by Beth Kephart
“Hey, Riley,” I whispered when she was settled in. She dropped her hand over the side. I reached for it. “Sweet dreams,” I said. “Okay?”
“Okay.” Her voice was quiet. She seemed far away, all the way up there, and I felt all alone in this place to which we’d come—each of us for our own, still-secret reasons. Even the beads on the bracelet Riley had given me didn’t glimmer; there was no light shining through the puny window.
Sleep didn’t come, not that night. I tried every trick, but I was restless—dreaming when I wasn’t even asleep, drifting all around in my mind to thoughts of Kev and my mom, thoughts of the men on the roof, thoughts of the goose across the street, thoughts of Riley above, who was so quiet, too quiet, even in sleep. Who was too thin. I thought of how last night my mom had come to see if I’d remembered what I’d need, then drew me close for a kiss. “You’re my daughter,” she said, “and don’t you forget that.”
I said, “Mom, you know I won’t.”
“Apply your intelligence to every living thing—to where you go, to how you behave, to the way that you look after Riley, because, Georgia, you will have to look after Riley. She’s not as good as you are at looking after herself.”
“I know that, too.”
“Don’t drink any water that isn’t bottled.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
“Don’t go anywhere alone.”
“It’s a cardinal rule.”
“Don’t think that you have to do everything that the boys do, only better. I know how you are, Georgia. But you leave those saws to them.”
I nodded, but it isn’t like a nod is a real promise.
Later that night I woke up sweating from a dream, those black wings inside my rib cage beating, my mother’s words—Apply your intelligence to every living thing—snaking through my blood. Because again my heart knew what my mind had avoided: Juárez was probably a hare-brained scheme; what were the chances—really—that I’d fly all the way there and come home stronger? I fought with the dark to free myself from my bed, struggled to wrest the weight from my chest. It was after two, and the house was quiet, and I headed for the stairs, my right fist against my heart to quiet the fury, to survive it. I needed the night beyond, which finally I reached, stumbling out onto the porch and into the streets and heading for the fairgrounds, which were empty now, the horses long since talked back into their trailers and driven off, Riley’s stories floating somewhere in the caverns of their heads. I hadn’t had a panic attack in two months. Each one was bigger than the last.
We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows.
The words are from a poem Jack Gilbert wrote and Mr. Buzzby read toward the end of my sophomore year, when I finally stopped minding the class so much and settled in to learn. I walked the streets that night with that line in my head—walked until I could breathe again and stand up straight without collapsing. I was going to Juárez because I needed some perspective, some place where I could let the big bird free. My head knew things that my heart didn’t yet. I was privileged. I was smart. I had a future. It was time to believe in myself.
Now Dad’s laugh seemed a million miles away, and Kev didn’t seem, in memory, quite so annoying, and I wondered whether Geoff was out or barricaded behind his door. I thought about how cool the air in my own bedroom was. I thought about waking Riley, or even waking Mrs. K., who was breathing hard against her dream, or saying something loud enough for Sophie to hear—Sophie, who was rustling in her own sheets, who was either awake or unwittingly restless; but what would I say if I called to Sophie? Where does a story like mine begin?
I pulled the thin sheet off my legs and crawled out of the hard-plank bed, through the darkest dark. I felt around for the doorknob and opened the door, and then I was outside, sitting on the loose plank landing of the stairs, my knees up under my chin. There was no light to read by, no place to pace, nowhere else to be, no need to put on my glasses. Through the dark I could see the rooftop men who had fallen to sleep in their spectator chairs. Beyond them was the rise of mountains. I heard no morning birds, no honking goose, no Lobo. The day would come. It had to.
I don’t know how much time passed. I don’t remember falling asleep, or thinking I would. But when I woke my chin was heavy on the platter of my knees; my mind was chasing some fuzzy tail of a dream. The black night sky was riddled pink. There was the smell of heated butter rising from the kitchen down below. When I turned, I saw Riley in the spot of morning light beside me—so transparent I could almost see through to her bones. Only her hair, which was loose, had some jive to it. The rest of her was like a hologram; I could almost tell myself that she wasn’t even there.
