Free Verse

by Sarah Dooley

  • • •

  Hubert sits for a long while, reading to Mikey even though he’s asleep. Then staring at him and staring at him. I watch from the couch, peeking through the crack in the bedroom door. When Hubert falls asleep there on the floor, Mikey crawls out of bed and comes into the living room, trailing a quilt. He crawls onto the couch beside me. He curls up with his head on my shoulder. He sleeps after a while. He still hasn’t spoken.

  I stay awake.

  Which is good, because it takes three hours to get the house clean. Dust is swept out into the dark yard. Long-neglected corners are mopped as dawn is breaking, left to dry in the sun with the windows open. The cold autumn morning plays with the curtains and sprinkles leaves onto the rug.

  There are things I can’t fix and things I can. I can get the stains off the molding. I kneel with a dish sponge, inching around the length of the kitchen, then the living room, then Mikey’s room, then Hubert’s. I leave the bathroom till last, because the black mold has begun to grow up the shower and I don’t want to ruin the sponge until I’m finished with it. The sun hitches higher. I scrub and scrub.

  When ten o’clock rolls around and Mikey and Hubert are both still asleep, I turn on the TV to Saturday infomercials, the way Shirley would have done by now. I raise the volume, but nobody stirs. So I put my shoulder into the black mold and I toss the old sponge and I scrub-scrub-scrub with Shirley’s left-behind toothbrush. After a while, the bathroom tiles sparkle. They are paler blue than I thought. I take the rugs out onto the porch and shake them. Phyllis is out there with her new girl. They’re both bundled up, tossing a stick for Chip to fetch.

  “Phyllis.”

  Her head whips around sharply. “Lord above!” she exclaims. “Have I missed that voice!” She crosses to me and wraps me tightly in a hug. The girl drifts along behind her, looking lost.

  I wrap my arms around Phyllis, and I don’t let go when I say, “He’s home.”

  She moves quickly to hold me at arm’s length. “Mikey?” When I nod, her eyes fill up.”He’s okay. He’s still sleeping, but he’s okay.”

  “Well.” She wrings her hands, smooths my hair and then her new borrowed kid’s “Well. Miss Phoebe, I think this calls for a very special dessert. Will you help me in the kitchen?”

  The little girl nods shyly.

  “Miss Sasha, would you care to join us?”

  “I’m going to stay here,” I tell her. I can’t help but be a little jealous, with Phoebe getting Phyllis’s attention, but it’s more than that. “I want to be here when he wakes up.”

  • • •

  Mikey wakes before Hubert, at a little past one in the afternoon. I’ve tried to make breakfast, and mangled it. The biscuits are hard as stones. The gravy is too thin. I was probably supposed to grease a pan or something. I toss breakfast in the trash and sit next to Mikey while he finishes waking.

  “Hey,” he says.

  Mikey was only quiet for a single night, and I’m relieved to hear his voice. I think of how Hubert and Phyllis must feel, hearing my voice after months of quiet. Mikey sounds older than he used to, and he’s gotten taller. His hair, once spiky, has grown out past his ears and lies in soft, light brown tangles. He’s thinner and his eyes are set deeper in his lean face.

  “Hey,” I answer.

  I don’t know why, maybe because I haven’t heard his voice in so many months, maybe because I’ve barely heard my own voice in as many months, but all of a sudden I’m swallowed up by tears that need to fall, and sobs that need to whoop out before they crack my chest from the inside. I bolt off the couch and into the kitchen. I throw the skillet onto the stove again, determined to get these biscuits right.

  • • •

  Mikey and me and Hubert sit on Phyllis’s porch with the plate of muffins she and Phoebe have made for us. Chip and Stella are in the yard, picking over the ruined biscuits and gravy.

  “I’ll teach you,” Phyllis tells me every time my breath hitches from crying. I nod, even though I’m not crying about the stupid biscuits.

