The Heart Is Not a Size (16 page)

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
thwonk
ing 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.

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

R
oberto’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.”