The Heart is Not a Size

by Beth Kephart

  We nodded behind him.

  “We saw yesterday what the wind could do,” he continued. “We all know what we’re coming back to. Some of you will be cleaning out the sewage hole. Some will sweep the foundation. The lumber is under the tarp, but we’re going to have to go find that tarp. The sand will be heavy, and you know it’s hard work. Spare each other. Don’t forget your water bottles.”

  “Hammering is starting to sound pretty good,” Riley leaned Sophie’s way and said. She flexed her right arm and scared up no muscle.

  We were put into teams, guys and girls—Riley and Drake, of all couplings, to begin with. He was huge to her small, but Mack said that was the point—to work each other’s strength and cancel out each other’s weakness. “Mismatches can be misleading” is what he said. “We’ve only got this morning to make this place right if we want to stay on schedule.”

  Riley had propped her pouch of bracelets near the water cooler. She had looked at me when she was paired with Drake, raised her eyebrow—a Riley triumph. But the thing was, I had no claim on him; I’d only sat beside him talking. Only traded Jack Gilbert lines. You can want something more than you can say. That doesn’t ever mean it’s yours.

  In the shed, Roberto and Lupe were ready with the tools, handing them off to us. We marched through the sand in our assigned pairs. I’d gotten paired with Sam, who had tied his unruly hair back with one bandana and knotted another one around his neck. He managed, he’d said once, his school’s baseball team. He had a mind for statistics and a coxswain’s body; but he worked—I had already noticed this—as hard as anybody else, making up for what he lacked in brawn with a pretty intense determination.

  “You have a weakness?” Sam had joked when Mack put us together.

  “Not one,” I’d said grimly. “And you?”

  “Just don’t want to show you up,” he said, “in the bucket-hoisting department.” He lifted an eyebrow over a very green eye and laughed. I laughed, too, because that’s another thing about panic: Distractions sometimes scare it off. Laughter you force yourself into. There’d be no fixing what was wrong between Riley and me—not today, not in Anapra, not beneath that sun. I grabbed a bucket and Sam seized a shovel, and we headed off to where we knew the lumber was—beneath layers and layers of sand. It was like February snow where we came from, only the heaped-up sand smoked every time it was touched. It started out with Sam shoveling and me holding the bucket, but I kept getting overcome with the dust.

  “Here,” Sam said, and he showed me where to stand so that the dust would blow right past me and not straight into my lungs. He was a statistician; that’s what he’d told us. But he had a mind for tactics, too, which was the reason, I realized, that he won every time he pulled out his deck of cards.

  We talked while we worked—about his baseball team, how they’d made it to districts even after their star pitcher tore a ligament, then lost on the run-up to states. I tried to picture Sam out in the dugout with his clipboard and cap, marking pitches and strikeouts and errors and hits on some official pad, getting called on by the coach for some key fact. But Sam wasn’t half bad at the shoveling, either—in fact, he made it seem easy. He had this nice, smooth way of digging and lifting, nothing extra in his effort. The sand, when Sam moved it, didn’t look as if it weighed a thing.

  “You’re good at that,” I told him.

  “Yeah. And like you said, you have no weakness.”

  I hauled every bucket to the designated dump, right around the corner from Lupe’s kitchen, not looking in Riley’s direction, not giving her that—I couldn’t. When I’d come back, Sam was ready with more. You couldn’t tire him out; he just kept coming at you—the bandana at his neck soaked through with sweat.

  By nine thirty some of the kids from the day before had returned, many in the same bright outfits. You wouldn’t have known from their faces that they’d been through a storm. They were smiling, waving, pointing, climbing back up onto Lupe’s roof and the monkey bars to get their bird’s-eye view of our work. Someone had taken special care with Isabela’s hair, which was corn-rowed back, away from her face, each cornrow pinned with a bright pink clip. She wore the same orange tank top and no shoes. She stood shy, in the shade of Lupe’s kitchen, until I yelled, “Hola”; and that was enough. She started running—jumping straight into my arms. Holding her high was like holding up air.

  “¿Cómo estás?” I asked.

  “Bien.”

  “Estamos construyendo un baño.”