  Mikey has eaten three muffins. The rest of us take one apiece, except for Hubert, who doesn’t take any. We wait to see how many Mikey will want. He starts on a fourth. Though he’s had a long bath today, he’s still hiding under a layer of grime. He stops halfway through the fourth muffin and starts looking green around the edges.

  “Slow down, Mikey,” Phyllis says.

  He does, and now that his mouth isn’t full, we’re all waiting. He must know it, but he doesn’t start talking for the longest time, and I can relate.

  • • •

  Mikey is not very good at telling us the story. When I ask him how he survived alone, he says, “I thought about what you would do, Sash. And then I did that.”

  “Oh, holy crap. It’s a miracle you survived.”

  It takes him three days to get the whole story out. The police come, and talk to Mikey, and piece a few things together, but some things we still don’t know. Like how he survived the first week down in Alley Rush, before he caught a ride to Beckley and escaped outside the police station. We know he lived in someone’s outbuilding, but we can’t imagine what he ate or what he drank or how he stayed calm. I think about what I would have done, like Mikey said, and I don’t know.

  “I ate from the farmer’s market,” he says. “I stole stuff. I figured you’d say it was okay to steal stuff just for that week.”

  I squeeze him. “I would have said that,” I promise.

  He tells us that once he got to Beckley, he got adopted by a man living out on the street.

  “A vagrant,” the police say.

  “Gary,” is what Mikey says.

  Gary taught Mikey how to find food, and shelter, and sometimes money.

  “Found dead of advanced cirrhosis of the liver,” the police say.

  “Gary didn’t come back one night,” is what Mikey says.

  But Gary had taught Mikey well. So Mikey went out to find shelter on his own. He found it in an abandoned red train station far outside of town. He lived there alone for two long, scary nights, with, he swears, the sound of ghost trains. Then somebody else joined him there.

  Having seen his face on all the telephone poles, Mikey’s mother went out looking for him. At the same time we were on the street asking bored college people, she was looking in empty buildings and safe hiding places. She knew all the places a homeless child might sleep. She found him in the train station, and they set up house, the two of them together.

  “Family,” Mikey says. “Except she kept taking off.”

  “For how long?” Hubert asks, his voice pitched low and sad.

  “A couple days. And she’d come back different.”

  “At least she didn’t do that part in front of you,” Hubert says, and I realize where she went when she disappeared.

  “It got cold,” Mikey said. “I wanted us to find a house, but she didn’t care about that. So I called home.” His eyes travel from my face to his father’s, and his voice chokes up. “I thought it would be Shirley to answer. I didn’t know either one of you would be here.”

  “I know, buddy.” Hubert eases closer, wrapping an arm around his son’s shoulders. I want to say I’m sorry for making him think the worst about his dad, but the words get stuck in my throat.

  He isn’t crying, which amazes me, but his voice, when he says the last part, gets so small. “I thought she’d come with me.”

  Hubert pulls him roughly into a one-armed hug. “She wanted to,” he says. “She wants to. She’s just . . . it’s an illness, Mikey. An illness she’s been fighting for a long time.”

  The whole story ought to be written down. But I haven’t touched my notebook in days.

  27

  Me and Hubert work on the porch. Then on the windows. Instead of putting up plastic, we put in new glass. The wind stays out as November drops
the temperatures.

  Mikey works, too. His hands have gotten steadier. He works like he’s so much older than ten. On the coldest nights, he thinks of his mother. I know because those are the nights he doesn’t sleep. He’s like he used to be, quiet and wide awake. He sits up on the far end of the couch, and I stay on my end, but I keep a blanket around him. I never know what to say. He chews his fingers and he watches late-night movies that I shouldn’t let him watch. I turn down the movies at the worst parts, but I leave the TV on for light.

  At dawn, after Hubert leaves for work, Mikey falls asleep on the couch with his legs hanging off the edge. I think of a day a hundred years ago, Mikey asleep on the rug with an arm over Chip. I think we should be next door cooking muffins with Phyllis. But those days feel like something I dreamed. I don’t sit on her front porch at four a.m. anymore, though sometimes she still slips me an egg salad sandwich across the fence. I built the fence, with Hubert. Mikey followed behind us, holding the nails between his lips.

