“Howdy,” says the big, fair man, and he smiles down on Gloria. He has a softly European accent.
“Hello.” Gloria adjusts Emmanuel’s limp sleeping body, shades her eyes. Her breast is showing where she has pulled down her swimsuit to nurse. (“I’m going to wean him any day now,” she says every time he demands to be fed. “It’s time.” And yet she doesn’t.)
“You are new in town.” The man smiles.
“We’re with the Roots of Justice. The children and I are taking a holiday from the city.”
“You have found the perfect place for a holiday.”
“My husband . . .” Gloria stops, looks down and strokes Emmanuel’s head, adjusts, tucks herself away.
“But I haven’t introduced myself.” The man offers his hand, which she accepts. “My name is Heinrich. My children: Isobel, Dirk, and Jonathan. My wife and I work for the Red Cross. We live” — he gestures down the beach — “Big white house, porch goes all the way around.”
“We haven’t had a chance to look around.”
“You will come for a meal, of course. Anytime. I’ll tell Clara.”
“Oh.” Juliet watches Gloria free her hand and gather her hair in one fist at the nape of her neck, her words trailing out. “I don’t know how long . . .”
“It was from this beach that many of Somoza’s guardia fled,” Heinrich says after a moment. He takes a cross-legged, very upright position beside Gloria. He is speaking of the former dictator, overthrown in the revolution. The word guardia is as evil on the tongue as Contra: words that mean terror and murder and death.
“I didn’t know that.” Gloria is genuinely surprised, her spine lengthening as she turns with interest to Heinrich.
“The ones who were pushed south, who were trapped here, they hijacked fishing boats. It’s a story not much told, but if you ask around, people know which fishing boats, which fishermen.”
Gloria gazes into the harbour, where vessels rock and bob in the contained port. The untended beach nestles between two rocky outcroppings, beyond which spreads the open sea.
“They say those guardia were trained into the Contra. They’re the leaders now. That’s what they say. Full circle.” Heinrich’s hand sweeps towards the ocean. “Leave by sea, right here, in the south, and return by land, up north. Everyone wants to go home.”
“Do they?”
“Don’t you?” he asks her.
“I don’t,” says Gloria, her face so open that Heinrich might fall in; but only for a glancing moment. Juliet watches Gloria release the full weight of her hair, swing it over her shoulders and around her cheeks, hiding herself again.
The girl named Isobel is watching too, her own hair coiled and pinned.
“I like your bun,” says Juliet.
“It’s a chignon,” says Isobel. Juliet has never heard of one. With a tug, Isobel removes the polished wooden stick that is holding her hair magically in place, and it cascades in pale ribbons around her neck and shoulders.
Isobel has just turned twelve.
“I’m almost eleven,” says Juliet.
Isobel disdains driftwood dragged to make a pretend house, nor will she touch the tiny crabs that scuttle over wet sand left behind by the tide, leaving faint tracks, a path anyone with interest could follow.
“You have the most beautiful . . .” they hear Isobel’s father tell Juliet’s mother.
The most beautiful what?
“Thank you,” whispers Gloria. She peers in the direction of the sun; her eyes squint shut.
Here comes the tide. Helped by Isobel’s brothers, Keith digs a trench, drags sticks, piles sand to divert water, but the tide overwhelms; Juliet cannot resist, crouching to push walls of sand with her forearms, until even Isobel is drawn into the fight, standing above the tide line, calling out directions.
Heinrich helps Gloria to her feet, bends and lifts her towel, shakes it out, folds it neatly.
“Time to go home,” he tells his children.
“Us too,” says Gloria.
“It was a pleasure to meet you.” Heinrich reaches for Gloria’s free hand, the one loosely against Emmanuel’s shoulder; his thumb strokes her knuckles.
Juliet’s bare feet sting as they cross hot pavement to the Roots of Justice house, which faces the water. She is thrilled to have met someone like Isobel, and relieved to be away from her.
