The Juliet Stories (10 page)

“A drone,” says Heinrich clearly, so that Clara can hear him as she walks away, “is a plane that flies without a pilot. It is fitted with cameras to collect information. Maybe it is taking a picture of my wife right now. It is known as a Blackbird.”

“Like a spy plane,” says Keith with some excitement.

Juliet watches Clara disappear into the darkness. She can’t see Isobel’s expression clearly, lit only by the flickering orange haze, but she senses that Isobel has watched her mother walk away before.

Isobel turns to Juliet and smiles. “Sleepover!” Juliet understands: they are in no danger of being punished further for today’s adventure. It is over, displaced in their parents’ minds, forgotten like a paragraph in a book that was never meant for grown-ups, that grown-ups could never understand even if they cared enough to try.

Andrew and Gloria wait to take their cue from Heinrich.

The artillery fire appears to have stopped for the moment, but he says nothing about leaving. “Does anyone have a cigarette?”

Gloria shifts her weight but doesn’t reply.

“We want to have a sleepover, Pappie.”

“Direct this request to our gracious hosts.” Heinrich sweeps into a partial bow.

Later, much later, fresh cigarette smoke drifts into Juliet’s sleeping lungs. Her feet are tangled in the sheet and Isobel’s arm is thrown over her own, making an X across the bed. Her hand is numb but she hesitates to move away.

Later, much later, Juliet pads from bedroom to bathroom. What does she see, like a spy camera, like infrared radiation collected on a fuzzy screen? Two grown-ups on the porch, his hands pushed under her heavy hair, her face turned and closed, soft and wet, and neither giving any consideration to something hanging overhead in the sky, circling, circling, encrypting their kiss with its secret eye.

“I’ve put in a call to Managua,” says Andrew in the kitchen the next morning.

“Let me talk to Bram when he calls back.” Gloria pours hot diluted powdered milk from a pan into her cup of coffee.

“Word is,” says Andrew, “a Russian cargo carrier offshore has caught the Americans’ interest. I’m going to pitch Bram on bringing the next delegation here.”

Without thinking, Gloria reaches for the packet of cigarettes on the table and lights one. “I’ve made a mistake,” she says. Juliet thinks that is what she hears as she comes into the kitchen with Isobel.

“Never, not you,” Andrew says, and to the girls, “You slept.”

He turns off the stove under the pan of milk, and Gloria walks to the open window to blow a stream of smoke away, as if the girls might not notice.

“How would you like your eggs, ladies?”

“Over easy,” says Isobel, and Juliet says, “Sunny side up.”

Gloria flicks the burning cigarette through the bars crossing the window and turns around. “Scrambled.” She is laughing.

The Roots of Justice rolls into San Juan del Sur, a travelling circus of Americans spilling from minibuses, waving signs and wafting cigarette smoke, trailed by a pack of foreign reporters and cameramen who anticipate bagging the story of the week: a showdown in disputed waters between a Russian cargo carrier and an American warship deployed to force it to change its course.

Juliet, Keith, and Emmanuel stand on the porch of the Roots of Justice house and watch their beach fill up and spill over. They are looking for their dad, and when he bursts from the milling crowd, they shout and wave. He jogs across the stretch of pavement and up the steps and they wrap themselves around his massive limbs and breathe him in. He smells of apple cider, slightly soured.

“Holiday’s over,” says Gloria from the open doorway, and she goes to the kitchen to start washing dishes. There is no cook and she will be in charge.

Bram follows, children hanging off him like monkeys off the branches of a tree. “Can we start bringing folks in?” he asks. “Beds all set up, everything ready?”

“Hello to you too,” says Gloria.

“I love you.” Bram doesn’t hesitate. He places his hands on her face and kisses her warmly.

“Yuck!” The children drop to the floor.

“Everything’s ready.” Gloria’s smile fights against itself.

Emmanuel screams frantically, arches his back, beats his mother’s legs. She bends and lifts him. “Did you bring Charlotte?” she asks. “I could use some help with this one if I’m going to get a thing done.”

In moments the house where they have been staying for weeks, rattling around its empty rooms, is transformed by the presence of a crush of guests. Sand crunches underfoot. A toilet is clogged, and the woman responsible churns frantically at its handle. Armpits leak odour. Wet towels dangle on lines strung across the courtyard. A radio crackles. Smoke drifts. Feet shuffle.

On the front porch, Gloria offers a mid-afternoon snack of cut fruit. Juliet and Keith circulate with a sign-up sheet asking for volunteers to wash dishes, cook, go to market. They return the page, filled with names, to their mother, who is in the kitchen mixing up punch dosed with a generous slug of rum.

“You should have added cleaning the bathrooms,” says Andrew, who has just spent half an hour applying his negligible plumbing skills to the problem of the overflowing toilet.

“I’m just getting started. I’m easing them into it — just you wait.” Gloria hands him a drink and sends Juliet and Keith outside to play.

