Free Verse

by Sarah Dooley

  When bad things happen only to one family, it feels different. Still, everybody knows. Still, everybody has heard about your cousin skipping town and disappearing in the woods. Everybody has heard about you and the boy’s father, the two of you clueless, searching and searching. They murmur. They use complete sentences: “Bless their hearts” and “You think he’ll turn up?”

  I close myself to the murmurs. I close myself to the talk. I close myself to the little voices who think they know what I’m going through.

  I sit on the bench in Town Center. I look at the yellow ribbons. I wonder where Mikey’s flowers are. Before I leave, I thread my fingers through a handful of purple clovers and yellow dandelions. They come up by the root. Tendrils reach down through clumps of dirt like fingers trying to hold on. I knock the mud out of their grip. I spill them across the steps of the caboose, where they will wilt and die by morning.

  25

  Hubert doesn’t look like himself when he hasn’t been in the mines. He’s too clean and he’s not wearing coveralls. Of course, he’s still in jeans and flannel, so I can still tell it’s him. But he’s off somehow. His eyes are different. Squintier. He tugs at his beard all the time.

  “He may have”—except he pronounces it like may of—“got seen in Beckley,” he says. “I’ll drive up that way after dinner.”

  Shirley looks up from her plate of burnt cube steak. It’s the first week of summer vacation. We’re eating dinner too early, since Hubert has been home today. It’s barely five. We usually eat later, seven or eight, sometimes even nine if Hubert is late getting home. “To Beckley? Tonight?”

  “I’ll go with you,” I say.

  Hubert nods. I sag with relief. He could easily say no. He could easily say I’m too much trouble.

  Shirley goes back to her plate. Her face is gathered like fabric around a pulled thread.

  “We don’t got a lot of money for gas,” she says, but she says it quiet, like she doesn’t expect an answer. I glace up at her quickly and then at the girls, but nobody seems to notice me.

  Sara is singing a song about the cube steak. She makes it up as she goes along. “This is my dinner, my dinner is good! This is my dinner, my dinner is yummy! This is my dinner, my dinner is awesome!” Her words all blur together like she isn’t sure where one ends and the next begins.

  “Awesome,” Marla repeats, sticking her fingers in Sara’s plate. Sara screeches and slaps her sister’s fingers. Marla wails, but nobody pays any attention. Hubert is staring past the girls, toward Beckley. Shirley stabs the meat so hard her fork hits the plate with a shriek.

  Hubert turns to look at Shirley. “What do you expect me to do?” His voice is just a little louder, just a little faster, than usual. Marla keeps grabbing for things from Sara’s plate, but Sara is staring at her father now. Her gaze darts rabbit-quick to me and then back to Hubert.

  “I expect you to go get him. Of course I expect you to go get him.” And I believe her. Her face is so tired. But something’s still wrong.

  “I could find him tonight,” Hubert says. “I could get him home.”

  “I know, Hugh. I know. You need to go.”

  “Then what—”

  “Nothing.” She stands quickly, scraping her chair back, and tips her dinner into the disposal. “I want you to find him. I want him home safe. Marla, no.” The baby, dry of tears now, is trying to feed Sara fistfuls of mashed potatoes, and her sister is dodging.

  Hubert stands, too, and rescues Sara from her sister, planting her on his hip and kissing the side of her face. He can’t seem to get enough of hugging and holding the girls since Mikey’s been gone.

  “I’m just worried,” Shirley says. “We got so many bills and you’ve missed so many days. I’m just worried if you’re not at work tomorrow . . .” But she dusts her hands off over the sink and nods sharply before unbuckling Marla from her high chair. “But we can worry about that later.”

  The way she says it sounds odd. I know Hubert notices, too, because we look at each other and back at her. But she takes the baby to change, leaving us behind her.

  • • •

  Every time Hubert’s truck tops a mountain, I think we’re there. But Beckley still slips up on me, a slow thickening of the houses by the road. I’ve been to Beckley plenty of times, but I was a lot younger. I thought it would be more familiar, but either it or I have changed.

  Hubert talks to the police for a minute. There’s a lot of nodding and a lot of pointing and a whole big lot of frowning. Afterward, my cousin climbs back in the truck. He puts it in gear and rolls away from the police, who have already turned to attend to other matters.

  “He was saw for sure,” Hubert says, and he drives us onto brick streets. “A fellow from Alley Rush picked him up walking and tried to take him to the police. Mikey ducked the guy and ran. Headed this way, s’posedly.”

  “He was found for a minute?” I think about this. For a whole chunk of time, Mikey wasn’t missing anymore. Mikey ducked and ran. Mikey wants to be missing. This is scary, this is upsetting, this is—this is really good news. As of this morning, Mikey was alive and well and ducking Good Samaritans. My heart soars.

  I think we’re going to head home, but then Hubert pulls us over to the curb. As I follow him out of the truck, I scan the sidewalks. It’s nearly nine, but it’s so warm and summery out that no one has headed inside yet. People are laughing, talking, bringing their dogs out for a last quick walk. It seems an odd place for a nine-year-old to be lost. Everybody looks happy. They are cleaner here than farther south, and there are fewer people wearing reflective coveralls.

