“Nice day for a hike.” Andrew pulls Heinrich’s rage onto himself, gently. He winks at the kids. “Where were you hiding?”
“We weren’t hiding,” says Dirk.
“This will never happen again,” says Heinrich.
Of course it won’t. It can’t, though it’s nothing to do with a grown-up’s decree, one way or the other. Escape is like being struck by lightning, as rare and as inexplicable. Being found again? Well, that’s nothing special. That happens daily: interruptions that startle children back into the world of time and safety, and the rules that would bind them here for good.
“I’m too angry to hug you,” Gloria says, even as she squeezes until Juliet and Keith think they will pop. “Stupid, stupid children! How could you be so careless with your precious lives?”
It is impossible not to feel ashamed. The shame seems unfair, a layer of adult misery burdening their happy day. Neither Keith nor Juliet wishes to share the details — any part of it — with their mother. She would never understand. And they see, suddenly, that it is her they were escaping, her and all the rest of them: the grown-ups.
The sound of the kettle whistles in the Roots of Justice kitchen, the clatter of coffee being prepared and served, the companionable murmur of voices: Andrew’s and Gloria’s and Heinrich’s. For supper Andrew will make his specialty: omelettes to order, with a choice of tomatoes, onion, and queso fresco, a soft white cheese. There is a surfeit of eggs in San Juan’s market, and a dearth of much else.
Clara arrives carrying a bottle of red wine, and Gloria and Heinrich join her on the porch. She is not as interested in the story of the foolish children as Heinrich thinks she ought to be.
“They are here and well, as far as I can tell.” She kicks off her sandals and tucks her bare feet under her on the swinging wooden bench. “They used their common sense. They didn’t attempt to walk back to shore until high tide had passed. Besides, punishment is futile, wouldn’t you agree, Heinrich?”
“Not if it prevents future disaster,” says Heinrich.
“And does it?” his wife asks. “I should very much like to know.”
The grown-ups have not finished eating when the power is cut.
Ahhh is the sound around the table. The children hear it from the porch, where already it is dark. The hunk of moon reflects off the water in the bay, and the rocks and their cave are far away, vanished, though not from the mind’s eye. They hear the clink of glass on glass and laughter as someone attempts to pour wine in the dark — no, it is Gloria’s laughter they hear.
Clara comes onto the porch. “We are going home,” she tells her children, who fail to rise. Heinrich follows and presses against his wife, his fingers kneading her shoulders.
“Stay,” he says, but she shrugs herself away.
She’s so tired, she says, by the end of the day. Her mind just shuts off.
Andrew lights candles and drips wax to stick them into plastic cups, which he arranges along the low porch wall.
“Oh, please, won’t you stay?” Gloria goes to Clara as if to touch her, though she does not.
It is at this moment that gunfire rattles. It could be coming from the street beside them, that is how near it sounds. Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud, quicker than Juliet can click her tongue. Automatic weaponry. And then a shrieking sound in the air, wailing, cutting the sky as it falls. Silence. And again the shrieking fall.
Their panic shocks them, the pushing and shoving, Gloria crying for Emmanuel, whom Juliet remembers was near her, sitting on his bottom and playing with a Dinky car, when the gunfire began. She could see him then but not now, though there is no reason for it — has she gone blind? — and she is on hands and knees searching the porch, knocking her head on the swing.
“Gloria,” says Heinrich in a clear voice. “Gloria, I am holding Emmanuel in my arms. He is right here with me.”
Andrew blows out the candles.
“God, we came here to get away from a bomb.” Gloria’s voice shakes.
Clara calmly calls out the children’s names, one by one, like a teacher taking attendance. She asks them to reply “I am well,” and they obey.
Andrew points at the lit sky. “It’s not a bomb. It’s tracer fire. Harmless as fireworks. It’s coming from the army base up the hill. They’re looking for something.”
Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a.
“And what the hell is that?” Gloria is a shadow in the doorway, stroking Emmanuel’s head.
