The Juliet Stories

by Carrie Snyder

  The game progresses over several recesses as the school year struggles towards its bludgeoned end. The day is particularly hot. The children should be swimming in northern lakes or lounging on concrete beside community pools; instead they gather under the slim shade of the sumacs, frantic with enforced boredom. Under the circumstances, anything might happen, anything to slice the day wide open.

  Lazily, a girl in crisp white shorts and a sky-blue polo shirt turns to Juliet and says, “I dare your friend to take off her Paki scarf.”

  Juliet does not reply. She has assumed herself invisible, and is at once amazed and appalled to discover that she has been seen and observed.

  Juliet’s friend shrugs, refuses. Her name is Nabihah, and she is accustomed to people, even teachers, claiming they cannot remember how to pronounce correctly such strange syllables. She tells Juliet, when Juliet asks, that her name means nothing here in Canada; it means only different.

  Nabihah will not fall for the girl’s trick, the appearance of inclusion.

  “Okay, then I dare her” — pointing — “to take off her glasses.”

  “So?” Juliet’s bespectacled friend throws her chin back like she’s taking a blow. Juliet realizes how little she knows about this girl, Mary Ellen, who is removed twice weekly from school to attend mysterious counselling appointments arranged by her mother, who is not her birth mother or her stepmother or even her adopted mother — she is a foster mother. The foster mother, who is Catholic, gave her the name; in the time Mary Ellen calls before, her name was Crystal.

  “So what? That’s all? That’s a stupid dare. I take my glasses off all the time.”

  Silently Juliet telegraphs danger, but Mary Ellen is slipping the frames over her ears. One of the boys, slight and blond, removes the glasses from her hand, which opens to let him. Mary Ellen’s eyes blink rapidly, shrunken in a face that looks undrawn, exposed. “I did it. See? Now give them back.”

  “Make us,” says the dare’s originator.

  Juliet recognizes that it is her duty as a friend to say something. But if she does they will turn on her, their instincts tuned to weakness and fear, and she is not brave in this new country. She is not courageous. She is not herself at all, the self she left behind in Nicaragua, the self who followed fisher boys into a seaside cave, who ate shark.

  She is not like her brother, who is at least as brave as he ever was, who shrugs off cancerboy, who says, with honest curiosity, “What do they know?”

  Because she knows what the Canadian children know: they know how to torture. They are looking for something simple: proof of their own power. They want tears and the humiliation of begging; their contentment depends upon it, and they will not be deterred. The scene will proceed as written. But Nabihah, tiny, her black eyes like polished stones, steps forward; Nabihah says, “Stop.” And what seemed inevitable suddenly is not.

  Juliet imagines that Nabihah’s hidden hair is cropped short around her head.

  They don’t say Why should we? They don’t say Paki.

  They don’t like Nabihah and they don’t know her name, but the surprise of her certainty commands respect. Juliet feels the distance between herself and Nabihah expanding; she thinks, despairingly, We will never be friends.

  The blond boy throws the glasses into the dirt at their feet. One arm is twisted and no longer sits properly on Mary Ellen’s ear. She’s gone crooked.

  “My mom is going to kill me, she’s going to kill me, she’s going to kill me.”

  The way she says this makes Juliet think it might be true.

  The danger, for the unwanted, cannot be quantified. It lodges inside the body and the mind, poison seeping from a secret wound. I am not wanted, the rejected child says to herself; she finds it entirely possible to believe that she is unwanted because of some want within, and thus the want within is invented, and recurs, replicates itself as voraciously as a cancerous cell.

  She hears his voice all the way from the foyer, instant recognition that pops like a bubble in her brain. Blindly, possessed of a desperate joy she has not previously known, Juliet throws off her backpack and tears down the stairs and past the laundry room (where a woman in black is folding silky items on top of the dryer), sprinting into Oma Friesen’s apartment, darting along the hallway, looking in every room until she finds her father, and flings herself into his arms.

