Free Verse

by Sarah Dooley

  Also by Sarah Dooley

  Body of Water

  Livvie Owen Lived Here

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Dooley.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eBook ISBN 9781101657256

  Bird images: EkaterinaP/Shutterstock. Paper images: Picsfive/Shutterstock.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Beth Anne

  and all my library writers

  Contents

  Also by Sarah Dooley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Two Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part Three 1. Haiku

  2. Quatrain

  3. Cinquain

  4. Epistle

  5. Enclosed Tercet

  6. Found Poetry

  7. Tanka

  8. Triplets

  9. Poems That Tell a Story

  10. Free Verse and Mixed Forms

  11. Haiku Once More

  12. Cinquain Once More

  13. Tankas Once More

  14. Enclosed Tercet Once More

  15. Epistle Revisited

  Part Four Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  Nobody tells me this is the last time I’ll see my apartment off Route 10. Nobody but Michael ever tells me anything, and Michael died. Still, I touch the grooves on the counter where he used to dice potatoes without a cutting board. I shuffle my sneakers against the scuffs in the linoleum where he used to kick off his fireman boots, trading them for his grocery store shoes.

  I want to say something. Something just right. But time keeps moving and the words won’t come, and my brother isn’t around to hear them anyway.

  Phyllis, the foster mother the state of West Virginia has picked for me, is still a stranger, despite the three days I’ve spent pacing her unfamiliar house. She drapes an arm across my shoulders, but it doesn’t fit right, so she takes it back. Before she leads me away, she checks the windows to make sure they’re locked. She mumbles something about the thermostat but never manages to find it. She puts my jacket around my shoulders but doesn’t make me use the sleeves. She leads me to the car.

  “You didn’t find your dress, Sasha?” she asks. Her question is pointless, since she left my key on the counter and locked the door. If I didn’t find my dress abandoned in a closet or lost behind the landlord’s couch, what difference does it make now? Strictly speaking, we weren’t supposed to be in the apartment to begin with, but it was my only piece of clothing that looked okay for a funeral and my last excuse to be here.

  I shake my head. I didn’t actually look for the dress, not once I was inside. There were too many other things to look at and to think about.

  Phyllis drives us back through town to her small house in one of the nicer neighborhoods in Caboose. She doesn’t have a driveway, so she parks on the gravelly shoulder of Route 10. She cuts the engine and waits for me to move, then, when I don’t, creaks her own door open. She loops around the front of the car and opens mine, too.

  “We need to be back in the car in forty-five minutes.”

  The dress she puts me in is too loose in the chest and smells like grease and Avon, like somebody sprayed Skin So Soft on a plate of fried potatoes. She stands behind me, finger-combing my hair. It hasn’t been washed in days. Nobody’s played with my hair since my mother left, and it makes tears crawl up into the back of my throat. I swallow them down.

  Phyllis’s front door sticks, and she kicks it closed behind us with enough force to make it stick. She tugs the doorknob to be sure it locked. This is not one of those sweet small towns. People will steal your prescription medication. They will steal your copper wiring. They will steal your dog. The neighbor kids are out on the porch, bundled up against the cold. I’ve caught glimpses of them before, through the dead February trees that separate the two yards. The boy is digging a trench around the bottom step with a stick. The two little girls stop fighting over a toy truck long enough to stare us down with round green eyes. Phyllis ushers me into the car and closes the door. The girls go back to their truck. The older one wins and the younger one flings herself down in a tantrum. Even with the car door between us, I can hear her high wail cutting through the cold. I draw my feet up onto the seat, and when Phyllis slides behind the wheel, she reaches over and tugs my skirt down till it covers my knees.

  “Hold on,” she says. I don’t think she’s talking about the car ride.

  • • •

  The church smells more like perfume than air. Me and Michael would have stood in a corner and made fun of people’s pantsuits and glittery brooches, but this is his funeral and all he does is lie still. I won’t look at him. I stare instead at the flowers, which look as though they might be real, only I know they’re not, because it’s February and nothing much is blooming now. Through its burgundy carpet, the floor feels hollow, like I might fall through it if I step too hard.

  The minister is only a minister on Sundays and when somebody dies or gets married. The rest of the time, he runs fire calls with Michael. He calls Michael his fallen brother, and I press fingernail prints into my palms. Michael wasn’t anybody’s brother except mine.

  The pastor’s eyes find me in the crowd, and I watch sadness deepen the lines on his face. I know all the faces and all the names of Michael’s fellow firemen, but I can’t always put them together. I check the program, which is printed slightly off center so that the last few lines of Psalm 23 curl around from the back. Pastor: Allen Ramey. Right.

