Tigers, Not Daughters - Samantha Mabry Page 0,32

Calvin to get to the window. He yanked the curtain back and also froze, just for a second, but then his face broke out into a smile. His eyes grew wide; they started to glisten. He reached out and put his palm on the glass pane, gently.

Deep down, we all knew the one thing—the one person—that could make Jimmy’s face light up with that amount of joy and awe. We flew from our scattered places around the room, pulled a pale and still-stammering Calvin up from the floor, and huddled behind Jimmy. We looked out the window and down.

It was Ana. Of course it was Ana.

All things appear ghostly under the weak light of street lamps, and so that was how Ana appeared. We knew it was her because she was standing with her back to us. How many times had we seen that back, the swoops of those shoulders and hips? Even though the ghost of Ana Torres was wearing an oversized white T-shirt that came down to mid-thigh, we knew that body beneath. It was seared into our minds. Ana wasn’t in her room, though, and she wasn’t undressing. She wasn’t in the street with her baton, either. Instead, she was in her front yard. Her pose, in a way, mirrored Jimmy’s. She was facing the window of her dad’s first-floor bedroom, with her hand up, but instead of pressing her palm flat to the glass, she was knocking against it with her knuckle.

The ghost of Ana Torres continued her steady knocking, and up in Hector’s room, we could hardly breathe.

Eventually, the porch light at the Torres house flicked on. Ana’s ghost turned its head slowly toward it. The front door opened, then the screen door, and then out came Rafe. We pushed back from the window and closed the curtain, leaving just an inch-wide gap for us all to peer through.

“Who’s that?” Rafe shouted into the night. He was shirtless, wearing baggy jean shorts and holding a baseball bat. He took a couple of steps out into the yard, heading in the direction of the window.

Ana, though, was gone. We don’t know how it happened. We never saw her fade out, evaporate, twitch like static and then disappear. She was just . . . gone. There, then not.

We watched Rafe stalk around the yard for a bit, calling out, making threats into the quiet night while smacking the bat into his open palm. He finally went inside, but the porch light stayed on. We drew back the curtains again and waited, staying up until dawn, hoping beyond hope that Ana would come back, but she never did.

It was Hector who finally broke the silence: “So what do we do now?”

Watching Ana undress and watching Ana twirl her baton were our secrets to keep. But this—this felt too big and too not ours not to share with the Torres girls.

“We should leave Rosa a note,” Jimmy said. “In her tree.”

So that’s what we did.

Several years ago, Rafe had tied a thick rope to one of the larger branches of the old oak tree in the front yard, and then fixed a knot at the bottom of the rope to serve as a foothold. It was a swing. Rosa was the only one who ever used it. She’d be out there for hours, pumping her knees to take herself higher. She’d cry out with joy, content with entertaining herself.

There was also a hollow in that tree. It faced away from the street, and we used to watch Rosa store things in that hollow—little things she’d find in the neighborhood like feathers or small stones or shards of colored glass. That hollow was the best place we could think to leave the note. The mailbox was out of the question. Did any of the girls have a cell phone? We had no idea, and if they did, none of us knew any of their numbers.

It took us most of the morning to get our message just right. We wanted it to be short and to say the right thing and to not have any major misspellings.

Calvin had the best handwriting, so he wrote it, in blue ballpoint pen on paper torn from