The Heart is Not a Size

by Beth Kephart

  What was I going to see of Riley going forward? How much of her would ever let me back in? I lay in that dark, and the sadness grew wings and the wings were a thrashing and the thrashing was my heart. Panic’s a bully. It hunkered heavy on my lungs. I sucked in air and I spat out that hot air. I pressed the hand I could lift to my chest.

  So what if panic attacks are a body’s defense—the afterbirth of the fight-or-flight response that is wired into our brains? So what? Explanations mean squat. Something ignites, adrenaline flows, a body succumbs, I was desperate. Alone in a room of girls, alone and dying. Waiting for the panic to finish with itself. To fly back into the cage from which it had come.

  Apply your intelligence to every living thing. That night I couldn’t think of anything but this: Riley had been my one best friend since I was five. And now she lay above me. Silent.

  Because of something I’d said.

  Because of my loving too much.

  Because I’d been a coward for way too long, and I’d let it come to this.

  five

  It was on the second day that the children came. The sun was high, and Mr. Thom had sent four of us to the top of the hill with the hope, he’d said, that we’d report back with some news. Four of us—me, Sophie, Drake, and Riley—randomly chosen, or maybe not so randomly; I couldn’t tell. But I had my camera, and I was using it as a shield, even as it let the strange world in. The white avenues of sand. The pallet houses. The doll that was still sacrificed to the sun. A pack of dogs was yipping through the streets, the dogs’ shoulders down and their noses to the ground, as if on the hunt for a bone greased with meat. The brain inside my skull was char. Not one of us was talking.

  Maybe we’d been watched the day before and branded friendly. Maybe the heat wasn’t as harsh as it had been. I can’t explain it. But it is true, what I told you before: That day the children came running. I can’t tell you who dared first—which door opened, then shut, leaving the house less crowded. What I know is that it was probably the loveliest thing that could have happened to me at the worst time of my life. It was color like sky—pinks, blues, and yellows. Color bright and clean in a desert place. In my camera’s eye. In my head.

  “This is so wild,” Sophie said; and Drake just hovered; and Riley said to no one, or maybe to herself, “They might as well be flowers, blown right off their stalks.”

  Despite the sun and the uptilting slope of the hill, these kids didn’t walk. Even the brother who was carrying his baby sister never slowed for a second, his body bent forward at the waist. There were brothers who came with brothers and clusters of girls and those who came from what must have been east by themselves, all of them dressed in parakeet colors; and I remember a pair of shining patent leathers, throwing the sun back up to the sun. I remember taking that photograph. Sun like bleach, like stain.

  Riley’s sapphire eyes were platters; for one bright instant they turned and took in the me behind my camera—took me in—and I snapped that portrait. The loose hair at the back of Sophie’s neck corked, anticipated, seemed ready to flee. Still, it was Drake who went to tell Mack, and Mack who brought Roberto, and Roberto who called out to the children by name, waving them up the hill faster. The first to reach the top of the hill was a pair of brothers with bright blue eyes and red paisley bandanas that tied back their thick, black hair. Some buttons on their shirts were missing. Their pants were light and loose. When they got to where we were, they hung their heads a little bit, but that didn’t disguise their smiles.

  The others were right on their heels. A boy in a strawberry-colored sleeveless shirt who had lost his front teeth. The girl with the black patent leather shoes. Several children—both boys and girls—wearing the same red paisley as the bandana boys. There were streaming colors in the hair of the girls—crimson bows and silver strings, wide navy blue bands striped with mango—and I kept thinking how much those kids must have been loved, how beautiful they’d been made by their mothers before they’d left their shacks and gone into the streets and trusted us to receive them. I thought that, and I took photographs. Portrait after portrait, and then I again turned the camera to Riley’s face as she stood there in the circle of children, as she reached her hands toward them.

  Roberto had a hug for every kid. Mack a handshake, a clap on the back. Now any of us who hadn’t been on break were on break, clustering around while the kids began to hang themselves from the monkey bars or sit on the roof of the sandbox or go back around to Roberto’s shed and return with plastic baseball bats and a seriously deflated soccer ball.

