The Heart is Not a Size

by Beth Kephart

  “Sorry, Ri,” I said. “That sucks.”

  “What about you?” she asked at last. “What’s up with the smart girl?”

  “Googling Juárez,” I told her.

  “What about that Lit thing you had due?”

  “Got Lit under control,” I lied. “But Juárez I don’t. It’s a complicated place.”

  “They call winter break a break for a reason,” Riley said. “You’re supposed to be taking it easy.”

  The thing is, I’m truly terrible at taking it easy. I have a habit of piling things on and wanting things to be perfect and going out of my way to make things harder than they are. It’s not that I’m running toward success so much as trying to keep my big wide feet off the heartbreak path of failure, and I don’t even know why I ended up this way—I can’t blame my parents or the example of my brothers.

  I was the kind of kid who thought you had to color inside the lines—that if you missed and your crayon strayed, you had done bad; you were wrong. I’d practiced my handwriting until my fingers hurt, thinking that my letters had to match the ones in books. I’d put only the perfect shells from the Stone Harbor shore into my neon orange bucket, then stand with the hose on the gravel beside the beach house, scrubbing the sand from the shells. I’d perfected a technique on the monkey bars so that I’d always make it across without fail. I still picked up my room without being told, and that way my mom could apply all her reminding skills to my wreck-making brothers. Once, in second grade, when Mrs. Kalin asked the entire class to write the words I will be quiet when the teacher is talking twenty times in a row on blue-lined paper, she’d exempted me on account of my being so freakishly well-behaved, attentive. I remember being jealous of the other kids that day. Jealous and aware of my grave difference.

  So that when I found the flyer about Juárez, I had to know about Juárez—whatever I could find, whatever sources. The atlas, the library, and, at home, my good friend Google, which is like falling down an endless hole—you could spend every waking hour chasing question marks with Google. I typed in the word and all these portals came up; and the more I read, the more confusing Juárez got, the more impossible to squeeze within a box.

  For example: There are a lot of people who have passed through Juárez—famous people, rich people, smugglers. People trying to get out and people trying to get in, the traffic going both ways across the river’s bridges. I liked the name of that river: Rio Grande. I liked how the river defined the edges not just of cities but of countries. There’s El Paso and there’s Juárez, and there’s the river in between them. The fish must be citizens of both.

  Meanwhile, the last battle of the Mexican Revolution was fought in Juárez. Meanwhile, John Wayne and Elizabeth Taylor and Steve McQueen sat drinking in Club Kennedy, a bar; and once Charles Lindbergh stopped by; and sometimes they’ll film a movie in Juárez, when they want that whole, authentic Wild West feel. Every time I Googled Juárez, I found out something new; but every single time, also, I found myself reading about the muertas. About those young women—hundreds of them—who’d gone missing. They weren’t much older than me, and some were younger than me; they’d go off to school or work and not come home. Later, in the desert, the women would be found: brutalized, dead, and abandoned. The country had been on a manhunt for a serial killer ever since 1993, but no such monster had been found. Tori Amos had written a song. Human rights groups protested. Still, young women from families without means up and disappeared.

  The muertas stories were always right there in my research on Juárez, near as a mouse click. They always made me sadder than I can say—not afraid of Juárez, but sad for Juárez, full of some big desire to do something that would make things better for the ones the murders left behind. I’d read the stories until I couldn’t anymore, then stand up and walk away. Go down the hall and outside and through the front door and either north, toward the horse show grounds, or south, where the older houses with their trembling gardens cast dark, moist shadows late at night. I needed stars and moon and night air, so I walked—worrying about women I’d never know; thinking about all that can’t be changed or controlled; trying to envision Juárez, this place of complications and contradictions, where perfect, I pretty quickly figured out, wasn’t the issue: Survival was. Survival under a hot sun, along a tired river, among factory jobs that paid hardly enough to sustain a family, and also among unsolved murders and loss.

