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“That’s not what I mean. I mean, someone gave you a name. You have a name. So does your mother.”
“Of course she had a name. I just don’t know what it was.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean that something tells me she’s not dead. This certificate is fake.”
“If she’s not dead, who is she? Where is she? How did I end up here?” Cage asked desperately.
I thought about his questions and surveyed the messy room filled with worn furniture.
“What did your father do for a living?”
“I don’t know. He wasn’t a fan of questions.”
“You never asked what your father did every day?”
“I’m thinking we had different childhoods. What my father did every day was drink. I guess it wasn’t every day. He did teach me a lot about football. At least when I was younger. But, when he wasn’t M.I.A., he usually did what you saw him doing when you were here.”
I thought back to the cold, red-headed man I saw looking over his shoulder at me from the couch. The TV had been on and there was something about him that told me he was drunk.
“I’m sorry you had to grow up like that,” I said as my heart broke for Cage.
“It’s what I knew,” he said casually. “You know what? I can show you this,” he said leading me to the door opposite his bedroom. “I didn’t touch this room either.”
I walked into the cluttered space where household valuables surrounded a queen-sized bed. More accurately, it was filled with things that looked like they could have been valuable but aren’t.
“Your father broke into houses,” I said as it hit me.
I looked back at Cage who had again lowered his head.
“You knew?” I asked surprised.
“I suspected. It’s why I didn’t ask. As a kid, I found a stack of cash and a gun. Something told me he hadn’t earned the money legally.”
“Where did you find it?”
“There’s a metal box hidden in the floor under the bed.”
I turned on the flashlight on my phone and crawled under the bed.
“It’s empty. I checked when I got back from the hospital. That’s how I knew he wasn’t coming back.”
There was a lot of stuff under the bed with me. Mostly it was more of what was surrounding it. But there was a path cleared to curling planks of wood. I removed them getting a lung full of dust. Finding the metal box, I opened it. It wasn’t empty. There was an I.D. card in it?
“What’s this?”
“Oh, right. The I.D. Yeah, I saw that. I don’t know. I just figured it was somewhere he worked when he was younger.”
I stared at the picture. He looked twenty years younger than he did when he was stabbing me with his hunter’s knife. I crawled from under the bed and showed it to Cage.
“He worked in a hospital.”
“So?”
“It’s where people generally have babies.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I think I know the hospital you were born in.”
