A Heart in a Body in the World

by Deb Caletti

  “Oh my God, you guys!”

  “Blame Malcolm.”

  “Why did you listen to him?”

  “He’s right You’re right. You need this. Jesus, it’s better than—you, lately. Rally, Annabelle. This is . . . a reason to, you know, go on. Wait. Olivia wants to talk to you.”

  “Annabelle?” Olivia is one of those strong, efficient people who’ll be the CEO of some big company after she gets her MBA. She can memorize long pieces of music, and she has one of those plain faces that turns beautiful unexpectedly, and she is so capable, she never loses her car in parking lots like Annabelle does. Annabelle has seen a different side to her, though. Like when her dad was going through chemo. Like after the tragedy. Like now. Her voice is small and full of hope. “You need to do this for you. And maybe this is the wrong thing to say, but I need you to do this, you know?”

  Zach is back. “Hey! GoFundMe just went up to one hundred twenty-one. Coach Kwan! Thirty-five bucks!”

  Someone’s knocking. It is probably Yvonne again, picking up the tray of untouched food. Or else the Preston Police Department, after Yvonne dialed 911.

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “Me too. Malcolm’s calling again on the other line.”

  When Annabelle opens the door, she does not find Yvonne or the Preston Police Department, or even her mother.

  “What the hell is this place? Mi fa cagare! I’m gonna have nightmares.”

  “Grandpa! What are you doing here?”

  “Jesus, what is that? Looks like a cat puked on that salad. Get your things.”

  “Are you taking me home? I’m not sure if I want to go. I think I do. Maybe I don’t.”

  “Who said anything about going home?”

  “Where are we going, then?”

  “Where are we going? We’re going to DC! You run, I drive. I got the RV outside. It’s been almost six months since I’ve been on the road, and I’m losing my mind. Che cavolo! Let’s get out of here.”

  “Grandpa . . .” Annabelle can barely speak.

  “Don’t get all mushy on me. Get your stuff. I got a pan of eggplant parmigiana in the oven.”

  • • •

  Yvonne seems relieved to see them go. She hands Annabelle her clothes, still damp. Grandpa has the RV parked at the end of the street. It’s a big, hulking beast, with a license plate holder that reads CAPTAIN ED, and a seen-better-days bumper sticker HOME OF THE REDWOODS from the time he visited Sequoia National Park. Now, Annabelle’s wet clothes hang off the back of the padded benches. Her socks lay limp over the door to the bathroom. It’s like a laundry crime has been committed.

  Stop!

  Grandpa Ed has brought some of her things. More clothes. Her laptop. Her bigger backpack, with lots of her special stuff in it. There are a few pairs of her favorite pajamas, including the flannel monkeys in space. Oh man, tampons, too, and that’s when she realizes.

  “Mom packed this. How is it that Mom packed this?”

  “Let’s just say, she said some things, I said some things.” Grandpa opens the oven, and great smells parade out. “I promised I’d take care of you. I promised you’d be safe. She cried. I slipped Carl Walter some money to get her a nice glass of wine and some dinner.”

  “It couldn’t have been that easy.”

  “She thinks you’ll be back in two days. Me, I know different.”

  He sets the pan of eggplant parmigiana on the small laminate table between them. It looks amazing. There’s a sourdough loaf and butter, and a salad in a Tupperware bowl. He’s gone all out. Grandpa slides a big cheesy slab from the pan and slaps it down on a Chinet plate.

  “You haven’t mentioned my hair,” Annabelle says.

  “Hair, shmair. Give me your glass.” He pours her a small amount of red wine. “Don’t tell your mother.” Grandpa Ed believes in red wine. His father and his father’s father lived to be ninety-six because of a glass of vino a day, he says.

  She shouldn’t drink it. Not only because she’s underage. It’ll be dehydrating.

  “It’ll help you sleep,” Grandpa Ed says.

  This is an excellent selling point. She used to just close her eyes and sleep hard all night long, but that hasn’t happened in a while.

  He lifts his glass. She lifts hers. “To—”

  There’s only one thing that should follow “to.” Forevermore, this will be the case. Annabelle’s face squinches up. She puts her head in her hands.

