The Juliet Stories (18 page)

But Bram doesn’t suspect the depths of the change to come, and has already forgotten the stranger. “What say we go tell your mother about this place.”

Like a magician, Juliet seals off the door to apartment number three; she won’t climb those steps again. This is where she’ll keep him, upstairs, silent, locked in: predator, guardian, seer, lost soul, stranger, danger, innocent, alone. This is where he will loiter, waiting in perpetuity as the walls grow thicker and dust settles like another coat of fur on the wolf and the bronco, and the blind rips, its fibres disintegrating in relentless sunlight, waiting, waiting, for the door she’s forgotten exists to fall open.

He has a message he’s been waiting all this time to tell her. He knows she is a balm.

She needs him too. Once, he had a name.

Under the dying pear tree, Juliet has a prophetic vision. It is not her first.

Her first, according to her mother’s telling, occurred when Juliet was two years old and Grandpa Harold was in the hospital, close to death. He’d been knocked unconscious while visiting a worksite, struck on the head by a falling beam; he hadn’t been wearing a helmet. Gloria was pacing the apartment, tears streaming down her face, praying. Little Juliet woke from her nap calling, “Mama! Mama!” When Gloria came running with the new baby — Keith — asleep in her arms, she found Juliet perched on the top railing of her crib. Was she surprised to find Juliet there? She was not; Juliet was Gloria’s first child and she assumed all of her children would be just as nimble — (it pleases Juliet that her mother was wrong) — walking at nine months, drawing gasps of concern from fellow mothers at the playground. “Do you know your baby is climbing that ladder?”

When Gloria came running and found Juliet atop her crib railing, hammering on the windowpane, what shocked her were the words coming out of her toddler’s lips. Juliet was shouting, “Grandpa! Grandpa!” (only it sounded like
Dampa! Dampa!
) Could it possibly be? The window overlooked a back alley crowded with rickety wooden staircases, dirty, damp, narrow stucco buildings blocking the skyline.

“What do you see?” Gloria asked, because she could see nothing.

“That man,” said Juliet. “Grandpa!” She was not capable of further articulation.

Gloria’s next thought was: My father is dead. He is visiting Juliet to say goodbye; I can’t see him because I refuse to believe that my father could die. Then the telephone rang; this is Gloria’s story. The telephone rang, waking the baby, and over his cries Gloria heard her mother’s voice, in another city, another country: Gloria’s father had woken out of his coma. He would survive.

That’s when Gloria understood what Juliet had been telling her: the man Juliet had seen was Jesus, come to tell Juliet that Grandpa Harold was saved. At that time in Gloria’s life, Jesus was a real, living being who entered into the world at will to intercede; that may not be how Gloria sees Jesus now, but Juliet can only guess, because Gloria no longer talks about Jesus or miracles, or even prayer. Her restlessness knows no bounds; her distraction is complete. She has given up hair-brushing and makeup and wears the same pair of blue jeans day after day, belted tightly to keep them from falling off her hips: she scarcely eats. Juliet has inherited the makeup — what little of it there is — gifts sent by Aunt Caroline in Georgia: black mascara that promises to lengthen and curl lashes; bright red lipstick, slick and wet; a compact of blue and silver eyeshadow; pale pink rouge to be applied with a brush, which is lost, so Juliet, who is fourteen, uses a Q-tip, peering into the mirror. Making herself look like someone else, someone older, someone less transparent, tended like the side of a house, freshly painted.

Juliet believes in miracles.

She cherishes her mother’s story. It gilds Juliet as visionary, special, and in her mind the story is enriched with detail, memories sought out and sourced from the rush of slippery images that arrive just before sleep. Juliet believes she can remember her smaller, sturdier self balanced on the crib rail, the wet windowpane against her hand. She believes in the existence of the man in the alley, shimmering, his feet bare in the cold rain, his white robes flowing around his body. If this is not a memory, what is? He walks hand in hand with Grandpa Harold, towards Juliet, looking up at her. The two men stop. They speak quietly to one another. When they turn to walk away, Grandpa Harold is gone, and only the other man walks — or rather, floats — slowly down the alley towards the ribbon of street far away. She watches him go.

She waits for him to come again. But no matter how she conjures him, he does not come. Years pass. There is no urgency, until suddenly there is; until there is a crisis. Someone else is dying.

