A Heart in a Body in the World

by Deb Caletti

  “Sometimes weird is your gut talking to you. The point is not him being weird or not being weird. The point is that you feel uncomfortable, and you’re trying to talk yourself out of it because you think you’re supposed to be nice,” Kat says, unwrapping a granola bar. “Anyway, if Will hadn’t just called things off, you would never have asked that. Don’t be desperate.”

  “I’m not being desperate! I’m just . . . regaining my mojo! Like you said last night.”

  “Mojo isn’t just about boys.”

  “Mojo is sometimes about boys.”

  “Ugh!” Kat concedes. “Hey, I brought you that Meg Gillian book.” They are on to more important things. “You’re going to love it, but I don’t know if you’ll like the end. I won’t say anything more, but it sorta just drops off.”

  “I still have to give you back Deer Hollow. God, I can’t wait for the movie.”

  “We can be like those Star Wars fans who camp in their sleeping bags to be first in line, even though there’ll be us and, like, four other people. Hey, Zach and I are going to your meet today.”

  “You are? You guys! Are you sure? It’s all the way in West Seattle. It’s raining.” Also, cross-country meets are not the most exciting thing ever. Lots of waiting around at the finish line.

  “It’s always raining. Zach has that big golf umbrella his mom got at Costco.” They both crack up because they immediately know what’s funny about this—the idea of Zach’s mom playing golf.

  She smells it all—Kat’s orange blossom lotion, chocolate bits from the granola bar, the waft of cafeteria pizza. She sees it all—the red scratch on the underside of Kat’s wrist as Kat hands her the Meg Gillian book, the brown and blue shine of the cover. Now, it’s all in front of her: the slight tang of weed coming from The Taker, the muck of wet newspaper, the orange stitching on The Taker’s denim jacket, and the flash of red of Mrs. Diablo’s nails as she claps her hands. Ten minutes! Let’s wrap it up, folks!

  She sees herself, smiling back. Flirting, almost.

  She is felled. Literally. Her toe catches on the tipped edge of the sidewalk, and down she goes. The thoughts make her feet lose coordination. The brain circuits skip, and she is on all fours, her palms stinging, her knees burning. Those internal employees who used to keep her safe are long gone. Laid off, fired. Who wants to stay in some thankless, impossible job? The factory is now a ghost town, with abandoned buildings and FOR LEASE signs. Her internal landscape is bleak. A dry wind whistles through.

  She smiled back. She flirted.

  Annabelle is down on her knees. A woman runs across her front lawn. “Are you okay? That sidewalk! I’ve called the city three times.”

  The woman reminds her of Tracie. She has a similar haircut with the same blond highlights, but she has warmer eyes. It’s expensive hair, unlike Gina’s. Gina goes to Supercuts and colors her grays in the kitchen sink. She wears the plastic gloves that come in the box and there are black splatters in surprising places for weeks after.

  “Oh my God! Sweetheart.” The woman’s voice goes from compassionate to alarmed as she takes in the fallen girl with the chopped hair. “Oh, God. Your ankles . . .”

  Annabelle looks. There are bloodstains rising up from her burning Achilles. The ignored blisters have burst. They have scraped, scraped against her shoes for miles. It’s bad.

  “Do you need to call someone? Are you all right? You shouldn’t even be walking, let alone running.”

  Annabelle can hardly look at that woman. She can’t bear to see that face that reminds her of Tracie and everyone else who hates her. She doesn’t deserve this woman’s compassion.

  Annabelle gets up. Brushes the small bits of gravel from her palms. “It’s okay.”

  “Honey! That does not look okay.”

  “It’s a . . . condition. I have medicine for it.”

  It’s a terrible lie. The woman looks doubtful. “Do you need a ride? I don’t have to pick up my son from school for another half hour.”

  “Thank you. But no worries! I live around the corner.”

  “If you say so.” The woman looks relieved. She’s actually backing up. Annabelle can only imagine what the woman sees. A bleeding, haunted girl with a crazy-person hairdo. She is right to be freaked out.

  “See you around. Thanks again!” Annabelle says.

  She limps, and Jesus, dear God, a scorching burn rises up her legs. Her palms sting from the fall.

