The Juliet Stories (8 page)

Adios, Mrs. Friesen. Say goodbye to your house. Say goodbye to your family. The bomb is ticking. Adios, los Raíces de Justicia.

The muffled voice on the other end of the line is speaking Spanish, but badly.

Describing it to the uniformed soldier afterwards, Gloria insists the accent was American. The Friesen family stands in the street across from their house. Two trucks styled in jungle camouflage idle in a diesel fog. The soldier jots notes; his companions amble and smoke. “What were his exact words?”

Gloria does not know the Spanish word for “ticking,” and when pressed admits that she cannot recreate the message with precision. “Does it matter? His exact words? He knew my name. He knew the office was in our house. He knew all about us.”

“
Ka-boom!
” The mysterious voice had made the sound of an explosion, and she dropped the receiver and ran, yelling her children’s names: Everybody out, get out, get out! Run!

Her hands are still shaking. She holds them out for the soldier to see.

“We’ll go through the house.” The soldier turns from Gloria and addresses Bram. “You. Show us where to look.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” Bram speaks an effortless Spanish, acquired through the skin as a child, while his mother attended university classes and he spent his days walking hand in hand along snowy sidewalks with an Argentine woman whose papers were not in order; his mother was resourceful and she was unsentimental.

“Show us where to look,” the soldier repeats.

“And if there is a bomb?”

The man shrugs. He is more boy than man, skinny, armed to the teeth. The soldiers with him are boys too, none of them seeming serious enough for the job.

“You can’t go,” says Gloria.

Bram shifts his weight to his shoulders; he is his mother’s son. “No one is going anywhere. We’ll let these men do their job.” Casually he removes a roll of curled American dollars from his back pocket and shuffles them with his thumb.

The soldiers, these boys, tear the place apart.

Juliet’s books are in there, and her collection of shabby figurines that populate the pretend dollhouse under the bottom bunk, and her hairbrush, her clothes, her underwear, her pillow and blankets, her toothbrush.

All clear
. The Friesens walk through their house as if it is no longer theirs: items strewn across the floor, dumped like trash, stepped upon, boot prints in dust.

“I will never feel safe in here again,” says Gloria.

“Maybe you’re right,” says Bram. “Maybe you and the kids should go somewhere else for a while. A little break, a vacation, by the beach.”

Bombed into paradise. That’s what Gloria calls it.

Gloria and the children take a bus to San Juan del Sur. There is some confusion about making a connection, and they are stranded in a nearby town, inland, until Gloria decides to accept the offer of a ride in the back of a pickup truck.

Hitching to paradise. That’s what Gloria calls it.

If she regrets the choice, or resents that Bram hasn’t taken the time to drive them himself, she does not say so. In fact, little can be said over the gusts of wind, sitting loose in the truck bed, jolted and jounced and jarred down a road that bears only the rough appearance of once having been paved. The smell of the Pacific comes at them at last, and then the sight of it, as they approach from above and it spreads out below, blue and endless and clear.

They are a million miles from school.

When Gloria tries to pay the driver, he refuses.

Free passage to paradise. That’s what Gloria calls it.

Andrew laughs appreciatively; but he laughs easily, he laughs at anything, he bubbles with mirth. He’s been waiting all day on the front porch of the Roots of Justice house, here in San Juan del Sur, keeping his eyes peeled — “Like this,” he shows them, fingers stretching eyelids wide — for the arrival of Gloria and the children. He’s only recently been sent to man the outpost, and “By God, I’ve been lonely!”

Gloria and the children will stay with Andrew at the Roots of Justice house: it has many bedrooms and a sunny courtyard, and is steps from the sand. The house is used both as a place of rest and recovery for weary volunteers and to host delegations of protestors. Although San Juan is a fishing town, its port has been targeted by American planes for surveillance. A military base armed with anti-aircraft artillery guards the town from atop the hill.

Andrew welcomes Gloria and the children with a monstrous bowl of purplish red fruit called
momones
.

“Help yourselves.” He demonstrates the technique. Juliet cracks the shell with her teeth, pops into her mouth the pale, wet, gumball-sized fruit within, and sucks and sucks and sucks until the hairy fibres lose their flavour and the jelly-like remnants come squeakily away from the pit. She is left with a strange emptiness, as if the fruit has parched her mouth instead of moistening it. She will eat until she is sick or until the bowl is empty, whichever comes first.

