The Heart is Not a Size

by Beth Kephart

  Geoff wore his thick, black hair buzzed close. He wore T-shirts winter, spring, summer, fall, and rotating pairs of jeans. The only variable was his shoes; that night he wasn’t wearing any. He just came in, sat at my desk. I put down the book that I’d been reading—Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires, which is, I have to say, a really great collection of poems, even if it did come by way of Mr. Buzzby.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.” I put the book facedown on my bed, propped myself up on my elbows. I must have given Geoff a funny look, because he shook his head, said, “What?” in his morning-announcements voice.

  “What what?” I said. “You’re the one who just barged in here.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Trespassing. I pulled a Kev.”

  I laughed. “What’s up?”

  “Miss Barham,” he said, “is a très cool English teacher. I told her you were going to Juárez.”

  “You did? You were talking to her about me?”

  “It happens.” He smiled. “Sometimes.”

  “Okay.” I grew self-conscious; I don’t really know why. Geoff’s just my brother, after all.

  “Miss Barham suggested Cormac McCarthy,” Geoff continued. “You know, as an author to read in prep for Juárez. I was in the library anyway. It was right there; I grabbed it. You know. What the heck.” He lifted the book so that I could see the cover. Cities of the Plain. A dusty landscape red with fire.

  I hadn’t noticed until then that he’d had something in his hand, and if I had, I wouldn’t have dreamed it was for me. “Wow,” I said, flabbergasted. “Well. Thanks.”

  “No problem, G.” Geoff stood, left the book on my desk. He began to cut across the room, then stopped. “Take it easy,” he said. “In Juárez, I mean.”

  “I’ve got to survive another two months before I’m even on the plane,” I said. “Still plenty of time to save you from Kev.”

  “Yeah,” he said, leaving. “What about that? Leaving me to the wolves. Thanks a zillion.”

  This was the story I was telling Ri—the my older-brother-pays-a-visit story—as we stood in the stables among the horses that day. I was going to tell her, too, about some of the research I had been doing, an article I’d just read: Across the border from El Paso, Texas, and 15 minutes northwest from Ciudad Juarez, sits a population of people with hopes for a better life. I was going to say that every time I read about our destination, there were fuzzy collisions of optimism and despair, opportunity and danger, welcome and barbed fences. The ghosts of murdered women. The faces of children left behind. The chance to help. The possibility of being helpless.

  But Riley seemed distracted, far away, and finally I stopped, let silence come up between us. I gave her the room I knew she needed if she was going to confide in me at all. I hoped she would confide in me. I’d been waiting for it.

  “Georgia?” she finally said, her hand on the spotted nose of a pinto whose name, we’d read, was Splash.

  “Yeah?”

  “I kind of screwed up this year. Academically, I mean.” Which I knew, even though we weren’t in any of the same classes. School for Riley had always been about her clay pots, her sculptures, her paintings. Her work was hung in the halls on Parents’ Night; in the case near the TV Studio they displayed her jewelry; she won scholarships to art camp. Science, math, English, world cultures, foreign languages, were all secondary to Riley. Her intelligence lived in her art. In junior year, especially, her grades had gone south; and every time I’d mentioned the tutoring center or a mentor Geoff himself once raved about, she shut me out. But now it was May, the end of the year. In the fall we’d be filling out our college applications.

  “Nothing’s permanent,” I told her. “You still can fix things.”

  “I’ve got a 2.9, Georgia. What college is going to look at me with that? Coming from Rennert High, especially, where a 3.5 is muck.”

  “You’re an artist, Riley. It’s your portfolio that counts.” I said it because I believed it, and because, within the stable shadows, she looked infinitesimally small. I put my arms around her. “You’ll be fine,” I told her. “You’ll see.”

  It was right then that we heard the commotion outside, when both of us turned and started hurrying for the door. When we reached that place where the shadows were intersected by the sun, we turned left and looked. There in the nearest exercise ring was Don Juan, dragging his tail like a long white hem.

  “That’s him,” I said to Riley, and she didn’t even ask who. She started walking, faster and faster now, toward the big white horse and his trainer and the ring that was full of nothing but them.

