The Juliet Stories (3 page)

Juliet and Keith sit still, hoping their mother won’t notice them too.

“Bedtime!” She snaps her fingers. “Juliet. Keith. Say goodnight.”

“Just a little longer, please? We’ll be quiet.”

“Enough. Say goodnight.”

“It’s not fair!”

“Say goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight. Sleep tight. Don’t let the mosquitoes bite.” One of the volunteers, the one with the moustache — Andrew — smiles at them.

It
isn’t
fair. Juliet and Keith know this for a fact: no one else goes to bed at seven o’clock, no one but babies. They whisper in the dark, the throaty snores of their brother sighing inside his pen of overturned chairs in the corner. Through open windows they hear other children playing in the street, the sound of firecrackers — or is it gunshots? The blare of a radio, the motor of a passing car chased by a pack of dogs.

A warm breeze deepens the orange of the lit mosquito coils on the windowsill, the scent of citronella drifting on a line of smoke.

From the dining room, laughter bursts in high-pitched waves — could it be real when it sounds so fake? Juliet and Keith resent its existence: fun that excludes them. They are not sleepy. They will not sleep.

Juliet tiptoes to the door, pulls it wider, Keith on her heels.

Shhh!

Candlelight flickers down the hallway, tossing shadows. They crouch against the door’s frame, conspirators clad in underwear. Smoke from cigarettes floats overhead, thick and blue. They hear the clink of glass on glass. They hear the squeak of borrowed guitar strings. More laughter, as their mother searches for a song — they know the sound of her — trying out an opening, and another, chording suggestions; and then, her discovery of the song itself, lonely before it fills out with other voices that ride in, uncertain and stumbling, till the chorus gallops by and they all catch hold, and the song swells full up, and they are vanished inside it, in another room in the mind.

Juliet inches across the tiles, naked from the waist up, her hair hanging long and unbrushed for days, a scramble at the back that will take persistence and bitter struggle to comb free. The grown-ups slump on chairs around the table, with eyes that do not care what they find — even when they alight on her. They are lost somewhere else, in song and drink, in cause and dream.

Gloria’s back is to Juliet, her shoulders bent over Simon’s guitar. The instrument slips out of tune, and Gloria fiddles with the pegs on which the strings are wound. Beside her, Simon slowly sips a bottle of beer while Bram tips his chair back on its hind legs, his expression animated, the wild brush of pale orange hair rising off his scalp, skin peeling in flakes;
yes, yes
, Simon nods seriously. Around the table dances Andrew, an elfin man, nimbly topping up glasses from a bottle of white rum; as he passes, he inclines his head and winks at Juliet.

No one else spies her.

Jason, another volunteer, is a man of many twitches; one of his eyes wanders independent of the other. Juliet takes a shiver of pleasure in her fear of him. He only sets down his burning cigarette to take in a bite of food, or to drink.

The last of them is Charlotte, her round face as softly appealing as the moon’s, angled upward, her eyes half-closed as she tracks a path through her private forests.

Gloria has found another song.

Charlotte’s timbre rolls low under Gloria’s, honey spilled on the floor, sticking; Juliet’s palms are caught in it. They are similar, Gloria and Charlotte: long, dark hair, and powerful voices. But Gloria has her back to Juliet, and Juliet prefers it that way. Gloria’s face is like the sun. Do not gaze upon it. If Gloria were to see Juliet, she would send her away, back to bed, impatient with being a mother; in turn, Juliet is impatient with Gloria, for being unfair and dismissive, but most of all, for being her mother.

Juliet does not see Renate, offering black coffee, watching her.

———

“
You
are a little rat,” Renate tells Juliet.

Juliet, who is on her way to the backyard with good news to tell. Juliet, who has just seen by accident — by slippery, stand-in-the-doorway-and-stare accident — Renate in their hushed bedroom (her office) silently kicking and trampling the Friesens’ bedding and meagre belongings.