“Yes, I know them,” Andrew is saying to Gloria. “But he’s not with the Red Cross. His wife is. She’s a physician. Dutch? Danish? Accept all invitations, that’s my motto. Take me along too?”
“Oh, leave the dishes,” Clara says. “Heinrich will do them before bed.”
She is a grand-looking woman who matches her husband, the way some couples do, as if drawn to each other in the mirror. (Juliet’s parents are that opposite version of coupledom, pulled together by differences that fold into one another like origami.) Clara and Heinrich are tall, robust, fair, though her eyes are icy pale and his dazzle like the ocean at noon — or is it only in memory that Juliet invents these characteristics?
The mothers flop onto a cushioned loveseat, sloshing wine; Gloria licks her wet knuckles, reaches for a book resting on the coffee table. “I never imagined such comfort in this country.”
“We have built this life over many years.”
Gloria opens the book as if opening their life, peering curiously at florid line drawings of half-naked, contorted bodies wreathed in vines and flowers, shone down upon by suns with stick rays. Heinrich smiles like a cat. Gloria pauses at a page that demonstrates how to squat in fresh running water and draw liquid in through one’s sphincter by means of some interior muscle; Juliet, hovering, will hunt for and examine the same page at the first opportunity.
“What is this?”
“Yoga.” Clara is dismissive. This is not her version of their story.
“Wow! Andrew, do you know anything about yoga?”
“Of course!” Andrew hops off his chair and stands with his feet hip-distance apart in the centre of the richly patterned rug. He bends at the waist, places his palms on the rug, and wiggles his bottom as he settles into the pose. “Downward-facing dog!”
Juliet can’t help giggling, but she is the only one.
Clara half-lids her sharp eyes.
“Is it Indian?” Gloria turns her face to Heinrich’s, and Juliet sees her ear exposed, one hand tucking strands, flushed cheekbone sleek with heat.
“Grown-ups,” Isobel whispers to Juliet. She pronounces the word dismissively. She knows where there is an abandoned glass of wine in the kitchen, and between them they drink the red liquid down.
“Are you drunk?”
“I guess so.”
“Me too.”
And Juliet and Isobel walk around the house like grown-ups do, weaving and laughing and bumping into furniture. Smiling like they have secrets and the secrets are about to spill out. I can tell her anything, thinks Juliet, but she cannot think of anything significant enough to tell.
There is a shark on the beach, but otherwise today is a day like all of their San Juan days. There is nothing particular to do or to be done. Gloria and the children are at leisure, not at wait, drinking up the sun, skin salty from the shallows.
Jellyfish wash up amidst the driftwood, pale and purplish and pliable when poked with a stick. Local boys run into the waves and scoop out fish with their bare hands or catch the shining, flailing bodies with primitive poles made of hooks and line and sticks. Today they run out of the water shouting with excitement. Juliet and Keith come to take a look. Laid out in the arms of a boy is a shark, dead. It is small, but the boy pulls apart its jaws to show them rows and rows of teeth.
Around ten o’clock, the Friesens are joined by Heinrich and his children, who are being home-schooled in an arrangement that has them sending ass
ignments back and forth by mail to a private school in Germany. Their hours are malleable. So long as she excels, Isobel is allowed to stay up as late as she likes, working, and to sleep in as late as she cares to, blinds drawn in her bedroom, the fan purring like a cat.
She is in the equivalent of the tenth grade and intends to graduate by fourteen and go directly to a foreign university. “But I won’t break any records. The youngest student ever accepted to Harvard was an eleven-year-old boy, so I’m already too late.”
Heinrich reclines directly on the hot sand, his hands cupping his neck, his elbows at angles, exposing tufts of pure white hair in the pits of his arms. “Isobel, this is known as bragging.”
Gloria does not glance up from her paperback, on loan from Clara. Emmanuel sleeps in her lap, crashed under his sunhat.
Juliet and Isobel walk in the waves that lick the sand. “Don’t follow us,” Isobel tells her brothers.
“You’re following us,” says Dirk. He and Keith are the same age. Jonathan is two years younger and silent.