  The town is pretty this evening. We have to step out of the road to avoid a fast-moving Hummer. Immediately I trip into a group of college students walking together. This town is faster and busier than I’m used to. I wonder how Mikey feels about it, whether it excites or frightens him.

  “Excuse me,” Hubert says to the college students, who walk away after giving me an irritated look. They walk faster when Hubert speaks, like maybe we’re going to kidnap them or ask them for loose change.

  “There’s a missing child,” I blurt. “Wait!”

  They stop and wait like I’ve asked, but they don’t move any closer. They’re carrying backpacks too big for them. They look like they’re in a hurry.

  “This is him,” Hubert says, pulling out a picture of Mikey. It’s one of those school pictures nobody likes. It says “Proof Copy” diagonally across the middle.

  The students look, shake their heads. “Sorry.” They scurry away. “Good luck,” one of them adds over her shoulder. Her backpack swings.

  We walk the opposite direction so they won’t think they’re being followed. We show Mikey’s picture to everybody we find. The people in town all have sympathy because they’ve seen him on TV, and ideas about where he might be hiding because they know the area, and stories about how one time a kid was missing and turned up safe a hundred miles away, or walked all the way back home on his own, or never came back and it’s a shame. None of the stories help, and they take up precious time, but Hubert never rushes. He nods thoughtfully and lets each person speak.

  We wave Mikey’s picture until it’s too dark to see it and the number of people on the sidewalk dwindles to almost zero. We have covered blocks and blocks of town. If Mikey were with us, I would have loved to walk around the town like this.

  “Did anybody check the hospital?” I ask Hubert as we climb into the truck.

  “All the hospitals know to look for him,” Hubert says.

  “I mean . . . I mean his mom’s hospital,” I say, remembering the papers we found in the box in the shed, the ones from when his mom went into treatment.

  “They been on lookout,” he says. “But it don’t matter.”

  “Why not?”

  “Aster ain’t there anymore. Hasn’t been for some time. She ran off again a long time
ago.” He curses, and lights up a cigarette. “He’s his mother’s son, that’s for sure.”

  • • •

  We look for Mikey in Beckley the next three days. And we pester his mother’s hospital for news of a possible sighting. Now that we know Mikey was headed in this direction, it seems to make sense that maybe he’s trying to find his mother. He knows where the hospital is from the papers we found from her treatment. And he’s my cousin. He’s a lot like me. He would want to find family if he could.

  • • •

  Thursday night is when I give up. This is the night we stay in Beckley till after ten, taping Mikey’s serious little face to all the telephone poles. I watch people walk past the poles without looking. I realize we won’t find him this way. Later, I lie perfectly still on the lumpy couch. I lie on top of the blanket Shirley gave me. I put my fingers in my ears until everyone is quiet. I lie awake.

  Maybe he got to his mother’s hospital by now, without being seen somehow. Maybe he found out about his mother, how she ran away. How she disappeared in the night like mothers do. I’m relieved that he’s alive. But I can’t help thinking, if he does know about his mom, then this is a night when he needs somebody. A dad or a cousin. Somebody. By now he might know that his mother is gone. That she’s slipped through his fingers and he will probably never see her again.

  He will never see her again.

  I know I’m being stupid. I know that if Mikey reached the hospital, somebody would have called us. Somebody would have caught him.

  At midnight, I slip off the couch. I ease myself through the quiet house one footstep at a time. I open the front door slow enough it doesn’t creak. I slip out into the darkness.

  I walk until the moon has crossed my narrow wedge of sky and dropped out of sight past the trees. As the sky darkens, I stop outside a closed, narrow storefront with its windows and doors boarded up. The smell of wet, burnt wood is faint but still present.

  Something rustles in the shadows. I stop walking toward the ruins and wait for it to be something scary. Instead it’s a cat, a lanky tabby with glowing eyes. It meows a warning and then slinks away.

  I slink away, too. My feet take me down familiar roads. I climb the stairs from the Dumpster again, let myself into the empty apartment I used to share with Michael. I’m not scared of the dark apartment this time. I can make it past the kitchen, into the pitch-black living room. I feel with my fingers down the hallway to the bedrooms. Michael’s bedroom. Then the one I shared with him back when we still had Ben. I lie on the floor where my bed would have been. I turn off an imaginary lamp, pull up an imaginary blanket, imagine I am sleeping.

  I let memories fill up my head for a while. Me and Michael at four and fourteen, playing flashlight tag. He was always a good big brother, even when he was a kid. Me and Michael at ten and twenty, staying up to set off fireworks at midnight on New Year’s.

  Me and Michael at five and fifteen, sitting down at the kitchen table for a serious talk with Ben. Noticing he was the only parent in the room.

  Me and Michael at eight and eighteen, cleaning the house, waiting for word.

  I have to think about breathing. In-in-in. Out slow. But it doesn’t seem to work this time, and tears well up from somewhere. I want to scream and sob and break things, but all that happens is, I lie perfectly still and tears drip down the sides of my face into my hair. The night passes one wide-awake minute at a time.

