The Juliet Stories

by Carrie Snyder

  “Easy,” Bram says to Josiah. “If you need a break, take a break.”

  Josiah does not want a break; he wants a cigarette. Yuri lights one for him, and one for Gloria too. With the windows open, smoke and dirt stream through the vehicle like a river that tastes in a fine grit on Juliet’s tongue, inside her cheeks.

  “Have you ever seen a sky so white?” Gloria’s hand quivers as she lifts the cigarette to her mouth.

  “Uh-oh,” says Bram.

  A pickup truck blocks the road. The Jeep fishtails to a stop on stones. Stillness. Dust choking, drifting slowly downhill.

  “Which side are they on?” Gloria holds the cigarette, unfinished, but does not draw.

  “Not ours.”

  “Everybody out!” The leader stands in the truck bed. His men are lean, dressed in jungle fatigues in varying stages of decay; boys, really.

  The teenager who guards them cannot stop talking, words crashing against words like kite string unravelling into the sky, laughter, flashing teeth, excitement, hysteria. The others eviscerate the Jeep, packages and packs ripped open, Juliet’s own bag dumped. One of the boys steps onto her baby blanket.

  “No!”

  Time blinks, stalls. But the leader bends, flicks the blanket to the teenager, who offers it to Juliet. He grins. “For you.”

  Gloria uses the blanket to wipe Emmanuel’s howling face; woken prematurely from his nap, he is not happy.

  “Trouble’s come looking for you.” The leader sweeps his gun at them, addresses Bram, who stands in reply: “We’re going to Jalapa.”

  “You should go home instead.”

  Bram is silent.

  “She’s a nice truck. How does she run?”

  “We are going to Jalapa.”

  “Ah, my friends, it’s going to be a long walk.”

  “Give him the keys,” says Gloria in English, rising. Reflexively, one of the boys trains his gun on her.

  Bram steps between them. “Take what you want.”

  “Ah, thank you, thank you.” The leader reaches for Bram’s hand and shakes it as if he is concluding a pleasant business deal, slaps his shoulder.

  Their guard marches the family and Yuri and Josiah away from the road into leafless brush, pushing deeper and deeper into the lush mountain desert. Small plants can be seen growing everywhere, tough, pale scraps of life clinging, rooted beneath the dust, waiting for sustenance. Hanging on.

  Is this it? It does not occur to Juliet that it might be. She is thirsty, her mother has given Emmanuel her special blanket, and every winking shadow is snake-shaped.

  The teenager stops. “Wait here.” He pats Juliet’s head roughly, like an older brother might, before backing away, gun pointed at them, then turning and running.

  They hear the Jeep’s engine turning over. Dust from its exit, and the pickup’s, floats down to them.

  “I can’t believe it,” says Josiah. He’s excited. “I can’t fucking believe it. Contras. Right here.”

  “They’re operating pretty deep for the Contra,” says Bram.

  “Holy shit,” says Josiah.

  “Watch the language.”

  “I’m sorry. Fuck.”

  Bram wraps his arm around Gloria’s shoulder, the palm of his hand cradling her cheek, pulling her head gently against his body. She resists.

  “We quit,” she is crying. “We quit this job. We quit this country. We are going home. Do you hear me, Bram? We are done.”

  And Bram says: “Have faith, Gloria.”

  In the middle of the road are tire tracks, boot prints.

  “They took my baseball glove,” says Keith.

  Bram lifts him, protesting, to kiss the top of his head. They begin walking, slowly, following the road north and east.

  “Wait.”

  They all hear it: the rumble of a struggling engine in pursuit. Juliet instinctively scrambles away, but Bram calls her back. If the advancing vehicle is populated with enemies, so are the hills surrounding, and if Juliet’s dad believed only in that, he would never have come to this country in the first place, would never have put his family into a Jeep and driven these roads. The fact that Juliet and Keith and Emmanuel are here, in this landscape, in this moment, is proof that the worst can be changed into something else.