  Isabela nodded. She touched her index finger to her mouth, then pointed to Lupe’s kitchen. “Mamá,” she said, stretching her arm even farther; and I set her down, and she went flying. I waited to see if she’d come back to me, but she was gone for now.

  By this time, more Anapra kids had taken their seats in the grandstands. There were rows of them now up on the bald hill, stitches of color on the rocks; and there were so many sitting on Lupe’s roof that I worried there’d be some disaster. On the monkey bars six of them sat—the blue-eyed brothers, the boy with the strawberry-colored shirt, three girls I didn’t remember seeing the day before.

  “We’re the next best thing to a Cinema Five,” Sam said. I glanced about at the other GoodWorks teams, and I understood that Mack hadn’t been half wrong when he paired us in our twos. The site was near to what it had been before the storm. We’d be able to frame that afternoon.

  I could hear pots and pans being banged around in the kitchen, water running. I could hear Lupe talking with another woman, Roberto’s voice working its way in, too. Lunch, I thought, and I thought about Riley. About how she’d have to eat today, about how I’d lost my place as the person who might help her.

  Half an hour on, we were still working—digging, lifting, hauling. We’d stopped for the millionth time for water, and then Sam and I had started again; and now when I hauled the bucket around to the dump, I heard something besides pots and pans in the kitchen, some version of soft sadness. It was quick inhales and real fast exhales—a child, I realized, crying. Like the monster bird had fitted its wings inside a person much too small for panic. I emptied my bucket, went around to the kitchen door, stepped in out of the sun; it was Isabela. She was sitting on one of the long, wooden tables, big tears on her face. Seeing me, she started crying harder. I looked from her to Lupe.

  “Mamá,” Isabela was crying. “Mamá.” She was pointing past the door where I was standing, to the high part of the road. Lupe was stroking the little girl’s head, saying some quiet something in Spanish; but whatever she said just made the girl cry harder, and finally Roberto, who was standing near, explained.

  “Her mother,” he said, pointing to where Isabela was pointing, “gone home. Fire on her hand. Bad burn. Isabela is scared. She wants to see her mother. Lupe has to stay to cook.”

  I stood in the doorway with the empty bucket in my hand. I thought about how quickly things can disappear, especially in Anapra, where stories like Socorro’s were too common and where Isabela was crying even harder now, inconsolable, and where my own best friend had traveled far from me because I’d cared out loud. Through the window on the opposite wall, I saw Sam standing by the lumber pile, leaning on his shovel, waiting for me to return. I knew my options, and I weighed them. “I’ll be right back,” I told Roberto, and I stepped out into the sun and hurried around to my partner.

  “You get lost?” Sam teased.

  “Sorry. I—”

  “I mean, here we were, winning the sand-hauling competition, and then what happens? You disappear.”

  “Didn’t you hear Isabela crying?” I asked.

  “No.” The teasing stopped. He got serious.

  “Roberto says that her mother got hurt working in Lupe’s kitchen—a burn, I think, something with the fire. She went home and left Isabela here, and now Isabela is upset and she wants to get back to her house, and—you know—well, I thought I’d help her.”

  “I don’t get it.” He leaned on the handle of his shovel, watching me.

&
nbsp; “I was thinking I might take Isabela home,” I said, shifting in my sneakers. “So that she could see her mom, I mean. See that she’s okay. That’s she going to be, anyway.”

  “You know that Mack isn’t going to like that,” he said after a pause. “Nobody walks in Anapra alone.”

  “Right, yes. I know that. But if you came with me, I wouldn’t be alone.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, if we both went, would it be so bad?”

  “Taking little girls home isn’t in the job description, Georgia. It’s also probably against the rules. Talk to Mack. He’ll get someone to get Isabela home.”

  “But she trusts me,” I said, and I know it sounded stupid, plaintive; I know it sounded like what it was: like me needing to be needed. Me, the one who had come all the way to Juárez to forfeit her best friend.

  “You’re kind of an odd one,” Sam said, but he wasn’t being mean when he said it.

  “I know.” I traced the sand with the toe of my heavy-duty sneaker, looked up, caught him smiling.

