The Juliet Stories (15 page)

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.

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, which 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.

When she tucks Juliet in, as she does on nights when Gloria stays at the hospital with Keith, she does not linger or ask to hear Juliet’s prayers, as Grandma Grace would. She says, “Goodnight, child,” and she turns out the light, whether or not Juliet has marked her spot in her book. It comforts Juliet to hear her in the hallway in her rocking chair, knitting needles clicking in the near dark.

Oma Friesen’s apartment has five rooms: the bedroom shared by Juliet and Emmanuel (he falls asleep with the light on when he’s not staying at the hospital too); the bedroom Gloria shares with Keith, which was Oma Friesen’s before they arrived last month; the living room, where Oma Friesen now sleeps on the pullout sofa; the bathroom; and the kitchen, which, though cramped with five around the table, is spacious enough to eat in. The hallway is a thin slit down the centre of the apartment to which the other rooms cling; it begins at the front door and ends at a window, high in the wall, that receives the eastern morning light. A lone spider fern hangs in the window and the rocker sits beneath, strewn with shed fronds. In a hidden compartment in the embroidered footstool, Oma Friesen stores her knitting supplies. This is not a play area.

Oma Friesen’s apartment is in the basement of a red brick building that stands back from a moderately busy street in a small city in Canada, a foreign country to which Juliet has only recently been told she also belongs. Three storeys tall, not including the basement, the building is a narrow structure that houses one separate unit on each floor. In the front yard, two maple trees flourish in spring bloom. The building backs onto a creek, which Juliet has not been expressly forbidden to explore, and to which she retreats when she is sent outside to play. It is shallow, and on its steep, slick banks garbage gathers in the spines of weeds.

Juliet has never seen another child at the creek.

No one from school walks down this street. She has been placed in the sixth grade. In her classroom the children are being taught their first words of French, but the children in the other sixth-grade classroom have been learning French since grade one, and the divide between the two groups is visible in their clothes and shoes, and the colour of their skin. The children in the other classroom are white, hair brushed sleek and tidy, their clothes branded with alligators, their shoes with shiny pennies.

Juliet knows that fortune is on her side. She has no alligators, no pennies, and her hair is braided, infrequently, by Oma Friesen into two long plaits that as the week passes fray into a halo of loose strands. At recess she wanders the muddy playground with a girl who wears white jeans and thick glasses, and another who must cover her hair with a headscarf, even for gym class, and whose parents do not let her listen to the Bible story their teacher reads every morning; instead she stands in the hallway with the melting boots until it is over. Both of Juliet’s friends come by bus and carry their lunches; they eat sitting in the foyer outside the front office with the other children who do not walk home for lunch.

Except, the girls are not exactly friends; they are agents of mutual protection.

Juliet walks home for lunch. On days when Keith is at the hospital, Oma Friesen leaves a sandwich wrapped in a washed milk bag in the fridge, and an apple, and Juliet pours herself a glass of milk. The apartment is empty, silent but for the breath of its own shifting weight.

On days when Keith is not at the hospital, Juliet’s mother is here to heat up a can of soup for their lunch. Between treatments Keith goes to school too, but it is much worse for him than for Juliet; if she is the latecomer, he is the freakish stranger, his appearances rare, his skull hidden under a baseball cap, dark spots like bruises beneath his eyes. He is not entirely bald: he refuses to be parted from the sparse bleached strands that remain and float like spider’s silk around his naked skull. The boy who sits behind him knocks his hat off. Keith puts it back on. The boy knocks it off. The teacher makes Keith stand at the front of the class, without his hat, and tells everyone that Keith has cancer.

Then they call him cancerboy.

Juliet hates them with an anger that has no expression. She wishes Keith could stay home on days when he is not at the hospital. She wishes she could stay home with him. They would play in the creek, away from the mockery of Canadian children, who care too much about too many things Juliet and Keith know nothing about: television programs, movie stars, punk rock bands and boy bands, fashion, hockey, ringette.

Oma Friesen does not own a television, or even a record player. There is neither time nor money to waste at the movie theatre (Oma calls it a waste). The mall is a very long bus ride away, and there are perfectly decent clothes to be found at the second-hand store. Hockey is a violent sport that rewards angry men and boys. Ringette is an unsolved feminine mystery.

The books Juliet chooses from the school library are various. She reads as if famished, every spare minute, even on the walk to and from school, her focus on the page; underneath the spread words her feet move in a blur along the sidewalk.

At suppertime Oma Friesen asks Juliet to put down the book and join them, but Juliet is far away. Quietly, firmly, Oma Friesen lifts the words from Juliet’s fingers. Juliet blinks back to these strange underground rooms, where she finds herself seated at Oma Friesen’s laminated tabletop, a paper napkin in her lap, faced with another bowl of bland slop served out of the orange and brown Crockpot: beans, hamburger, barley, macaroni, canned tomatoes, more or less. The tableau remains the same: her dad is not here.

