A Heart in a Body in the World

by Deb Caletti

  “Also, that the guys get to wear regular clothes and the women have to cover their heads and wear the heavy dresses.”

  “Hide those dangerous bodies,” Luke says.

  “Yeah, no kidding. But being away from the world like this . . .”

  “Permanently, though? I mean, I’m on hiatus on this trip with Mim, but I wouldn’t want to do it forever.”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “Well, the world kicked your ass.”

  It’s one of the most truthful things that anyone has ever said to her about what’s happened. And it means something to her. It means something because they haven’t had to have some big talk about it. It’s a simple statement of fact.

  He has said something truthful, so she does, too. “I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “Kick the world’s ass right back.”

  “How?”

  He laughs. “How? That is so funny.”

  She makes a face. “Why funny?”

  “You’re kicking the world’s ass right now.”

  20

  “I told you I’d bring you a surprise, didn’t I, Bella Luna?” Grandpa Ed waves the uncut half of the dry salami.

  “Salami, Ritz crackers, and Swiss cheese, family tradition,” Annabelle explains to Dawn Celeste and Luke as Grandpa Ed passes the plate. Dinner is at Grandpa Ed’s, a thank-you for the lightning storm rescue. From their parking spot at the end of the dirt road, just inside the gates, she can see Martinsdale Colony. Now, Annabelle knows what’s over there. She imagines the thousands of turkeys and chickens, the cows, and the hundred and fifty rosy-cheeked adults and children, settling in for the night. The sun drops, and the earth glows with a warm, orange light. It’s strange the way thirty square miles can look like heaven or hell, depending on what the weather blows in.

  “Can I help?” Dawn Celeste says. Annabelle notices that she’s wearing lipstick. Also, a skirt, and a colorful scarf tied over her shirt. No fuzzy socks tonight.

  “You sit down. I got it handled.”

  Dawn Celeste munches a Ritz hors d’oeuvre. “Delicious, Ed. Where do you get good salami, huh? This is the real deal.”

  Grandpa’s cheeks flush with pride, or maybe it’s just the wine. She’s speaking his language. He lifts the lid of the pan on the stove, and steam escapes, along with the rich, juicy smell of chicken saltimbocca—little jelly rolls of chicken breast stuffed with spinach and prosciutto.

  “Light the special candle, will you, Bella?”

  She meets Luke’s eyes and rolls hers. The candle is just a straw-wrapped Chianti bottle with years of wax drippings down its neck. She hunts for the matches, schwick-strikes one, and lights it.

  “I can’t believe you’ve got dimmers,” Dawn Celeste says as Grandpa turns the lights low.

  “Hey, I’m a romantic guy.”

  Luke and Annabelle meet eyes again. This time she makes hers large and horrified and he grins.

  This is their last night together, and everyone is relaxed and laughing. Dawn Celeste and Luke are doing impressions of Luke’s parents, and their rigid disapproval of anything that doesn’t follow their plan. Luke’s mom and dad are both attorneys, same as Will’s parents, Robert and Tracie. It’s weird, but then again, Will and Luke aren’t the same person. She can’t imagine Luke ever playing lacrosse, and Will didn’t really read books for fun.

  “They were running this boy into the ground! He was taking SAT vocabulary classes since he was five.”

  “Well, true. I did have the SAT Math Concepts shower curtain in my bathroom.”

  “Oh my God!” Annabelle laughed.

  “It paid off! I graduated high school at sixteen. But, then, one year shy of an MBA . . .”

  “He decides he doesn’t want an MBA, which I could have told everyone since he was three years old.”

  “My Bad Attitude is my MBA,” Luke says.

  “Nonsense,” Dawn Celeste says. “You just finally said what you needed.”

  “When I told them I was taking a year off, they lost their minds.”

  “When we told them he was taking a year off to travel the country with me, they really lost their minds,” Dawn Celeste says. “My daughter, she was always more like her dad. Jim was a businessman, died too young. Driven as the day was long. But now her son has my blood, it seems.”

  “Kids. What’re you gonna do,” Grandpa says.

  “Are you going back to school?” Annabelle asks Luke.

