A List of Cages(34)

“We had a forest, a bamboo forest, and I’d pretend…I’d pretend to be an explorer.” He grabs his skinny bicep in that broken arm stance. “I miss my house.”

Sometimes Julian says things that are like a sucker punch to the chest. I wish I could buy his house and give it to him, but it would still be sad because it would be empty, so I wish I could change that too—that I had time-travel-world-spinning superpowers and could undo everything.

“We should go there,” I suggest impulsively. It’s something I think I’d want if I were him, but then again maybe it’d be too painful, like walking through a cemetery.

“I do.”

“You do? You know the people who live there now?”

“No. I mean…I don’t go inside or anything.”

And now I’m picturing Julian standing outside the house where he lived with his parents, watching, but never going in, and…Jesus.

“Well, we should go introduce ourselves. I bet they’d let you inside.”

“I don’t know….”

“Is this Julian-shyness, or do you really not want to go in? Because if you really don’t, I’ll shut up.”

He looks at the ground.

“Well?”

“Shyness.”

“So you want to go inside?”

“Yes.”

“Then we will.”





“TURN HERE,” I tell Adam.

“Okay.”

I feel sort of empty and absent as I touch the vent on the dashboard. “This looks like a robot face.”

He chuckles. “I know.”

“Turn right at the stop sign. It’s the third house on the left.”

“The green one?”

“Yes.”

Adam hops out, and slowly I follow.

This is my house, my real house. For the most part it looks the same as it always did, but there are small differences. A mailbox that isn’t ours. A wreath on the door. Red curtains in the window.

We’re halfway down the path that leads to the front door when I halt. “Maybe we should…”

“What?”

“Leave.”

“Do you really want to? We can if you want.”

I don’t know what I want.

Adam stands there fidgeting until a girl with a blond ponytail opens the door. “Can I help you?” she asks.

Adam wheels around. “Brittany!” He knows her, of course. They hug, and she tells him she’s taking a year off from college and she’d love to hang out sometime. She looks curiously at me. “Oh, this is my friend,” Adam says. “He used to live here. Can we come inside?”

She says, “Sure,” as if it isn’t an odd request at all.

Adam looks back at me and waits until I cross the threshold.

Right here in the entryway there should be flowers. The scent should be strong, almost overpowering. Instead it’s spicy, peppery, the smell of food that burns your eyes. Below my feet there should be flat green carpet. But it’s gone, replaced by red-brown tile. Just two steps farther into the entryway is where my mother’s piano should be, and above it one of my father’s paintings. But they’re gone. Everything is gone.

Without a word to Adam or the girl, I cross my old living room and step out into the backyard. I take in a deep breath, and blink back tears. This is my yard, my real yard. And it’s closer to what I remember, but it’s still wrong. It’s smaller, as if the fence has been squeezed in on all sides. The bamboo forest isn’t a forest at all, just two dozen waxy green stalks, most of them not much taller than me. I remember getting lost in them.

I walk the perimeter of the fence, and try to summon what I used to feel back when I thought I could bend time and spoons. I touch the red grains in the wood. I have a vague memory of doing that.

I freeze at the triangle-shaped garden in the corner. There are no flowers since it’s winter, but it’s still framed with red brick exactly as it was. I kneel in the grass and press my fingers into the cold soil.

I remember.

Waking up early on Saturday to the specific scent of morning and pure unfiltered joy. Grabbing a gardening shovel, eager to get outside, then being here in this exact spot. Black dirt on my fingertips. The sun and air clinging to my skin and my clothes. I remember looking over my shoulder, and there was my mother, still in her nightgown, standing on the back porch shielding her eyes from the sun.

“Are you okay?” Adam asks as we’re driving away.

I don’t really want to talk, and for once I don’t want him to talk either. I’m trying to capture more of the memory. What came next? Did she step off the porch? Did she say something? What did we do that day?

But the rest won’t come. I have just that moment, her on the back porch, me kneeling in the grass and feeling a sort of happiness I didn’t remember I could feel.

“Yes,” I finally answer. And even though it’s not enough, I add, “Thank you, Adam.”





THE BUS RIDE is quiet—boring. Everyone scatters in a million different directions the second we get to the museum, so I have to wander around alone—also boring. Then an elderly security guard yells at me for stomping. So basically this field trip sucks.

I explain to the old man that I wasn’t stomping, but my feet fell asleep and I was doing that thing where you jump around to wake them up. We end up talking and I find out his name’s Gus and he has four kids and nine grandkids. He shows me a private exhibit of swords that’s closed to the public, so okay, maybe things are looking up.