The Juliet Stories (12 page)

Every day on their way to and from school, the Friesen children pass a white graveyard. It tilts on a hill. Each cross is white. The mausoleums are white. The dust is white, because the rainy season has dried up and the landscape is reverting steadily away from greens and floral hues to bleached browns and greys. It makes Juliet wonder: is the world always brown and grey and white under the surface, or is it the opposite, a world of colour hidden under the surface, just a few rains away?

Is there always a world in reverse beneath the surface, waiting to be revealed?

In the graveyard, visitors leave behind plastic flowers. These, and a scattering of toys and dolls, offer the only colour, garish but appealing against all the white.

It is a graveyard for children.

“What’s the age limit?” Keith asks, but their mother does not know. What constitutes childhood in a country where a thirteen-year-old like the cook’s daughter, Marta, can get pregnant and prepare calmly for motherhood, and sixteen-year-olds, male and female alike, are conscripted from their classrooms en masse and driven to the
campo
to help with the nation’s coffee harvest, dangerous work on steep slopes under threat of guerrilla attack?

The children sit in the car with Gloria and watch a truck leave from outside their own school, overflowing with teenagers who sing songs of the revolution, laughing, shouting, waving black and red flags.

“How would I feel as a mother?” Gloria asks. “I would not send you. I would lay down my body.”

Juliet believes her and is oppressed by this fervour, which seems both excessive and pointless: her mother would lay down her body and the truck would drive over it. The children would be taken, the sacrifice worse than worthless; it would serve only to steal her from them entirely.

At home Gloria puts a pot of beans on high and they boil over and burn and the stink fills the house. She tosses the mess against the back fence.

Juliet and Keith watch her from above. They have shinnied up the tallest banana tree to get onto the flat roof of their house. They search for treasure and they find: the white bones of a bird, its jagged curving claws; bent nails; misshapen stones; artifacts that they pretend tell the story of a long-lost roof-dwelling civilization. They arrange their collection on undulating zinc near the courtyard’s opening, working in agreeable silence.

They can look down on Emmanuel peeing onto the concrete. They have seen a rat walk right out of the drainpipe and into their house. And they hear conversations — they do not think of it as eavesdropping — and by this, they position themselves in time and space, in a reality that is marked by constant change. The Roots of Justice never stays the same; it exists as a stream of volunteers and delegations perpetually coming and going, their arrivals and departures fraught with intensity.

It feels to Juliet that she will know these people forever — how could she not? — and then they are gone.

Andrew doesn’t renew his term.

“Don’t call it burnout.” He hugs Gloria goodbye, her arms piled with wrung wet clothes she will hang on the line in the backyard.

Gloria says, “There’s nothing else like this,” but there is. It’s really very commonplace. It’s called war, and on the ground, running, its risks are mundane and it is only and ever about circumstance, and people circling within circumstance.

Their mother is back with more clothes, dry, crumpled, needing to be ironed.

“The blowhard’s never even been to Nica and he presumes to tell me —”

“It wasn’t just one complaint, Bram.”

“Don’t invent a conspiracy, Gloria. We stay on. No question.”

“If they’ll keep you.”

“Oh, they’ll keep me.”

“If we want to stay.”

Juliet and Keith look at each other. They want to stay.

They are waiting for their mother. She is late.

She is almost always late, which gives them time to spend their coins on treats from vendors who wait outside the school gates, but today she is so late that the vendors have packed up and most of the other children are gone, except for those few who have nowhere immediately to go and who loiter restlessly.

Juliet and Keith pass the time by imagining her coming for them on their usual route: “She’s turning the corner in Las Piedrecitas. She’s coming down the hill. She’s at the stop sign by the Palacio Nacional. She’s passing the little park. She’s going around the big tree. She’s close to the Seminaria Bauptista. She’s coming around the corner, and if we look up we’re going to see her . . . right now . . . right now . . .”

“Nope.”

“Okay, so she’s backing out of the driveway, and she’s going past the guesthouse, past Dr. Romano’s, past the three-toed sloth and . . .”

Today is special. Today their mother is taking them to the Hotel Intercontinental to celebrate Keith’s ninth birthday, and maybe their father will come too. Their mother hopes.