But this is paradise. The bowl is never empty. The children are never sick. The days are solidly sun-filled. The nights are languid and studded with stars, and the sound of waves through open windows soothes their sleep. Gloria sits on the porch in the dark and picks at her guitar’s strings, and Juliet lies in bed under one thin sheet and listens; the songs are in a minor key, but for beauty, not for loneliness.

It is Juliet who sees the other children first, white-blond, walking with their father along the top of the beach. There are three of them; the oldest is a girl, and they are picking their way deliberately towards the Friesens.

“Howdy,” says the big, fair man, and he smiles down on Gloria. He has a softly European accent.

“Hello.” Gloria adjusts Emmanuel’s limp sleeping body, shades her eyes. Her breast is showing where she has pulled down her swimsuit to nurse. (“I’m going to wean him any day now,” she says every time he demands to be fed. “It’s time.” And yet she doesn’t.)

“You are new in town.” The man smiles.

“We’re with the Roots of Justice. The children and I are taking a holiday from the city.”

“You have found the perfect place for a holiday.”

“My husband . . .” Gloria stops, looks down and strokes Emmanuel’s head, adjusts, tucks herself away.

“But I haven’t introduced myself.” The man offers his hand, which she accepts. “My name is Heinrich. My children: Isobel, Dirk, and Jonathan. My wife and I work for the Red Cross. We live” — he gestures down the beach — “Big white house, porch goes all the way around.”

“We haven’t had a chance to look around.”

“You will come for a meal, of course. Anytime. I’ll tell Clara.”

“Oh.” Juliet watches Gloria free her hand and gather her hair in one fist at the nape of her neck, her words trailing out. “I don’t know how long . . .”

“It was from this beach that many of Somoza’s
guardia
fled,” Heinrich says after a moment. He takes a cross-legged, very upright position beside Gloria. He is speaking of the former dictator, overthrown in the revolution. The word
guardia
is as evil on the tongue as
Contra
: words that mean terror and murder and death.

“I didn’t know that.” Gloria is genuinely surprised, her spine lengthening as she turns with interest to Heinrich.

“The ones who were pushed south, who were trapped here, they hijacked fishing boats. It’s a story not much told, but if you ask around, people know which fishing boats, which fishermen.”

Gloria gazes into the harbour, where vessels rock and bob in the contained port. The untended beach nestles between two rocky outcroppings, beyond which spreads the open sea.

“They say those
guardia
were trained into the Contra. They’re the leaders now. That’s what they say. Full circle.” Heinrich’s hand sweeps towards the ocean. “Leave by sea, right here, in the south, and return by land, up north. Everyone wants to go home.”

“Do they?”

“Don’t you?” he asks her.

“I don’t,” says Gloria, her face so open that Heinrich might fall in; but only for a glancing moment. Juliet watches Gloria release the full weight of her hair, swing it over her shoulders and around her cheeks, hiding herself again.

The girl named Isobel is watching too, her own hair coiled and pinned.

“I like your bun,” says Juliet.

“It’s a chignon,” says Isobel. Juliet has never heard of one. With a tug, Isobel removes the polished wooden stick that is holding her hair magically in place, and it cascades in pale ribbons around her neck and shoulders.

Isobel has just turned twelve.

“I’m almost eleven,” says Juliet.

Isobel disdains driftwood dragged to make a pretend house, nor will she touch the tiny crabs that scuttle over wet sand left behind by the tide, leaving faint tracks, a path anyone with interest could follow.

“You have the most beautiful . . .” they hear Isobel’s father tell Juliet’s mother.

The most beautiful what?

“Thank you,” whispers Gloria. She peers in the direction of the sun; her eyes squint shut.

Here comes the tide. Helped by Isobel’s brothers, Keith digs a trench, drags sticks, piles sand to divert water, but the tide overwhelms; Juliet cannot resist, crouching to push walls of sand with her forearms, until even Isobel is drawn into the fight, standing above the tide line, calling out directions.

Heinrich helps Gloria to her feet, bends and lifts her towel, shakes it out, folds it neatly.

“Time to go home,” he tells his children.

