The Heart is Not a Size

by Beth Kephart

  “It’s what he can see that we can’t see that’s got him worked up like he is.”

  I shook my head, didn’t follow.

  “The ghost,” he went on. “That little girl who lost her sister. She’s been looking for her sister’s spirit. Maybe Lobo’s gone and found it.”

  Upstairs, on the roof, a man had started snoring. The sound of dreams, I thought. The sound of survival.

  “Manuel said that some nights after a storm has passed over, he’s almost sure he’s caught a glimpse.”

  “Of what? Of Socorro’s sister?”

  “He didn’t say exactly. Or if he did, I didn’t understand. All I know is that a storm passed today. That Lobo’s on edge. That you’re here and I’m here, and all of us are waiting.”

  We sat there and said nothing—Drake’s hand on the dog’s head, Lobo going in and out of restful and alert. There is silence that stumbles toward words, and silence that transcends words. The skies change, and the truth does. But right then silence was the truth, the stars; silence was Drake; it was me breathing.

  “Socorro’s the only one left,” Drake said. “She’s five. She doesn’t say much. But she doesn’t give up looking.”

  A girl after your own heart, I thought; and suddenly it was clearer to me—why Drake had taken such an interest in the child. He had seen something in her that he’d recognized. He had leaned toward it. Time is the future in Juárez. Friendship, too, lives in the future and not only the past.

  “What would the ghost of Socorro’s sister look like?” I asked now. “I mean, what do you think?”

  “Something that floats,” Drake said. “That’s all I can figure.”

  I smiled. “Like what that floats?”

  “I don’t know—sailboats, balloons, kites, happiness….”

  “Happiness?”

  “Just an idea I had. Probably stupid.”

  I looked around in the dark for something floating. I saw angles, stucco, a hoisted cross, dust-dirtied windows, the belly of the splintery stairs, the men on the rooftop sleeping.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Drake said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be sleeping?”

  “Too much stuff,” I said, “in my head.”

  He let it go at that; he didn’t press, but suddenly I wanted to tell him. Suddenly I didn’t want to be alone with me—the regrets I had, the things I’d broken. “You know anything about panic attacks?” I asked him finally.

  He turned, looked at me, shook his head.

  I settled back into my chair, closed my eyes. “I had my first almost two years ago. They’re like heart attacks, but not really. They’re like wanting to run except for the fact that you’re stuffed stupid and trapped inside the hole of yourself.”

  “You were having a panic attack? Just now? Upstairs?” It wasn’t an accusation, it wasn’t gossip, the way Drake said it. It was just somebody trying to understand.

  “I was trying not to,” I said.

  Drake watched me. He listened. Lobo had started to wheeze again, the ears like darts on his head. “I think happiness is the color white,” he said after a long time.

  I laughed—I don’t know why; it just came out. “Why white?”

  “I don’t know. Peace. The truce you make with yourself.”

  I looked at Drake through the dark, his big hand on that dog’s head.

  “Georgia, you know the girl who I told you about? The one who drowned in the storm?”

  I nodded, but it didn’t matter. Drake had again fixed his eyes high on the moon, which a cloud had started to gauze over.

  “I always thought I should have saved her. That I should have seen her, you know, out there swimming. That I should have seen her drowning coming.”

  “That couldn’t have been your fault,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter. She died. I was there.” Lobo lifted his snout and moaned. There was a long silence after that.

  “Happiness is the color of a truce,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Drake said. “I hope so.”

  ten

  The goose woke everybody else. It started honking soon after the first parabola of sun appeared from behind the mountains that rose beyond the compound; and it didn’t stop until Lobo answered bark for honk—stood at the gate with his nose between the pickets.