  “Lord,” she said, her voice hushed. “He’s gorgeous.”

  “I told you.”

  “I mean, really gorgeous, Georgia.”

  “I know it.”

  Now she was up against the fence of the exercise ring, braiding herself into its horizontal slats, her body like twine, folding in places mine never would. The trainer glanced our way but didn’t mind us. Don Juan stomped and snorted, stepped, studied us. He seemed strong enough and proud enough to save the entire world.

  “Mister Don Juan,” Riley was saying. “There you go, big guy.” He raised his tail and he swung it from side to side while Riley kept talking to him, saying, “You look so fine.”

  I was watching Riley; she was mesmerized. I shifted my gaze to Don Juan. When I turned to look at Riley again, I saw that she was crying. Big tears, like long rain on bright window. Big tears, drowning out her freckles.

  “Hey,” I said, and I reached out to touch her—to put my hand on the small, hard wing of her shoulder. To touch her too-diminished self. “What is it, Riley? What’s wrong?”

  “He’s so beautiful?” She shuddered.

  “Yeah?”

  “So beautiful, Georgia, and he isn’t even trying.”

  “I get that, Riley. But how’s that sad?” Tell me why you’re sad, I wanted to say. Tell me why you aren’t eating, because I know you’re not eating. Look at you, Riley. What’s up?

  “If you lived with my mother, you’d know.”

  “Riley,” I said, but she wouldn’t say more. Riley, I wanted to say, I’m your best friend. Talk to me, Riley. We can fix this. But she’d said what she could and there would be nothing else—no more sign of anything wrong until we were too far from home. No more chances that I found or made to get to the heart of our troubles.

  PART Two

  one

  We were out of our minds with the heat the second we stepped off the plane. Even inside the El Paso airport we were feeling flattened and woozy as we stood waiting for our bags to spit down the chute and wind their way to us. Mack, Mr. Thom, and Mrs. K. had gone to get the vans that would take us through the heat, across the border, to the church where we’d be sleeping. I’d had to buy a new sleeping bag. I was hoping not to use it.

  We stood in the blaze of the sun for an hour—no one even close to straying. Corey and Sam played some kind of card game. Jazzy blew bubbles through huge wads of gum. The guy who didn’t talk just stood, staring out toward streets that appeared to be melting.

  “You know Dalí?” I heard Sophie say.

  “Dalí?”

  “The painter?”

  “Sure,” Riley answered. Casually, not for an instant betraying that art was what she knew.

  “He should be here, painting our picture.” Sophie threw back her head and made her whole body go loose and limp. She looked, for a minute, like goo. Riley started laughing, and she could not stop. She tossed her arm across Sophie’s shoulder: “It’s official,” she said. “You’re one of us.”

  “Cool beans,” said Sophie.

  “Don’t even talk about beans,” Riley said. “We’re going to get our fill of those.”

  Hope you do, I wanted to say.

  I didn’t.

  It took another hour to get to our quarters—past clanked-up cars; past roadside vendors; past women walking, old men walking, children, crowds of children—hundreds of th
em. They moved along beside the road with steady determination, or they were carried by their mothers, or they were chasing one another, laughing; and where, I wondered, were they going, what was waiting for them, at the end? I pressed against the window and took photographs—through the dust, through the traffic, child after child.

  We arrived at last at a tiny, gated-in church located on a hard-dirt road in a part of Juárez where we were not ever—we were three times cautioned—to go walking. Some of us were to sleep in the miniature chapel, some in the kitchen, some in the two tight rooms that had probably been designed for storage, and the rest of us up a flight of stairs that seemed to have been nailed there only seconds before our arrival.

  “Up there?” Riley asked. We’d sat together in the van, with Sophie one seat up—beside Sam and Corey, who had stopped playing their card game and had stopped talking, too, taking their cues, it seemed to me, from the big guy. It was Jazzy who had provided running commentary as we drove, until even she couldn’t think of words for what we saw. Mr. Thom had driven, with Mrs. K. beside him. He was blond and young looking; he was Corey’s dad. Mrs. K. had long, brown wavy hair held back by a broad white band. She looked glamorous with her sunglasses on, and she was an older version of her daughter, Catherine, who had traveled in the other van. Now Mrs. K. stood in the courtyard with her suitcase in one hand, looking around at her lodging options, looking, as I’d been looking, at the scarily rickety stairs.

