summer comes, bringing rumors of a tiger.
the air is close and sweat-sticky. cicadas, crickets, sighs, a dark ratcheting. a time for lingering after lamps are lit, for windows swung wide—a languorous heat in ordinary times, a loosening.
but this year the tiger presses its claw against the vein of the town, and all sweetwater shivers. a few chickens went missing three days back, and a side of beef. a guard dog was found with its throat slashed. yesterday a woman fainted while hanging laundry and woke gibbering about a creature behind her sheets. a print left in the mud. fear is this summer’s excitement, as hoops were last summer’s, and syrup over crushed ice the summer before’s.
anna, of course, wants a taste.
“don’t you think,” anna says, tipping her head back as lucy untangles her curls, “that a baby tiger would make a lovely pet? i could train it to come when called. maybe i should ask for one.”
lucy raps anna’s forehead with the comb. “i think you should quit squirming. turn around.”
“or maybe a wolf pup. or a little jackal. those i know papa can find.”
lucy remembers jackals, and what those teeth can do to a girl. but she only smiles at anna, her face kept clear and sweet.
anna talks of the tiger as lucy buttons the thirty pearl buttons down the back of anna’s linen dress. anna talks as she does the same for lucy: same buttons, same dress, same boots excepting that lucy’s have three extra inches of heel to make her match anna’s height. lucy’s hair takes longest—her curls must be set and heated. anna goes quiet at last, tongue poking out in concentration.
but as they leave for the station, anna strokes the orange throat of a flower in her garden. “i’ve decided to call it a tiger lily,” she says, her green eyes even wider in pleasure. last week the baker renamed his two-color loaves tiger bread, the dressmaker a striped fabric. “isn’t it clever?”
the flower on its stalk nods along with lucy.
the streets stand eerily empty as they pass through anna’s side of town, those mansions themselves sprawling wide and lazy as sunning cats. people are sparse, moving in nervous knots when they do appear. a group of three or more, it’s said, and the tiger won’t dare approach.
a rumble jolts the street, and shoulders tense, faces draining. it’s only a carriage with its wheel stuck. movement returns as a gust of nervous laughter.
anna presses close to lucy. “maybe . . . maybe it isn’t safe to go to the station today.”
there’s a jump in lucy’s heart that even the rumored tiger couldn’t incite. she tamps it down, as she’s learned to tamp down so much else. “don’t be silly, anna. you have to meet your fiancé.”
yet anna wheedles, coaxes, cajoles, her capacity for speech a marvel—an endless, carrying current that flows past all obstacles. seventeen like lucy, there are times when anna seems a child. she begs for one stop.
—
long before they see it, they hear it: the house of the woman who claims she was visited by a tiger. a crowd’s gathered, chattering, on her lawn. “it came right up,” the woman says. “i heard it growl.”
anna tugs lucy to the front. two slight girls, and yet people part around them because they’re really three. anna’s hired man follows. gossip says that all of the hired men employed by anna’s father—taciturn, stealthy men outfitted in nondescript black—carry guns under their coats. ordinarily, anna rolls her eyes at the notion.
today anna’s too transfixed to notice. she hunkers in the mud, seeming ready to kiss the print, or ask of it some benediction. so alive with hope and possibility that envy snaps in lucy with the sudden, cold teeth of a steel trap. what she’d give to feel that.
lucy steps closer. the print’s half a print. two toes, a partial paw pad, hardly bigger than a saucer. some lesser cat left it—lynx or bobcat, or even a fat domestic tom.
anna says something about her heart racing, and lucy echoes it, as if her own heart isn’t flat and sluggish, as if the old disappointment doesn’t rankle. she could turn and tell the crowd the truth of this print, watch their faces fall. but. she’s told her story in sweetwater. orphan. left on a doorstep. don’t know who my parents are. no one but me.that girl doesn’t know tigers.
“i think that if you were an animal,” anna says, “you’d be a tiger. the very sweetest, most beautiful kind.”
lucy kisses the top of anna’s head. flowers, warm milk. a soothing nursery scent. she puts a hand out to help anna up.
“of course,” anna says, taking the hand, “we’d have to get you declawed.”
heat makes sap, and blood, rise faster. lucy’s hand so sweat-slippery around her friend’s. who could blame her, on this hot day, for losing her grip? not even the hired man would know the difference if she let go, sending anna sprawling into the mud, brown eating up the clean white field of fabric.
lucy pulls anna up so fast that their shoulders knock together. as anna turns back through the crowd, lucy hangs behind, wiping her sweaty palm. there’s a second print some distance from the first. not a paw—a pointed boot.
“your sister’s leaving,” a man says, glancing over. that first glance quick. the second protracted. it takes lucy apart, eyes and nose and mouth and hair. counting up her differences. by then lucy is past him, slipping her arm through her friend’s. from behind, they’re identical.
—
so there is no tiger, no terror, no crisis to avert what lucy’s dreaded all week long. right on schedule the train comes ripping. its whistle pierces the station. track trembles, cottonwoods shedding loose leaves. anna says something the wheels drown out.
lucy mouths the words she hopes to hear:i’ve decided not to get married.
what?she sees anna say as the smell of chicken shit enters the station.
a part of lucy stays on the platform where a freight car halts, feathers puffing from between its slats. another part staggers back into a dim shack at the edge of a valley. she feels anna propping her up, asking if she’s unwell.
lucy swallows back bile. i’m quite well, excepting this train reminds me of living in a hen coop. likely the shit got in my food and bed.“i’m only thirsty.”
anna offers to call a carriage. today even that kindness is souring, spoiling in the summer heat. summer is lucy’s least favorite season. how heavy it drags. how damp. after five years in this town, a longing still fills her for the clear-cut world of two seasons only: dry or wet. she stands, brushing anna off. says she’ll walk back alone.
“you can’t!” anna cries. “sweetheart, the tiger. i won’t do a thing except worry if you leave. you shouldn’t—you can’t—”
it’s too hot to protest, and pointless anyhow, as anna will get her way. lucy sits. “look. here. i’ll wait right on this bench.” she resists a strange compulsion to purr.
—
in that thronged station, anna manages to be first at the train door when it opens.
charles’s light hair is a fit to anna’s dark curls, his chin a fit to the top of her head, his gold watch a fit to her gold rings, his hired man a fit to hers. most of all they fit in how they stand. at the center, unconcerned with the passengers forced to step around, unconcerned with tucking in their elbows, shrinking the circle of their feet. anna throws her head back all the way in laughter, and a woman jumps away from the swing of those curls—which are doused, lucy knows, with rose water.
soon it’s just anna and charles talking on the empty platform, and their hired men, and lucy. time creeps. sun slants over the bench. the creases of lucy’s dress grow limp with sweat.
a last, lone cart drives into the station. the butcher’s boy has come for his chickens. red-faced, collar askew, he stands too close to lucy as he struggles with the freight car’s door. she edges away, intending to unpair herself—and then the door slams open. a gritty wind swallows her dress.
down the platform, charles’s hand has fallen to anna’s waist. neither notices the commotion.
lucy beats at herself, but it’s too late. dirt and sweat mix into a muddy paste that clings to white fabric, dirtying her dress as, earlier, she imagined anna’s dress dirtied. she must look as filthy as the butcher’s boy. anna’s voice carries on, and on, and when lucy leaves, only the hired men take notice.