“Are not.”
“Are too.”
“Are not.”
“Are too.”
Isobel sighs. “What were we talking about?” she asks Juliet.
The boys with the shark are ahead of them, down the beach. That’s who they’re following, all of them, walking north on sticky sand, allowing the salt water to wash in and out over their toes.
It doesn’t feel like they are going too far, not at all. The beach looks short from one end to the other, and Isobel says they are allowed to go wherever they like, but as they walk and walk and walk, distance becomes an optical illusion, a trick.
The village core is only a few streets wide, and soon they are past it. Concrete houses are replaced by primitive structures, few and far between; the smell of cooking fires. Wild greenery grows up to the sandy perimeter. A cow with a hump, more like a buffalo, wanders loose, foraging for feed.
They hop from stone to stone across a sludgy stream that feeds into the ocean. Isobel has to turn around to help Jonathan. She and Dirk debate the annoyance: “I didn’t bring him; you brought him; you take him back.” But Jonathan doesn’t want to go back.
Gloria and Heinrich have been reduced to two miniature figures in the centre of the beach. The children wave and believe they see hands waving in return.
Past the stream, more rocks crowd the sand, tumbled from the cliff that marks the end of the bay. The rocks are black and slimy with seaweed. Some they pick through like a maze, and others must be scrambled over.
“Cool!” Keith finds a pool of water on top of an indented boulder in which a tiny fish swims, in its own private lake. The children discover more puzzling puddles atop tall rocks, high above the water that washes in, but none of them can read the warning.
They pause between rocks, the five of them, on a sheltered plot of sand warmed by the sun. They have come to the end of the beach, beyond which boulders make a gradual ascent up the rock face and curve around into the open sea; but they can’t tell from here.
Nobody says: Let’s go back now. Nobody wants to be the one to say it.
Dirk’s white hair lifts in the breeze. Juliet notices his green eyes. Though younger, he is already taller than her. She fights the urge to grab him and push him. She wants to beat him at something: climb faster, climb higher. It is the only suitable expression for what she feels.
She scrapes her knee in her hurry to climb the next stone, Keith and Dirk at her heels.
Isobel, stuck with Jonathan, falls behind.
The waves are higher, wilder, louder. Juliet pushes on without thinking, following the San Juan boys, who disappear from view, then reappear, always seeming to be just around the corner. The sun stands at noon. The wind rises.
And so does the tide, with stealthy speed. There is no more sand below them. Water runs in between the boulders and eats away their passage to shore.
“Wait for us!” Isabel hollers, and Juliet pauses.
She and the boys stop. They look down, and they see ocean below them, clear beneath frothy waves, limpid green.
Juliet smells smoke, but it is Dirk who discovers its source, above them. He and Keith climb up and up until they are standing on a ledge looking down on Juliet, now joined by Isobel and Jonathan.
“It’s a cave! A real cave!”
“I’ll never get him all the way up there,” says Isobel. “He weighs a ton.”
“Do not!” says Jonathan.
The cave is not deep, as Juliet expects, more like a cupped hand of rock, a shallow shelter overlooking the bay. She climbs into it and stands. She can’t see her mother on the beach, but perhaps it is too far. Isobel lifts Jonathan and scrambles up last.
“Thanks for nothing,” she says to Dirk, but she too is drawn almost instantly into this perfect pocket, this camp improvised by the San Juan boys. It is clear that they visit the hideout often: a collection of dry sticks and driftwood stored in one corner; a vessel of rainwater that can be covered by a lid. Everyone takes turns dipping their hands and drinking from cupped palms.
The three boys, not much older than their visitors, welcome them courteously. One dusts the floor with his hand before offering the girls a seat.
Another guts the shark with a knife and throws the guts onto the rocks for the seabirds.
Over the open fire, several whole fish sizzle, stabbed onto sticks. Everyone is suddenly ravenous. They eat with their hands, carefully, so as not to choke on the bones.
