Free Verse (2 page)

There's a rectangle of weak, late February sunlight on the floor of Phyllis's kitchen. It used to be over by the ice-cream churn, but as evening comes on, it inches toward the bag of red potatoes propped up beside the fridge. I haven't moved in a while.

Phyllis is humming her way around the kitchen, adjusting things that don't look like they need it. There aren't any dirty dishes in the sink, but every so often she plucks something out of the drainer, looks at it closely, and then whips it over to the sink to rewash. Twice, she's heated water in the kettle and forgotten to make tea. Neither of us has said anything in a while, except for when her humming gives way to a word or two:
“. . . green and shady . . .” “. . . river's in flood . . .”
This is how we've spent the last week, nervous and quiet, together in the kitchen.

As foster mothers go, Phyllis could probably be worse.
Of course, she's the only foster mother I've ever had, so I don't have much to compare her to. She's kind, and she cooks. She's sweet to her animals, a nosy cat and a sagging dog, both of whom live outside. She's thoughtful enough that she's taken some time off work, even though her boss has called twice to see when she's coming back. I don't know her very well yet, and maybe we're not talking much, but I'm relieved I don't have to be here by myself. I can't think of anything lonelier than a stranger's kitchen with nobody in it.

“You hungry yet?” she asks me, checking the oven clock, which is still set to daylight savings instead of standard time because she doesn't know how to reprogram it. You have to subtract an hour when you look at it. It'll be right again in a couple of weeks.

It's impossible to think about food, let alone eat any. I shake my head.

She starts cooking anyway, dirtying up some of the dishes from the drainer.

“Help me, would you, Sasha?” she asks after a while. Each thing that happens with Phyllis—I can't help but compare it to the way things were before. Michael didn't let me cook. Maybe because he was a firefighter and he didn't want me to use the stove. I don't know how to do much, and anyway, the smell of potatoes browning in butter is making my stomach feel swimmy. I back away, shaking my head.

“You don't have to eat it,” Phyllis says, tipping a mess of steaming potatoes onto a plate. She runs cold water in the frying pan and steam hisses up out of the sink. “But I could use a little help with the dishes.” Her words are mild, and her tone is kind. “Sometimes it helps a person to keep busy.”

At home, I'd have been busy with studying or putting on music to clean house with Michael. Every so often, when the mess got too huge, we'd put on one of our favorite albums—something old, like Bob Dylan or Elvis—and we would whip around the apartment armed with a broom or a vacuum or a bottle of Windex, and by evening we would be worn out from laughing and the place would look arguably worse than it did before, and we would go to sleep happy. I can't remember ever washing a dish that was already clean, or cooking something that didn't come from a box in the freezer.

We eat in the living room, in front of the TV, only neither of us turns it on. I manage a bite or two of potatoes, but there are too many onions and not enough ketchup and my stomach still hurts. After dinner, Phyllis brings out the acoustic guitar with its bumper stickers and scratches, lifting it from a case lined with nicked red velveteen. I have never heard anybody play the guitar the way she does, a string at a time, not chords. She doesn't look at written music. When she plays, she closes her eyes. There is no makeup on her cheeks, and her hair must be its natural color, because I have never seen this shade of
gold-coming-on-silver on a box. She's not a large person, but when she plays the guitar, her shoulders draw up taller and her legs relax out longer and her neck—I swear, her neck grows three inches as she tosses her head back and breathes songs up to the sky.

I watch her fingers most: nails even but unpolished, fingers calloused and stubby. I like the way the skin dents in when she presses a guitar string. Her fingers are strong like Michael's. Michael's hands saved people from fires. Phyllis's hands make music to distract the people left behind. She does not demand that I listen, but I'm caught, sitting on the floor next to the door, watching her fingers. There is a rug half under me, thin with years, on top of plywood. The way the strings snap back into place when she lets them go washes me in sadness. Like nothing you do ever really makes a difference.

My mother used to sing, just like Phyllis. She had a song about sunshine she liked to sing in cold weather, and I swear I still get warmer whenever I hear it. She sang songs to make the rain go away and songs to get us out of bed in the morning. I used to love hearing her voice.

There was one song, though, that I never liked to hear. She used to sing it on her saddest days. It's all about a caged bird trying to get free. Phyllis does not look up or act startled when I start to sing along. I remember the words. I remember them in my mother's voice, and that's what comes out of me, high and sad and longing.

•   •   •

There's this thing that happens sometimes.

