Tigers not daughters, p.15
Tigers, Not Daughters, page 15
“Walter!” Rosa called out.
Walter turned. “Everything alright?” he asked.
“After I figure all this out,” Rosa said, approaching him, “about Ana, I’d like to go with you to the basement and abandoned rooms of the church.”
“Okay.” Walter laughed. “Of course.”
Rosa reached for Walter’s hand, and Walter let her take it. She didn’t thread her sweat-damp fingers with his, but she held his right hand, palm up, in her left hand. Then she touched it. For what felt like a long time, she traced Walter’s fingers across his rough fingertips and the blunt edge of each of his nails. She pictured these fingers holding hammers and light bulbs and ladder rungs. She pressed her thumb into the mound under his thumb. She spread his fingers wide to feel the webbing between them. This was a hand that did things. Rosa liked that. She liked that he wasn’t a ghost, or a phantom animal. If she wanted, she could walk up to him and touch him.
Jessica
(early Monday, June 17th)
Jessica and John had spent the last ten hours together, and she’d been half there for all of them. After her shift, she had gone to John’s house because he’d told her to come to his house. They’d watched television. They’d driven around. They’d gotten burgers from a drive-through. They’d parked and eaten those burgers in the car and then made out a little even though John’s mouth tasted like meat and Jessica wasn’t really into it. Then they’d driven around some more. They’d talked. Well, John had talked. He’d talked about how his older cousin was never home anymore now that he’d enrolled in some classes at the community college, and because of that, John had to do more chores around the house. He may have talked about some other stuff, but Jessica hadn’t really been listening. For sure, she hadn’t said anything back. He’d never asked her anything about herself or her job or her family. Eventually, Jessica pulled up outside her house, thinking that John would get the point. He didn’t. The engine was off. The windows were rolled down. It was nearly five in the morning, and Jessica was so very over all of this. She thought back to when she was in grade school, in the choir. Her heart used to feel so full.
Jessica had a song stuck in her head, one she’d heard at work that day, probably seven or eight times. John was still talking as she looked out the windows and started humming to herself.
“Jess?” John urged. “What are you doing?”
Jessica closed her eyes and kept right on humming.
“Jess!” John grabbed Jessica’s arm and shook her a little.
Jessica turned to hum in John’s face, so close and so sloppy, spit flung from her lips to his. John blinked and leaned back.
“You’ve changed,” he said.
The bruises around John’s eye were still black and plum-colored, ringed with mucus yellow. It was sort of a masterpiece.
“You’re making excuses to not see me,” he added. “And you’re acting all mean.”
“That’s not true,” Jessica replied half-heartedly.
“It is true.”
“Do you want me to take you home?” Jessica asked.
John said nothing. It was hard for Jessica to take him seriously, with his eye looking like that. She bit back a smile.
“So,” she said, “I guess you just want to sit here and do nothing?”
“Fuck!” John shouted. Jessica recoiled and John leaned forward to press the tip of his nose into her ear. This time she felt his spit on her skin. “Fuck!”
“Stop,” Jessica gasped.
“You stop!” John yelled.
“I’ll just take you home.” Jessica tried to twist her key in the ignition, but John stopped her.
“You’re not listening to me! What’s wrong with you?”
“Are you serious?” Jessica spun in her seat. “Are you just now realizing that something is wrong with me?”
Jessica opened her car door, but John reached across her and slammed it back shut. She grabbed frantically for her phone to call her sisters inside, but John snatched it from her hand and tossed it out his window and into the grass. He did the same thing with her car keys: yanked them out of the ignition and tossed them out the window. Then he took both of her arms, pinned them to her sides, and pressed his forehead against her temple. Jessica’s whole spine rattled, and a scream rose up, which John cut off by pulling her forward then slamming her back against the seat. Her head bounced against the headrest, and for a second, Jessica saw stars.
“I worry about you,” he grunted. “I’m worried you don’t know how much I love you.”
