A Heart in a Body in the World

by Deb Caletti

  The deer flies into the sky. Annabelle can hardly believe what she is witnessing, because the animal is actually in the air, like he’s been lifted by a tornado. And then he lands, and it’s horrible, awful, because the hit and the landing instantly turn the animal—beautifully alive and running across the road just a moment ago—into a gruesome, bent corpse. She can see the deer’s eyes, and his eyes are flat, just flat, and blood is flowing from him.

  Oh God. Oh God, oh God. Annabelle lets out a cry. She can’t move. No, it’s worse than that. She is sobbing, and she stands there paralyzed. She doesn’t even realize she is sobbing because she is as struck as that deer. She is stunned by what she’s just witnessed, how the animal was alive and then not.

  The driver flings his door open. The front left side of his truck looks like a crushed beer can. He runs out. He gets halfway to the animal and realizes there is nothing to be done.

  “Shit!” he says.

  Annabelle throws up. She is trembling. Now, the man really has more than he bargained for.

  “Can I call someone for you, honey? Can I help you, honey? Can I help you, honey?” he says again and again.

  22

  1. A cockroach heart has twelve to thirteen chambers, arranged in a row. If one fails, he barely notices.

  2. Squid and cuttlefish all have multiple hearts. An octopus has three.

  3. The earthworm doesn’t have a heart at all. Instead, it has five pseudohearts wrapped around its esophagus.

  4. Only the zebra fish, though, can do the truly necessary thing: If his heart is broken or damaged or destroyed, he can grow a new one. Deer cannot. Humans cannot.

  “Talk to your mother, huh?” Grandpa Ed begs. “She’s called ten times. Come on, Bella Luna.”

  Annabelle folds the pillow over her head. She sees the deer, who flies and lands and splats, his eyes flat and blank.

  “Bella Luna, look. Your brother is on the phone. He wants to talk to you. Please.”

  She scoots farther down into her bed.

  “It’s your friend Zach on the phone,” Grandpa Ed says. “It’s your friend Olivia.”

  She pretends not to hear him.

  “It’s Dr. Mann on the phone,” Grandpa Ed says.

  She doesn’t move. But he climbs the ladder to her bunk. He peeks into her face. He looks like hell. His hair is boofed up and uncombed and his ears hang low and old, and he has little fluid-filled crescents under his eyes. He looks exhausted. Three days ago, he drove them from their last location to a KOA campground in town, so he could be closer to Nick’s Grocery and get better Wi-Fi. She’s only been out of her bunk to pee. She hasn’t eaten anything but toast and polenta and bananas since the deer. Grandpa Ed is eating and drinking for both of them. He’s stress-eaten most of a pork roast and he’s been hitting the supply of wine and salami like it’s the war and the bombs are dropping, so what the hell.

  He’s in over his head.

  He shoves the phone to her ear. She tries to roll away, but he moves with her, and there is Dr. Mann’s voice.

  “Annabelle?” Dr. Mann says through the miles. Annabelle can see her, with her lovely auburn hair and her smile, sitting in her warm office with the leather couch and soft pillows and Kleenex box. Annabelle once saw her getting out of her car, a cute little red MINI Cooper, which made Annabelle love her even more.

  Annabelle says nothing.

  “I heard what happened.”

  “I—” Annabelle starts to cry.

  “Oh,” Dr. Mann says. “Oh, this is hard. So hard.”

  Annabelle sobs. Grandpa Ed is crying, too. Tears roll off his big bulb of a nose. He wipes his eyes on the back of his sleeve.

  “That deer,” Dr. Mann says. “He had to go run into the road this week of all weeks. The anniversary.”

  • • •

  The anniversary. The second week of June. June tenth, to be exact. She had felt it there, black and hovering like a death sentence, and now it’s here. She avoided looking at it, as if it were the malocchio, the evil eye, out to curse her worse than she already is.

  “I don’t want to look, but tell me,” Annabelle says to Grandpa Ed.

  “You think I wanna look? I don’t wanna look.”

