The Heart is Not a Size

by Beth Kephart

  None of us spoke on the way to the clinic. Nobody asked me where I’d been, not even Mack, who was driving somewhere between fast and slow—fast on the smooth stretches, slow over the long, hard humps of sand. We were heading for a part of Anapra we’d never been. I turned around, and all I could see of the compound were the little kids, still standing on Lupe’s roof—Riley’s genius on their arms.

  Up front, Roberto had started pointing the way. Mack verified every turn in Spanish. “Sí, sí,” Roberto would say, and then they drove again in silence until more directions needed giving and confirming.

  “Do we even know what’s wrong?” Sophie finally asked. “I mean, like, specifically?”

  “She was right there with me,” Drake said. “She said her head hurt. Then she asked me if it was snowing. I thought she was kidding, because it’s, like, two hundred degrees out here. But then she said ‘Oh,’ like that. ‘Oh.’ The next thing I knew, she’d quit digging, and she was calling to the girls, the little girls. She seemed odd, you know. Nervous. Like she had something she had to do fast. And then I saw her with her bag, saw her taking out those bracelets, and she was leaning down close and handing them around; and then her feet were going out from under her, and one of the little girls cried, and I don’t know, Georgia, I don’t really know. I was just there. Just lucky enough to catch her.”

  “I saw it,” Sophie repeated, and it seemed that that was all she knew of the story, that it was the only piece of the puzzle she had, as if she hadn’t been watching, as if she had never really noticed just how too-thin Riley really was.

  “It just happened,” Drake said. “There wasn’t time to think about it.”

  There wasn’t time, Drake said, and all I could think of was how I’d been the one to drag Riley into this, back in the winter, when I had done my best to ignore this disease she’d been trying to hide, when Anapra was nothing more than a name to us, a place on a map, a way to get away and see the world and grow up, some more, together. I’d come to Anapra to gain perspective, to fight my battles, to let the blackbird that was my heart go free. But I’d gone missing when Riley needed me, and now here we were, headed for a clinic in a squatters’ town where storms could blow down the houses and water was delivered in trucks. Way beyond, in the distance, rose the Cristo del Rey, a big white limestone cross on a hill. I prayed in its direction. I made promises I swore to God I’d keep:

  No more hiding from the problems that confront me.

  No more seeing mostly black in a world of so much white. “We must risk delight.”

  We had to travel several long blocks. We passed a house whose roof was the sawn-off roof of an old pickup truck. We crossed over power lines and the streaming sewage. In one backyard three perfectly white horses stood. I thought they were statues until one flicked its tail. Sophie saw it too, and we shivered. There was a cat fast asleep in the two-thirds part of a broken pail.

  “We almost there?” Sophie leaned forward and asked Mack, and Roberto answered, “Sí.” Riley hadn’t opened her eyes. Her skin was dry despite the heat. I saw Drake glance back at her, then search through the windows for some kind of clinic sign; and oh, how I wanted to reach out and kiss him, thank him for being there for Riley, for saving her from a concrete ditch, for me.

  The clinic was beige and small. Drake carried Riley from the van just as he had carried her in; and this time when he lifted her, she moaned.

  “Hey, Ri,” I whispered, “it’s us,” holding her hand as Drake carried her forward and Mack and Roberto hurried ahead.

  They spent a lot of time talking to a nurse at a desk. I spent the time talking to Riley—telling her where we were and what we were doing and how she was going to get better soon, even though I couldn’t tell if she heard me. Drake just stood there with her, didn’t budge, strong as the Cristo del Rey. There were children and women sprawled all over the room, waiting for doctors and cures.

  “They’re going to put her in a room,” Sophie said, because she’d been going back and forth between the front desk and us, trying to keep track of the plans. Now Mack started walking and Drake followed behind, and we all wove between the people who sat crowded in that hall—stepped over feet and legs and sacks and babies sitting on the floor. A nurse was just finishing putting a fresh sheet on a thin cot. Drake leaned and laid Riley down. I straightened her hair and Sophie held her hand, and now Roberto did the talking as the nurse wrote down things on a chart.

