(They’ll look, but they’ll never find this place again.)
Spring wind crashes against eardrums and the children can’t hear a word their parents are saying.
Crunch. Something darts out of rotting weeds and ends underneath their tires.
“What the hell was that?”
“Oh God. We hit a dog.”
“We have to go back.”
The car reverses slowly and stops at a laneway. Their father gets out and walks to where the dog lies. They watch him shake his head. It is not a big farm dog, but smaller, like a terrier. It is not in a state to be picked up or delivered to its owner.
Slowly they drive up the stranger’s lane. Their father says: “Come with me, Juliet, Keith.” They don’t want to, but obey. He knocks on the door. A woman opens it, young, in cut-off jeans and a man’s T-shirt, paint-spattered like her bare arms and legs.
Their father explains the accident.
The woman says, “I knew this house was a mistake.”
She holds the door open for them and they stand in her gritty kitchen and eat one burnt cookie each. “He was just a puppy,” she tells them. She presses fists against her eyes, which look dry, hot, itchy. Juliet is still chewing when the woman flings herself in a crashing motion through the standing silence at their father, who opens his arms and braces her against his chest.
They stand like this, as their father stands now, feet in the ocean, breathing.
The woman lifts her head from their father’s chest and gazes up at him, anointing his Sunday clothes with wet paint; as Charlotte soaks him in salt water.
Everything he offers emanates naturally from his eyes, the calm assurance of his encircling arms. Of course she would want what he can give to her. Of course he would give it.
Their mother waits in the car; waits in the sand, on the beach.
They can hear Emmanuel howling, but he is different now, older. He is muttering to himself. He sits at his mother’s feet and stirs himself a hole.
Bram releases Charlotte, all but her hand, and she gathers her sodden skirt and accepts his assistance into a waiting boat. Carefully, Bram swings his bulk in beside her, the last to board. The engine putters, the panga turns, and they are off in a slur of wake.
The beach is deserted. It seems twice as quiet as it did before the protestors arrived, the way a house feels abandoned after a party, and dirty, and forlorn. They stand and look out into the bay for a long time. The tiny pangas skitter around the larger fishing boat, eventually fluttering and dispersing, and the big engine chugs and the Boat of Justice is dispatched, like that, out to sea.
Gloria sinks into the sand behind Emmanuel. She sets her face into her palms and lets her thick black hair drape and hide her like a blanket. Juliet and Keith bite their lips and glance at each other.
“Mom?”
But she doesn’t reply. She allows herself to tip sideways, to fall into the sand, to collapse. Her knees curl in towards her belly, her feet bare beneath a simple dark skirt, and her elbows and wrists curve before her face. Her chin tucks, her ribs rise and fall, and her eyelashes flutter against her cheek.
Ever so subtly, the children, even Emmanuel, remove themselves from her and begin digging a hole that will become a pool as the tide rises. No one sees the two men approaching, laden with equipment, until they are very near: gringos with tanned, roughened skin and ruffled greasy hair, and kind eyes that are yet not gentle.
One smiles at Juliet and Keith and raises his hand for quiet, though they have said nothing.
The other, the photographer, does not ask permission. He lifts the heavy eye of his camera and bends and circles, calculating the angle of the sun and the opening of the aperture. He shoots. He is not interested in the story or its context, only in the tableau made by the lovely fallen woman and the wild children who hold themselves apart from her.
He alone sees what Gloria has become, fallen onto the sand: she is iconic. He steals from her an image that will give a man a name for himself. It will win prizes.
But Gloria will despise it, and pretend it never happened.
Many years from now, Juliet will go looking for this photograph that has fallen into myth and that she cannot confirm exists. Seated at a library carrel, she will sail through rolls of microfilm and arrive, dizzy and nauseated, at this particular take on portraiture: unrelated to either real disaster or real deliverance, while appearing to portray both.
She will not quite believe that what she’s been hunting still lives to be found.