  To keep going—it seems a little sick. A lot sick. Of course she knows this. She doesn’t need Dr. Mann to tell her so.

  It’s hard even for Annabelle to understand. But she feels this in her heart and soul and with every searing and burning step: A crime must have a punishment, and this is part of hers.

  6

  “Holy moly,” Grandpa Ed says. “You look like Vinnie Lucchese after Gino sicced his dog on him. We’re going to a doctor.”

  “Food. Water.” Annabelle collapses onto the padded RV bench. Her head spins from exhaustion.

  “Yeah, here, that, too.” He hands her a full bottle. “But we’re finding a doc-in-a-box. Jesus, you’re bleeding all over. Let me get a towel.”

  The towel is from Grandpa Ed’s trip to Niagara. There’s an embossed photo of the falls, meant to hang over the stove railing decoratively. She holds the wet cloth across her ankles as Grandpa Ed backs out of his spot and hits the accelerator. Well, hitting the accelerator is actually the RV lurching and climbing slowly to thirty-five. Everything rattles—pots, pans, Annabelle’s eyeballs. Something in the oven slides and bangs and slides again.

  “Ah! Broccolo! I forgot to turn off the ziti. Can you reach the oven from where you are?”

  “Ouch, ouch, ouch.” After the half marathon she’s just run, the thought of food makes her nauseous. In a few hours, she’ll be starving, but right now, even the smell of the food could make her vomit.

  “From where you are! Did I say move? I said, don’t move! You’re lucky I don’t take you to the hospital and sign you in.”

  They’re in the small logging town of Edgewick. People are going about their regular lives. She remembers the world. She’s been in her head, deep in memories, lost in a pain universe, and the world seemed like a faraway thing. But, look—business as usual.

  The doc-in-a-box is next to a gas station and a feed store. When Dr. Ohari cleans her wounds, it hurts like a motherfucker. There is no other way to put it.

  “Any pus or fever, I’ll want to see you back here. Needless to say, you should stop until these have healed. Use the antibiotic ointment under a loose bandage. Replace the bandage if it gets wet or dirty.”

  “Pus or fever,” Grandpa Ed repeats. Annabelle shuts her eyes against the pain. She concentrates on her hatred for the word pus.

  “Do you understand the long-term issues of a cross-country run like you’re planning? Muscle damage, oxidative stress, enlargement of the heart, knee damage, hip and pelvis misalignment, should I go on?”

  “You tell her, because we sure as hell—”

  “I don’t know who’s in charge here, but—” The doctor is eyeing her hair. “Emotional well-being is critical to physical health.”

  “Hey, now,” Grandpa Ed says. His chest puffs up.

  “You must remember that the heart is a muscle, too, and it can get as stressed as the others.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Grandpa Ed says.

  “Thank you, Doctor.” Annabelle lifts herself from the table. “I’ve gotten advice from my physicians at home.” Lies are flying out her mouth right and left.

  “She’s gotten advice from her physicians at home,” Grandpa Ed says. He looks like he’s about to punch out Dr. Ohari.

  “Well, then. Take this to the front desk.” Dr. Ohari hands them a receipt and a pamphlet entitled Instructions for Wound Care. “Good luck to you,” he says, as if bestowing a dire prognosis.

  “Fa Nabla!” Grandpa Ed says the minute they’re outside. He sticks his forearm flat against his chest in disgust. Ooh, it’
s a low blow: Go to Naples, I can’t stand you.

  Annabelle leans on his arm as she hobbles back to the RV. “You’re such a liar.”

  “What? Me? You are! ‘My physicians at home.’ Bella, Bella, you got the Agnelli Curse.”

  “The Agnelli Curse?”

  “Silver-tongued liars. Gets us into a world of trouble, gets us out of a world of trouble.”

  “I thought you were going to take out Dr. Ohari back there.”

  “Nah. He doesn’t bother me.”

  But he does a little, Annabelle can tell. And it’s not just that Dr. Ohari poked at Grandpa Ed’s substantial pride. Dr. Ohari worries Grandpa Ed. This whole thing does. The Taker and Seth Greggory do. Annabelle can see it on his face right now. But Grandpa Ed is not just a reckless guardian with a madwoman on his hands. He has made calculations, Annabelle knows. He is choosing what he thinks will give her the best chance of survival. This is no easy task when each of her hands holds a grenade.