“Hey,” she said when she felt my eyes on her.
“I thought I was supposed to be the insomniac,” I told her.
“You can’t have it all, Georgia,” she said, laughing softly. Her gaze shifted toward the rooftop men—the six of them still fast asleep, their straw hats pulled down on their heads. One had on the most gigantic belt buckle I’d ever seen; it caught the daybreak light and emitted a beam.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked her finally.
“I thought I’d count,” she said.
“Count?”
“You know.” She reached into the pouch that, I only noticed then, she’d brought to the balcony with her. She opened her hand and held her palm up flat.
“The bracelets,” I said.
“Yeah.” She placed the one she’d drawn out across her bony lap and reached into her pouch for more. “I hope I have enough.”
In the still-new morning light it was hard to make out the colors. There were double rows and triple rows of sparkles, some longer and some shorter, all the beads strung together on wire and clasped like the one I wore. “You’re one of a kind, Riley,” I said. “Always were and will be.”
“Wish I could believe that myself.”
“And you’ve got a real big heart.”
She shook her head. “You see those kids along the road today?”
“Of course.”
“It made my head hurt, Georgia.” By now there were at least three dozen beaded bracelets stippled across her thighs. She reached into her bag and drew out more.
“They seem happy, though. I mean, their faces. Don’t they? Or is it just me hoping, Georgia? I can’t figure that out either.”
“I don’t know.”
“Great,” she said. “And you’re the smart one.”
I turned one of her bracelets over in my hand. It was a three-bead-across design, perfectly made. In the morning light it looked like pale blue crystals. It could have been green. It could have been white.
“How are you going to choose?” I asked her.
“What?”
“Choose who gets a Riley bracelet in a country as big as this?”
“That’s what woke me up,” she said. “Part of my brain was trying to do the math.”
“Luck of the draw?” I suggested.
She nodded. “Maybe that’s the only way.”
“Put them in a sack, line up the children, and let them choose.”
“You think Mack will let me take them to the work site?”
“Why not?”
“It’s not like I warned him or anything. Not like giving things away is in his book of rules.”
“I’ll ask him if you want me to.”
“Not necessary, but thanks.”
The sky around us was brightening. The moon was growing dull. We sat together over another day beginning. The men on the rooftop had started to stir. One tilted his hat in our direction.
“I was afraid of them last night,” said Riley, meaning the men. “But that was stupid.”
I shrugged.
“Turns out they’re kind of nice. Kind of like protection.”
“Agreed.”
“I keep thinking about my mother,” Riley said. “What she’d do if she saw this.”
I put my arm across the wire hanger o
f Riley’s shoulders. “I don’t know, really. And I don’t know if it matters. It’s what you do that counts. What you see. Who you are.”
“I guess so.”
Down below, the door to the chapel creaked open. It was Jon, in a towel, making his way to the bathroom. Riley and I didn’t say a word. He didn’t look up. He never saw us.
“You’re always so together, Georgia,” Riley said. “You always are.”
“Oh, God,” I said. “That is just so much bullshit. You should see the inside of my head.”
“That’d be something else,” she said.
“Yeah. Like a big old biology experiment.”
“What’s in there?”
“A mess. And you should see my rib cage. I’ve got a blackbird instead of a heart.”
Riley laughed her beautiful laugh.
“I can’t do this,” Riley said, leaning her head on my shoulder.
“You’re here,” I told her, and that was all. It was what I’d told myself.
two
A little later we were all packed tight into our rented vans and out in Juárez, on the road. We’d loaded the five-gallon water jugs, and all the tools and clothes we could fit were in the back—the hammers and work aprons and thick cotton gloves we’d all been told to bring from home, along with the more complicated stuff that the guys had pulled from the back of Manuel’s chapel. It wasn’t even seven A.M., but it was hot, and there was only one music station on the van radio that worked and a single speaker through which the tinny music floated. Jazzy, Sophie, Mariselle, Riley, and I all looked like newbie candy stripers in our secondhand scrubs. Catherine was in the other van, but so was Mrs. K.