  “Just peek. Peek and tell me.”

  The news. What people might be saying. What people might be feeling. All the emotions. The news and emotions and the grief and despair on top of her own emotions and grief and despair.

  “I’ll do it if you answer your phone.”

  “No.”

  “You gotta. Your mother. Your brother. Your family, at least.”

  “Ugh. I can’t talk to anyone.”

  “Family! They’re the ones who’re always gonna be there for you. You don’t ignore the family. They show their love. You take their love. You feel better. Capisce?” He is stern.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll talk to the family. That’s all, though. Peek.”

  He makes the sign of the cross, and opens his laptop. Wow, he’s gotten good at it, too, the typing and technological maneuvering. It’s almost funny to watch, how he still hunches over a little in concentration, like he’s a new hire from the agency. He even has an e-mail account now. He’s on there all the time. She asked him if he’s still writing to Dawn Celeste, but he only says, “Do I ask you your business? You mind your own, I mind my own.”

  She waits.

  “It’s what you’d expect.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Articles. People talking. Remembering—”

  “That’s enough.”

  “Wait, wait, wait. This could be—”

  “What?” She’s terrified.

  “Big. This could be big.”

  “Oh, God.”

  Her fingers tap, thumb to each finger pad—index, middle, ring, pinkie. It is not enough. She paces the small space. They are still in Hayward, population 250. By now, Grandpa Ed knows the names of the people who work at Nick’s Grocery. There’s Annie, and Ken, and Nick himself. She could leave the RV and pace the few streets in town. Hayward, Minnesota’s claim to fame is being the site of the world’s longest horseshoe game in 1930. It lasted over five months.

  “It’s good. It’s all good stuff.”

  “Okay, okay. Tell me. Only in tiny bits.”

  “USA Today.”

  “Holy shit! Holy shit! No more. Oh my God. Tell me you just didn’t say USA Today.” She claps her hands over her ears.

  “Bella Luna. It’s fine. Okay? Relax. I told you, it’s good.” She can still hear him, like he’s above water and she’s under.

  “Nothing that big is good.”

  “I’m reading. . . . It’s long. Give me a minute. It’s awesome.” He never uses the word awesome. She wants to throw up. It is horrible; there is no way to describe how horrible, having this grief and this shame and this responsibility and having it be so public.

  “Does it say that I—”

  “It’s about what you’re doing. The run.”

  “Oh no. I don’t want this. They’ll think I’m trying to get attention. They’ll think I’m drawing the focus away from—” Her fingers tap, tap, tap.

  “Basta! And stop pacing, Jesus, you’re making me dizzy. Just look. The headline. See?”

  He turns the laptop toward her. She summons her nerve, glances at the headline.

  “ ‘Reluctant Activist Makes 2,700-Mile Run.’ ”

  “Heh. They got that right,” he says.

  • • •

  “I wish I were there,” Gina says.

  Annabelle wishes she were there, too. Sometimes, you need your mom, even if she drives you crazy.

  • • •

  “I love you,” Malcolm says.

  “I love you, too.”

  They sit in silence on the phone. Most of the time, even in the worst times, I love you is enough.

  • • •

  I’m sorry, she says to Kat. I’m sorry, she says to Will.

  • • •

  Her father, That Bastard Fat
her Anthony, calls, too. It is an awkward conversation. It’s weird to have him paying attention after years of not paying attention. He asks about her run, and how she is feeling, and how she is doing, and since she doesn’t know what to ask about his life, she asks about the weather in Boston.

  “I just wanted you to know that I am thinking about you today,” he says.

  • • •

  She dares to look at the comments after the USA Today article.

  Brave.

  Inspiring.

  After what she’s been through . . .

  That YouTube video made me cry.

  No one is blaming her. They don’t know her, though.