Sweating inside her winter coat, in the pulsing heat of the library’s overworked radiators, Juliet will look upon a beautiful figment told in black and white, a compressed image that speaks to the eye and calls to whatever it is missing. She can’t remember why her mother was fallen on the beach — perhaps she never knew — but not remembering gives her permission to see what a stranger saw and captured, and she will be washed by profound emotion, stabbing into the heart this truth: some grief cannot be touched.
Gloria sits up, resting on the heels of her hands. “What’s this?” Her eyes are dry.
The first man names the newspaper for which he is freelancing. “Could we ask you a few questions?”
“You’ve missed the boat.” Gloria’s hair is thick with sand. She frowns at the photographer, who lifts his lens to the harbour.
The other laughs and taps a cigarette from a packet, lights it. As an afterthought, he offers the packet to Gloria. She flicks her eyes at the children.
“No, thanks.”
“Yours?”
“Believe it or not,” she says.
“You are American.”
She nods, expressing disinterest in his questions, turning her gaze to the water.
“More Americans.” The man points up the beach. “More blond kids.”
Heinrich and his children are walking towards them, and Gloria sighs. “Dutch. They’ve nothing to do with anything.”
“But you are with the protestors?”
“Gloria!” Heinrich waves as his children run to meet their friends, except for Isobel, who never runs. She arrives cool and composed.
“You will excuse me.” Gloria stands and shakes sand off her skirt. She goes to Heinrich and they speak to one another in low tones. Her arms are folded across her chest, and so are his; though he smiles, she does not.
The freelancer turns to the children. “What are you kids doing in this town?”
“I live here,” says Isobel. “My mom is a doctor.”
He nods.
“My dad is on the Boat of Justice,” offers Juliet.
“The Boat of Justice,” the man repeats.
“To stop the American boat,” says Juliet.
“So you’re an American Sandinista,” says the man.
“No.” Juliet hesitates, her tongue curling around the o sound, lengthening it.
“Isobel! Dirk! Jonathan!” Heinrich is calling his children, and his voice has an edge. “We are not staying to play. Come. Now.”
Surprised, the children continue to dig, half-heartedly.
“Keith, Juliet, say goodbye to your friends.” Gloria’s artificial lilt does not disguise her command.
Isobel stands.
“Bye,” says Juliet.
“Um, bye.”
“Bye,” says Dirk.
“Bye,” Juliet says again.
Their parents are telling them to say goodbye for good, but they do not know this.
Gloria is not sober. She has gone to the bathroom to splash her face before returning to the party. Upon exiting she is met by her husband, who hands her a bottle of red wine, a going-away present: “For you, from the European fellow, the doctor.”
Her expression is fixed as she stares up and down the hallway and into the cour
tyard and kitchen, thronging with people.
“I didn’t invite him in, should I have?” says Bram.
Juliet and Keith press themselves, camouflaged, against the kitchen doorframe; they have already been tucked in once. The Friesen family is sleeping in a cramped room originally intended for servants, just off the kitchen — about as close to the party as actually being there. Noise, laughter, a sprawl of light as the door is opened by someone who thinks she’s discovered an extra bathroom.
The opened door is the kicker. They’ve left Emmanuel snoring softly at the soggy centre of the double bed where he will be joined later tonight — much later — by their parents, when the party’s over.
It is their last night in San Juan del Sur. Tomorrow they will rattle home to Managua with their parents to become schoolchildren once again. They have not been consulted, only informed of their changing circumstances: “All good things must come to an end.”
“For what it’s worth, it didn’t look like he wanted to come in,” says Bram to Gloria.
The children watch their mother accept the bottle.
She hesitates, then turns and walks slowly past, not seeing them. She is balancing the bottle in the cup of one hand like someone performing a trick, though she moves tentatively, as if struck and dazed. At the threshold to the porch the bottle teeters, and she seems to stand aside and watch it slip, its smash terrific, instantaneous, glass striking tile and shattering to splinters and blood-red splatter.