I was in the middle of the middle, a really bad spot. Too far back to get any benefit from the timid AC, too squeezed in to make much use of the digital camera on my lap, too sweaty hot to keep my glasses up high on the bridge of my nose. I had Riley on the one side and Mariselle on the other—shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, and sticking-to-each-other hot. Mariselle’s sighs were in endless supply. Riley had started sighing in stealth imitation; and Sophie, up in front of us, was perfecting The Mariselle, too, except that Mariselle never noticed—she was far away in her head, thinking her immensely sighable thoughts.
The roads nearest our living compound were dirt finished off with dust; they finally led to asphalt-paved stretches. The stores along the roads sold secondhand hubcaps and steering wheels, used tires, roof tiles, panes of glass; and sometimes there were closet-sized stores that seemed to specialize in plastic toys or laundry detergent or cans of soda stacked in blocks of vaguely yellow cooler ice. There were people walking, people driving, people sitting up on roofs, people in buses, people in shirts and dresses that were vivid, bright, so bold; and I thought about las muertas de Juárez. I wondered how anyone could disappear when so many eyes were watching.
The farther we drove, the wilder and more dangerous the driving got, and there were stretches that were probably a dozen lanes across, and stretches where the roads split and then rammed back into one, and a tunnel beside a bridge, and a sudden concrete barrier wall; and then at last the road bent along the river.
“El Paso,” Mack said from his driver’s seat, and we all turned and looked past the sludging Rio Grande toward a stand of sleek American banks and silver corporate headquarters and comfortable-seeming universities and regular-looking stores with honking-big logos nailed way up high like ads for people who could never buy whatever was being sold. It gave me the strangest feeling to see my country from the other side of the fence. To be among the million in junker cars who would have to pay, somehow, to get out.
“Lord, it’s hot,” Sophie said, and from the curl of her ponytail hung a suspended bead of sweat. Jazzy, who was sitting beside Sophie, started beating her hand like a fan. Riley started fanning, too, but none of us were better off.
Mack kept driving, with Mr. Thom’s van sometimes behind, sometimes beside. The road eventually skinnied down. We reached an intersection, and Mack signaled to go left; and just as he turned, I saw a side-of-the-road man holding high this huge, ugly fish, like another kind of sign. That fish had the fattest lips I’d ever seen. Its scales had a grotesque pinkish tint. The eye I could see reminded me of a bashed-in metal bucket. “I’m never eating sushi again,” Jazzy said, but only Riley laughed.
It took us fifty minutes to go fifteen miles; and then the streets deteriorated to thick, hard sand and we were turning left into a colonia, Mr. Thom’s van still right behind. Now we were the only two vans anywhere for as far as we could see, and the streets were wide, whitish, and, it seemed, vacant; and Mack turned off the radio so the only thing we heard was silence, which was louder than all the noise we had up until then been driving through. Even Mariselle did not sigh.
I leaned forward, lifted my camera. I zoomed in and out, framed Anapra as I first saw it. Familiarity doesn’t do photographs any good. What is news to you is news to the lens, and that’s where art comes from; and also when you are looking through a camera’s eye, you see things you wouldn’t otherwise.
There were mattresses for dividing walls between the broken houses, cacti in tire planters, a mule in a yard, the bruised-looking veins of electrical wires in a sprawl down one bleached hill.
Finally we caught sight of a broom truck up ahead painted fire engine red. The bristles of the brooms poked upward, toward the sky, as if to scrub the air. The driver had his windows down and his radio blaring, and all of a sudden I was thinking about the old neighborhood ice cream truck. About Kev rushing out on summer evenings to get his Fudgsicle.
