The Heart Is Not a Size (13 page)

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

T
wo 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

T
hat 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.

“It’s what he can see that we can’t see that’s got him worked up like he is.”

I shook my head, didn’t follow.

“The ghost,” he went on. “That little girl who lost her sister. She’s been looking for her sister’s spirit. Maybe Lobo’s gone and found it.”

Upstairs, on the roof, a man had started snoring. The sound of dreams, I thought. The sound of survival.

“Manuel said that some nights after a storm has
passed over, he’s almost sure he’s caught a glimpse.”

“Of what? Of Socorro’s sister?”

“He didn’t say exactly. Or if he did, I didn’t understand. All I know is that a storm passed today. That Lobo’s on edge. That you’re here and I’m here, and all of us are waiting.”

We sat there and said nothing—Drake’s hand on the dog’s head, Lobo going in and out of restful and alert. There is silence that stumbles toward words, and silence that transcends words. The skies change, and the truth does. But right then silence was the truth, the stars; silence was Drake; it was me breathing.

“Socorro’s the only one left,” Drake said. “She’s five. She doesn’t say much. But she doesn’t give up looking.”

A girl after your own heart, I thought; and suddenly it was clearer to me—why Drake had taken such an interest in the child. He had seen something in her that he’d recognized. He had leaned toward it. Time is the future in Juárez. Friendship, too, lives in the future and not only the past.

“What would the ghost of Socorro’s sister look like?” I asked now. “I mean, what do you think?”

“Something that floats,” Drake said. “That’s all I can figure.”

I smiled. “Like what that floats?”

“I don’t know—sailboats, balloons, kites, happiness….”

“Happiness?”

“Just an idea I had. Probably stupid.”

I looked around in the dark for something floating. I saw angles, stucco, a hoisted cross, dust-dirtied windows, the belly of the splintery stairs, the men on the rooftop sleeping.

“Can I ask you a question?” Drake said.

“Yeah?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be sleeping?”

“Too much stuff,” I said, “in my head.”

He let it go at that; he didn’t press, but suddenly I wanted to tell him. Suddenly I didn’t want to be alone with me—the regrets I had, the things I’d broken. “You know anything about panic attacks?” I asked him finally.

He turned, looked at me, shook his head.

I settled back into my chair, closed my eyes. “I had my first almost two years ago. They’re like heart attacks,
but not really. They’re like wanting to run except for the fact that you’re stuffed stupid and trapped inside the hole of yourself.”