“Anti-aircraft artillery, also from the base. Something’s come too close to shore. Probably a drone.”
“American?”
“We’ll never know,” Clara says briskly. “This is not our business and not for us to know.”
“What’s a drone?” asks Keith.
“It is nothing,” says Clara. “We have to live here, and you do not.”
“Clara,” says Heinrich.
“I’m going home,” she says.
“The children stay until this is over.”
“Fine. I need the quiet.” She walks down the porch steps. “Safe.” She lifts her arms, offering them her vision of the sky, which continues to rain tracer fire. “Perfectly safe.”
“A drone,” says Heinrich clearly, so that Clara can hear him as she walks away, “is a plane that flies without a pilot. It is fitted with cameras to collect information. Maybe it is taking a picture of my wife right now. It is known as a Blackbird.”
“Like a spy plane,” says Keith with some excitement.
Juliet watches Clara disappear into the darkness. She can’t see Isobel’s expression clearly, lit only by the flickering orange haze, but she senses that Isobel has watched her mother walk away before.
Isobel turns to Juliet and smiles. “Sleepover!” Juliet understands: they are in no danger of being punished further for today’s adventure. It is over, displaced in their parents’ minds, forgotten like a paragraph in a book that was never meant for grown-ups, that grown-ups could never understand even if they cared enough to try.
Andrew and Gloria wait to take their cue from Heinrich.
The artillery fire appears to have stopped for the moment, but he says nothing about leaving. “Does anyone have a cigarette?”
Gloria shifts her weight but doesn’t reply.
“We want to have a sleepover, Pappie.”
“Direct this request to our gracious hosts.” Heinrich sweeps into a partial bow.
Later, much later, fresh cigarette smoke drifts into Juliet’s sleeping lungs. Her feet are tangled in the sheet and Isobel’s arm is thrown over her own, making an X across the bed. Her hand is numb but she hesitates to move away.
Later, much later, Juliet pads from bedroom to bathroom. What does she see, like a spy camera, like infrared radiation collected on a fuzzy screen? Two grown-ups on the porch, his hands pushed under her heavy hair, her face turned and closed, soft and wet, and neither giving any consideration to something hanging overhead in the sky, circling, circling, encrypting their kiss with its secret eye.
“I’ve put in a call to Managua,” says Andrew in the kitchen the next morning.
“Let me talk to Bram when he calls back.” Gloria pours hot diluted powdered milk from a pan into her cup of coffee.
“Word is,” says Andrew, “a Russian cargo carrier offshore has caught the Americans’ interest. I’m going to pitch Bram on bringing the next delegation here.”
Without thinking, Gloria reaches for the packet of cigarettes on the table and lights one. “I’ve made a mistake,” she says. Juliet thinks that is what she hears as she comes into the kitchen with Isobel.
“Never, not you,” Andrew says, and to the girls, “You slept.”
He turns off the stove under the pan of milk, and Gloria walks to the open window to blow a stream of smoke away, as if the girls might not n
otice.
“How would you like your eggs, ladies?”
“Over easy,” says Isobel, and Juliet says, “Sunny side up.”
Gloria flicks the burning cigarette through the bars crossing the window and turns around. “Scrambled.” She is laughing.
PHOTOGRAPH NEVER TAKEN
The Roots of Justice rolls into San Juan del Sur, a travelling circus of Americans spilling from minibuses, waving signs and wafting cigarette smoke, trailed by a pack of foreign reporters and cameramen who anticipate bagging the story of the week: a showdown in disputed waters between a Russian cargo carrier and an American warship deployed to force it to change its course.
Juliet, Keith, and Emmanuel stand on the porch of the Roots of Justice house and watch their beach fill up and spill over. They are looking for their dad, and when he bursts from the milling crowd, they shout and wave. He jogs across the stretch of pavement and up the steps and they wrap themselves around his massive limbs and breathe him in. He smells of apple cider, slightly soured.
