The Heart Is Not a Size (3 page)

“I have to ask my mother, Georgia.” Riley’s voice was small, the opposite of effervescent. That was the thing about Riley. She could be so back and forth. “It’s going to freak her out.”

“When are you going to ask?”

“I don’t know. Maybe today, when she’s nursing her hangover.” The thought of this made Riley laugh. And then she couldn’t stop laughing. Her laughter picked up speed, gained force.

“You have to go because you want to go,” I heard myself saying. “Not because you want to freak your mother out.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Riley said, growing quiet again. My bedroom windows were beginning to streak with rain. Tomorrow, the third quarter of school would begin.

three

T
hey like to tell you that panic attacks begin in your head. My first began and ended with my heart.

I’d piled on too much at school, but it was not as if that was news. It was my sophomore year, and I’d stacked AP Biology next to Honors Spanish next to Trig; but it was AP English that took the cake for messing with my head.
Nuance
was Mr. Buzzby’s favorite word, and into every assignment he would wedge his famous shades of gray. He asked for lines, for boundaries, for distinctions. He drove the whole class mad.

Some days we’d walk in and there’d be paired terms on the board:
Insidious/Invidious
.
Ominous/Onerous
.
Nom de plume/Nom de guerre
.
Tortuous/Torturous
. “You have ten minutes,” he’d say, “to write an essay delineating the proper use of each word.” Mr. Buzzby balanced his frameless glasses on the end of his nose. He combed his cantaloupe-colored hair straight back. He tacked his knitted ties with a silver pin, and his face never evolved from a frown. The twinned terms were only ever ten-point essays, but there was no predicting them. You walked in. You sat down. There were the words on the board, Buzzby’s frown on his face, the relentless clock on the wall. Sometimes I had something to say and sometimes I didn’t, and when I didn’t, my heart would start pounding. I’d sit at my desk holding my Uni-ball above an empty page, listening to the clock’s minute hand.

But that wasn’t it. That was not what set the attacks in motion; that was just a case of nerdy nerves. My first veridical panic attack had come the day before the marking period ended, when an Objects at Rest essay was due. We had been studying Pablo Neruda. We had read his words out loud: “It is very appropriate,
at certain times of day or night, to look deeply into objects at rest.” Mr. Buzzby had given us a week to write eight “inspired” pages—something, Mr. Buzzby said, that would make the Chilean poet proud. I had a grading-period B that I had to pull up to an A. Or thought I did, because isn’t that the way it is? The colleges we choose not choosing us unless we’ve proven our utter readiness?

I’d had what I’d thought was a brilliant idea: Object at rest equals Kev when he is sleeping. I didn’t doubt it, didn’t second-guess it—just had the idea and blasted through. I’d stolen into my brother’s room at night and sat in that strange silence. I paid attention to the sound of stillness—to its color, to the rays of moonlight that plashed against my brother’s sheets. “Kev at Rest,” that’s what I called my essay; and when it was finally done, when I’d gone to sleep the night before it was due, I felt as though I’d trumped the assignment and earned myself an AP English A. I was on top of things, where people expected me to be, which is what I expected of myself.

I’d woken up dying. I’d woken up pinned to the bed by a bolt of pain, with a heart split wide and bloody.
There was no feeling, nothing, in my left arm. There wasn’t any air in my lungs. I was flattened and ashed, and when I tried calling out, not one word appeared; when I pounded at my headboard with my right fist, nobody came. I was fifteen years old and a bleating terror: I’d never drive, I’d never kiss, I’d never grow up and leave my ransacked teenaged self behind.

I was dying all because Kev was no object: My heart had figured that out. He was a living, breathing human being, pain in the butt that he usually was, and my essay was wrong, my A was an F, my body was blaring,
You’re done for
. I love it when people think you can talk yourself out of pain. You can’t. You can only defend yourself against it; and to defend yourself, you have to muscle up. You have to face your fears and pulp them. You have to fight until there isn’t one fear left.

You have to get perspective.

Winter couldn’t summon snow. I’d have given anything for a couple of white days off, but the temperature hovered in the mid-thirties and the clouds could manage only rain. Most of the days were gray all the way through, and on the few days when the sun shone
brightly, the mercury in the thermometers plunged. The atmosphere was doing a lousy job of getting its snow act together.

