The Juliet Stories (17 page)

“I don’t believe it,” says the mother. “I just don’t. Why did you wait so long to tell me, if you knew?”

“There wasn’t a funeral or any kind of announcement.”

The voice of a small child breaks in, whining, and the mother says, “You are a big boy and I’m not going to carry you.”

The father says, “I didn’t realize you would be so —”

“I can only think of the children. I can’t stop thinking of them.”

The father says, “It closes a chapter — that’s how I see it.”

“The hell it does, the hell it does, my God. This has nothing to do with you!”

“I could tell you the same thing.”

“Why did he do it? Was there a note?”

“This is a minor incident in another country that happened to a family we hardly knew. Put it into perspective.”

“Stupid man,” says the mother. (The mother is not allowed to use that word, thinks the girl.)

There is the sound of a small scuffle, footsteps, the child’s incoherent protests disappearing down the stairs, followed by silence. The girl takes a huge breath and opens the door, understanding too late that she has made a mistake: the foyer is not empty. Outside apartment number one, the mother sits on the bottom step, surrounded by plastic bags of groceries.

Silently, with the minutest of movements, the girl pulls the door shut behind her. An appealing thought alights: that her mother cannot see her, that she is invisible to the world, that the act of entering and exiting these other apartments is literally transformative.

She is the liminal girl.

Gloria’s eyes are puffed and red. Her lips are half open. She rises slowly to standing.

She and Juliet face each other with something that resembles astonishment but may be simple unfamiliarity. Juliet thinks, She’s always with Keith. She’s never with me.

“What on earth, Juliet? What —”

“What were you and Dad talking about? Who’s dead?”

Gloria shakes her head, attempting to focus her eyes, but she cannot. “Oh, Juliet, I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you.” And Juliet suddenly loses her breath, gasps, though the thought she has formed makes no sense:
Keith is dead
. She cannot say the words out loud because it will make them true.

Gloria does not recognize Juliet’s fright. Oblivious, she takes her time, arriving slowly at words as she seems to weigh what should be said or left unsaid. “Juliet, it’s Heinrich. Do you remember Heinrich and Clara, and your friend Isobel?” As if Juliet might already have forgotten them, as if coming to Canada might have excised vast landscapes of memory.

“Mom, what’s happening? What is it?”

“Heinrich is . . . he passed away. I don’t know anything more.”

But she does, and Juliet knows it. Juliet is breathing again. She is angry. “Why did he die? Was it . . .” — Juliet struggles to form the word — “cancer?”

Gloria says, “Oh no, no, no, not that, nothing like that.”

But her mother knows something she isn’t saying. Juliet pushes. “Then why is he dead?”

Gloria’s gaze drifts far away. Finally she says, “Maybe he died of sadness. I would almost believe it.”

Returning up the stairs to retrieve the remaining bags of groceries, Bram snorts.

“She didn’t love him,” Gloria says to him. “You wouldn’t have known that. He was raising those children practically alone. It was a lonely life.”

“The girl is the one who found him,” says Bram.

“Hush! Hush!” Gloria throws her hands over Juliet’s ears.

“Juliet.” Bram peels back Gloria’s fingers. “Where did you come from?”

Juliet looks at Gloria, who returns her gaze blankly. It is as if Juliet has walked into her mother’s dream. Her mother has no idea what either of them are doing in this dream, which is possibly a nightmare, nor how they arrived here, nor what they are to do next. That is how far away her mother is, that is how far apart the two of them stand.

You can die of sadness? thinks Juliet; the idea encrusts a soft centre of pure terror.

Juliet wants something. She decides it is a horse.

At suppertime she announces her intention to have a horse, and Bram latches on: “A farm!” he says, and turns to Gloria with unexpected excitement; maybe this is love, thinks Juliet.

“Remember our farm?” Bram is speaking of a place that does not exist, and never did, except in their collective imaginations.

“We should look in this neighbourhood,” says Gloria, refusing to acknowledge their shared imaginary past, refusing to play along. “The children are already settled into school.”

“I hate school,” says Juliet.

“But your friends . . .” Gloria waves a hand, manufacturing for Juliet scads of birthday-party invitations and sleepovers.