  I stay home for a couple of days with Mikey before Hubert says we both have to go back to school. Phoebe and Mikey climb onto the bus to the elementary school, and I wait for the middle school bus.

  Jaina’s sitting with some new friends, but she raises her chin at me when I get on the bus.

  “I heard your cousin came back,” she says.

  I smile a little, but I don’t know what to say. I shuffle my way to an empty seat as the bus starts moving again.

  Anthony is waiting at my locker. “Sasha! I heard there’s good news!”

  I nod.

  “Well? How is he? Is he all right?”

  I think of the Anthony Tucker who used to snap my bra strap and smell my hair, and I get a lump in my throat. He’s changed a lot since I started getting to know him. He even talks about poetry club in the hallways now.

  “He’s okay,” I say, and study his face for a reaction to hearing my voice. His eyebrows disappear under his hair, but I can tell he’s working to keep his expression calm.

  “Good,” he says, a slow smile creeping across his face. “Good, I’m really glad.”

  I smile back at him. “Hey . . . thanks for the . . . you know.”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “The poetry.”

  He laughs. “I mean, I didn’t invent it . . .”

  “No, but you wrote that note in my . . . in my notebook about sending my poems in, and . . . just, thanks, okay?”

  He’s still grinning. “You’re welcome. Hey. That reminds me. The prize list for the August contest is in, and we did not kick butt. Which means I need something amazing from you ASAP. Like, yesterday, if you can swing it. The deadline’s the end of November, and they announce the prizes in February. We need a win, Sasha! I need a win from my poetry club!” He loops an arm around my shoulder and escorts me down the hallway, still talking about how unjust it is that nobody from our junior high has ever won a poetry scholarship. It feels so natural to talk with Anthony again that I don’t even notice the other kids in the hallway staring when they hear my voice.

  • • •

  Two weeks past Mikey’s homecoming, Hubert Harless owns the cleanest house in the town of Caboose, and I own the emptiest notebook. I don’t understand where all my words have gone. In those quiet months when Mikey was missing, I never had trouble writing things down. Words poured out of my pen. Now that Mikey’s back, I have my voice again—I remind Mikey to wear a jacket or to eat his cereal or to take a bath—but my poetry has vanished. Six or seven times a day, I pick up my notebook, grip my pen, bend low, determined to write something to give to Anthony. I write a word or two and scratch them out. Write half a sentence and scratch it out. Nothing feels real. I feel like I’m still waiting for something big to happen, and until it does, I won’t know what to write.

  So I close the notebook. I drop the pen. Then I pick it up again and put it neatly in the pencil cup I’ve placed on Shirley’s computer desk, which we have moved to the living room to use as Mikey’s homework desk. I hide the notebook under the couch cushions, where it stays. Then I fluff the cushions. And I fold the quilt and hang it neatly over the back of the couch. And I pick up Mikey’s shoes from the rug and set them carefully by the door. And I get out the vacuum for the mud left behind. And before I know it, a whole evening has slipped by and Hubert is stomping in from work and I have coal dust to clean up. Outside, too, there is filth. I scrub every window in the house. The glass is new but already settled with a gray film of coal dust. It settles on everything for miles. I walk outside and stand on my tiptoes. The glass comes clean, sparkles like water. But by morning there’s a film on the windows again. The notebook stays hidden. The pen stays in the cup. I have rags and Windex. I do not have words.

  • • •

  I play with Mikey like nothing is wrong. He is ten years old. He needs to play. But I’m relieved, deep down, in secret, when Mikey starts going next door to play with Phoebe. I’m not able to play properly, and Mikey is annoyed with me for hounding him about homework and muddy shoes and not eating enough at dinner. I don’t even know why I’m doing these things, but they roll out before I can stop them. Sometimes I sound so much like my brother, Michael, that I wonder if this is how it was for him; if he cared so much, he couldn’t help what he was saying. The thought makes me feel better, both about disappointing Michael and about my harping on Mikey. Still, it’s good, I think, when he finds someone he likes to play with who won’t pester him about the things I can’t help pestering him about.