  “I could eat that ziti straight out of the pan right now.”

  “Thatta girl.”

  Grandpa Ed returns to the very spot they left. She may be a silver-tongued liar, but she will not be a cheat. They are parked beside the freeway. That night, when trucks speed past, their headlights flash, and the RV trembles and shivers against their power. They are comets and meteors burning past her little capsule; they scorch up her very skin as she tries to sleep. They sear and singe images on her retinas: furious screams, wails of sorrow, the slow, mournful crawl of cars. The destroyed shoulders of Robert and Tracie. The crushing guilt. The wrong fact of her existence.

  Her heart still pumps blood. Every day, her heart pushes and thrusts and pumps its gallons and gallons of life-stuff. The next day: again. The next day: again, and again. She is a criminal. Her socks have been rinsed, but they are tinged pink as they hang to dry over the bathroom door. She sees them—two still, white ghosts, hovering near the ceiling.

  7

  1. Though the heart weighs less than a can of soup, a healthy heart pumps two thousand gallons of blood each day.

  2. A kitchen faucet would have to be turned on full force for forty-five years in order to equal the amount of blood pumped by a heart in a lifetime.

  3. Looked at another way: During an average life, the heart will pump nearly 1.5 million barrels of blood. This is enough to fill two hundred train cars.

  4. In spite of all that power and force, there are only one and a half gallons of blood in the body at a time. And you only have to lose two liters of it—one bottle of Diet Coke—and it’s over.

  Annabelle promised both her mother and Grandpa Ed that she would take a few days off, that she would wait until her blisters healed before she runs again.

  But she has the Agnelli Curse. She is a silver-tongued liar.

  She is also driven by something that is beyond all sense. She is compelled by a force that has no reason. Call it guilt, shame, a need for redemption. Call it terror or courage. Call it the human spirit, trying to rise.

  Call it stupidity, given the condition of her feet. Still—call it the deepest of desires smack up against a lost cause.

  It is very, very difficult to sneak out of an RV when a grandfather is sleeping right on a pullout bench below. It requires some advance planning. Seth Greggory would call this premeditation. In this case, the planning involves a note she wrote to Grandpa Ed the night before. Also, sleeping in her clothes. She packed her pack when Grandpa Ed was brushing his teeth and gargling with Listerine before bed. She’s got energy bars and fruit and a dinner roll stuffed with cheese slices, so she’ll have breakfast and lunch.

  It also requires a little luck, which she gets: On the table, she spots the juice glass ringed in burgundy. Grandpa Ed’s second glass of wine before bed. See? She is stressing him out. However, he is snoring hard. His mouth gapes like a cave.

  Sneaking out also requires some disgusting stuff—not brushing her teeth, peeing outside. And, gross—changing her bandage out there and leaving the old one on the steps to the RV door. Forgive me, she says in advance. This is such a familiar phrase that she should have it tattooed on her wrist, or maybe over her heart. She wraps her feet in so many bandages, it’s like she’s wearing snow boots. She’ll hobble like Mr. Giancarlo the whole run if she must.

  In the next three days, Annabelle will become very acquainted with the Iron Horse Trail. She’ll be on it for forty-two of its nearly three hundred miles. If Grandpa Ed doesn’t disown her after her jailbreak, he’ll meet her at a state park on the Snoqualmie River on day one, at a bend in the Yakima River on day two, and just off of Cabin Creek Road outside the small town of Easton on day three, her eighteenth birthday.

  In its former life, this trail was a working railroad. Now, it’s home to some of the most desolate land in the state. She isn’t likely to see many humans out here, only coyotes and gopher snakes and worse.

  This morning, past the Cedar Falls train stop, Annabelle runs on a friendly path of crushed rock bordered with trees, all bright green and yellow with baby leaves unfurling. The antibiotic cream slathered on her feet comes with a nice pain-numbing element, and so the scorching fire of the day before is just a burning hum. The abundance of bandages makes her clump along, though. She has loosened her laces and stretched her old running shoes to accommodate them, but she still feels like a C-grade zombie. She worries about a new ache in her hip. She hopes it isn’t the start of Dead Butt Syndrome—tendonitis in the cu, basically—something Coach Kwan warned them about. She’ll have to make sure to add some crunches and leg lifts to strengthen her abdominals and her glutes.