Jessica felt sick, but there was a little voice inside her chanting: fight, fight. She didn’t know how to win a fight with John, though. She needed to think. She needed to buy some time.
“If you’re quiet, I can sneak you up to my room,” she offered. “Then I can take you home before I have to go to work.”
“You’re not listening.” John pressed against her, skull to skull now. “Have you ever been scared, Jessica?”
What was John talking about? What the fuck did he know about being scared? How dare he ask her that, as if he knew the first thing about fear, about the blinding claustrophobia that went along with being trapped in a car, in a house, with a ghost, with a living person?
The worst fear of all, Jessica was coming to realize, was the fear of having no idea who she was. Jessica had become a ghost, and not a good kind of ghost like Ana or like the ones that maybe haunted centuries-old churches. She was acting like a small spirit. She was so mad all the time, but instead of striking out, she would do nothing or reach out with tentative, tissue-paper fingers. She had to do better. An angry girl was allowed to be angry. Earlier that day, in the pharmacy, Jessica had watched a girl her age screaming at her boyfriend in the allergy medicine aisle. The girl had kept yelling, “When were you going to tell me? When were you going to tell me, huh?” The boy kept trying to calm her down, but she wouldn’t have it. Eventually, Mathilda came out with a security guard, and the girl had yelled, “Fuck this!” and then thrown a bottle of nasal spray at the boy’s head.
Jessica had been transfixed. The scene had been so inspiring. Jessica had to start. She had to start scraping away the layers. This—this shit with John—was the first step, and, if she was honest with herself, it was the easiest because John was a total fucking loser.
“Get out of my car,” Jessica said.
“Did you not hear me?” John asked. His disgusting meat breath poured into Jessica’s ear, and she couldn’t help it: She laughed. Then she pried one of her hands free and smashed down on her horn.
John was startled enough to allow Jessica to reach for her door handle again, but before she could fully open it, he grabbed her arms again, squeezing tighter. This time, it didn’t matter that Jessica didn’t know how to win. She fought anyway.
“Get out!” Jessica screamed, flailing against him. “Get out!”
She repeated those two words over and over again at the top of her lungs. The words stopped being words and became shrieks. Jessica stared straight into John’s bruised eyes and continued to scream. For the first time, she wanted the whole neighborhood to be her witness.
Iridian
(early Monday, June 17th)
Given that her name meant “relating to the eye,” it was ironic how selective Iridian’s vision was. The things she wanted to see mostly lived in her head or in the worlds she created on paper. She could picture a character’s skin in such vivid detail, she knew how it tasted. She knew so clearly—in her mind—the difference between eyes that sparkled with tears and those that sparkled with joy and those that sparkled with pride. The things she didn’t want to see, she avoided. Instead of burying her head in the sand, she buried herself between book pages or under bedsheets or, now, into couch cushions. Rosa knew her sister well, so she’d known the solution to Ana’s writing on the wall was to cover it up. She’d also known that the solution to Ana’s destroying Iridian’s books and notebooks was to simply pick everything up and put it back into the closet.
Iridian’s new notebook was snug against her side, and the television was still on soap operas, still on mute. She wished she lived there—in the screen, in the beautiful houses on the screen where people spoke but you couldn’t hear their muted words. At some point, Iridian fell asleep to that beauty. She woke when a lamp clicked on—more like, she jerked awake. Her long legs bucked against the tangle of her blanket. Iridian blinked and saw her father at the far end of the couch. With a dried crust of spittle at the edge of his mouth, he was the opposite of the beauty on the screen.
“What?” Iridian asked.
Rafe said nothing. A little knowing twitch played at the corner of his mouth, right next to the spit.
Iridian looked down and, there, clutched in her father’s hand, was her notebook, the new one with the yellow cover. She exhaled hard and fast, and before she could even really think about it, Iridian launched off the couch. She collided with Rafe, and her notebook flipped open, its ink-covered pages fanning out. Iridian’s nails dug into the skin of Rafe’s wrist and the backs of his hands. Her attack worked—sort of. Rafe pulled away, but all Iridian was left with was a tiny scrap of paper with the word ravage written on it.