By February of the year of Juárez, the seniors were already hyped about the internships they’d start in May—Jeremy getting a gig at Wired 96.5, Josh writing a screenplay under the wing of someone famous, Haley returning to the elementary school, where she’d assist with the third graders. They’d tell us their big news at lunch or in between classes in the halls. Pretty soon, too, the college gossip was flying: who’d gotten into where and who hadn’t and all the guessing about why, all the talk about whether there still might be time to shine up our own junior résumés a bit. The seniors were free; they’d been let loose from their shackles. I envied them that. Geoff, too, had been liberated, had gotten his ticket to S. I. Newhouse at Syracuse. The best communications program in the country, Mom said, something of which the whole family should be proud. Even Kev high-fived Geoff when the news came in. Even he sat with us and watched the DVD that came with the acceptance letter.

But for us juniors, for me, there were only exams
on the horizon, AP tests, a second shot at the SATs, on which I’d done better than I had thought I’d do but where there was always room, as my counselor said, for some meaningful improvement. Riley acted as if it didn’t matter then and would matter never—took the SATs once and shrugged at her scores. “Whatever,” she said, and that was it. She said the most exciting thing about planning for college was imagining all the fabulosity that’d come with living away from home. She was looking for exits, even in winter. It was my fault, not understanding how genuinely desperate she was to disappear.

You get caught up, junior year, in yourself. You can’t help it. There’s that much pressure.

By the middle of February, Mack had collected a gang of eleven, and even though it wasn’t his perfect dozen, he’d scheduled a first actual meeting on a Thursday at the local GoodWorks office some twenty minutes down the road. All of us had at least one parent with us; that was one of Mack’s rules: It’s a family thing. Maybe it’s the kids who are flying south, but everyone commits to the mission and Dad was my family rep that day.

So there we were, in the bottom-wedge office space that had been leased to GoodWorks for cheap by a corporate sponsor. Instead of windows there were color photocopies of photos from prior-year excursions. A well-water project in Nicaragua, Mack said, rapping his finger against the pinned-to-the-wall pic. A roof raising in Honduras. Soil work in El Salvador, where some of the coffee farming was going organic. Every year a brand-new hillside or neighborhood, a brand-new start. Little seeds, Mack called them. We plant them, get them started. The communities take everlasting care.

Mack had a carousel projector with him—one of those old-fogy kinds. He made the room dark and then beamed the thing on, and for every face or mound or hill of beans that shone through the black-blue-white light, he had a story. Transformations, he called them. He said that no initiative was its own foregone conclusion. That success in the end was not just the what that was tried but the who that had attempted. I looked around. Except for Riley, these kids, to me, were one hundred percent strangers—a few from private schools, a few from competing public high schools, a handful
of seniors from my own Rennert High with whom I’d never had reason to mix. We wore name tags around our necks, our school names on the line below our names. Our parents sat at our sides, too well dressed, too manicured, a little shaken in a room of walls bruised blue, black, and white with poverty.

Riley was turning the bracelets on her wrist. When Mack stopped the show and flipped the overhead lights back on, her mother was the first with a question. “I’m assuming they’ll be nice—the accommodations?” she asked, no doubt expecting a Hilton. I felt my mouth twist up into a half-smiled smirk. I crossed my arms and awaited Mack’s answer.

“We’ll be living in a church,” he said, looking at me so that I’d know he hadn’t forgotten my question of several weeks ago. “We’ll be taking a one-hour drive each day to the site of the squatters’ village. We rent the vans in El Paso.”

“Are there beds in this church?” Riley’s mother persisted, her voice in a pinch.

“We ask everyone to bring sleeping bags,” Mack said. “We prepare ourselves for all seasons, for beds or no beds, for rain or shine.”

Riley’s mother had one of those hairstyles that hugged the face and then flipped out, like the bottom half of an
S
. She had the fingers of one hand in her hair now, telegraphing not so much nerves as disdain. She could have asked about the vans, the roads, the existence or not of roofs, the people of Juárez, the ways in which they struggled. Instead, she asked about the bathrooms.

Mack was used to this, you could tell—his face grizzled by a lifetime of summers in the sun, his hair dark beneath streaks of blond that, I guessed, he’d had painted there. He had lovely green-brown eyes, Mack did. His eyes were how I guessed that he was young. Or not old, anyway. Maybe close to thirty.