  He lifts her like a toy and squeezes her against his chest. “My girl, you’ve grown so long and tall. How can this be?”

  She is too overwhelmed to reply.

  It isn’t until she is set back down that the room slides into focus — the sickroom, air dank with expelled mucous — and the people gathered in it — her entire family, and her oma, all of them, all together, here, in another country.

  For a moment no one says anything. No one can. Then Keith begins to cough, and Bram, who is unaccustomed to seeing his pain, bends at his son’s side and tries to hold him, to soothe him, placing his big hands on Keith’s head the way Juliet’s fingers stroke the cat in apartment number one.

  “I’m not leaving,” Bram says (no one has asked).

  ———

  The girl’s heart jams her throat with its throbbing. She stands frozen, one hand flat against the closed apartment door with the cat twisting around her ankle, rubbing its naked, deep ear into the bones of her bare foot. There are noises in the foyer. She’s lingered too long, but her opportunities have grown scant now that her father is here to stay.

  Her needs are bold, demanding. She has found patches of white fur on her clothes or caught in the pale hairs on the backs of her arms, evidence that is proof of her daring, proof that she is known elsewhere. That she knows things no one else knows, or knows she knows.

  She knows that a single woman lives in apartment number one, older than her own mother but not as old as her grandmother, and she has seen the woman, in pressed pants, snapping towels in the laundry room and folding each with symmetrical precision. The woman’s short, fluffed hair is a brash shade of red, and she has told the girl, in passing, “My hair used to be exactly the colour of yours.” (This is something grown-ups say often to the girl, or a variation on the theme — my daughter’s hair was just like yours; my grandson’s hair is just like yours; I always hoped for a child with hair like yours.)

  The girl presses her cheek to the door. She has no escape route. The foyer door does not slam immediately; she im­agines it propped open as bags drop heavily to the floor. Voices. The girl relaxes fractionally, her spine compressing: the noise belongs to her parents, not to the woman in apartment number one.

  Her parents have come into the building talking, stuck in a conversation they do not wish to end though they have arrived at their destination. The girl slumps to pet the cat. Her parents cannot know that their voices, in the foyer, carry as if amplified into every apartment. If they knew they would stop themselves, if they could. But perhaps they could not.

  “I don’t believe it,” says the mother. “I just don’t. Why did you wait so long to tell me, if you knew?”

  “There wasn’t a funeral or any kind of announcement.”

  The voice of a small child breaks in, whining, and the mother says, “You are a big boy and I’m not going to carry you.”

  The father says, “I didn’t realize you would be so —”

  “I can only think of the children. I can’t stop thinking of them.”

  The father says, “It closes a chapter — that’s how I see it.”

  “The hell it does, the hell it does, my God. This has nothing to do with you!”

  “I could tell you the same thing.”

  “Why did he do it? Was there a note?”

  “This is a minor incident in another country that happened to a family we hardly knew. Put it into perspective.”

  “Stupid man,” says the mother. (The mother
is not allowed to use that word, thinks the girl.)

  There is the sound of a small scuffle, footsteps, the child’s incoherent protests disappearing down the stairs, followed by silence. The girl takes a huge breath and opens the door, understanding too late that she has made a mistake: the foyer is not empty. Outside apartment number one, the mother sits on the bottom step, surrounded by plastic bags of groceries.

  Silently, with the minutest of movements, the girl pulls the door shut behind her. An appealing thought alights: that her mother cannot see her, that she is invisible to the world, that the act of entering and exiting these other apartments is literally transformative.

  She is the liminal girl.

  Gloria’s eyes are puffed and red. Her lips are half open. She rises slowly to standing.

  She and Juliet face each other with something that resembles astonishment but may be simple unfamiliarity. Juliet thinks, She’s always with Keith. She’s never with me.

  “What on earth, Juliet? What —”

  “What were you and Dad talking about? Who’s dead?”