  “They’re cousins,” Mack said to the three of us, meaning Roberto and the nurse. “Riley’s in very good hands.”

  “They’re going to start an IV,” Drake said. He’d been following the conversation.

  “That’s good,” I said. “Right?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “She should be fine.”

  She didn’t look fine, though. I could see through her skin to her bones like I had the night before, and I knew that no matter what they could fix in Anapra, they’d have to fix a whole lot more at home. Riley had stopped eating to prove something to her mom, to make herself so unordinary thin; but what she’d done had hurt herself and had not in any way made her lovely.

  Roberto’s cousin went out and came back in, dragging one of those IV poles behind her. She made us go out into the hall while she tapped at Riley’s veins. The hall was as crowded as it was before, and now there were kids poking their faces past our legs to get a look at what was going on. Little kids, pretty as the kids up the hill. All big brown eyes and colored cottons, though you could read the sickness in them, the hurt, the fact that here, too, fixing was needed.

  “Georgia,” Mack said, motioning to me to step away from the others and follow him down the hall. I knew what was coming. I deserved it. “You know I’m disappointed,” he started. “We stay together at GoodWorks. We don’t go wandering off.” I waited for his anger. For repercussions; there would be some.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I felt a child’s sticky hands on the backs of my legs. Mack said something to the child in Spanish. I turned and saw him smiling as if he’d just won some game.

  “I know you had your heart in the right place; but if you really felt you had to take Isabela home, you should have asked me first and found a partner.”

  “I know.”

  “In every good place there are bad people. Anapra’s no different.”

  “I know that, Mack.”

  “I don’t care if we’re working in New York City. When you’re with GoodWorks, you go with a partner.”

  I didn’t answer. He’d said it enough times now. I understood.

  “Riley’s here in this clinic because she hasn’t stayed hydrated. And frankly, Georgia, because she hasn’t eaten. You understand, I’m sure, what I mean.”

  I nodded.

  “We make our rules at GoodWorks for a reason.”

  “I understand. It won’t happen again.”

  “I told your parents you’d be safe with me. But every one of you is responsible for helping me to keep that promise.”

  “I will.”

  The little boy was back at me again. I looked down and saw that he’d thrown his head straight back, trying to get my attention.

  “They’re going to keep Riley here this afternoon,” Mack said. “I’m asking you and Sophie to stick together, stay with her. They’re good people at the clinic. They are Roberto’s friends; they know what they’re doing. They can help Riley for right now, for today. We can help her going forward. But when she gets home, she’s going to need much more than that.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Riley has a problem.”

  “I know.”

  “No afternoon at a clinic is going to fix that.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m taking Drake and Roberto up to the site. I’ll be back for the three of you later.”

  I nodded, wanting to thank him. But when he smiled, his face broke up into its many sun-scribbled pieces, and for some reason that made me even sadder. Mack was old and young at the same time. Maybe the
constant taking care had left him somehow lonely.

  thirteen

  Roberto’s cousin had brought two bamboo chairs into the room and had placed them on either side of Riley’s cot. She’d hung the IV bag from a metal prong above Riley’s head, and a strip of thick white tape went across the place where the needle had gone under Riley’s skin. The nurse had taken a second sheet and bunched it up into a pillow. Already Riley seemed less pale, the color coming back into her freckles, her thirteen earrings looking a little more like music.

  “She’s pretty,” Sophie said; and I said, “Except she doesn’t know it. I hate when that happens.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  We sat there in silence, one of Riley’s hands in each of ours.

  “How long,” Sophie asked, finally, “have you two been friends?”