  Ramey talks about the man upstairs as though he’s afraid to say the word God too loud. It’s a simple service because both the man doing the talking and the man surrounded by flowers prefer thin
gs that way. Michael was never one for the dramatic, so Ramey keeps the service bare-bones short out of respect. He was a good man. He sliced cuts of meat at the Save-Great by day and put out fires by night. He once literally saved a kitten from a tree, and got scratched so deep he had to get stitches. A grim chuckle. We hassled him for weeks over that one.

  Everything he says is true. Michael was a good man. He did work two jobs. He was the kind of guy who would go out of his way to save a kitten, even if he cussed it while he did. None of those things are the most important part of who he was, though. He was my brother. Michael was my brother, and now I don’t have a brother.

  “They don’t make ’em like old Harless anymore,” Ramey says. I wrap my arms around myself because there’s nobody else to do it for me.

  • • •

  The cemetery is close to where Michael and I lived. Michael’s firehouse only has one real fire truck, which is parked now at Michael’s graveside, a flag hanging from its raised ladder. The rest of the fleet is made up of people’s old Chevy S-10s, with red lights Krazy-Glued onto the dashboards. The squad is small and mostly volunteer. I only know their last names, because Michael called them by Ramey or Kamm or Sweeney, usually with jokes or swearing after. Most of them are young, and most hold other jobs, like Michael. I see them around town, salting fries at Burger Bargain, shelving old TVs at the pawnshop, dodging potholes with school buses.

  I think maybe Ramey’s going to start talking again, but he just stares at the ground and waits. A radio crackles and Michael’s name is called, as if he’s being asked to respond to a fire.

  “Harless, this is dispatch, please respond.”

  We wait for his voice to come over the air.

  “Harless, this is dispatch, come back?”

  Come back! I think.

  “Dispatch to Harless, please respond.”

  He doesn’t, and he doesn’t, and he doesn’t.

  “Dispatch to Harless,” the voice on the radio says. “You are relieved of your duty. God bless you for your service.”

  Somebody sobs. I think maybe it’s Phyllis. She never met Michael, so she probably doesn’t know he’d be embarrassed by all the fuss. He always said he wanted to be cremated and then scattered on the grounds of the fire, if that’s what took him. Which is stupid, so I never told anybody.

  The prayers and flags and radio static are all too much to take in. I expected the dirt and the hole in the ground, but I didn’t know the hole would have neat corners and this metal structure, now lowering the box out of sight with a low hum. It reminds me of the air conditioner in our apartment, which is a silly thing to think about.

  Michael’s gone into the hole before I can stop him. I’m supposed to throw in a handful of earth, but instead I hold the two fistfuls of black dirt. I’m pretty sure I got half an earthworm. I smell the dirt. I taste it, and it tastes like rare meat or lost teeth. My lip and chin are smeared with grime. Polite mourners turn their faces away. Phyllis takes a wet wipe from her purse and cleans my chin as casually as she would her glasses.

  2

  There’s a rectangle of weak, late February sunlight on the floor of Phyllis’s kitchen. It used to be over by the ice-cream churn, but as evening comes on, it inches toward the bag of red potatoes propped up beside the fridge. I haven’t moved in a while.

  Phyllis is humming her way around the kitchen, adjusting things that don’t look like they need it. There aren’t any dirty dishes in the sink, but every so often she plucks something out of the drainer, looks at it closely, and then whips it over to the sink to rewash. Twice, she’s heated water in the kettle and forgotten to make tea. Neither of us has said anything in a while, except for when her humming gives way to a word or two: “. . . green and shady . . .” “. . . river’s in flood . . .” This is how we’ve spent the last week, nervous and quiet, together in the kitchen.

  As foster mothers go, Phyllis could probably be worse. Of course, she’s the only foster mother I’ve ever had, so I don’t have much to compare her to. She’s kind, and she cooks. She’s sweet to her animals, a nosy cat and a sagging dog, both of whom live outside. She’s thoughtful enough that she’s taken some time off work, even though her boss has called twice to see when she’s coming back. I don’t know her very well yet, and maybe we’re not talking much, but I’m relieved I don’t have to be here by myself. I can’t think of anything lonelier than a stranger’s kitchen with nobody in it.

  “You hungry yet?” she asks me, checking the oven clock, which is still set to daylight savings instead of standard time because she doesn’t know how to reprogram it. You have to subtract an hour when you look at it. It’ll be right again in a couple of weeks.

  It’s impossible to think about food, let alone eat any. I shake my head.

  She starts cooking anyway, dirtying up some of the dishes from the drainer.

