I don’t know why.”

“Do you want to come tonight?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you want to come to the concert?”

“I don’t have a ticket.”

“I can get you a ticket.” I think I can, anyway. “I can text you as soon as I get it.”

“I don’t have a cell phone.”

“Seriously? Everyone has a cell phone.” He looks embarrassed. “Doesn’t matter. You can just meet me at my house at six.”

I’ll have to prepare my mom first. Julian had been with us for eight months when, out of nowhere, a social worker took him. It turned out there was a relative, sort of—Julian’s godfather/uncle by marriage. Mom and I thought we’d be able to at least visit Julian, but then she got a notice from the woman handling his case. The uncle said Julian needed to adjust to his new home and that he believed seeing us would harm the process somehow. I remember Mom carefully folding that letter before tucking it into a drawer as gently as if it were Julian himself. Losing Julian—for Mom, for me—it was like a death.

“So do you wanna come?” I ask.

He smiles, wide and happy like a kid about to blow out the candles on his birthday cake. “Yes.”





FOR THE FIRST time in four years, I’m standing on Adam’s front porch.

But I can’t make myself knock.

I have a strange, dizzy feeling, like the time Mom and I went on a hike and had to cross a tall suspension bridge. I remember being right at the edge and how it felt to peer over the side—terrifying and incredible all at once.

I take a deep breath, then I knock.

A moment later, Adam opens the door, saying, “Hey, come in.” The house is just like I remember: yellow and cluttered and alive like an electrified current. “I’m almost ready.” He darts off toward where I remember our room was.

There are still a ton of photos of Adam everywhere. Adam as a naked toddler in a bathtub with a soap beard. Adam proudly holding a badly carved pumpkin. Adam at a roller-skating party with dozens of other children when he must have been five or six.

I step closer to a photo framed in black—it’s me. I’m nine years old, and I’m smiling as I stand on that wooden box I used to pretend was a stage. I scan the crowded wall of pictures and find my face again. In one photo Adam is carrying me on his back. In another I’m holding his hand.

“Hey,” Adam says, appearing behind me. “You ready?”

I nod and try to smile, but it probably comes off more like a grimace.

He doesn’t seem to notice, and tells me to come on. I follow him through the swinging doors. Standing in the center of the bright yellow kitchen, a rolling pin poised over a mound of dough, is Catherine, Adam’s mother. She’s pretty, just like I remember, and I feel a particular type of pain—the same squeezing heart I get every time I open the trunk. Suddenly I have this thought that I should have dressed up, the way you would before you enter a church. Instead I’m wearing my too-short jeans and too-small shirt with the holes in the armpits and along the collar.

She steps from behind the island, reaching out both hands as if she’s going to hug me, then she glances at Adam and lowers her arms. “How are you, Julian?” There’s a certain inflection to my name, the same tone people use to say honey or sweetheart.

“Fine.” It seems wrong to give an automatic response like fine to her, but it’s all I can say. No one starts filling the silence and it’s awkward until I hear a bass pulse from outside, so loud it rattles the copper pots and pans hanging against the wall.