Keith actually turned nine three weeks ago. It wasn’t forgotten exactly, just lost in a shitstorm. (Their mother’s phrase; they hate it when she swears. Bad words sound uglier coming from her mouth than from the mouths of other adults.) The children aren’t privy to the details, but lying awake in their beds, they smell thick cigarette smoke. Scuttling to the bathroom in what feels like the middle of the night, they see their mother and father pacing the porch.

Juliet witnesses an opaque scene between her father and one of the outgoing volunteers, a woman named Bess with hair shaved close around her head and a wide body tented under colourful cloth. On the street outside their house, Bess weeps; in Juliet’s mind, this hysteria connects to Gloria’s shitstorm.

Bess is saying goodbye, and the presence of a child is incidental. She is angry. She says to Bram, “I forgive you.”

Bram sighs and watches her climb into the waiting minibus with the others who are leaving the country. The driver starts, then stops suddenly, and Bess leaps out and runs back to Bram, and hugs him with awkward fierceness that he does not seem to know how to receive.

“I forgive you too,” he says.

“Fuck you,” says Bess, and returns to the minibus looking much happier.

Bram looks at Juliet, who looks at him. He shakes his head and attempts no explanation. “I tried,” he tells Juliet. It might become his motto.

A delegation of fifty lay pastors from across the United States arrives almost immediately. Keith turns nine. The delegation brings with it no packages from home, and therefore no birthday gifts. Keith has to make do with a brief announcement and a stocky emergency candle stuck into a plate of
gallo pinto
at an orientation meal attended by fifty strangers, who join in singing him Happy Birthday.

Gloria determines that this is not enough. She promises to give him something special, and there is no place more special in Managua than the Hotel Intercontinental. The Hotel Intercontinental is an oasis in the desert of Managua, louche and spectacular amidst the wreckage of the former downtown. It rises in the shape of a concrete pyramid and offers a pool, and a daily brunch buffet that serves a shambling contingent of foreigners: stringers covering the war from this side of the mirrored bar; men sporting Eastern European moustaches; well-meaning Canadians and Japanese; missionaries; drifters; spies.

The children have been once before, when board members of the Roots of Justice visited from Washington and footed the bill. The hotel accepts only American dollars, and its buffet is spread with American food. Juliet and Keith give up imagining their mother on her way to pick them up, and imagine instead what they will eat: waffles and ice cream and macaroni and cheese and Jell-O squares and pink grapefruit juice and tapioca pudding.

Still their mother does not come.

“We could walk to the hotel.” (They can see the building, stabbing the clear sky, from the curb where they sit.)

“We’re supposed to wait here.”

“What if she’s not coming?”

“She’s coming.”

“What if she forgot?”

A taxicab screeches to a stop before them and Gloria leaps out. She wears sunglasses and a long dress that tangles around her ankles and exposes her shoulders and collarbone. “Get in! Get in!”

“What took you so long?”

“Where’s the car?”

“Where’s Dad?”

There is a sound Gloria makes when she is not in the mood for discussion. It begins in her throat and pitches through clenched teeth and open lips. It is neither groan nor sigh nor grunt, but all combined, an expression of disgust, pain, and deep irritation that only a fool would prod and disturb.

“I have dollars, I have bathing suits, I have your little brother, and as long as the buffet is still open for business, we are going to celebrate this goddamned birthday.”

Luxury is air conditioning, macaroni and cheese splattered with ketchup, coagulated fingers of burnt breakfast sausage, french toast with brown syrup, and Juliet is greedy for all of it. She eats diligently through rubbery pasta and smears of sweet sauce. Keith joins her on the velvety banquette. Above his swim trunks he has a boxer’s square torso; there is a bruise under his eye that nobody knows how he got. It makes him look tough.

They hear their mother’s laugh soar above them, as if swinging from the elegant chandelier overhead. In unison they turn towards a commotion at the buffet. It is a shock to recognize Isobel’s brothers, Dirk and Jonathan, piling their plates high with sticky desserts. Isobel stands as far from her brothers as possible.

Gloria flutters her fingers, face bright with excitement, voice carrying across the cushioned room: “Children — Juliet, Keith — you’ll never believe who’s here in Managua, staying right in this very hotel!”

