The Heart is Not a Size

by Beth Kephart

  Time passed—there was no telling how much—and then, above me, I heard Riley turn. I saw her pale, lean arm fall down toward mine, a sheen in a black room, a hope I shouldn’t have had.

  “Hey,” I whispered. “You awake?”

  Nothing.

  “Ri?”

  She withdrew her arm. There was silence.

  Mrs. K. had begun to snore—soft little whimpers that seemed embarrassed of themselves. Somebody deeper into the dark was jittery. I had the taste of dust far back in my throat, and when I swallowed, it was like swallowing over pebbles.

  “Ri. Listen. This is stupid.”

  I turned on my left side and faced the wall. I turned right, toward the door. I remembered the time that Kev had started crying late at night when my parents were out at some function and how I’d let him cry until I had to find out what was wrong. I’d gone into his room and found him balled up on one side, beneath a twist of covers.

  “Hey,” I’d said, “what’s going on?”

  “Can you sit with me, Georgia?” he’d asked. “Can you?”

  So I’d sat with him, on the side of his bed, waiting for his breathing to steady and his limbs to relax, for the covers to go looser over him. I’d just sat there, waiting. When my parents got home I was still sitting there, listening to the sound of my little brother sleeping.

  seven

  We’d stirred up fifteen batches of concrete; Sam and Corey had traded off being our wheelbarrow men. We’d mixed enough to pour two thirds of the bathroom floor and to supply the sewage hole crew besides; by now they were slapping the stuff between the concrete blocks like old-time bricklaying pros. Mack had said that we’d work an hour more, get the floor all poured so that it could set while we hammered up the framing come tomorrow. My arms were like noodles; my head hurt. My secondhand scrubs were soaked through. Mariselle and Mrs. K. built up another cement-and-gravel mound. Then they flattened the top and poured the water in, and Jon and I stirred.

  We made four more batches of that concrete, and that’s when things changed—that’s when the wind began to blow and Sophie, noticing, said: “The gods are showing mercy.” She pulled her T-shirt out away from her chest to get some breeze against her skin, and now Catherine was looking up—removing her sunglasses and squinting toward the sky. Her body was perfectly straight and, even in all that heat, somehow cool and orderly, and when I saw her staring, I followed her gaze. Saw the clouds off in the distance, nowhere near the sun. The sky itself was less blue than green, even without sunglasses on. At the big hole Riley was noticing; the Anapra kids, perched high on the cliffs, had their eyes tilted skyward, too.

  Now the green that had been creeping in turned a seaweed color. There was the spitting of something against my face, the hard sound of gravel on my glasses, which wasn’t rain but sand.

  There were flutters on the cliff, on Lupe’s roof, on the monkey bars—splashes of kids climbing down, as the bigger ones handed the littler ones to the ground. The girl with patent leather shoes went running for Drake, who was in the sewage hole slopping the concrete mix between the blocks. She leaned toward him, waved.

  We were calling “¡Adiós!” as the kids scattered—their shirts and dresses blowing, their strawberry, mango, lemon, peach colors flaring against the sky. Mrs. K. turned her back to another gust of wind. I felt the sand blow hard, knock against my shins. The blue tarp that had been hung over the lumber pile crackled and snapped, tried to tear away from its posts.

  “Anything loose goes off the ground and into the shed,” Mack called; and now we were scrambling to get our stuff out of the storm—the bags of cement, the gravel, the shovels, the rakes, the buckets—leaving the block right where it was but hauling up the plywood planks on which we’d been mixing the concrete.

  With every back and forth to Roberto’s shed the wind kicked harder. Covering our eyes with our hands, covering our mouths, we bent against it. The sky was like pea soup, and finally one fat cloud caught up with the sun; and when I looked back down to the streets of Anapra, there were no colors, just blobs of tumbleweed knocking around between the shanties. I made out a mule at the other end of town trying to snap itself free from a rope tied to a fence. I saw the shells of old junker cars ripple with wind. It was like a scene from one of Geoff’s video games, and I wanted to take photographs. But now Mack was saying that we had to get inside, and we were running, tripping to the banging open door of Lupe’s kitchen. It slammed behind Mrs. K., the last one in. It didn’t matter that we’d come inside. I felt the prickles of sand on my skin.