  They all hear what Gloria is muttering under her breath, as if it were being said by someone else: I give them back to you, Lord, I give them back to you, I release them, Lord, they’re yours, take them.

  A colourless Lada brakes on loose gravel — peeled-off roof, doughnut tires, and holes where once belonged headlights and windows.

  “Get in.” His white dress shirt flows loosely around thin arms; his gun, and his son, nowhere in sight. “Americanos.”

  Yuri balances Keith and Juliet, one on each knee, beside Gloria and Emmanuel in the back seat.

  “Your lap or mine?” says Josiah to Bram after a pause, and laughter pours like medicine down their throats. Juliet can feel herself breathing again. She tugs the blanket from Emmanuel and sinks her hands into its softness, wrapping her wrists like a fur muff. Emmanuel hits her and grabs.

  “I don’t want to leave,” she tells her mother. “I don’t want to go home.”

  “Give the blanket to Emmanuel, Juliet. Now.”

  Afternoon shrinks to twilight as the ancient engine broaches corners and guts its way into a valley and out again, where await them plots of jocote trees and orange groves and cool pines barely visible in the raw blackness of night. The driver refuses their invitation to stay the night, but not a few of the American dollars Bram has kept hidden in the lining of his boot. Yuri’s pocket flashlight illuminates the rutted main street of downtown Jalapa.

  Juliet steps over a narrow, garbage-strewn concrete channel that separates the road from a line of attached houses. Charlotte waits in the doorway, electricity off, the cramped room alight with candles. A pot of beans bubbles on her little gas stove over licking tongues of flame, blue and orange.

  Charlotte has a hug for each of them, but Bram holds her at arm’s length. “This has been a day and a half,” he says.

  “And Gloria,” says Charlotte. Their hair lingers together as their heads touch and part.

  “I couldn’t let Bram come all by himself,” says Gloria. “Could I.”

  “Pineapple?” offers Charlotte.

  Keith and Juliet eat and eat. They gorge themselves until their tongues prickle and burn with the fruit’s sweet acid, and then they rinse sticky elbows and chins in the pila standing in the tiny courtyard.

  Stunted banana trees are growing all around them, right out of the dirt floor, and the shadows of bats pass in and out of the house through the wide opening in the tin roof. It is just the two of them here, spying on the grownups through jungly leaves. She loves her brother — but is this retrospect? They have the capacity to argue over the most insignificant subjects, over who sits where, over who saw what first; they toss magic phrases at each other like amulets, lists of words that have weight only because they’ve agreed between the two of them that they do: black ball beats them all, called it, stamped it, red ball, silver ball, no backsies, no cheatsies, and others she can no longer recall. And there is no one to ask: Do you remember? Can you tell me, do you remember what they meant?

  Here they are, still and together in this private interior forest, and she loves him. She loves that it is the two of them, that they have each other for protection, that in the worst of moments she can glance at him and away and know: he knows too. Even if they never talk about it (because they never do). Even so. He knows. He knew.

  What it feels like to float unmoored, to be carried on the breeze or blown by hurricane winds, to be given back to God. What it feels like to part suddenly from friends, to live without warning, with terminal uncertainty, to know everythi
ng in an instant will change. What it feels like to be called, to let go of the self, a feeling of running amidst an epic rainstorm, drenched and amazed, shot far beyond the boundaries of what is proper and expected.

  Maybe this is what it feels like to be a boy with a gun. Maybe.

  Think of the things these two could say to each other, here, under green-veined leaves. But it seems they never say the things that could be said, and it seems that is okay too, because what could these two say to each other that would fit more perfectly than a line of words strung together by magic, a spell that binds them, brother and sister, in this house lit by flame, in this town under siege, near the border of a country that is not theirs and never will be, and which they do not claim?

  Here they are. Let them be.