  In Juárez all my little self-imposed rules would be tested, the things I tried to control, my minuscule attempts at doing most things right. I’d be a rising senior that summer, on the verge of college. I needed a release from the narrow outlines of my life.

  But it’s not as if I understood this at first, in the days just after finding the flyer. All I knew then was that I had grown desperate for some kind of change in view. Desperate for a way to heal myself from the panic attacks that I had not told a soul about, the panic attacks that also seemed like failure. Even Riley, my only longtime best friend, didn’t know what I went through. But then again, she was keeping secrets, too. We were each hiding demons from the other.

  That night we waited until Dad got home to call GoodWorks and ask questions. Mom dialed the kitchen phone first, then Dad and I picked up—me in the upstairs hall, Dad in the living room, Mom taking the lead. She interrogated. Dad clarified. Mack, the leader of this GoodWorks trip, answered every question calmly. They were looking for a dozen local teens who wanted to make a different kind of difference, Mack said. Teens who could recognize the value of small steps in vast places. This trip would focus on a colonia called Anapra, where the people by and large were good—working at jobs that paid some fifty dollars a week, struggling for food, struggling for water, struggling for survival in their sixty-square-foot houses. GoodWorks was liaising with a local outfit, Mack said, an organization whose sole business and purpose was to give American teens the chance to get to know the real people of Anapra and to leave something lasting in their wake. “These trips change lives,” Mack said, and my mom was quiet. “They change perceptions on both sides of the border.”

  “Safety,” Dad said, “is a concern.”

  “We take every precaution,” Mack said.

  “It’s a complicated world,” Mom said.

  “There are no guarantees,” Mack agreed. “None in Juárez, none in any city in the world. But we have history on our side at GoodWorks. A long-running program with an impeccable safety profile. As for the health of those who go: We require up-to-date inoculations, including hepatitis A. We’re zealous about water supplies and dehydration.”

  “What about housing?” I asked. I wanted to be able to picture the whole thing, to visualize two weeks away.

  “We’re still working some of that out,” Mack said. “We’ll have all our plans in place by our first kickoff meeting, which we’ll hold in February.”

  That night I could hear my parents talking late. The next morning I found a note slipped beneath my door: Honey, if you want to go, you can. It was written in my father’s hand. My mom had drawn a heart for love.

  It was early. The skies were gray. There was a crack of sun low on the horizon, but there’d soon be a lashing of cold winter rain. I took a good look around my room—at the wallpaper I’d chosen when I was seven, at the mobile of butterflies that I had never bothered taking down, at all the English springer spaniel porcelains my dad had given me once as gifts because we could never get a real dog of our own—Geoff was allergic. It looked, in my room, as if nothing ever happened. But something had to happen, that was the thing, if I was to rise above all the mounds of worry that were threatening to do me in.

  I picked up my cell and turned it on. I called Riley, who never turned her own phone off. “Hey,” I said after she’d said hello.

  “Georgia,” she moaned, “what are you doing? It’s not even—like, what time is it, Georgia?” She yawned. I could hear her rustling around in her bed.

  “Listen,” I said.

  “I’m listening.”
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br />   “Ri, you’re going to Juárez, right? You’re going to come?” I was sitting on my bed, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of Old Navy shorts. I was sitting there, and then I stood and walked over to the window and looked out at the little-kid swing set in the yard—still there as if my parents thought we kids would stay little forever.

  “I have to ask my mother, Georgia.” Riley’s voice was small, the opposite of effervescent. That was the thing about Riley. She could be so back and forth. “It’s going to freak her out.”

  “When are you going to ask?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe today, when she’s nursing her hangover.” The thought of this made Riley laugh. And then she couldn’t stop laughing. Her laughter picked up speed, gained force.

  “You have to go because you want to go,” I heard myself saying. “Not because you want to freak your mother out.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Riley said, growing quiet again. My bedroom windows were beginning to streak with rain. Tomorrow, the third quarter of school would begin.

  three

  They like to tell you that panic attacks begin in your head. My first began and ended with my heart.