  There was room at the one window for just some of us to see, and Jazzy was already there with Catherine, their hair gone wild with the wind and hanging down their backs like curtains. Soon they joined the crowd that had collected and knotted around Sam, who went nowhere without a deck of cards. Those who weren’t dealt in watched Corey to see what he’d do with his Hacky Sack.

  Outside, the sand was blowing up and falling down like hail, slapping the thin metal roof. But still it hadn’t rained; and even Mack seemed surprised, or at least he didn’t use the occasion to give us some you-see-what-I’ve-been-talking-about instruction. He was watching over the shoulders of Drake, who now stood at the window. I thought about the mule down the road, wondered if it had gotten itself free, and if it had, where was it going? Where do Anapra mules go?

  Finally Drake spoke, and when he did, all of us but Corey turned. “Houses down there can’t survive this wind,” he said. “It’s like they’re getting clobbered by snow.” Suddenly I wanted to see what Drake was seeing—stand next to him to wait out the storm. There was room by the window, and I stepped in beside him. Neither of us spoke for quite a while. The sand, harassed by the wind, was a truly putrid shade of green. An old pickup truck had stopped in its tracks, letting the wind and the sand whip all around it. A flattened cardboard box had separated from four walls of tin and was pin-wheeling across the sand.

  “Jesus,” I said. The snakes of electrical wires shimmied, as if they were being snapped by an invisible hand.

  “They make the storms different here,” Drake said. “I’ve seen this kind of thing only one time before when I was twelve.”

  “Where?”

  “Hilton Head Island. My dad has a place.”

  Beyond the window a wheelbarrow rumbled loose from a shed near the top of a hill and started to wobble backward. It crashed into a bucket fence, and then the buckets started rolling. “So, what was it like?” I asked. “That storm, I mean?”

  “Brutal. Came up quick, when there were lots of people still on the beach. Picked up buckets, hats, towels; tossed them. Pulled the waves up high and crashed them, too.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Standing on my dad’s balcony. Beachfront home.” He said it as if it were something to apologize for, as if he were ashamed of his family’s wealth. I’d met lots of rich kids, growing up on the Main Line. But never one like Drake.

  “How long did the storm last?” I asked him.

  “Too long.”

  “I guess.”

  “A girl drowned.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “She lived five houses down from my dad. She was six. She’d gone out to play while the nanny was sleeping. No one realized she was missing, and then it was too late.”

  I just stood there. I just stood and listened.

  “Stuff like that happens, and it changes the way you think.” On the other side of the window, the sand was howling at the monkey bars, throwing itself up against the metal like bullets made of spit.

  “You were good with Socorro last night,” I finally said.

  “That goose,” he said, “should have been on its leash.”

  “Or eaten.”

  Games were going on behind us, idle talk, pacing, Sam slapping out another game of cards. “This should have been rain,” Mariselle was saying. “That’s what they need.”

  I turned and registered her concern, decided that she was, after all, a girl with a
heart, the kind of complicated heart that it might make sense to know.

  “Drake,” Mack said, “Roberto needs you in the kitchen.”

  Drake gave me a perplexed look, then turned, leaving me alone at the window before the spectacle of the storm. That was when I remembered that I hadn’t seen Riley, that I’d lost track of her in all the commotion.

  I scanned the room, the knots of people—Mrs. K. and Mr. Thom at one table, Catherine and Jazzy by the door, Sam and most of the rest of them jammed around a game of hearts. Corey and Jon were sitting side by side, backs against the table, Corey teaching Jon some juggling trick; and nowhere in any of that was Riley.

  “You seen Riley, Corey?” I asked. He shook his head no without lifting his eyes from the Hacky Sacks. I scanned the room again: no Riley. I started walking the hard-dirt floor now, checking the worn-out benches, thinking maybe Riley was napping, but nothing. I wasn’t supposed to care, she wasn’t even talking to me now, but I was worried—I couldn’t help it; I didn’t see Riley. “Mack, you seen Riley?” I finally asked him when he returned from the kitchen with Drake.