  “Oh my God,” I said, sighing like Mariselle, leaning into my chair but keeping my hand in Riley’s. And then: “Forever, I guess. Yeah. Forever.” My thoughts went back to the beginning of time, and now I started telling Sophie how it was that Riley and I had met in kindergarten. It was back before Riley’s dad had done his gonzo merger deal, I said, before Riley’s mom had started Botox. We had been more the same than different at first. It was the sameness part of us that we grew up holding on to. “We were the queens of finger paints,” I said. “We made pancakes out of mud. We got carpooled together after a while because we were that inseparable; and after school she’d come to my house, or sometimes I’d go to hers.”

  “You mean you’ve known each other for, like, a decade?” Sophie asked, incredulous, doing some math in her head, it looked like, looking from Riley’s face to mine.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Totally,” she said. “I’d give anything for a longtime friend like that. I mean, I don’t know. My parents keep moving. My dad, you know: his job. I’ve already been to seven schools. I didn’t get a shot at best friend forever. Class clown, yeah. I got that. But never best-friend-forever status.”

  “I’m lucky, I guess,” I said.

  “Guess so.”

  “I don’t know. It’s just how the cards fell.”

  Sophie sat as she was, leaning back against her chair; and I kept remembering, letting the pictures crop up in my head, little snapshot portraits of a friendship. “We had a tadpole farm when we were seven,” I said after some time had passed. “Like, that was our big thing for a while—the tadpole farm.”

  “A tadpole farm?” Sophie looked at me like I was crazy.

  “Yeah. I swear. We did.”

  “And how does that work?” she wanted to know.

  “I’m not really sure,” I said. I was trying to remember. “It was in the stream behind my house,” I started. “We’d take these rocks from the banks and build up these walls in the shallowest parts of the water. Then we’d flutter the water with our hands, you know, like this”—I showed her—“to get the tadpoles in. They always scattered away, at least from what I can remember. Sometimes they came back. But for a little while they were like our own tadpoles. Like, we had names for them and everything. And then one day we went and they weren’t tadpoles. They had arms and feet. They were frogs.”

  “I wouldn’t have taken Riley for a farmer,” Sophie said.

  “Riley just goes with things,” I said. “Always has. She’s almost always good for my wacko ideas.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Like at Halloween”—I kept going, couldn’t stop myself now—“we always dressed like twins, even after I’d gotten big and she’d stayed small, and my hair got dark and hers did not, and her dad got rich and my dad’s job was the same old, same old. We called ourselves the Identicals. It always made Riley laugh really hard. She’d fashion our costumes. Do the makeup. Riley’s really good at costumes, hair, and makeup. At making things. Riley’s great at that.”

  Sophie had let her hair out of its ponytail while I was talking. It hung in thick, wild pieces around her face. She had a crease in her brow, where I suppose she kept her thoughts. She would have made someone a really good best friend.

  Now looking at Riley lying there on the cot, I knew how strange my story must have seemed, how clear it had to be that Riley could have chosen anyone at all for a best friend. A girl like me doesn’t have options the way girls like Riley do. A girl like me doesn’t often get chosen. But Riley had stayed true, and now I’d blown it, and I felt myself getting hot with tears. “It’s weird,” I said. “I know. You wouldn’t think it just to see us. She being so petite. Me like the Jolly Green Giant.”

  “The heart is not a size,” Sophie said after looking between Riley’s face and mine and saying nothing for a real long time.

  “Oh, God,” I said. A fat tear in the back of one eye got loose and started to roll and roll.

  “Georgia,” Sophie said, “now is, like, the exact wrong time for sad.”

  I looked at her to see what she meant. She gestured her chin in the direction of Riley’s face.

  “Hey,” I said, for the sapphire eyes were open. “You scared the hell out of us. You know that?”

  “What just happened?” she asked. Her voice was soft, wisping, true. It was unguarded.

  “The heat,” Sophie said. “The hole.”

  “Exhaustion,” I said. “A long time coming.” I didn’t say anything about anorexia or disproving average, because I knew I didn’t have to. Riley bit her pale lower lip with her row of perfect upper teeth. She looked past Sophie and past me and let one tear fall from one eye. She shook her head, then touched one hand to the tape that held the IV line to the needle that fed her for now.