  She does the harder thing. She looks at the online posts of some of her friends on this day, the anniversary. God, she feels so sick. Her heart is crushed, crushed, crushed. There’s Geoff Graham. He posted a picture from last year, of their group with their arms around each other. Zander posted the one from the sophomore picnic, all of them sitting around the table, happy. She’s touched, because Sierra has changed her profile picture to an image of her and Annabelle at Green Lake, sitting on their beach towels. Coach Kwan has the old cross-country team photo up. There are a lot of heart emojis, lots of expressions of love and support. She doesn’t see the hate and the blame, but this isn’t where she’d likely find it most.

  Still, it emboldens her to do another thing she hasn’t been able to do—to see what she’s been missing. She peeks. She scrolls back in time on their accounts. A week, two weeks. She looks at prom photos. There’s Zander and Hannah Kelly, holding hands. Annabelle didn’t even know he liked her. There’s Destiny and Lauren K, who must have gotten back together, because there they are with their arms around each other in Lauren K’s backyard. There’s Zach Oh and Olivia. They never mentioned a word about going. Annabelle didn’t even ask. She’s mad at herself for being so self-involved.

  Everyone looks beautiful and young and hopeful. There are strappy shoes and artful curls; thin, stylish ties; big smiles. Lauren K’s backyard has a tableful of food. As Annabelle pokes through other stuff, she sees a lot of talk about college and next week’s graduation at KeyArena and a summer camping trip. Everyone looks like they’ve moved on. Like they have a future.

  • • •

  Two days after the anniversary, Annabelle still cannot budge. She refuses to leave the RV. Grandpa Ed is getting short-tempered and stir-crazy. He complains for the millionth time that there is no prosciutto anywhere in a fifty-mile radius, when of course there is no prosciutto in a fifty-mile radius. He huffs around and doesn’t wear his hearing aids on purpose. He has even visited the quilt shop in town so often that he’s been invited to the proprietor’s house for dinner. Annabelle is learning that he likes the company of the ladies. But maybe one lady in particular, because he turns down dinner at Mrs. Quaker’s house, and shortly after that, Annabelle gets a glimpse of his e-mail, and sees Dawn Celeste’s name and name and name.

  Annabelle wants to help him out, to get this thing done, so they can all get back to normal life, whatever that is. But she can’t move. She just can’t. Her heart is a steel drum, turned sideways on the ground. Cement flows through her veins. Her legs are toppled iron pillars. She just wants to sleep.

  “Bella Luna, we either gotta go forward or go back. We can’t stay stuck here in the middle.”

  “Your voice is so loud,” she says. “It hurts my ears.”

  “That’s because you been sitting here listening to crickets chirp. You haven’t even walked around the campground. Come on, at least come to Abigail’s with me for breakfast.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “I’m turning this thing around if you don’t get up and run tomorrow, capisce?”

  “You said that yesterday.”

  “This time I mean it.”

  “You said that yesterday, too.”

  That night, she hears him outside the RV, talking to Gina on the phone. I can’t just make her! What, I’m gonna haul her home by force? And then: I don’t know what you expect of me, he says. You always think I can make things happen that I can’t make happen.

  She sticks her fingers in her ears. She tries to hum all the states and the capitals.

  • • •

  The next day, Zach Oh calls. She finally answers, because it’s preferable to listening to the fifteen messages he’s left.

  “In two weeks, after you get to Rockford, there’s a place nearby, Cherry Valley? They have a water park, Magic Waters. They’re giving you four free tickets. You get a day off and a two-night stay at the Cherry Valley Hotel.”

  There is no way she can fly down some waterslide with Seth Greggory getting closer and closer every minute. This is nuts. “Who am I going to go with, Grandpa Ed and our two imaginary friends?”

  “That’s not the point. They thought you deserved some kind of a treat.”

  “I can’t just take a day off.”

  “I can’t believe you’re saying that right now.”

  “Well, if I ever decide to run again, I’ll be way behind.”

  “The Rockford Register Star will be there! And you can’t let the people of Magic Waters down! They’re giving half price to all high school kids who show up in a Run for a Cause shirt.”

  “A what?”

  She hears Olivia in the background. “Okay, okay!” Zach yells. “Olivia says, don’t freak out, but when you get to Pittsburgh, the Young Feminist Alliance club of a certain university is bringing you in to talk to some students. Wait, what? Tell her yourself!”

