The Juliet Stories by Carrie Snyder Read Free Book Online Page A

bare foot, Gloria kicks aside a scramble of beads.
    After all this time, it isn’t far.
    They cross one anarchic street, trudge past a low concrete wall painted with martyrs of the revolution. Hats, bandanas, fields, faces, babies, guns; primary colours. Or perhaps these are revolution’s children. Gloria isn’t certain. She reads the slogans several times but cannot promise that her translation is correct.
    “There?” Juliet points to a lone square building, like a child’s block, painted bright yellow with windows all along one side.
    Gloria’s body sags under Emmanuel’s weight, and Keith trails behind in silent misery. It is not far, but suddenly it seems they will never arrive. Midday heat streaks down upon them; their hair will catch fire.
    They wade through a bare field with grass burnt dead from the sun.
    Behind its heavy door, the library is quiet. Its shelves are half-filled; you might say, mostly empty. Juliet kneels and selects a picture book, opens it. Disappointment crests and buries her. She can’t read this book. She can’t read any of the books in this library. It is like staggering through a desert towards what looks like a pool of clean, clear water and discovering as you kneel to drink that cupped in your hands is sand, that you are washing your face in a pool of sand.
    “Mom?” she whispers.
    “Yes?”
    “It’s in Spanish!”
    Gloria huffs a small laugh; she knew it all along.
    They could walk home the way they came, but Gloria is lost in the jumbled world and today she trusts no one. They cross a different field and another street, dodging cars whose drivers — men — honk and call to Gloria. She doesn’t exactly ignore them; she mutters her disgust as they escape into a neighbourhood that resembles a war zone, pitted and scarred.
    It is Gloria who sees the diapers flapping from the clothesline. White, thick, triple-padded, absorbent, superior, American-made cloth diapers. She stops in the street.
    “Could it be?” she asks, and in confirmation, Bianca steps out of the hole in her wall before them, holding her baby. He is peppered with pocks.
    The women face each other.
    Gloria doesn’t say, My diapers , just turns and looks at them.
    Bianca does not say, My poor sick baby . She says, “You’re lost? Come, come. This way.”
    Gloria and the children obey in dull silence. They are pallid by comparison, blanched of strength, bewildered and weary.
    At the seminary gates Bianca reaches with her free hand for Gloria’s, clasps it, and Juliet sees what could be: she imagines as if it were happening Bianca removing the red blouse like a snake shedding skin, new skin beneath the old. Imagines her mother’s arm sliding into warmed silky fabric in reverse, pocks erased. She imagines her mother saying, I was wrong .
    But instead, after a moment, Gloria lets go. She says, “ Gracias ,” and they leave Bianca and her baby outside the gates, climb the steps to their apartment. It is hot, as always. The rooms smell of an unflushed toilet and underfoot the tiles are gritty.
    “Mom,” whispers Juliet. What would happen if she were to tell?
    Gloria gazes at her, eyes glazed with exhaustion. “Did you find what you wanted, Juliet?”
    “Mom?”
    “At the library?”
    Oh.
    “Did you? Sweetheart?”
    Juliet nods imperceptibly. Her mother is already halfway to her bedroom, through the now-exposed doorway. Nothing so terrible, nothing so terrible.
    Emmanuel pops a bead in his mouth and rolls it across his tongue. When Juliet tries to dig it out with her finger, he screeches, and Gloria calls out blindly, “Whatever you’re doing, Juliet, just stop.”
    Emmanuel swallows; gone.

THE ECSTATIC
    “You can endure all kinds of things, but that’s not living,” Charlotte says to Juliet. “Living is when you’re going somewhere with someone you love.”
    They are in the new guesthouse. They kneel barefoot on Charlotte’s mattress: the upper bunk of a bed in a room Charlotte shares with other