  “I messed up,” Riley said.

  “You can fix it,” I told her.

  But she looked at me as if she wasn’t precisely sure. As if the only thing she knew right then was that there were two of us, one on either side, holding her skinny hands.

  “You guys,” she said, and then she couldn’t say more, for her shoulders were quaking, her breathing was all fits and starts. A tremble. A shiver. A sigh.

  “You guys,” Riley said again.

  “We can fix it,” I said. “I promise.”

  fourteen

  A cloud had floated in and opened; at last the rain had come. We rode in the vans looking out at Juárez—at the gully of the river, at the dust pooling to mud, at the saturating border town where we had come, each of us bearing our secrets. Riley had her head on my shoulder and her hand in Sophie’s, and nobody was talking—there wasn’t any need. I caught Drake’s eyes in the window. They looked straight back and into me.

  By the time we reached the complex, the cloud had emptied. Beads of rain sat on the upturned faces of things and clung like glitter to the stucco walls and dazzled the thick-paned windows. At Manuel’s, Leonor and Concha were busy. Above us the skies were scrubbed clean.

  fifteen

  At dusk we pulled the tables side by side and ate as one—Catherine, then her mom, then Jazzy, then Corey, Mariselle, Neil, and Jon on the one side; Sam, Sophie, Riley, Drake, and me on the other. At one end of the table was Mr. Thom. At the other sat Mack, lean and crinkled and talking, not teaching, as if he had joined us, somehow, crossed a bridge. We wouldn’t let Riley fall again. We understood that; so did she. We understood, too, that it would not matter, not at all, where we would go with our lives after Anapra—to what internships, what colleges, what promises or problems. We’d come together there, and that would always be our fact. And that night, as the sun went low on the hills beyond, I remembered Mack, down in the basement in that Main Line space, talking about seeds. I thought of how responsibility is not just a weight but also those things that you’re given the privileged chance to see. To snap into your camera for later, when you’re home, when time is still the future.

  After dinner was over and we’d cleared our plates, Mack suggested that we move the tables and the benches to the chapel side of the courtyard. “On the count of three,” Mr. Thom said; and we all lifted, carried, set the splintery things down. Manuel was already
headed up the steps when we returned—a donkey piñata hanging from one hand.

  “It’s been years,” Mrs. K. said, shaking her head, “since I have seen one of those.”

  “Is that for us?” Jazzy was saying. “Really?”

  You could tell that the piñata had been made by hand. It was gray with pink eyes and Irish green hooves, and the sombrero was jaunty on its floppy-eared head. Corey hammered at the air with some invisible bat, and now Manuel was rambling up the stairs. He laced a long rope through the railing and left the donkey swing-tilting from a frayed rope end. When the whole thing was rigged, Manuel came back down the steps, went into a storage room, and returned with a blunt stick.

  Corey was first in line, because Corey was Corey. Everyone else lined up after him, Mrs. K. and Mr. Thom included. I was at the back of the line, between Riley and Sam. When I turned to look for Drake, I saw that he had vanished across the courtyard and was headed for the gate, where Socorro was standing.

  She wore a green dress with a yellow cotton sash that was fixed in the back with a bow. On her right arm, where the goose had snapped its beak, was a sleeve of gauze. Drake had on his torn jeans, a black T-shirt, and gray flip-flops, and he held keys in one hand. Now he was leaning down and working the lock, opening the gate, inviting Socorro in. Soon she was hoisted high in Drake’s arms, riding toward us on his strength, the shyest smile on her face. Soon Sophie was reaching and straightening the hem of Socorro’s green skirt, and now Riley, pale Riley, was slipping every one of her twenty-two bracelets from her too-skinny wrist and gliding them up the pole of Socorro’s left arm. The heart is not a size, Sophie had said; and I knew she was right—that there was no measure for the people we were becoming, no limit to what we might become.