  “I’m making a claim,” I said, sounding more confident than I felt. I gathered my things, headed for the stairs, tested the first step with my foot. Riley was right behind me, Sophie second. Mrs. K. wasn’t too far behind.

  “Catherine wants the kitchen,” she said as a way of explaining her decision to room with us. She waited until Riley, Sophie, and I had reached the thin plywood landing outside the second-floor room before she started to make her way up. She hoisted her bag high with both her hands, then realized she needed a way of steadying herself. “Well, this is sweet,” she said; “the whole thing’s swaying.” And just like that, Riley was down the steps helping Mrs. K. with her bag. It was half her height and twice her width, that suitcase. I could see only Riley’s head and feet.

  “If your mother could see you now,” I said.

  “Except that she can’t,” Riley said, and yipped.

  Again Sophie started laughing. “Don’t get her started,” I warned. “Believe me.”

  The upstairs room had just one puny window. It had five bunk beds that were built of wood, and that was it—no sheets, no pillows, no blankets, no mattresses. There was a red-tile floor and a loose pane of reflective glass on the far wall. “For primping,” Riley said. Mrs. K. lifted her heat-dampened hair off the back of her neck and removed her huge sunglasses.

  “You know what the worst part is?” Mrs K. asked, wiping a bead of sweat off her face.

  “What’s that?” I asked when it was clear that she wasn’t about to answer her own question.

  “The worst part is that this was my idea. ‘College résumé,’ I kept saying. I had to force Catherine to go.” I remembered Catherine sitting all sullen faced at the airport and on the plane. I remembered her shoving her way into the van she knew her mother wouldn’t be taking.

  “I think there’s just so much to love,” Riley said, and now she opened the plank door that had slammed shut behind us and swung her arms open to Juárez. We stepped out with her onto the wobbly second-floor landing and stood together watching the others below us, watching Sam, Corey, and Jazzy, mostly, who were already deep in a game of Hacky Sack. Corey was going knee-to-ankle with the thing. Then he tossed it off to Sam, who chested it to Jazzy, who meant to hit it with her head, I guess, but it flew past her, hit the ground, threw up a cone of dust.

  “My bad,” she said.

  “Nice,” Jon said. He was standing there watching, leaning against the chapel wall beside Mariselle and Neil. They looked odd together, the three of them—Mariselle so tall and Jon so broad shouldered and Neil real skinny—and they had their arms tied across their chests, as if they couldn’t decide if Hacky Sack was cool or not, something they should move in on or something to despise.

  Finally it was Neil who broke free from the wall. “Yo,” he said; and Jazzy tossed him the sack and he spun on one foot, then tossed the thing off his head like Jazzy was supposed to have done in the first place. Sam made a dive for it and saved it, brushed himself off. Corey got it next. He put on a show, then tossed it high; Neil was the one who took over.

  “Anyone have a basketball?” Jon asked from the sideline. Nobody answered.

  “God, it’s hot,” Mariselle said. She drew in a deep breath and exhaled, then slumped against the chapel wall as if she were bored already with everything Juárez. Now something caught her eye, and I followed her gaze—straight up to the rooftop next door. There were six men up there, in folding plastic chairs. Maybe I’d have stared, but Mrs. K. was drawing our attention across the courtyard and past the gate toward a little pink stucco house and a slender goose that stood like a guard dog at a post. Beside the goose sat an elderly woman who’d tethered the goose to the stoop with a rope.

  “Georgia.” Riley nudged me. “Look at that.” Outside the gate stood a little girl—dark haired and well dressed and no more than five years old. She was sticking her nose through to our side of things, toward the big guy, Drake the Third, who, I realized, had been nowhere during Hacky Sack. He was kneeling down, making himself her height. He was talking quietly to her.