The two of them stand alone in the hallway, brilliant sun flashing through the open back door, making of Renate a silhouette.

“
Rat
.” Renate speaks in a whisper, menacing, in Juliet’s face. She anticipates betrayal, tattling, though Juliet has no intention of telling. What to tell? Her family is living in a state of such untidiness — Gloria incapable of picking up after them or demanding that they do so for themselves, Bram oblivious — that Renate’s tornado can neither create damage nor leave behind evidence. But Renate is right.

Juliet is a little rat.

Just for now, she’s a packrat, adding to her piles, her secret stash; but one day, someday, she will be that other kind of rat, she will
tell
, in her own way, wearing the sheerest of disguises, quite remorseless. And none of it will be true; and all of it will be. And even that is not true, because there is nothing absolute about telling: there are only fragments, shards, the rare object retained whole, ciphers removed from original context, hoarded by shifty, impecunious memory.

Why is one thing taken and put away and another not? And who is to place value on the worth of either? The thing that is lost may have mattered more than the thing that is saved, and there is no way to judge.

Silence.

Renate whirls past, and Juliet thinks it might have been a dream. She makes it into a dream. It becomes one. It was.

Juliet wakes, blinks, and she is running down the hallway, chased into the white-hot backyard by the good news she’s come to tell. She shouts at her mother: “Our bags are here! Our bags are here! Dad says!”

By the time the Friesens pile themselves into Simon’s polished pickup for another drive across the city, the scratch on Juliet’s leg is just a scab and she has brushed her hair free of knots. The truck enters Managua’s ruined core, speeding Juliet away from
You are a little rat
, from the boy called Freddy and the children throwing stones and the smell of burnt rum, as if these have vanished forever.

The air swarms ripe, thick as nectar, closing around them like the seminary’s iron gates. Gloria hauls Emmanuel and a heavy rectangular suitcase up the clean-swept concrete stairs to their new apartment. Juliet follows behind.

Imagine that someday everything in that suitcase will no longer exist. Everything that made its journey, lost to found, will be used up, discarded, replaced, forgotten. Into that someday, imagine Juliet. Imagine that she has found these other bags, ones she has no memory of packing. They seem to belong to her.

Imagine that she has gotten around to opening them.

The seminary stands encircled by a chain-link fence and surrounded by the remains of less fortunate buildings felled in the earthquake of 1972, crumbling cement skeletons occupied by those who refuse to leave what once was the bustling downtown core. But Bram says there’s a library nearby. He’s scooted past it on his motorcycle.

Juliet scrapes the corner of a book against her two front teeth: it’s borrowed from a Canadian family living in Managua, not-quite-acquaintances. Juliet chose the book for the horse on its cover, only to discover that horses are peripheral to the plot, an adventure story about a forest fire and a daring rescue. The Canadian family has two boys, older.

“I need more books!” Juliet begs, but Bram leaves a trail of breakfast crumbs on his way out the door, and Gloria can’t decide whether to attempt an adventure before or after the maid is to come. Before would be ideal — it is scorching by mid-morning — but the seminary director has been unwilling, or unable, to pinpoint the maid’s arrival time. A shrug, a smile, a “what does it matter?” Because it doesn’t, in this country, in this heat. Time is a liquid, improvisational substance that only a foreigner would attempt to freeze into symmetrical cubes. Tomorrow morning, the man said.

“
Mañana, en la mañana
,” Gloria mutters. Sunlight licks thin, dirty curtains. “Besides,” she argues with herself, “Emmanuel’s napping.”

Plastic institutional breakfast dishes crowd the sink, stale crusts uneaten. The Friesens supper in the cafeteria among the seminary students, and otherwise fend for themselves. Their kitchen consists of a miniature fridge squatting beside a gas-fired hotplate, and a sink set in a scrap of rotten countertop. Mouse dirt spills from drawers and cupboards; cockroaches the size of toy cars beetle freely about the floor.

Gloria disappears through the curtain of beads that separates her bedroom from the main room. Cigarette smoke drifts lazily.

