Tigers, Not Daughters - Samantha Mabry

The Night the Torres Sisters Tried to Run Away from Southtown

The window to Ana Torres’s second-story bedroom faced Hector’s house, and every night she’d undress with the curtains wide open, in full view of the street. We’d witnessed this scene dozens—hundreds—of times, but still, each night Ana had us perched there, pained and floating on the edge of something tremendous.

With her back to us, Ana would strip off her shirt and her bra—that bra made of white cotton, the fabric so thin we could see the shimmer of her sandstone skin through it—and toss them onto the floor at the foot of her never-made bed. She’d lift up her arms, stretch her spine like a cat, and roll her head side to side to ease out the kinks in her neck. She’d run her fingers through her long, ink-black hair before gracefully winding it up into a knot. Then she’d turn—so slowly it made our eyes gloss with tears. She’d sigh and gaze through her window—never straight at our faces, which were always twisted tightly with hope—but always past us, over the top of the crooked oak tree in her front yard, over the top of Hector’s two-story house, over the tops of tilted palms several streets away, to some faraway place. She’d have this wistful expression on her face, like she was waiting for something, or someone, to come down from the night sky and take her away.

We were barely fifteen, and Ana was nearly eighteen, but we were convinced that we could be her heroes. We could be the ones to rescue her and take her wherever she wanted to go. Up and over into New Mexico? No problem. Down into Matamoros? Just say when. Peter knew the basics when it came to driving a car, and Luis had close to fifty bucks stashed away in a drawer. We would do whatever it took and would suffer any number of indignities to be with her, this girl of our young, fresh dreams, to save her from our old neighborhood, with its old San Antonio families and its traditions so strong and deep we could practically feel them tugging at our heels when we walked across our yards. We wouldn’t have cared if Ana made fun of our gangly bodies, our terrible, squeaky voices, the way no deodorant could come close to covering up our puberty-stink, or the very, very dumb things we inevitably would say.

Just tell us where you want to go, Ana. And we’ll take you there.

We never got the chance.

Just over a year ago, on an unusually warm spring night during Fiesta, Ana Torres opened her second-story window and stuck out her head. She was checking to make sure the street was clear before she latched on to the sturdy branches of the old oak tree. She shimmied down the wide trunk, and once the soles of her flip-flops landed on the patchy grass, she dusted off the bits of bark from her palms and turned her gaze up.

There, at Ana’s window, was her sixteen-year-old sister, Jessica. Jessica tossed down a pink backpack, then a blue one, then two matching tweed suitcases like the kind traveling salesmen used to carry back when there were such people as traveling salesmen. Ana caught each of them, one after the other, her knees buckling only slightly under the weight. She set them in a row near the base of the tree and looked up again, to watch Jessica hitch her left leg awkwardly through the window and then reach for the nearest branch with unsure hands.

Even from across the street at Hector’s house, we could see Jessica’s lips pulled back and her teeth clamped together in cold determination. She was gripping too hard—first to the window frame, then to the branches. It was obvious she’d never done anything like this before. Her fingers were popping the leaves loose, and the soles of her high-tops were chipping off bits of bark. Both the leaves and the bark were fluttering to the ground, right to where Ana was bouncing on the balls of her feet. We could tell Ana wanted to call out to her