“Do you know the story of Romeo and Juliet?” Oma Friesen asks Juliet.

Gloria says, “She wasn’t named for that. I just liked the name Juliet, that’s all.” Washed out and past pale, Gloria’s dirty turtleneck smells strongly of underarm sweat. Keith is resting on the double bed he shares with his mother. They are waiting for the sound of him waking, retching. Gloria will snap alert, as if shocked by an electrical current, to run to him.

Oma Friesen says, “More tea, Gloria?” and Gloria stares at her.

“Oh. Yes.”

Oma Friesen pours. “I tell the girls at the shelter, the name you choose will be a gift to your child, so choose with care. I had such lofty intentions for my poor infant boy. Abraham — prophet, patriarch. What a burden, and no one could stop me. But he went ahead and made his name his own. Maybe that was the gift I gave him: to rise above.”

Oma Friesen offers her thoughts in little stabs, an awkward dance performed without a partner; Gloria remains silent. Oma Friesen does not sigh when she reaches the end. She waits with unreasonable expectation for someone to care; she will wait without malice and with hope, generously.

Juliet says to her mother, “Can I take horse lessons?”

Gloria says, “No.”

“It’s not fair.”

Gloria says, “What is?”

Oma Friesen takes Juliet’s hand and squeezes it. She smiles warmly, her eyes bright with sudden tears, and she says, “Juliet, you will love passionately: that is your parents’ gift to you.”

Gloria says, “It’s just a pretty name, that’s all.”

“It is that. Like yours, Gloria.”

“I was named for a song, I think.” Gloria has waited to speak until the thread is nearly gone; considering. She hums to herself. Juliet frowns, reminded of something she’d forgotten had been lost: her mother making music.

Her mother stops. She looks at Oma Friesen. “It could be a curse, too, not a gift. Doomed to star-crossed love. But I didn’t name her for that.”

———

Juliet reads
The Secret Garden
and
A Little Princess
, which feature characters torn out of one life and tossed into another: fairy-tale endings that leave her sobbing. She dances through the Emily books and thinks Anne slightly inferior.

But she also devours books she cannot possibly understand; she is at an age — eleven and a half — that does not object to partial comprehension. Books that confuse and mystify appear to hold important information just out of reach. She stumbles upon Canadian literature: a stack of paperbacks beside her mother’s bed. Juliet reads
The Diviners
, which she cannot make sense of, especially the parts to do with sex, and
Surfacing
, crammed with vivid images that fail to cohere in her brain; nevertheless, she finishes both, moved by a sense of being on the edge of discovery. She reads a book called
Lives of Girls and Women
, but it frightens her in a way she cannot explain, were there anyone here to tell. As she reads the stories a terrible feeling swells in her: that as she grows older she is tumbling forward and down, faster and faster, out of control.

She has never spent this much time alone.

Unsupervised, she is expected to sit at Oma Friesen’s kitchen table to eat, to read, and to do her homework. After school she may help herself to a cookie, baked and then frozen in vast healthful batches by Oma Friesen, and if weather and time permit, she may go outside to play.

But Juliet does something else instead, something she knows she should not.

She opens doors and walks right in.

———

The calendar that hangs above the black telephone in the living room has changed from wildflowers in bloom to a field of fluorescent canola: May to June. Juliet examines it. The days on the calendar are marked:
treatment
,
treatment
,
treatment
,
home
. But one day is circled in black, at the end of the month, and the word inside reads
Bram
.

“Is my dad coming?” Juliet asks Oma Friesen.

“Maybe.” Her grandmother wields the honey spoon like an artist, drizzling delicate floral designs or labyrinthine animal shapes onto the pocked surface of the toasted English muffin.

The phone rings, and Juliet scrambles: “Hello?” She knows it is her father by his silence. The pause of long distance prefaces everything he says. His words have to travel along hundreds of miles of wire stretched between his mouth and her ear.

Bram’s work continues: he is in Costa Rica, lecturing at a seminary; he is flying to give a talk in Miami; he will return to Nicaragua to arrange for a group of three hundred protesters to travel to the Honduran border; there has been a kidnapping. He cannot come to them.

But he says to Juliet, “Don’t worry. I will get there soon.”

Gloria drags herself from the bedroom — the sickroom — squeezing shut at her neck a robe of pale lilac — Oma Friesen’s. “Pass me the phone, I need to talk to him.” The sickroom has developed its own weather: grey fogs that descend and hover, humid fevers that shine the ceiling, bone-chilling winds that wail between walls.

Gloria says, “I will not discuss this when we have no privacy.” She says, “I’m not angry, I’m exhausted. I’m a shell of myself. If you could only see me.”

“Do you have news?” she says. “I do love you.”

“I do love you,” she says, “but I can’t talk to you.”