  “I’ll cover for you, if you want.” He smiled more broadly. It was like getting permission for something we both knew was wrong.

  “Could you?”

  He gave me the long look of a statistician. He shrugged his shoulders. “Sure.”

  “I owe you big-time,” I said.

  “Yeah, Georgia. You’re not kidding.”

  “I’ll make it fast.”

  “Of course you’ll make it fast. And don’t be stupid, okay? Just go and then come back.”

  She wouldn’t let me carry her; she had to lead the way. We cut across the deep sand on the opposite side of Lupe’s kitchen, away from the teams of sand sweepers, then climbed a steep, sinking, sand-sucking pitch and got ourselves onto a road that swung high to the left. I kept saying her name, and she kept saying “Mamá,” and I kept wishing that I could think of something useful and consoling.

  The houses here were like the houses I had already seen, except that every single one was different. Across some of the pallet walls sheets of dark paper had been nailed. Across some front yards there was barbed wire. Between two houses tires had been planted straight up in the ground, and inside the tires there were sprouts of cacti. You could tell where the storm had been and what had already, just that morning, been repaired or dug out or hung on a line so that the sand would shake loose from the dresses, pants, sun-bleached slips. We passed ladies walking beneath little kids’ umbrellas. We passed a group of boys playing something like soccer with a foam ball. There was a house built so squarely of cinder block that it reminded me of Riley’s Rubik’s cube, which she had never yet solved. There was a house that had been built of plastic stacking boxes, almost like something Kev would have Legoed, except for the bird in a cage by the front door, which was green and squawked as we passed. There were larger houses, nice, stucco houses that were painted the colors of seashore homes—turquoise, white, and pink—and out in the middle of the road was half a skull of a large dog, all its teeth lined up like piano keys, or maybe the skull had belonged to a small horse.

  “Mamá,” Isabela kept saying, tugging me along; and then she started running and I was running to keep up, her hand still in mine, so tiny.

  We came to a house with real glass windows, a real front door, a dark green roof, three dogs in the yard, tied to a fence. It was the nicest house in all of Anapra, possibly, at least. All of a sudden I wanted it urgently for Isabela, wanted the door to open, wanted Isabela’s mother to be standing there, calling Isabela home. But Isabela never even glanced in that direction. She kept tugging me forward, kept running. We went around a curve, across down-on-the-ground electrical wires. We dodged the stinking trickles of sewage. We passed a group of men, and I wondered if I had gone too far, why I hadn’t asked for Mack’s permission. Thought about how, if Riley and I were still best friends, she’d have noticed I was gone; she’d be on the lookout for my return. Then the broom truck went by, playing the kind of music they play on the horse show merry-go-round back home and kicking up a storm of dust, and I thought about my dad and how he always said that sometimes you can’t know what is right or wrong until you get some distance.

  Finally Isabela broke free and turned right, up a hill. She ran with her arms stretched out, and her “Mamá” loud but growing softer as she ran away from me. She never looked back, never waved. I stopped and stood where I was and waited for a sign that the little girl was really home—that this was hers, this mostly-tin house with the one-pallet wall, the door made of a heavy black curtain and beside it a tall cactus that bloomed these bright red flowers. Someone drew the curtain aside. Isabela disappeared within. She had her proof, I hoped at least, that her mama would be fine.

  I stood and waited for I don’t know what more. Then I turned and walked the road alone. Listened to my feet on the slide of thick sand.

  twelve

  I returned the way I’d come, up along the high road, past the half skull, by the bird in the cage. The women with the umbrellas were down on a parallel road; and the broom truck was returning, dust high ahead and above and beside and behind it, but the music loud as ever. Three men had come out of one of the houses and were fixing a fence that had fallen in the storm. An old black dog lay in a stripe of shade, his head on his crossed-together paws. I walked as fast as I could until a pack of dogs started trotting slowly behind me. Dogs smell fear; that is what my father says. I tried to give off the scent of someone taking a pleasant little stroll.