“Country air is so healthy for children,” says Oma Friesen, to which Gloria does not respond, and Juliet thinks, It is settled, just like that. Oma Friesen has spoken. Oma Friesen does not want or need her grandchildren to live in her neighbourhood. She approves of horses and open skies, and of love. As she proclaims, so it will be.

After supper Bram lifts Emmanuel onto his shoulders, ducks the low doorways, and strolls to the convenience store to purchase a local newspaper: farms listed for sale or rent. Gloria and Keith resume a card game at the table; Keith is between treatments, building up his white blood cell count so the doctors can knock it down again. Oma Friesen manages the washing up; in this task, she actively discourages help.

Juliet slips out. Tomorrow is the last day of school. She will not say
Au revoir
; she will say,
Adieu — goodbye forever
.

She cannot visit apartments one or two at this hour; their tenants are sure to be home. But the door to apartment number three is locked; it is always locked. The girl sits with her back against it, her ear on the scratched metal, listening, but hears nothing. She thinks, Maybe no one lives here. Maybe it is empty. Or maybe it is not: it could be filled with anything, with a dead body, with squirrels and birds, with ghosts.

It is very warm on the third floor: a perfect place for ghosts, who, the girl imagines, carry a chill and crave warmth.

When the door swings open, she falls backwards, sprawling into the apartment. Her mouth opens to scream, but she has been quiet for too long, and her throat produces only the tiniest squeak.

“What in the . . .” A man frowns down at her. She turns her eyes to his boots: heavy yellow leather, stained and oily, rubber bottoms grooved like tire treads.

“I’m sorry,” she breathes.

“You must be the kid who screams half the day and wakes me up,” says the man.

“That’s not me.” She raises herself on bent wrists. “That’s my little brother.”

“I work nights. I don’t like little brothers.”

“We’re moving,” she says. “We’re going to live in the country.”

He sees her furtive glance as she tries to take in the dimly lit room: tidy, but dull. “I’m headed to my shift, but I happen to be early. Make yourself at home, look around.” He is closing the door, and she moves her feet to let him.

“You’re cute,” he says. “Cute kid.”

The girl stands. She cannot remember anything about herself that relates to the way he is looking at her: a look that is mildly admiring, curious. She stares back at him as if paralyzed, seeing him for the first time above the boots and the rolled blue jean cuffs. He is not a man she would instinctively trust. He is old, but only to an eleven-year-old, to whom even teenagers are old; perhaps in his mid-twenties. His hair is long and thin, pulled into a ponytail, dark blond — what her mother would call “dishwater” — and his eyes are a very pale blue, striking but uncanny, eyes that belong on a husky dog. He is a small man and he has hair on his face, rough stubble, and an earring in either ear: tiny gold crucifixes.

He says, “Don’t be scared. What’s your name?”

The girl hunches her shoulders, works her mouth, mumbling as if she’s lost something, as if her name has been stolen from her.

“Why are you whispering? Don’t be scared. Are you scared?” He walks away from her into the middle of the room and spreads his arms wide. “Not gonna touch ya.”

A framed poster of a howling wolf hangs on the wall over a black velvet sofa, and on another wall is a bucking bronco. He sees the girl glance at the bronco. “Do you like horses? I like horses.”

Way down below, someone enters the building, and displaced wind rattles the door of apartment number three, behind which the girl stands, near enough to put out her hand and touch the handle.

“Don’t go yet.”

The girl hears her father’s voice talking to her little brother, but only briefly, as he barrels down the basement stairs; gone.
Adieu
.

“I’ll pour you a pop. Do you like Pepsi?”

The girl shakes her head but he thinks she means yes, and he brings her a glass, no ice. The girl says, “Thank you.” He waits until she’s drunk half.

“I gotta go before I’m late,” he says. “My name’s Steven. You never asked. It’s polite to ask. You still never told me yours.” He takes the glass and shakes her hand, which is damp from condensation.

The girl blurts, “Can I look around? Can I just . . . look?”

He laughs. He still has her by the hand. “What are you looking for?”

But she cannot shape it for him; even if she could, she would not. What gets kept in the attic of the mind, symbols sorted and boxed, imaginary and antique? Different from the mouldering memories stuffed into the basement, which are frightening, and lurk. The attic is what could be; the attic window the view from which a life, and its potential, might be glimpsed, spread out below, in miniature.