There was a foulness in the air: the open sewer lines. There was a crowd of wild dogs. There was a doll that had been thrown to the roof of a tar-paper house, like some kind of sacrifice. The dust was earth and air and sun. There were no children anywhere. There were no people we could see; and Riley looked at me, and Sophie looked at Riley, and Jazzy sighed even before Mariselle did, and Mack said, “Welcome to Anapra.”
I took a photograph of that sign. I took photographs of air and sun, of that doll on the roof, of the dogs—and the word for them was feral. Then I turned and took a photo of Riley, whose bones were so close beneath the skin of her face, whose eyes were big and hungry.
three
Out in the heat, on the work site, it was just like what we had seen on Mack’s aerial drawings: a cluster of three pale blue stucco buildings nested high on a plateau of sand. Anapra lay below the compound. Mountains rose behind—scruffy and mostly bald, except for the occasional clumping of gray-green and yellow weeds; I never got a good photo of those mountains, I never captured that gray-green.
One of the buildings was long and rectangular, with a kitchen on one end and wooden tables and benches everywhere else except at the other end, where a toilet sat behind a door. One was a two-room house with an attached shed. The last was a tiny chapel half the size of my bedroom, with a rose-colored carpet on the floor. There were wooden monkey bars on the plateau, a sandbox with a roof, a swing. The ground was sand so coarse and thick that I felt myself going ankle deep when we walked and when we stood. We were gathered now in a semicircle around Mack. Beside him was a short man whose name, we learned, was Roberto González. Roberto had a wife, Lupe, who stood in a triangle of shadow. She was just as short as the man she’d married, but there were more lines around her face, more places etched by sun.
I had my camera around my neck. I took their photo graph.
“Five years ago,” Mack was saying, “Roberto and his wife presented their compound to Anapra. They built this playground for the children. They opened the chapel to guests, to meetings, to songs. They converted an old shed into a kitchen and encouraged community meals on Saturdays after mass, and they did this because Anapra is their home, because they understood that God had given them more than many others. Roberto and Lupe have two daughters. Both now live in the States. One is a nanny and one is a maid. They send part of their wages home. It was from the employer of the elder Gonzá
lez daughter that we at GoodWorks learned the González story, and of the quest to build a community bathroom.”
Roberto stood in the sun while Mack was talking, squinting straight ahead. Lupe maintained her spot in the wedge of shade, wiping her broad hands across her apron, stealing looks at us. There were little rivers of sweat running down my back, a gathering heat around the waistband of my scrubs. Riley had swept her hair high, away from her face.
Mack was explaining now—processes and precedence, expectations and rules, the little things that would, he said, determine our success. He was drawing the basic footprint of the bathroom with his foot, sketching out something long but not so wide that would sit between the house and the kitchen. He was describing the pipas—tanker trucks that drive water to the dunes and fill the concrete cubes that store the drinking water. He was saying that we were all so lucky that Mr. Thom wasn’t just Corey’s dad but an architect, too, and that as builders we’d be taking our instructions from him, working in teams, getting things done. “I don’t care who you are or where you’ve come from,” Mack said. “For the next two weeks, building a bathroom is your purpose. Leave Anapra better than it was, and you will have made a difference.”
Mack stepped aside so that Mr. Thom could take the center spot in our semicircle and tell us in fuller detail about the days ahead. In the shed of Roberto’s house we’d find what we’d need, he said—shovels, ladders, buckets, wheelbarrows, even a circular saw. The two-by-fours and two-by-sixes would be arriving later that day, in the back of a truck. “Thanks, by the way, Drake, to your dad for underwriting the lumber,” said Mr. Thom. I glanced at Drake beneath his maroon baseball cap. He didn’t so much as blink. I looked again at Mr. Thom, whose short blond hair was white in places and whose eyes were blue and serious now, though once, I imagined, they were full of something else: mischief, maybe, or ambition.