The first time, I was eight. A few days after Michael and I got left alone, we were carrying groceries in from the car and I dropped the eggs. He'd told me six or eight times already to be careful, but I was certain I could handle them. This was the first normal thing we'd done since burying our father, and neither one of us was in very good shape. Michael had already snapped at one of his coworkers at the Save-Great for putting the granola bars on top of the bread, and now I'd gone and ruined the eggs. I hoped for just a second that they had survived; that the Styrofoam container had somehow protected them. But then I saw yolk oozing out.

I looked up and saw Michael's face, angry and tired and so much older than it had been the week before.

And then I looked up and I saw Michael's face again, now devastated and frightened, almost the way it looked at our father's funeral. I thought it odd that his expression changed so quickly. And then I looked down because my knuckles hurt, and I found out that I wasn't holding any of the grocery bags anymore, and the Styrofoam egg container was smashed into pieces, and the passenger-side mirror was hanging sideways off my dad's truck, and I was out of breath.

Michael took three full, shaky breaths, so slow and so
loud I could hear them over the start of my own hiccupping sobs, and then he simply opened his arms and I flung myself into them and we both held on so tightly.

It happened a second time last year, when Chris McKenzie died.

I was in math class when Mr. Powell, the guidance counselor, stepped into the room. He had this look on his face that made my stomach feel cold, because I'd seen that look on my brother's face twice and it never led anywhere good.

I didn't know Chris McKenzie well. He was an eighth grader and I was only in sixth. I knew where he'd been yesterday evening, though. I'd seen him setting things on fire in the parking lot of the Save-Great, watching bits of paper bag whoosh upward in flames, raining sparks down to where he stood. My brother was a firefighter, and even if he wasn't, I'd have known it was stupid to light things on fire, but I was a sixth grader and Chris was in eighth. All I did was give him a mean look.

Still, there was a little part of me that understood. Sometimes you do something crazy because you can't stand to not do anything. That was Chris McKenzie, lighting fires because he needed his hands and his mind to be full. Bright sparks, dangerous things. They command attention. They distract. I didn't know what it was Chris needed to be distracted from, but I recognized the need itself.

And then sometimes you do something crazy because
there's nothing left to distract you. When Mr. Powell speaks, when he tells you what has happened to Chris—or, rather, what Chris has done to himself—there's so much fear and so much sadness welling up inside you that you can't hold it all. Yesterday Chris was a person lighting things on fire at the SaveGreat, and today there is no such person, and you might have been the last person to see him when he was still real. Your brain goes from overload to total shutdown, and then you blink, or at least you think that's what you did, only you find out you're not in class anymore. You're standing behind your school, next to the Dumpsters, where the kitchen staff sneaks out to smoke, and your knuckles are scraped but you don't know why. And Anthony Tucker is standing three feet behind you, breathing heavily and looking terrified, with his hands up, like you're some wild thing that might charge him.

“Sasha?” He's the school bully. Since you were second graders, he has followed you around, tugging at your braid, stepping on the backs of your shoes, and putting gum in your hair. You've never heard his voice sound anything except taunting, but now it's dead serious and scared and he sounds about six years old. “Hey. What did that Dumpster ever do to you?”

And you run past him because you can't face the fact that the worst bully in the whole school just saw you lose your head for a minute.

I'm not crazy. I'm not. It's just that there are days when
the scared and the mad and the sad inside me get so big that my body can't hold them. And then they come out, and maybe I'm a little bit scared that it
does
make me crazy, but I'd never say so.

•   •   •

When Phyllis is done singing about caged birds, I open my eyes. There is a weird sound, like a hard strum of a guitar. I am on my feet and Phyllis is half up from her chair, fingertips stretching out in the air like she's trying to catch raindrops or the seconds that just went by. The guitar is on the floor with its strings pointing every which way, splinters of wood poking out along the side.

I work on catching my breath. In-in-in quick. Out long. In-in-in quick. Out long.

Phyllis, without her guitar, looks small. Her hands seem fragile.

“Well. I guess I played the wrong song,” she says. There is nothing musical about her voice now. She sinks into her chair and goes still.

Michael leapt sideways and managed
to catch the Frisbee even though I wasn't very good at throwing it. We'd been playing for half an hour, and he had yet to miss a catch. My third-grade teacher, who just yesterday finished wrangling us through a Memorial Day craft, would have said we were being disrespectful, playing Frisbee in a cemetery with fallen soldiers and stuff, and I told Michael as much, but he said if he were buried here, he wouldn't mind two kids having fun on his lawn.

“Any soldier grew up here would know there's no other place to play that's sort of flat and doesn't have trees,” he said.