  “Bella.” Grandpa Ed puts one old hand on her arm. “In San Francisco, back in the day? After Gino Maserelli—” He stops. Tries again. “After your Grandma Luna—” He’s going for wisdom, but the real wisdom is knowing there sometimes isn’t any.

  She peeks at him and, God damn it, his old eyes are watery with tears, and then he takes out his grandpa handkerchief and honks his nose into it loudly. They just sit there in silence across from each other at the laminate table of the RV, which has traveled the country and seen better days. Viewed from above, it is a glowing capsule of aluminum, with two astronauts inside. She wishes she were one, anyway, an astronaut. She wants to propel herself into the dark and terrifying universe. Being that unanchored and that much in peril seems preferable to being here, grounded on the earth that wrecked her.

  5

  1. The average human heart beats seventy times a minute. But it can speed up to 220 in extreme circumstances.

  2. A hummingbird’s heart zooms at 1,260 beats per minute.

  3. A blue whale’s heart beats six times a minute. A groundhog—five times a minute when he’s hibernating. A horse—thirty-eight. A rabbit—205. A mouse—670. The heart of a canary beats seventeen times in a second.

  4. A study (“The Physiological Response to Fear in Unexpected Situations”) found that hearts beat over six times faster when a person has been startled.

  5. In real life, the Physiological Response to Fear in Unexpected Situations is a feeling that your heart has stopped altogether.

  Annabelle leaves the Moleskine under the pillow of her bunk. The bunk is a narrow alcove above the RV’s front seats. When she sits up without thinking, she bonks her head. She did this twice last night, not remembering where she was. Grandpa Ed was wrong about the wine and sleep—she was awake all night. This might have also been due to Grandpa Ed snoring down below on the daybed. Hour after hour, it sounded like a donkey was getting strangled.

  When Annabelle climbs down from her bunk, Grandpa Ed’s eyes are narrowed from morning light. He isn’t used to getting up this early. There’s a lot of swearing, and gross throat-clearing. He can’t hear a word she says, either, because he doesn’t have his hearing aids in yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he says to everything.

  The plan is: He will meet her by the trailhead of the Iron Horse Trail at the end of her day. Gina wants Grandpa Ed to follow behind Annabelle in the RV as she runs. This would not only be annoying, but pretty much impossible and sometimes dangerous, since Loretta’s pedestrian route is on back trails and down small, narrow highways. It will take Annabelle three days to finish the Iron Horse Trail. It’ll take another two weeks to cross the state line into Idaho. When Annabelle thinks of that state line, she thinks of Kat, and the joke they had after the two of them read On the Road. For weeks, whenever they got in a car together, even if they were just going to get Slurpees at 7-Eleven, they’d do it.

  “We have longer ways to go,” Annabelle would say in a profound Kerouac voice.

  “No matter,” Kat would answer. “The road is life.”

  • • •

  It is a different view today for Annabelle and Loretta, and the sky is blue and the air is crisp. Annabelle tries to concentrate on all this, instead of on the pain, pain, pain in the back of her heels. She and Loretta have planned a shorter run today, twelve miles. Her body needs a break. The end location will be near food and facilities.

  The route takes her down the street of a town, North Bend, and on a backcountry road through a long stretch of green meadow. Now, she finds herself in a suburban ne
ighborhood of big houses with three-car garages. The lawns are all perfect except for the one shit yard that probably makes the neighbors crazy. In the others, flowers bloom flawlessly, and there are SUVs in driveways, ready to ferry the kids to soccer practice.

  It makes her think of Will, of course. And then The Taker.

  “Stop,” she tries, but she’s weak today. Sometimes, you just need to give in. It’s like the pain of punishment, when it’s a craving you succumb to. The way you laugh until you cry, the way you eat until your stomach aches, the way you scratch an itch until it bleeds.

  “Turn left on Eagle Lake Drive,” Loretta encourages. But Annabelle can’t be reached. She is in it.

  The Taker. Will.

  • • •

  In Will’s large suburban house, Annabelle and Will are in the bonus room—that vast, luxurious space where Will and Stevie played when they were little, and where they now hang out with their friends. Will lives in Bellevue, on the east side of Lake Washington, and he goes to Bellevue High. Annabelle goes to Roosevelt and lives in Seattle. The Eastside seems so foreign. Most Seattleites think so. They make fun of Eastsiders for having lots of money and for driving everywhere. The bonus room is practically bigger than the whole downstairs of Annabelle’s house. Will and Annabelle sit on a leather couch that could fit eight people.

