Tigers, Not Daughters - Samantha Mabry Page 0,50

his gaze. She tried not to stare at the one eye that was swollen nearly shut, the bruising around it nearly black. The seam of that eye, all along his lashes, was moist, weeping like a cut blister.

“You’re pressing too hard,” John said.

“Sorry,” Jessica muttered.

She wasn’t sorry.

Rosa

(Saturday, June 15th)

After warming up some leftover chicken fried rice Jessica had brought home the other day, Rosa eventually coaxed Iridian into the kitchen. They ate together at the table, and then Rosa led Iridian to the couch in the living room. She clicked on the lamp. The television was still on. Rosa sat down next to Iridian and started telling her about her searches for the hyena and her trips up and down the river and out to Concepcion Park. She described the sounds of frogs and wind and crickets.

As Rosa started in on all the birds she’d seen recently—cardinals, bluebirds, crows, little warblers—Iridian’s eyelids started to flutter closed.

She waited a few minutes to make sure Iridian was asleep, turned off the television, and then went upstairs to grab a box she kept under her bed. When she was younger, Rosa used to collect all kinds of colorful things. She liked tiny racecars with missing wheels, swirled-glass marbles, and bird feathers. She’d find objects around the neighborhood and hide them all over: in a plastic grocery bag that hung on a hook in her closet, in the hollow of the oak tree outside, in an old sour cream container she’d buried under the bushes in the backyard. Over time, she’d narrowed her collection down to the most important objects, and those objects were in a single shoebox.

Rosa pulled that box onto her lap and sifted through the contents. Her fingers skimmed a fake pearl button and a couple of Fiesta pins, and then landed on the note she’d received last July, a little over a month after Ana had died, from the boys across the street. One of them had written it, printing in very neat letters on a piece of a rounded-edged page from a composition book, the kind Iridian had always used. It was dark in the room, so she couldn’t read those neat letters, but she didn’t need to read it. She knew by heart what it said.

We saw Ana last night. She was standing in the front yard tapping on your dad’s window. We thought you’d want to know. P.S. This is not a joke. We are serious.

She’d believed the boys, figuring they didn’t have a reason to lie. They’d never been the mean types. She’d never heard about any of them playing pranks on other kids at their school. They didn’t come right out and say they’d seen a ghost, but they didn’t have to. She knew that’s what had happened. But she couldn’t understand why Ana would appear first to Hector and his friends, as opposed to her and her sisters.

There had to be a connection, Rosa thought, between Ana and the hyena and the cardinals. There just had to be. Rosa decided she needed to search again, and she needed a better, or quicker, method than on foot. She needed a car, or someone with a car. There was no way Jessica would take her around, or her dad, but maybe there was another option.

Rosa tucked the boys’ note back in with the pearl button and the pins and the rest of her most important treasures. She guided the box to its hiding place, and then went into the hall to grab the receiver to the landline. She tried the church first, but Walter Mata wasn’t there. He picked up on the second ring on his home phone.

“Hi, it’s Rosa Torres,” she said. “Do you think you can borrow your mom’s car for a while?”

Rosa was wondering if she’d made a mistake. Cars were different from feet. Obviously. She was too removed from the ground. The car’s muffler was sort of broken, making huff-huff sounds. Being a cautious driver with only his recently acquired learner’s permit, Walter was diligent about using his turn signals, so in the background there were always these little click-clacks. The radio was on, playing the doo-wop oldies his mom liked. It was low-volume, but still. Rosa