The Juliet Stories (24 page)

You say, Thank you.

Goodnight, goodnight, what is dark will be light, what is sleep will be wake, tomorrow.
*

The audience loves it. The audience gobbles this stuff up, sucks it directly into its swollen gullet, its hidden, needy core. As one they bite lips and reach for a hand to squeeze; they shake their heads, eyes bright with tears; they murmur,
Oh
. Everyone needs a good cry once in a while: that is her mother’s philosophy. With gentleness like a touch on the head, a blessing, she strums through the final chords and arrives at dropped quietness, bows her head, her flat hippie hair falling across the strings, the picture of idealized modern maternity, though her children — all but Emmanuel — are too old; they do not fit perfectly into the scene.

Applause.

Her mother, lowering her chin in humble gratitude. Her mother, rising to curtsy, laughing, to bow.

A toast! Jesse stands and raises his glass, and the guests search for and lift theirs, though the children continue to sit cross-legged, no drinks in sight. To my new family, he says, choking on the words, unable to squeeze anything else out.

To family! shouts the room, and there follows the clink of glassware, someone tapping a dirty fork on a plate, and then another and another, and it’s turning into a wedding, thinks Juliet, as the guests chant, Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss.

Awww
. The collective sigh of appreciation washes the room and dissolves into laughter. There is a crowd at the bar, and Juliet stands to see that the boy has been called back to serve. He smiles at her crookedly, not embarrassed or regretful, the most straightforward face she’s seen all night.

Do you like him, then? asks the stepbrother.

Well, she says, thinking about it. I do.

The stepbrother lowers his mouth towards her ear, says to her shoulder, And do you like me, too?

She shakes back her hair and laughs at him. Don’t be stupid.

He won’t give up. He waits for her with an open face.

She has not looked closely at him, does not even know the colour of his eyes — blue. She examines him slowly, in the middle of this room, without emotion. His hair is the dusty brown of someone who was a blond baby, cut shorter than she prefers. His left eyebrow is broken by a scar where the hair will not grow. He does not look like the kind of person who would have a tattoo; she sets the question aside to ask later. He is not a tall man; he takes after his father, she thinks, but not in a bad way. She imagines him running long distances, riding a bicycle up a ski hill, surfing. She knows nothing about surfing.

I need to put Emmanuel to bed, she says.

I’ll come with you.

They follow the white circle that emanates from Emmanuel’s flashlight, and Juliet wishes she were wearing shoes. They walk along the top of the beach, but it is not groomed. Broken shells stab her feet, she catches a toe on a clump of driftwood.

Did you say goodnight to Mom? Juliet thinks to ask only after they arrive at their hut and the stepbrother is unlocking the door with the key attached by a tiny chain to a carved wooden parrot.

Sort of, says Emmanuel, which is good enough for Juliet.

Brush your teeth.

But Emmanuel staggers over the threshold like a miniature drunk, head lolling, dazed. He has walked here bravely — Follow me! He is spent. Juliet leads him to their shared room. Do you want to wear pyjamas?

He does not answer her. She removes his sneakers and covers him with a sheet.

But she does not return immediately to the main room, where she knows her stepbrother is waiting. For her. She sits on the edge of her bed and drops her face into her hands, breathing into the cupped space between the palms, the bones of her skull almost legible under her fingertips. What could she read in them? What message? What, other than this discrete moment in a lifetime, this force of the present lifting her from the hips, carrying her deeper into darkness?

Where are you going? Where have you been?

She lifts her face. She stands and glides between these two walls, and like a thief breaks into the spacious expanse of tonight. It has room enough for both of them. It is forgiving and generous and vast.

She meets him. In silence, he takes her hand. In silence, they walk together, outside. They do not pause. They sink, they give way.

A breeze rises, a luscious night wind, and lifts her. She is removed, she is carried away from the picture they are making in the sand. She sees them from above, earthly cut-outs, and she floats higher. Here is the palm-roofed restaurant alight with song and sounds. Here are the people dancing and getting drunk and remembering themselves in their bodies, remembering what they were going to be, when they were young; being young. Here is the beach — no, it is receding: here is the ocean, here are the waves, here she is pulled out, lifted higher. Up here the air undulates like water beneath her outspread arms, her lifted head, her belly and breasts. She is not grand. She is small.

She will be taken from this place and unable to return. She thinks of the things she’s said and forgotten to say, in equal measure, equally mistaken.

Her arms stretch, but the struggle is brief; she submits. It is almost out of sight, almost gone from her. What is gone? Oh, she knows now what it is; she’s read this story before. It could be named
childhood
; or it could be named
a dream
. She’ll never find that beach again. She’ll keep trying.

