The Juliet Stories

by Carrie Snyder

  Sadness spreads like a leak, pooling inside her mouth.

  “Hey, kids.” Dane has found them. He kicks sparks of snow onto Juliet’s boot, rests heavily on the fountain’s rim and searches his pockets.

  Teddy breathes on her red hand, crippled by the ring, as she pushes to sitting. Dane pulls out a crumpled cigarette packet.

  “You don’t smoke,” Juliet says.

  “And you’re getting married.”

  “It’s not what it looks like.” Her knees are numb.

  Teddy lurches onto the fountain’s rim beside Dane. “It’s exactly what it looks like,” he says. “I’ll take one, thanks.”

  The two men fumble with the lighter, heads bent together, united. Before tonight they had never laid eyes on each other. But Juliet floods with relief that it is Teddy sitting beside Dane on the fountain. She could not bear to sit with Dane and look down on Teddy in the snow. She would rather be the foolish one, the fallen one, under their feet. Her sacrifice is temporary but she is certain that it matters: it protects them inside a moral universe of her own creation.

  “Esther,” says Teddy.

  “Oh my God, you’re smoking? You gave him a fucking cigarette?” She snatches it out of his mouth and tosses it, spinning and flaring, and the puppy gives chase.

  Juliet stands. “Do you have any idea how enormous that dog is going to be?” Stiffly, she follows the puppy. She finds the cigarette, glowing, undampened by fiercely chilled snow, and bends and puts it to her lips. Lightly, experimentally, she draws. The last thing his lips touched, she thinks, and the thing before that.

  “Off the wagon?” Laura and Mike hold hands in their approach.

  “I’m so drunk it doesn’t count.” But in truth, she’s certain she’s sober as sin.

  “How is it?” asks Mike.

  “Do you know when you’re dreaming, and you find yourself in the middle of a cigarette, inhaling, even though you can’t remember lighting it — it just happened to you? The cigarette found you, and you think, ‘This is not happening. I will make this not happen, but already it’s too late.’ Do you know that dream?”

  “Yes,” says Mike.

  “You think, ‘This isn’t me. I’m not doing this.’”

  “I know that dream,” says Mike.

  One last drag, and Juliet drops the cigarette into the snow, kneads it beneath the surface with the toe of her boot. Gone, as easily as that, as easily as tonight will vanish.

  Dane struggles to his feet, grabs Laura’s free hand. With Mike on the other side, arms swinging, the three of them are children playing: Red Rover, Red Rover, let Juliet come over.

  The puppy is at her laces again, tugging, growling; everything is a game. Love for the animal rushes through Juliet, for its newness, its capacity for destruction. She bends to the puppy’s snarl and snap. She gathers its surprising and lively weight into her arms, against her chest: fur tough, claws smooth, rolls of fat around its ribs. It nips her ear, and a tooth catches on the tiny silver ring Juliet wears in the lobe, and the wince of pain gleams.

  It is how her own lies catch her, when they do, off guard, bright stabs that remind her that she is alive. She thinks of what she is willing to sacrifice in order to burn, to feel her light burning. It is dangerous close to the fire, and she does not feel afraid.

  Teddy is standing, Esther wrapped around his arm; or he is bent onto her and she is holding him upright. He is hungry — ravenous — against the stillness that is coming for him, and Esther would feed him anything he wanted, anything at all.

  “Nightcap.” Teddy’s teeth are chattering.

  “Please,” says Esther. “Please, can we just go home?”

  Juliet looks at Mike. He swings his arm, promising I will catch you no matter how hard you crash. She thinks, He knows, he knows, he knows. She is comforted. She backs up three steps and takes a run at them all.

  OSCURIDAD

  They drive northwest through green and fertile fields of bushy wheat, deceptive corn. Every lane has a sign: QUILTS. NO SUN SALE; EGGS. BROWN, WHITE; GARLIC SCAPES, GLADS, LAMB. Further north and off the main roads, unkempt properties — trailers and rusted car bodies parked in unprofitable bush — advertise firewood.

