The Heart Is Not a Size (17 page)

“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

A
t 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.

By now the sky was the color of the purple gladiolus that grow high in my mother’s garden. There were the men on the nearby roof in their spectator chairs, and there was Lobo lying low beside the chapel. Leonor and Concha had come out to watch, and Manuel stood beside them, his back against the kitchen wall. It was Mack, in the end, who took the piñata rope in hand and went up to the third plank step and began to make the donkey dance. Corey stepped up and clobbered the poor beast’s hind foot. Neil got a whack at the tail. Then Mariselle gave the thing a dazzling crack; but the only thing that the donkey shed was some of its tissue-paper coat—fizzing pieces, like confetti. Next, Catherine, Jon, and Mrs. K. took their turns, but Mack was hiking the thing up and down so fast that no one had made meaningful contact.

When it was Drake’s at bat, he turned to me. “Georgia,” he asked, “do you mind?” He leaned down so that I could reach Socorro—take her into my arms and keep her safe. We all stepped back then as Drake
assumed a slugger’s stance eyeing the dangling donkey that Mack was swinging all around. The donkey went up and down—smashed up but still holding, shedding but not letting anyone close to its candy—but Drake never lost his focus, didn’t give in, even as we hollered, “Take it down, Drake. Show it your business, Drake. Show it what you’re made of.” We were calling, and the men on the roof were calling, and Leonor and Concha were laughing, and in my arms Socorro was perfectly still, a look of wonder on her face.

But Drake did nothing until Drake was ready. He let the poor beast dangle and Mack work the rope, and then he turned and fixed his eyes on me. “This one’s for Georgia,” he said; and the next time that donkey entered smack into Drake’s strike zone, he let go with a magnificent whack. It was a beautiful, single, super-clean swing. It sliced the donkey from neck to tail. But still the donkey hung above us and not a piece of candy fell.

Riley curtsied as Drake now handed her the stick. He bowed and said, “All yours.” The stick was bigger by far than both of Riley’s arms together, but she took it in both hands and lifted it high above her head. We
started chanting her name, as if it were the bottom of the ninth, all bases loaded and two outs. Drake was standing close beside me now, and I was leaning toward him, slipping within his shadow.

On the third plank of the step, Mack kept making that donkey dance, pulling the rope up and down, being careful with it now so that it wouldn’t split in two before Riley got her chance. “Ri-LEY. Ri-LEY. Ri-LEY,” we were chanting, and the rooftop men were chanting, and Lobo was running in wolf circles barking, and the thirteen earrings in Riley’s ear sparkled. She was wearing a pale yellow skirt and a neat white tank and a Band-Aid over the place where the IV line had gone in. The high part of the stick was trembling above her head; and Mack had this smile on his face as he pulled the donkey tricks, a smile that I’m sure I’m never forgetting. Riley bent her knees and flexed her elbows, her wrists. She focused her eyes, pursed her lips. When Mack let the donkey down into her zone, she stepped back and into one long, gorgeous, perfect swing—nothing anyone would ever count as average. The candies spun out high and far, over the roof, past the gates. It was as if she’d set a million stars free to
shimmer in whatever ways they wished.

The moon was a perfect half, and I couldn’t remember if it was waxing or waning, another of Buzzby’s favorite paired words. I could only see how everything was happening at once—the sun still setting and the moon still rising, and Drake leaning toward me close.

That’s when I felt Socorro stretch skyward with her arms—reach for a figment I couldn’t see, then struggle to reach farther. It was as if I were holding a pair of wings in my arms, a beating something.

“Esmeralda,” Socorro said. “Esmeralda,” her voice a pure, sweet sound above the courtyard’s happy chaos, her tiny body so alive and urgent, so extremely true and present.

I turned and saw that Drake was watching me, his complicated goodness right there on the surface, within reach. “Her sister,” he told me, and Socorro said the name again—Esmeralda—then reached for Drake so as to be lifted higher. I felt the weight of her vanish into Drake’s arms; I saw her arms go up, toward the sky. I heard her cry out again, and that’s when I saw what she was seeing: a pure white cloud belted by a band of gold, a horizontal offering.

Happiness floats, I thought. It is the color of a truce. I closed my eyes and opened them, and it wasn’t just the ghost of Socorro’s sister up there; it was my own anxious heart set free.

“Hey, Georgia.” I heard Riley now from across the courtyard, where she was still collecting the spoils of her work with Sophie, Mariselle, and the others. “What’d you think?” She flexed her skinny arm and popped a sour ball into her mouth.

“Most outstanding, Riley,” I said, and she laughed; and that, in that ruthless furnace, was the everlasting thing. Because no one ever laughed like Ri.

Acknowledgments

The Heart Is Not a Size
began as so much of my work does—not as a novel, but as a series of impressions glimpsed, gained, lost, and finally resurrected.

In this case, it began with a trip I was privileged to take with the adults and youth of St. John’s Presbyterian Church. Like the characters in this story, we traveled from the Main Line near Philadelphia to the squatters’ village called Anapra. We drove the streets, slept beneath a cross, went out on the bleached, white roads, and always were graced by the exceptional beauty and generosity of the local families who embraced our efforts to build a community bathroom. My Salvadoran husband, Bill, came along as interpreter and architect. My son, Jeremy, loaded sand and hammered frames and yielded his impeccable perspective. Victor Wilson, Dave Exley, Karen Black, Brian Bouvier, Libby Dalyrmple, Tom Higgins, Janette Scott, Kathy Shaw, John Shaw, and Karen Sheep paved the way with intelligence, fortitude, blinding good humor, and ponderable but never ponderous stories. Joe Apathy, Katie Babiy, Kelly Birmingham, Kyle Birmingham, Meredith
Bouvier, Michael Browne, Sammy Browne, Josh Chudy, Sarah Ciarrochi, Christine Cummins, Charlie Dalrymple, Elizabeth Dalrymple, Taylor Eschbach, Dustin Gilmour, Maureen Higgins, Billy Hudson, Matt Kaminskas, Alex Klebe, Mark Moeller, Danny Scott, Kaitlyn Shaw, and Nina Shaw made the trip profoundly unforgettable and left me feeling so infinitely lucky to have spent the days with them. They have gone on to exceptional things, these exquisite young people; the world has opened to them.