  “Look,” Riley was urging Sophie, but I was the one who turned to see Drake with a girl sitting high on his shoulders and another kid—couldn’t have been more than four—reaching up to hold his hand.

  By now Riley had her own little person dangling from her hand—a miniature girl with gaps between her teeth and eyes that weren’t brown but copper. The boy with the strawberry-colored shirt was alone. I went to him, and he opened his arms. I stooped to pick him up. “Hola,” I said. He pointed to a plastic bat. When I put him down, he dropped to the gravelly dust and with his hands began to shape a pitching mound. He was flocked to by others, and now they were kneeling, too—building up a mound of dust so that a game could start.

  Corey grabbed a stick and started drawing out the plates. Sam took first, Jon second; third went to Neil. Behind home plate the kids of Anapra lined up, mostly boys, except for this one girl who was tall and knobby kneed, with hair that had been chopped short. The Third strode out onto the mound. He underarmed a Wiffle ball to the kid in the strawberry-colored shirt.

  An hour later we were all crowded into Lupe’s kitchen—us, the Anapra kids, some mothers and fathers who had come up the hill with shy smiles on their faces and gold crosses hung at their necks. Some of the littlest kids sat on our knees; some tucked in close beside us; the patent leather–shoe girl had climbed back up to her post on the Third, who held one of her ankles with his hand while he ate so that she wouldn’t fall. Every now and then she’d drum on his head, and I guessed that was their sign, because the Third would stop whatever he was doing and hand her a wedge of the watermelon that Lupe had stacked on a plate at every table.

  On my own lap was a child who’d climbed up in all the chaos of the lunch hour and stayed put, perhaps sensing protection in my bigness, some kind of well-defended shelter. She had a little bit of green in her very dark eyes, and lots of light in that green. She had her hair in pigtails and a fringe of bangs, and her eyelashes were tangled and dark as daddy longlegs legs—so long that they cast shadows on her cheeks. Her orange tank top had a satin bow at its neck. Her canvas shoes seemed new.

  In the room the noise was big and confused; but it was good noise, mostly Spanish or bad attempts at Spanish, and laughter when the words didn’t come out right. Noise I could lose my self within. Mack and Roberto stood together at one end of the room, chatting with Lupe, drinking tall glasses of juice, getting down to the business of the dark stew that Lupe had ladled onto our plates a little while before—stew that Jon called rooster casserole just to make Neil laugh, which he did. I tried to keep my eye on Riley, but she kept vanishing from view. I helped the girl on my lap with her fork. She chewed about a million times before she finally swallowed.

  “Georgia,” I said, pointing to myself. “Georgia.”

  She understood. “Georgia,” she said.

  “¿Cómo te llamas?”

  “Isabela.”

  “¿Cuantos años tienes?”

  “Cinco.”

  “Five,” I said, putting up my hand and stretching out my fingers.

  The child nodded again. “¡Hola!” she said.

  Now all eyes were on Mack, who had clapped his hands to get our attention. Even the Anapra kids who couldn’t understand his English grew quiet—their parents, too—as he explained the work we were to do that afternoon: how some of us would be lining the big, deep hole with concrete block, and others would be mixing and pouring the concrete that woul
d form the foundation of the bathroom proper, and two would be needed to finish the forms into which the concrete pad would be poured. Any way we chose, he said, it was heavy work made even tougher by the sun; and we were not to overwhelm ourselves, not to push so hard that we wouldn’t be able to push as hard tomorrow.

  “This is not a race,” he said. “The key here is pacing. You’re going to watch out for yourselves, and you’re going to watch out for each other.”

  He told us to grab a last piece of watermelon, clean up our places, and fill our water bottles. He said, “The sun is high. Go get your sunblock.” Then we said, “¡Gracias!” to Lupe as we filed out into the heat, the Anapra kids still mixed in with us, the Third still neck-laced with the little girl. What we needed had been laid out for us by Roberto and Mack when we’d been playing ball. I chose the mix-the-concrete station after Riley announced that she’d be happiest toting block. “Given the choices,” she said, and laughed. Everyone but me laughed with her.