She pulls free her hand.

“After you,” says the man. She pushes away his name.

He follows her from room to room, pointing out where he’s going to fix or improve things: a missing light bulb, a bare wall, no shower curtain around the tub.

He stands aside in the narrow hallway so she can pass without brushing against his body as they return to the main room. The girl goes to the window and moves the dark shade. She was mistaken. There is her father with her little brother, playing in the front yard, not gone inside. They are collecting dandelions, twigs.

The girl feels the stranger behind her, the extra heat of his proximity, seeing what she’s seeing.

“Better go, kid,” he says, lightly brushing the braids off her shoulders. “And don’t come back.” She feels his breath as he bends over her, warm in the part along the middle of her scalp. Warm, and scented of peppermint. She hears the crunch between his teeth of a hard candy, the crinkling of a cellophane wrapper dropped to the floor. The carpet is the same in this apartment as in all the others. Her feet are bare. Its fibres are rough.

He does not touch his lips to her skin. His fingers on her neck raise tiny hairs, stroking along her shoulders, down her arms, bare beyond the T-shirt sleeves, to her hands, which he grasps, fingers softly tucked onto her palms, thumbs rubbing her knuckles and tendons.

He is holding his breath. He is gentle. She feels, just at this moment, needed. She is necessary. She is rare. She is wanted.

Down below, her father lifts his gaze, as if he’s looking straight up and at her. She sees his mouth make the shape of her name:
Juliet
.

She is named. It could be an accusation. It could be rescue.

The apartment is stifling, its openings closed tightly against all outside noise and light.

He senses the change in her, the fear, and drops her hands.

“Get out of here,” he says, whispered, tight. “Please.”

She doesn’t look at him, and she runs, skittering, away and down the stairs, tearing to the front door and out into bright evening.

In the yard, in the green uncut grass, Bram is glad to see her. He flaps the newspaper: “What do you think of this one, Juliet? Hobby farm, ten acres, pond.” (The translation for listings of this sort, generally, will prove to be:
Land pocked with rocks and scrub brush no good for crops, house in suspect condition and with worse plumbing, built carelessly close to a swamp that fills up during spring runoff and floods the cellar.
)

“Uh-huh.” Juliet bends to rip handfuls of grass, smelling its crushed fresh blood.

He is coming. Juliet won’t look. He pushes open the front door and clumps his heavy boots along the concrete walk, swinging a silver lunch pail with his name written on it in black marker. A truck idles at the curb: his ride, waiting.

As he passes them, Bram greets him politely, “Hello,” and the man surprises them all: he steps onto the grass and extends his hand, coming to meet them. “Steven,” he says. “We must be neighbours.”

“Bram,” says Bram. “We’re here temporarily, staying with my mother.”

“Nice to meetcha, Graham,” says Steven.

“Bram,” says Bram.

“Graham,” repeats Steven. He can’t help himself; he is occupied with ignoring Juliet. His glance at her is sneaky; he smiles — Juliet recognizes that he is trying to suppress the impulse — and he winks. But Juliet, kneeling, folds her arms across her chest, one, two: Stop.

“That’s a real pretty girl ya got,” says Steven. “You’d be smart to keep an eye on that one.”

Bram shifts his weight, frowns at Juliet, who is examining the dirt. She feels like smearing herself in dirt; and she feels powerful.

Bram drops Steven’s hand, gazes at his own, looking for a mark, a legible sign.

“Good luck,” says Steven, a phrase that means nothing within the context of this exchange. Grown-ups say things like this all the time: platitudes that do not apply, and other grown-ups accept the nothingness at the heart of what is being said, as if nonsense spoken out loud is always and ever more acceptable than silence.

He steps into the waiting truck, slams the door, and is driven away.

“What do you have to say, Juliet?” Bram eyes her.

She flushes; she’s been caught doing something wrong, but not the thing that she thought was wrong. Something else — unexpected and accidental. Something that will make her father mournful and disappointed, that has the potential to diminish her worth, and that she cannot avoid. She cannot avoid growing out of girlhood and into the tempting lushness of woman.