The Juliet Stories (13 page)

Less than two years after the earthquake, Heinrich tells them, Howard Hughes was dead, a disfigured, rotten-bodied version of his original self, and all his inexplicable behaviour died with him. This is where Heinrich’s story ends.

“Why?” Juliet asks again.

“Why what?” Gloria says impatiently.

“I don’t get it.”

“There is nothing to get.” Clara is kind. “It is a story, that’s all. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Juliet thinks a story should always mean something.

Isobel wrenches herself out of the water, and Juliet follows, flat on her belly across gloriously scorching tile. Clara dries and combs her daughter’s hair before allowing the girls to return to the air-conditioned dining room.

“He saw us — I swear to God,” Isobel whispers. She has nipples that have begun to swell into breasts, that push out triangles of bikini fabric, and Juliet is flattered to be included — “He saw
us
” — despite her humble one-piece, ragged in the behind. “Oh my God, he’s coming in, too. He’s following us. Don’t look, don’t look.”

Juliet studiously obeys, but Isobel cannot help herself. “I am totally going to kiss that guy,” she tells Juliet. He is too far away to hear, ordering himself an umbrella-accented cocktail at the bar.

“When?” Juliet asks, to stop herself from asking, Why?

“How should I know?” Isobel is practical.

Juliet is hungry again but Isobel is not, so Juliet sits alone, damp bathing suit soaking into the furry fabric of her chair. She gnaws the edges of a flap of pink ham ribboned with white fat, stabbed onto her fork, twirling it slowly. She is only dimly aware that this behaviour is rude, and she carries the impression, from her mother, that it doesn’t matter anyway.

People disappear and reappear in this hotel.

The bathrooms are furnished with benches, ornate mirrors, and shag carpeting. Juliet pulls her bathing suit right down and sits naked upon the toilet seat. Slowly she counts backwards from ten. The toilet paper is thick, not pink and nubbed. Yanked back up, the suit snags damply on skin.

Warm water pours out of the golden tap.

The bathroom echoes silence, but for a breath, a sigh: in the mirror, Juliet spies feet exposed under a locked stall door — two pairs, one bare and one shod in black hard shoes. She freezes, hands dripping. Her panic is nonsensical, radiating from an unmoving, lodged danger, and her heart returns to thumping, crashing, as she runs away.

Juliet stares, shivering, around the busy dining room. Her brother sits owlishly by a window, burnished in sunlight dimmed by dusty glass. She cannot see any of the grown-ups from here, or Isobel, but she isn’t looking for clues or explanations. She isn’t looking for anything. She is a sponge, absorbing information, holding it, sinking, unable to do anything with it.

It seems that she lives in an unknowable world, on this side of a great divide; on the other side are the grown-ups, who know everything, who hold the answers to the gigantic questions that plague her: How do you know you’re in love? How can you be sure about God? What if you’re wrong? But she doesn’t really want to cross that divide. She doesn’t really want to know, for sure, that they don’t know either. Someone needs to know. Someone needs to be sure.

Juliet scoops herself a sloppy bowl of chocolate pudding. Sitting across from Keith, she devours the pudding. He sighs, but he can’t eat today. He does not know why. He looks at his plate of food and feels hunger, but he cannot swallow even one bite.

Heinrich slaps by them. Juliet looks, but she isn’t certain: was it a pair of shoes she saw in that stall, or could it have been sandals paired with black socks like those Heinrich wears, white hairs on his legs tufting out above elasticized cuffs?

Gloria waves from the other side of the window. One arm twists behind her back to hide the burning cigarette. She is close to the glass, looking for and finding them, waving to Juliet and Keith, mouth wide, high cheekbones bright.

Juliet licks insipid chocolate off her wrist.

Isobel slides onto the bench beside her. “Don’t tell,” she whispers.

Juliet shifts her a glance. “Okay.”

“He gave me his room number.” Isobel sits in triumph.

Behind her mother, Juliet sees Emmanuel jump silently into the pool, the splash of water displaced by his body, his hands raised, disappearing. But he can’t swim. Behind her mother, Juliet sees Clara leap, then emerge. Her mother turns slowly, too slowly. Clara’s white dress sucks against her skin and Emmanuel’s dark head is a blotch against her breast, as they bob together in the water, laughing and laughing.