  TWO

  Of all the songs sung by the Roots of Justice volunteers, the one Juliet loves most asks, “Where have all the flowers gone?” Each verse follows a repetitive pattern, carrying forward until the song curves around to end at its own beginning, illuminating it so that the meaning changes, she sees differently, she understands where all the flowers are growing in the first place — in a graveyard, beneath which soldiers lie. The delicious shiver as the guitar strums into its final surprise of Gone to flowers, every one.

  Why does this song so affect her? It is composed of only a few spare lines, but it needs nothing more to build a cumulative picture so vivid, so elemental, of the double forces of creation and destruction. What are flowers, if not for plucking? What is youth, if not for abandon? What are seasons, if not for turning? What are soldiers, if not for war?

  But war is never mentioned in the song.

  How can the most important part be left out and the song still say everything that needs saying? But it does.

  Juliet is going to tell a story. She knows the rules, the five W’s, five sister witches who must be beguiled into gathering and pouring out their tinctures and their powders, lest the story emerge from the pot deformed, unbreathing, lest it bubble until it is burnt away, stillborn. Magic. It’s as good as anything for explaining why one tale comes out for good and another does not. Effort, though a fine starting place, is not the half of it.

  This story emerges in a dark barroom; they serve underage, and she thinks she is in love with the boy who listens to it. This is a theme. She will give it to the ones she loves, and she will love the ones who listen. It grows with her. It fills journals: a black hardcover with blank pages meant for sketches; another, a gift, leather-bound; several flimsy drugstore notebooks. It ages. It is stamped into three passports. Years separate it from itself, decades. It is a silent argument, a dream she waits to have again, an album of photographs never taken.

  Who? Juliet. What? Going away. Where? To Nicaragua. When? When she was still a child, aged ten. Why? Yes, why? Because she went. Because it happened (didn’t it?). Because it happened (not like this).

  There is no time to waste: Juliet knows this. A test has found something in her brother’s blood, a disruption, a word that can be spoken only in a whisper, and only when there is no way to avoid saying it altogether. The more it is said, the more it multiplies — that is what it seems to Juliet. Cancer, cancer, spreading on the tongue, filling the cheeks, spilling into the air, mutating and deadly; but Juliet is a child and deadly does not mean to her in childhood what it will mean to her when she grows up. Neither does cancer; both glittering, but without consequence. When she is a child, the words are separate from her, crusted like jewels inside stone, cannot be dug out and admired and feared.

  She knows enough to be afraid.

  She does not know enough not to be just a little bit thrilled. Maybe she never will.

  Juliet and Keith perch on duffel bags, wearing, for once, clean clothes. Juliet’s shoes have been purchased for this occasion at the American store, where imported goods can be bought with dollars. She already regrets her choice: their electric blue, their lack of laces, which she so admired on the shelf, look ridiculous in the murky sunshine that pours through hot, dirty windows.

  Bram hugs Gloria and speaks into her hair. She is weeping.

  Juliet looks at Keith, who is looking at the floor.

  Out the windows are coconut palms and broken concrete and trucks painted military green and soldiers smoking cigarettes. Will Juliet ever see anything like this again?

  But she must.

  Call me, call me as soon as you — Bram — and I’ll come as soon as I — call — please, forgive me, what choice do we — you never — we haven’t — this isn’t, is it? The end?

  Emmanuel sleeps slumped in the seat between Keith and Juliet. The airplane is half empty, the largest plane on which Juliet has ever flown, expansive, enormous, and plush. The stewardesses offer the children colouring books and crayons and any kind of pop or juice they might desire, but Keith will only take a small sip and shake his head, no thank you.

  Gloria has disappeared. At first Juliet thinks she has gone to the bathroom, but she is gone for so long that cannot be it, no, and then Juliet begins to hear, so slowly, creeping into her eardrums, a muffled wailing from the rear of the plane, a keening that rises and goes on and on, and she begins to know, horribly, that this is her mother.

  This is the sound of her mother breaking into little pieces.

  Juliet stands, like a sleepwalker. Keith’s eyes are closed, weary.

