The Heart Is Not a Size (12 page)

“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

W
e 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.

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

W
e’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.”