The crickets at night are not just chirping, and the birds in the morning are not just chattering. The sounds they make come from their hearts.
When Rosa first started sitting in the backyard on Sunday mornings and her sisters asked what she was doing, she told them she was trying to talk to the animals. She wished she hadn’t ever said that. It sounded kind of ridiculous. She didn’t want to talk to the animals. That was impossible. It also made no sense. Maybe communicate was a better word? She just wanted to be able to hear things, and she wanted the creatures of this world to know they were being heard. That’s all. When a squirrel sat up on the telephone wires, flicking its tail, Rosa didn’t know what it was thinking, and she didn’t need to know what it was thinking. If anything, she wanted him—the squirrel—to know that she was thinking of him.
The Torres family had never had a dog, and, until Rafe hit that one a week ago, Rosa had never been able to lay her head against a dog’s silky fur and listen to its heartbeat. At first that dog’s heart was beating fast, but then it started to rumble. Then it lurched and twisted. The dog was bleeding pretty bad, and whining softly, and if Rosa could’ve done something to make it hurt less in its final moments she would have. Finally, its heart beat once more—hard—and shuddered. The dog exhaled and then was silent. Rosa counted out a full fifteen seconds, and the dog didn’t move. That’s when she knew it was dead. She wished she’d done the same thing with Ana, a year ago in the front yard, but she’d been too scared. Before the ambulance came, she should’ve put her ear to Ana’s back, up between her shoulder blades, and counted to fifteen. She should’ve listened to her heart and said please, as if a heart could hear her request. But she didn’t.
People were animals, too, and when they got sick or scared, their hearts gave out.
Rosa
(early Monday, June 17th)
There was no doubt the hyena was close—in the neighborhood somewhere, maybe in one of the alleys. Rosa had heard it laughing. When she was standing in her yard with her sisters and all the lights in the house had gone out, she’d heard the animal’s wild laugh, clear as day.
So Rosa ran into the dim space between two houses. She stopped in a patch of waterlogged grass. Thunder cracked. The sky flashed bright white, and then the sound rose up again, like a bobbing chuckle.
With the humidity in the air, Rosa felt like she weighed an extra twenty pounds. The heavy, electric air tugged at the tiny hairs on her arms.
Storms, she knew, brought out certain instincts in animals. The birds, normally quiet at this time of night, were getting nervous. They squawked and flew around in crazy loops. They heard thunder, and they saw those flashes of lightning, and they got scared. They wanted shelter in a warm and comfortable place.
Jessica used to do the same thing. If a thunderstorm broke out in the middle of the night, she’d run down to Ana’s room to seek shelter. Jessica thought no one else in the family knew about that, but of course Rosa did.
The dogs were barking so loud and from so many different places. They were driven mad by the thunder. Rosa could still hear the hyena and its laugh, but she couldn’t tell where it was coming from. She’d turn down an alley, thinking she was on the right track, and then the sound would come from right behind her. She’d spin around, and the laugh would suddenly seem far away. Rosa cried out in frustration. There was another clap of thunder, and after that, Rosa thought she heard another laugh, but not the hyena’s laugh. It was, undeniably, Ana’s laugh.
It was different from the high, cruel laugh she and her sisters had heard back at the house on the day of the block party. That one was meant to frighten, Rosa thought, but this one was genuine and joyful. Ana would laugh like this when the four of them were little and would be playing in the yard together in the summer, barefoot in the grass, racing one another from the edge of the back porch to the fence, chasing one another with the hose or having cartwheel contests.
Rosa heard Ana’s laugh again, coming from the street. She swerved and ran back toward it. She could help. She would help. It’s what she was made to do.
Human hearts are very complicated. They can pull a person this way, then that. They can convince someone easy things are hard, or cloudy things are clear.
Jessica
(early Monday, June 17th)
Jessica’s wiper blade flicked across her windshield. Nothing was there. The blade flicked again across her windshield, and there the animal was, standing perfectly still in the road. A gray hyena against a gray sky and gray street. Her headlights caught the reflection of two eyes. They weren’t startled or scared, but intense, as if they were urging her onward. It was only when Iridian gripped the seat in front of her and shouted that Jessica braked hard and braced for the impact. The sound of the animal colliding with the car was quieter than Jessica would’ve expected, and it came in two parts. First, there was a wet thud against the front bumper, and then another, more violent thud as the meat of the body was pulled under the tires.
The car went on a few more feet before skidding to a stop. Jessica bucked forward in her seat and clung to the steering wheel for balance. Squinting through the windshield, she saw the wipers still swishing, uselessly tossing sheets of rainwater side to side. Her headlights were feebly illuminating the empty street.
“Shit,” Jessica breathed. She looked into the rearview mirror and saw the hyena’s dark, unmoving form. “What the fuck just happened?”
“It was a dog, I think,” Iridian said.
A howl, animal-like but not quite, cut through the night and rose over the thumps of rain. Initially, Jessica thought the piercing sound came from the hyena, and she half expected to see it rise, all herky-jerky, and stumble out of the road. But when the howl rose up again, louder and more mournful, Jessica realized the sound came from a person, a girl, her sister. In the rearview mirror, Jessica watched Rosa run out from between a couple of houses and into the middle of the street. She was lit up an oozy blood red by the taillights and the rain, and then dropped to her knees in front of the hyena. She swept the long rope of her hair over one ear and leaned down over the animal.
In the back seat, Iridian sucked in a hard breath. She was staring in horror through the rain-streaked windshield at the murky yellow headlights of an advancing pickup truck. That truck was headed straight toward Rosa and the hyena, both of which had merged into one dark mass on a dark road.
“No!” Jessica frantically slammed down on her horn, but the truck didn’t halt and Rosa didn’t leave her animal. “No, no, no!”
Jessica threw open her door and ran out into the road. She heard Iridian shout something, a warning maybe, but she didn’t look back. Jessica knew, just as every other person in Southtown knew, that Rosa was the good sister, the one worth saving. Jessica was the expendable sister, the one with the heart too hot, the one who locked boys into houses with ghosts, the one with nothing to give but anger.