  • • •

  I guess I fall asleep around dawn. I know because when I wake, it’s completely daylight, and I can see that the apartment walls are not the right color. There is a ladder in the corner, near the front door. There are drop cloths. There are paint cans.

  I scurry out. I feel desperate, like I’m late for something. I run. I need to reach home before anybody realizes I’m gone. But I know it’s too late for that; the sun’s already up. I feel a stab of guilt, adding to the missing persons list in the Harless household. I run faster. I trip. I’m never as fast as I need to be.

  Bloody knees and scratched-up palms are the first things to reach Hubert’s door. He flings it open as I get there. He has the phone in his hand, says into it, “Never mind, she’s home.” He is red from head to toe; even his shirt is red. His hand on my elbow is rough.

  “What the hell was you thinking?”

  I’ve never heard his voice like this. The last voice I heard like this was Ben’s. Michael never raised his voice or grabbed me this way. I scramble backward, wrench free from Hubert’s grip. He follows, and I can feel his footsteps shaking the porch. We will have to spend some time this summer firming it up with wooden joists, knocking in nails till it can weather storms like this.

  “Dang it, Sasha!”

  I trip down the stairs. I spin in the dirt and run. My heart has gone ahead of my brain. In my brain, everything is calm and slow. But my heart pounds. My hands shake.

  I have one foot on the road when Hubert gets hold of me again. He pulls me back by my shirt, and I almost fall. A noise escapes me, something like the noise Michael made when they told us Ben was dead. Hubert lets go of me and balls his fists against his pockets for a second. Then he turns around and starts beating the hell out of his pickup truck, cursing and kicking till the door dents in. Curses spill out of him. I stand a few feet away, wishing I could run. My feet feel like they’ve grown roots. My brain has caught up and now my heart feels too slow.

  Hubert stops beating up the truck and stands still except for his shoulders, which go up and down. His face is violet, but it’s starting to fade back to red. There’s blood on his knuckles, and I hand him a rag out of the back of the truck.

  Hubert won’t look at me. He reaches for me and I tense, but this time he means to hug me. He squeezes me to him. I can smell his sweat and feel his muscles. After a minute he lets me go. He walks toward the porch without saying a word or waiting for me to follow.

  • • •

  We don’t look for Mikey the next day, or the next day. Each day I expect that we will, and then the sun rises, and then it walks across the sky, and then it sinks, and we still haven’t managed to get out of the house. Hubert has all but stopped going to the mines. I don’t even know if he still has a job. He doesn’t speak except to Marla and Sara, who are louder than usual, picking up on all the stress. They’re in trouble all the time with Shirley. Hubert is too clean to be Hubert. He walks out to the shed after dinner. I stand at the door and watch him organize and reorganize the boxes. To my horror, he stops and hides his face in his hands for a while, and his shoulders shake. I turn away quickly.

  Inside, Shirley’s got the TV on. Since Dogwood, the old arguments have flared up again on the local news: Is coal worth the cost? Is there a better source of energy? Are the jobs worth it when our miners aren’t safe?

  But nobody in this town is safe. Doesn’t matter if you mine coal or don’t. You can fight a fire. You can be nine years old. I think about my last words to Michael and how they were probably “Later!” or “After a while!” I think about telling Mikey, “I’ll catch up!” Before Ben left for his night shift, and when Judy put me to bed, I probably told each of them I’d see them in the morning. None of those things turned out to be true.

  When Hubert says good night that evening, I don’t say it back.

  POETRY NEWSLETTER

  I print the first one

  and I tape it in my book.

  I don’t email back.

  ONE

  I had a friend once.

  We spent our days on the porch.

  Now I’m alone here.

  QUIET

  I do not talk now.

  I do not talk to people.

  I do not have words.

  IF

  If Ben and Judy

  were here right now, I would not

  say a word to them.

  THE MISSING MINERS

  Shirley’s TV says

/>   they’re still looking for bodies.

  Oh God, I forgot.

  IN OTHER NEWS

  Shirley’s TV says

  they’re still looking for Mikey.

  It’s coming Week Five.

  AND NOW FOR THE WEATHER

  Shirley’s TV says

  it’s the perfect summer day.

  Enjoy yourself, folks!

  THE DAY THEY FIND THE MINERS

  All the major stations show

  the weeping and the flowers.

  Then the weatherman arrives

  to speak of summer showers.

  “FILL THE MINER’S HAT” DONATION STATION

  Signs go up at Save-Great:

  “If you can, please give!”

  I don’t know who the money’s for.

  Nobody lived.

  MIKEY

  We do look for him, but we don’t feel

  like we will ever find him. Still,

  this is not something we say out loud.

  We keep silent. That’s our deal.

  FUNERALS

  Hubert doesn’t go to work

  and he doesn’t go pay his respects.

  Shirley nags and nags at him.

  I don’t know what she expects.

  SUMMERS PAST

  This time last year, I dozed upside down on the couch

  with my feet on the wall and my head on the floor.

  Summer day after summer day dripped by like lemonade.

  I complained and complained, “Michael, I’m bored!”