  I’d fallen asleep in that plastic chair and awakened to sunrise. Manuel’s bulb was out, and the courtyard was going live—smoke rising through the kitchen windows, Jon and Neil creeping from the chapel’s dark shell, Mrs. K. creaking down the stairs and heading for the bathroom, her hair mashed at embarrassing angles. Catherine opened the kitchen door and stood in the courtyard—arms crossed and eyes on the sun, refusing to take in her mother. Jazzy was singing—I heard her voice but couldn’t see her. Not far from me, their legs straddling a wooden bench, Sophie and Riley sat face-to-face. Riley’s pouch of bracelets was upended between them, and Riley had her back to me. It didn’t matter: She had to have walked right by me, had to have seen me sleeping there, had to have known that I’d wake to this—her and Sophie, her new best friend, making bracelet plans.

  “You’re a genius, Riley,” I heard Sophie saying. One by one she pulled each bracelet to the sky, letting the sun stream through. “You could sell these in Hollywood, to the celebrities, I swear,” Sophie continued. “You could be famous.”

  “They’re just bracelets,” Riley said; but she was laughing, her nose tilted in the direction of her own dangled jewelry, which was all blazed up and brightly fractured by the roaring-over-Juárez sun. Riley really did have a gift for color. For making glass look like diamonds, rubies, gold.

  “Just doesn’t do you justice, girl. Just is not what these are.”

  “Bracelets don’t get you into college, Sophie.”

  “You don’t meet celebrities in college.” Sophie caught my eye and smiled. “At least not most of the time.”

  I couldn’t tell if Sophie knew that a fight was on, that she was sitting in the line of fire. Turn around, Riley, I tried to will her with my thoughts. Turn around and let me back in. But Riley wouldn’t budge, and Sophie kept talking, kept pulling one bracelet after the other to the sky and telling Riley what a genius she was.

  “So, like, what’s next?” Sophie was asking. “What’s the distribution plan?”

  “Anapra,” Riley said.

  “Brilliant,” Sophie said. “Swear to God.”

  Riley sighed, settled her head into the palm of one hand, settled her elbow onto the splintered picnic table. “So many kids” is what she finally said.

  “And you’ll be the girl,” Sophie said, “who won’t be forgotten.”

  The chapel door opened, and there was Mack, the brash streaks in his hair made even more aggressive by the sun. There, too, was Drake—a little beside, a little behind him. Together they were hoisting some ancient-looking toolbox, Mack staggering more than Drake, both of them headed for Mr. Thom’s van. I couldn’t see what Drake was seeing, where he was looking, if he was looking for me.

  “Hey,” I called.

  “Hey.” He was synced with Mack; he kept moving. I felt hulking ugly in my WITNESS PROTECTION T-shirt. My bare feet and my gym shorts.

  “Need some help?” It was Sam, leaning out of the kitchen window.

  “We’re good,” Mack said, though I could see how his muscles were tensing. “We’re out of here in thirty minutes, guys. Make sure you’re ready by eight.” Mack and Drake kept making their way until finally they’d arrived at the van, where Mr. Thom had flung the back door wide and where the three of them now battled the box into place.

  “Anything actually in working order in there?” Mr. Thom asked doubtfully, rubbing one hand over the box when they were done.

  “Elbow grease,” Mack said, “is a prerequisite.” He slammed the door shut, clapped the dust off his hands. He turned and took us in—Sam, still hanging out a kitchen window; Mrs. K.; Catherine, with one arm across the shoulder of Leonor, w
ho had come to see what the hassle was about and who had stayed—a wide, pickety grin on her creased brown face.

  Mrs. K. started saying that she could use a good masseuse; and right then is when Mariselle appeared, as if the courtyard were a theater—pacing a circle, reciting some dream, going on for the benefit of no one.

  “Like, there was this wall,” she was saying, “and I couldn’t get over the wall, so I kept running, you know, right beside the wall so that I could find its end, but it never ended.” She paced, but it was her eyes that were shifting back and forth, as if they were running after the dream. “I don’t think I ever got to the end of the wall,” Mariselle said. “I’m not sure, but I don’t think so.” Now she stopped and leaned against the second van. She crossed her eyes and squinted. “I’m trying to remember,” she said, “if I got to the end of the wall.”

  We were waiting for more, for some decision about the dream; but Mariselle was done. She pulled herself up into a dead halt, lifted her head, shook her hair out, and smiled.

