The First Time Ana Torres Came Back as a Ghost
Some nights, before Ana would undress at her bedroom window, she’d go out into the street. Wearing white Keds, a long T-shirt, and short shorts, Ana would march under the light of the street lamps. She was practicing to be a majorette, which was something we’d heard her mom had done back when she was in high school.
We’d watch Ana hurl a silver baton into the dark sky, and then spin around with her gaze up. Over and over. Ana could spin. She had that down. She could march. She could toss her baton so high it nearly grazed the telephone wires, but the problem was, she could hardly ever catch it once it came back down. Something about her aim was bad. Her fingers always grasped but never caught. The baton would ricochet off her hand, bounce against the asphalt, and skitter away. Ana never gave up, though. Again and again, she’d snatch up the baton and head right back into the middle of the street. Once there, she’d tick up her chin, press one fist against her waist, cock out her elbow, and prepare to lead the vast, invisible band behind her.
We were the first people to witness Ana come back as a ghost, and we considered ourselves lucky. She died in June, and we saw her again in August. It happened at night, when hauntings typically happen. We were in Hector’s room. It was late, way past midnight, when we heard thumps at the window—not like rocks being thrown because that sounds like ping, ping—but actual thumps, like the soft knocking a knuckle makes on wood. This was particularly weird because Hector’s bedroom was upstairs.
Calvin was closest to the window. He crawled up on his hands and knees and slowly pulled the curtains back. There was no one on the other side, of course, just the night sky and the light coming in from the street lamps. He looked over his shoulder and laughed.
“You’re all such pussies,” he said.
Just as he was about to release the curtain, Calvin turned back to the window, this time looking out and down, toward the street. His expression spun from humor to horror, and for a moment he was frozen. He made a choking sound and then fell backward.
Jimmy vaulted over 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 a composition book. Hector volunteered to run over and put it in the tree.
We never saw Rosa retrieve the note, but a couple of days later, Hector’s mom called us from downstairs saying that a letter had been left in the mailbox addressed to “Hector & His Friends.” We ran downstairs, took the letter into the backyard, and crowded around as Hector unfolded it.
Rosa’s writing, in pencil on heart-shaped stationery, was so light. When the sun hit the paper, the words were nearly invisible.
Thank you for telling me about my sister, she’d written. I hope she comes back. If she doesn’t, I will go out and try to find her myself.
Rosa
(Wednesday, June 12th)
Rosa had to wait almost an hour before she could speak with Father Mendoza, so once she took her seat in front of his wide oak desk, she placed her hands into her lap, leaned forward, and got right to the meat of the thing.
“Good afternoon, Father,” she said. “I’d like to know what Catholic doctrine has to say about ghosts.”