The Juliet Stories (19 page)

Fury clears a path. It lights the air around Juliet.
Just try to come close, just try
.

Kay surrenders.

Noise from the picnic, which she cannot see, carries over the farmhouse roof to the pear tree, improbable laughter bouncing off the tarpapered garage wall. Juliet keeps her eyes on the row of pines. Something will happen. Something — someone — will come.

She wills the glowing figure to appear before her. She wills him to walk out of the cornfield. He is in there, she knows it, a vision on the verge of emergence, bearing a message she will carry in a dead sprint around the house to the gaping picnickers, but most of all to her family:
He is saved! Keith, you’re saved!

Just to think this thought breaks it. It shatters like glass. And she sees through the possibility to the cornfield, to the pines, to the restless summer sky. She sees herself sitting bone upright and alone.

The word
saved
has no meaning. It is empty and fantastical, in this context worthless. It implies rescue. It implies the lightning strike of a saviour, and that is not what real saving would look like. If Keith were really saved, he would simply and surely continue to live. His lungs would pull and push air; his heart would beat steady and strong; he would rise and walk on his own; he would taste food and swallow it down without thinking twice; his pain would be from a knee scraped, falling off a bicycle, or a wrist broken, falling out of a tree. He would live, as Juliet lives, with the luxury of ample time, the comfortable belief that there is more and more and more of it, that it flows like water, that there is always tomorrow.

But this is not a vision. The vision is coming.

Juliet hears it before she can see it: a dull drone.

Her heart will crash out of her body. A motorized formation is speeding across the sky, casting shadows ahead of itself: nine winged machines aligned nose to tail and tip to tip. Juliet spirals inside a memory that has no shape or sound or sense; it exists as pure physical response, a switch flipped in the depths of the mind. Her body thinks it knows the meaning of this approach: death and darkness, human-made fear, bombs released and tumbling in slow motion towards the earth, landing like fire, shrapnel, chemical eruption. The other Nicaragua.

Juliet cannot move. She is paralyzed in the place where her body will be found, afterwards, silently.

The glinting planes have come so close. They are upon the little farm. They shift like airborne dancers on the stage of sky. They pass over the barn and the house, and the noise for a moment squeezes out all else, and just as suddenly it departs, fades. Juliet stares through bare branches, heart opening and closing like a hand making and unmaking a fist, and she watches them go. She hears the others running into the lane to see what they can see.

She thinks, This is my sign.

But she does not know what it means. The effort required to manufacture symmetry: is it a kind of beautiful violence? The machines mimic birds, but they are not birds. They are armour protecting a fragile human body within. No bird could fly with such precision, requiring such careful planning, such practice. That is not how the bird flies. That is not what concerns the bird.

She cannot hold her thoughts. She does not have the depth or the capacity to contain their expression. She thinks instead: They were gone so fast. I wish I could have looked at them longer.

Everyone else is milling around the lane, talking about the planes.

Nobody comes to get her. She unwinds to standing. There they are: she can see them all. She sees Keith in her father’s arms, and his legs dangle, skinny and weakened. He would never consent to being held and carried if he were strong enough to walk on his own. She sees her father, collapsing inside himself like a gigantic balloon deflating; all of his bulk is caught around his waist. She sees her mother, unkempt, mildly hysterical, laughing wildly. She sees her little brother Emmanuel ducking away from Kay, who is forever trying to pet him, to hug or to kiss him, to press his cheek. She won’t give up, and he turns and kicks stones at her, purposely.

Look at them. They form nothing. Their dance is not engineered.

Juliet isn’t angry, not at all.

The house stands square, emptied of its people. Except for the face. It is watching Juliet from an upstairs window — her own bedroom window. Juliet stops like she’s been shot, shades her eyes against stark midday sun. It is a child’s face, a young child’s. She knows the spindly strands of flyaway hair and the bare chest and the sagging diaper. She knows the pudgy baby palms pressed to the window’s pane, and she sees the child’s entire body, the feet balanced on top of a crib rail. She feels the rail pressing, as if against her own soles.

She thinks, There’s no crib in my bedroom.

Oh!

