by Sarah Dooley
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.
23
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.”
24
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.