  “Hey, Annabelle,” Olivia says.

  “Wait. What students? What university?”

  “There’s been an increasing swell of support from young women,” Olivia says.

  “A swell of support from young women?”

  “The market research from Zach and Mrs. Hodges indicates that fifty-nine percent of the contributors to GoFundMe are now young women ages twenty-four and under.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I get it! I get it perfectly. Do you have any idea how many young women have experienced . . . well, if not exactly what you have, something like it? Someone using violence to control or silence them? Powerlessness through intimidation? Who doesn’t feel they need a voice?”

  “I’m not anyone’s voice. I haven’t even said anything. What university? I can’t talk to university students.”

  “Of course you can. Every day that you go on, you say something. You say you can go on.”

  “If you saw me right now, you’d know I can’t do what you’re asking. Only two hundred and sixty-five people have run across the country. Who am I kidding? I can’t. I have no will. I can’t say anything to anyone. I don’t know what I would say. I just want to sleep.”

  “Annabelle, come on!”

  “The reason I was doing this anyway . . . It wasn’t to say some big thing. It was just for me. To . . . get through.”

  “That’s exactly the point! That’s exactly what people get. You are not pounding another freaking message among a million messages. You’re not talking, talking, talking. God, I’m tired of hearing people talk! You’re doing. And you’re just being your honest self, moving forward. You’re not staying in old places anymore, do you see? That is the message. That is triumph.”

  “You should give the speech. You almost made me stand up and applaud.”

  “Aaargh!” Olivia screams.

  Zach is back on the phone now. “You will be at Magic Waters in two weeks, wearing one Run for a Cause T-shirt. You will be in Pittsburgh in seven weeks, speaking to a few students. It’s not like we didn’t give you plenty of warning. You’ve got seven hundred miles to figure out what to say.”

  “What university?”

  “Carnegie Mellon.”

  She hangs up on him.

  23

  The problem is, she’s done things too often because she didn’t want to disappoint people. Maybe if she would have said no and stuck to it, she’d be getting ready to graduate with her cla
ss right now. She’d be getting her cap and gown, and Mom would be taking pictures, and Malcolm would be trying it on while she yelled at him not to wrinkle it after all that ironing.

  Instead, she is in the bunk of the RV, unshowered and smelling bad, her stomach growling but the idea of food revolting, the vision of that deer and the flesh and the blood—

  Stop! Stop! Stop!

  She rolls over and puts the covers high up over her shoulders. It’s all too much. Grandpa Ed is on his laptop. She hears the rapid mice steps of the keys. He has a lot to say, anyway.

  She summons Dr. Mann. She tries to remember what Dr. Mann has said again and again. Your only job—and it’s a big one—is to try to speak and live your own honest truth. That truth might shift. You might need more time to even understand what that truth is. That’s it. That’s the job. Trying to manage or control everyone else? Not the job. Impossible, besides.

  It is hard to believe this, it really is. Because—if she’d only been more consistent and sure . . . If she’d only maintained the distance she’d created after she stopped driving The Taker home . . . If, if, if . . .

  When she closes her eyes, she sees this: herself, feeling more comfortable, more in control after the distance. She relaxes. She is friendly to The Taker again. After AP English Comp, he walks with her to her locker, even though his is in the other direction. They are complaining about the brutal compare-and-contrast paper they have to write, on the speeches of Sojourner Truth versus Chief Joseph. They are joking about the way Emily Yew always raises her hand to ask kiss-ass questions.

  At lunch, The Taker saves a place next to him, and she sits there. He unwraps his sandwich.

  “Ewww, onions!” She crinkles her nose from the smell.

  His face flushes. “You know, I wouldn’t be like that if I were you,” he says. He sounds actually mad. The muscle in his cheek pulses.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I was just teasing.” But he is silent. She feels awful. He is too sensitive to be teased, she realizes. Well, everyone has their thing. Zach Oh acts like a baby when he loses a video game.