Their beach has been overrun, not just by Roots of Justice but by a swarm of organizations and non-profits, all come together to protest against the United States of America and its warship. The ship can’t be seen, though Juliet imagines she sees it, a mirage on the horizon, a flash of white. The other ship is out there too, invisible: if Ronald Reagan is to be believed, it carries a shipment of Soviet-made fighter jets, though the Sandinista government says it is merely dropping into port to receive a load of Nicaraguan shrimp. Either way, the protestors argue that it has the right to dock, to move through a sovereign nation’s waters unchallenged.

Juliet and Keith tread like spies. English is the dominant language, pronounced in the accents of America: the Southern drawl, the flattened Midwestern grade, the West Coast wave and the East Coast punch.

Charlotte is easy to find amidst the throng, kneeling on a white bedsheet spread flat over the sand, its edges held in place by stones. Emmanuel busily dips his fingers into paint and whacks the sheet. Charlotte is writing the words
Boat of Justice
in large, looping letters across the fabric.

“Come and help!” She waves to Juliet and Keith. She wants them to stamp their handprints and footprints in primary colours around the words — messy and deeply satisfying work.

At four o’clock the sun looks as if it might stay forever perched above their heads, like a benevolent god. No matter how long you’ve been there, it is always a surprise when it begins to fall, and how precipitously, crashing into the sea and leaving behind the blackness of a primitive sky, nothing but stars and moon.

Charlotte hangs their creation over the porch wall to dry.

The house is candlelit. It lacks a central gathering room with ample table and chairs, so guests line up through the kitchen doorway to load plates with beans and rice, tortillas, salad, before perching themselves in odd improvised places to eat, heads bent over plates balanced on knees: in the hallway and courtyard, on the porch, down the steps, and even on the curb along the street.

“This is going well,” Bram tells Gloria as he passes by. She is eating with the children in the kitchen, at the breakfast bar, on stools.

She lifts an eyebrow. “You say that like you’re surprised.”

“I’ve found a Nicaraguan school that will take the kids. Private but not exclusive. Classes entirely in Spanish,” he says. “If you’ll come back to Managua.”

Juliet and Keith hold themselves perfectly still. Silently their mother wipes Emmanuel’s mouth with his shirt. He is standing on her lap. Whatever she is thinking, it cannot be read on her face.

On the beach, the flames of a bonfire rise. Bram circulates through the rooms of the house, reminding delegates of the early-morning prayer meeting, though they are free, of course, to join the party on the beach.

It goes on through the night.

Emmanuel and Keith race Dinky cars down the hallway, on hands and knees, crashing them into walls with exploding sound effects, a game they share despite their age difference. Though the hour is early, their father permits the play: anything to rouse the volunteers, young and old, fuzzy with booze, some of whom glare with unguarded hostility at the boys, though others chirp unconvincingly, “How cute.”

Early-morning prayer meeting is a quiet affair. Gloria serves
café con leche
.

It has been decided that the group will gather at a hut on the beach that serves a generous — and cheap — breakfast of eggs with
gallo pinto
and tortillas. Following the meal, a press conference has been planned, and then the Roots of Justice will launch the “Boat of Justice,” a fishing vessel hired to carry protestors out to sea, into disputed waters, to float between the American warship and the Soviet freighter.

“I’m going on the boat.” Charlotte slides into Juliet’s chair, pushing against her thigh so that they both fit.

“We’re not.” Gloria sits with the children at a round table off to one side. The children devour a plate of
platanos
, thick, gummy fried bananas, licking caramel stickiness off fingers. Above them the roof is of thickly woven dried palm leaves, populated by sleeping bats.

“I want to go too,” says Juliet.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Gloria.

Surely this is not a scripted moment: after the press conference, Gloria walks the children towards their father, into the ring of cameras, and he touches each on the head and says goodbye. He kisses Gloria. Later today, footage of the family will flicker briefly on American network television. Bram will appear, hair blowing, backed by the ocean: “This is not a publicity stunt. Our job is to witness. We also serve who only stand and wait.”

“All aboard!” calls Bram, and the waters throng with Americans churning towards the little motorboats, called
pangas
, that will ferry them to the larger vessel anchored in the deep waters of the bay.

Charlotte runs past them, wrapped in the colourful painted bedsheet. It flutters around her shoulders like a superhero’s cape. She is barefoot, so it is a mystery what trips her up — the sheet, her own toes, her flowing yellow sundress? She stumbles, tumbles, splashes all the way under the waves and then gasps to the surface, helpless and struggling with laughter.

Bram grasps her outstretched hands and pulls her upright, and she leans into his bulk, still laughing, though her face is upset, humiliated — young. Juliet sees the paint smearing, dissolving off the sheet. Bram speaks to Charlotte gently, pulling her wet hair into his closed palm, wringing it out at the nape of her neck.

It is a shred of a moment that adheres to the curved rear of Juliet’s eyeball: the shape the two of them make could be a different day, another woman gazing up at Juliet’s father with wide eyes, asking for something it seems only he can offer.