  “Well, thank you for sharing,” Mrs. K. said, and for some reason that made Riley laugh—the old, familiar Riley laugh. Then Sophie was laughing, and Mrs. K., too, and even Catherine couldn’t help herself. Only Jazzy appeared to be confused—Jazzy who, I finally figured out, had been sitting above us this whole time, taking in the scene from the balcony. Taking it in, but clearly not hearing a word.

  “What’s so funny?” she demanded.

  “Mrs. K. is doing stand-up,” Sophie called to her. She lifted one hand, and Riley high-fived her; and then they both broke into rioting, ricocheting giggles. It was enough. I stood. I was decamping. I didn’t have to stand there watching while Riley pretended that I did not exist.

  “Georgia.” I heard my name and turned. “You ever get some sleep?” It was Drake, the quietest large person I’d ever seen. Drake, pushing the hair from his eyes.

  “Some,” I said. “I guess. In the beach chair. I guess.” I cast a furtive glance at my ghostly T-shirt.

  “Moon beach.”

  “Something like that.”

  He smiled, but his eyes were still tunnels I couldn’t see through. They were bastion places that held out promise for some light. I stood in that sun. I looked for that light. I stood there undecided and confused.

  “Thought of another Gilbert poem,” Drake said. “Thought of this line: ‘We must risk delight.’”

  “‘A Brief for the Defense,’” I said. “One of my teacher’s favorite poems. Buzzby. That was the guy’s name. He practically drove me insane, but still, it turned out that the man had impeccable taste.”

  “Fierce,” Drake said. He hardly moved when he talked. Didn’t use his hands. Didn’t shift his feet.

  “‘We must have / the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless / furnace of this world.’” It was my favorite line from the Gilbert poem. I’d never recited it to a soul. Didn’t know anyone else, except for Buzzby, who’d have even cared.

  “Yo.” Now it was Jon, calling from the threshold of the courtyard kitchen, megaphoning his hands around his mouth. “Leonor’s cooked up about a million eggs. Sam’ll chow them all down if we let him.”

  I looked from Sam to Mrs. K. to Mariselle to Sophie to Drake. “Tour leaves in twenty-five minutes,” Drake said. He turned for the kitchen. I looked beyond him, to Sophie and Riley—to Riley, actually, who was facing my way, giving me the oddest stare.

  “You’re a stealth operator, Walker,” she said. Then she pivoted back, and the delicate frame of her delicate back was like a door that had pulled itself shut.

  I felt it then—felt something inside me snap. “What is with you, Ri?” I said; and I didn’t care if Sophie was watching or if Mack was nearby, if Jazzy was floating, headed for the kitchen wearing the shortest pair of short shorts. It was getting stupid, this whole thing was—why couldn’t Riley see? Why was she so flipping insistent on barricading me?

  “You know what I miss?” Riley said now, loud for Sophie’s sake—a one-woman exclusionary act. She lifted a hand to the plane above her eyes to block the sun, and the shadow cast by the crook of her arm looked like one of these triangles you play in music class.

  “What do you miss?” Sophie asked. She was looking at me and then at Riley. She looked at Jazzy, who seemed flummoxed.

  “My long, white, scrubbed-clean bathtub.” Riley was stuffing her stash of bracelets back inside her pouch. She was unstraddling the bench, standing up.

  “Don’t start on that.”

  “God,” Riley said. “I’d fall asleep in it. I’d soak all day and not get out.”

  “Like your mother,” I said, and Riley glared. Sophie went on, because what did Sophie know? She was just some pawn in Riley’s game.

  “Don’t start dreaming, though,” Sophie said. “Today isn’t bath day. Today is framing.”

  “Yeah. Whatever that means.”

  “You take a two-by-four and a two-by-four and a two-by-four until you have yourself a wall.”

  “Hammer and nails.”

  “Correct.”

  “I’ve never even hammered a nail.”

  “Today’s your lucky day.”

  The sun was a full red circle out there above the mountains and climbing fast. The day was getting on. Eight o’clock.

  “Leonor’s made eggs,” I said, the words like metal between my teeth.