It seems only natural that Heinrich and Clara will invite Gloria and the children to spend more time with them. Juliet does not question why her mother lets them skip school, why she packs their bathing suits and towels and hats and a basket of fruit and a knife, why they wait by the gate with such excitement for Heinrich and Clara to arrive in their pickup truck, for Heinrich to lean out his window and slap the metal door with his open palm: “
Vamos a la playa!
”

“
Caliente el sol
,” sings Gloria in reply.

Lake Xiloa is a volcanic lagoon near the city, with a beach of startling black sand. They have visited it several times in the company of volunteers, and once, before Christmas, with Bram. The waters have no bottom and are believed to be haunted, layer upon layer of sunless depths through which to fall. Festooning the beach are huts with picnic tables, their supports sunk into concrete under palm-leafed roofs. The water lapping the black sand is buoyant and soft with nutrients and salts soaked out of volcanic rock.

There are paddleboats for rent, but Clara hates boats: she hates water. Today’s book cover is indigo-skied, stars over a midnight lake, a woman in pale, flowing nightwear, a man with a riding whip.

“But who will come with me?” Heinrich wonders.

“Oh,” says Gloria. “I suppose . . . but we can’t take Emmanuel.”

“Isobel will look after him,” says Clara. “Isobel hates boats too.”

“Mom!”

“You’re better off where I can see you,” says Clara. “Your father might throw you overboard.”

Heinrich sighs.

“Subject closed,” says Clara. “Enjoy your tour.”

There are no lifejackets.

The other side of the lagoon is darkly treed and looks near enough to touch. It seems they could be there and back in time for lunch. Sitting side by side, relaxed in bucket seats, Heinrich and Gloria pedal cheerily, and the children — Juliet, Keith, Dirk, and Jonathan — sprawl across the flat back section and dangle their feet into warm water. But no matter that the beach from which they’ve set sail grows smaller and smaller, no matter the churning pedals, they never seem to advance.

The trees on the other side are anonymous, merged into a singular, unyielding mass.

“Strange,” says Heinrich.

It is as if they are under a spell: everything moves and no progress is made. Flickering shimmers dance on the water’s surface, but there is nothing to see. No fish. Sunlight penetrates the upper layer of green water, but beneath is cold and obscured, dead. Juliet could sit for hours and stare, as if into a burning fire, mesmerized.

Slowly, stealthily, waves rise and beat at them, lap, lap, lapping with liquid tongues at the boat’s sides, licking higher, oozing across the pale pink deck.

Heinrich’s sons beg to swim.

“Forget it,” he says.

The boat heaves and plunges, temporarily weightless, awash. Juliet believes it is unsinkable. She also believes that taxis and buses never crash, that every movie that makes it to the theatre must be objectively good, and that her own hands clasped in a certain special formation across her waist will act as effectively as a seatbelt in a moment of emergency.

“Should we turn around?” Gloria’s sunglasses are suddenly incongruous.

Heinrich heaves on the rudder, and the boat shudders. Out here, in the middle of the lake, the weather is different, changed. When did it change? Black clouds gather. The wind flings spray onto their exposed bodies and chills the skin; goosebumps rise, a strange, forgotten feeling in this perpetually hot country.

“Turn around,” says Gloria.

“I am trying,” Heinrich says in a low voice. “Can you pedal any harder?”

Fear brushes Juliet, but washes away in a moment. She thinks about Dirk’s hand, quite near her own. She thinks about touching it, by accident. They are turning. They float in silence, a pink speck of life upon spreading, quiet black.
Ca-chunk-ca-chunk
splash the puny paddles beneath.

Juliet sees that Heinrich’s hand rests atop Gloria’s on the rudder. She sees, but does not see, because her mind is elsewhere, distracted, working to sustain belief in this vessel, because her mind loops round and round the same narrow track of internal, necessary reassurance and all other images and sounds are peripheral, taken in through the skin, dimly scratched on the canvas of her mind, to be recalled later like a dream bleached transparent.

“I’m thirsty.” Keith’s glasses are splotched with droplets of lake water, spits of rain. “When will we get back?”

“I don’t know,” Heinrich says after a while.

They are making their way towards land, but it is not the beach from which they came.

“We’re close now.”

“I don’t know,” Heinrich says again.