Keith pens on the inside of his wrist and watches Juliet chew the borrowed book. “I’m telling,” he says.

“Keith’s drawing on his arm!” Juliet counters.

“Juliet’s chewing on the book!”

“Am not.”

“Are too.”

There’s a rap on the door. The mop handle bangs as the maid enters, bucket dragging behind. Emmanuel flares from the towel on the floor where he’s been left.

“Out of the way, children,” says Gloria, hurrying through the chiding beads. She plucks up Emmanuel.

“Ah, what a pretty baby,” says the maid in Spanish. She is thin, bony, young — not youthful. Juliet sees that she is missing what looks like an important front tooth.

“
Now
are we going to the library?” she asks her mother.

“I have four of my own,” the woman continues. She bends and waves her hand close to the floor. “Little, little ones.” This is only the beginning of all she has to tell. Juliet understands the new language like a haze on the horizon, like she’s hearing without seeing, understanding without interpreting.

Complaints.

Patchy elbows exposed, the maid runs cold water (there is no other kind) and washes dishes, wipes them dry, casually stacks them in the dark, bug-ridden netherworld behind the rickety cupboard door. Gloria’s face contorts in protest — she’s been storing them on the table when cleaned and not in use — but she stands frozen in the middle of the room, staring, as they all stare.

The maid fills her bucket at the sink, grunts as she lugs it past Gloria, who rouses herself as if speaking in a dream: “What is your name?”

“Bianca.” The woman laughs without smiling and enters the children’s bedroom.

Juliet licks loose a fragment of flame-illustrated paperback cover, chews it to pulp, spits it out discreetly onto the back of her hand. She sees Bianca at her cot, folding and tucking the sheets. She mops backwards across the bedroom, long grey tentacles swiping the tiles,
swish, swish, swish
, until she is back in the main room.

“Lift your feet,” Gloria says to Juliet and Keith.

“Oh, how hot it is.” Bianca’s ropy arms strain. “What heat.”

She props her mop, wipes her forehead, and advances upon Gloria’s bedroom, where Gloria stands guard before the veil of beads.

“Your clothes, your clothes,” Bianca demands, snapping fingers with impatience.

Gloria’s eyes dart.

Bianca explains: She will take home their dirty laundry and return with it, cleaned, dried, and ironed, in the morning.

“Wonderful, wonderful!” Gloria dashes about, her pleasure all out of proportion: perhaps because she hates doing laundry, or perhaps because she’s kept Bianca out of her bedroom and wants to compensate for the imagined offence.

Bianca stuffs their soiled clothing into a plastic bag and gathers her supplies. She is going. Gloria holds the door. It doesn’t seem possible for Bianca to transport on her person everything that she must.

Gloria calls anxiously down the stairs, “Is it okay?”

“Yes, yes, it is fine,” Bianca calls back.

“Mom? The library?”

“Not today,” says Gloria. “Just play outside. Now. Take Emmanuel.”

“We need to make a trip to Jalapa,” says Bram after supper.

Juliet and Keith, freshly showered and wearing T-shirts for pyjamas, dart around the main room, scaring into oblivion the mice and cockroaches. Gloria’s reply goes missing beneath Keith’s rattling cough.

“It has to be done, and quickly,” says Bram. “The first team arrives next week.”

“By ‘we’,” says Gloria, “you mean you — don’t you.”

“We could all go.” Bram scratches the back of his neck.

“On your motorcycle?”

“We’re getting a truck.”

“Over the land mines?”

Bram inhales deeply, his chest broadening with breath. “So stay,” he says.

“You don’t want us to come,” says Gloria.

Bram opens the fridge, removes a bottle of beer. His shoulders slump fractionally and the underarms of his shirt hang damp. But he is revived by his first sip.

Gloria cries, “Brush your teeth!”

“You heard your mother,” Bram says.

“He’s going to leave us here, all alone!”