  “Oh, yeah. I’m seeing about transferring my credits from University of Oregon to Oregon State College of Forestry.”

  “Land management. The other side of the courtroom from his parents.” Dawn Celeste chuckles.

  “I’m not into it for the rebellion,” Luke says. “That doesn’t do much for me. Just . . . Have you ever heard that Willa Cather quote? ‘I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.’ ”

  Annabelle hasn’t heard that, but she loves it. “Nice.”

  “You ever go to Sequoia National Park?” Grandpa Ed says. “Now there’s—”

  It’s almost hard to hear the rap at the door. But Dawn Celeste sets her hand on Grandpa Ed’s arm to quiet him, and they all listen, and sure enough, someone’s knocking. The dinner dishes are stacked in the sink, and the candle wax is dripping onto the Formica table, and the wineglasses only have the last puddles of red. It’s late.

  When Grandpa Ed opens the door, Annabelle can see the truck with the round headlights lighting the road. Two young women stand outside. They’re in their heavy blue dresses, with their heads covered in blue kerchiefs.

  “I’m Ruth, and this is Elisha,” the heavyset young woman says. “We were hoping to meet Annabelle Agnelli?”

  “Here,” Annabelle says. She sounds like a student at roll call.

  “We were hoping to talk with you.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  She shuts the door behind her. She’s a little nervous about why they want to speak with her. Outside, there’s the smell of night and dry grass. She almost thinks she can smell the moon, golden and otherworldly in the sky.

  “We have this. For you,” Elisha says. Their blond hair almost glows in the darkness. Elisha hands Annabelle a loaf of bread, wrapped in a cloth. It’s still warm.

  “We were excited that you’re here,” Ruth says.

  “She was excited,” Elisha says.

  “You were excited, too!”

  They are giggly and nervous. It reminds Annabelle of when she and Kat met Alice Wu at University Bookstore that time.

  “Ruth has watched your video a hundred times.”

  “My video?”

  “On YouTube.”

  “My video on YouTube? I didn’t know I had a video on YouTube.”

  “You didn’t know?” Ruth says. “I can’t believe it. It’s pretty new, but it’s really popular. Really popular.”

  “I’ve been out of touch with—” It sounds so ridiculous. “My team.”

  “I’ll show you.” Ruth has a cell phone in her pocket.

  “You have cell phones here?”

  “Well, at first we only had six for the whole community, but then people started sneaking them in and now everyone has one except my mother and Elisha’s mother.”

  “Ruth sent six hundred texts last month,” Elisha tattles.

  “Six hundred!”

  “We get really good Wi-Fi, too.”

  Annabelle can barely concentrate on the conversation. She can only think: video. YouTube. Really popular. She can only think: That waitress. The one at the truck stop. That’s why I looked familiar. She saw it, too.

  “My brother lives on the outside and pays my bill,” Ruth says. “But, look. Here you are.”

  Uploaded by Malcolm. Ruth pushes play, and there is Annabelle. She’s on the phone of a young woman from a Montana religious sect, on a moonlit night, on the spinning and ever-changing earth. She is on the bed of the Sleepy Inn, wearing her monkey-in-space pajamas.

&nbs
p; She’s going to kill Malcolm.

  What do you hope to accomplish with your mission?

  I hope to discover a new planet with evidence of life. Go to bed.

  Annabelle. Come on.

  What? I’m exhausted. Go brush your teeth.

  After everything that’s, um, happened, why are you running from Seattle to Washington, DC, Annabelle Agnelli?

  I have to do something.

  She sees it the way other people might: her thin, serious face, her big eyes. Her chopped hair. She looks destroyed. She sees the lonely motel room that speaks to a mission. And the way she goes from teasing and joking to sudden seriousness. She sees the way those words have solemn weight . . . I have to do something. It sounds like a vow. It sounds like a vow every single human should make.

  “It just . . .” Ruth clutches her heart. “It got me.”

  And then she sees something else. The number of views. An astonishing number. Sixty-eight thousand. She can’t breathe. There’s a long scroll of comments, too. She catches the words brave and end this madness and everyone must do something.

  “We wanted to say, God bless you.”