“Us too,” says Gloria.

“It was a pleasure to meet you.” Heinrich reaches for Gloria’s free hand, the one loosely against Emmanuel’s shoulder; his thumb strokes her knuckles.

Juliet’s bare feet sting as they cross hot pavement to the Roots of Justice house, which faces the water. She is thrilled to have met someone like Isobel, and relieved to be away from her.

“Yes, I know them,” Andrew is saying to Gloria. “But he’s not with the Red Cross. His wife is. She’s a physician. Dutch? Danish? Accept all invitations, that’s my motto. Take me along too?”

“Oh, leave the dishes,” Clara says. “Heinrich will do them before bed.”

She is a grand-looking woman who matches her husband, the way some couples do, as if drawn to each other in the mirror. (Juliet’s parents are that opposite version of coupledom, pulled together by differences that fold into one another like origami.) Clara and Heinrich are tall, robust, fair, though her eyes are icy pale and his dazzle like the ocean at noon — or is it only in memory that Juliet invents these characteristics?

The mothers flop onto a cushioned loveseat, sloshing wine; Gloria licks her wet knuckles, reaches for a book resting on the coffee table. “I never imagined such comfort in this country.”

“We have built this life over many years.”

Gloria opens the book as if opening their life, peering curiously at florid line drawings of half-naked, contorted bodies wreathed in vines and flowers, shone down upon by suns with stick rays. Heinrich smiles like a cat. Gloria pauses at a page that demonstrates how to squat in fresh running water and draw liquid in through one’s sphincter by means of some interior muscle; Juliet, hovering, will hunt for and examine the same page at the first opportunity.

“What is this?”

“Yoga.” Clara is dismissive. This is not her version of their story.

“Wow! Andrew, do you know anything about yoga?”

“Of course!” Andrew hops off his chair and stands with his feet hip-distance apart in the centre of the richly patterned rug. He bends at the waist, places his palms on the rug, and wiggles his bottom as he settles into the pose. “Downward-facing dog!”

Juliet can’t help giggling, but she is the only one.

Clara half-lids her sharp eyes.

“Is it Indian?” Gloria turns her face to Heinrich’s, and Juliet sees her ear exposed, one hand tucking strands, flushed cheekbone sleek with heat.

“Grown-ups,” Isobel whispers to Juliet. She pronounces the word dismissively. She knows where there is an abandoned glass of wine in the kitchen, and between them they drink the red liquid down.

“Are you drunk?”

“I guess so.”

“Me too.”

And Juliet and Isobel walk around the house like grown-ups do, weaving and laughing and bumping into furniture. Smiling like they have secrets and the secrets are about to spill out. I can tell her anything, thinks Juliet, but she cannot think of anything significant enough to tell.

There is a shark on the beach, but otherwise today is a day like all of their San Juan days. There is nothing particular to do or to be done. Gloria and the children are at leisure, not at wait, drinking up the sun, skin salty from the shallows.

Jellyfish wash up amidst the driftwood, pale and purplish and pliable when poked with a stick. Local boys run into the waves and scoop out fish with their bare hands or catch the shining, flailing bodies with primitive poles made of hooks and line and sticks. Today they run out of the water shouting with excitement. Juliet and Keith come to take a look. Laid out in the arms of a boy is a shark, dead. It is small, but the boy pulls apart its jaws to show them rows and rows of teeth.

Around ten o’clock, the Friesens are joined by Heinrich and his children, who are being home-schooled in an arrangement that has them sending assignments back and forth by mail to a private school in Germany. Their hours are malleable. So long as she excels, Isobel is allowed to stay up as late as she likes, working, and to sleep in as late as she cares to, blinds drawn in her bedroom, the fan purring like a cat.

She is in the equivalent of the tenth grade and intends to graduate by fourteen and go directly to a foreign university. “But I won’t break any records. The youngest student ever accepted to Harvard was an eleven-year-old boy, so I’m already too late.”

Heinrich reclines directly on the hot sand, his hands cupping his neck, his elbows at angles, exposing tufts of pure white hair in the pits of his arms. “Isobel, this is known as bragging.”

Gloria does not glance up from her paperback, on loan from Clara. Emmanuel sleeps in her lap, crashed under his sunhat.