“Holiday’s over,” says Gloria from the open doorway, and she goes to the kitchen to start washing dishes. There is no cook and she will be in charge.
Bram follows, children hanging off him like monkeys off the branches of a tree. “Can we start bringing folks in?” he asks. “Beds all set up, everything ready?”
“Hello to you too,” says Gloria.
“I love you.” Bram doesn’t hesitate. He places his hands on her face and kisses her warmly.
“Yuck!” The children drop to the floor.
“Everything’s ready.” Gloria’s smile fights against itself.
Emmanuel screams frantically, arches his back, beats his mother’s legs. She bends and lifts him. “Did you bring Charlotte?” she asks. “I could use some help with this one if I’m going to get a thing done.”
In moments the house where they have been staying for weeks, rattling around its empty rooms, is transformed by the presence of a crush of guests. Sand crunches underfoot. A toilet is clogged, and the woman responsible churns frantically at its handle. Armpits leak odour. Wet towels dangle on lines strung across the courtyard. A radio crackles. Smoke drifts. Feet shuffle.
On the front porch, Gloria offers a mid-afternoon snack of cut fruit. Juliet and Keith circulate with a sign-up sheet asking for volunteers to wash dishes, cook, go to market. They return the page, filled with names, to their mother, who is in the kitchen mixing up punch dosed with a generous slug of rum.
“You should have added cleaning the bathrooms,” says Andrew, who has just spent half an hour applying his negligible plumbing skills to the problem of the overflowing toilet.
“I’m just getting started. I’m easing them into it — just you wait.” Gloria hands him a drink and sends Juliet and Keith outside to play.
Their beach has been overrun, not just by Roots of Justice but by a swarm of organizations and non-profits, all come together to protest against the United States of America and its warship. The ship can’t be seen, though Juliet imagines she sees it, a mirage on the horizon, a flash of white. The other ship is out there too, invisible: if Ronald Reagan is to be believed, it carries a shipment of Soviet-made fighter jets, though the Sandinista government says it is merely dropping into port to receive a load of Nicaraguan shrimp. Either way, the protestors argue that it has the right to dock, to move through a sovereign nation’s waters unchallenged.
Juliet and Keith tread like spies. English is the dominant language, pronounced in the accents of America: the Southern drawl, the flattened Midwestern grade, the West Coast wave and the East Coast punch.
Charlotte is easy to find amidst the throng, kneeling on a white bedsheet spread flat over the sand, its edges held in place by stones. Emmanuel busily dips his fingers into paint and whacks the sheet. Charlotte is writing the words Boat of Justice in large, looping letters across the fabric.
“Come and help!” She waves to Juliet and Keith. She wants them to stamp their handprints and footprints in primary colours around the words — messy and deeply satisfying work.
At four o’clock the sun looks as if it might stay forever perched above their heads, like a benevolent god. No matter how long you’ve been there, it is always a surprise when it begins to fall, and how precipitously, crashing into the sea and leaving behind the blackness of a primitive sky, nothing but stars and moon.
Charlotte hangs their creation over the porch wall to dry.
The house is candlelit. It lacks a central gathering room with ample table and chairs, so guests line up through the kitchen doorway to load plates with beans and rice, tortillas, salad, before perching themselves in odd improvised places to eat, heads bent over plates balanced on knees: in the hallway and courtyard, on the porch, down the steps, and even on the curb along the street.
“This is going well,” Bram tells Gloria as he passes by. She is eating with the children in the kitchen, at the breakfast bar, on stools.
She lifts an eyebrow. “You say that like you’re surprised.”
“I’ve found a Nicaraguan school that will take the kids. Private but not exclusive. Classes entirely in Spanish,” he says. “If you’ll come back to Managua.”
Juliet and Keith hold themselves perfectly still. Silently their mother wipes Emmanuel’s mouth with his shirt. He is standing on her lap. Whatever she is thinking, it cannot be read on her face.