Unfamiliar cars creep up the long laneway, past the front field, where Juliet’s neglected pony has eaten all but the newest slivers of grass. The house fills with distant relatives — cousins of Juliet’s dad bearing canned-soup casseroles and Jell-O salads studded with grated carrot and half-moons of celery. Jobs are suspended: Oma Friesen sleeps on the couch and washes the dishes; Juliet’s dad no longer rises early on mornings or weekends, and his colleagues at the Peace and Justice Initiative come to visit with their spouses, sitting for hours praying, practising the laying on of hands.

But her mother does not sing.

They thought he would live. That is the worst of it. They thought that after three years of treatment his blood cells had fought themselves safe. He was
in remission
. It was over — the periodic spells of her mother driving her brother to stay at the hospital, interspersed with periodic spells of normalcy: the weeks between treatment when her brother would be safe at home, drawing cartoons, learning how to play the guitar, skipping his homework and barely passing tests at school, never having to do the dishes (unlike Juliet — totally not fair).

Declared cured, he was free to play bruising games: soccer and football. He even had to help with the dishes. His hair grew back, as thick and as black as it was before.

Late August is too hot, the whine of bugs in the grasses rising and falling like madness. Fan heads groan on windowsills. Juliet stays out of the house. Keith is in there, surrounded. Juliet knows the vocabulary. She knows
out of remission
. He was in remission. Now he is out of remission. It sounds almost holy. Grandpa Harold and Grandma Grace were missionaries long ago, when Gloria was a child and before Grandpa Harold made his fortune as a contractor. Being in remission is like being sent, as a missionary is sent, back again into the world:
Go, you are called, you have a purpose
. Out of remission:
Come home, whether or not you’ve completed your work; you’re done.

There is one pear tree on their whole farm, and it is dying. This is where Juliet sits.

In early spring the tree burst out for three days in fragrant white blooms; but whole branches failed to come into leaf, and they scratch, black and bare, against the sheer, rich sky. Cross-legged, Juliet faces the row of ragged pines that separate their several acres from a field of green, whispering corn, which belongs to the neighbour.

It is not a comfortable place to sit. All around the pear tree spreads a mess of tangles and brambles and weeds, interrupted by frost-tossed stones. Juliet’s bare legs are scratched and she swats at insects that swarm and scuttle and alight. Into her spine, dull bark imprints its muted pattern. If Juliet turns her gaze to the right, she can see, past the stand of poisonous black walnut trees, the sprawling vegetable garden: the sum total of her parents’ truce this spring, flourishing with offerings despite neglect. The cabbages are worm-eaten, the summer squash run rampant, fallen tomatoes rot in the dirt.

The garage is to her left. It is the oldest structure on the property, a log cabin built by the lowland Scots who settled this land in the middle of the nineteenth century — long, long ago, or not so very long ago, depending on how Juliet thinks about it.

Behind the garage rests the crumbled ruin of a smithy. The original settler was a blacksmith, though his workshop was abandoned around the turn of the century. Juliet and Keith have marked out with footprints the shape of the original hut, and have unearthed treasure in the rubble: rusty nails and iron spikes and curved, blunt tool heads, wooden handles rotted off; the iron frame of a bellows. They arranged their discoveries on the flat remains of the rough kiln and posted a cardboard sign at the end of the lane, which failed to tempt even one visitor:
MUSEUM! A BARGAIN AT ONLY
25
10 CENTS!

That wasn’t even two months ago. Not so very long ago, or a long, long time ago, depending on how Juliet thinks about it.

The house behind her is alive. She senses it as a breathing, altered presence, its thick stone walls stretched outwards by the pressure of what it must contain. It will stop breathing when he stops breathing. Juliet’s chin drops to her chest and she stares at her fingers, curling open in her lap.

The past is like a dream. It feels too long ago to affect her, yet she gazes upon it as on a marvel, drifting into the familiar tropical geography that cups her body like a carved stone shelter. Nicaragua. She has learned that the name of that country does not mean to her what it means to other people. Canadians, if they have heard of it, find the word difficult to pronounce. If they have heard of it, they think of war or poor people, of grinding bad luck. It is not, yet, a country to which a tourist would travel for pleasure, unlike other tropical countries in the hemisphere. It is not a vacation destination; it is a disaster.

But when Juliet thinks or says the word out loud, she is overwhelmed by a sensation of deep satisfaction.

It is not that she wants to go back. She cannot imagine going back. It is that she holds Nicaragua as a secret, as mysterious and significant as a chamber of her own heart. Like other secrets she will come to hold, it cannot be talked about in any ordinary way; it will out in its own time.