  I’d piled on too much at school, but it was not as if that was news. It was my sophomore year, and I’d stacked AP Biology next to Honors Spanish next to Trig; but it was AP English that took the cake for messing with my head. Nuance was Mr. Buzzby’s favorite word, and into every assignment he would wedge his famous shades of gray. He asked for lines, for boundaries, for distinctions. He drove the whole class mad.

  Some days we’d walk in and there’d be paired terms on the board: Insidious/Invidious. Ominous/Onerous. Nom de plume/Nom de guerre. Tortuous/Torturous. “You have ten minutes,” he’d say, “to write an essay delineating the proper use of each word.” Mr. Buzzby balanced his frameless glasses on the end of his nose. He combed his cantaloupe-colored hair straight back. He tacked his knitted ties with a silver pin, and his face never evolved from a frown. The twinned terms were only ever ten-point essays, but there was no predicting them. You walked in. You sat down. There were the words on the board, Buzzby’s frown on his face, the relentless clock on the wall. Sometimes I had something to say and sometimes I didn’t, and when I didn’t, my heart would start pounding. I’d sit at my desk holding my Uni-ball above an empty page, listening to the clock’s minute hand.

  But that wasn’t it. That was not what set the attacks in motion; that was just a case of nerdy nerves. My first veridical panic attack had come the day before the marking period ended, when an Objects at Rest essay was due. We had been studying Pablo Neruda. We had read his words out loud: “It is very appropriate, at certain times of day or night, to look deeply into objects at rest.” Mr. Buzzby had given us a week to write eight “inspired” pages—something, Mr. Buzzby said, that would make the Chilean poet proud. I had a grading-period B that I had to pull up to an A. Or thought I did, because isn’t that the way it is? The colleges we choose not choosing us unless we’ve proven our utter readiness?

  I’d had what I’d thought was a brilliant idea: Object at rest equals Kev when he is sleeping. I didn’t doubt it, didn’t second-guess it—just had the idea and blasted through. I’d stolen into my brother’s room at night and sat in that strange silence. I paid attention to the sound of stillness—to its color, to the rays of moonlight that plashed against my brother’s sheets. “Kev at Rest,” that’s what I called my essay; and when it was finally done, when I’d gone to sleep the night before it was due, I felt as though I’d trumped the assignment and earned myself an AP English A. I was on top of things, where people expected me to be, which is what I expected of myself.

  I’d woken up dying. I’d woken up pinned to the bed by a bolt of pain, with a heart split wide and bloody. There was no feeling, nothing, in my left arm. There wasn’t any air in my lungs. I was flattened and ashed, and when I tried calling out, not one word appeared; when I pounded at my headboard with my right fist, nobody came. I was fifteen years old and a bleating terror: I’d never drive, I’d never kiss, I’d never grow up and leave my ransacked teenaged self behind.

  I was dying all because Kev was no object: My heart had figured that out. He was a living, breathing human being, pain in the butt that he usually was, and my essay was wrong, my A was an F, my body was blaring, You’re done for. I love it when people think you can talk yourself out of pain. You can’t. You can only defend yourself against it; and to defend yourself, you have to muscle up. You have to face your fears and pulp them. You have to fight until there isn’t one fear left.

  You have to get perspective.

  Winter couldn’t summon snow. I’d have given anything for a couple of white days off, but the temperature hovered in the mid-thirties and the clouds could manage only rain. Most of the days were gray all the way through, and on the few days when the sun shone brightly, the mercury in the thermometers plunged. The atmosphere was doing a lousy job of getting its snow act together.

  By February of the year of Juárez, the seniors were already hyped about the internships they’d start in May—Jeremy getting a gig at Wired 96.5, Josh writing a screenplay under the wing of someone famous, Haley returning to the elementary school, where she’d assist with the third graders. They’d tell us their big news at lunch or in between classes in the halls. Pretty soon, too, the college gossip was flying: who’d gotten into where and who hadn’t and all the guessing about why, all the talk about whether there still might be time to shine up our own junior résumés a bit. The seniors were free; they’d been let loose from their shackles. I envied them that. Geoff, too, had been liberated, had gotten his ticket to S. I. Newhouse at Syracuse. The best communications program in the country, Mom said, something of which the whole family should be proud. Even Kev high-fived Geoff when the news came in. Even he sat with us and watched the DVD that came with the acceptance letter.