  Zombie feet, dead butt, haunted spirit—pieces of her are dying off already. This is only the third day of her run. Fourth, if you count the hours after fleeing Dick’s. It feels like so long ago.

  As she shuffles forward, she taps her thumbs to each of her fingers. She’s aware of other pains and pulls in her body, all potentially catastrophic. Her chest fills with anxiety, same as a sinking ship fills with water—it rushes in and then rises slowly. That morning, she’d read about this route, and she knows what’s coming: a pitch-black train tunnel. Two and a half miles of complete darkness. After that, twelve miles, all uphill. Punishment enough? No way. Not by a long shot.

  Don’t believe everything you think, Kat says. Or maybe that’s Dr. Mann, meeting her eyes and smiling before fetching her glasses to make their next appointment.

  It is a bad, bad moment to get the text. Annabelle almost doesn’t look at her phone, because she’s sure it’s Grandpa Ed, fuming mad, or Gina, or even Malcolm, with news that the GoFundMe is up from yesterday’s four hundred sixty bucks. But she’s alone out there, except for Loretta. The bling of the text sounds like reassuring company.

  It’s Geoff Graham. Geoff is her friend. They used to be on the cross-country team together. He has a T-shirt that says Like Jeff, but Geoff, but nothing seems funny anymore.

  Heard what you’re doing. That’s awesome.

  Nice, huh? So nice. But the text socks Annabelle in the gut. It almost bends her right in half.

  Annabelle stops. She thinks she spots the tall, gaping cement arch of the tunnel up ahead. She has no flashlight or headlamp. The timing sucks.

  God damn you, tunnel. God damn you, Geoff, sounds like Jeff. God damn you, Taker.

  It is what it is, Annabelle tells herself.

  It’s a phrase she often finds comforting. It reminds her to accept the truth rather than struggle against it. But now, it sort of pisses her off. Sometimes, what is is something that shouldn’t be. It should never have been. It only is because of messed-up reasons going back messed-up generations, old reasons, reasons that don’t jibe with this world today. Sometimes, an is should have been gone long, long ago, and needs to be—immediately and forcefully and with not a minute to lose—changed.

  She is more than pissed off. Actually, it fills her with fury, the way people can protest and shout and write letters and yet, the is stays an is, and bad, bad stuff can still
happen and happen and happen. There are no words for this. It’s unbelievable. It is a travesty. It is a communal mark of shame.

  She’s standing in front of that stupid tunnel now and, wow, it’s dark.

  “I am coming for you, tunnel. You are not coming for me,” she says out loud. She gives the worst of the worst gestures she’s learned from Grandpa Ed—index fingers stuck aggressively out. Literal translation: I’ll kick you so hard, your buttocks will end up this far apart.

  She runs. She’s inside. The tunnel has a high ceiling and curved walls, and it is roomy enough for a freight train, but the walls close in. It is too dark to even see the end. And it’s cold in there. She’s suddenly freezing. A chill draft whips down its length.

  Annabelle shivers. It’s so frigid and so utterly and completely dark that she forgets about the pain in her feet and in her butt and even, for a moment, her heart. If she hears or feels a bat, she will have a heart attack. Something wet plops on one shoulder and then her cheek. There’s more dripping. She speeds up.

  Annabelle’s feet echo. Goose bumps ride up her arms. She thinks she hears something, and then she’s sure she does, because all at once it’s upon her. It’s a bright light, coming close, growing large. For a second she sees the stone walls around her before his headlamp blinds her. It’s just a man on a bike. He says a cheery and surprised “Oh, hello,” and then he is gone. It’s black again.

  Two and a half miles is a long way in complete darkness. Of course, she’s gone a lot farther in places much darker than this.

  • • •

  Geoff Graham.

  She sees him that night. He opens his front door. He grins. He says, “Hey, chips! Thanks.” He squeezes the bag in appreciation. “No one else brought anything. Losers.” There is music—