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

Roots of Justice volunteers, though it’s just the two of them on this soft afternoon. The room is always dark, its lone window shaded by trees, ceiling low over their heads. Squat candles line the metal rails at the head and foot of the bed. Charlotte has taken time to carve out her own space in a place that is always and only a temporary home. Most Roots of Justice volunteers travel frequently; some are sent to live for a month or more in outlying villages, wherever the danger is most present, but not Charlotte. Charlotte has yet to be sent.
    Charlotte holds out a candle: “Smell this.”
    Juliet bends, palms sunk into the thin mattress, breathes a scent smoky and sweet, emanating not from the unburnt candle but from Charlotte herself, her hair swinging past her ribs. The bed sways.
    “This is my mother’s kitchen. Vanilla. She was always baking something good,” says Charlotte. She holds out another. “Close your eyes. When you’re blind, your other senses become stronger. Patchouli. This is Mexico, and my first true love. And here’s the Jersey Shore every summer of my life except this one. Coconut oil. One more — this is spring in my grandmother’s yard. Peonies in bloom.”
    Inside her mind, Juliet sees everything that Charlotte is showing her.
    “Open your eyes. Your turn.”
    “My turn?”
    “You tell me. Where are you coming from? Where are you going?”
    Conversations with Charlotte are like nothing Juliet has ever known. She would wrap them whole in scraps of fabric and store them for later examination if she knew how. To Charlotte, Juliet is a whole person who is only incidentally a child. Juliet is free to put her head back and think, to take her time, to imagine, to wait for an important thought to shake loose and float into view.
    “French fries with ketchup in the back of the car. The creek overflowed and it smelled like . . . worms. Well, mud and worms. My best friend —” Juliet stops to consider. Her eyes squeeze shut the better to see Laci, as if it were the two of them sitting side by side on Laci’s bed, each holding one half of a book about unicorns, and Laci smells like, Laci smells like — “Strawberries. But not real strawberries, strawberries like a Strawberry Shortcake doll.”
    Juliet waits with her eyes closed. Charlotte does not comment or judge. She does not say, “You must miss her,” because the obvious does not need saying. Nor does she remark upon Juliet’s brilliance or creativity; she does not flatter or assess. She lingers in the whorls of their shared thoughts.
    “Today, this afternoon, smells like sand,” Charlotte says. “And we’re nowhere near the beach.”
    “Like frijoles. ” Juliet opens her eyes again. Maybe the guesthouse cook is making beans for supper. She adjusts her gaze to the posters thumbtacked to the wall all around Charlotte’s bed: golden women, some of them naked, coupled and melting into an embrace with a man, or alone in interior contemplation, or alone and dead, as in Juliet’s favourite: ravishing Ophelia, wreathed in flowers and floating down a river. She could fall right in, washed by waves of sweet sadness, as if she herself were cloaked in flowing white robes, her hair streaming, as if she herself were a vision of departed loveliness, pale skin and green eyes.
    Juliet wants something when she looks at the pictures. She aches. She cannot name the want because it exists only in evocation. The unicorn’s horn and lifted front leg and delicate white hoof. The curve of a rainbow. Fairy wings. Heavy princess gowns. A landscape of misty forest and rolling green hills. Hair. Gauzy imaginary impossible shimmering beauty.
    “Stay just like that.” Charlotte opens a small black book filled with blank pages. She says, “Your life is a canvas on which you can paint — anything, anything at all, so long as you don’t hesitate.”
    But she herself hesitates, pencil hovering over empty page. “Yes,” she says, considering.