  They are sailing on the burning wings of excavated fossil fuels. Think of the buried arterial forests marinating for millennia in anticipation of this moment.

  There is a sign at the end of this lane, too. SOLD.

  Mike slows the car to a crawl, windows open, the sound of wind shushing the corn, the hum of insects. The maple trees are dying, splitting, limbs crashed into the raspberry brambles along the lane. Juliet turns her face away from Mike so he won’t see her emotion. She’d expected to feel nothing, and it is not nothing she feels after all.

  On the front lawn, in heavy grass, Mike pitches their tent.

  Juliet can find no keys hidden under stones or antique iron axe heads. She walks all around the house, spying through any dusty window that she can reach. The rooms are mostly empty: a broom with broken bristles leans against the kitchen wall; a black garbage bag, half filled, slumps on the dining-room floor.

  Juliet stands on the porch, hip against the locked front door, and bangs the wood with her fist. Her fury is primitive.

  Approaching gravel dust, a diesel rumble, music pumping a deep bass line, and then silence. Emmanuel gets out, stretches. Their mother bought him the car and pays the insurance. He seems too young to be living all on his own, in an apartment shared by friends, working the night shift at a diner near campus. He didn’t even bother applying to go to university: I’m not smart like you. Yes, you are too — you are smart! Nah, it’s okay, I don’t care. I like my life.

  “Hey, Sis, breaking in?” Emmanuel greets Juliet with a hug that pulls her shoulder into his armpit. How is it that she is so much smaller than him now?

  “No,” she says.

  “Yes, you were,” Mike calls out.

  Emmanuel lights a match and touches it to the cigarette between his lips. “I was thinking we could torch the place.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Let’s.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Why not?”

  “Let’s do your thing instead,” says Emmanuel.

  Well, Kay didn’t think of everything. She can’t keep them out.

  “Don’t smoke in the house,” Juliet says.

  Emmanuel watches her descend down begrimed steps into darkness. The cellar is damp, the inside of a lung. Juliet chases a spider’s web out of her hair and it winds around her forearm like gauze. Another skims her lips.

  “I’m going in,” she calls to Emmanuel, who does not reply. The door at the top of the rickety stairs is closed but has no lock. She opens it and steps into light, into the house that has become, over the years, her father’s house; into the narrow hallway between kitchen and dining room.

  She receives the strangest memory as she pauses here, batting at her face — the web is tough and persistent. She remembers putting her hands on the wooden ledge, hip height, that runs along either side of the short hallway. She remembers practising over and over an invented acrobatic trick, palms on the ledge, swinging her legs into the air, higher and higher, aiming for the ceiling, aiming to twirl over backwards and jump down to land safely on her feet. It would have been the centrepiece of an imaginary show, the climax. She was always putting together imaginary shows for the entertainment of imaginary audiences — admiring imaginary audiences. But she remembers now that she never once twirled over and landed on her feet; the act ended after an attempt that threw her onto her back, crashed her through the air to the hard wooden floor, the wind kicked out of her lungs. She remembers the fall, and the slow-motion appeal of the fall, how she watched herself with mild perplexity: that this was happening and that it could not now be stopped.

  It is the way
one feels inside an accident whose ending has not yet arrived. She thinks it would be the way one would feel in an airplane tumbling towards earth. That the moments would stretch and the mind expand and time slow to contain all that was and could be, and will not be, in another beat, another beat and gone.

  She winds through this memory in just the same way, slamming through, then vanished, and walks to the bathroom to pick away the spider’s web. The wallpaper is peeling pink roses, luscious blooms exaggerated in all seasons, an eternal floral hell: someone else’s heaven. The bathroom mirror has not changed — gold-rimmed, affixed above the cracked porcelain sink. You again.

  Sixteen years rush past in fast-forward. She sees her family — her original family — the mother and the father and the brothers and herself, as if each were being pulled up a tunnel at great speed towards a miasmic light. They begin by holding hands, but one by one they disappear from each other, one by one, at a pace ever more terrifying.

  Except for Emmanuel. She still has Emmanuel.