She is alone. No one else can see what she is seeing. It is up to her after all. She raises her hand, palm flat as if against glass. The past stands still, stands forever in the window, and love rises without bidding, will not be swallowed, emerges full-throated like a song.

Juliet is running in a dead sprint across the grass and over the stones towards him, towards her living brother. She does not know what she will do when she gets to him. Or maybe she does. It does not matter. She is flying with the ease of a bird.

She thinks, I love them all the same, I do. A mother does.

She has forgotten where she is, her mouth moving silently, her frozen gaze set upon the pear tree, black and fruitless in this season of harvest. A figure passes before her eyes, an interruption, and she stares, shocked to see that there is a girl walking through her dining room. The girl balances on one wrist an open book, a bowl of cereal in the other hand.

She thinks, Who is this? As if her living child were more than a stranger: frightening, spectral.
Daughter
. She thinks, I do not know her; she rushes further and further from me.

An explosion of expelled breath breaks her panic, and she turns, blinking rapidly.

“Watch me?” The boy looks up. The round wooden table, now too large for the family, is peopled with Lego figures: commanders and captains and masters and warriors. Every scenario imagined by the boy is a battle. His being is sharpened like his imaginary weapons, his sabres of light, his swords and spears. He hurts her.

Thought is slow, drags itself forward. She repeats in her mind, I love them all the same. A mother does. But she cannot remember why she is telling herself something so obvious, and so impossible.

Between her hands is a mug of coffee gone cold, a film of milk soured on the muddy surface.

She thinks, Two are left, as if the children were stones deposited by a retreating glacier, their hard surfaces evidence of what was once here: a family entire, whole. I have these two, she thinks, almost frantic. They need me. A mother knows. And she pursues the girl — wait, wait — and presses her into a hug, sloshing the cup of coffee on the floor outside the bathroom, jostling the cereal bowl.

The girl shrinks, stares darkly as if assaulted.

I love you, she says to the girl. She can smell her own rank breath, a thirsty air.

I know, the girl says, though she might as well be spitting.

She sets the cup of coffee on top of the piano and bends to wipe the spill with the corner of her bathrobe. It takes her exactly this long to forget that she has been holding something and has set it down. Will the coffee cup be found today, or tomorrow, or in a week? Will her husband find it or will she, or will it be discovered only when it is knocked to the floor by a passing elbow, and the screaming will begin — her own. She will not be able to spare herself the release.

Every emotion is filled to the brim, quick to spill and to die: hunger is not mere hunger, it is starvation; anger flies beyond frustration, it is rage; sensations possess her and as suddenly evaporate, burn off, and silence follows. Blankness shrouds her like a fog in which she can find nothing, not even herself, in which there is no warning.

The girl is gone. You see, she thinks, they hold themselves apart from me. It is not just her imagination.

In the kitchen she touches her face, her hair, she slides her hands down the front of her body. Her feet are cold despite the woolly men’s socks she wears against the dull autumn chill that creeps under doors and insinuates itself at window’s edge. She sees the coffee pot bubbling on its flat black burner. She opens the creaking cupboard and removes a mug. She pours herself a cup of coffee and dresses it with milk from the fridge, sugar from the bowl.

She takes a sip. She swallows.

She tastes nothing until the taste becomes residue, bitter, persistent, a reminder of the original sip that yet bears no resemblance to the creamy sweetness she knows it must have been.

At the long mirror over the row of sinks, girls apply eyeshadow, lipstick, powder, mascara. Their tools and compacts leave tracks of colour and black on white porcelain. The floor is littered with ripped paper towels. They don’t turn off the taps. They release strands of pulled hair from their fingertips to float on the air like their words.

She sits on the toilet behind the locked stall door. She has heard her name.

She has heard:
dead
.

Does the girl who speaks know that she is trapped here, listening; does the girl who speaks think she will be afraid to stand or to flush?

She hears the stall door open; its slam echoes against the painted concrete wall. She hears her own voice pitched high, spiny, an insect’s phosphorescent whine. She is saying, All of you will be dead. All of you will die and then you will stop talking and someone else will talk about you being dead.

Someone says, Hey, we’re just . . . like, sorry, we didn’t . . . Someone hugs her.