  “Your strength inspires me,” Ruth says. She takes Annabelle’s hands and squeezes.

  A shiver runs up the back of Annabelle’s neck. It’s the kind of shiver that tells her things are changing once again. She is stunned. She wants to cry, because her heart aches. She can’t tell if it’s a good ache or a bad one, and so she just holds Ruth’s hands and squeezes back.

  • • •

  Annabelle is in some weird shock.

  “How is it possible that two girls way out here saw a video that my stupid brother made in a motel room weeks ago?”

  “So much for being cut off from the world, huh?” Luke says. “They saw that before you knew it even existed. So did seventy thousand other people.”

  Annabelle and Luke stand outside the parked RVs as Dawn Celeste and Grandpa Ed say good-bye.

  “It’s so bizarre.”

  She and Luke and Grandpa and Dawn Celeste watched the video again and again in disbelief. In this most distant, away place, she’d been found. She. Annabelle doesn’t even know who she is. Which Annabelle is the real her? The pre-tragedy girl? The girl who stands under this Montana sky? The girl in that video?

  Maybe she’s being told something. Maybe she’s not meant to hide. God, what a terrifying thought.

  “Look at that moon,” Luke says.

  “It’s seen some things.”

  “Still there, through the eons.”

  They’re quiet. They stare up. Luke feels familiar. In just a few days, she’s gotten used to seeing his face beside hers. She feels close to him. But it’s okay. It’s possible she’ll never see him again.

  “Do you think our grandparents are doing it?”

  She socks him.

  “Ouch! Hey, I’m going to get up early tomorrow and see you off, so this isn’t good-bye.”

  “Great,” she says.

  “It’s funny. I’m going to miss Martinsdale Colony.”

  “Me too.”

  Probably, it’s not Martinsdale Colony she’ll miss, but she shoves that thought away. It’s been great, amazing, to have someone her own age around, someone who doesn’t just see the burnt wick of tragedy when he looks at her.

  “I’m impressed, you know? My friend Owen thought he was a YouTube sensation when forty-six people watched him play the ukulele.”

  “I hate my brother,” she says.

  “Good night, Annabelle. Thanks for a memorable day.”

  • • •

  The next morning, Annabelle gets up an hour earlier than usual, and then heads out. She does not want to see Luke Messenger to say good-bye. The idea spins up a cyclone of sadness that she can’t bear. After That Bastard Father Anthony, after The Taker and all that’s happened, she’s not up for good-byes.

  When her run is finished and she returns to the RV, now parked at—oh, God—Deadman’s Basin Reservoir, Montana, there is something on her bunk.

  A book.

  Alfred Lansing’s Endurance.

  21

  By the time she’s here—running beside the green-brown waters of Albert Lea Lake in Minnesota, watching the eerie mist rise from it, listening to the chirp of indigo buntings and eastern bluebirds—she has read Endurance four times.

  She does not read it the way she and Kat used to read books—devouring them with the speed of two people famished for words, ideas, and beautiful sentences that make you feel everything. No, she reads Endurance the way a person might read the Bible—in small passages, repeated again and again, to help her stay grounded. To help her persevere, and understand her place in the world.

  She has missed books, but she’s been afraid of them, same as music. Books make you feel things hard. They hit the tender spots. Books remind her of her and Kat, but also of her old self, too, the mostly carefree self. The girl who was just so happy to come home from the library with a big stack of new stuff to read. Books were dangerous.

  But this is the story of explorer Ernest Shackleton, and his twenty-seven men who survive years in Antarctica after their ship is crushed by ice, and she can’t help but get swept up into it. It is 1914, in the most inhospitable place on earth, and there is starvation and exhaustion and desperation, danger and isolation, a horrible sea and unforgiving ice, and a slide down a fog-shrouded mountainside for a last chance at survival. And she is a contemporary young woman wearing a moisture-wicking sports bra, trekking in the balmy months of May and now mid-June, across North Dakota, then South Dakota, then through the southwest corner of friendly Minnesota. She is well-fed on mostaccioli and scaloppine and bananas and oatmeal. She has a full cabinet of energy bars (thanks to Zach and all the GoFundMe contributors), which are heavy with carbs for the run itself, full of antioxidants for post-run immunity boosts, jammed with protein for recovery. She does not have to fight for the smallest chunks of seal meat and penguins and worse. But the words that the Endurance crew wrote in their diaries speak to her.