  But the closer I got to Roberto’s compound, the more I felt the wobble of panic. Up in the bald hills above the site, the Anapra kids had gotten out of their crouch. They were standing, stretching out, as if to get a better view of something I couldn’t see from where I was. On the roof of Lupe’s kitchen, the same thing was true—kids on their feet, kids in tension. Something was broken; I knew something had gone wrong. The kids were on their feet, some with their hands over their mouths, all of them, but I couldn’t guess why, couldn’t parse the silence.

  Apply your intelligence to every living thing. I heard my mother, and then I heard myself telling Drake that panic attacks are like wanting to run except that you can’t because you are trapped inside the hole of who you are.

  Don’t you dare break down, I told myself, remembering Buzzby’s class and Longwood Gardens, the night before Juárez. Don’t you dare. And now I was running—kicking up dust in the face of the dogs, which made the dogs run, too, close at my heels, yipping. If they’d come any closer, they’d have had my ankles in their teeth, my shoelaces, something. But I wasn’t letting them get any closer. I wasn’t letting anything else get in my way—not the dogs, not the dust, not myself, not the blackbird that thundered and banged in the place of my heart.

  I wasn’t going to be beat by panic. Not this time. Not one time more.

  Nobody was at any of the sand-clearing stations. It was much too still. All I could hear as I came around the bend was my own big feet thwonking the sanded-over road. I nearly stumbled down the pitch, caught myself, kept stumbling on toward Lupe’s kitchen; it was like trying to walk through ocean waves, because the sand was so loose and so soft. Not even Lupe was in Lupe’s kitchen. Through the window on the opposite wall I could a crowd gathered in a circle. I turned from the door and hurried around. Sam was the first to see me.

  “It’s Riley,” he said, and now I put my hand on my heart to stop the wings that wanted to start flying.

  “Let me see her,” I insisted, still pushing forward, pressing in. Now Corey and Mariselle stepped aside and made me an alley, and I could see what they had all already seen—Riley down on the ground, her head in Sophie’s lap, her right hand in Lupe’s. Roberto and Drake were holding a piece of tarp above her head to keep her face in shadow. It cast a pale blue across her skin.

  “What happened?” I asked, looking at Drake, trusting Drake to tell me the news, the damage; trusting myself to hold back the panic, to do the right thing, to focus only on my friend.

 
; “She passed out, Georgia. She was standing there, giving the girls their bracelets….”

  “Their bracelets?” I glanced around, glanced up at the roof, saw flashes of Riley color sparking from the dark arms of little girls, saw the pouch near Riley’s head empty. I looked at Sophie, and she shook her head, chewed her lip, tried not to let loose the tears in her eyes.

  “Drake caught her,” Sophie said. “I saw it. She would have fallen back, into the sewage ditch. She would have hit her head on the block.”

  Drake didn’t deny or confirm. I looked back down at Riley. “Riley,” I said, “can you hear me?”

  “She isn’t talking,” Sophie said. “She hasn’t opened her eyes, either.”

  Mrs. K. was dabbing Riley’s forehead with a towel. Catherine was concerned and silent. Lupe was calm and steady, watching Riley like she’d watch a pot of stew, careful and expectant.

  “Where’s Mack?” I asked at last.

  “Getting the van with Mr. Thom.”

  “Where are they taking her?”

  “A clinic down the road.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, but I did; and that was worse. They were taking my one-and-only best friend to a clinic in Anapra. She was sick and a million miles from home, and I had been gone when she fell.

  Mack got the van backed in as close to Riley as he possibly could, Mr. Thom calling, “A little more, you’ve still got room; a little more; no; there, you’ve got it,” until Mack pulled to a complete stop. We all stepped back then and gave Drake the room he needed to scoop Riley into his arms. It was as if he’d been built for this, as if he had been rescuing people all his life, shaping his arms into a cradle. He stooped, brought Riley up with him, didn’t let her head snap back. We let him go with her; we gave him more room. Even I gave Drake more room, because if unconsciousness is sleeping, then he knew how not to mess with her dreams. Drake got Riley to the van as I went ahead and slid into the middle row beside Sophie, because it was the two of us, Mrs. K. said, who should go with Drake, Mack, and Roberto to the clinic. The rest were to stay behind and work with Mr. Thom. We were to send word if we could.