The anger disappeared from it so completely that if I had not heard him only seconds earlier, I might have wondered whether I had imagined it.

“I’m cleaning her up.”

The woman did not answer him.

She called my name.

Hearing it from another person almost hurt.

My son used my name when he wanted my attention, but lately he had preferred other words.

Stubborn.

Pathetic.

Crazy.

Problem.

The neighbor simply said my name as though it still belonged to me.

Then she asked, “Can you hear me?”

My son stepped between us.

The movement was small, but there was nothing accidental about it.

His body blocked part of my view through the bars.

“She gets confused at night,” he said. “Please go back inside.”

There was that voice again.

Patient.

Concerned.

Almost embarrassed on my behalf.

I had heard him use it before when people asked why I no longer came to the door, why I had missed something, why I stopped returning calls.

He never needed a complicated story.

He only needed to make me sound unreliable.

The woman raised one hand.

A phone was pressed against her palm.

“Then unlock the cage,” she said.

My son’s shoulders tightened.

“It isn’t what it looks like.”

She pointed toward the padlock near my ankle.

“I saw you fasten that yesterday,” she said. “I thought it was empty until I heard her tonight.”

Something in me shifted.

For weeks, my son had insisted that nobody could hear me from our backyard.

The houses were too far apart, he said.

The windows were closed.