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 sister. She couldn’t say anything, though—couldn’t risk it—because the base of the tree, right by the row of luggage, was directly in front of their dad’s bedroom window.
By now, fifteen-year-old Iridian—the girls, we realized, were making their escape in birth order—was leaning halfway out the window, scowling at Jessica’s slow and clumsy progress. She kept glancing nervously over her shoulder, then down to the top of her sister’s head. Her fingers drummed against the window frame. Finally, she couldn’t wait anymore. She pulled her hair back into a quick bun and climbed out. Her movements—like Ana’s—were solid and sure. She knew exactly where to grip, how to shift her balance, when to inhale, when to exhale. Soon though, Iridian was forced to pause and dangle, waiting for Jessica. She glanced to the window above, where the youngest of the Torres sisters, Rosa, who was twelve, was starting to emerge.
Finally, Jessica hit the ground—hard and flat-footed. Her arms pinwheeled like a cartoon character’s until she caught her balance. Seconds later, Iridian swung off a high branch and landed in a crouch in the grass. She pulled her hair out from her bun, and the strands spilled across her shoulders.
Now that the three of them—Ana, Jessica, and Iridian—were all on solid ground, they looked up in unison. Rosa was wearing a calf-length dress because Rosa always wore a calf-length dress. Tonight, though, in honor of Fiesta, the front of that dress was covered in medals—like awards, like pins in the style of a Purple Heart, except most of hers were made of plastic with bright, multicolored ribbons attached to them. As Rosa was suspended with just the tip of one bulky shoe braced against the window frame, the fabric of her dress caught in a breeze, and we wouldn’t have been surprised if, instead of climbing down to join her sisters, Rosa climbed up into the tallest, most tender branches of the tree to search for birds’ nests or pluck off the prettiest leaf or just be closer to the stars in the night sky. We’d always thought that if Rosa were an element, she’d be air, the lazy kind that gets tossed around a room when a ceiling fan is on its lowest setting.
Rosa did decide to climb down instead of up, but just as she was about to take the final, short leap to the ground, her dress got caught on something—maybe the sharp nub of a snapped-off limb—and her skirt was hoisted up to her ribs, exposing not just her pale underwear but the bottom edge of her bra. Our breaths caught—all at the same time. We saw Ana reach over and grip Jessica’s wrist. Iridian took a step forward, then stopped, then put her hand over her mouth. Rosa shifted her weight, released one hand from the tree branch and pulled—once, twice—before the fabric gave way. Then, finally, she leapt.
From there, the girls didn’t hesitate. They each grabbed a piece of luggage and were gone, down Devine Street and then north and away from Southtown.
For a moment, we just stood there, shoulder to shoulder at Hector’s bedroom window, our skin buzzing with the kind of feeling a person gets before jumping off a high cliff into water: bravery mixed with low-level terror. Eventually, we looked at one another. We knew that this was our moment. We crept out of Hector’s room and tiptoed down the stairs. One by one, we pushed through the Garcias’ squeaky storm door and stepped out into the night.
If the Torres sisters were headed north and carrying luggage, we figured their destination was the Greyhound station on St. Mary’s and Martin, even though it was over a mile away and on the other side of downtown. Sure enough, when we got to the end of Devine, we saw the sisters hustling in that direction. We didn’t know for sure where they’d catch a bus to, but if we had to guess, we would’ve said the girls were heading south, to the Rio Grande Valley, where their aunt Francine lived in a big house in the middle of the orange groves.