Michael had been planning to join the military; had been impossible to live with for weeks because of all the working out and eating healthy and all the hooyah-ing. Then the mine fell down on our dad and everything stopped. Now certain things were starting again—I was going to school, Michael was back
at work—but there was no more working out and no more talk of going anywhere and Michael hardly ever smiled. We played a lot of Frisbee. We hiked, too, and ran sprints, and we were building a fence between our building and the house next door, but it was only half finished, because we ran out of wood and energy.

Michael hated Caboose. Always had. Some of my earliest memories were of Michael telling me stories about Someplace Else. He told me all about how in
real
places, there were trains that ran under the city and that they could take you anywhere you wanted to go, and nobody had to drive an old pickup truck that broke down every two days. How in some places you could live in a house up on stilts so the ocean could drift in and out underneath. He told me about planes that landed on water, and about night skylines that made the stars look faded. There were a lot of places Michael wanted to go, but they all sounded awfully far away.

Even now that he'd stopped talking about leaving, he couldn't help but mutter under his breath about how much he hated Caboose: “Only place I know where kids can have a game of Frisbee and a dang séance in the same five minutes.” I wasn't sure what a séance was or why he sounded so bent out of shape about it. He threw the Frisbee so hard, I heard it whistle past my ear. I ran to catch it. I'd missed it about thirty times already, but Michael hadn't given up on me yet.

“Watch out!”

His warning came a second too late. My shin connected with a gravestone, and the Frisbee and I were suddenly side by side, airborne. I snatched the bit of plastic out of the last six inches of air before it would have smacked into the grass. It never touched a blade, only the grass stains on my fingers. I lay still, catching my breath.

Michael's footsteps pounded up behind me. “You all right? Hey . . .” He dropped to his knees next to me. He looked mad, but not at me. He'd been mad a lot lately, ever since our dad. He got sad a lot, too, but I don't think he knew I could tell. “Hey, sorry,” he said, helping me up to sitting. “I'm sorry, sis, I didn't mean to throw it so hard.”

I was pretty sure I could taste mud in my mouth, and I couldn't get my breath to go back out all the way. I sat for a minute, gasping, before my air all came out in a whoosh. Michael ran a shaky hand down his face, leaving a trail of mud to match my own.

“You all right?” he asked again.

“I got it,” I said, holding up the Frisbee, and his eyes moved from my face to the toy and back again. I waited to see what he would do next. Ever since he got to be my only family, I could never tell how he would act about things.

A grin spread across his muddy face, and I could feel my own grin come out.

“Well, you play Frisbee like you doggone mean it, Sasha,” he said with pride in his voice.

•   •   •

For some reason, after I smash the guitar, I can't stop thinking about that Frisbee. Can't stop thinking about Michael's pride when I finally caught it. He gave up everything for me: his dreams of the military, of college, of subways and ocean views and living someplace better than here. At eighteen, he took over being my parent and he never once complained. He wanted me to catch the doggone Frisbee, and even back then, I think I'd have flown if it meant doing what he asked me to.

And Michael asked me to do a lot of things over the years. Ace my spelling test. Read a chapter a night.
Brush your doggone teeth before they fall out of your head!
But there was one thing he asked for more than any other, and he spent the last few years of his life getting me ready for it.

So I'm a little glad he doesn't know that when I finally do leave Caboose, I don't even manage to wear shoes.

I can't stay in the house with Phyllis. She's sitting in a chair, not moving. Her hands are empty. Her hands are empty and it's my fault. She's not going to want me. I don't even know her, and I've gone and wrecked her life. I'm all the way down past Town Center before I realize I'm still in my socks. I've wrecked those, too. I'm good at wrecking things.

Route 10 is the main road through town and the only one with a yellow line. Once I cross the Gillums Bridge, I
feel more at home. There isn't enough of Caboose to have very many parts of town, but there is, at least, a poor side and a rich side. Phyllis lives on the rich side, where the houses are set down single-lane paved streets. The grass is cut even in summer, and it more or less survives the winter. In spring, people will plant flowers in the boxes and pots that now stand empty by the walk. Even on the rich side, folks are mostly poor. They've just had a splash or two of better luck.

On my side of town, houses cluster along the highway or curl through the floodplain on dirt roads over and again washed out. Weed-strangled vacant lots lurk in between mushed-down brown yards, which, come summer, will still be more dirt than grass. Instead of flower boxes, yards here are dotted with bikes and rusting lawn mowers, dogs chained to plastic igloo-shaped shelters, and sets of tires marked with
FOR SALE
signs. It's February, and the weeds gripping the vacant houses have been beaten down by rain and a couple of good snows. The sagging houses lean low against their neighbors, an occasional filthy patch of ice refusing to melt in the shadow. Here and there, a pretty house pops up—trim repainted, fence in good repair—and dogs patrol those houses with a suspicious eye toward a lone girl walking.