Juliet blinks at her dad. His face is crinkled with sunburn, and she can see all the way to his crispy scalp. They share the same thin red hair, fragile skin, but there the comparison ends. Nothing scares Juliet’s dad, not even her mom.

“So come,” Bram says lightly.

Gloria begins to cry, which everyone hates, including Gloria, but most especially Bram. “It’s nothing to you to leave us, is it.”

Juliet understands that no one is listening.

In the bathroom, Keith coughs again.

“Your germs are all over my toothbrush!” Juliet punches her brother in the arm; she can’t say why, but she must. He aims for her shoulder. She tackles him and they roll on tiles scented with Bianca’s vicious lemon Pine-Sol.

“My glasses!”

“Disgusting!”

“Stop.” Bram is visible in the doorway for a solitary beat of time before the electricity fails, extinguishing the buzzing light overhead, emblazoning their father’s outline on Juliet’s retinas: he stands solid as a tree trunk, strong as stone. At the apartment’s core, the windowless bathroom is black and it hums in the wake of machinery fallen silent: no fan blades rotating and exhaling, no refrigerator murmuring, no radios blaring outside. Juliet feels herself lifted, like a child much smaller than she actually is, and pressed to her father’s chest, Keith mashed next to her.

“Apologize.” Bram smells sharpish.

They hear the grunt and slurp of Emmanuel suckling at their mother’s breast. They hear and feel with disgust each other’s half-brushed breath, hear and feel the lonely beat of their father’s heart against their cheeks.

“Sorry.”

“Sorry.” Juliet turns her head away from her brother. Faint moonlight ghosts the curtains in the main room. She can’t remember what she’s trying to forget — something specific dissolved into an emotion, a crack of fear opened in the wall of her rib cage, a splinter of cold fingering its way inside.

Sweat pastes them together. Something has to.

It is dawn. The children and Gloria rise early to admire the new truck. The men are on their way.

“Call as soon as you get there,” says Gloria.

“No phones,” says Jason from the driver’s seat, his face sectioned into nerve endings, cigarette burnt down to the filter as he lights a fresh one off the old.

“No phones?”

“No phones.”

“But how will we know you’ve arrived safely?”

“Assume the best!” says Bram, squashing Keith and Juliet like bugs against his ribs. “Always assume the best.”

“Don’t worry,” Andrew says to the children. “We’ll look after your dad. We’ll take good care of him.”

“Okay,” says Juliet. She would agree to most anything Andrew says.

“It’s going to be fine,” Bram whispers into Gloria’s hair, fingers tangled, stroking. The grown-ups gaze the other way, but not the children, for whom every scene is open, yet closed. “It has to be done. It’s a routine trip, nothing to worry about. You’re strong.”

“I’m not.” So quietly Juliet might be wrong.

“You are.”

“The sooner we go,” says Jason, “the sooner you’re back.”

“So long! Farewell!
¡Adios!
Goodbye!” Andrew leans across Bram to call out the window as Jason taps
beep-beep
on the anemic horn and the white truck bumps down the potholed street and around the corner, ignoring a broken stoplight.

Goodbye, Juliet waves in return, practically frantic.

“Can we look for the library?” asks Juliet.

“No.” Gloria paces. After she’s gone around the room a few times, she disappears into her bedroom.

The children gnaw stale bread. Gloria purchases it fresh from a bakery just beyond the seminary gates, but it arrives out of the oven dry and rough-textured, tasting of the mould it promises to grow.

Keith places his slice on the tabletop, one hole gnawed into the centre, and rests his head on his wrists.

Cigarette smoke trails through beads. What is she doing behind there? She is reading a book — not the Bible but like the Bible, given to her by her parents, Grandma Grace and Grandpa Harold. Juliet has opened its sunrise cover and skimmed its soft pages. One entry for every day of the year, a passage of scripture, a meditation on which to reflect, ending with a suggested prayer, each sounding very much like the others: God, greatness, goodness, love, Jesus, spirit, forgiveness, obedience. Something else about the book: Bram would never read it, not because he doesn’t like books about God or Jesus, but because this book is a book written for women. Only a woman would read it, ashes and tears marking the cracks between the pages.