  Annabelle and Will met at a football game, Bellevue versus Roosevelt, when they were both sophomores. Bellevue High is a rich school, a rich city, and the kids there win everything, every football game, every track meet, every academic scholarship. The parking lot of their school looks like a luxury car dealership, stuffed with BMWs, a few Porsches and Jaguars thrown in. After the game, Annabelle and Kat and Zander were down on the field, and so was Will. Annabelle was wearing her big puffy coat and braids and a baseball cap, and Will tugged one braid playfully and said “Pippi.” A boy who looked like that, who knew about Pippi Longstocking . . . well, that was that.

  After a year together, she still wants to put her hands on him all the time, and he wants to put his hands on her. His big arms feel so good. His butt in those jeans does. His chest is a perfect hard pillow to rest her head on. His eyes are brown and sweet, like those of a deer in a forest. God, Annabelle’s attracted to Will, but they’re buddies, too. They have fun. He cracks her up, and she cracks him up. They go to Shilshole Beach with friends, and they drink a beer or two at the bonfires, and they bring burritos to Magnuson Park. He sometimes runs with her in the summer when she trains for cross-country in the fall, and she goes to his spring lacrosse games. They swim at Green Lake and go to each other’s houses for dinner, watching all the premium channels at Will’s because Gina doesn’t have them.

  Will has it all. He’s funny, and a good person; he’s popular, athletic, and so smart. His favorite sandwich is peanut butter and honey, and he’s nice to his little brother, but his mom still does his laundry and he drives his dad’s old Mercedes. He’s good-looking, with those brown curls and those eyes and that body, and he can get a little cocky, a little self-involved, but Annabelle and everyone else forgive him for it. She especially forgives him for it whenever she sees him write by hand; he crouches over in concentration, his arm curled and his fingers pressing hard like a child, and she loves this. She especially forgives him, too, when he comes inside and he smells like cold winter air, and also when he keeps his promises. He is serious about promises. He’s going to be a lawyer, like Robert and Tracie, his parents.

  Now, on this couch, they are kissing. Annabelle’s cheeks are hot. She wishes they were somewhere alone instead of at Will’s house, where she can hear Robert and Tracie downstairs talking and having a glass of wine. See, he has perfect parents, too. They like each other. It’s like witnessing a vanishing species. They take family trips to Tahiti and Bali. They’re a family you envy.

  Annabelle rubs her hand on the V of Will’s jeans. She loves him and wants him, but he also seems a little distant right then, as he has been lately. She’s trying to reach him, to bridge the distance. She can sense the unspoken rules, all right. Making him feel wanted and desired is part of what’s required of her. But she also just plain likes rubbing her hand on the V of his jeans. She’s forever in a spinning round–ness of who she’s supposed to be and who she really is, what’s expected and what she really wants. When you spin like that, things get blurry.

  Will grabs her wrist. “Annabelle.”

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “I think we . . .”

  Of course, he doesn’t need to say much. She reads his eyes, and suddenly she knows she was right about what she feared was coming.

  “I think maybe we should . . .”

  “Oh, God.”

  “I love you, Belle. You know I do. But my mom and dad think we’re too serious, you know, for our age. They think—”

  “They think?”

  “Well, they’re probably right. I mean . . . we should have other experiences, with other people. You’ve only been with me and Chase. I’ve only been with you and Sarah and Catherine.”

  Annabelle’s chest caves in. Tears gather, and one rolls down her face and drops off her nose like an unlucky mountain climber.

  “Is that what you want?”

  He doesn’t say anything more, so she knows the answer. “Pip,” he says. This is her love name. “Please don’t cry. Shit.”

  “I’m going.”

  “Don’t go yet. Don’t go like this.”

  “I can’t . . . I’ll call you later.”