  Anyway, he and Phoebe are thick as thieves, building forts out of blankets, pouring chocolate chips into muffins. Phoebe finally starts speaking above a whisper once she starts playing with Mikey. I can hear their voices up and down the block. But at night in our house, he is still quiet. I start to think I’ve done something wrong to make him this way. We can’t find our rhythm. We’re awkward and out of sync. And at night, he barely sleeps. He can’t stay warm, or he’s too hot. At dinner he eats everything, or nothing at all, with no in between.

  • • •

  I keep expecting things to get better, but they don’t. And then I figure, maybe they won’t get better. Maybe this is just the way things are now.

  I’m elbow-deep in dishwater when I feel like somebody’s standing in the doorway, and I turn and find Mikey looking at me.

  “Sasha,” he says, “I’m real sorry.”

  “What are you sorry for? You’re not the one who messed up.”

  “Yeah, I did. I ran off without you. I let the cops get you.”

  “It’s not like they arrested me; they just gave me to Hubert. Mikey, I’m sorry.” I cross to him, pulling a dish towel from the oven handle to dry my hands, and stop just shy of him. “I’m really sorry. Hubert was just fine. I didn’t . . . I was so scared to find out, but he was fine. I shouldn’t have made us run away.”

  “I went with you on purpose,” Mikey said. “I didn’t want you to run away without me. When you first moved in with Phyllis, Dad told me you was sad and maybe you needed a friend, and I thought if you ran off, you wouldn’t have anybody, so I went with you.”

  The words make my throat close up with tears. While I was dragging Mikey out of town to protect him, he was trying to protect me by playing along. All at once, I’ve got my arms around him, and he’s squeezing me around the middle.

  “I was so scared for you,” I whisper. “Mikey Harless, don’t you scare me like that ever again!”

  “Promise,” he mumbles into my T-shirt.

  • • •

  Once Mikey goes back out to play, I return to the dishes, standing where Shirley always stood. In Phyllis’s window I can see dirty dishes piled high in her sink, and I know she’s out on the porch watching Phoebe and Mikey, doing more important things than dishes. I think how Shirley must have felt these last few years, standing here, washing dishes for a man who didn’t love her enough. Con
densation drips down the inside of my window, and my hair is curling with the dampness. So it takes me some time to realize there are tears running down my cheeks and plopping off my chin.

  When the poem hits, I’m so surprised that I drop the mug I’m washing. It breaks, and the pieces disappear in the dishwater, shards to find and deal with later. I scramble so quickly for my pen, I knock the cup off the desk, and pens and pencils scatter and roll. I fall onto the couch and dig for my notebook. I rip open to a blank page, and little bits of paper from the spirals scatter down into the blankets. I’m undoing all the clean that’s been keeping me distracted. I have words.

  28

  I won’t speak. Not permanently—just right now, because I’m nervous. So Anthony does. He reads my new poem out loud. His voice rises and falls.

  Afterward, he waits. Nobody says anything. For a minute, they’re like me.

  Lisa adjusts her neckline, which is lower than the dress code technically allows. Jaina is sitting with Lisa and their new friend, Maggie. The other girls pick at their fingernails. I watch Jaina for a minute, and she looks at me. She smiles just a little. I know Jaina tried to be my friend. She tried really hard, but I didn’t try back. It’s harder with her than with Anthony. Anthony is okay with quiet.

  It’s Miss Jacks who breaks the silence, shaking her head and letting out a long breath. “Well,” she says. “Sasha, welcome back.”

  • • •

  Anthony catches up with me in the hallway with the cracking, sinking linoleum and the smell of old flood. He leans against the lockers, and he looks at me and looks at me.