Free Verse (15 page)

They call off the search at the start of June, a week after Mikey disappeared into the woods. They say,
We're still looking for your son.
They say,
This doesn't mean you should give up hope.
And while they talk, they call the teams in out of the forest. Weary Alley Rush folks dust themselves off and head into their houses, chins low, shoulders stooped. They say,
We wanted this to have a happy ending.
They say,
Everybody wanted this to have a happy ending.

They can't stay in the woods forever. I understand that. But I think they could have stayed in the woods another five minutes, and then another five minutes, and then another five minutes. How do they know they aren't that close to finding Mikey? They could be giving up fifteen minutes short of bringing my cousin home safe.

He might not be in the Alley Rush area anymore,
the police tell Hubert.
He might have made it to the next town. Or maybe somebody picked him up.
Hubert winces.
We've got a missing child alert out nationwide. We've got his face all over. We can't keep these men in the woods; their families need them.

This is the first time that I can tell, truly and without a doubt, that Hubert is my cousin. We don't talk. He doesn't talk and I don't talk. We stare at the police officer's pale green eyes until he closes them, looks away, studies his knuckles. We don't have to talk; I know he hears us. We have family that needs us, too.

•   •   •

It is true, though, that every square inch of the woods around Alley Rush has been searched. Mikey isn't there. He isn't anywhere.

•   •   •

Shirley says Hubert has to go back to work, and Grace says I have to go back to school. There are only a handful of days left, and I need to take my tests. We don't care about work and school, but Shirley and Grace have ways of making us do things we don't want to do.

We drive down and down. I watch the sky get grayer, the trees get grittier, the night get darker. Lighted windows up toward Alley Rush look bright and warm, but the closer we get to Caboose, the dimmer the lighted
windows look. Some of the windows still have their heavy plastic up from winter, and the lights behind them are blurry. I watch clean cars give way to filthy trucks. I watch sidewalks give way to train tracks.

We crunch onto the shoulder at the end of the lawn, and Hubert shuts off the engine. I hear forest sounds, thick and heavy, birds and crickets. After a week at the motel in Alley Rush, it's odd to hear forest sounds in the middle of town. I look at the trees all around us. I think if we had carved them up like the people of Alley Rush, we wouldn't be able to hear woods sounds now. I feel like a stranger, like a traveler. I feel an odd relief to be home.

I won't get out of the truck. I won't go inside the house, go to sleep in a bed, eat food. I won't allow life to continue without Mikey. I won't get out of the truck. I won't.

Except Marla and Sara are on the porch. Sara looks older, just in the week we've spent away. She's growing to look more like her mother all the time. Marla takes after Hubert with her round face that is almost always a breath away from smiling.

I itch to hold the babies, to tickle under their arms until they squeal, to hold them tight while they fall asleep on my shoulder. I get out of the truck.

I try to will Mikey to be waiting on the porch. I will him to find his way home. But I don't think Mikey could find home if he wanted. He followed me through the
woods on our way out. He followed
me
, not the creek, not the highway. It won't occur to him to turn around, to retrace the highway to the creek, to retrace the creek to our front porches. Even if it did occur to him, I made my case. I talked him out of ever coming home just a few hours before he vanished. If he's looking for me, this is the last place he'd expect to find me.

Hubert asks me where I want my things. Am I okay sharing a room with the babies? Sleeping in Mikey's bed? Or would I rather sleep on the couch? Would I rather be in a space by myself even if it's the couch? I forgot I don't live with Phyllis anymore. Phyllis is the neighbor. She's not my foster parent anymore. Upstairs in her house is an empty bedroom and, if I know her, a perfectly made bed with an old quilt smoothed on top. She's waiting for another borrowed kid, waiting for a new, maybe not so drastic set of problems. She is waiting to teach somebody else how to cook.

I hurt for Michael. The county watched us, but there was no worry about them taking me away and giving Michael some other kid. Michael and I were bound by blood and everything we'd lost. We watched our mother walk away. We waited for our dad to come back. We were connected in ways I will never be connected to anybody else.

And now there is no Michael.

And there is no Mikey.

I am connected to no one.

I am still staring at Hubert, and he is waiting for my answer. I can't begin to imagine taking Mikey's bed.

“The couch,” I say.

•   •   •

Shirley takes Marla from me when we walk into the house. She has lines around her mouth.

I see Sara mimic her frown. I kiss the top of Sara's head.

Shirley changes Marla while I follow Sara, picking up the things she's dropped on the floor—her shoes, her pants, the hair bow Shirley insists on. There's a trail of freedom behind Sara. She doesn't like to be stuck, even in clothes. I gather up her stuff and make a pile on the nightstand. Immediately, Marla appears to scavenge.

“Sossa,” she says. It's as close as she can get to my name. I think it sounds like
salsa
, and it makes me smile. She's talking more than she was even a week ago. She tugs her loose diaper up with her free hand and stands on her tippy-toes. I lean over so she can kiss my cheek, a sloppy, wet little smack.

“Ew, you're yucky,” I tease.

“Gucky.” She beams and sticks a finger in her nose. I guess somebody's told her one too many times that nose-picking is yucky, and now she thinks that's what
yucky
means.

“Yeah, that's gucky, too. Quit that.” I tug her hand away
from her nose and tickle her under the armpit. She folds sideways with a shriek.