  The struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated, she reads, before closing her eyes.

  In some ways they had come to know themselves better. In this lonely world of ice and emptiness, they had achieved at least a limited kind of contentment. They had been tested and found not wanting, she reads, with ice packs on a strained muscle in her groin.

  The numbers tell the story: She has been gone 107 days. It has been sixty-two days since she left Martinsdale Colony without saying good-bye to Luke Messenger. She has run 952 miles since then. She has worn through three additional pairs of running shoes. She has had four days off. Two days were due to a bout of food poisoning from a taco truck next to Dave’s Marine in Webster, South Dakota. She and Grandpa Ed were both hit; oh, gross—the two of them heaving and trembling in the suddenly smaller RV. And two of those days were for a depressive episode after a fall in Bowdle, South Dakota, essentially the halfway point.

  There, among more grain silos and a just-passed threat of a tornado, she twisted her ankle and tumbled onto the road, bloodying her palms and knees. She cried, like a little girl who fell off her bike, and then she collapsed with despair. It was the despair that any halfway brings, with the knowledge that everything you’ve gone through awaits again. She had such a longing for home. The person who lived there seemed long gone. Now, she was an astronaut clipped from her vessel, floating endlessly in endlessness, with no possibility of ever returning. She didn’t want to be an astronaut anymore. She wanted to be a girl, but The Taker had ruined that for her.

  She has listened to the tape Luke gave her sixty-nine times, once a day, and twice a day during one rough week. Near misses by semis: two. Bouts of severe cramping due to dehydration: three. More numbers: two visits from Gina and Malcolm, who flew into Miles City, Montana, and Bismarck, North Dakota, necessitati
ng extra driving for Grandpa Ed but gaining them five nights total in actual motel beds. Number of fights between Gina and Grandpa Ed: five. Number of eye rolls and under-table-kicks between Malcolm and Annabelle: fifty-five, at least.

  Number of additional ankle twists on the rocky grounds of North Dakota’s hills and buttes: four, maybe more. One infected toe. Toenails lost: bunches. Sunburns: multiple. Miles running against the wind: countless. Layers of dust, dirt, sweat on her skin: endless. Truckers, troopers, snakes, and dogs: infinite. Number of bicyclists heading toward the Badlands of North Dakota: thirty to fifty. New friends: Mary and her wife, Sharon, from Seattle—Seattle!—who they ate dinner with at the Prairie Knights Casino; a herd of antelope; two bison; a flock of pheasants; and two students, Josh and Rashelle, from the gifted-and-talented program at Standing Rock Community School who interviewed her and took her picture by their flagpole. Also, Dan Williams, nature photographer, writing a book about the Standing Rock reservation, who ran three miles of it with her while also taking her photo. They met when he spotted her stretching just outside of the Dakota Countryside Inn, where she and Grandpa Ed decided to stay for a real bed and Wi-Fi and a free breakfast.

  And more: twelve girls and six of their parents from Aberdeen High School, South Dakota, who cheered her with signs as she crossed the border from North to South Dakota. Shia and Jo from girl’s varsity cross-country at Montevideo High, who invited her to come meet their team. The six thousand new people on the Run for a Cause Facebook page, who leave messages of encouragement that Annabelle can’t bear to look at; the 1,203 people who have now given money to her GoFundMe; the three-hundred-thousand-plus people who have now watched her YouTube video, although she can’t be sure they are friendly. She could have three hundred thousand enemies, aside from Ruth and Elisha back at Martinsdale—who knows. There are lots and lots of comments, but she is not brave enough to read them.

  Something has happened to her and about her, and yet it is hard to grasp this fact. Her run is larger than her, and yet her daily life is mostly just her solitary steps, the rhythm of them, her daily aches, her loneliness, and the flashes of the nightmares that she experiences daily. It seems that she’s become a person with a message, but she’s unclear what the message is. Maybe because the message is still fighting its way through the grief and guilt to get to her.