Before Nicaragua, before
here
, the Friesens are Americans in a small town in Indiana. Of a Sunday they go for a drive in
the country, but no matter how far they drive, they are never far from somewhere: from a tidy farm property, from a well-tended orchard with shacks to house migrant labourers during the picking season, from the bell tower of a church in the next town over.

The conversation from the front seat flows musically over the children’s heads, drawn out by the movement of the world outside the windows. They pass a wooded lot with a
FOR SALE
sign nailed to a rotten fencepost.

“When we find our fortune,” says their mother, “we’ll live right here.” (But they won’t.)

“We’ll build our house out of trees we’ll chop down with our bare hands.”

“We’ll have chickens.”

“And a horse!” says Juliet.

“We’ll clear a spot for a big truck patch,” says their father. He slows the car and performs a three-point turn in order to drive by the property again, letting them drift past the rutted laneway and idle to a stop in the road. “There’s room for a horse,” he says.

“I’d like one too,” says their mother.

“Then we’ll have two.” (But they won’t.)

“Goodbye, see you soon,” the family waves out the windows to their imaginary log house in the woods, the mare and the stallion and the foal, the truck patch of vegetables, rows lined with straw to keep down the weeds.

(They’ll look, but they’ll never find this place again.)

Spring wind crashes against eardrums and the children can’t hear a word their parents are saying.

Crunch
. Something darts out of rotting weeds and ends underneath their tires.

“What the hell was that?”

“Oh God. We hit a dog.”

“We have to go back.”

The car reverses slowly and stops at a laneway. Their father gets out and walks to where the dog lies. They watch him shake his head. It is not a big farm dog, but smaller, like a terrier. It is not in a state to be picked up or delivered to its owner.

Slowly they drive up the stranger’s lane. Their father says: “Come with me, Juliet, Keith.” They don’t want to, but obey. He knocks on the door. A woman opens it, young, in cut-off jeans and a man’s T-shirt, paint-spattered like her bare arms and legs.

Their father explains the accident.

The woman says, “I knew this house was a mistake.”

She holds the door open for them and they stand in her gritty kitchen and eat one burnt cookie each. “He was just a puppy,” she tells them. She presses fists against her eyes, which look dry, hot, itchy. Juliet is still chewing when the woman flings herself in a crashing motion through the standing silence at their father, who opens his arms and braces her against his chest.

They stand like this, as their father stands now, feet in the ocean, breathing.

The woman lifts her head from their father’s chest and gazes up at him, anointing his Sunday clothes with wet paint; as Charlotte soaks him in salt water.

Everything he offers emanates naturally from his eyes, the calm assurance of his encircling arms. Of course she would want what he can give to her. Of course he would give it.

Their mother waits in the car; waits in the sand, on the beach.

They can hear Emmanuel howling, but he is different now, older. He is muttering to himself. He sits at his mother’s feet and stirs himself a hole.

Bram releases Charlotte, all but her hand, and she gathers her sodden skirt and accepts his assistance into a waiting boat. Carefully, Bram swings his bulk in beside her, the last to board. The engine putters, the
panga
turns, and they are off in a slur of wake.

The beach is deserted. It seems twice as quiet as it did before the protestors arrived, the way a house feels abandoned after a party, and dirty, and forlorn. They stand and look out into the bay for a long time. The tiny
pangas
skitter around the larger fishing boat, eventually fluttering and dispersing, and the big engine chugs and the Boat of Justice is dispatched, like that, out to sea.

Gloria sinks into the sand behind Emmanuel. She sets her face into her palms and lets her thick black hair drape and hide her like a blanket. Juliet and Keith bite their lips and glance at each other.

“Mom?”

But she doesn’t reply. She allows herself to tip sideways, to fall into the sand, to collapse. Her knees curl in towards her belly, her feet bare beneath a simple dark skirt, and her elbows and wrists curve before her face. Her chin tucks, her ribs rise and fall, and her eyelashes flutter against her cheek.

Ever so subtly, the children, even Emmanuel, remove themselves from her and begin digging a hole that will become a pool as the tide rises. No one sees the two men approaching, laden with equipment, until they are very near: gringos with tanned, roughened skin and ruffled greasy hair, and kind eyes that are yet not gentle.

One smiles at Juliet and Keith and raises his hand for quiet, though they have said nothing.

The other, the photographer, does not ask permission. He lifts the heavy eye of his camera and bends and circles, calculating the angle of the sun and the opening of the aperture. He shoots. He is not interested in the story or its context, only in the tableau made by the lovely fallen woman and the wild children who hold themselves apart from her.

He alone sees what Gloria has become, fallen onto the sand: she is iconic. He steals from her an image that will give a man a name for himself. It will win prizes.

But Gloria will despise it, and pretend it never happened.

Many years from now, Juliet will go looking for this photograph that has fallen into myth and that she cannot confirm exists. Seated at a library carrel, she will sail through rolls of microfilm and arrive, dizzy and nauseated, at this particular take on portraiture: unrelated to either real disaster or real deliverance, while appearing to portray both.