“Don't get them girls rowdied up before bedtime,” Shirley says from the door.

I rush to stand. “Sorry.” I don't know how to act in Shirley's house. It's so strange to be here at night and without Mikey.

“Sleep tight,” Shirley says when she hands me blankets for the couch. “Hubert, you gonna read to them girls?”

I don't recognize the book, but it sounds sweet and far away. I lie in the next room and stare at the ceiling with its long cracks from the cold and its low-hanging bulb with no cover. The blanket scratching my skin smells like cigarette smoke. The couch is lumpy in a specific pattern. My feet are in a groove where Shirley must sit. My hips are down even lower in Hubert's spot. The rest of me is on firm cushion where the girls don't make a dent. And there's a rip above my head. Mikey's place.

After the story stops, and I hear Hubert clumping away into his room, Shirley's voice rattles out, hopping mad about something. I hear my name. I hear the back-and-forth of their voices without hearing any words. There is never a point where I hear the voices stop, but eventually I realize they have.

I roll over. The apple-shaped night-light from the kitchen sketches shadows on the floor. The carpet is flat
and dull from years of feet. It's the same brown as river mud. I can see the nail holes in the wood underneath where the carpet is torn away in one corner.

I roll the other way. The house settles. The wind rattles the sheets of plastic Hubert still hasn't taken off the windows from when the house got too cold in winter. Shirley's computer stops whirring and goes into sleep mode.

I was waiting for everything to be silent, but old houses never are. So I wait, at least, for all the people to fall silent.

I get up and walk out into the backyard. I stand outside Mikey's window. I stare in at the little girls, lumps of sleepy blanket in their beds. Their night-light is shaped like a butterfly. I miss Mikey on the other side of the glass. I miss the last time I saw him, filthy, running, hungry. I miss the first time I saw him, scared, silent.

I stand at the window and wait.

•   •   •

Phyllis comes out at four a.m. It ought to surprise me that she knows where to find me, but it doesn't. I guess she already knew about me and Mikey staring at each other in the dark. She leads me to her porch, where the sandwiches are.

“I'm up,” she says. “I'll help you get ready for school. Hubert's a dear, God love him, but he don't know how to get a teenage girl ready for school.”

I let Stella climb onto my lap and share my sandwich.
I let Phyllis unbraid my hair. I trust her to braid it back again. She does, after a long, slow brushing. She braids it tight, ties new ribbon over the rubber bands. She hands me new clothes. Black jeans without any holes and a girlie-cut, V-neck pink T-shirt. They are clean and smell like someone else's home.

“Grace sent some things,” she says. “They showed up . . . well . . . you wasn't here when they showed up.”

I go into her house, which is so familiar it hurts me to walk through it. In the dark, it's silent, breathless, empty. It's changed so much in the week since I was last here. I hear the quiet where I guess there used to be noise pouring down from upstairs, all the sounds of me. I think about how much more peaceful the house must be without me in it.

I hurry up the stairs, shower quick because it's too cold in the house. It might be the beginning of June, but down here between the mountains, it's still spring. When I'm dressed, I peek into my old bedroom. I'm surprised to find my bed unmade. I want so badly to crawl inside it, but instead I stand and look at it. I don't fit there anymore.

“Hubert said to tell you good-bye,” Phyllis says from the door. “He left for work.”

She comes into the room, holds me at arm's length so she can look me up and down. “You look real pretty in that outfit,” she says.

“Do you think Mikey's dead?” The words taste so awful that I wish I hadn't said them, but now they're hanging out in the open, waiting to be dealt with.

Phyllis presses me close to her for a long moment. “No,” she says. “I do not.”

•   •   •

I don't speak to Jaina on the bus. She talks for a while, and then she stops. She crisscrosses her boots at the ankle.

“Are you mad at me?” she asks.

I feel exhausted. I wish she knew it's not her I'm mad at; it's me. But I don't have the energy to explain. I am silent, like I used to be before poetry club. I wait and I wait for this day to be done.

After English class, Miss Jacks stops me at her desk and speaks quietly. Her voice is like a poem without an ending. She wavers into silence, waiting for a rhythm that doesn't come. She is a haiku without the last five syllables, a cinquain without the final synonym. She does not get anything from me.

•   •   •

Anthony stops me outside of class. He puts a warm hand on my cold arm. He doesn't seem to notice his uncomfortable-looking friends nearby, all of them dressed like he is, in saggy pants and slouchy shirts, with their hair growing long. He ducks to look at my eyes. His own are large and darker blue than usual. He asks, “Any word on your cousin?”

There are several words on my cousin.
Lost. Scared. Hurt. Troubled.
I don't want to say any of them out loud. I stare at Anthony's face until the lines blur, until I can't see his concern, until I can't feel his concern. His hand loses its grip, slides up my arm and then off my shoulder as I pass him, like I did at the Dumpsters last year, willing him not to see me.

•   •   •

In a town like ours, there are bad things, and there are shared bad things.

Shared bad things are big, like a bad storm or a flood. Sometimes a car accident with a lot of cars involved. Or, once every few years, bad news from the mine. From the first flashing light, the first wailing siren, the people of this town pull together, circle the wagons, protect each other. Everybody speaks in half sentences—
“So young”
or
“God's will”
or
“A real shame”
—because everybody knows the other half of the story.

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.

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?