“This is what you think about?” Rafe demanded. “What kind of girl are you?”
“It’s nothing,” Iridian lied, because it was, of course, everything.
“It’s filth! It’s trash!”
Rafe waited for his daughter to respond, maybe to apologize, and Iridian waited for Rafe to do what he always did: say something terrible and then try to twist things to make it seem as if Iridian had been the one to force him into saying something terrible.
Rafe took a step forward, and, out of the corner of her eye, Iridian saw Rosa creep down the stairs. Iridian steeled her nerves, took a breath, and remembered how diligently she had practiced for this sort of thing. It was rare he could hurl an insult at her that she hadn’t hurled at herself already.
“I know why you do this,” Rafe said. “You’re trying to make up for the fact that you aren’t beautiful like Ana, talented like Jessica, or kind like Rosa. You are just . . .” He paused, trying to find the right words. “You are a nothing person. Not beautiful. Not talented. Not kind. I thought I raised you better, but I guess I was wrong.”
Before, when this had happened at school, when her secrets had been plucked away and shared by and to her awful classmates, Iridian had been so humiliated she hadn’t been able to move. She’d heard the jeers and laughter, but only over the white-noise roar in her head.
For a long, long time, Iridian had wanted to be completely inconspicuous, homebound, so introverted she was practically invisible. But nothing? Iridian didn’t want to be nothing, and when she heard her father say that to her, she exploded like a star.
With a sharp cry, she lunged for the notebook again, but Rafe held it above his head, toward the overhead light and out of his daughter’s reach. Iridian tried to claw her way up his arm, but Rafe pushed her hard—right in the center of her chest—and she fell back against the couch and then bounced onto the floor. Rafe started to flip through the pages, just like Evalin had done, like he was going to read from them. She couldn’t bear the thought of her words coming out of his mouth, so she screamed. Still on the floor, she folded herself into the tiniest ball possible, closed her eyes, covered her ears with her hands, and screamed.
Rafe started reading. Iridian couldn’t hear everything, but the worst/best phrases seemed to rise over her screams: suck, smack, salty. She screamed louder. Eventually, Rafe grabbed her by the arm and tried to pull her up, but Iridian was dead weight, a shrieking heap. Rafe was dragging her across the carpet. Her shoulder twisted, threatening to wrench out of joint, but Iridian kept screaming. She vaguely heard Rosa telling Rafe to let go, but Rafe wasn’t listening. He bent over Iridian and told her—shouted—into her ear, “If only your mother—God rest her precious soul—could see this.”
“Stop!” Rosa yelled.
Iridian was able to turn her head and see that her sister had pulled a nearby lamp from its electrical socket. She held that lamp in both her hands, wielding it like a baseball bat. Its cord dangled to the ground.
Outside, someone honked the horn of their car.
Then, Iridian felt something unmistakable: wind.
It was warm, and it was so strong that it blew back the loose strands of her hair. Iridian had to tilt her face away to protect it from the grit she felt flying into her eyes, but there was nothing she could do to avoid the smell of oranges that the wind carried with it.
In the next instant, the television blinked off. A high, whining sound came from its screen, and Iridian watched as the glass shattered on its own, radiant, as if a fist had been slammed in the center of it.
“Leave, Iridian,” Rosa commanded, tightening her grip on the lamp. She was focused on Rafe. “Go outside. I’ll take care of this.”
Once outside, Iridian heard Jessica shrieking from her car. Through the open passenger-side window, she saw her sister thrashing against her seat, and John was trying to keep her pinned down. A different kind of wind blew through—rain was coming—but a piece of Iridian’s hair got stuck in her mouth, and she could taste the dry dust. She thought of Rosa, always swooping in to save her, as she’d just done seconds ago with Rafe. She could still hear the both of them, behind her, yelling at each other in the house. Rafe was yelling, “This is my house!” but Iridian knew that wasn’t true anymore. Her father had no control over what was happening in those walls.