Dust collects on the insides of windows in what used to be my family's favorite breakfast spot. I can still make out the
w
and
y
of
Railway
and the
Din
of
Diner
, but it's
been years since the low-slung building's smelled like eggs and bacon, or anything besides high water. Caboose hasn't had a bad flood in years, but with the creek lapping at our yards every time it rains, everything on this side of town smells like mold and mud.

I walk past three empty buildings and a Goodwill. Two more empties and a home décor shop called Dolly's Primitives, which I predict will last all of two months. Sometimes people open businesses and try to make the downtown thrive, but nothing ever stays long. At the end of the block, I walk past the narrow building that used to be Get Reel Video Rental, before it was Sugar Shaker Nightclub, before it was Honey Ham Cafe. Now it's Cupcake Emporium, only it isn't Cupcake Emporium anymore, because the windows that used to say so are busted out. I see glass twinkling on the sidewalk. I see yellow fire tape. I see signs that say
DANGER
. I look away.

On the other side of the street, birds are sorting through an overgrown lot for seed. A boy, maybe seven, throws a rock. They all fly, the birds and the boy, back to where they came from.

•   •   •

A human being in good shape, on good roads, can walk about twenty miles in a day. I looked it up online once, back when me and Michael used to stay up late talking about all the ways we could leave. He told me that was
crazy—we weren't going to walk out. We were going to plan and study and take our time and get me a scholarship to some awesome college somewhere. But all his talk about getting trapped made my clothes feel too tight and my breath come short. I needed to know there was a quick way out, should I ever notice that I was getting comfortable with the idea of staying here forever. Michael made it sound like I might someday wake up and realize I was forty and that I'd never been anywhere and could never escape.

By late evening, I've learned that a human girl in okay shape, in thickets, carrying her belongings, can walk about three miles.

Then she panics and hides in a culvert and loses track of time for a while.

Then she goes to sleep.

•   •   •

When I wake up, it's thunderstorming, and I stay in the culvert, which fills more and more with water. I cannot make myself stand. My joints stay folded. My limbs stay useless. The water rises.

•   •   •

The things in the suitcase I've brought with me are soaked. I keep the clothes. They'll dry. I leave the soggy picture of me and my brother. You can't see our faces anymore.

All the way down East Avenue, I look back and I see
that little white speck of ruined photo paper. When it's finally out of sight, I run back. I pick it up.

Michael would tell me what the clouds mean. How long the storm will last. I take shelter in the doorway of the Baptist church at dusk. They can't kick you out of the doorway of a church.

•   •   •

After they kick me out of the doorway of the church, assuming, I suppose, that I'm a teen of the rock-throwing variety—the church has lost three stained-glass windows this year alone, and is adorned now with less spiritual plywood—I cross the train tracks, slippery socks on rusty ties. I find a railroad spike, pick it up, throw it as hard as I can. Thunder crashes right when I should have heard a clatter. I needed the clatter, the noise. That's why I threw the spike in the first place.

I stand still for a while because I don't know what else to do. Then I hear the ruckus of train wheels approaching, and I hunker down on the thin strip between the train tracks and the creek. I press my hands over my ears. The train roars by, roars away. The creek roars by, keeps roaring by.

When the rain lets up, I walk some more. I stop to pick up fistfuls of mud. I kick rocks and beer cans into the creek. I fight through thickets. I untangle brambles. After I've fallen no less than three times in the dirt, I stop for a minute. I braid my hair.

•   •   •

Night happens. The kind with stars. Then morning does. The kind with birds.

•   •   •

When the wind goes out of my sails and I admit defeat, I loop back the way I came. I pass everything again, going in the other direction, but it's all so gray and familiar that I have to work to see each building as a separate place. I pass closed stores and empty houses. I pass a fire station with one truck and one less fireman than it used to have. I pass a pawnshop full of wedding rings. I pass skinny men on front porches looking at me with suspicion in their eyes. Michael always warned me away from this part of town, told me the druggies weren't safe to be around. He wouldn't like me walking here alone. I want to walk faster, but I only seem to have one speed. I trudge on through the worst part of my little town.

•   •   •

I sit on the bench at Town Center, the little park marked with a rusting red train caboose. I gaze at the park's sign, which is missing a
C
:
TOWN
   
ENTER
. I don't feel cold or tired anymore, but I can't imagine ever doing anything again besides sitting on this bench. I wait for night to fall. I wait for somebody to find me.