———

“Juliet! Juliet!” a woman’s voice calls from the covered porch that runs along three sides of the square house. Juliet does not answer. It is not her mother’s voice, or her Oma’s. She turns fractionally so as not to disturb the trance she may or may not be caught in, and she sees a woman named Kay coming towards her. “Kay as in the letter.”

“Juliet, it’s lunchtime. We’re spreading out a picnic on the front lawn.”

Juliet blinks and turns deliberately away.

“It will be lovely,” says Kay, panting. She answers the phone at the Peace and Justice Initiative; she files papers and makes photocopies. During the school year she allowed Juliet to sit in her twirly chair and play receptionist after school, though she also said, “If you were my daughter you wouldn’t be out in public wearing that much makeup.” Kay has no daughters, no sons, no children of her own. She is a single woman. A single woman is dangerously unattached; she is on the lookout, or the warpath, or her high horse, according to Gloria, so
watch out
.

Juliet attends a private school in the city, paid for by Grandma Grace and Grandpa Harold, who also settled the down payment on this house and paid for airline tickets to fly Juliet’s family to North Carolina last winter, for a holiday at their cottage to celebrate the end of Keith’s treatment.

At last Keith could swim underwater again: the doctor had yanked out his Broviac, a tube inserted under the skin of his chest into which the killing medicine was pumped. The whole family came to the hospital to watch its removal. Keith sat on a lowered bed and the doctor demonstrated how he would pull on the catheter.

“Will it hurt?”

“Yes, but then it will be out.”

After that, Keith visited every room to say goodbye to every kid. Juliet admired and feared the way her brother talked to the sick kids, his ease with their weakness. She felt nothing but shamed panic, as if she’d been caught peeking: the wan bodies resting with eyes towards open doors, looking for someone to come, gazing without the energy to rise up and escape; the squeezed rooms, barren despite clots of teddy bears and silver foil balloons. She would have given anything never to go back. Anything except this.

The nurses wept to witness their escape.

Juliet sees her family — mother, father, brothers, herself — at peace in the humming elevator; Keith clutches his discoloured Broviac tube in a see-through plastic bag like a prize. The nurses wave. The doors close. They fall at high speed, whisked through a hot metal tunnel to the brightly lit main floor, where the children are given permission to choose a sandwich from the automatic cafeteria, each of them sliding a red tray along a rolling track: egg salad on white on a white plate, framed behind glass; chocolate milk; a brownie.

On the highway, four paved lanes cut through buried farmland, and a car guns neck and neck with theirs. The man in the driver’s seat gestures and mouths, wild-eyed, at Juliet and Keith. “Dad! He’s swearing at us!”

“You cut him off,” says Gloria.

“The hell I did!” Bram flourishes his middle finger and revs the station wagon’s engine. “Asshole! Take that!” The car swerves, the children scream with delight. It is so unlike their dad.

“Eat my dust!” yells Bram.

Kay would never believe that happened, thinks Juliet. She halfway disbelieves it herself, seeing her dad as he appears at the office: mild, sinking, sucking on a cough candy, hands laced behind his back. “You’re a lucky girl. My father thought he could beat sense into his children,” Kay told Juliet as Juliet twirled in the chair. And then, musingly, almost to herself, “Then again, I never went out in public looking like a harlot.”

Juliet keeps her eyes down as Kay crouches before her in a beige skirt that reveals strained calves and plump knees. Juliet has seen her father drop his hand to rest on these very knees, hairless and sheathed in taupe nylon, for a moment. She has seen these very knees permit the action, perhaps fall open ever so slightly: an invitation.

“Come and eat.” Kay reaches for Juliet’s shoulder, lands heavily as if balancing herself.

Juliet shrugs free. “You’re not my mother.”

Kay sways to uncertain standing. Her beige pumps are slightly grass-stained, heels sinking into soft dirt. “Your father is bringing Keith outside. The picnic is all spread out. So much food.”

“I’m not hungry,” says Juliet.

“Don’t come for the food,” says Kay. “Come for your brother.”

Juliet looks up and sees Kay looking down, her eyes soft with tears. Rage courses through Juliet’s bloodstream and bursts behind her eyes. “I’m not coming,” she says. Everywhere she looks she sees fakery: an invasion of affectation, outsiders staking their claim, stamping their pity, crying their tears,
helping
.

A picnic?

Keith does not, cannot eat. He looks at food set before him and lifts a spoonful to his mouth, and his tongue wads, his throat closes, he gags. He has told Juliet what it is like to want to eat and to feel his body refuse.