  Gloria shakes her head, attempting to focus her eyes, but she cannot. “Oh, Juliet, I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you.” And Juliet suddenly loses her breath, gasps, though the thought she has formed makes no sense: Keith is dead. She cannot say the words out loud because it will make them true.

  Gloria does not recognize Juliet’s fright. Oblivious, she takes her time, arriving slowly at words as she seems to weigh what should be said or left unsaid. “Juliet, it’s Heinrich. Do you remember Heinrich and Clara, and your friend Isobel?” As if Juliet might already have forgotten them, as if coming to Canada might have excised vast landscapes of memory.

  “Mom, what’s happening? What is it?”

  “Heinrich is . . . he passed away. I don’t know anything more.”

  But she does, and Juliet knows it. Juliet is breathing again. She is angry. “Why did he die? Was it . . .” — Juliet struggles to form the word — “cancer?”

  Gloria says, “Oh no, no, no, not that, nothing like that.”

  But her mother knows something she isn’t saying. Juliet pushes. “Then why is he dead?”

  Gloria’s gaze drifts far away. Finally she says, “Maybe he died of sadness. I would almost believe it.”

  Returning up the stairs to retrieve the remaining bags of groceries, Bram snorts.

  “She didn’t love him,” Gloria says to him. “You wouldn’t have known that. He was raising those children practically alone. It was a lonely life.”

  “The girl is the one who found him,” says Bram.

  “Hush! Hush!” Gloria throws her hands over Juliet’s ears.

  “Juliet.” Bram peels back Gloria’s fingers. “Where did you come from?”

  Juliet looks at Gloria, who returns her gaze blankly. It is as if Juliet has walked into her mother’s dream. Her mother has no idea what either of them are doing in this dream, which is possibly a nightmare, nor how they arrived here, nor what they are to do next. That is how far away her mother is, that is how far apart the two of them stand.

  You can die of sadness? thinks Juliet; the idea encrusts a soft centre of pure terror.

  Juliet wants something. She decides it is a horse.

  At suppertime she announces her intention to have a horse, and Bram latches on: “A farm!” he says, and turns to Gloria with unexpected excitement; maybe this is love, thinks Juliet.

  “Remember our farm?” Bram is speaking of a place that does not exist, and never did, except in their collective imaginations.

  “We should look in this neighbourhood,” says Gloria, refusing to acknowledge their shared imaginary past, refusing to play along. “The children are already settled into school.”

  “I hate school,” says Juliet.

  “But your friends . . .” Gloria waves a hand, manufacturing for Juliet scads of birthday-party invitations and sleepovers.

  “Country air is so healthy for children,” says Oma Friesen, to which Gloria does not respond, and Juliet thinks, It is settled, just like that. Oma Friesen has spoken. Oma Friesen does not want or need her grandchildren to live in her neighbourhood. She approves of horses and open skies, and of love. As she proclaims, so it will be.

  After supper Bram lifts Emmanuel onto his shoulders, ducks the low doorways, and strolls to the convenience store to purchase a local newspaper: farms listed for sale or rent. Gloria and Keith resume a card game at the table; Keith is between treatments, building up his white blood cell count so the doctors can knock it down again. Oma Friesen manages the washing up; in this task, she actively discourages help.

  Juliet slips out. Tomorrow is the last day of school. She will not say Au revoir; she will say, Adieu — goodbye forever.

  She cannot visit apartments one or two at this hour; their tenants are sure to be home. But the door to apartment number three is locked; it is always locked. The girl sits with her back against it, her ear on the scratched metal, listening, but hears nothing. She thinks, Maybe no one lives here. Maybe it is empty. Or maybe it is not: it could be filled with anything, with a dead body, with squirrels and birds, with ghosts.

  It is very warm on the third floor: a perfect place for ghosts, who, the girl imagines, carry a chill and crave warmth.

  When the door swings open, she falls backwards, sprawling into the apartment. Her mouth opens to scream, but she has been quiet for too long, and her throat produces only the tiniest squeak.

