Juniper Berry

M. P. KOZLOWSKY

Drawings by
ERWIN MADRID

For Margeaux

Chapter 1

T
HE HOUSE WAS A MANSION,
te lake was a pool, Kitty was a dog, and Juniper Berry was an eleven-year-old girl.

And like many eleven-year-old girls, she couldn't wait until her parents returned home from work. She sat at the top of the stairs, binoculars in hand and directed out the two-story front window, waiting to see the golden gates of her home slowly open. Tonight was Italian night and the three of them were supposed to make pizzas for dinner. This was part of their weekly schedule, only Juniper couldn't remember the last time they actually followed through with it. For a while now, everything, including her, had been neglected.

Still, she never gave up hope. One of these days her parents would come home from work and be thrilled to see her. The rest of the day and every day after would be spent in each other's company, not a minute wasted, not even a single second, just like it was years ago.

Juniper was an only child, a lonely child, mostly because her parents were adamant to keep things that way. Mr. and Mrs. Berry were very famous. They were movie stars in every sense, paid a pretty penny (plus back-end percentages) to grace the screen in summer blockbusters and year-end award fare alike. Respected, admired, even loved by peers and fans, they were unceasing fodder for the gossip columns and recognized the world over. Hence the mansion, with its gates, its seclusion.

Juniper just never thought she would be kept out as well. But indeed, everything was at a distance. The world outside might as well have been the moon or Mars or the event horizon of the blackest of black holes. She had, by now, grown accustomed to her isolation, carrying her binoculars everywhere, spying from afar, searching for what she was missing. There was a telescope on a tripod in her bedroom, a monocular of some age that she always kept tucked away in a convenient pocket, goggles for underwater adventuring, a microscope and magnifying glass for that world even smaller than hers. Discovery and exploration were her salvation; if she couldn't go out into the world, she could bring the world to her: the stars, the insects, the unsuspecting distance. Everything but her parents.

Today, however, was going to be different. She just felt it. She had it all planned out, from the moment they walked in the door until the second she fell asleep. It would go exactly like it did before they were famous.

From all the way in her past, she could still see the front door opening.

“Mommy! Daddy!” She ran to them, sprinting down the hall. Then, three feet away, she came to a screeching halt.

Mr. Berry's mouth hung oddly ajar, a sliver of saliva the bridge between two teeth. His body was twisted and awkward and his eyes were glazed over, nearly rolling back. Moaning, he lumbered right past Juniper.

“Dad?” She turned to her mother for an answer, but Mrs. Berry only shrugged, her lips strangely pursed.

Juniper turned back to her father.
What is wrong with him?
She reached out and . . .

“Ahh!” he screamed as he swung on his heels, scooping up his daughter.

Legs kicking, Juniper squealed in delight and overwhelming relief.

“Oh, I was so trying not to laugh. He's been working on it in between his auditions,” Mrs. Berry explained. “You know how he gets. Has to live the lives of his characters.”

“Except Juniper's zombie has more life than anything I read today.” Mr. Berry laughed. “Probably why I didn't get the part.” He squeezed Juniper tighter. “Is that what you were looking for, Juniper? For the zombie in your story? Did I get it right?”

Juniper nodded emphatically. “I finished writing the rest today.”

Mr. Berry pointed a bony finger in the air and yelled to an imaginary assistant, “Get the kid an agent!”

“Write us a movie, Juniper,” her mother said. “We'd be the first family of Hollywood!”

“I'll do it. I will.”

Now, waiting for her parents, a new script tucked into her back pocket, her dog, Kitty, beside her, Juniper sat up a little straighter. They all used to get along famously, putting on their own plays in the room once kept vacant for such occasions (recently converted to a home gymnasium complete with sauna, flat-screen TVs, juice bar, hot tub, and a personal trainer). Back then, Juniper composed her short, playful scripts at a furious pace, one after the other, scene after scene, written for two.

As she directed, her parents recited lines and Juniper was wrapped in awe at how quickly they memorized them and with how much conviction each word was spoken, filling the room with thick voices, as if they breathed a fog of sound. The characters came to vivid and luscious life through their portrayals. It was as if Juniper's words now belonged to all three of them.

“Bravo! Bravo!” She cheered them on, her throat hoarse from laughter. And when the play was complete, her parents took a bow. Then they waved her onto their makeshift stage and had Juniper do the same as they applauded exuberantly. Finally, mother, father, and daughter all held hands and bowed once more in unison.

They always laughed again when they watched what they recorded each night, a fresh bowl of popcorn shared between them, their limbs lovingly overlapping. “A masterpiece,” her father said every time. Juniper blushed, both then and now.

But that all could have been a lifetime ago. Juniper, still looking through her binoculars, again had to convince herself these events actually happened, that they weren't a figment of her imagination. That her parents, deep down, were still the same people they were back then.

The wait stretched from a half hour to an hour, from an hour to two hours. The sunlight was nearly extinguished, and Juniper's stomach grumbled aggressively. They had both forgotten, again. It had often come to this.

She walked to the kitchen and looked at all the cooking supplies she had neatly arranged on the counter and got started.

She made her personal pie with little fanfare. No grapefruit slices, no chocolate shavings, no crumpled potato chips. She spread the sauce and cheese joylessly. It was horrible being alone, just horrible. Of course, there was the constant stream of workers—housecleaners, gardeners, cooks, chauffeurs, handymen—and, at this moment, while Juniper was waiting for her plain cheese pizza to cook, she could hear the finishing chops of firewood by an ax man racing the coming rain. And although such employees were always about the premises, these were adults with whom she was forbidden to speak, except for her tutor, Mrs. Maybelline.

