Free Verse (19 page)

“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.

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. Condensation 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.

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.

“Where did it come from?” he asks.

There are so many complicated ways to answer that question. I think about how, for so long, I've tried to figure out a way to balance the inside of my head and the out. Inside my head, there is poetry, and there are memories of Michael and Ben and Judy all the time. There are plans for escape and fears of what will happen if I don't, and a bigger fear that by the time I figure out how to escape, I won't want to anymore.

And outside my head, there are people trying to get to know me. Anthony writing in my notebook and never asking me to speak. Miss Jacks encouraging me to write. All the poetry club kids sharing their words. And at home, Hubert taking me into his family. Mikey doing things the way he thinks I would do them. Phyllis, always meeting me halfway.

“I'm not sure,” I say, because there's no way to explain all the thoughts in my head.

“I didn't know you entered any contest,” Hubert says. A little more than a month has passed since I turned in my poem for the contest. It's January, and we're on the porch, putting down salt because they're calling for snow. Phyllis and Phoebe are sitting on our steps, playing with Stella, who has followed them over.

“I might not win,” I remind them. “I have to perform at the conference in February. Then they'll announce the winners.”

“You'll win,” Phyllis says, with complete confidence. “You have earned this, sweet Sasha.”

I kiss her cheek, then scoop Stella up and look her in the eye. “You're not eating all Miss Phoebe's food now, are you?”

Phoebe giggles. “She begs for everything. She's like a dog.”

“More like one than Chip,” I agree. “He's like a . . . like a bearskin rug. Unless you've got a stick.”

“So where is this conference?” Hubert asks.

“Charleston.”

“And when do we go?”

“It's the second week in February.” I like how he used the word
do
, like we're definitely going to do it.

“And you get to read your poem to everybody?”

I nod. Hubert nods, too, and tugs at his scrub-brush beard. “Well, little lady, I can't wait to hear it,” he says.