  “Check this.” He bumps up the cellar steps holding a box he has found. The two of them kneel in the front hall, lit by a lowering sun, and pull open the cardboard flaps crossed on top and caving in at the centre. Emmanuel sneezes. Juliet lifts out a wooden truck with bottle-cap headlights. It is missing two wheels.

  “Juliet!” Mike is knocking on the front door. “Everything okay in there?”

  “Nica,” breathes Juliet. It is like opening a grave, disturbing the totems of the dead. Crouched on her heels, she shudders.

  Emmanuel just looks at her.

  “Nicaragua. This was Keith’s truck; we played with it out back in the mud in Nicaragua. I made houses out of palm leaves. Keith caught lizards and took their tails off because he said the tails always grow back, but I don’t know if that’s true. We made the port of Corinto out of mud. We spent hours out there, rain or sun. You broke the wheels when Mom made us share.”

  “I would have,” says Emmanuel.

  “You were just a baby,” says Juliet. “We were probably mean to you.”

  “You weren’t,” says Emmanuel.

  “Can you remember?” She is surprised.

  “No,” he says, “but I know you weren’t. Keith wasn’t, you weren’t.”

  She will weep. What faith. Does it matter if faith is misplaced? They were mean to him, she knows, picking silently through the remnants of the incident. Keith made him cry after the wheels got broken and Juliet went and told, though their mother took Emmanuel’s side, which just made the two of them howl, Unfair! We’re never going to share with that baby again and you can’t make us! He wrecks everything! That’s how mean the two of them were, even Keith.

  Juliet prefers Emmanuel’s version, but she knows better. It isn’t always better, knowing better. She keeps it to herself.

  Mike knocks again. “Hello? Anybody home?”

  Emmanuel unlocks the door and throws it open with a flourish: “Where have you been all my life?”

  But Juliet has no time for their jokes. She is sick with seriousness. This is who she has become: Juliet, running down to the shore to throw stones and stir up the waters; Juliet, standing an inch too close to demand answers to questions that have none, or that, answered, cause pain, burn like a lit coal she will hold in her hand, deliberately wounding herself. She cannot make light; she dismisses lightness and its shallow pursuit of laughter. Stupidity, blasphemy: what is the point?

  “What are we looking at?” asks Mike.

  Juliet drops the truck back into the box and closes the flaps so he can’t see, sending up a puff of decay and rot. Emmanuel defers to her; he stays silent.

  “The past,” she says.

  She won’t always be like this.

  She hears herself saying, to a fellow grad student, “My father’s body is in that building,” as they stroll past on their way to get a cup of coffee. She’s said this on several occasions this quiet, bleeding summer, not always when passing the same building; she doesn’t require of herself accuracy when the truth remains the same.

  It is true that her father’s body lies in the bowels of a large stone building on campus, preserved and in use, but not by him. “He donated himself to medical science. Well, technically, his girlfriend did the donating, but it was what he wanted.”

  She looks for clues in the spectrum of gut responses — pity, fear, revulsion — but what she receives is so mild, so Canadian, so determined not to be shocked. Oh, how generous; he must have been an extraordinary person. To which Juliet must reply, Yes, he was; it was just like him, so in character; and she is prevented from pursuing her line of follow-up questions: Does this strike you as normal behaviour? Is this what normal people do to their children after they die? Do they go to the same damn university? What if I want to switch to nursing?

  As if that’s what’s stopping her from stepping out of the concrete shoes of sixteenth-century popular English literature and a thesis she will never finish, doomed by thoughts she is unable to think, the weight of failure dragging her down, down, down to the bottom of a dead lake. As if someone else is to blame.

  Nurse. Registered massage therapist. Yoga instructor. She has considered all of the above, investigated programs and costed out notions, and returned, always, to the library, to its heat, the fragrance of dried pages like pressed leaves, its quietude. Something else is present here, too: oscuridad — the Spanish word for darkness, which Juliet believes contains so much more than its translation. The oscuridad in here mirrors her own: one tiny darkness amidst the darkness of a multitude of minds seeking illumination, dead and alive, trapped in dormant words. She thinks she can hear the oscuridad, her cheek pressed to the fake wood of the carrel she has earned; she can hear it, even though the library’s lights are forever on.