During idle moments, of which there were many, she often thought of their former house—not even a quarter of the size of this one—and how it was always bustling with aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins, friends, the promise of school and school buses. No more. Now she didn't even have her parents.

The oven timer went off and she went about eating her meal in silence. She could barely remember the taste of those dinners past, but she knew this wasn't it.

From under the table, Kitty scratched at her leg. “You hungry?” Juniper asked, rising. “They didn't leave you anything again, did they?” Kitty wagged her tail as her bowl was filled with brown nuggets, quickly devoured.

Juniper cleaned up herself and considered retiring to her room, maybe to observe the birds and squirrels in the woods outside her window yet again. Or perhaps she would write that movie her parents always yearned for, the one that would be remembered and loved for generations to come, the movie to define their careers. Now, that would be something. But who was she kidding? She knew it wouldn't live up to their high standards. She was sure that anything she wrote would wind up in her parents' growing pile of unread scripts.

It was as she took her first step up the stairs that she heard the turn of the key in the front door.

“Mom! Dad!” She ran to them, bubbling over with excitement.
I don't care, I'll eat another pizza
, she thought. But her strides came to a sudden halt.

Her father walked in, dazed. In the shadow of the front door he looked like a stranger. Then, without any acknowledgment at all, he stepped past his daughter.

Juniper grinned.
He's going to try to scare me
, she thought. “Dad!”

But he kept walking. She turned to her mother, who promptly tossed Juniper her coat. Catching it, Juniper raced ahead to her father and reached out.

But as hard as she tugged at his sleeve, he never turned around. He just looked to the floor and spoke. “They're all amateurs. Everybody on the film. I can't believe I agreed to work with them. They're going to ruin everything. If I have to do everyone's part, then so be it.”

Her mother spoke up as well. “I don't know why they cast these young girls for such demanding roles. Standards have changed, that's for sure. The poor thing can't even pull off a British accent.”

They continued talking, neither much listening to the other, and they both shrugged off Juniper, giving only a ruffle of her hair on their way past. When they came to the stairways beyond the living room, one went one way and the other went somewhere else, punctuating their departures with the slamming of doors.

There were a lot of slamming doors lately. Unfortunately, it had become normal to see her parents brooding and frustrated. By now, the days all blended together. She believed this exact moment might have happened before.

Juniper made her way up the stairs to her mother's room.

When her parents were home she often followed them around, but typically to no great satisfaction—they were lifeless. Yet, on this day, there she was again, trailing her mother through the many rooms of the mansion. The rain finally arrived and the animals Juniper so loved to watch from her window were no longer anywhere to be found, and there wasn't much else to do but discover what was troubling her mother this time. Maybe there was something Juniper could do, for once.

Mrs. Berry stormed through the house, a newspaper crumpled in one fist, a red touch phone in the other, which she was constantly dialing. She had long, thin legs with striking muscle tone. Her torso was also long and seemed to bend like warm rubber, and her fiery mane enveloped her stunning face. She had so much hair, one might not even notice how empty her eyes were.

“Juniper, dear, you go to all those websites, those gossip pages, posting boards. Have they been mentioning me? What are they saying? Where am I going, where have I been?”

“I don't read those things,” Juniper muttered. And she didn't. In fact, she thought the computer was the most boring object in the house. Each time she sat before one she could swear the screen was mocking her in each flash of a page. There was information to be discovered, for sure, but none of it came to life the way it did in the backyard of her mind and home.

“Don't be silly. Of course you do. Everybody does.”

“But . . . I
live
with you.”

Mrs. Berry had yet to make eye contact with Juniper. Her body moved at an uncanny speed, her arms completing a multitude of tasks in seconds—she drank her coffee, popped her pills, looked in the mirror and applied some makeup, dusted some of Kitty's dog hair off her pants, popped some more pills, and ate a granola bar in three careless and rather reflexive bites. “Are they saying I'm looking older? That I need another hit? A comedy? Should I not have chosen another drama—that was your father's idea. What are they saying?”

“I don't know.”

“Oh, you're useless,” she snipped.

Juniper just looked down at the carpet. She couldn't help remembering, again.

“I could never live without you,” her mother had once told her. “You're all I need, you and your father.” Juniper thought it an odd moment to say such a nice thing. Mrs. Berry was bending over in the middle of the street, tying several packs of jumping jacks together, her longest string yet—it stretched halfway down the block. But then again, her mother always surprised her. “Get back, baby,” she said in but one of her arsenal of accents. “This might get a little crazy.” She lit the fuse and ran toward Juniper, ducking her head. “Get down!” And mother and daughter dove headfirst onto the grass and, heads tilted and touching, watched the skittish array of colors ping-pong across the street, slow to fade. It wasn't the Fourth of July, but it didn't matter.

Now Mrs. Berry collapsed backward onto a gargantuan and rather tacky bed, letting out a massive sigh. “I can't take it, Juniper. They always want more. More, more, more. I have only so much to give.” Her lips went loose, her voice falling into a Novocain whisper. “We're trapped,” she said. “Your father and me. We live two-dimensionally. Our lives aren't ours anymore.” She sat up and looked at Juniper for the first time. “And you must be careful or yours will be taken, too.”

Juniper crossed the room and curled next to her. Her mother's arm wrapped around her and pulled her close. For just a moment, her whole body warmed.
Please don't go
, she thought.
Don't ever leave me
.