She freezes stiff, arms hanging, furious, humiliated, goaded into giving them what they’ve wanted all along: a reaction, a secret pulled out of her like an essential organ. She knows something they do not. They want it too, but only for the purpose of diminishing it to the point of elimination.

Look at this mess. Look at what these girls leave behind for someone else to clean up: their sticky threads of hair, their crumpled paper towels, their spilled powders and handheld mirrors and the lids of lost lipsticks.

Yet when they exit into the noisy hall beyond, look at them: immaculate, condensed, instantly legible.

By comparison, she is a scrawl in the mirror. A pimple rages on one cheekbone; she has picked at it for days, and her attempt to cover it glares like putty over a throbbing wound. Blood-red nail polish is chipped where her teeth have been. The only part of herself she admires is not of her: the hoops that swing like trapeze artists from her earlobes.

The bell rings straight through her skin to her heart, rattling its chambers.

She bends and scrubs her face under the cold tap, dirty water running through her praying hands and down her wrists, running, running.

———

He can see his own breath. The walls are not insulated, the room heated by a portable electric grate. They have done little to change or improve their square stone farmhouse, bought more than three years ago, and paint peels from the low ceiling, darkened by water marks. The walls are dirty and of a violent turquoise that does not belong to this century. Who, now, would choose to paint the walls of an office this colour, even if such paint could be found? Today’s colours are neutral and bland, clean, comforting: he thought it would be nice to do the whole house over in something called taupe. His wife refused. She said, You might as well slap porridge on the walls. They argued.

He has forgotten what argument feels like. He has forgotten irritation.

Now she would let him paint the walls any colour at all; the argument is over. It is not that he has won and she has lost. It is not that he has persuaded her and she has acquiesced. It is that she no longer cares. No, he thinks, it is much graver than that. She has forgotten how to fight. She has forgotten that she ever cared. She has forgotten all of them; him most especially.

His desk is spread with books.

The books are open. He wills his eyes to gaze upon the words, his mouth to shape them. He thinks, and immediately regrets the thought, This is an opportunity that you cannot squander.

He has always intended, secretly, to finish what he started long ago, before children, when he was a young man with hair on top of his head.

Now he may. A gift.

A gift? Low discomfort rises from his belly like a belch. How can he pin onto the body of his son even the least good?

His wife would say, You feel nothing. You are dead.

He cannot disagree. He presses the tips of his fingers together, urgently, as if by this gesture he might will himself to feel. He is wearing black gloves with cut-off fingertips. He lifts the palms to his cheeks and rubs. Thinly woven wool catches on bristles.

The computer on which he works glows green; the letters of the unfinished dissertation glow brighter green. The room quivers: darkest, vilest green.

He thinks, I hate this colour. I’m keeping it.

He says, This guy is the master, this guy is the commander. He says, Boom, exploding bombs away! He says, Fire on it, fire on it, commander, the bad guy is coming, the dragon. He says, Attack, attack. He says, Commander, we need you, do you read, do you read. Commander! Destroy! Destroy! He says, This guy, this one, where is his weapon?

He checks the floor under the chair.

There it is.

She blames her husband. He is the one who stopped praying; when there was still hope, he quit. He confessed it to her. Naked with rage, she beat his bent forearms. How dare you, how dare you? There are churches full of strangers praying for our son — and you’ve given up asking?

She blames him, but she thinks, He is not to blame. Who has such powers? What difference would one prayer make, or a hundred, or the prostrations of thousands?

She is kneeling now, by their marriage bed, her cheek against the quilt, eyes staring at a blurred pattern in which many triangles come together to make the four corners of a house. The memory of her own prayer eats at her. She sees herself kneeling at the end of another bed — her child’s — palms stiff against the metal frame, murmuring, Whatever you want, God, he’s yours, he’s yours.

I didn’t mean it, God, she thinks. He was mine! I thought it was a test. I thought you would command otherwise: untie the boy, douse the flames, cast the knife from my hand. He would rise up, puzzled and bewildered. He would forgive me. We would walk down the mountain together. He would live.

Who does she blame? There is no one but herself.