But just now she does not need to. She is here on the beach that is, damp and cool, the beach on which she is lying indented with another, entirely possessed of her body, entirely discovered in this primitive circle of craving and kindness.

Hey, Juliet, he says. Are you okay? Juliet?

He will say her name and say her name, just to taste it.

She thinks, I’ve never said his. She searches for it in the debris on top of the water. She says, I’m wearing black. Do you think it means something?

Good or bad? he says, and slips the other feathered earring from her ear and steals it into his pocket.

They begin. This was where they began.

Juliet lies on the Murphy bed pulled down from the wall, its thin metal legs snapped into position. The room, the entire apartment, is chilled, and she shivers in fetal position under a thin sheet. There is a window along the wall, slatted blinds drawn against the rising early sun, shadows easing, longer and thinner, across the carpeted floor. Everything in here is white. Out there, it is already hot. Out there, Grandma Grace is taking her brisk morning walk along the winding blacktop of the retirement village, built on Florida swampland that roils underfoot. Acres of quilted sod, laid out in rectangles, are sinking. Juliet feels herself sinking.

She hears the apartment door open and close. She hears her grandmother’s breathing in the hallway, heavy from exertion, her grandmother’s knock on the bedroom door: “Breakfast, Juliet?”

Juliet thinks, This was a mistake, coming here, telling. Her errors compound, interest she will never be able to pay. She needs to go home. She cannot answer.

“Juliet. Answer me: cereal or toast?”

But she does not answer. There is a small rush of quiet, the almost silent animal padding of footsteps on wall-to-wall carpet, and Grandma Grace returns. She opens the door with her elbow and walks around the bed to place a tray beside Juliet.

“Eat. It will settle your stomach.”

Juliet closes her eyes, and the tears well through her lashes.

“Worse things have happened,” Grandma Grace says, and strokes Juliet’s cheek. “Worse things will. We will get you through this. Life goes on.”

The phone rings, and Juliet’s body tenses.

“If it’s your mother, I’ll tell her you’re sleeping,” says Grandma Grace.

“What if it’s Mike?”

“We’ll let it ring through to the machine.”

They wait. Several mechanical beeps precede the sound of a voice, coated in static, talking into the empty living room. “Mother? It’s Caroline here. Just to say I’m on my way and I’ll be there later today. Tell Juliet I love her, and I can stay for as long as you need me.”

“Not Aunt Caroline,” says Juliet.

“Juliet, I’m going to sit right here until you eat something. You don’t know your Aunt Caroline well enough. She’s exactly who you need to talk to. She’s been through this herself, before it was legal. She will understand.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You don’t have to talk about it.”

Juliet nibbles on the toast crust. She feels as though her limbs are coated in heavy fur, dragging her down. The inside of her skull is lined with the same fur, inhibiting coherence. But her stomach is a prune, a shrivelled, tough wad in her gut that rejects nourishment. Juliet sits up straight and begins to gag.

“Oh, Juliet,” Grandma Grace sighs.

Juliet backs out of the sheets and stumbles in her underwear and T-shirt down the hallway to the bathroom, where she shuts and locks the door. The toilet seat is composed of puffy off-white plastic, the water is tinted blue, and when nothing comes up, Juliet closes the lid and sits on its fluffy cover: a lavender mat made of water-resistant synthetic wool. Lit by dim oversized bulbs set in a row above the mirror, every flat surface is clean and empty. The entire apartment is like a sterilized operating room, all the tchotchkes removed to prevent Grandpa Harold from swallowing or hiding them; only last month, after he’d started his day by swallowing his dentures (partials, but still), did Grandma Grace move him into a home for the demented elderly.

Juliet has not yet visited, though Grandma Grace goes every day, to feed him his lunch. Juliet has been taking the opportunity, in her absence, to slide open the screen door and smoke a cigarette on the back stoop. She does not intend to smoke forever. She thinks of it as a hobby picked up in a foreign land, which will be discarded as soon as she returns to normal life.

Seated on the toilet’s lid, Juliet swivels her hips and leans towards the mirror. Peering into her own face, she feels nothing. She is at a distance from this freckled, sunburnt, unkempt girl. This girl is not Juliet. This girl is a fragment of the real Juliet, a scrap. The real Juliet waits at home, in another country, for the return of her body.

Grandma Grace knocks on the door. “How are you?”

“Fine.”

“Can I come in?”

The door is locked. Juliet does not answer, listening to her grandmother try the handle.