  He pointed his chin in the direction of Lupe’s stove, and I didn’t understand. Then he thrust it out in the same direction, and I went that way—toward the counter where the food was served, toward the stove. There was a door back there that I hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t latched. I pushed against it. It opened to a room that was hardly any wider than the cot it contained.

  “Riley?” I asked. “Ri?” She was lying there, with her hair sprawled out around her. She was holding Lupe’s one outstretched hand. The other hand she’d given to Sophie.

  “Hey,” I said in the softest voice.

  Sophie turned and gave me the please-be-quiet eye.

  “What’s up?” I asked, trying to lower my voice, too, trying not to give away my rising panic, because panic is contagious. It’s worse than a disease.

  “I don’t know,” Sophie said. “Something about her head—it’s hurting.” Lupe’s hand was so big compared to Riley’s. So dark and wrinkled with age. “Mack said I could take her back here, get her to rest. Lupe’s being an angel.”

  “Well, that was nice of Mack,” I said; and now what had been becoming panic geared into relief, and now the relief was a little like anger, and I was standing there feeling pissed. Pissed that Sophie was there beside Riley, who hadn’t opened her eyes or said a thing. “And nice of Lupe, too.” Scared, too. Mostly I was scared.

  “Real nice of Lupe,” Sophie said. “I mean, this is her room.”

  I nodded again in Lupe’s direction. I took off my glasses and cleaned them, then fitted them back onto my nose. Took a long breath, as if I thought I could wait out Sophie and her ministrations.

  “Well, how is she now?”

  “I don’t know. Says she’s still kind of hurting and dizzy.”

  “Storm’s huge,” I said, trying to sound casual, “and mean. You should see it outside. We won’t be going anywhere soon.” Between Lupe and Sophie and Riley, the room was full. I stood in the doorway, feeling monstrous.

  “I think we should just let her sleep,” Sophie said, looking for a long time at Riley, then glancing at me. Telling me without telling me that it’d be good for me to leave.

  “Sure,” I said. “Right. Check on you soon.”

  “I’ll let you know if she needs anything.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But I kind of doubt it. I think she just needs sleep.”

  Sophie the nurse. As if she knew a damned thing. As if she had any idea what was wrong, as if she could fix it. I closed the door behind me. Breathed.

  eight

  Two hours later, when the sandstorm stopped, it was as if the whole world had been smeared. It took us an hour more to dig out our two vans, to start bumping down the road. It was true what Drake had said. It was as if Anapra had been hit with snow. There were pieces of tin and mattresses all tossed out to the street, parts of walls that had folded, cracked pots, a rubber wheel that had gotten loose from some bike and was wobbling around. The mule was gone. The doll that I’d seen tossed up on the roof was nowhere to be found. The kids of Anapra were wherever they had vanished to.

  I sat taking photos of the things that still remained the whole way back.

  Riley rode with her eyes shut tight and her head on Sophie’s shoulder.

  nine

  That night, after dinner, most of us went straight to bed. Even Corey packed up his Hacky Sacks and slipped away for sleep. It was everything we’d seen and done. It was thinking about those kids in their blown-out shacks, and the mule and the doll—things vanished and buried and broken—and tomorrow the people of Anapra would open their doors to the blaring sun and begin making everything right again. Hammering the roofs back above their heads. Straightening the pipes. Finding the mule. Hanging the signs.

  “Night, Riley,” I whispered to the above-me bunk.

  Nothing but nothing floated down.

  The air seemed heavier than ever, thickened by the storm. When I breathed or swallowed, I felt the gravel in a clot by my tonsils. When I closed my eyes, I saw color. When I opened them, I saw storm. I saw Riley lying on that cot in that minuscule room, Lupe and Sophie on either side. I saw Drake at the window and me next to Drake, my hand on his forearm.

