The Prison and the Ambulance (Part II)
Andrew takes a tour of possible prisons.
The boy needs to brush his teeth, but he knows the rules. No talking to anyone else in the house. No lingering. No laughter or hugs.
His father sets the timer. “Be back in five,” he says.
* * *
This February, a thirty-one-year-old man, S, set fire to his house. He told the first responders that his father and stepmother had kept him locked there since the fourth grade.
When I wrote about S last Wednesday (see the link below), I said that “it felt like I was inside the story.” That’s a crazy thing to say when narrating the life of a kid who has been taken hostage by his family. His story is sensational, haunting in the worst one-of-a-kind way.
Take just this snapshot:
During his twenty years of captivity, S says he was permitted to leave the storage room that was his cell for an hour a day. He would go to the back door and tell the dog to pee. While he waited—he wasn’t allowed beyond the porch—he’d make himself an egg salad sandwich. Tuna on Fridays. If his stepmother was out, he might turn on the TV. Then he’d drink a glass of water and return to the room.
I imagine that S would sit on his bed and look out the window, waiting for the inevitable plodding of footsteps, the fastening of locks, the passage of another day.
* * *
The boy fakes a frown as he scrubs his lips with the toothbrush. Back and forth he saws, dramatically arching an eyebrow at his own antics. He doesn’t talk or linger or laugh, but he puts on a show.
His younger cousin watches from the hall, cracking up at the act. The boy gets carried away, adds exaggerated circular motions, pretends to short-circuit.
Downstairs, in the garage that has been converted into a bedroom, an alarm sounds. Be back in five, his father had said.
I made that toothbrush tomfoolery up, but I know what would have happened next. I know what happens when the boy doesn’t make it back to the room in five minutes. I know because I read the case files and talked to the boy’s social worker. I know because that’s not S; that’s my adopted son, Hiroshi.
* * *
According to the usual definitions of freedom and captivity, Hiroshi and Rana are now free. They haven’t lived in that room or with their birth father for nearly a decade.
But in November 2023, when their biological aunt took them from our home, they moved down the hall and up the stairs from that same room.
Their biological family would have argued that they were there of their own accord, that they had freely decided to leave our home under the cover of night, just like our son with the A- GPA freely decided to suddenly stop attending school or to stop taking part in his favorite activities, like playing soccer or competing in Rubik’s cube competitions.
Perhaps the aunt would argue that she had freed them from our parental economy of responsibilities and rewards—the kind of parenting their grandmother once decried as bribes. Now they could watch Instagram reels at three in the morning, eat meals alone, commit banking fraud, and ignore teachers, counselors, and family. Now, perhaps, they were truly free.
* * *
When I read the story of S in the Times, I was gripped by the scale of his struggle and the miracle of his release, but I also had a palpable feeling of foreboding. S’s story was an epic tragedy that, to me, felt oddly small and personal. And at first I couldn’t understand why. It took me a minute to recall the toothbrush incident or to recognize that it was Roshi I was picturing as S.
And then the questions rushed at me like a punch to the gut: What if the reason Hiroshi rarely responds to our texts and messages is that he is physically trapped in his room? What if he isn’t attending school because he is in danger, just like S, and I’m misinterpreting the signs?
The literal answer is no, there’s no one physically keeping him in that room. I believe that Hiroshi’s biological family members have been awful caretakers of his interests, that they have abdicated their role to treat him as they would treat their own children, yet I do not believe they are monsters. And I have recently seen Rana; she would not let her brother be harmed.
Speaking of Rana, I have this sense that, at least on a material level, she is finding a way out—she is kicking butt at a trade school and living with friends now.
But my heart hurts for Roshi, for the incredible young man that he is, for what he might do if he were not held hostage by the mistakes of his father and aunt and grandmother, for where he might be if we, Erica and I and our team of psychiatrists and therapists and social workers, had known how to be and what to do, if we had known the cheat codes to walk with him and his sister in the way they needed.
So if God speaks through the New York Times, if the feeling that caught my breath was more than a palpitation of subconscious concern, then please, God, hear my response. Bring the fire, the matchsticks and M-80s. Give light and love to Hiroshi and to Rana and to all the prisoners, even or especially to those who toil in prisons that have no locks. Make the cold places blaze.
Well said, my love.