“I wish nobody had to know,” says Juliet.

“Nobody will,” says Grandma Grace through the shut door. “Now. Juliet. Let me in.”

Aunt Caroline arrives bearing scented candles and a box of herbal tea. Her hug is vise-tight and her tears are expected, but that doesn’t make either easier to bear. It is evening, and outside the sliding glass doors Juliet sees fog rising off swampland like steam out of a volcano. Grandma Grace has prepared a green salad with cilantro and tomatoes and is boiling water for pasta. Fighting a lethargy that feels fatal, Juliet sets the table.

Aunt Caroline gets right to it. “Does the father know?”

“Hush, hush.” Grandma Grace drops three handfuls of spaghetti noodles into the pot. But Aunt Caroline wants an answer.

Juliet sinks into her chair and rests her head on the cool china plate. Aunt Caroline is asking the wrong question. The question should be, Does the man who is not the father know? The man who is the father is irrelevant. She has already forgotten his face; richer with detail is the room they shared: two beds, a green mosquito coil on the windowsill that burned itself orange and ash. They did not share a bed all night, but afterwards moved to separate beds, in silence. The open window faced the town, not the ocean. In the morning he walked with her up and down streets, searching for something recognizable, a house preserved in her memory from childhood, but the town had been taken over by surfers, foreigners selling smoothies and yoga on the beach.

He spoke to her in English but it was not his first language. He was kind. Without him, she would never have deciphered the bus schedules. She was not bothered by their exchange, though it was of some relief to learn that he lived in a different part of the country. He called her once, at the house in Managua where she was boarding with a mother and her four daughters, but they had nothing to say to each other over the telephone. It had seemed the only consequence of their night together would be the teasing of the four daughters, aged twelve to seventeen, who eavesdropped on the phone call and who knew about her boyfriend in Canada. On Saturdays the sisters huddled in their bedroom around the television and watched
telenovelas
made in Mexico. Juliet slept on her own cot, but the others shared double beds. There was space for little else: the girls stored bales of clothing in black plastic garbage bags under their beds, digging through them at dawn and pressing out the wrinkles with an iron before leaving the house. Juliet also slid her backpack under her cot, but she never ironed. She favoured paisley-patterned cotton skirts that fell in crinkles to the ankle, T-shirts, hiking boots in which she kept her American dollars.

It was a miracle anyone found her attractive. She was appreciative. She was ambivalent. She was without excuse. There had been rum, and a lot of it. That is not an explanation.

“You do know about” — Aunt Caroline’s voice hushes — “
condoms
, don’t you?”

Juliet lifts her head off the plate. She says, “It’s too late for the safe-sex talk.”

“You need to get tested. For disease.”

“She knows that.”

“This pregnancy could be the least of her troubles.”

“Caroline,” says Grandma Grace, “your tone is not helpful. We do not sit in judgement.”

“We should tell your mother.” Aunt Caroline turns to Juliet.

Juliet looks to Grandma Grace, who shakes her head and dumps the pasta into a colander in the sink. “I expected more from you, Caroline. You, of all people.”

“What do
you
want to do?” Aunt Caroline sinks heavily into the chair opposite Juliet and reaches for her hand. Juliet lets her squeeze away, milking the bones of Juliet’s hand as if she might drag out one glistening drop, one tear, one bodily expression of regret.

“I just want it to be done,” says Juliet, “and I want to go home.”

The telephone rings. Aunt Caroline leaps to answer it. She covers the mouthpiece with one hand and whispers, “It’s Michael, Juliet.
The father
.”

Juliet shakes her head. Aunt Caroline nods hers, holding out the receiver. Juliet stands and slides open the glass door, walks into a landscape as foreign as tundra. She walks barefoot through slippery grass that holds her footprints. She imagines quicksand, and crocodiles. She imagines sliding under and disappearing. She walks until the apartment, and the larger block of low stucco building that contains it, is reduced to rectangles of yellow and blue light.

———

“Well,” says Grandma Grace. “I made a mistake. I’m sorry.”

Aunt Caroline has gone, leaving the scented candles and the box of tea.

“No,” says Juliet.

“When I think of all the mistakes . . .” Grandma Grace’s voice trails off.

“Like me, you mean? Like how I was a mistake?”

“That is not what I am talking about.”

“An accident, then.”

Grandma Grace exhales heavily. With a black pronged utensil she lifts a portion of waving spaghetti fronds and lays them on Juliet’s plate.

“I’m not hungry,” says Juliet.

“How can a life be a mistake? Or even an accident? And yet.”

“Are you trying to talk me out of this?”