Keith coughs tenderly. Juliet wishes for jam or peanut butter or honey. Emmanuel renders his slice inedible, crumbling it into minute fragments, seeding the hairs on his head.

Someone should tell someone something, but when Juliet says, “Mom?” there is no reply.

By noon, Keith’s face and chest will have broken out in red dots. Before suppertime, Gloria will discover that her favourite red blouse is missing from the pile of clothes returned by Bianca. Near midnight, Emmanuel, speckled and inflamed, will thrash off the bedsheets. Gloria will wake at three in the morning to rise and compulsively count the cloth diapers, twice. She will meet Juliet, stumbling to the bathroom, and tell her that some are missing.

The smell of a burning cigarette wreathes Juliet’s dreams.

———

“I think this is a pock.” Juliet thrusts her wrist under Gloria’s nose. Gloria glances with disinterest. Emmanuel lies naked on her bed, spattered red from the crest of his scalp to the fat soles of his feet.

“It’s very itchy,” says Juliet. She’s finished the adventure story about the fire and the horses. She’s read a book about a boy detective named Encyclopedia Brown and has nearly completed a third, set in the Arctic, in which two boys become lost and build their own log cabin to survive a long winter. She wishes the Canadian not-quite-acquaintances had girls instead of boys.

“Can we go to the library today?” she asks, already knowing the answer.

“Don’t scratch it.” Gloria’s hands wearily fold the corners of Emmanuel’s diaper and she talks around a pin held between her teeth.

“Mo-o-om,” calls Keith.

“Coming!” Gloria cries and the pin falls out. “Juliet, see what your brother wants.”

“But what about my pock?”

“Juliet!” Gloria’s forehead shines with beads of sweat. She pushes a hank of damp hair behind one ear. “Go, now!”

Juliet stands in the doorway of the room she shares with Keith. “What do you want?” Their room is several steps closer to the flat zinc roof, several steps closer to the sun, and the sun just won’t stop staring.

“I want Mom.” Keith scratches his chest with socked fists, teeth gritted.

“Mom’s changing Emmanuel.”

“I’m thirsty.” Without glasses, Keith’s eyes look shrunken in his tanned brown face.

Juliet comes closer. She picks up Keith’s arm.

“What are you doing?” he says.

Silently, Juliet rubs Keith’s arm against her own. It isn’t fair. She wants the pox too.

“Mo-o-o-om,” Keith hollers. “Juliet’s touching me!”

Dust settles on every surface. Juliet drops Keith’s arm. They look at each other in a silence that is neither hostile nor challenging but worn out. After a while, they hear their mother calling hoarsely, “Juliet?”

Juliet finds Gloria lying slumped on the bed. Her slender body looks even smaller curled around Emmanuel’s plump baby flesh, brushing his dimpled thighs.

“It’s so hot. Pull the curtains,” whispers Gloria. But there are no curtains in the little bedroom.

Juliet touches her mother’s wet forehead. It burns. Juliet’s heart pounds hard.

“I never got the chicken pox.” Gloria opens her eyes and gazes despairingly at Juliet. “As a child. When you’re supposed to.”

They hear Keith crying, “I’m thirsty.”

Gloria lets her eyelids fall. Emmanuel sucks crankily at one exposed breast. Juliet conjures her dad. He’s in Jalapa by now, far gone, way up north near the Honduran border (Keith has looked it up in his travel-sized atlas). He’s in Jalapa, where there are no telephones, even if Juliet knew how to find one on which to call. He’s in Jalapa, where they are fighting the war. He’s where the Contra fighters attack villages and farms, running out of the trees to shoot and to burn. The roads are mined with bombs. Helicopters fly overhead. Soldiers launch rockets at green and black planes sent by the Americans.