Iridian ran toward Jessica’s car—toward Jessica’s shrieking. She was determined to be the hero for once. She was fed up with men trying to leave their bruises all over her and her sisters.
Jessica
(early Monday, June 17th)
The passenger door opened, and John was being yanked from the car. Jessica could see Iridian behind him, her arms around him, tugging him backward. John quickly found his feet, however, then spun around and backhanded Iridian across the face. She fell hard against the side of the car, her head whacking the metal frame, and then crumpled to the curb.
All the air left Jessica’s body. She couldn’t have possibly seen what she’d seen. She blinked, and there was Iridian, on the ground, grimacing, her hand coming up to press against her temple and her thigh scraped from where she’d skidded against the concrete.
Jessica was out of the car, stalking John around the front end. There was a sound in her head, like a pulse, like a whomp, whomp, whomp. Pressure was building behind her ears, in the palms of her hands. She was about to explode.
“I will fucking kill you,” she said to John, her voice hoarse. “You hit my sister, and I will fucking kill you.”
Jessica shoved John in the chest with both hands, but all he did was stumble, laugh, then spit on the street. Too fast, John reached out and grabbed a chunk of Jessica’s hair, right at the root. She yelped as he gripped her hair tighter and attempted to push her back into her car.
Jessica’s eyes watered from the sudden burst of pain, but she could still recognize the blur of red fabric that had suddenly appeared in her vision. Rosa was there, swinging some kind of weapon at him. After the sickening thud of metal on meat, there was a noise, a grunt. John fell away, yanking out strands of Jessica’s hair. Again, Rosa brought her weapon up over her head and swung it at the soft part of John’s side, right under his ribs. This time, John bellowed, gripped his torso, and landed hard on one knee.
Jessica heard the bang of a storm door, then another. She looked around and saw her wish from before had come true. Her neighbors were out of their houses. Mrs. Moreno from next door was on her front porch in her bathrobe, yelling into her cell phone and gesturing wildly with her free hand. Teddy Arenas was out in the driveway, cradling his little dog. Mrs. Bolander was at the front edge of her yard in a matching pajama set—pink with watermelons.
Hector and his friends were there. They were out of breath, like they’d just sprinted down the stairs. Peter wasn’t with them. He must’ve been at the pharmacy.
At last, Jessica turned to her own house and saw her father, standing in the open doorway clutching paper in his hand. He hadn’t come out to help—he never, ever helped them.
Rosa was still gripping her weapon—a lamp without its shade, Jessica now realized. Its cord dragged across the patchy grass. Rafe slumped against the doorframe, placing his hand over his heart, and that’s when Jessica noticed he was wearing one of Ana’s old bracelets on his wrist. It was made out of yellow string and a couple of beads. Where on earth had he found that?
It had just been a little over a week ago that Rafe had been in the middle of the street, bruised and crying out, needing help. Jessica had rushed to his side. She’d stopped her car in the middle of the road and had thrown herself at her father. And this is what she got in return, when she was the one who needed help—nothing.
Jessica could see, at the edge of her vision, her neighbors taking slow steps closer to her house, to her yard, to her and her sisters. She remembered, half-remembered, the night that Ana died. It was sticky out—just like now. Rafe was slumped in the doorway—just like now. Jessica and her sisters had needed help, and the neighbors had come rushing from their houses. She remembered screaming against a woman’s body. She still didn’t know whose. She just remembered the woman’s shirt smelled a little bit sour-sweet, like red wine.
“We’re leaving,” Rosa said to her sisters, dropping the lamp in the grass. She bent to pick up Jessica’s phone and keys from where John had pitched them in the yard, and climbed into the passenger seat. “Iridian, are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Iridian muttered. She hauled herself to standing.