Waves nudge them intractably towards a rocky cliff face; at a distance, it looks sheer. Up close, they are lifted and flung whole into a secret space beneath towering stone, hollowed-out watery caves that threaten decapitation.

The boat is thrown like driftwood, grating against invisible rocks, trapped.

“How well do your children swim?” asks Heinrich quietly.

“Oh God.” Gloria herself cannot, Juliet knows.

“I have to get into the water and push. These pedals are shit.”

“Go,” says Gloria.

With one hand slipped behind her neck, he pulls her towards him and kisses her forehead. “I’m so sorry.”

No one says anything. Eyes open, bodies still and low. They have crossed into another world, a raw and splayed world that holds them captive. All is very quiet, or very loud — it is impossible to tell, either sensation overwhelming all else, the rest of the world beyond reach or interpretation, removed. Juliet feels the soft green watery depths beckoning. She feels what it would be like to capsize, to be thrown adrift, to struggle and to sink.

Heinrich splashes overboard. He swims strongly, fighting the boat. At times he is pinned to the rock face, straining and ruddy. His lips will explode.

Juliet crunches her knees against her chest and holds on.

In Managua, littering Juliet’s shelf and the floor under her bed, is a pile of books she is in the midst of devouring, called “Choose Your Own Adventure.”

Grandma Grace sends them from the United States in packages, along with Black Stallion books and the entire Anne of Green Gables series. The Choose Your Own Adventures are intended for Keith, but Juliet’s taste is for words in any form, any shape, any combination, and she finds these particularly edible. In each, sections of narrative end with several options. The reader makes her choice, flips through pages to find the corresponding subsequent section, and discovers the consequences. Callous death awaits the wrong choice: an abrupt plunge over a cliff’s edge, burial beneath a convenient avalanche. Other choices rescue the characters, but unsatisfactorily, and others yet escort them to the most happy of endings.

Juliet unpeels the books whole, retracing her steps, reading every possible combination. The stories are simple adventures, the choices lacking moral cause and effect. If you follow the path through the pine forest, you die; if you hike through the swamp, you live.

Life is nothing like a Choose Your Own Adventure. Except for when it is, in its randomness: a cancer cell splitting and spreading ruthlessly within the bloodstream; a storm rising on a deadly lake. Except for when it is, in the way the ending changes — in memory, in meaning rather than substance.

“Pray,” Gloria commands.

Almost imperceptibly the shoreline is changing. They are beyond the caves. There are fewer rocks, more trees. And then, there is sand, there are huts in the woods, cooking fires burning. Slowly, slowly, Heinrich crawls beside the boat while Gloria pedals and Dirk directs the rudder.

They can see Clara in her fluttering white wrap.

They can hear Emmanuel’s wails of grief. At heart, he is closest to knowing what was almost lost, what almost happened out there on the silent lake, because he is closest among them to the state of unbeing. But he has no words, and he won’t tell. None of them will, exactly.

There are enough ghosts without inventing ones that might have been.

The real choice, the one that changes this story, is made invisibly.

Gloria staggers onto the beach, following the children, weeping in a way that frightens everyone. Here is Heinrich. He is weak, stationary for this moment, ankles underwater. He looks at the women and children on the black sand. He takes a step. Even then, Juliet knows there is more significance than what can be glimpsed in this instant, on this beach. Choice isn’t revelatory. The shock of one charged moment is nothing compared to the languid, haunting reverberations that undulate into a long and unlived future.

Heinrich chooses Clara.

“Why can’t I go to the pool tonight?” In the gravel parking lot, Isobel picks up an argument that has chased them all afternoon.

“You know why.” Clara’s shawl flaps furiously in the deepening breeze.

“It’s our last night. Juliet can come with me. She can come back with us and spend the night.”

“She cannot,” says Clara.

“Please? Pretty please? Pretty please with sugar on top and whipped cream and icing and chocolate sprinkles and —”

“We are saying goodbye, Isobel. This is it.”

This
. Juliet feels tears well and trickle foolishly through spiky eyelashes, even while the boys run up slurping
bebidas
out of plastic bags, sticky liquid spilling.

“I told you not to buy them anything!”

“We’ll swing by your house and drop you off,” says Heinrich. He makes it sound like a generous offer. Gloria is unmoving behind her sunglasses.