  The air inside the tent holds flecks of dying sunshine as Juliet unrolls sleeping bags. Through thin walls she sees the flicker of first flame, hears Emmanuel’s car stereo picking up a local country station.

  Not one mosquito has penetrated the tent’s zippered flap. It is hot, but the intensity wicks away quickly as night closes in: August in southern Ontario. Knees folded, head bent, she gazes through the mesh screen door at the farmhouse in silhouette. Looking at the house, she tries out the words, as if to shock herself, My father’s body is in that building, and hears as if for the first time what she’s really been saying all along: “My father is dead.”

  He is not supposed to be dead, and she is not supposed to be crouched, past dusk, in a tent on what was once the grass he would cut with a riding mower. Maybe if he’d pushed the damn mower; maybe if he’d been a vegetarian; maybe if he’d walked down the lane every once in a while to pick up the mail rather than driving in his car, which he loved; maybe if he hadn’t loved his car quite so very dearly; maybe if he hadn’t carried his sadness inside but had shared it everywhere, like Juliet’s mother; maybe.

  Then again, maybe not.

  Near the fire, Emmanuel plunders the woodpile — their father’s woodpile.

  Mike offers a blackened veggie dog soaked in ketchup and nestled in a white bun from the gas station down the nearest highway. Juliet stands like a statue on a stump of sun-bronzed wormy pear wood and devours the meal; a handful of Cheezies for dessert, elbow-deep in the crackling bag.

  “I brought marshmallows,” says Emmanuel.

  “I brought whisky,” says Mike.

  “Wash it down,” says Juliet.

  In his last year, fighting, her father tore down the falling garage. He dismembered the rotten pear tree with a chainsaw. He went to battle against the killing black walnuts. The woodpile sprawled, festering — the farmhouse was not fitted with a woodstove. The uneasy barn was his final project, and he burned the damn thing to the ground; but that was an accident, that’s what Kay told Juliet. Kay, the girlfriend, the one Juliet’s father would never marry, for re
asons he kept to himself.

  The concrete barn walls remain, blackened, half-collapsed, summer weeds flourishing as tall as grown men out of the ash-rich soil.

  From her vantage point on the stump, Juliet points past the long-abandoned garden, to the east, where untended bush spreads, trees growing out of standing water, a tangle of swampy wild.

  “Do you remember?” she says and lifts the plastic cup of lukewarm Canadian rye. “Keith was going to build a ship and sail it through the bush, with a pirate’s eye patch, and a plank.”

  She is talking to herself. She is the only one here who remembers; who could.

  The house is open, and there is something to be said for indoor plumbing.

  On the threshold, Juliet does not hesitate. She is not afraid of ghosts, not the ghosts of the ones she knows. She would call them out of the walls: Are you here?

  She lingers in the unlit bathroom, before the mirror that turns her into silhouette and phantom. The toilet fails to flush. She will have to warn the others: no paper. She isn’t thinking. She is in oscuridad. She walks all around the shadowed, cramped rooms, ascends the steep stairway to the airless second floor.

  She asks again, quietly: Are you here?

  She calls to her father, so recently present, and she calls to her brother, present nearly half her life ago, to them both. This is such a sad house, stupid with sadness, walls thick with the living seeped into stone, and stilled.

  A scurry answers behind plaster and lath.

  But really it’s the only answer she expects in a place reeking of mothballs and mouse dirt, the settlement of lunar dust thick as fur on every surface: vermin, termites, the creatures that arrive after death to break down the remains, the life that feeds off the natural process of dissolution, of undoing.

  Keith slept in this room. Its window overlooks the swampy bush. He slept in this room until he was too frail to make his way up and down. She sees her father holding her brother in his arms and swinging him down the steps: one large man with flyaway hair, one child of twelve puffed with drugs that are failing in their task.