Juliet feels droplets spray her own legs.
Gloria’s feet are bare. Her hairline is soaked. She stands at the centre of the mess, a light smile tugging at her lips.
Andrew dashes towards her with a broom. “Now it’s a party — something’s been broken!” But Gloria isn’t in the mood to laugh.
Bram thinks he understands. He walks across broken glass and his arms wrap and hold her. Gloria looks up at him, and Juliet sees the other women looking up at him, and she sees that her mother is not the same. She is asking for something different, something her father may not have it in him to give.
She wants him to leave her alone. She wants him to let her stand unprotected in the middle of her own mess. She wants him not to tell her what to do or how to fix it, but just to let her be.
That is what Juliet takes. If she could slide back through time with a camera, she would point it at this, and she would shoot it for all to see. Bang.
DEAR RONALD REAGAN
Juliet is always writing.
She writes to her best friend Laci back home in Indiana. Her mother tells her to write to Grandpa Harold and Grandma Grace and to Oma Friesen, and she does, without complaint. She also writes letters that will never be sent, words tumbled into a lined notebook received as a Christmas gift, along with a set of fancy pens, The Encyclopedia of the Horse pocket guide, and a stationery set decorated with kittens, too fancy for any ordinary letter.
Dear Isobel, I miss you. I’m growing my hair out. My mom pierced my ears with a needle. She almost stopped after the first side. They’re kind of infected.
Dear Charlotte, Dad says we can come see you in Jalapa!!! Mom took us to a volcano, but mostly it’s school, school, school.
Dear Juliet-Older-Than-Me, Are you still living in Managua? Have you been to the beach again? Have you gotten to ride a horse?
———
Juliet and Keith’s new school is private, evangelical, with classes conducted entirely in Spanish. Rather than riding the bus, which is overcrowded to the point of comedy or tragedy, depending on one’s point of view, they are driven each way by their mother.
The school’s classrooms are painted turquoise or fuchsia or sunflower yellow, and are connected by corrugated zinc roofs that shelter concrete walkways from the sun but not the wind. Goats roam the weedy playing field, trimming the grass with their teeth.
At recess Juliet sits under a tree and writes.
Her classmates ask to see what she’s writing so diligently, so constantly, and they admire the pages upon pages of words in English, which none of them can decipher. Some of the girls stroke Juliet’s fine, fiery hair, and Juliet pinches the carved wooden cross hanging around her neck on a thick blue string, head bent, until the girls go away.
What’s wrong? they ask. They aren’t mean. They are curious. If anyone should recognize and sympathize with the impulse, it is Juliet. But she hates being the object of interest, being defined and misunderstood. She shakes her head and waits for them to leave her alone.
At home, Juliet works on a magazine. Juliet assigns Keith an article and he obliges with a story about beisbol, the country’s favourite sport. He curls in the lower bunk, poring over the daily newspaper, and includes the latest scores: Managua 7, Rivas 5; Leon 8, Granada 13. Juliet thinks these details are irrelevant. Her own piece describes the three-toed sloth that hangs from a branch in a tree across the street and never appears to move. The sloth may or may not be three-toed — Juliet is unable to count for certain — but she labels it as such, and draws a picture with arrows: greyish brownish fur, closed eyes, long claws. The result is discouraging: her pictures never turn out the way she plans them in her head, though she’s frequently pleased with what she writes — sometimes privately amazed, hardly believing the words came from her own head.
Maybe Juliet will be a writer.
She composes and sends a series of letters to the authors of her favourite books, requesting advice. Almost all neglect to reply — several are apparently dead — but within a month a huge cardboard box arrives on their porch in Managua, the delivery itself a miracle, given the city’s absurdist system of street addresses (theirs includes the directions “two blocks north of where the little tree used to be”). Encyclopedia Brown’s publishers have responded with charitable force: Juliet and Keith rip open the package to discover a generous collection of paperbacks. But the author’s letter looks suspiciously mimeographed. Though Juliet reads it carefully, she can discover no clues to How to Be a Writer. If there is a secret formula, the author of Encyclopedia Brown is not sharing.