  I lined up with Sam, Mariselle, Mrs. K., Corey, Catherine, and Jazzy, who couldn’t decide until Mr. Thom pointed her in the direction of our crowd. “I can’t even make brownies,” she whined as Roberto demonstrated so many parts cement to so many parts gravel to a lesser water part—the dry stuff mounded high like a volcano and the water poured in last, and big shovels used to turn, fold, and mix. You had to be strong to do the stirring; you had to stick with it, find the right grip; and you couldn’t think about anyone or anything else when it came your turn to stir.

  We shoveled the first batch into a wheelbarrow, and Sam took over from there, his light-colored eyes squeezing in on themselves as he pushed his cargo across the thick, loose sand and tried his best not to sink. Corey sang Sam some song of encouragement, and then the kids of Anapra joined in, singing some other song of their own from wherever they sat—some on the roof of Lupe’s kitchen, some on the rungs of the monkey bars, some in the shade, some up high on the cliff that overlooked Roberto’s compound. Chins on their knees, they sang, arms linked together; and finally when Sam got the wheelbarrow the whole fifteen-or-something-foot distance, the kids let out a cheer so big that even Sam, his entire blond head wringing sloppy wet with sweat, had enough in him to take a 360-degree bow. The concrete we’d made filled a fraction of a fraction of the formed-out foundation hole.

  “I am predicting,” Mrs. K. said, “that we shall be here forever.”

  Mariselle sighed.

  “Think of it as an adventure,” Riley called from around the corner. Some people laughed.

  six

  We didn’t get back until five, each of us kids disappearing at once to the bare shelter of our beds while the adults went off to take their showers. I was disgusting hot, a crust of sweat on every inch of skin, my hair mopped down around my face and too stiff with salt even to comb my fingers through.

  I must have closed my eyes; I don’t remember. All I know is that when I woke up, I was the only one in that upstairs room. I lay in the afternoon shadows, then slid out of the bunk toward the door, stood on that balcony, looked down. There was not an inch of shade on the balcony. In the courtyard, Catherine and her mother were husking corn with Leonor. Sam and Corey were balancing wood shafts on their fingers—scraps of lumber they must have found lying around. Sophie, Mariselle, and Riley sat in battered beach chairs reading the magazines that Mariselle had stowed in her carry-on luggage like some kind of contraband. They could have been girls at a salon letting their pedicures set. Even if I’d not been at war with Riley, I’d have no business there.

  I turned back into the room, grabbed my things, reemerged. Halfway down the steps, I heard Drake and Manuel in the chapel doorway talking. Part English. Part Spanish. The subject was Socorro—the girl, I realized, who stood outside the complex gate. Drake was asking questions, pressing.

  I stepped into the bathroom, pulled the shower curtain shut. I didn’t turn the water on. Socorro’s sister was dead, I’d heard Manuel say. She’d been taken, raped, abandoned, her shoe found in a deserted parking lot. Her father was dead from cancer. Her brother had gone off to the States. It was just the girl and her mother. “Las muertas de Juárez,” Manuel said. “There are ghosts everywhere. Socorro comes finding.”

  “Finding?” Drake asked.

  “I mean to say looking.”

  “For what?”

  “For her sister’s spirit.”

  “But why does she think she’ll find it here?”

  “Because her sister passed this way each day on her way home from her horchata stand. And because this is a church, where spirits live.”

  There was silence then, and beyond that silence the sound of Corey gathering up some crowd, the sound of Jazzy saying, “You should join the circus.” But then I heard Drake asking questions again. Drake still close, talking to Manuel.

  “So why doesn’t she come inside?” he asked. “Why won’t she come past the gate?”

  “Time, in my country, is the future, Drake. Socorro will come when she is ready.”

  There was grime on the floor of the bathroom, mud in a dark halo around the drain. I stripped off my stiff clothes and stood beneath a thin stream, thinking of Socorro and the ghost she was chasing. Of a sister, abandoned. Of the future of time.