On the beach, the flames of a bonfire rise. Bram circulates through the rooms of the house, reminding delegates of the early-morning prayer meeting, though they are free, of course, to join the party on the beach.
It goes on through the night.
Emmanuel and Keith race Dinky cars down the hallway, on hands and knees, crashing them into walls with exploding sound effects, a game they share despite their age difference. Though the hour is early, their father permits the play: anything to rouse the volunteers, young and old, fuzzy with booze, some of whom glare with unguarded hostility at the boys, though others chirp unconvincingly, “How cute.”
Early-morning prayer meeting is a quiet affair. Gloria serves café con leche.
It has been decided that the group will gather at a hut on the beach that serves a generous — and cheap — breakfast of eggs with gallo pinto and tortillas. Following the meal, a press conference has been planned, and then the Roots of Justice will launch the “Boat of Justice,” a fishing vessel hired to carry protestors out to sea, into disputed waters, to float between the American warship and the Soviet freighter.
“I’m going on the boat.” Charlotte slides into Juliet’s chair, pushing against her thigh so that they both fit.
“We’re not.” Gloria sits with the children at a round table off to one side. The children devour a plate of platanos, thick, gummy fried bananas, licking caramel stickiness off fingers. Above them the roof is of thickly woven dried palm leaves, populated by sleeping bats.
“I want to go too,” says Juliet.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Gloria.
Surely this is not a scripted moment: after the press conference, Gloria walks the children towards their father, into the ring of cameras, and he touches each on the head and says goodbye. He kisses Gloria. Later today, footage of the family will flicker briefly on American network television. Bram will appear, hair blowing, backed by the ocean: “This is not a publicity stunt. Our job is to witness. We also serve who only stand and wait.”
“All aboard!” calls Bram, and the waters throng with Americans churning towards the little motorboats, called pangas, that will ferry them to the larger vessel anchored in the deep waters of the bay.
Charlotte runs past them, wrapped in the colourful painted bedsheet. It flutters around her shoulders like a superhero’s cape. She is barefoot, so it is a mystery what trips her up — the sheet, her own toes, her flowing yellow sundress? She stumbles, tumbles, splashes all
the way under the waves and then gasps to the surface, helpless and struggling with laughter.
Bram grasps her outstretched hands and pulls her upright, and she leans into his bulk, still laughing, though her face is upset, humiliated — young. Juliet sees the paint smearing, dissolving off the sheet. Bram speaks to Charlotte gently, pulling her wet hair into his closed palm, wringing it out at the nape of her neck.
It is a shred of a moment that adheres to the curved rear of Juliet’s eyeball: the shape the two of them make could be a different day, another woman gazing up at Juliet’s father with wide eyes, asking for something it seems only he can offer.
Before Nicaragua, before here, the Friesens are Americans in a small town in Indiana. Of a Sunday they go for a drive in
the country, but no matter how far they drive, they are never far from somewhere: from a tidy farm property, from a well-tended orchard with shacks to house migrant labourers during the picking season, from the bell tower of a church in the next town over.
The conversation from the front seat flows musically over the children’s heads, drawn out by the movement of the world outside the windows. They pass a wooded lot with a FOR SALE sign nailed to a rotten fencepost.
“When we find our fortune,” says their mother, “we’ll live right here.” (But they won’t.)
“We’ll build our house out of trees we’ll chop down with our bare hands.”
“We’ll have chickens.”
“And a horse!” says Juliet.
“We’ll clear a spot for a big truck patch,” says their father. He slows the car and performs a three-point turn in order to drive by the property again, letting them drift past the rutted laneway and idle to a stop in the road. “There’s room for a horse,” he says.
“I’d like one too,” says their mother.
“Then we’ll have two.” (But they won’t.)
“Goodbye, see you soon,” the family waves out the windows to their imaginary log house in the woods, the mare and the stallion and the foal, the truck patch of vegetables, rows lined with straw to keep down the weeds.
The Juliet Stories Page 9
