Tigers, Not Daughters - Samantha Mabry Page 0,25
go off in different directions, some into the hallways that extended off that front room, others up stairs. The cathedral doors creaked open. Someone was heading over to the side, in the direction of the confession booth. At least a couple of people were coming down the center aisle. Eventually, Jessica saw a pair of beat-up black Adidas coming her way. They were John’s. She pushed back deeper under the pew, causing it to squeak. John stopped. He shuffled his feet and turned in a circle. He didn’t see Jessica, didn’t realize she was there. She could’ve reached out and touched him. She could’ve scraped her nail against his rubber sole. If she’d had a pin, she could’ve pricked the skin of his ankle with it.
“Jess,” John hissed, not down to where she was, but out to the whole room. “Jess, babe. Where are you?”
Jessica covered her mouth with her hand. How funny that John thought she would respond to him. He actually thought that she wanted him to find her, just like he thought she wanted him to wake her up in the middle of the night and force her out of bed, but he didn’t know how thrilled she was to be left alone in the cold dark. Now that she had that thrill, she wanted to hold on to it, coat it in sugar and chew on it.
John whispered a curse and then took off down the row toward the center aisle. Back at the door, he stopped and called out again. Jessica didn’t respond. She still had her hand over her mouth. Eventually, the doors opened, John’s footsteps faded, and the cathedral was quiet. Jessica exhaled and laughed to herself.
The quiet didn’t last very long. Little by little, the cathedral filled back up with sound. Pipes started to bang. The floorboards up in the organist’s loft creaked as if someone was slowly pacing back and forth across them. Voices rose up from other sections of the church, the sound seeping through the cracks of the stone. There were echoes and the click-clack of shoes against tile.
Jessica could explain away the creepy sounds. The banging noises could be from an old boiler. The groans could be from the centuries-old foundation continuing to settle. That or rats. What sounded like ghosts talking to each other was most likely wind or the voices of Jessica’s not-really friends being carried through the pipes.
Jessica had never been afraid of the dark, or silence, or weird night sounds, but back when Ana was alive, she’d pretend to be afraid of thunder just so she could pad down the hall to her big sister’s room. Ana had this habit of going to bed early, like at nine at night, but then she’d wake up a couple hours later and stay up until three or four in the morning. She once told Jessica she liked feeling that she had not just the whole house but the whole neighborhood to herself.
When Jessica had gone to Ana’s room during thunder-storms, Ana would usually be awake, wearing just her white underwear and a ratty old shirt. She’d be on her phone or painting her nails, sometimes both. She’d glance up from whatever it was she was doing, and even if Jessica was interrupting, she wouldn’t act put out. She’d ask if Jessica was scared because of the thunder and if she wanted to hang out for a little while. Jessica would nod. Her little girl’s heart would be beating so, so fast.
Usually, Jessica would pretend to fall asleep on Ana’s floor, just so she could stay in the room longer and listen to her sister do all the things she did. Ana would experiment with eyeliner, put on face masks, and flip through weeks-old magazines. Sometimes she’d go into the bathroom, open the window, and turn on the vent. Jessica would open her eyes just enough to watch her sister pull out a cigarette and a matchbox from behind a stack of mismatched towels in the cabinet. Ana would sit there on the edge of the sink, wearing hardly anything, staring into the night, blowing clouds of smoke out the window. The girls’ grandpa smoked, and the bitter smell always lingered on his breath, his hair, his hands, his clothes. Ana, though, always somehow smelled like her perfume, like linen.
John