  “What in the . . .” A man frowns down at her. She turns her eyes to his boots: heavy yellow leather, stained and oily, rubber bottoms grooved like tire treads.

  “I’m sorry,” she breathes.

  “You must be the kid who screams half the day and wakes me up,” says the man.

  “That’s not me.” She raises herself on bent wrists. “That’s my little brother.”

  “I work nights. I don’t like little brothers.”

  “We’re moving,” she says. “We’re going to live in the country.”

  He sees her furtive glance as she tries to take in the dimly lit room: tidy, but dull. “I’m headed to my shift, but I happen to be early. Make yourself at home, look around.” He is closing the door, and she moves her feet to let him.

  “You’re cute,” he says. “Cute kid.”

  The girl stands. She cannot remember anything about herself that relates to the way he is looking at her: a look that is mildly admiring, curious. She stares back at him as if paralyzed, seeing him for the first time above the boots and the rolled blue jean cuffs. He is not a man she would instinctively trust. He is old, but only to an eleven-year-old, to whom even teenagers are old; perhaps in his mid-twenties. His hair is long and thin, pulled into a ponytail, dark blond — what her mother would call “dishwater” — and his eyes are a very pale blue, striking but uncanny, eyes that belong on a husky dog. He is a small man and he has hair on his face, rough stubble, and an earring in either ear: tiny gold crucifixes.

  He says, “Don’t be scared. What’s your name?”

  The girl hunches her shoulders, works her mouth, mumbling as if she’s lost something, as if her name has been stolen from her.

  “Why are you whispering? Don’t be scared. Are you scared?” He walks away from her into the middle of the room and spreads his arms wide. “Not gonna touch ya.”

  A framed poster of a howling wolf hangs on the wall over a black velvet sofa, and on another wall is a bucking bronco. He sees the girl glance at the bronco. “Do you like horses? I like horses.”

  Way down below, someone enters the building, and displaced wind rattles the door of apartment number three, behind which the girl stands, near enough to put out her hand and touch the handle.

  “Don’t go yet.”

  The girl hears her father’s voice talking to her little brother, b
ut only briefly, as he barrels down the basement stairs; gone. Adieu.

  “I’ll pour you a pop. Do you like Pepsi?”

  The girl shakes her head but he thinks she means yes, and he brings her a glass, no ice. The girl says, “Thank you.” He waits until she’s drunk half.

  “I gotta go before I’m late,” he says. “My name’s Steven. You never asked. It’s polite to ask. You still never told me yours.” He takes the glass and shakes her hand, which is damp from condensation.

  The girl blurts, “Can I look around? Can I just . . . look?”

  He laughs. He still has her by the hand. “What are you looking for?”

  But she cannot shape it for him; even if she could, she would not. What gets kept in the attic of the mind, symbols sorted and boxed, imaginary and antique? Different from the mouldering memories stuffed into the basement, which are frightening, and lurk. The attic is what could be; the attic window the view from which a life, and its potential, might be glimpsed, spread out below, in miniature.

  She pulls free her hand.

  “After you,” says the man. She pushes away his name.

  He follows her from room to room, pointing out where he’s going to fix or improve things: a missing light bulb, a bare wall, no shower curtain around the tub.

  He stands aside in the narrow hallway so she can pass without brushing against his body as they return to the main room. The girl goes to the window and moves the dark shade. She was mistaken. There is her father with her little brother, playing in the front yard, not gone inside. They are collecting dandelions, twigs.

  The girl feels the stranger behind her, the extra heat of his proximity, seeing what she’s seeing.

  “Better go, kid,” he says, lightly brushing the braids off her shoulders. “And don’t come back.” She feels his breath as he bends over her, warm in the part along the middle of her scalp. Warm, and scented of peppermint. She hears the crunch between his teeth of a hard candy, the crinkling of a cellophane wrapper dropped to the floor. The carpet is the same in this apartment as in all the others. Her feet are bare. Its fibres are rough.