  “Wonder who she is,” Riley said.

  “Wonder who he is,” I said. “I mean, who he really is.” I took off my glasses, rubbed the lenses clean on my shirt.

  Two women in white cooked for us that night—beans that softened to a purple, chicken in a tomato stew, tortillas. There were sodas without ice and sterilized water from a five-gallon jug and some kind of pineapple-watermelon drink that Mack said was safe but that Riley and Sophie and Jazzy and I decided to forgo—all of us sitting together at the two picnic tables that had been dragged out from somewhere onto the rubble. We’d cleaned up a little since the plane and the van, but we still didn’t look like much. Sophie’s weather-saturated hair fell limply to her shoulders. Riley’s streak of orange looked strangely harsh by the light of the setting sun.

  Sam and Corey had already made some pact with Neil. Catherine was where her mother wasn’t. Jazzy had asked us, “Do you mind?” and Mariselle had come along sighing and stayed—sitting at the table’s end, near Mrs. K. The men on the neighboring rooftops had doubled in numbers but were perfectly quiet, peaceful, neighborly even, just catching a breeze on the roof. The goose across the street was still. There was a yellow German shepherd-sized dog whose name was Lobo and who walked around us, nice enough, except for the fleas in his fur and the look in his eyes; and this is what we talked about, the six of us at our crooked table, while the sky turned from blue to black. When Mrs. K. said Lobo might have started life as a wolf, Mariselle rolled her eyes.

  “This is a dog that wouldn’t hurt one of the fleas on its own back,” she declared. She squinted until her eyes got as small as two black dots.

  “Do you think it ever rains?” Mrs. K. asked. “In Mexico?”

  Now Mack—who hadn’t, I’d noticed, been eating at either of the tables—came out of the kitchen and stood by that door. He raised one hand and we all got quiet. “Welcome to Juárez,” he said. “We are grateful to Manuel and his family for sharing this home with us, and to Leonor and Concha, who will be keeping you well fed. By now you’ve all met Lobo.” The ears on the old shepherd went up in the direction of his name. He trotted over to where Mack was standing and accepted Mack’s hand on his head.

  “Today was a long day,” Mack continued. “Tomorrow will be longer. Sleep will be the most important thing that you will do tonight. Ten o’clock, lights out. You’ve got another hour. Remember that we’re here as emissaries, as good neighbors. No loud games or noises. No leaving the premises. No flushing anythi
ng but the obvious down the toilets. You’ll need to be dressed by six tomorrow morning. There’ll be cereal in the kitchen.”

  He bent now to a cardboard box that was by his feet and pulled out a water bottle. “There is one of these for each of you,” he said. He reached into his shirt pocket. “And here’s a marker. Take a bottle, write your name on it. Take it with you everywhere. Refill it with the filtered cooler water that I provide.” Mr. Thom cupped his chin in his hand. Lobo stirred and walked away. Mack said, “I believe Leonor has your dessert prepared,” and he stepped aside to let the cook appear with a heaped-high plate of melons. She walked her plate to Mr. Thom’s table. Concha followed with a plate for us.

  “They must be sisters,” Sophie said. “Same size, same eyes, same nose.”

  “Probably Manuel’s sisters,” Riley said.

  Mariselle yawned to prove she couldn’t care less.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” Mrs. K. announced. “If you girls don’t mind.” We all understood what she was saying, which was “Please. I’d like to be alone.” Even Mariselle nodded; and Mrs. K. rose, made her way up the rattling stairs. Then she came back down with a bundle in her arms and went off toward the bathroom, pulling the plastic curtain door as closed as plastic curtains close.

  Afterward—after Mrs. K. was through with her shower and the rest of us had gone two by two into the bathrooms, had brushed our teeth with the water from the cooler, had splashed our faces with the same stuff, had not forgotten (no one did) about the toilet trash—we were upstairs in the dark. I made Riley take the top bunk of our claimed set, afraid that if I did I’d smash straight through. I was the largest girl on this trip to Juárez, and I didn’t trust the thin plank beneath me, which made bizarre, creaking sounds when I turned.