Free Verse (14 page)

Hubert lets out this awful noise, halfway between a sigh and a sob, before he answers. “There was a lot of hurt in Aster's life,” he says. “And she didn't have . . .” He draws this funny little picture in the air with his hands, like he just can't find the right words to explain. “She didn't have the right kind of mind to deal with all that hurt. So she had to find a way to make it stop hurting, and the way she found was drugs.”

I look from Hubert's face to the ceiling of the truck, headliner sagging and stuck up with thumbtacks. I think about what Hubert's telling me, and this feeling swims up in me, this horrifying feeling that I shouldn't be having, this feeling that might be envy.

“Why'd she take him?”

“Well, she loved him, Sasha.”

“Why'd she take him and Judy didn't take me?” Hubert twists in his seat to look at me.

“Judy left when I was five. And she wasn't sick. She felt like a caged bird who wanted to get free. Why didn't she take me?” I think of what my life would be like if my mother had taken me with her all those years ago. I wouldn't have had to wait for news of Ben's death. I wouldn't have had to watch Michael be lowered into the ground. I think of all the places my big brother wanted me to see, how much work he put into making sure I would see them. I think how maybe our mother has seen them all already. She could have saved Michael so much worry
and trouble, and she could have saved me from all these sad things.

“Do you wish she had taken you?” Hubert asks. “What about your dad and your brother? What would they have done without you?”

I think of Frisbee in the graveyard with Michael. I think of rowdy housecleaning days set to loud music. There would have been no arm wrestling and hugs from Ben, no kisses hello and good-bye when he came home and left again for the mines. There would have been no poetry club. No finger-bone muffins with Mikey and no four a.m. egg salad with Phyllis.

But I would never have met Mikey. I latch onto that thought.

“She should have taken me with her,” I say, “so I wouldn't have had the chance to lose Mikey.” I've never felt as terrible about anything as I do right now about this.

Hubert sighs and lets his arm drape across me. “Try to get some sleep, little lady,” he says in a low, rough voice. I close my eyes.

•   •   •

In the morning, I help Hubert gather up the blanket to drag it into the motel. “Paid for a whole room and used one blanket,” Hubert mutters. “Danged expensive blanket if you ask me.”

In the bathroom, I look at the mirror. The glass is smooth. I don't look past it at the girl in the reflection.

We climb into the truck. But it takes a long time for Hubert to turn the key. It takes a long time for Hubert to put the truck into drive. It takes a long time for Hubert to press the gas and aim us toward the road.

•   •   •

When we search in the direction of Caboose, my heart beats faster. My breath gets louder. I'm most calm when we search the other direction, toward Beckley and the rest of the world.

We see a lot of the area today. We see more yellow ribbons tied on more power poles. We see more signs, in store windows and out front of churches:
OUR PRAYERS ARE WITH THE DOGWOO
D FAMILY
and
PRAY FOR OU
R COAL MINERS
and
WE LOV
E OUR MINORS
, which is spelled wrong, which makes it fit both my situations but still makes me want to cry.

“What happened the other day?” I ask.

Hubert's scanning the tree line. “Which day?” he asks. “You're going to have to be a little more specific.”

“At work.” He's told me the basics—that he was stuck a few hours and he never got hurt—but the ribbons and the signs in Alley Rush let me know there's more to the story.

“Oh,” he says.

“There's all these ribbons.”

“Yeah.” His voice is sad. “Freak accident. Couldn't have been avoided.”

“Did people die?”

He swallows, hard. “Two, probably. They ain't found them yet. Two more got hurt.”

“Why do you go back?”

“It's my job.”

“Hubert, I don't get it. That makes five people killed this year.”

“It ain't usually like that, Sasha.”

“So just every
few
years, a bunch of people die?”