“I see,” Riley’s mother said.

“This reminds me of a cardinal rule in Juárez,” Mack said. “No flushing paper of any kind down the toilets. You do, and you spoil a whole neighborhood’s plumbing. You do, and they come looking for the person who perpetrated the toilet crime.”

“Yeah. But,” said this girl who called herself Jazzy. Exotic, with long, dark, crinkling hair.

“No buts on this one.” Mack didn’t even let her get
started. “You throw it in, you fish it out. That is the way it gets done.”

I saw the girl named Sophie turn a pale shade of green, which looked particularly odd against her bright red hair. I heard Riley start to shake her head, the tambourines going off down her ear. “I owe you big-time for this,” she leaned over and said.

“At your service.” I smiled at her. “Always.”

One hour later, the eleven of us kids plus the chaperones plus the parents who would stay behind while their children planted seeds straggled out into the bright sunshine of a cold, blue February day where a quarter-moon already pressed into the sky. Those of us who were new to one another did the limp handshake thing, exchanged phone numbers and email addresses, said we’d friend one another on Facebook. Our parents hurried us along. As soon as we got into his car and closed the doors, my dad, who had all along been keeping his own close counsel, said, “You know you don’t absolutely have to go.”

“I know,” I said, looking at him, his fine broad face, his graying temples. “That’s the best part.”

“What is?”

“The chance to choose to do something like this.”

“As opposed to?”

“Being required. Going around thinking that you had to.”

“I’m surprised Riley’s mom hasn’t signed up as chaperone,” he said after deciding, I guess, not to press not going too hard. Turning for an instant, he caught my eye and smiled. He was in on my jokes about Mrs. Marksmen, which was just one of the millions and millions of reasons that he ranked high on my list of great guys.

“No room for all her face creams,” I said. “No time for morning Pilates.”

“Let’s not tell your mom about all the driving—not yet.”

“I know,” I said. “I thought of that.”

“Let’s tell your mom some of the transformation stories. We can probably score with that.”

four

M
y second panic attack had happened right out in broad daylight, forty miles away from here, at Longwood Gardens. The place is one-thousand-plus acres gigantic, with forty total gardens, indoor and out. Sometimes we go there in the summer for the lighted fountain shows. Sometimes we go in winter for the Christmas holiday lights and poinsettias. But this had been Easter week of my sophomore year, and my little brother was bored. After the long, tedious winter, my mother, too, wanted out. “We could try Longwood,” she had said that morning at breakfast, as if we were all
on the executive council. Geoff said no thank you, but what would you expect of Geoff, who had, for as long as I could remember, lived his life outside the circle of our family? Kev and I piled into the car.

It was one of those days. Half the sky was blue and half was floated through with puffed cloud matter. When the clouds covered the sun, it was perfect sweater weather. When the sun was bare, it felt as if nothing could go wrong. Just past the entrance gates at Longwood the parking lot is huge. Once you’ve parked and paid and walked past the gift shop through the tunnel, the gardens fall off in all directions—toward the conservatory; toward the Peirce-duPont House; toward a bell tower, a waterfall, a theater; toward gardens. Kev didn’t have a destination in mind. He wanted your basic runaround.

“Do you mind, Georgia?” my mother asked, and I shrugged and said it’d be all right. I’d let Kev spin out some of his energy—that was the plan—and then we’d all meet at the café at one, when Mom would let me go to the orchids alone while she plied Kev with yellow-mustarded hot dogs.

But Kev took off before I could tell him not to, and
so now I was running too—down the alley between the Topiary and Rose Garden, then past the Rose Garden toward Forest Walk, where the tulip trees were colossal beasts, too big, even, for Longwood. It was early for lilacs, but as I ran I noticed a few clusters getting ready to bloom. I noticed, too, that Kev’s red shoelaces had come undone, but he was too far down the long stretch of the Flower Garden Walk for me to do anything about it. I called to him, but he wouldn’t hear me. “Kev!” I pleaded, but he was gone toward the fountains and the Peony Garden and the huge Meadow that lay beyond the rest of it—a field that seemed to have no edges, that just went on and on. There were paths that crossed and vanished. There was shade, then there was sun. The problem was that Kev could run anywhere, and I was doing nothing to thwart him.