She will have to figure it out on her own.
She has another letter to write. It has just occurred to her that she can, that letters travel to places otherwise impenetrable, and there are things that he needs to know, which she can tell him.
She will write to Ronald Reagan.
She feels the weight of this letter’s importance, and begins with a rough draft. Her mother corrects it, and Juliet copies this version onto a clean sheet of paper, folds it twice, and slides it into an envelope. The letter exits the country with a departing delegation from Pennsylvania, who will post it upon entering the United States.
Dear Ronald Reagan, the letter begins. You should come to Nicaragua and see what is happening here.
Juliet believes that in his busyness a visit is something Ronald Reagan has been overlooking, and all he needs is an invitation — hers. She imagines Ronald Reagan walking down this very street where the supposed three-toed sloth hangs, and seeing the children. She senses that the children are of particular importance. They will crowd around him and talk to him, they will explain, and he will stop paying for the Contras to fight.
She spends some weeks in eager anticipation, either of a letter or a visit.
Gradually Juliet thinks of the letter less and less, though it is more a matter of the idea losing its immediacy than of Juliet losing hope. She continues to wait, in pleasant and secret expectation. Even many years later, after Juliet is grown, even many years later, after Ronald Reagan has died, she finds herself in odd moments waiting, and she thinks: I am waiting for his letter.
This is her special gift and curse: the ability to have faith without evidence, to see vividly what isn’t there and what will never be.
Here is Ronald Reagan in his Oval Office in his White House. Though Juliet knows otherwise, the White House i
s a little cottage set in an emerald garden. Inside, the cottage is filled from end to end with one huge, egg-shaped wooden desk that dwarfs the President, who sits behind it impatiently, rummaging through heaps of letters and answering a big black phone.
His fingers linger on a crumpled envelope. The return address has caught his eye — who could be writing to him from Managua, Nicaragua? Zzzzpt, the gold-handled letter opener slides under the flap. Dear Ronald Reagan, he reads, in a child’s printing (Juliet has failed all attempts to learn proper handwriting). Not even halfway through the letter, Ronald Reagan is daubing his eyes. His heart is heavy. He continues.
The children. He has not considered them. He has not considered how some of them are being killed by his very own freedom fighters. How they lack for food sometimes, because of the war. How they are scared of his warplanes flying overhead, booming as they crash through the sound barrier. How the children at school, Juliet and Keith too, scatter and freeze when they hear that crushing noise, how everyone shouts that the Americans have come, that they’ve dropped the first bomb — the one everyone is waiting for — on Managua.
Of course, Juliet writes, it wasn’t a bomb after all. We are happy you haven’t dropped any bombs yet. The bomb shelters are holes in the ground, and only the children will be allowed in. I don’t know what we’re supposed to eat in there, Juliet writes.
Nobody here has done anything to you, she finishes. You should come and see and then you will know.
And Ronald Reagan, in his Oval Office, holds her letter in his age-spotted fingers, bends his head, and weeps. He is so thoroughly overcome that he must put his head in his arms on the desk, and tears flow down his wrist and smear Juliet’s words.
He is quiet like this for a long time, thinking about the children, remembering his own, but most importantly, his thoughts turn with curiosity and compassion towards this particular and extraordinary child, this Juliet, who lives in Managua, Nicaragua. He is thinking that he must invite this girl to come and visit him at the White House. He will order a special meal, discovering in advance Juliet’s favourite foods (mashed potatoes mixed with green peas, and chicken gravy), and there will be a fancy ball, and Juliet must dress up in a puffy skirt and twirl on the dance floor, and newspaper people will come and take pictures of her and print these pictures in their newspapers, and Juliet will answer questions like What is it really like in Nicaragua? and How does an eleven-year-old girl like you manage to change the President’s mind?
The Juliet Stories Page 10