“I am talking about being human. The mistakes. We all make them and they pile up, Juliet. You can lie down and let them bury you or you can forgive yourself and be kind. Be kinder.”

Juliet watches her grandmother in silence.

“You were meant to come to me, Juliet, and you were meant to tell me first. Your mother, what choice did she have? Your Oma Friesen is a good woman, a crusading woman, but she is hard. Once she got wind of that pregnancy, there were no options.”

“A mistake,” repeats Juliet.

“You are young. You have your whole life. What
do
you want to do?”

Juliet drops her eyes. I want to pretend this never happened, she thinks.

There is a knock on the door.

Grandma Grace stalks the plush carpet and checks the fisheye peephole. “It’s Caroline. I knew it would be. I knew she wouldn’t get far.”

Grandma Grace unlocks the door, saying over her shoulder, “It’s going to be fine, Juliet.”

“I’m sorry,” begs Aunt Caroline, not bothering to remove her shoes. “I was walking around the parking lot wondering, ‘What should I do? What should I do?’ I couldn’t just get into the car and drive away. I could not. Not when Juliet needs me.”

“Caroline?” says Grandma Grace.

“It was the right thing to do. I know it. I went and called Gloria. I did. I thought she should know.”

“Caroline.”

“She’s dropping everything. She’s on her way.”

There is a silence so piercing it hurts Juliet’s head. She will not permit herself to contemplate the tripwire of consequences. She picks up her fork and winds a thread of spaghetti loosely around and around the scraping tines, an ellipsis of noodle that refuses to bind, that she cannot therefore lift to her lips and take in.

Grandma Grace is stamping with fury. “This is my fault,” she rages at her night reflection in the sliding glass doors, “for raising such a stupid child.”

Aunt Caroline hovers on the threshold.

“Come in and shut the door,” snaps Grandma Grace.

Juliet looks from the mother to the daughter and feels pity for each. They are betrayed by stubborn difference that persists despite age.

Aunt Caroline says, “I am very afraid, Mother. I am so terribly afraid for Juliet’s life.” She is wearing a light jacket with sleeves that pinch around the fattest portion of her upper arm. Juliet sees that she is shaking, and she is reminded of Gloria, though the two sisters are unalike in taste and manner and form. The fork scratches the plate.

“You are projecting,” says Grandma Grace.

“This choice could ruin her life.”

“Your life was not ruined.”

“I have no children of my own.” Aunt Caroline addresses Juliet. “After the operation, my
womb
” — she whispers the word, pauses to eat her lips — “fell barren. If I had my life to live again, I would change just one thing. I would have that baby.” She turns to Grandma Grace. “He would have turned twenty-seven in May.”

“That baby — that embryo — wasn’t a boy,” says Grandma Grace. “You don’t know that. She doesn’t know that.”

“He visits my dreams,” Aunt Caroline tells Juliet. “You don’t know what you will want later. You are thinking only about what you want right now.”

The phone is ringing. The women leave it be.

“Hello? Juliet? If you’re there, can you pick up? Please? I need to talk to you.”

Mike’s voice calls to them through the machine, gentle, a version of his father’s, but without the chronic marijuana cough.

“Juliet, um, I know. I know what’s happening. Dad called. Please pick up. Can I come to you? Or will you come home? Please. I love you.”

Grandma Grace’s lips quiver with tears she refuses to shed. Aunt Caroline lifts shaking hands together into a position of prayer, pressing fingers against chin, sodden with tears.

The apartment is too damn white. There is nowhere to hide, thinks Juliet. She stands out like a raging wound, dirt under her fingernails, sun-cracked skin, flame for hair. She just barely evades the thought: Would the baby have my hair?

“I hear you.” She sits at the table and says to the machine, “I hear you, Mike.”

Grandma Grace, who is nearest, lifts the receiver, speaking into it as she crosses the room. Her voice is steady and betrays no emotion. “Hello, Mike. How are you?” From the receiver’s upper end she uncollapses a long metal antenna.

“I want to see you too,” Juliet whispers into the heavy plastic shell, turning away, hunted by the generations in the room; the antenna swats dangerously. “But I’m not keeping it. Just so you know.”

What he says in reply is only hers, and she will not share it.

“I will put the kettle on,” says Aunt Caroline, her voice lifting, making of the statement a question, to which Grandma Grace does not reply. Instead Grandma Grace walks silently down the hall to the linen closest to snap sheets and count comforters. She runs a whining vacuum cleaner in the spare bedroom where Juliet has been sleeping. They hear her in the bathroom slamming cupboard doors, working, working, working.