  “Help me, would you, Sasha?” she asks after a while. Each thing that happens with Phyllis—I can’t help but compare it to the way things were before. Michael didn’t let me cook. Maybe because he was a firefighter and he didn’t want me to use the stove. I don’t know how to do much, and anyway, the smell of potatoes browning in butter is making my stomach feel swimmy. I back away, shaking my head.

  “You don’t have to eat it,” Phyllis says, tipping a mess of steaming potatoes onto a plate. She runs cold water in the frying pan and steam hisses up out of the sink. “But I could use a little help with the dishes.” Her words are mild, and her tone is kind. “Sometimes it helps a person to keep busy.”

  At home, I’d have been busy with studying or putting on music to clean house with Michael. Every so often, when the mess got too huge, we’d put on one of our favorite albums—something old, like Bob Dylan or Elvis—and we would whip around the apartment armed with a broom or a vacuum or a bottle of Windex, and by evening we would be worn out from laughing and the place would look arguably worse than it did before, and we would go to sleep happy. I can’t remember ever washing a dish that was already clean, or cooking something that didn’t come from a box in the freezer.

  We eat in the living room, in front of the TV, only neither of us turns it on. I manage a bite or two of potatoes, but there are too many onions and not enough ketchup and my stomach still hurts. After dinner, Phyllis brings out the acoustic guitar with its bumper stickers and scratches, lifting it from a case lined with nicked red velveteen. I have never heard anybody play the guitar the way she does, a string at a time, not chords. She doesn’t look at written music. When she plays, she closes her eyes. There is no makeup on her cheeks, and her hair must be its natural color, because I have never seen this shade of gold-coming-on-silver on a box. She’s not a large person, but when she plays the guitar, her shoulders draw up taller and her legs relax out longer and her neck—I swear, her neck grows three inches as she tosses her head back and breathes songs up to the sky.

  I watch her fingers most: nails even but unpolished, fingers calloused and stubby. I like the way the skin dents in when she presses a guitar string. Her fingers are strong like Michael’s. Michael’s hands saved people from fires. Phyllis’s hands make music to distract the people left behind. She does not demand that I listen, but I’m caught, sitting on the floor next to the door, watching her fingers. There is a rug half under me, thin with years, on top of plywood. The way the strings snap back into place when she lets them go washes me in sadness. Like nothing you do ever really makes a difference.

  My mother used to sing, just like Phyllis. She had a song about sunshine she liked to sing in cold weather, and I swear I still get warmer whenever I hear it. She sang songs to make the rain go away and songs to get us out of bed in the morning. I used to love hearing her voice.

  There was one song, though, that I never liked to hear. She used to sing it on her saddest days. It’s all about a caged bird trying to get free. Phyllis does not look up or act startled when I start to sing along. I re
member the words. I remember them in my mother’s voice, and that’s what comes out of me, high and sad and longing.

  • • •

  There’s this thing that happens sometimes.

  The first time, I was eight. A few days after Michael and I got left alone, we were carrying groceries in from the car and I dropped the eggs. He’d told me six or eight times already to be careful, but I was certain I could handle them. This was the first normal thing we’d done since burying our father, and neither one of us was in very good shape. Michael had already snapped at one of his coworkers at the Save-Great for putting the granola bars on top of the bread, and now I’d gone and ruined the eggs. I hoped for just a second that they had survived; that the Styrofoam container had somehow protected them. But then I saw yolk oozing out.

  I looked up and saw Michael’s face, angry and tired and so much older than it had been the week before.

  And then I looked up and I saw Michael’s face again, now devastated and frightened, almost the way it looked at our father’s funeral. I thought it odd that his expression changed so quickly. And then I looked down because my knuckles hurt, and I found out that I wasn’t holding any of the grocery bags anymore, and the Styrofoam egg container was smashed into pieces, and the passenger-side mirror was hanging sideways off my dad’s truck, and I was out of breath.

  Michael took three full, shaky breaths, so slow and so loud I could hear them over the start of my own hiccupping sobs, and then he simply opened his arms and I flung myself into them and we both held on so tightly.

  It happened a second time last year, when Chris McKenzie died.

  I was in math class when Mr. Powell, the guidance counselor, stepped into the room. He had this look on his face that made my stomach feel cold, because I’d seen that look on my brother’s face twice and it never led anywhere good.

  I didn’t know Chris McKenzie well. He was an eighth grader and I was only in sixth. I knew where he’d been yesterday evening, though. I’d seen him setting things on fire in the parking lot of the Save-Great, watching bits of paper bag whoosh upward in flames, raining sparks down to where he stood. My brother was a firefighter, and even if he wasn’t, I’d have known it was stupid to light things on fire, but I was a sixth grader and Chris was in eighth. All I did was give him a mean look.