“If you don't get it, then you just don't.” Hubert sounds exasperated. He tugs at his mustache and his voice softens. “I don't mean you, Sash. I mean everybody. People think it's crazy, that we're hillbillies back in the mountains digging coal because we don't know no better. They wouldn't last a day. You got to be smart and know your sh—stuff. The equipment, the training—it's not some dumb hillbilly job. My dad worked the strip job. He was the explosives guy. You know how precise you got to be to handle explosives?” He glances sideways, seems to realize who he's talking to. “I mean, no, I don't reckon you do. Least you better not.” Half a smile. “I've worked the strip job and I've been underground, and the only thing I can tell you is, I love my job. Every time I flip on the damn light, I think,
I did that.
What would this place be without the guy in my job?”

“But if something bad happens to the guy in your job, where would his family be?” I sneak a hand across the truck seat until my pinkie and Hubert's pinkie are close enough to touch.

He looks at me again, quick and startled, and then at the road, and then back at me.

“Well, shoot, Sasha,” he says. “I ain't got an easy answer for you on that one.”

•   •   •

We see houses in town that lean toward each other like they're cheating on a test. Kids' bicycles and plastic turtle-shaped sandboxes and electric scooters litter yards while their eight-year-old owners sit on the steps, playing with handheld video games. Teenage girls walk together in groups of three or four, passing cigarettes back and forth. Boys shove each other and gas up their four-wheelers. Women wrestle babies into loud trucks with big tires and cutout silhouettes of coal miners taking up the rear windows, stickers that read
COAL MINER'S WIFE
or
CO
AL MINER'S DAUGHTER
.

We leave town. Outside it, there is space between the houses. Trailers climb hills like mountain goats. Pit bulls and German shepherds pace grooves around the trees they're chained to. There are still kids' bicycles and plastic turtle-shaped sandboxes.

Farther out, there are cows, and tired horses with sharp backbones. There's a rooster standing on a barn roof. There's a shiny green tractor stuck in the mud. There are half a dozen leaning grain silos, ribs showing, siding worn through. There's an eerie blank spot against the sky, an abandoned screen from a drive-in theater that closed more
than a decade ago, back when this used to be a town. Every few miles, a low-slung building covered in dead vines of ivy claims a wide spot next to the road, windows boarded up and peppered with buckshot from somebody's target practice. Nothing has been open for miles, not even the front doors of houses.

We keep driving until there's nothing but road, with a steep climb on one side and a drop-off on the other. Trees reach across the road to touch branches over top. With all the leaves leaning low, the sky never seems to get all the way light, even when there is sun.

•   •   •

We stop searching long enough to head back to the motel for lunch. Hubert insists. He says Grace will take me away if I'm not fed. He says he's supposed to be my temporary guardian and a temporary guardian at the very least makes sure the temporarily guarded is fed.

We're almost to town when Hubert slams on the brakes. He curses and punches the wheel. There is a truck jackknifed in the road up ahead. The traffic snakes away in front of us, a sea of brake lights. Nobody is moving. Fear comes up in me so quick I can't contain it.
We are all stuck. We are all stuck. We are all stuck.

I panic. I aim to move the glass.

•   •   •

In case I get upset again, Hubert requires me to wait at the motel. This is not an ideal situation, he says. Who
knows what trouble I might get into at the motel? But I have to wait somewhere, and he has to look for Mikey. We're three days out, and every day he's missing, he gets that much harder to find. Hubert says a few other choice words, too, mostly to himself and mostly words I'm not supposed to say. I can't tell exactly whether he's angry or whether he's just upset and overwhelmed like I was in the car when I started trying to fight my way out. I didn't make a dent in the windshield, of course, but I reopened the cut on my hand. Hubert wraps it up clumsily for me before he starts to leave.

He's halfway out the door when I start crying, snot-nosed, hiccupping, out-loud bawling. I don't see it coming and am caught midstep between the TV and the bed. I think I was reaching for the remote.

•   •   •

We wait until Phyllis arrives in her little car. It rises when she climbs out of it. She hugs Hubert in the parking lot. She talks quietly to him. She climbs the steps. I stare at my reflection in the window. Tangled hair. Tangled brow.

Phyllis comes in softly and hugs me. I'm all right until I see that she has brought egg salad. Egg salad is for front porches and four a.m. It's for mornings when Mikey will be out in an hour. I shove the egg salad into the trash can. I fall onto her shoulder and grip a handful of her shirt. She smooths my back over and over and whispers, “Sweet Sasha.”