She is invisible in the school hallways. Even teachers avert their eyes. She eats her lunch in the library and stares at the row of shadowy pines. She hides behind her hair.

Do they expect her to go on crying?

She will not.

Do they think she is rawer than they are, that the least slight, the least scrape will harm her further?

They are wrong. She is tough as hide. You could cut her but she would not flinch. You could throw at her any name, any false rumour, and she would stand still and steady as a rooted tree. You could push against her and she would not move.

She sits and stares at the pines, and her eyes wash with sudden water.

She can’t stay here. She can’t go home.

She walks out the back doors, onto the crunching soccer field, eyes forward. No one stops her.

She pushes through pruned shrubbery, over curving sidewalks, across backyards of dead grass, the suburban maze of houses empty in daytime, dark but for strings of light winking on Christmas trees. She sees herself as shadow sketched on their windows. Behind glass, the houses are tombs for soft furniture. Their cupboards shelter more food than any family could consume. Warm and dark, they forgive her for anything.

She returns to school in time to meet her father. Hunched over the wheel, glassy-eyed, he glances at her. How was your day? Good?

He mutters under his breath something she cannot hear, could not even if she were paying attention, the clacking of discrete words like beads on a string.

He prays.

He invokes the name of God. But he does not stop at a single utterance. The god on whom he calls has many names, names not to be called lightly. He has not learned all of them and he hopes God will forgive his ignorance. The names move through him like water, washing his lungs. Each name connects to an exhalation. The names roll smoothly, as if they are waiting at all times to be spoken, eternally offered to anyone in need.

He says: Jehovah. Father. Mother Earth. He says Mother Earth with the same weight and necessity that he says Allah, Jesu, Holy Spirit. He says: Shiva. Mary. Buddha. Saint Brigid. Saint Francis. He says: God. He says: Love.

When she sees his lips moving, she looks away. It is too late to take her by the hand, to confess this prayer. It’s shot beyond fear or habit. Each of them is filled with shame in the presence of the other. There was never, he thinks, an excess of kindness between us. Now, he thinks, I could be kind, but I do not know what kindness would mean to her.

In the alien dark, eyes open, he rolls away from her pitched and sleeping form and looks at the window, where shadows are moving, the last snow of the season is blowing. He says: God. God. God.

He senses where this is leading, though he cannot let himself grasp the possibility. He is being led into the turquoise room, shuffling; his mouth will shape the words, letters will form on the screen, and he will discover space for work that does not consume. He will find himself — not yet, not yet, but some day, not even so very far away — saying Thank you.

He cannot bear the thought.

He eats paste. He pinches at quiet time. He markers in blue on his face. He refuses to hold a pencil. He colours the ants purple and yellow when his teacher reminds him that ants are red or black only. His winter scene has sunflowers. He pretends he cannot read even the simplest words. Enfolded in the teacher’s arms, he shatters. He weeps into her shoulder until the fabric is soaked. He says, I want my mom.

The woman in the office telephones.

Finally his mother arrives. He smells her before he sees her, an upper layer of freshly sprayed blue perfume and underneath a sweeter smell that he trusts, that smells like the black mould growing on the underside of his mattress at home. She breathes it out as she takes him into her arms, and he melts against her.

He isn’t crying anymore. She strokes his back and his wet forehead.

She says, He’s just tired. He needs to rest.

The teacher nods. Take him home. Of course.

At home, in the yard, the ground is thawing, muddy. She makes him a snack and sets it on the porch on a plate: a hardboiled egg. He is digging a hole into chilly earth through pale yellow grass and early green fronds. He licks dirt off his thumb. He gathers pinecones and piles them into the hole, and rotted black walnuts — a separate hole. He considers the peeled egg.

He buries it too.

She has a duty to care; she is a mother.

She creeps to her daughter’s bedside, kneels and waits for her eyes to adjust to the grey light. The girl’s face is relaxed, like that of a much younger child. She can see the infant in her, the rashy cheeks, the toddler who could not sing in tune, the seven-year-old bossing a playmate — No one will want to be your friend if you play like that! — the gangly, downy-limbed older child who could run like the wind, away, away. How she envied her daughter’s weightless, leaping stride.