  She can’t deal with leavings. Not after That Bastard Father Anthony. A vanishing like that could make you feel the deepest sort of unseen and unwanted, and suddenly she is feeling those same things again. It’s a horrible trick, the sense that her value is being sucked down the drain, like when the plug is pulled from the tub and the dirty water goes down. It’s a lie, but maybe it isn’t, so she flees down the stairs and then realizes she forgot her purse. Ugh! Embarrassing. She runs back, snatches it from the couch, and then rushes past Robert and Tracie, those traitors, in the kitchen.

  She drives home in a haze of tears. Her heart is being squeezed in a big, mean fist. Cruel words like No one wants and There will never be poke at her bruises.

  She wipes her eyes. She is not the sort of person who will lose her mind with abandonment and jealousy. There will be no crazed calls and tormented letters and drive-bys. No, Annabelle handles things. She studies for tests early, and keeps a training log of her running, and her nail polish bottles are arranged in an orderly rainbow in her bathroom drawer. What’s done is done! Right there as she drives, her efficient, internal employees get to work. They erect barriers and fences, hammer up giant gates. Back there, behind them, is her heart. There are guards, too. She can feel them inside, getting in place.

  She ignores Will’s calls that night. She ignores his messages, even if he’s crying in one of them.

  Take that.

  As a power move, it is so lame—rejecting his rejection.

  The next morning, she aches with sadness. But she picks something really cute to wear to school. It’s a new shirt that she and her mom bought when they went school-clothes shopping, one she hadn’t worn yet. Money is tight, and so she rations the new clothes. But this is an emergency, and emergencies are when you use your rations. She chooses cute heels, too, clips her long hair back. None of this is about replacing Will by attracting someone else. It’s just about feeling good and powerful again. In terms of power, though, beauty is like glass, isn’t it? Shining, but transparent and easily marred. A shard of glass can draw blood, but a fist can shatter it, too.

  “Look at you, Belle Bottom,” Kat said at school that morning. “You survived. You are the Phoenix!” They’d been on the phone for hours the night before, Gina interrupting with feed-your-heartbreak homemade macaroni and cheese and bowls of ice cream. Kat listened to Annabelle cry and go on, same as Annabelle had done after Kat and Noah broke things off.

  Here is where the memory starts to really hurt. Wi
ll, Kat, her own rejected self—each fateful piece sears her. Now, as she runs, Annabelle’s heels scream in pain. The suburban houses fly past. With every step, those blisters flame, and she lets them, because there he is.

  There’s The Taker, in Mixed Media. The class stands along the long back counter, hunched over tubs of gray pulp-filled water. They are making paper. The next step is to dip the wire frames in the muck. The Taker is next to her. He’s so tall. She’s aware of his presence in some energy-way.

  “Yum, ashy bone soup,” he says as he dunks the frame in.

  This is not some big foreshadowing moment. He’s just being funny. And it is funny, because that’s what it looks like. “Delicious,” Annabelle says. “Fine dining.”

  “Oh no. Your cute shirt,” he says.

  She looks down. He’s right. There’s a gray splotch. But she hears the compliment, too. She forces a grimace. “Can’t take me anywhere.”

  “Note to self: Only take Annabelle to the drive-through.”

  “Ha,” she says. She smiles. It’s sweet. There’s been so much shy grinning at her, it’s even kind of bold. He doesn’t seem to talk that much to anyone.

  And after what happened with Will, it’s kind of nice, the little flare of energy, the flirtation. The way he sees her, and notices her. She can’t tell if he’s weird or cute.

  She says this to Kat at lunch. “I can’t tell if he’s weird or cute.”

  “If you’re asking that question, you know the answer.”

  “Cute?”

  “Weird.”

  “We shouldn’t do that. It’s mean. We don’t even know him. Who is ‘weird,’ anyway? Only every person who will do great stuff in the future.”

  “Georgie Zacharro,” Kat says.

  Annabelle groans. In the sixth grade, she was nice to Georgie Zacharro. You were supposed to be nice. He followed her around for the whole school year. It gave her the creeps. He did. She told Mr. Riley about it. This was hard to do. She wasn’t sure if this was a legitimate problem, even though it was a problem. He just likes you, Mr. Riley had said. Georgie Zacharro’s right to like her, to step into her space, was greater than her own right for him to stop, apparently, so she didn’t say anything more about it. She felt bad and ungenerous for bringing it up at all. She also felt weirded out and mad every time Georgie Zacharro lurked around.