The Heart Is Not a Size by Beth Kephart Page A

Before and after. After and before. The sun went down to a certain place and then held off sinking farther. The next time I looked up, I saw that dark-haired girl. Standing at the gate alone, peering in and up.
    She had on a different dress—a sun-faded yellow that seemed as if it had been worn for years by various sisters, neighbors, strangers. Lobo trotted to her first. Manuel called out to her and waved. Somebody had taken care with the young girl’s hair, fixing it with bows. She wasn’t wearing any shoes. I lifted the camera and zoomed the lens. She was missing her front teeth.

    We were to go nowhere by ourselves in Juárez, yet here was a child out alone at dusk. In fifteen minutes the sun would drop, and the goose across the street was still, and the old woman had left her post—must have been asleep already inside her house that could not have been more than the length of her short body wide. The men on the neighboring roof had settled into their spectator chairs, and over at another table, a game of travel chess was going.
    Meanwhile, Riley and Sophie were playing hangman, Riley drawing her stick figures with such high-fashion detail that soon Sophie called Mariselle and Catherine to see, and soon it wasn’t even hangman anymore but a game in which a style—punk modern, runway chic, debutante ball, grunge—was being blurted out and Riley was asked to draw it. It was as if they couldn’t trip her up. Whatever she drew they loved; they called it perfect. They’d struck at the vein of Riley’s talent in hardly more than a day—all it had taken was a game of hangman. I’d known Riley almost forever; but here she’d been discovered, and I could see the glow working on her, convincing her of something she couldn’t find at home and taking her further andfurther from her need to talk to me.
    Sometimes color is all there is; and as the sun now fell fast, I photographed its dying pink until the moon was higher than the sun and it was shadows I saw through my camera’s eye—blues leaning into blacks and blacks spattered through with the violet. The shapes of men on the roof. The bulge of a mountain range beyond. The old cross that rose from the chapel’s roof, which was a rusty color.
    The men in their folding chairs lit cigarettes. I sat there watching them, watching the last of the daylight fall across the balcony, until that’s what I wanted—that balcony, that light. I walked toward the steps and climbed them. They creaked beneath my weight. Then I stood there looking out, taking photos that would never mean a thing. They mattered only in the present tense, gave my solitude a purpose.
    It was then, from up there, that I noticed Drake pushing back from the game of chess and walking toward the gate. He had his hand on Lobo’s head, and now he was kneeling down, talking to the girl who stood peering in. Taking something from her outstretched hand, turning to admire it, then slipping whatever it was backthrough the gate. It was as if the girl had known Drake for a long time. As if one can make a friend that quickly, which, it seems, some people can.
    “Riley’s walking runway,” I heard Sophie call.
    And then I watched as below me Riley pretended to model the clothes that she’d just drawn.
     
    In the bunk beneath Riley, I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t stop hoping, stupidly hoping, that she’d turn and whisper, “Good night, Georgia. Love you.” Turn and say she understood, that she’d get help, that she’d stop starving herself, that she was grateful. But the space above my bed was silent. Riley didn’t so much as rustle her sheets. I couldn’t tell if she was sleeping, couldn’t know what she was thinking, couldn’t confront her, because this is a fact: Silence defeats like nothing else does. There is no fighting it.
    “You an artist now?” she’d sneered. I remembered freshman year, when Riley’s watercolors had taken first place at districts. It was a pretty big deal, and Rennert High