•   •   •

Phyllis orders us a pizza without mentioning the cost or the wasted sandwiches. While we wait, she washes my face. She lays the washcloth against my neck. She digs a brush from her purse and works on my hair. She runs down to her car and brings back some of my clothes, old and worn and clean.

“Take a shower, love,” she says. “Get into something fresh.”

I sit. I think of Mikey's torn jeans. I think of Mikey filthy. I think,
My fault my fault my fault.
I think I don't deserve to be clean.

“You'll feel better,” Phyllis coaxes. She goes into the bathroom. I can see her in the mirror, turning on the shower, testing the temperature. She fluffs a towel twice, three times, with shaky hands. She looks like she'll feel better if I take the shower, so I do. I have a hard time breaking the seal on the tiny shampoo bottles with the motel logo on them. My hands have no strength behind them. I think of Phyllis, the first time I saw her hands after her GUI-tar was broken. I think of holding Mikey's hand, pulling him along. I think of tossing the Frisbee with Michael, wrestling the remote from him. I think of my hands thumb-wrestling with Ben, holding his hand when I was little. I flex my fingers. Hands can be tired from not doing the things they want to do.

I stand in the shower. I count the seconds. Each slow second, each stubborn second, I will myself to be in some other place, some other time, but nothing happens except my fingers get pruny. So many seconds go by, I forget how to stop. I lose myself in the counting. I don't know what comes next. I don't know what comes next. I don't know what comes next.

In the middle of the night, without opening my eyes, I ask, “What if we don't find him?”

Hubert sighs, and I hear the bedsprings and his knees creak as he sinks onto the other bed.

“It's two in the morning, little lady.”

“He's not with his mom. She's not there to bring him back. What if he never comes back, Hubert? What if I lost him for real?” Now I crack an eye open to look at him. In the light of the TV he's left on for distraction, he looks old and gray.

“That boy was lost long before you came along,” Hubert says. “I think you found a little piece of him I never could.”

“What do you mean? What piece?”

“The piece that smiles.” I see Hubert's mustache twitch. I remember Mikey saying he laughed a lot in Caboose, but
I know it isn't true. At least, not
real
laughs, at something more than a gross scene in a movie or a joke you've played on someone.

“Did he smile a lot?” I ask. “You know—before his mom?”

“He was a silly kid. Always laughing and running off to get into things. Probably part of why Aster couldn't stay away with him more than a couple of days. She was having trouble keeping him up. Keeping him, you know, safe and all.” He tugs his mustache, hard. Works his jaw. “She could see herself sometimes. Just every once in a while. She could see . . . well, it was like the mirror always had the sun caught in it and all she could see was its reflection, blinding. Then, every once in a while, there'd come a cloud over top, and she'd see herself the way she really was. Skinny and sick . . .” He rolls away from me.

I think of how Ben missed Judy for years, even though she left. I take a chance on a question that's none of my business. “How can you love Aster and Shirley both?”

He's quiet so long, I think he's gone to sleep. But then he says, “I love 'em different, Sasha.”

“Different how?”

“It's two in the morning,” he repeats. “Go to sleep, little lady.”

I think of Shirley and her apple kitchen, her dishpan hands, her two little girls born barely a year apart.

“Does Shirley know you love 'em different?”

“God.” The word is more breath than voice. “You sure have some questions, you know that?”

“I just don't get it.”

“Lord, Sasha, nobody gets it. It's just—it's how it works, you know? Everybody you love, you're gonna love different. Only I didn't know . . . I didn't know
how
different before I married Shirley.” He coughs his smoker's cough a couple of times. “She's a good woman, Sasha. I know she's got her faults. We all got our faults. But she's a good woman. She deserves better than . . .” He clears his throat. “It's two in the damn morning, Sasha. Get some sleep.”

But I don't. I slip out of bed and cross the room to Hubert; give him the quickest of pecks on the cheek.

“Night,” I say before retreating to my own bed.

Startled, he looks after me with grim eyes and a kind smile. “Night, Sash.”