  But for us juniors, for me, there were only exams on the horizon, AP tests, a second shot at the SATs, on which I’d done better than I had thought I’d do but where there was always room, as my counselor said, for some meaningful improvement. Riley acted as if it didn’t matter then and would matter never—took the SATs once and shrugged at her scores. “Whatever,” she said, and that was it. She said the most exciting thing about planning for college was imagining all the fabulosity that’d come with living away from home. She was looking for exits, even in winter. It was my fault, not understanding how genuinely desperate she was to disappear.

  You get caught up, junior year, in yourself. You can’t help it. There’s that much pressure.

  By the middle of February, Mack had collected a gang of eleven, and even though it wasn’t his perfect dozen, he’d scheduled a first actual meeting on a Thursday at the local GoodWorks office some twenty minutes down the road. All of us had at least one parent with us; that was one of Mack’s rules: It’s a family thing. Maybe it’s the kids who are flying south, but everyone commits to the mission and Dad was my family rep that day.

  So there we were, in the bottom-wedge office space that had been leased to GoodWorks for cheap by a corporate sponsor. Instead of windows there were color photocopies of photos from prior-year excursions. A well-water project in Nicaragua, Mack said, rapping his finger against the pinned-to-the-wall pic. A roof raising in Honduras. Soil work in El Salvador, where some of the coffee farming was going organic. Every year a brand-new hillside or neighborhood, a brand-new start. Little seeds, Mack called them. We plant them, get them started. The communities take everlasting care.

  Mack had a carousel projector with him—one of those old-fogy kinds. He made the room dark and then beamed the thing on, and for every face or mound or hill of beans that shone through the black-blue-white light, he had a story. Transformations, he called them. He said that no initiative was its own foregone conclusion. That success in the end was not just the what that was tried but the who that had attempted. I looked around. Except for Riley, these kids, to me, were one hundred percent strangers—a few from
private schools, a few from competing public high schools, a handful of seniors from my own Rennert High with whom I’d never had reason to mix. We wore name tags around our necks, our school names on the line below our names. Our parents sat at our sides, too well dressed, too manicured, a little shaken in a room of walls bruised blue, black, and white with poverty.

  Riley was turning the bracelets on her wrist. When Mack stopped the show and flipped the overhead lights back on, her mother was the first with a question. “I’m assuming they’ll be nice—the accommodations?” she asked, no doubt expecting a Hilton. I felt my mouth twist up into a half-smiled smirk. I crossed my arms and awaited Mack’s answer.

  “We’ll be living in a church,” he said, looking at me so that I’d know he hadn’t forgotten my question of several weeks ago. “We’ll be taking a one-hour drive each day to the site of the squatters’ village. We rent the vans in El Paso.”

  “Are there beds in this church?” Riley’s mother persisted, her voice in a pinch.

  “We ask everyone to bring sleeping bags,” Mack said. “We prepare ourselves for all seasons, for beds or no beds, for rain or shine.”

  Riley’s mother had one of those hairstyles that hugged the face and then flipped out, like the bottom half of an S. She had the fingers of one hand in her hair now, telegraphing not so much nerves as disdain. She could have asked about the vans, the roads, the existence or not of roofs, the people of Juárez, the ways in which they struggled. Instead, she asked about the bathrooms.

  Mack was used to this, you could tell—his face grizzled by a lifetime of summers in the sun, his hair dark beneath streaks of blond that, I guessed, he’d had painted there. He had lovely green-brown eyes, Mack did. His eyes were how I guessed that he was young. Or not old, anyway. Maybe close to thirty.