Shark meat is denser than fish. The San Juan boys discuss meals past. They claim to have caught and cooked a pelican, and as proof show off a pelican’s skull, but Isobel teases them: You found that on the beach. The conversation is in Spanish, and Juliet’s is weakest. She listens in silence until one of the San Juan boys addresses her directly.
“Do you like the fish or the shark best?” Keith translates.
“I know what he said!” But words for a reply slip from her. She shrugs. The San Juan boys laugh and Juliet flushes and says, in English, “The fish.”
Dirk tells the boys, “She likes the fish,” and Juliet discovers that the question was not idle. The boys wish to offer her more food, whatever she desires.
Isobel prefers the shark. She sits primly upright, her legs crossed at the knee, feet curled around her left hip. Unlike Juliet, she does not lick her fingers but eats delicately off her palm and brushes her hands together lightly to clean them.
Until the tide turns, the San Juan boys tell them, there is no way back to shore. No one finds this news unwelcome.
When the girls need relief, they scramble over rocks around the corner, towards the open sea, until they are out of sight. Perched side by side, trying to pee down a crevice, Isobel and Juliet get the giggles. It isn’t anything; it’s everything. They want to laugh. They have to. Pulling up their underwear, they are doubled over, weak, helpless. Just a glance at one another brings on fresh waves.
Back at the cave, the bigger boys play a game that involves pairing up and slapping the inside of the other’s wrist with two fingers, taking turns — slap, slap, slap — back and forth until one boy can no longer stand the pain. The other is the winner.
Keith and Dirk trade slaps until their fingers are puffed and raw. Juliet hopes that Dirk will win, but she is helplessly proud of her brother, his teeth gritted, his tanned, round face set and determined. There is no mercy; this is not a game for girls.
“Give it up,” says Isobel. She pulls Juliet down by the wrist and they lie side by side, faces towards the sky. They indulge Jonathan’s limited imagination, which can find nothing but trucks and guns in the cloud shapes.
At last, two San Juan boys separate Keith and Dirk: a truce.
Isobel inclines her mouth towards Juliet’s ear. “I think that one likes you.”
One of
the San Juan boys dips his fingers in the bucket of water and spritzes the girls, who sit up and gasp. “Told you,” says Isobel, in English. “He likes you.”
Another boy punches the first in the arm. They exchange punches back and forth, smiling sheepishly.
“Ignore them,” says Isobel. At any moment the weather could change — the clouds could roll, black and tumbling, blown by an angry wind — but it won’t. The children are not bored or hungry or tired, and it does not occur to them that a search might be underway.
If Juliet is giddy, if she is bold, if she exudes a vague hysteria, it is because she has no awareness of being afraid. Anxiety flickers deep under the skin, so far down it is interpreted as a thrill, as the hum of unease that accompanies adventure, enlivening the body, and it is with regret that the children watch the tide recede, become low enough for safe passage.
The San Juan boys clean up, kicking out the fire with their bare feet, tossing bones to the birds. One lifts Jonathan onto his narrow back and the descent proceeds quickly.
“Uh-oh,” says Isobel, the first to notice Heinrich and Andrew on the rocks below.
Everyone deflates just a little bit. The San Juan boy drops Jonathan gently. Without being close enough to hear what Heinrich is saying, everyone knows it is not good. Juliet spots Gloria on the beach, and is glad that her mother has been stopped by the fallen boulders, Emmanuel in her arms. Wrath pours off her.
The San Juan boys vanish into the landscape.
“Totally unacceptable!” Juliet hears.
“Pappie,” Isobel mutters under her breath. Isobel’s family speak to one another in English in public, but in private they often use Dutch or German.
“We’re fine!” Dirk shouts.
“Just ask us how bloody fine we are!” Heinrich has lost a sandal and his foot is cut. “All of your privileges — gone!”
“What privileges?” Dirk says, and Juliet is impressed by his boldness and stupidity.
Neither family is a hitting family, though for a moment, now that he’s near enough, Heinrich looks to be considering otherwise.
The Juliet Stories Page 8