Juliet hesitates, half stands. Isobel chooses a skewer of grapes and pineapple chunks and comes towards them, placing a grape between her lips and pulling it off. She sits on the bench opposite.

“It’s been ages,” she says.

“Hi.” Juliet feels shy. It is only in seeing Isobel that she comprehends the depths of her loneliness, at school and at home, with only her brothers for company. But she can’t say
I missed you
.

The grown-ups congregate around the children’s booth, and Heinrich pretends to address Juliet and Keith. “We are here for a conference.”

“Oh, but you should have called, you should have told us.” Gloria looks at Isobel, as if Isobel has been mildly neglectful.

Clara says to Gloria, “We know how busy you are.”

Gloria turns to Clara: “But this is such a happy coincidence!”

“We are enjoying the sun.” Clara’s expression does not change as she nods and takes her leave, through the swinging glass door into the patio’s heat.

“Of course you will join us by the pool.” Heinrich bows to the children. He is holding two fancy cocktails, and he grins at Gloria, broadly. “One of these must be for you. I don’t know what I was thinking when I ordered.”

Gloria places Keith’s folded glasses on the small metal table beside her dilapidated plastic lounge chair and he cannonballs into debris-littered water, joining Dirk and Jonathan in their rowdy play. Juliet turns somersaults, brushing her hands on the pool’s pebbled blue bottom, but Isobel ignores everyone and floats and gazes dreamily at potted palm leaves sagging overhead.

She pulls her top half out of the water and rests with elbows on hot ceramic tile, and Juliet joins her, mimicking the posture.

“Did you see that boy?” Isobel whispers.

“What?”

“That boy with no shirt, like, sitting by himself?”

Juliet points, “Who — him?”

“Oh my God, I can’t believe you did that! Oh my God, Juliet!”

The boy under consideration is not a boy, in Juliet’s estimation, but a man, grown, nursing a moustache into fruition, smoking a cigarette. If he notices any of them, it is Gloria, unselfconsciously rubbing oil into her brown shoulders and arms and thighs, slapping it under the straps of her worn black bathing suit. Clara reclines beneath an umbrella, long limbs sheltered by flowing white cotton, reading a paperback novel with a picture on the cover that looks like a photograph but is actually a painting: a fiery sky, a castle, a woman with hair blown wild and upper bosom heaving, a man sweeping her somewhat resistant body towards his naked chest.

“Rubbish,” she tells the girls.

Both women sip out of the fancy glasses brought to them by Heinrich, suck on cut fruit swimming in peach-coloured liquid.

“Did you know that Howard Hughes once lived in this hotel?” Heinrich begins.

“I didn’t know that.” Gloria turns her face, shades her eyes. Emmanuel kneels on her belly and gnaws a triangle of grilled cheese sandwich from the buffet. Crumbs spatter her chest, the bones visible and pronounced.

“Who is Howard Hughes?” Juliet kicks underwater, hair drying beneath the fierce sun.

Heinrich’s story goes like this: First, you have to know that Howard Hughes was an immensely wealthy, eccentric American inventor — and that eccentric means strange or peculiar, some might say crazy.

“Like you, Heinrich,” suggests Clara, never lifting her eyes off the page.

In 1972, just before Christmas Eve, a powerful earthquake struck the city of Managua, killing ten thousand people in an instant. Cars bounced in the street like basketballs. But the Hotel Intercontinental stood firm. That same day, at the tip of the hotel’s undamaged top, a helicopter mysteriously landed and took off, ferrying away Howard Hughes, who, unbeknownst to the world, had been living in a warren of penthouse suites, completely naked, surrounded by boxes of tissues.

“And you won’t believe what Howard Hughes left behind.” Heinrich stands bareheaded, relaxed on the balls of his feet.

“I can’t imagine,” says Gloria. “What did he leave behind?”

“Please,” says Clara. “You don’t want to know. Heinrich, spare us.”

“But it’s the best part.” Because what Howard Hughes left behind was room upon room filled with neatly labelled and organized bottles of his own urine.

“Why?” Juliet asks.

“He was afraid of germs,” says Clara sternly, as if they all might learn a lesson. “He had a compulsive disorder. And he was addicted to drugs.”