“She was there,” Jessica gasped. “I saw her.”
John called out again. The pitch of his voice was higher now. It was like when she was hiding in the church, and he was growing frantic when he couldn’t find her. She’d done nothing then, and she’d do nothing now. Jessica closed her eyes and tipped her face up to the rain.
Rosa came up to her side and linked their arms together. “You did the right thing,” she said.
John pounded on the door again, over and over. Suddenly, he stopped. Then the screaming started. Only someone standing close to the house could hear it, though. The roar of the storm was so loud.
Iridian
(early Monday, June 17th)
Jessica’s eyes were closed. She looked peaceful, like she was listening to music, like the storm was her favorite song.
Linked together with Jessica, Rosa’s eyes were closed, too. Their lids were sealed tight. Rosa dropped her sister’s keys into the grass. Jessica might have been soaking in the sound of John’s fear, but Rosa was fine-tuned to something else farther away.
Finally, Rosa exhaled, long and slow, like she was deflating. Then her eyes popped open.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to go.”
Rosa unlaced herself from her sister and took off across the yard. Within moments, she’d vanished between two houses. Without Rosa, Jessica seemed to sway, like she’d lost her anchor. She stared at the front door, then in the direction in which Rosa had run, then back to the door.
“We should find her.” Iridian picked up Jessica’s keys from where Rosa had dropped them. “Jess!”
Iridian yanked her sister’s wrist, but Jessica jerked away, causing Iridian to tip back. She tried to dig her heels into the ground but slipped and fell palms-first into the mud.
“What’s your problem?” Iridian barked, wiping the splatter from her eyes.
“She’ll be fine!” Jessica replied. “She goes out by herself all the time.”
“Not during a thunderstorm!”
Lightning silently split the sky, and for a moment longer, Jessica stood facing the house. John’s screams had died out, and Iridian imagined him, curled up in a ball just inside the front door, with his head in his hands, weeping. When she had a pen and paper again, she’d fill up line after line describing him there—his body position cramped, his breathless paralysis caused by fear.
“You’re right,” Jessica said. “Let’s go.”
Jessica took her keys and then grabbed Iridian by the waist and hoisted her up to standing. Together, they marched to Jessica’s car, but at a clap of thunder so close and loud, Iridian startled and again lost her footing. She threw her hand out to check her balance and realized it was empty. The piece from her notebook—the one that she’d been holding in her fist—was gone. Frantic, she fell to her knees and started to claw at the wet grass.
Jessica tried again to pull her up. “Are we going or not?”
“Stop!” Iridian yelled. “Just give me a second.”
Iridian’s limbs were slick with rain and mud, but still Jessica managed to wrestle her up off the ground and drag her the few feet to her car.
“Wait!” Iridian cried out.
Thrust into the back seat, and without her scrap of paper, Iridian folded forward in half and covered her head with her hands.
Iridian had no heart for John. She didn’t care about the low moans and high whines she heard before Jessica closed the door to the house, sounds that mimicked the wind. She cared about that paper more than she cared about almost anything. In that moment, she cared about that paper more than she cared about her sisters, including Ana. As they drove through the neighborhood, Iridian half-heartedly looked for Rosa while mourning the loss of her piece of paper. Occasionally, Jessica would call back to her and ask if she could see anything, and Iridian would just shake her head and mumble.
Eventually, Iridian peeked at her empty hand and saw blotches of blue ink. I’m sorry had transferred to her skin. The words were blurry and backward, but they were there.
“Jess. My paper.”
“I’m not going to—”
“Please just turn around,” Iridian croaked. “My paper. I dropped it. We can find it, and then we’ll find Rosa.”
“Iridian!” Jessica shouted. “Shut up! This was your idea. This isn’t about your fucking piece of paper right now.”
Iridian bolted upright and reached forward across the console to grab the steering wheel. She pulled it clockwise, in the direction of the curb, but instead of stopping, the car went into a skid. Jessica shoved Iridian away and was able to pump the brakes and prevent the car from going into a spin. They were stopped, at a diagonal, in the middle of an empty intersection. Iridian was wheezing and could feel the hard thuds of her heart.
“What the fuck?” Jessica shouted. “Don’t fucking do that again!”
“I’m sorry,” Iridian said. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
Iridian wanted to fold back into herself, crawl into the fabric of the seat. She met Jessica’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
“It’s okay,” Jessica said, easing the car through the intersection. “Just . . . I’ll get you another notebook. Let’s find Rosa first, alright?”
Rosa
At the heart-level, all animals are different. Birds have small hearts that beat very fast. Once, at a petting zoo, Rosa held a chick up to her ear, and the sound it made wasn’t like a thump, thump, thump but more like a whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, like water tumbling around and around in the washing machine. The birds that flew around Southtown during the summer had hearts like tiny engines. They were always moving. They propelled themselves from tree branch to tree branch and telephone line to telephone line. Rosa imagined their heartbeats were so fast that, if she could hear them, they would sound like drumrolls. If their hearts beat that fast, then maybe, sometimes, they conked out mid-flight, and then dropped straight to the ground.
Squirrels also have small hearts that beat fast, though obviously not as fast as birds’. Rosa had never held a squirrel up to her ear, but she’d watched them. Like birds, they propel themselves off tree branches and telephone lines. Sometimes they freeze mid-step because they hear something in the distance or notice something out of the corner of their eye. Their arms and legs and head stay motionless, but their hearts still pound against their ribs. Also, their tails never stop swishing. It’s like they can’t help it.
Fireflies have tiny hearts that create electricity. Crickets have tiny hearts that fuel tiny legs that scrape together to create a song that will bring them a mate.