  Watermelon juice in plastic jugs. Baskets of chips. Plates of wedged lime. A soup thickened by chicken and squash, and Lobo running in circles with his ears pulled high. The men in the folding chairs on the neighboring roof lit their cigarettes and laughed; and it was understood, by all of us by then, that we’d become their entertainment, that they would miss us when we were gone.

  Mr. Thom was telling a story about a child he’d met on the work site that day—a boy who was nine who was home alone with his younger siblings all day while his parents worked at a maquiladora that was, the boy said, three bus rides away. “The boy seemed proud,” Mr. Thom said, “of the care that he was giving. As if he were honored, not burdened, by the responsibility. I don’t think, growing up, that I’d have been like that. I don’t see it where I live; do you?”

  “No,” Mrs. K. said. “Not often. Or at least not often enough.”

  I thought about Kev, but the comparison didn’t fit. I’d turned the word responsibility into a bad thing in my life. This boy, this squatters’ village boy, had turned it, according to Mr. Thom, into something over which to be proud.

  “He introduced me to his sister,” Mr. Thom was saying. “She couldn’t have been more than three. She wanted to help with the construction.”

  “Something like that happened to me,” Catherine said. “I was taking a break, right? From all that shoveling. And I turned around, and there was this kid handing a bottle of Gatorade to me. I was, like, pretty embarrassed, because two minutes before, I’d been complaining to Mariselle. Like, what? A little shoveling’s supposed to kill me?”

  Mariselle said, “You weren’t complaining that much, Catherine.”

  “Well. You know. Enough.”

  I was avoiding Riley by watching Drake—watching him take the conversation in while the sky above us changed. He didn’t seem the least inclined to talk, but he was precise in the way that he listened. Tall and broad, he clearly came from more money than most of the rest of us, but he wasn’t arrogant. His head was in some other place. Increasingly, I wondered about the things he never shared.

  Leonor and Concha were collecting the empty bowls of soup. They were bringing out trays of sliced green melon and bowls of M&M’s. Corey was balancing a spoon on his nose, and even Mack was watching. Mr. Thom was shaking his head. Sophie was trying to one-up Corey, tossing the M&M’s high and catching them with her mouth, like a seal at a fancy water park. You could get lost in it even if you weren’t part of it, which is why I didn’t hear the screams at first. Didn’t hear Socorro, out in the street, in the shadows of that dusk.

  What I noticed was Lobo’s frenzy. Then I noticed Drake—pushing back from the table and running for the gate. The goose from across the street had gotten loose. Its
wings were stretched and high and angry, its hard, yellow beak was snapping, and Socorro was there, her head in her hands, her body crouched low to the street. The wings were taller than she was, the white, assaulting wings.

  “Get me the keys,” Drake called, and Manuel, halfway to the gate himself, tossed them, and Drake caught them. In one swift motion he opened the door and rushed the goose, which swiveled its head about its ropy, white neck and, confused, beat its wings harder, unwilling to leave the girl, for whatever reason she’d been chosen, but made afraid, too—you could see it—by Drake’s imposing height. The girl was crying now, sobbing, and the old lady from across the street was out on her porch waving a cane in the scene’s direction, whether at the goose or at the girl I couldn’t tell.

  Drake never stopped. He just kept at the goose, closing in, raising his arms as if he could lasso the wild wings that way. Manuel was near, Manuel was yelling, but it was Drake from whom the goose finally fled, Drake who carried the girl through the gate, which Manuel closed and locked behind them. The girl was tiny, a wisp in an olive-colored dress with a crown of silky black hair.

  Leonor was there with a bucket of ice, Mrs. K. at Leonor’s side. Drake kept speaking, words that none of us could hear. He never let her down.

  “God-damned goose,” Jon said, and Mariselle said, “Really.”

  Riley looked as if she might cry.

  That night, in the room up the unsteady flight of stairs, we all lay quiet. Everyone lost in her own thoughts, in the aftermath of Socorro, the goose, Drake, Manuel, who, in the end, extracted the child from Drake’s arms and took her down the street to where she lived with a mother who had lost one daughter and could not afford to lose another. Socorro had not once lifted her head to look at us. She had only clung to Drake, sensing in him a safe harbor, a place where she could be afraid and then not afraid.