The Heart Is Not a Size (11 page)

Sometimes color is all there is; and as the sun now fell fast, I photographed its dying pink until the moon was higher than the sun and it was shadows I saw through my camera’s eye—blues leaning into blacks and blacks spattered through with the violet. The shapes of men on the roof. The bulge of a mountain range beyond. The old cross that rose from the chapel’s roof, which was a rusty color.

The men in their folding chairs lit cigarettes. I sat there watching them, watching the last of the daylight fall across the balcony, until that’s what I wanted—that balcony, that light. I walked toward the steps and climbed them. They creaked beneath my weight. Then I stood there looking out, taking photos that would never mean a thing. They mattered only in the present tense, gave my solitude a purpose.

It was then, from up there, that I noticed Drake pushing back from the game of chess and walking toward the gate. He had his hand on Lobo’s head, and now he was kneeling down, talking to the girl who stood peering in. Taking something from her outstretched hand, turning to admire it, then slipping whatever it was back
through the gate. It was as if the girl had known Drake for a long time. As if one can make a friend that quickly, which, it seems, some people can.

“Riley’s walking runway,” I heard Sophie call.

And then I watched as below me Riley pretended to model the clothes that she’d just drawn.

In the bunk beneath Riley, I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t stop hoping, stupidly hoping, that she’d turn and whisper, “Good night, Georgia. Love you.” Turn and say she understood, that she’d get help, that she’d stop starving herself, that she was grateful. But the space above my bed was silent. Riley didn’t so much as rustle her sheets. I couldn’t tell if she was sleeping, couldn’t know what she was thinking, couldn’t confront her, because this is a fact: Silence defeats like nothing else does. There is no fighting it.

“You an artist now?” she’d sneered. I remembered freshman year, when Riley’s watercolors had taken first place at districts. It was a pretty big deal, and Rennert High was throwing a reception in the lobby bordered by admin and the cafeteria. I’d driven with her and her mother, worn a sorry shade of peach—
a dress that I had bought too small, hoping it would fit me. By the time we’d arrived, the lobby was packed and Riley’s watercolors were already strung up on movable boards. She’d given crazy titles to each one—random mind bursts, she’d confided to me the day before, when she was telling me what to expect at the show. “The titles just occurred,” she said, titles such as “Believe Me I Tell You” and “What Are Mirrors For?”. I knew that they meant more than that. I knew, but I didn’t insist that she come right out and say it, because that was back then, when I left her boundaries sacred. When I chose friendship over truth.

In the lobby, the art teachers had gathered and the principal, too, and there were kids we ate lunch with, kids from Riley’s art class, a couple of Mrs. Marksmen’s friends. Somebody started clapping, and then other people did, and soon the crowd divided in regular Red Sea fashion so that Riley could pass through and stand in the space between the principal and her teachers. She was to be commended, it was said. She had set a new art standard.

“Riley Marksmen has graced Rennert High with her talent,” the principal declared, and I will never
forget the expression on my best friend’s face when she looked toward her mom. It was as if none of the rest of us mattered that night, as if none of the rest of us had come. The point for Riley was that Mrs. Marksmen see that her only daughter was growing up to be someone.

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

I
t 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 would 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.