  “Eggs,” Riley said, crinkling her nose.

  “I’m serious,” I said, and I was. “Seriously, Ri. Breakfast.”

  “Vans leave in twelve minutes,” Mack called. He’d had his head inside the van’s wide engine, and now he was slamming shut the hood, returning a wrench to Manuel. “Weather,” he said to Mr. Thom. “Chokes these engines every time.” Then he turned to me and gave me a look that I understood to mean No more bitching right now.

  Riley’s sapphire eyes were cool and hard. She stared through me, then walked past and up those stairs, into that cavern of a room. She defied me to defy her, and I wouldn’t. I went up the stairs right after her. Changed in silence, my broad back to hers.

  eleven

  We drove to Anapra with American music playing loud. Drake had rigged his iPod to the van’s third-rate audio system and turned the volume to high; and he’d done it with Mack’s permission, because, I guess, looking back on it now, Mack was trying to keep things light. To cool the fight. To get back to business. To plant seeds, not uproot them.

  The music was our own; it was loud, but that wasn’t the amazing part. The amazing part was that Drake sang, and that he was no way shy about it. Sitting in the middle of the rest of us, he did beatbox, rap, hip-hop, three songs in a row from Maroon 5. He had a voice you wouldn’t believe could come from a guy his make and size, from a guy who’d been so good at being quiet. Even the guys in the van were giving him respect. Corey, too, the Hacky Sack king, was giving it up for the Third.

  “Dude,” he said, “where you been hiding that thing? You should have talked more, man, given us some warning.”

  Drake didn’t mind the praise, didn’t need it. He just sang as if he’d grown up singing, as if the music weren’t just for him or for us but for all of Anapra, too—for survivors of sandstorms, of deserts, of murders that go unsolved. “The ruthless furnace of this world.” I’d have recorded his singing with my camera if I could. I’d have sent it back, across the Rio Grande, past the border guards, way past El Paso, home. To be played at night. To restore myself.

  There were signs, all along the road, of yesterday’s storm. Walls that had shimmied down, big pileups of tumbleweed, so many squares of corrugated tin that had snapped off houses or shops and lay wherever the wind had left them. The closer we got to Anapra, the more banks of sand we saw, or gutters of nothing where the wind had tunneled through. There were bottles rolling around in the streets. Loose dogs chasing kicked-in metal trash cans.

  When we turned left into Anapra, we saw the people fighting back—women and girls with brooms, some boys, too, pushing the sand out of thei
r front doors and into the side yards or out onto the street. What had been blown away was being carried back—mothers, fathers, little kids with tires lifted above their heads, pallet boxes, ceramic pots, tarps. Sticks were being bundled. An entire clothesline had been freshly pinched with plastic clips. One kid had an armful of paper. The mule had made its way back home.

  The dogs traveled in packs. One gang of them picked up their heels after Mr. Thom’s van, which was itself kicking up so much sand, it looked as if the dogs were going up in smoke. Drake had stopped singing by now, and I’d taken out my camera. If my mom had seen this, she’d have found the right words. All I would ever have was pictures.

  “I am never,” Mariselle said, “ever, ever complaining about taking out the trash again.”

  “You got it, sister,” Sophie said.

  “I mean, like”—and then Mariselle sighed, but it was a perfectly reasonable sigh.

  “What makes it so that they don’t up and quit?” Sophie asked.

  “This is their life,” Mrs. K. said. “They make the best of it.”

  I was taking photograph after photograph. I was looking into the houses where the doors had been blown off, remembering the women who had never made it home—who had been taken, vanished, disappeared, never to come back to this, their home. I was thinking how too-small the houses were for grieving; how a daughter might have waited up all night, all day, all night again for a mother to return. How a sister might. Socorro. And then what? And then how do you make the best of that? And what do you say to all the other daughters, and how do you keep your loved ones safe? How do you keep standing up when you’re shaken to the bone?

  “We’re going to have to dig out before we start framing,” Mack was saying from up front as the van hit the sand hills hard and bumped us down the road.