  “Stuff like that happens, and it changes the way you think,” Drake had said, as if he took his own decency for granted, as if it were inevitable—but decency never is, decency is as close as you get to impossible; and if I were decent, I thought, if I truly were, I’d stop letting Riley run from her problems. I wouldn’t let her disappear; I wouldn’t let her pretend to some girl who hardly knew her that she’d gotten smacked by some headache that a sweet nap might cure. I would insist. Out loud. In the open. I’d do something at last with the panic in my head, save Riley even though it seemed she had precious little interest in saving herself. I’d out her secret, for her sake.

  I sat up, slipped from between my sheets, grabbed my camera, found my way to the door. I stood out on the balcony beneath the silver fish of the moon, inhaling and exhaling slowly. I thought about Riley and that punk word average, how Riley’s answer to that had been to starve herself to excessive thin. Extremes aren’t average. But neither was Riley ever anything like average: She could draw an old man or a pair of boots from memory; she could take beads and string them into sunsets; she could just sit there looking like her Riley self with a mist of freckles and her percussion earrings and anyone would stop to see her, anyone would. She was letting her mother’s word rule. She was letting her secret destroy her. I was Riley’s best friend, and I’d done nothing but cower. I’d vanished, too, as big as I was.

  The men on the neighboring roof had fallen asleep. I could see their chins tipped onto their chests, their profiles lit up by the moon. I began dialing back through the photos, each trapped splinter of Juárez. The children who had nothing, smiling; the mothers who were holding their hands. Privilege doesn’t make you smarter. It doesn’t gift you decency.

  Below me now I heard the scratch of Lobo’s nails on the courtyard floor, saw his tail swatting the air. My hair was a mess; my feet were naked; I went to see what the lone wolf was up to. Every loose plank wobbled and walloped, no matter how lightly I trod.

  “Hey, Lobo,” I called when I reached solid ground.

  “Georgia?” My name rose from the shadows; but all I saw was the slatted dark, the strange nighted shadows of Manuel’s makeshift courtyard. When my eyes adjusted, I realized it was Drake, sitting in one of those plastic beach chairs, his hand on Lobo’s head. Too late, I thought, to turn back. Too late, and I didn’t want to.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Lobo,” he said, “seemed nervous. I came out to see what was up.”

  I glanced at Lobo, then back at Drake—the straight drop of his cheeks to his jaw, the short, unambiguous nose, the wide, smooth plane of his brow. He wasn’t looking at me, not really. He was looking at something only he could see—looking
at it or searching for it, roaming. There was room for me in all of that, and so I stood there, waiting.

  “So what is up?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. But definitely something is.”

  The moon was big; it was so close, I could have grabbed it. It was shadow and it was light, quiet and loud with itself.

  “There’s an extra chair,” Drake said, “if you want to hang.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.” The chair creaked as I settled in. Lobo wheezed like a saw on a torrefied log. There was a small bulb of light outside the door to Manuel’s room. Drake just kept staring at the sky.

  “Hard to think,” he said, “that the same moon is hanging above the Main Line right now.”

  “One world, one moon,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Except not really.”

  Lobo whined, settled down, cushioned his head on his legs. It was hard here, and it was easy at home. It wasn’t one world, and we both knew it.

  “You know Jack Gilbert?” I asked. “The poet?”

  “Yeah,” Drake said, after a minute. “Actually, I do.”

  “‘We find out the heart only by dismantling what / the heart knows,’” I said. “Gilbert’s words.”

  Drake just shook his head. He might have laughed, but his voice was muffled. Lobo’s ears went up on alert, and Drake put his hand out to calm him. Now I was looking at Drake and seeing moons in his eyes, and seeing the ruin in the moons in those eyes but also a gentling, too, a clear shot at healing.

  “I like the line,” I said. “Even if I don’t have it figured out.”

  “I think it’s about starting fresh,” Drake said after a long time had passed. “Your line. Seeing things newly.”

  “Maybe.” Up in the sky, a second generation of stars had washed up on the shore of the moon, or a cloud had passed, revealing. Lobo’s tail was going back and forth, anxious, waiting. “What do you think Lobo sees?” I asked Drake.