  Juliet sways. Suspended in thin air, she floats along the carpeted aisle until she comes upon this small disturbance, these women in blue skirts and jackets pinning to the seat this crumbled, echoing body: her mother’s. Her mother’s head rocks from side to side on orange fabric, hair mashed and wild, in one hand a lit cigarette that is burnt almost to her knuckle, in the other a glass of white wine, which the stewardess is whispering to her to lift, to drink, to swallow. And the plane floods with consequences, the plane careers the sky with all that will happen, all that may, all that is being left behind, and all that refuses to be.

  Juliet can’t see out these windows. It isn’t dark yet, but she cannot see. The plane is over water, but she cannot see. She can’t see the blue and green earth turning below her, pulling her towards the endings that await.

  Keep it like this. Float. Suspend.

  Drink, drink, you’ll feel better.

  My son has cancer.

  He’ll be fine, says the stewardess. You have to believe.

  Tell me, asks Juliet, what could you hold in your hands to prevent anything bad from happening ever? What could you wear around your neck, what could you eat or drink, to what god could you pray, what could you burn, what could you promise? And if you knew, would you?

  The story begins like this. The story begins: Juliet is telling her story.

  PART TWO

  DISRUPTION

  APARTMENT NUMBER THREE

  Oma Friesen’s first name is Elizabeth.

  In the New Testament, Elizabeth has grown to old age unable to bear a child; she is visited by her young relative Mary, who has been told by an angel that she will bear the son of God, and at this news, in Elizabeth’s belly, a baby leaps for joy. Both will bear sons: fruit given to women who believe that nothing is impossible with God.

  If Oma Friesen were named for the biblical Elizabeth she cannot know, and she wonders, because she has come to believe that a name is a fortune, a gift from parent to child. But the question had not arisen in her before her parents died, a year apart, each of a brain hemorrhage. Oma Friesen was seventeen — and nobody’s oma — when her father went to bed with a vicious headache and did not rise again, and eighteen when her mother’s coffin nestled into the ground beside her father’s. And though she was not alone in the world, her sisters were grown and married with small children, and she was free to do what most young women of her era could not: she escaped.

  “Where did you go?”

  She went to West Germany, whic
h was then a nation impoverished and defeated after the Second World War, to the village of Bad Dürkheim, where she worked for a Christian agency that housed, clothed, fed, and instructed forty children chosen from those families most desperate in the surrounding villages and towns. The children were not orphans, but Oma Friesen, herself an orphan, believed their situation was more pathetic. These were children abandoned not by fate but by those who should love them most, sent away out of raw necessity, the ruthlessness of desperation.

  The agency’s focus was the children’s moral instruction. Oma Friesen thought little of that but kept her opinions to herself. Already she was the woman she would become: compassionate, but practical.

  Now she is no longer young. Her only son, Juliet’s father, is long grown. For many years she lived by herself. During those years she established small and particular routines, which she continues to follow though she is no longer alone. Juliet and her family, all but Bram, have come to stay; they have nowhere else to go.

  Every day, even on Saturdays and Sundays, Oma Friesen dresses in clothes that look the same: off-white elastic-waisted pants creased down the centre of each leg, a flowing flowered top, and running shoes. She sits at her table and eats an English muffin drizzled with honey and drinks a cup of black, unsweetened tea, and just before eight, she leaves the apartment to ride the bus downtown, where, on a shabby, quiet street, in a rambling brick house that has been converted into a shelter, she counsels girls who are troubled by unwanted fruit.

  Oma Friesen used to manage a home for unwed mothers — girls who had been sent from away to birth their babies in secret, adopt them out, and return to their families unscathed — but such homes have gone out of fashion. The new shelter is for girls who have been hurt or abandoned, who are angry and suffer addictions, and who long to keep their babies.

  It is Oma Friesen’s job to listen to the girl, and to ask the girl to listen for the baby leaping with joy inside her womb.